This week marks 23 years since George W. Bush declared a U.S.-led “war on terror” and the people of Afghanistan and Iraq are still suffering its consequences. After the U.S. invaded Iraq, an estimated half a million Iraqis were killed and at least 9.2 million were displaced. From 2003-2011, more than 4.7 million Iraqis suffered from moderate to severe food insecurity. Over 243,000…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Journalist Rêbîn Bekir was driving near the Kurdish town of Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq on the morning of August 23, when a rocket slammed into his car. The vehicle immediately burst into flames. Bekir was lucky. He was thrown from the car by the explosion and survived with injuries. But Bekir’s colleagues, Gülistan Tara and Hêro Bahadîn, died instantly, their bodies burned beyond…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
After nearly two decades of obstruction by the U.S. military, The New Yorker has obtained and published 10 photos of the aftermath of the 2005 Haditha massacre, when U.S. marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians in revenge for an IED bombing that killed a service member. The graphic images show dead Iraqi men, women and children, many of them shot in the head at close range. The victims ranged in age…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
After nearly two decades of obstruction by the U.S. military, The New Yorker has obtained and published 10 photos of the aftermath of the 2005 Haditha massacre, when U.S. marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians in revenge for an IED bombing that killed a service member. The graphic images show dead Iraqi men, women and children, many of them shot in the head at close range. The victims ranged in age from 3 to 76. Release of the photos came only after producers of the investigative podcast In the Dark sued the Navy, the Marine Corps and U.S. Central Command to force them to turn over the photos and other records. “What the photos clearly show is that these were innocent people who do not appear to be doing anything threatening at the time of their deaths,” says Madeleine Baran, host and lead reporter of the podcast. Four marines were charged for the killings, but the charges were dismissed in three cases, and the last ended with a plea deal that did not result in a single day in prison. Baran says the survivors of the massacre, who cooperated with producers to get the photos released, are still waiting for justice. “What they want is the world to know what happened to their family, to know that their family were good people, not insurgents, and they want justice,” she says.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has submitted a report on the state of press freedom and journalist safety in Iraq and semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan to the United Nations Human Rights Council ahead of its January to February 2025 Universal Periodic Review (UPR) session.
The U.N. mechanism is a peer review of each member state’s human rights record. It takes place every 4 ½ years and includes reports on progress made since the previous review cycle and recommendations on how a country can better fulfill its human rights obligations.
CPJ’s submission, together with the MENA Rights Group, a Geneva-based advocacy organization, and the local human rights groups Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq and Community Peacemaker Teams Iraq, shows that journalists face threats, online harassment, physical violence, and civil and criminal lawsuits.
The submission notes an escalating crackdown on civic space in Iraq where crimes against journalists are rarely investigated, fueling a cycle of violence against the press, while public officials have voiced anti-press rhetoric and attempted to limit access to information.
Iraq is ranked 6th in CPJ’s Global Impunity Index 2023, with 17 unsolved murders of journalists, and is one of the few countries to have been on the Index every year since its inception in 2007.
CPJ’s UPR submission on Iraq is available in English here.
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The New York Times (8/19/24) insinuated that Phil Donahue attributed to politics a cancellation that was really caused by low ratings.
If I were teaching a class called “How to Slime People in a Subtle, Scuzzy Way in the New York Times,” this paragraph from the Times‘ obituary (8/19/24) of Phil Donahue—written by Clyde Haberman, Maggie’s father—would be part of the curriculum:
In 2002, Mr. Donahue tried a comeback with a nightly talk show on MSNBC. Barely six months in, the program was canceled. He said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq. (In 2007, he co-produced and co-directed an antiwar documentary, Body of War.) It hardly helped that his ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.
Even now—more than 20 years after the New York Times was catastrophically wrong on the Iraq War—the paper cannot forgive anyone who was right.
1. Yes, Donahue “said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq.” Do you know who else said this? MSNBC‘s network executives, in a leaked memo. Get the fuck out of here with the “he said” bullshit.
MSNBC executives said, in a leaked memo, that Donahue was “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war… because of guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush.” This was reported by CNN (3/5/03), among other outlets, at the time. Unfortunately, these outlets are so obscure that the Times cannot access them.
2. Yes, Donahue’s “ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.” It was also the top-rated show on MSNBC. Sadly, the Times does not know this, because the only place it was reported at the time was in such little-known publications as the New York Times (2/26/03).
This post was originally published on FAIR.
From what is read and what is said, Iran is the major sponsor of international terrorism — creating turmoil, preventing peace, and wanting to dominate the Middle East. One problem with the accepted scenario is that the facts do not coincide with the assumptions.
Except for revenging terrorist attacks by Iranian dissidents and Israeli intelligence and military services, the Islamic Republic has not harmed anybody in the Western nations. In the last 200 years, Iran has fought only one war ─ a defensive battle against aggressor Iraq. It has assisted friendly nations in their conflicts with other nations, similar to United States actions, but on a smaller scale. The demise of Ayatollah Khomeini established a refreshed Islamic Republic that promoted cordial relations with nations who were willing to return the cordiality. Iran has not sought hegemony, economic advantage, or extension of its influence to others than those who desire the influence.
Do a somersault and find the real Iran. The real Iran has tried to cooperate with the United States and other nations and bring peace and stability to the Middle East.
This does not excuse Iran’s semi-autocratic regime and human rights violations, no more than they can be excused in nations with whom the United States has friendly relations — Israel, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Mexico, Tajikistan, and others. For American diplomats, the concept of “cannot excuse” is an excuse for not engaging in diplomacy and resolving problems with Iran. The results have been disasters — harm to American society, harm to the American people, and an unending voyage to calamities.
Designating Iran as the greatest menace to peace assumes there is peace in the Middle East. Is there peace and has there been peace since the words Middle East entered the lexicon? The conflagrations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria would have existed without the presence of the Islamic Republic; the former two wars occurred due to United States’ invasions in those nations. Is the Islamic Republic responsible for Israel’s continuous wars with its neighbors and for Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the Emirates battles with their own citizens and quarrels they had with Yemen and Gaddafi’s Libya. The Islamic Republic and its well-educated and alert citizens have not initiated a war against another nation and their restraint holds the key to Middle East peace. The United States refusal to allow the key to unlock the cages that maintain the doves of peace is one of the great tragedies of the century. This was shown in the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Unlike America, Iran had special connections and interests in Afghanistan. After the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. officials responsible for preparing the war in Afghanistan, solicited help to unseat the Taliban and establish a stable government in Kabul. Iran had organized the resistance by the Northern Alliance and provided the Alliance arms and funding, which helped topple the Taliban regime. In an interview with Iranian Press Service (IPS), Flynt Leverett, senior director for Middle East affairs in the National Security Council (NSC), said, “The Iranians had real contacts with important players in Afghanistan and were prepared to use their influence in constructive ways in coordination with the United States.”
Because the Northern Alliance played a significant role in driving the Taliban out of Kabul in November 2001, they demanded 60 percent of the portfolios in an interim government and blocked agreement with other opposition groups. According to the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Dobbins, Iran played a “decisive role” in persuading the Northern Alliance delegation to compromise its demands.
Dobbins, J. (2009). “Negotiating with Iran: Reflections from Personal Experience,” The Washington Quarterly, 33(1), 149–162.
The Northern Alliance delegate, Younis Qanooni, on instructions from Kabul, was insisting that his faction not only retain the three most important ministries—defense, foreign affairs, and interior—but also hold three-fourths of the total. These demands were unacceptable to the other three Afghan factions represented in Bonn. Unless the Northern Alliance demand could be significantly reduced, there was no way the resultant government could be portrayed as broadly based and representative.
Finally Iranian representative, Javad Zarif, stood up, and signaled Qanooni to join him in the corner of the room. They spoke in whispers for no more than a minute. Qanooni then returned to the table and offered to give up two ministries. He also agreed to create three new ones that could be awarded to other factions. We had a deal. For the following six months, Afghanistan would be governed by an interim administration composed of 29 department heads plus a chairman. Sixteen of these posts would go to the Northern Alliance, just slightly more than half.
Dobbins worked with Iranian negotiators in Bonn and related that at a donors conference in Tokyo, in January, 2002, Iran pledged $540 million in assistance to Afghanistan.
Dobbins writes:
Emerging from a larger gathering in Tokyo, one of the Iranian representatives took me aside to reaffirm his government’s desire to continue to cooperate on Afghanistan. I agreed that this would be desirable, but warned that Iranian behavior in other areas represented an obstacle to cooperation. Furthermore, I cautioned him by saying that my brief only extends to Afghanistan. He replied by saying, “We know that. We would like to work on these other issues with the appropriate people in your government.”
On returning to Washington, O’Neill and I reported these conversations, to then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and cabinet level colleagues, and to the Middle Eastern Bureau at the Department of State (DOS). No one evinced any interest. The Iranians received no private reply. Instead, they received a very public answer. One week later, in his State of the Union address, President George W. Bush named Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, an “axis of evil.” How arch-enemies Iran and Iraq could form any axis, evil or otherwise, was never explained.
How would the Afghanistan fiasco have played out if the American governments cooperated with the Iranian governments? No analysis can supply a definite and credible answer; clues are available.
The result of 20 years of U.S. occupation and battle in Afghanistan resulted in nearly 111,000 civilians killed or injured, more than 64,100 national military and police killed, about 2500 American soldiers killed and 20,660 injured in action, and $1 trillion spent by the U.S. in all phases of a conflict that ended with the Taliban return to power. The only accomplishment of the twenty years of strife had Osama bin Laden leave the isolated, uncomfortable, and rugged mountain caves in Tora Bora for a comfortable and well-equipped walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a gift from Pakistan intelligence. Note that the al-Qaeda leader did not flee to U.S. adversary, Iran; he joined his family in U.S. friendly, Pakistan. The 20-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan was a catastrophe and anything is better than a catastrophe.
More than any other nation Iran had justifiable reasons for wanting a stable, friendly, and economically secure government in Afghanistan.
More than any other nation, Iran had assets to assist in achieving a stable, friendly, peaceful, and economically secure government in Afghanistan.
The U.S. State Department learned nothing from its disjointed and catastrophic actions in Afghanistan. It repeated the same worthless and aggressive policy in its invasion of Iraq.
After supporting Iraq against Iran in the 1980s Iraq-Iran war, the U.S. declared war in 1991 against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and performed a first in the history of foreign policy ─ helping a nation that wars against a nation that is not doing any harm to you, and then attacking the nation that it helped do the harm to the nation that was not harming you. The U.S. continued with sanctions against the nation it previously supported, Iraq, and then, in 2003, engaged it in another war, finally ending up with the nation it initially wanted to contain, Iran, essentially winning the war without firing another shot, and gaining influence in Iraq; another example of a U.S. policy toward Iran that backfired. Foreign policy at its finest.
While stumbling and fumbling its way into destroying Iraq, the U.S. managed to have al-Qaeda (remember them, the guys that America invaded Afghanistan to defeat) reconstitute itself in Iraq. This renewed al-Qaeda, “organized a wave of attacks, often suicide bombings, that targeted security forces, government institutions, and Iraqi civilians.” The American military was forced to use Iraq’s notorious militias, known as “Awakening Councils,” to expel the al-Qaeda organization; a short-lived victory that led to the formation of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS).
A statement by the ever-unaware President Trump, in a January 8, 2020 speech, argued the US had been responsible for defeating ISIS and the Islamic Republic should realize that it is in their benefit to work with the United States in making sure ISIS remained defeated. The US spent years and billions of dollars in training an Iraqi army that fled Mosul and left it to a small contingent of ISIS forces. Showing no will and expertise to fight, Iraq’s debilitated military permitted ISIS to rapidly expand and conquer Tikrit and other cities. Events energized Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, which, with cooperation from Iran and personal assistance from Major General Qasem Soleimani, was able to retake Tikrit and Ramadi, push ISIS out of Fallujah, and eventually play a leading role in ISIS’ defeat in Mosul. The U.S. honored Soleimani’s efforts by assassinating him ─ one of the most vicious crimes in history ─ and commended Iran by continually sanctioning it. No good deed goes unpunished.
As in Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic assisted in the re-building of Iraq. As far back as 2012, The Guardian reported that “Iran is one of Iraq’s most important regional economic partners, with an annual trade volume between the two sides standing at $8bn to $10b.” The U.S. confused competitive advantage with diabolical meddling and regarded Iran as a troubling factor in the Fertile Crescent, even though the inhabitants of Mesopotamia considered the United States as the troublemaker in the region. Iran had leverage in Iraq that could not be ignored nor easily combated.
Why is the Islamic Republic, sanctioned, vilified, and isolated? One clue is that almost all references to Iran in the U.S. media succeed with the phrase, “leading state sponsor of terrorism.” The phrase is stuck onto the word Iran as if by Velcro and all the words are one word. How does this coincidental commonality occur?
It occurs because the Zionist press distributes most reports on Iran to the American media. Israel has used U.S. support to subdue Israel’s adversaries — Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, and Iraq —and has turned its national army to coerce Iran, the last man standing, into battle. It has turned its worldwide army of thought controllers to vilify Iran and entice Western powers to remove the Islamic member of the “axis of evil” from the map. Blind the world to reality.
Substitute the nation Israel for the nation Iran in each of the salient accusations made against Iran and the accusations become correct. Nowhere do the facts and historical narrative demonstrate that Iran has disrupted peace and stability by any of the combining factors. Israel is present in all the factors. During the 2016 presidential campaign, contender Donald Trump said, “Many nations, including allies, ripped off the US.” Doesn’t Donald Trump, in his support for apartheid Israel, know that he verified his statement? Bet on the wrong horse and you are sure to lose.
The following table summarizes the factors and clarifies the issues.
Iran ─ Key to World Peace
Analysis shows that Iran has not displayed characteristics of a “major sponsor of international terrorism — creating turmoil, preventing peace, and wanting to dominate the Middle East.” The only directives against Iran are sanctions and some human rights violations. The former are engineered by the U.S., Israel and their allies, have proved ineffective, not accomplished their intentions and greatly harmed the Iranian people. The latter need attention and can be addressed to almost any country on the planet, including the U.S. in its treatment of its African American citizens.
Israel displays all the characteristics falsely attributed to Iran plus being recipient of tens of Resolutions and decisions by International agencies that accuse Israel and its leaders of aspects of genocide, war crimes, apartheid, illegal occupation, and crimes against humanity. In the 21st century, in Resolutions by the UN that condemn nations, Israel is mentioned more times than all others combined, an enviable record.
Incorrect U.S. policies have led to continuous warfare in the Middle East, the unnecessary sacrifice of U.S. lives, economic disturbances, and waste of taxpayer money. When something is wrong, the normal practice is to make it right. Why does the United States maintain an aggressive attitude toward Iran and a permissive attitude to Israel? The answer is that the U.S. is controlled by traitors to American principles and to the American people. This cannot continue until its final denouement ─ settled by Armageddon.
Only Iran has been willing to challenge Israel and halt its destructive path. Iran cannot do it alone. By supporting Israel, the Western powers have turned their backs on their own people. It is radical and will be greeted with gasps, but it is time to turn the other way and support Iran in its endeavors. Stopping war is mandatory and preliminary to achieving peace. If fortifying Iran stymies Israel’s aggression and stops the wars, then peace can be achieved. Iran is the key to world peace.
In the cauldron of corruption and autocracies, which pits Sunni against Shi’a, Gulf states and Saudi Arabia against Iran, religious extremists against moderates and Israel against all, the United States makes its choice of allies. Whom does Washington support – those who are the most repressive, most corrupt, most militaristic, most prone to cause Middle East instability, and to add to the obvious State Department confusion, Israel, the principal instigator of Al Qaeda terrorism, and Saudi Arabia, the principal supplier of al-Qaeda terrorists. A new perspective of Iran yields a revised perspective of a violent, unstable, and disturbed Middle East. Israel would finally receive attention as the major participant in bringing chaos to the region.
Discouraging to note that policies that determine war or peace proceed from agendas and not from facts and obligations. Maybe, when the makers and shakers realize their warlike polices will one day result in the eventual nuclear catastrophe, they will have an awakening and comprehend that the quotation, attributed to Plato, “Only the dead know the end of war,” is given more meaning by adding, “after you’re dead, it’s too late to stop the war.”
The post Iran: Key to World Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Black Voters Matter co-founder LaTosha Brown remembers longtime Texas Democratic Congressmember Sheila Jackson Lee, who was a tireless fighter for civil rights and progressive causes throughout her three decades in the U.S. House. Jackson Lee has died at the age of 74 after announcing last month she had pancreatic cancer. Lee was an early and outspoken opponent of the disastrous and illegal invasion of Iraq, as well as an advocate for reparations to the descendants of enslaved African Americans. “She has left a legacy of service, a legacy of love,” says political organizer LaTosha Brown of Black Voters Matter. “She was someone you could always depend on.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
We continue to look at the record of Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, with a focus on his foreign policy actions, with Matt Duss of the Center for International Policy, former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders. Vance is “very aligned with Trump,” says Duss, such as in his support of the Abraham Accords, the Arab-Israeli normalization deal signed under the Trump administration that sought to increase Israel’s power in the region at the expense of Palestinian rights.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The reported plea bargain between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the United States government brings to a close one of the darkest periods in the history of media freedom, says the union for Australian journalists.
While the details of the deal are still to be confirmed, MEAA welcomed the release of Assange, a Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance member, after five years of relentless campaigning by journalists, unions, and press freedom advocates around the world.
MEAA remains concerned what the deal will mean for media freedom around the world.
The work of WikiLeaks at the centre of this case — which exposed war crimes and other wrongdoing by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan — was strong, public interest journalism.
MEAA fears the deal will embolden the US and other governments around the world to continue to pursue and prosecute journalists who disclose to the public information they would rather keep suppressed.
MEAA media federal president Karen Percy welcomed the news that Julian Assange has already been released from Belmarsh Prison, where he has been held as his case has wound its way through UK courts.
“We wish Julian all the best as he is reunited with his wife, young sons and other relatives who have fought tirelessly for his freedom,” she said.
‘Relentless battle against this injustice’
“We commend Julian for his courage over this long period, and his legal team and supporters for their relentless battle against this injustice.
“We’ve been extremely concerned about the impact on his physical and mental wellbeing during Julian’s long period of imprisonment and respect the decision to bring an end to the ordeal for all involved.
Julian Assange boards flight at London Stansted Airport at 5PM (BST) Monday June 24th. This is for everyone who worked for his freedom: thank you.#FreedJulianAssange pic.twitter.com/Pqp5pBAhSQ
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 25, 2024
“The deal reported today does not in any way mean that the struggle for media freedom has been futile; quite the opposite, it places governments on notice that a global movement will be mobilised whenever they blatantly threaten journalism in a similar way.
Percy said the espionage charges laid against Assange were a “grotesque overreach by the US government” and an attack on journalism and media freedom.
“The pursuit of Julian Assange has set a dangerous precedent that will have a potential chilling effect on investigative journalism,” she said.
“The stories published by WikiLeaks and other outlets more than a decade ago were clearly in the public interest. The charges by the US sought to curtail free speech, criminalise journalism and send a clear message to future whistleblowers and publishers that they too will be punished.”
Percy said was clearly in the public interest and it had “always been an outrage” that the US government sought to prosecute him for espionage for reporting that was published in collaboration with some of the world’s leading media organisations.
Julian Assange has been an MEAA member since 2007 and in 2011 WikiLeaks won the Outstanding Contribution to Journalism Walkley award, one of Australia’s most coveted journalism awards.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The unique post-World War II economic and military power of the United States prevented military and foreign policy errors from becoming overpowering disasters. Military adventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq upended America’s political system and wounded its psyche. Other than the 2001 attacks on American soil, physical destruction was foreign, appearing as images on television screens. Oil price rises, inflation, increasing debt to finance military costs, and social upheavals temporarily perturbed the US socioeconomic system. A powerful America overcame the impediments and continually extended its power until the Asian Tigers, a rejuvenated China, and progressive Latin leaders appeared on the global stage. America’s hegemony declined and the decline became confirmed by the Russian/Ukraine conflagration, Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and a subsequent attack on protesting students at the UCLA campus. No nation with unique power and in control of that power would have permitted these horrific happenings.
The US is sliding into a mediocre existence. Heard that before? Hear it again. Four words describe those who have brought the United States to a sorrowful state ─ treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitor ─ harsh words that will be met with smiles, sneers, and derisions. They are correct words and backed by a long list of treacherous, treasonous, tyrannical, and traitorous actors in the American public. The description of the “tyranny in America” is not a repetitious overkill; it is a necessary refrain that punctuates the alarm ─ America is led by pseudo patriots who have betrayed its ideals and Americans must regain its inspiring freedom, liberty-loving, and peaceful aspirations.
Domestic treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors
Running for president of the USA are two traitors ─ Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Donald Trump is accused of provoking and aiding the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the US capitol and pursuing an insurrection against the US government. Treason.
Donald Trump is accused of keeping US government top secrets in his home in locations where they could be revealed to others. He is guilty of violating US espionage laws. Treason.
Donald Trump solicits Evangelical vote and financial assistance by supporting Israel, a foreign nation, in its genocide of the Palestinian people. Treachery.
Joe Biden said, “Because even where we have some differences, my commitment to Israel, as you know, is ironclad. I think without Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who’s secure. I think Israel is essential.” Besides the nonsensical statement that condemns Biden for not knowing that Israel is the only country in the world where Jews have continually suffered from fatal attacks, claim insecurity that seeks security, and exhibit excessive prejudice toward one another — Ashkenazi against Mizrahi, both against Yemeni and Falasha, and secular against ultra-orthodox — Biden admits he has failed to protect the most well-off Americans ─ Jewish citizens (from what??). Treachery.
By having said, “My commitment to Israel, as you know, is ironclad,” Joe Biden betrayed US interests, which should have a flexible foreign policy. He has allied the US people with genocide. Traitor.
Hunter Biden had financial dealings with adversaries of the US government. Joe Biden should have known his son’s arrangements and prevented accusations of influence peddling. Joe Biden is guilty of violating his oath of office. Treachery.
Biden, similar to Trump, brought classified documents to his home and left them scattered in places open to revelation. Despite the Justice Department not pressing charges, Biden is guilty of violating US espionage laws. Treason.
The US Justice Department (DOJ) indicted several Russians and Chinese who infiltrated America, gathered information, and lobbied for a foreign nation. The US Justice Department has not indicted one of tens of thousands of Israelis (could be one of hundreds of thousands), who have performed similar duties for Israel. Lobbying is only a small part of the damage to Americans done by these miscreant infiltrators, sent by Israel to foreign shores to do their mischief. From the almost one million Israelis living in the United States, hundreds of thousands may have become citizens, voted, and changed a highly contested election. In a coming election in Westchester, New York, Westchester Unites urged Jewish voters in the district (not non-Jewish voters??) to request ballots so they could vote before the June 25 Democratic primary battle between New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who criticizes Israel, and challenger, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, an avid supporter of apartheid Israel’s genocide. Campaign organizers say they will spend up to $1 million to boost voter turnout.
I’m not privy to the manipulations of the American public performed by the mass of Israeli infiltrators. One example is the declarations by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. His contrived Amplify Israel Initiative “aims to breathe new life into the principles we’ve been committed to for decades, with an array of programs aimed at bolstering support for Israel and aligning Zionism with liberal ideology.” In clearer words, “influence every man, woman, and child that nationalist, militarist, oppressive, and apartheid Israel is a benevolent country.”
Who is Rabbi Hirsch? Ammiel Hirsch went to high school in Israel, served as a tank commander in the IDF, and was formerly the director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, the Israeli arm of the North American Reform movement. In a response to a letter, in which 93 rabbinical and cantorial students harshly criticized Israeli actions in the hostilities between Israel and Hamas, Rabbi Hirsch wrote:
For the record, the Reform movement is a Zionist movement. Every single branch of our movement — the synagogue arm (Union for Reform Judaism), the rabbinic union (Central Conference of American Rabbis), and our seminary (HUC-JIR) — every organization separately, and all together, are Zionist and committed ideologically and theologically to Israel.
Why did Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, after receiving training in Israel, come to the United States to guide the Reform movement, which, in previous decades, had been against Zionism, and define it in Israel’s image? By not investigating the actions of multitudes of Israelis residing, the US Justice Department betrays the US people.
In an espionage scandal involving Lawrence Franklin, a former United States Department of Defense employee, who passed classified documents to AIPAC officials, which disclosed secret United States policy towards Iran, Franklin pleaded guilty and, in January 2006, was sentenced to nearly 13 years of prison. He served ten months of house arrest. The DOJ dropped espionage charges against the AIPAC officials — Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. Reason (which was treason) — the Department claimed court rulings had made the case unwinnable and the trial would disclose classified information (which can apply to almost every trial for treason). Despite the previous espionage charges and knowledge that un-American AIPAC is a lobby for apartheid Israel, the DOJ has not indicted AIPAC for being an unregistered lobby and has permitted its cadre of Israel firsters to wander the halls of Congress and shake palms with dollar bills. Traitors.
US representatives know that AIPAC lobbies for an apartheid Israel that is committing genocide and drags US citizens into accusations of aiding the genocide. Politicians accept contributions from individuals allied with AIPAC and vote in accordance with AIPAC’s preferences. The power of the contributions and fear that disregarding AIPAC poses a danger to remaining in office was highlighted in 1984. For voting to permit Boeing to sell AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia and for suggesting there were Palestinians and they had “rights,” AIPAC marked as undesirable the popular Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Charles Percy, who had always favored Israel. Paul Simon wrote in his autobiography that Bob Asher, an AIPAC board member, called him to run for Senator from Illinois. Simon unseated the admired and respected Charles Percy who was only 98% pure in his support for Israel. Treachery.
The US government and local governments favor laws, such as the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which can suppress free speech and free actions that contend Israel’s genocidal policies, and H.R. 3016, Anti-Boycott Act, which “bars U.S. citizens from participating in boycotts of U.S. allies if those boycotts are promoted or imposed by foreign countries.” Federal and local governments tyrannize the US people. Tyranny.
The Los Angeles (LA) Police Department stood by for hours before halting attacks on peaceful UCLA students and then arrested dozens of student protesters and not any of the vigilantes who represented a foreign power and attacked the students. The LA Police Department supported a group representing a foreign government and failed to protect American citizens. Treason.
The House of Representatives has had numerous one-sided hearings on campus anti-Semitism that feature callous remarks against Jews from relatively few of the protestors. In none of the hearings has a Committee invited the student protestors to testify; maybe, because they might say, “These students do not represent the protestors. They are angry and frustrated individuals who see Israel identify itself as a Jewish state and note that a great number of American Jews approve of Israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people. They realistically equate Jews with the genocide.” The truth of these hearings is they are more concerned with fictional Jewish feelings than factual Palestinian lives. Let’s face it, these hearings are organized by Israel’s advocates who seek to prevent the US public from gaining awareness of the genocide and shift the protest arguments to a spurious charge of anti-Semitism in America. Elected officials adhere to a foreign nation’s request to stifle American citizens from exercising their right to protest and move dialogue from the horrific victimization of Gazans to an artificially created Jewish victimhood. College presidents committed a huge error by not responding to the committees’ fabricated charges of campus anti-Semitism with a simple statement, “There is no campus anti-Semitism and you are attempting to divert the impact of these demonstrations that criticize Israel policies into a false charge that indirectly enhances Israel’s image.” By representing a foreign power and censoring American students from their right to protest, these elected officials are guilty. Treason.
Foreign policies exhibit the same treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors.
North Vietnam
President Lyndon Johnson’s reciting a dubious attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on the USS Maddox in international waters cajoled Americans into accepting an increased US military involvement in the Vietnamese civil war. Global strategists also mentioned the Domino Theory, where if one country falls to communism, then adjacent nations also become communist. A non-functioning Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (SEATO) tied these fabrications into a call for action. Result was 58,148 uniformed Americans killed, 200,000 wounded, and 75,000 severely wounded. Ho Chi Minh’s followers won the war and none of the neighboring SEATO nations became communist. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the leading prophet of the Domino Theory, confessed, “I think we were wrong. I do not believe that Vietnam was that important to the communists. I don’t believe that its loss would have led – it didn’t lead – to Communist control of Asia.” Treachery.
Six-day war
During the 1967 war between Israel and its neighbors, Israeli torpedo boats and airplanes attacked the intelligence ship USS Liberty in international waters, killed 34, and wounded 171 American service personnel. President Johnson refused to respond to this assault, an insult to all Americans. Treason.
Yom Kippur war
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, President Nixon’s administration supplied arms to Israel and reversed the course of the war. Arab nations responded with an oil embargo that caused huge inflation in the United States, punished the American consumer, and harmed the American economy. Treachery.
Afghanistan-1980s
President Ronald Reagan’s CIA covertly assisted Pakistan intelligence in providing financial and military assistance to Osama bin Laden during the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. In effect, the US played an essential role in creating the al-Qaeda network. Treason.
International Terrorism and 911
After Ronald Reagan helped create and popularize Osama bin Laden, later presidents did not heed Osama bin Laden’s warnings. The arch-terrorist clarified his position in the infamous Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American people,” which has been conveniently sidetracked to ensure Americans do not get infected with terrorism germs. It should be titled, “How the United States made me a terrorist.” It is difficult to agree with bin Laden but his statements are not easily contended.
You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern.
Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.
William J. Clinton was president during the period that Bin Laden raged his fury at the United States. If Bill Clinton had considered some of bin Laden’s grievances his considerations might have prevented the later 9/11 attack on American soil. Treason.
George W. Bush and American security officials permitted 19 co-conspirators to enter the country and take preparatory flying lessons in full view of authorities. His DOJ did not pursue information that connected the Saudi royal family with the bombers. Treason.
Afghanistan-2001
Without exhausting all means to have Osama bin Laden extradited from Afghanistan and knowing that the Taliban was not directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in a military adventure that had no defined purpose and accomplished nothing. In a war that lasted 20 years, the United States had 2,459 military deaths and 20,769 American service members wounded in action. Twenty years of a useless war that only brought the Taliban back to power. Treachery.
Iraq
George W. Bush’s uncalled-for war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) is the best example of sacrificing U.S. lives to advance Israel’s interests. The cited reason ─ destroying Hussein’s weapons of destruction ─ whose evidence of developments the U.S. based on spurious intelligence and was a farce that no sensible person could believe. This “made for consumption” and fabricated story detracted from the real reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq — to prevent Iraq from becoming the central power in the Middle East and able to threaten Israel. Neocons succeeded in pressuring President George W. Bush to sacrifice American lives and, by military action, remove Saddam Hussein from power. Discarding the nonsensical assertion that Saddam Hussein, who had no nuclear material, no technology to develop a nuclear weapon, and no ICBMs to deliver a bomb, threatened the United States, and needed to be immediately stopped from turning bubble gum into a mighty weapon solicits a more acceptable reason for the U.S. attack on Iraq. The U.S. Department of Defense casualty website has the US military suffering 4,418 deaths and 31,994 wounded in action during the Iraq War. No coincidence that Iraq was a long-time adversary of Israel and it was in Israel’s interests to have Iraq become militarily impotent. Treason.
Libya
NATO declared it intervened in the 2011 Libyan Civil War “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.” President Barack Obama remarked, “Gaddafi declared that he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment.”
Reuters report demonstrated significant differences between Gaddafi’s remarks and President Obama’s rendition: Gaddafi Tells Rebel City, Benghazi, ‘We Will Show No Mercy,’ March 17, 2011.
Muammar Gaddafi told Libyan rebels on Thursday his armed forces were coming to their capital Benghazi tonight and would not show any mercy to fighters who resisted them. In a radio address, he told Benghazi residents that soldiers would search every house in the city and people who had no arms had no reason to fear. He also told his troops not to pursue any rebels who drop their guns and flee when government forces reach the city.
Logic tells us that few Benghazi residents could even have guns to hide, and Gadhafi’s forces were too limited to carry out any large-scale purge.
The U.S. vacillated, and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, convinced President Obama to join NATO in removing Gaddafi. NATO eliminated Gaddafi, Islamic extremists gained partial power, discarded armaments were shipped to al-Qaeda “look-alikes” throughout North Africa and soon the Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) coalition, Boko Haram, and Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA) were creating havoc throughout North Africa. The US gained nothing in removing Gaddafi and created more Islamic extremist organizations with which to contend. Treachery.
UN Vetoes
As of December 18, 2023, the U.S. vetoed resolutions critical of Israel 45 times. Each time, the Secretary of State offered the excuse that the resolution would not advance the cause of peace, and each time vetoing the resolution did not advance the cause for peace. Why do Americans give deference to Israelis when Israel insults American leaders, uses Americans to die in wars that advance Israel’s interests, causes havoc that brings injury to U.S. relations with other nations, and sucks money ($3.1 billion annually) from U.S. taxpayers to support its apartheid and oppressive policies?
Some mentioned reasons, which have changed during the decades, are:
Pundits confuse support for Israel with support for this Israel. The United States, for military and geopolitical reasons, can support Israel, as it does Columbia, but there is no reason to support and assist this Israel in the destruction of the Palestinians. The Washington establishment and foreign policymakers have incorrectly calculated the tradeoffs between supporting this Israel in its denial of Palestinian rights and in satisfying the Palestinian cause.
Just for money and votes, U.S. politicians sell out their commitment to the American people, follow the dictates of a foreign nation, and make Americans party to the destruction of innocent people. TREASON!!
Conclusion
Americans have, at times echoed grievances against their government’s policies and demonstrated their despair, well, some Americans, a small minority of the US population. The rest of the population has been naïve, complacent, and manipulated. Due to America’s intrinsic wealth — natural resources, abundant farmland, temperate climate, rivers, valleys, streams, hard-working population, ocean barriers to foreign incursions — the treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors temporarily slowed but did not stop the roaring engine. The roaring engine is beginning to sputter.
America’s posture as the leading defender of democracy and human rights is hypocritical; its economic system is challenged; its united states are disunited; its pluralistic political system is an epic fantasy; its legislative bodies are divided; and its courts are agenda-seeking rather than law-abiding. Democracy recedes and polarization of citizens widens. Americans are increasingly divided in their aspirations and express increasing fears of one another. An almost self-sufficient economic system proceeds with debt financing imports, trade imbalances, and growth, an unruly situation that can continue until debt hits a financial wall and repaying the debt becomes intolerable.
Hopefully, more Americans will take cognizance of the failed leadership, meet the challenges they pose, gather the resources, form the organizations, shout much louder, push much stronger, and succeed in disposing of the treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors that have made the Statue of Liberty weep.
The words of Patrick Henry, “These are the times that try people’s souls,” are heard again in the cities and villages of a disunited United States of America.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Carne Ross was once a British diplomat. After the invasion of Iraq, he gave “secret evidence to the Butler Inquiry” and resigned. He knew the government had lied, failed to pursue alternatives to military action, and broken UN resolutions. And this experience profoundly changed his political views.
Today, he’s standing against Labour Party “machine politician” Emily Thornberry in Islington South and Finsbury at the general election. And his big message for voters is that Britain’s political system is in desperate need of change. As he told the Canary:
… it’s obviously not working. People are fed up with it, that society is not fair, it is not inclusive, people are treated badly, we are destroying the planet. It’s a long list of failure, and we’ve got to consider radical ideas to improve matters.
We asked Carne Ross, as the Green Party’s Global Solidarity spokesperson, about how to end the genocide in Gaza and bring peace to occupied Palestine. He insisted:
There is an occupation of one party by another, and until that ends there will not be peace. And that used to be a clear plank of British policy towards Israel/Palestine…
You won’t hear government ministers talk about it now. You won’t hear Labour politicians talk about it. But it is the fundamental requirement of peace. The occupation has to end.
Regarding the position of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party on Gaza, Ross stressed:
I think the Labour Party has been a disgrace on Gaza. It has abandoned fundamental rules of international law and the laws of war in particular. Keir Starmer and indeed Emily Thornberry have at moments approved of Israel’s action in cutting off food and medical supplies – food and fuel and water – to the Gaza Strip, which is condoning collective punishment, which is a war crime.
So how bad does it have to get? You condone a war crime? That’s what Labour has done.
The Green Party, on the other hand, believes:
… there is no military solution to this problem. There is only a political solution. And pursuing a military solution will just make things worse and will cost a lot of lives, and that’s precisely what we’ve seen.
Speaking about the immense difference between the West’s approach to Ukraine and Gaza, Carne Ross said:
[Labour’s] David Lammy talks about a rules-based international order, just like the Tories by the way. [It’s] very difficult to distinguish between them. What they have done in Gaza is not supporting a rules-based international order. It is the opposite. It is undermining that rules-based order because it is exempting Israel from these rules.
The rules of war, international humanitarian law, Security Council resolutions. They’ve given Israel a free pass. And that is double standards. We… rightly condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and we demand that the world condemns Russia, as they should. But that call is undermined by the application of double standards in Gaza.
The world isn’t stupid. Other countries – I talked to them at the UN, to diplomats of other countries. They see this – you know, the way that Britain and the US have defended Israel at the UN Security Council, have voted to stop resolutions calling for a ceasefire. I mean, they are shocked and appalled. And if I was a British diplomat today, which I’m glad to say I’m not, I would be ashamed.
The Canary also asked Carne Ross about the impact that his resignation over the invasion of Iraq had on his political views. He explained:
This was a democratic government that… launched a blatantly illegal and unnecessary war that cost 500,000 lives. And the people responsible have not been held accountable. That is pretty shocking, and it remains something I feel very, very strongly about and talk about when I can because that lack of accountability is a systematic failure of our political system.
It’s not just Iraq. It’s also Grenfell, it’s the Post Office scandal, the infected blood scandal. We see it over and over again. The institutions look down on everybody else. They’re not accountable. They’re not transparent. And that has changed my view of politics fundamentally.
That will always be the case as long as a few people have power over the many. And we need to invert that pyramid.
For more on Ross’s comments on the election and other issues, see the full interview on our YouTube channel:
Featured image via the Canary
By Ed Sykes
This post was originally published on Canary.
COMMENTARY: By John Minto
Good slogans have people nodding their heads in agreement because they recognise an underlying truth in the words.
I have a worn-out t-shirt which carries the slogan, “The first casualty of war is truth — the rest are mostly civilians”.
If you find yourself nodding in agreement it’s possibly because you have found it deeply shocking to find this slogan validated repeatedly in almost eight months of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The mainstream news sources which bring us the “truth” are strongly Eurocentric. Virtually all the reporting in our mainstream media comes via three American or European news agencies — AP, Reuters and the BBC — or from major US or UK based newspapers such as The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Washington Post or The New York Times.
This reporting centres on Israeli narratives, Israeli reasoning, Israeli explanations and Israeli justifications for what they are doing to Palestinians. Israeli spokespeople are front and centre and quoted extensively and directly.
Palestinian voices, when they are covered, are usually at the margins. On television in particular Palestinians are most often portrayed as the incoherent victims of overwhelming grief.
In the mainstream media Israel’s perverted lies dominate.
Riddled with examples
The last seven months is riddled with examples. Just two days after the October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protesters were accused of chanting “Gas the Jews” outside the Sydney Opera House.
The story was carried around the world through mainstream media as a nasty anti-semitic slur on Palestinians and their supporters. Four months later, after an intensive investigation New South Wales police concluded it never happened. The words were never chanted.
However the Radio New Zealand website today still carries a Reuters report saying “A rally outside the Sydney Opera House two days after the Hamas attack had ignited heated debate after a small group were filmed chanting “Gas the Jews”.
Even if RNZ did the right thing and removed the report now the old adage is true: “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its trousers on”. Four months later and the police report is not news but the damage has been done as the pro-Israel lobby intended.
The same tactic has been used at protests on US university campuses. A couple of weeks ago at Northeastern University a pro-Israel counter protester was caught on video shouting “Kill the Jews” in an apparent attempt to provoke police into breaking up the pro-Palestine protest.
The university ordered the protest to be closed down saying “the action was taken after some protesters resorted to virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews’”. The nastiest of lies told for the nastiest of reasons — protecting a state committing genocide.
Similarly, unverified claims of “beheaded babies” raced around the world after the October 7 attack on Israel and were even repeated by US President Joe Biden. They were false.
No baby beheaded
Even the Israeli military confirmed no baby was beheaded and yet despite this bare-faced disinformation the Israeli ambassador to New Zealand was able to repeat the lie, along with several others, in a recent TVNZ interview on Q&A without being challenged.
War propaganda such as this is deliberate and designed to ramp up anger and soften us up to accept war and the most savage brutality and blatant war crimes against the Palestinian people.
Recall for a moment the lurid claims from 1990 that Iraqi soldiers had removed babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals and left them to die on the floor. It was false but helped the US convince the public that war against Iraq was justified.
Twelve years later the US and UK were peddling false claims about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction” to successfully pressure other countries to join their war on Iraq.
Perhaps the most cynical misinformation to come out of the war on Gaza so far appeared in the hours following the finding of the International Court of Justice that South Africa had presented a plausible case that Israel was committing genocide.
Israel smartly released a short report claiming 12 employees of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) had taken part in the October 7 attack on Gaza. The distraction was spectacularly successful.
Western media fell over themselves to highlight the report and bury the ICJ findings with most Western countries, New Zealand included, stopping or suspending funding for the UN agency.
Independent probe
eedless to say an independent investigation out a couple of weeks ago shows Israel has failed to support its claims about UNRWA staff involved in the October 7 attacks. It doesn’t need forensic analysis to tell us Israel released this fact-free report to divert attention from their war crimes which have now killed over 36,000 Palestinians — the majority being women and children.
The problem goes deeper than manufactured stories. For many Western journalists the problem starts not with what they see and hear but with what their news editors allow them to say.
A leaked memo to New York Times journalists covering the war tells them they are to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to avoid using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land.
They have even been instructed not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” or the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza settled by Palestinian refugees driven off their land by Israeli armed militias in the Nakba of 1947–49.
These reporting restrictions are a blatant denial of Palestinian history and cut across accurate descriptions under international law which recognises Palestinians as refugees and the occupied Palestinian territories as precisely what they are — under military occupation by Israel.
People reading articles on Gaza from The New York Times have no idea the story has been “shaped” for us with a pro-Israel bias.
These restrictions on journalists also typically cover how Palestinians are portrayed in Western media. Every Palestinian teenager who throws a stone at Israeli soldiers is called a “militant” or worse and Palestinians who take up arms to fight the Israeli occupation of their land, as is their right under international law, are described as “terrorists” when they should be described as resistance fighters.
The heavy pro-Israel bias in Western media reporting is an important reason Israel’s military occupation of Palestine, and the ongoing violence which results from it, has continued for so long.
The answer to all of this is people power — join the weekly global protests in your centre against Israel’s settler colonial project with its apartheid policies against Palestinians.
And give the mainstream media a wide berth on this issue.
John Minto is national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
There are constants in this world — occurrences you can count on. Sunrises and sunsets. The tides. That, day by day, people will be born and others will die. Some of them will die in peace, but others, of course, in violence and agony. For hundreds of years, the U.S. military has been killing people. It’s been a constant of our history. Another constant has been American military personnel killing…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Ruthless prosecutor behind thousands of executions who rose through the theocratic ranks to become the president of Iran
The career of Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, who has been killed in a helicopter crash aged 63, was defined by violent events. His initiation into politics was triggered by the 1979 Iranian revolution, one of the most cataclysmic and epoch-shaping events of the late 20th century, which unfolded with headline-grabbing drama as Raisi was just turning 18.
Given the heady fervour of that revolutionary period, with daily mass street demonstrations eventually leading to the toppling of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country’s once seemingly invincible western-allied monarch, followed by the return from exile of the messianic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to ecstatic acclaim, it is perhaps no surprise that a militant, impressionable young activist was sucked into the political system that took shape in the aftermath, was moulded by it – and later participated in some of its more unsavoury actions.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Democracy Now! speaks with Dr. Adam Hamawy, one of around 20 American medical workers trapped in Gaza after Israel closed the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. A plastic surgeon and Army veteran, Hamawy is on a volunteer mission with the Palestinian American Medical Association at the European Hospital in Khan Younis. Like many Gazans, the U.S. medical workers are now facing dehydration and other deadly health conditions. “We’re continuing to do our job. … It’s tiring, but this is exactly what we need to be doing,” says Hamawy, who calls on President Biden to stop supporting Israel’s assault on Gaza. “If my best friend is a serial killer, I’m going to stop being his friend.” Hamaway describes treating “massive” injuries to civilians in Khan Younis, where much of the city has been destroyed and vandalized in Hebrew. “It’s going to haunt all of us. … I’m here. I see it with my own eyes. At some point in time, everyone is going to see it.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Israel’s aspirations to become the region’s transportation hub have taken a hit. The maritime and land blockade against Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza is working, as one of Israel’s main plans for a prospective “land bridge” connecting the Gulf countries with Israel and Europe has suffered an irrevocable setback. The Israel-centered India Middle East Europe Economic Corridors project (IMEC)…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On April 25, along Melbourne’s arterial Swanston Street, the military parade can be witnessed with its bannered, medalled upholstery, crowds lost in metals, ribbons and commemorative decor. Many, up on their feet since the dawn service, keen to show the decorations that say: “I turned up”. Service personnel, marked by a sprig of rosemary.
The greater the pageantry, the greater the coloured, crimson deception. In the giddy disruptions caused by war, this tendency can be all too readily found. The dead are remembered on the appointed day, but the deskbound planners responsible for sending them to their fate, including the bunglers and the zealous, are rarely called out. The memorial statements crow with amnesiac sweetness, and all the time, those same planners will be happy to add to the numbers of the fallen.
The events of April 25, known in Australia as Anzac Day, are saccharine and tinged about sacrifice, a way of explicating the unmentionable and the barely forgivable. But make no mistake about it: this was the occasion when Australians, with their counterparts from New Zealand as part of the Australian New Zealand Corps, foolishly bled on Turkish soil in a doomed campaign. Modern Australia, a country rarely threatened historically, has found itself in wars aplenty since the 19th century.
The Dardanelles campaign was conceived by the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and, like many of his military ventures, ended in calamitous failure. The Australian officers and politicians extolling the virtues of the Anzac soldiers tend to ignore that fact – alongside the inconvenient truth that Australians were responsible for a pre-emptive attack on the Ottoman Empire to supposedly shorten a war that lasted in murderous goriness till November 1918. To this day, the Turks have been cunning enough to treat the defeated invaders with reverence, tending to the graves of the fallen Anzacs and raking in tourist cash every April.
For the Australian public, it was far better to focus on such words as those of British war correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett written on the occasion of the Gallipoli landings: “There has been no finer feat in this war than this sudden landing in the dark and the storming of the heights.” Ashmead-Bartlett went on to note the views of General William Birdwood, British commander of the Anzac forces at Gallipoli: “he couldn’t sufficiently praise the courage, endurance and the soldierly qualities of the Colonials”. They “where happy because they had tried for the first time and not found wanting.”
In March 2003, these same “colonials” would again participate in the invasion of a sovereign state, claiming, spuriously, that they were ridding the world of a terrorist threat in the form of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, whose weapons of mass destruction were never found, and whose subsequent overthrow led to the fracturing of the Middle East. Far from being an act of bravery, the measure, in alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom, was a thuggish measure of gang violence against a country weakened by years of sanctions.
When options to pursue peace or diplomacy were there, Australian governments have been slavish and supine before the dictates and wishes of other powers keen on war. War, in this context, is affirmation, assertion, cleansing. War is also an admission to a certain chronic lack of imagination, and an admission to inferiority.
The occasion of Anzac Day in 2024 is one acrid with future conflict. Australia has become, and is becoming increasingly, an armed camp for US interests for a war that will be waged by dunderheads over such island entities as Taiwan, or over patches of land that will signify which big power remains primary and ascendant in the Indo- and Asia-Pacific. It is a view promoted with sickly enthusiasm by press outlets and thinktank enclaves across the country, funded by the Pentagon and military contractors who keep lining their pockets and bulking their accounts.
Central to this is the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and the United States, which features a focus on nuclear powered submarines and technology exchange that further subordinates Australia, and its tax paying citizens, to the steering wishes of Washington. Kurt Campbell, US Deputy Secretary of State, cast light on the role of the pact and what it is intended for in early April. Such “additional capacity” was intended to play a deterrent role, always code for the capacity to wage war. Having such “submarines from a number of countries operating in close coordination that could deliver conventional ordinance from long distances [would have] enormous implications in a variety of scenarios, including in cross-strait circumstances”. That’s Taiwan sorted.
Ultimately, the Australian role in aiding and abetting empires has been impressive, long and dismal. If it was not throwing in one’s lot with the British empire in its efforts to subjugate the Boer republics in South Africa, where many fought farmers not unlike their own, then it was in the paddy fields and jungles of Vietnam, doing much the same for the United States in its global quest to beat off atheistic communism. Australians fought in countries they barely knew, in battles they barely understood, in countries they could barely name.
This occasion is often seen as one to commemorate the loss of life and the integrity of often needless sacrifice, when it should be one to understand that a country with choices in war and peace decided to neglect them. The pattern risks repeating itself.
The post Anzac and the Pageantry of Deception first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
US state department says law could drive away foreign investment while David Cameron described it as ‘dangerous and worrying’
Human rights groups and diplomats have criticised a law passed by the Iraqi parliament over the weekend that would impose heavy prison sentences on gay and transgender people.
The US state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that the law on passed Saturday “threatens those most at risk in Iraqi society” and “can be used to hamper free-speech and expression”. He warned that the legislation could drive away foreign investment.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
By not responding to decades of Israel’s provocations with an attack on Israeli soil, Iran displayed patience. The Islamic Republic rulers realized the provocations were becoming harsher, more damaging, and without stopping; it was time to respond. Their response was notable; a mild rebuke that showed power and unwillingness to harm civilians, unlike the offensive attacks by Israel’s military and intelligence that have killed Iranian civilians and military personnel.
Israel’s worldwide propaganda mechanism omits the tens of previous illegal and damaging attacks inflicted upon Iran and charges Iran with cruel and threatening behavior that requires a strong reply. Already, members of England’s parliament (MP) obeyed the Zionist call for action with outrageous pleas to assist Israel against “Iran’s genocidal actions,” and “attempt to interrupt the peace.”
One person is injured and that is genocide. Tens of thousands of Gazans killed and no reference to genocide. Mayhem in the Middle East since the first Zionist set foot in Palestine and one relatively harmless attack disturbed the peace. Are these MPs real people or artificial intelligence? How can they run for office and be elected?
A common thread exists in US actions of aggressive behavior toward nations that have not threatened the security of the United States, such as 21st-century Iraq and Iran. The common thread weaves nations that were or are antagonists of apartheid Israel. All, except Iran, have been subdued by the U.S. What Israel wants, Israel gets, and Israel convinced the United States to eliminate the foes of the Zionist Republic. Americans died and Americans paid for efforts that had scarce benefits to U.S. citizens. Iran is now the last nation standing and Israel is coercing the U.S. to perform its usual duty — get rid of Iran. Look at the record.
Sudan
Deposed Sudan leader, Omar al-Bashir, made it clear. “Israel is our enemy, our number one enemy, and we will continue calling Israel our enemy.” Israel also made its relationship with Bahir clear by destroying a Sudanese arms factory suspected of producing chemical weapons for Hamas. Times of Israel reports that “Over the years, there have been reports of the Israelis continuing to aid South Sudanese rebels during Sudan’s second civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2005.” Israel’s assistance to the rebels enabled South Sudan to secede and weaken Bashir. The Times of Israel also reports that “Miniature Israeli flags hang from car windshields and flutter at roadside stalls, and at the Juba souk in the city’s downtown, you can buy lapel pins with the Israeli flag alongside its black, red and green South Sudanese counterpart.”
Link of a car bomb at the World Trade Center in New York to Osama bin Laden, who resided in Sudan, prompted the US State Department to add Sudan to its list of state sponsors of terrorism. In October 1997, the U.S. imposed economic, trade, and financial sanctions on Sudan. These sanctions occurred despite none of the extremists engaging in terrorist activities while in Sudan. Bashir offered extradition or interviews of arrested al-Qaeda operatives and allowed access to the extensive files of Sudanese intelligence. According to a CIA source, reported in the Guardian, Sept 30, 2001, “This represents the worst single intelligence failure in this whole terrible business. It is the key to the whole thing right now. It is reasonable to say that had we had this data we may have had a better chance of preventing the attacks.”
The U.S. Congress heightened the insurrection in Sudan’s Darfur province by passing amendment H.Con.Res.467 — 108th Congress (2003-2004), amended 07/22/2004, which “States that Congress declares that the atrocities unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, are genocide, and urges the Administration to refer to such atrocities as genocide.” The amendment gathered world opinion against the Sudanese government. Although the public accepted the figure of 400,000 killings of people in Darfur, this genocide had no verification of the number of killings, no displayed mass graves, and no images of a great number of bodies.
Before he left the U.S. State Department, former US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick stated on ABC News online, November 9, 2005, “It’s a tribal war. And frankly I don’t think foreign forces want to get in the middle of a tribal war of Sudanese.”
A peace agreement ended the second Sudanese civil war in 2005. On July 9, 2011, South Sudan became independent and reduced Sudan to a pipeline for South Sudan oil. After Sudan became a diminished state, barely able to survive, the United States lifted economic and trade sanctions. Independent South Sudan fared worse — involved in its civil war, human rights violations, and social and economic turmoil. Human Rights Watch (HRW) claimed [South Sudan] “Government security forces and armed groups perpetrated serious human rights abuses, including killings, acts of sexual violence, abductions, detention, torture and other ill-treatment, the recruitment and use of children, and destruction of civilian property.” The U.S. government did not criticize the human rights violations of the friend of Israel.
On October 23, 2020, Israel and Sudan agreed to normalize relations
On April 6, 2021, the Sudanese cabinet approved a bill abolishing the 1958 law on boycotting Israel.
The once wealthy Sudan, flowing with minerals and gushing with oil had the possibility of becoming a strong and vibrant African nation. US policies of countering terrorism, assisting South Sudan rebels, and interfering in the Darfur civil war contributed to preventing that outcome and provided Israel with a friendly Sudan that no longer assisted the Palestinians.
Libya
Libya’s leader, Mohammar Qadhafi, has been quoted as saying on April 1, 2002, “Thousands of Libyans are ready to defend the Palestinian people.” In that speech he called for a Pan-Arab war against the state of Israel’s existence and demanded “other Arab leaders open their borders to allow Libyans to march into Palestine, to join the Palestinian uprising.” In the speech, Gaddafi claimed he would not recognize Israel as a state.
The United States used Gadhafi’s support for radical revolutions as a reason to have strained relations with Libya. Sanctions soon followed. In March 1982, the U.S. Government prohibited imports of Libyan crude oil into the United States and expanded the controls on U.S. originated goods intended for export to Libya. Licenses were required for all transactions, except food and medicine. In April 1985, all Export-Import Bank financing was prohibited.
On April 14, 1986, the United States launched air strikes against Libya in retaliation for “Libyan sponsorship of terrorism against American troops and citizens.” Five military targets and “terrorism centers” were hit, including Gadhafi’s headquarters.
After Libya halted its nuclear program, renounced terrorism, accepted responsibility for inappropriate actions by its officials, and paid appropriate compensation to the victims’ families for the bombing of a US commercial airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, the United Nations (UN) lifted sanctions, the U.S. terminated the applicability of the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act to Libya, and President Bush signed an Executive Order terminating the national emergency, which ended economic sanctions. All was going well until 2011.
Despite the lack of clarity of the 2011 rebellion against Gadhafi and specious reasons for NATO and US roles to defend the rebels, the U.S. government cut ties with the Gadhafi regime, sanctioned senior regime members, and, together with several European and Arab nations, managed to convince the UN Security Council to authorize intervention in the conflict. The intervention demolished the Gadhafi regime and enabled the rebels to obtain victory, another fallen nation that was an outspoken antagonist of Israel, and, still, in 2024, an embattled nation.
Egypt
On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel to reclaim territories they had lost in the Six-Day War. With Israeli troops seriously outnumbered and facing near-certain defeat at the hands of the Soviet-backed nations, President Nixon ordered an emergency airlift of supplies and materiel. “Send everything that will fly,” Nixon told Henry Kissinger. The American airlift enabled Israel to launch a decisive counterattack that pushed the Egyptians back across the Suez Canal.
In a briefing, Scuttle Diplomacy: Henry Kissinger and Arab-Israeli Peacemaking, by Salim Yaqub, Woodrow Wilson Center, Dr. Yaqub argued that “Kissinger’s pivotal role as the intermediary allowed him to feign neutrality while secretly supporting the Israelis, and to turn the peace negotiations into a long series of small confidence building steps which would give the appearance of progress that Egypt required to come to an agreement with Israel, but which would allow Israel to keep most of the Syrian and Palestinian land gained after the 1967 Six-Day War.”
Prime Minister of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, signed a peace treaty with Israel, and the U.S. normalized relations with previously combative Egypt. The most populous and leading nation of the Arab world, the principal defender of Arab rights, which had waged several wars with Israel, no longer posed a threat to Israel and became a weakened observer to the hostilities affecting the Middle East.
Syria
Israel and Syria battled from day one of the UN 181 Proclamation that recommended partition of the British Mandate.
The U.S. never favored the Assad regime and cut relations. After the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. soil, the Syrian Government tried limited cooperation with the U.S. War on Terror. Syrian intelligence alerted the U.S. of an Al-Qaeda plan to fly a hang glider loaded with explosives into the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Syria was also a destination for U.S. captives outside of its borders in its rendition program. According to U.S. officials, as reported by Nicholas Blanford, in a Special to The Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 2002, ”Syrian information was instrumental in catching militant Islamists around the world.”
Syria’s descent into near oblivion started with its civil wars, in which foreign fighters (ISIS and al-Nusra) entered Syria from NATO’s Turkey (no retribution to Turkey for allowing ISIS to enter Syria), and a multitude of insurgents fought with and against one another until Assad, with assistance from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, overcame the insurgencies. WikiLeaks, in 2011, released diplomatic cables between the U.S. embassy in Damascus and the State Department, which revealed the U.S. had given financial support to political opposition groups and their related projects through September 2010.
ISIS is defeated and a limping Assad government barely survives as a splintered nation. Bombed almost daily by Israeli missiles and planes, the hopelessly weak Syria cannot retaliate. With assistance from the U.S., Syria’s threat to Israel has been neutralized.
Iraq
Justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq with a spurious reason that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and needed to be silenced was so absurd that another reason was sought. Security school scholars argued a joint threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist groups. Hegemony school scholars argued preservation and extension of U.S. hegemony, including the spread of liberal democratic ideals. When in doubt bring in liberal democratic ideals.
The interventionists conveniently forgot that Saddam Hussein was a restraint to Iran and a deterrent to Radical Islamists. With Hussein removed, Iran lost its restraint. Bordering on Iraq and spiritually attached to Iraq’s Shi’a population, Iran became involved in the commercial, economic, and political future of Iraq, an event that U.S. strategists should have known.
The invasion of Iraq and disposal of a Saddam Hussein regime, which had prevented al-Qaeda elements from establishing themselves, exposed Iraq’s porous borders to Radical Islamic fighters. Founded in October 2004, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) emerged from a transnational terrorist group created and led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His cohorts entered through Jordan, while al-Qaeda forced out of Waziristan in Pakistan found a haven in Iraq. Meanwhile, fighters trained in and wandering through the deserts of Saudi Arabia hopped planes to Istanbul and Damascus and worked their way across Syria into Iraq. Disturbed by the U.S. invasion and military tactics, Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri al-Samarrai, later known as Al Baghdadi, founder of the Islamic Caliphate, transformed himself from a fun-loving soccer player into a hardened militant and helped found the militant group Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamaah (JJASJ), which countered the U.S. military in Iraq.
Spurious reasons and obvious counterproductive results leave doubts that the original explanation and rationales for the invasion were correct. A more valid reason involves the neocons in the Bush administration who were closely identified with Israel in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and the office of the vice president, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, who aggressively advanced the case for the invasion. Some backups to that theory,
Haaretz, Apr 03, 2003, “White Man’s Burden,” Ari Shavit, “The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish (ED: Avid Israel supporters), who were pushing President Bush to change the course of history.”
In The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad echoes the case.
The road to Iraq was paved with neoconservative intentions. Other factions of the US foreign policy establishment were eventually brought around to supporting the war, but the neocons were its architects and chief proponents.
Ahmad quotes a remark attributed to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. “It’s a toss-up whether Libby is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day.” He also quotes former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan who contended, “The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right.”
A 1996 report, Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, prepared by neoconservatives at the Jerusalem-based think tank, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, many of whom held vital positions in the George W. Bush administration, lends substance to the charge that the invasion of Iraq served Israel’s interests.
We must distinguish soberly and clearly friend from foe. We must make sure that our friends across the Middle East never doubt the solidity or value of our friendship….Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.
Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values by stressing that Israel is self-reliant, does not need U.S. troops in any capacity to defend it, including on the Golan Heights, and can manage its own affairs. Such self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure used against it in the past.
Participants in the Study Group included Richard Perle, American Enterprise Institute, Study Group Leader, James Colbert, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Johns Hopkins University/SAIS, Douglas Feith, Feith and Zell Associates, Robert Loewenberg, President, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, Jonathan Torop, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, David Wurmser, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, and Meyrav Wurmser, Johns Hopkins University.
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser later served in high positions in the George W. Bush administration at the time of the Iraq invasion. The others were allied with organizations that promoted Israel’s interests.
Two observations:
(1) Why were Americans prominent in an Israeli Think Tank and why were they advising a foreign nation?
(2) Note that the thrust of the report is to advise Israel to have a “clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity, and mutuality.” This has been the modus operandi of the Netanyahu administrations.
Another ember that warmed the neocon’s heartfelt devotion to Israel; The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years. “Bombing Iraq Isn’t enough. Saddam Hussein must go,” William Kristol and Robert Kagan, PNAC neocon directors wrote in the 1998 New York Times.
No “smoking gun” firmly ties the neocons devoted to Israel together with using the United States military to eliminate another Israel antagonist. The argument is based upon it being the best, most factual, and only reason the war could have been wanted.
Iran – Last Nation Standing
The Islamic Republic may not be an exemplary nation, but there is no evidence or reason for the U.S. accusations that Iran is a destabilizing, expansionist nation, or leading sponsor of international terrorism. Why would it be – there are no external resources or land masses that would be helpful to Iran’s economy, Iran has not invaded any nation, and its few sea and drone attacks on others are reactions from a perception that others have colluded in harming the Islamic Republic and its allies. Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision of expanding his social ideology never got anywhere and died with him. Subsequent leaders have been forced to reach out to defend their interests and those of their friends, but none of these leaders has pursued an expansionist philosophy or wants the burden that accompanies the task — enough problems at home.
No matter what Iran does, the US perceives Iran as an enemy and a threat to not only the Middle East but to world order. All this hostility, despite the facts that (1) the Iranians showed willingness to create a new Afghanistan by pledging $560 million worth of assistance, almost equal to the amount that the United States pledged at the Tokyo donors’ conference in January 2002, (2) according to the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Dobbins, played a “decisive role in persuading the Northern Alliance delegation to compromise its demands of wanting 60 percent of the portfolios in an interim government,” (3) Iran arrested Al-Qaeda agents on its territory and, because Al-Qaeda linked the Shiite Muslims, represented by Iran and Hezbollah, with Crusaders, Zionists, and Jews as its most bitter enemies, had ample reason to combat terrorist organizations, and (4) Iran has no reason for or capability of attacking the U.S .or its western allies.
Being vilified for inadequate reasons is followed by Iran not being praised for significant reasons. President Trump, in his January 8, 2020 speech, argued the U.S. had been responsible for defeating ISIS and the Islamic Republic should realize that it is in their benefit to work with the United States in making sure ISIS remains defeated. Trade the U.S. with Iran and Trump’s speech would be correct.
The U.S. spent years and billions of dollars in training an Iraqi army that fled Mosul and left it to a small contingent of ISIS forces. Showing no will and expertise to fight, Iraq’s debilitated military permitted ISIS to rapidly expand and conquer Tikrit and other cities. Events energized Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, which, with cooperation from Iran and leadership from its Major General Qasem Soleimani, recaptured Tikrit and Ramadi, pushed ISIS out of Fallujah, and played a leading role in ISIS’ defeat at Mosul. Iran and Soleimani were key elements in the defeat of ISIS.
What reward did Solemani receive for his efforts? When his convoy left Baghdad airport, a drone strike, perpetrated by U.S. military, assassinated Major General Solemani and nine other innocent people on January 3, 2002. UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Agnes Callamard, reported the U.S. had not provided sufficient evidence of an imminent threat to life to justify the attack.
As usual, Israel used the U.S. to satisfy its desires. “Israel was going to do this with us, and it was being planned and working on it for months,” President Trump said about the coordination to kill Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force. “We had everything all set to go, and the night before it happened, I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack. I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. We were disappointed by that. Very disappointed…But we did the job ourselves, with absolute precision … and then Bibi tried to take credit for it.”
Why do these protectors of the realm want Iran destroyed — they fear Iran may act as a deterrent to their future aggression. Iran cannot win a war with a nuclear weapon or any weapons; it can only posture and threaten use of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Its principal antagonists, Israel, United States, and Saudi Arabia have elements that shield themselves from a nuclear attack by Iran. Israel’s small size makes it likely that fallout from a nuclear weapon will endanger the entire region, especially Iran’s allies. Any nuclear strike on Israel will be countered with a torrent of nuclear missiles that will completely wipe large Iran off the map and without fallout causing harm to neighboring nations. With little to gain and everything to lose, why would Iran engage in nuclear aggression?
Netanyahu’s scenario follows a pattern of using American lives and clout to further Israel’s interests and decimate its adversaries. Survey the record — destruction of Iraq, destruction of Sudan, destruction of Libya, destruction of Egypt, destruction of Syria. and now Iran. Only Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries will be left standing, remaining in that position as long as they show no threat to Israel.
The destructions visited upon the described nations have done little to advance US security and economy. Therefore, the reason for the actions and US support of Israel must be political —politicians coopted by catering to the religious right community and other Israel defenders. US administrations are willing to sacrifice American lives and give exorbitant financial assistance to Israel in trade for electoral support from Israel’s backers.
The present confrontations between Iran and Israel have escalated. Those who believe Israel’s few drones over Isfahan concluded retaliation for Iran’s excessive number of missiles and harmless result in the attack on Israel might be mistaken. The drones may have only tested Iranian defensive capability. More, much more provocations may happen.
Due to US aggressive tactics, the antagonists to Israel have fallen and Iran is the last nation standing.
The post Last Nation Standing ─ Iran first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Time (4/14/24)
This week on CounterSpin: The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuse of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed.
Time magazine unwittingly told the tale with the recent headline: “Abu Ghraib Military Contractor Trial Set to Start 20 Years after Shocking Images of Abuse.” That’s the thing, people had been reporting the horrific treatment of Iraqi detainees at the Baghdad-area prison and elsewhere, but it was only when those photos were released—photos the Defense Department tried hard to suppress—that it was so undeniable it had to be acknowledged.
But still: When Australian TV later broadcast new unseen images, the Washington Post officially sighed that they weren’t worth running because they did not depict “previously unknown” abuse. Post executive editor Len Downie had a different answer, saying in an online chat that the images were “so shocking and in such bad taste, especially the extensive nudity, that they are not publishable in our newspaper.” Because that what officially sanctioned torture is, above all, right? Distasteful.
We got a reading on the case last year from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Transcript: ‘CACI Aided and Abetted the Torture of Our Clients’
Prometheus Books (2024)
Also on the show: Historians tell us that the Cold War is over, but the framing persists in news media that love a simple good guy vs. bad guy story, even as who the good and the bad guys are shifts over time. Telling history through actual human beings makes it harder to come up with slam-dunk answers, but can raise questions that are ultimately more useful for those seeking a peaceful planet. A new book provides a sort of case study; it’s about Ted Hall, who, as a young man, shared nuclear secrets from Los Alamos with the then–Soviet Union. Veteran investigative journalist Dave Lindorff has reported for numerous outlets and is author of Marketplace Medicine and This Can’t Be Happening, among other titles. We talked with him about his latest, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World, which is out now from Prometheus Books.
The post Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Lawsuit, Dave Lindorff on <i>Spy for No Country</i> appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Jury trial against military contractor CACI over ‘sadistic, blatant and wanton abuses’ comes 20 years after scandal broke
The first trial to contend with the post-9/11 abuse of detainees in US custody begins on Monday, in a case brought by three men who were held in the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The jury trial, in a federal court in Virginia, comes nearly 20 years to the day that the photographs depicting torture and abuse in the prison were first revealed to the public, prompting an international scandal that came to symbolize the treatment of detainees in the US “war on terror”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Archivists can be a dull if industrious lot. Christmas crackers are less important than the new year announcement in Canberra, when the National Archives of Australia releases documents like the newborn into the information world. The event is not without irony, given that such documents are often aged and seasoned numbers, whiskered by storage and grey with cataloguing.
On January 1, the NAA diligently followed a long standing convention of releasing a stash of cabinet documents running into 240 from the Howard government, a period in Australian history when finance ruled with raffish vulgarity, and critical adventurers of conscience were anesthetised and told to get a mortgage. John Howard, Australia’s dull, waxwork prime minister, reminded his voters that Australia’s links to Asian countries were less important than the sigh-heavy attention from Washington.
What was particularly interesting in this disgorging of material was the focus on Australia’s foolish, negligent and even criminal contribution to the war on Iraq in 2003. Even more interesting was how little the files said about the reasons for Australia’s commitment to the invasion. Much of this was occasioned by the omission of 78 records that would otherwise have been in the original 2020 transfer to the archives.
Canberra is the city of smudged politicians, unnervingly clean air and endless meetings, but the omission of documents troubled Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, given that they concerned the invasion. He even went so far as to order an inquiry. In true capital fashion, it was done with reserve and caution, the broom being of the “one of us” school. Dennis Richardson, former director of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), not to mention being on the government’s retainer as a consultant, became the broom in question.
In subsequent recommendations as to why the omission of the documents had taken place, Richardson advanced the less than controversial thesis that the NAA include documents from the National Security Committee (NSC), a fixture of the Howard government.
On March 14, the Archives, as if prodded, released certain NSC documents relevant to the Iraq invasion. In the incomplete release, Australia as empire’s obedient, perfumed appendage becomes almost ridiculously evident. On January 10, 2003, the Defence Minister Robert Hill, along with the defence force chief, identified the need for deploying some personnel from the Australian Defence Force within a month “on the likely time-frame for possible military action against Iraq” as indicated by US Central Command. The meeting also reveals that ADF forward units were already designated from a list agreed upon by the NSC on August 26 and December 4, 2002. The thrill for imminent war was palpable.
Howard, at the same meeting, promised that committing ADF forces required the consideration of all cabinet members, also noting that he had “foreshadowed to the governor-general the general direction of steps under consideration by the government in relation to Iraq”. But the governor-general of the time, the eventually doomed Peter Hollingworth, was subsequently told by the prime minister that involving him in the decision to invade Iraq was needless; the ADF could be deployed under the provisions of the Defence Act.
A minute dated March 18, 2003 makes mention of the full cabinet’s authorisation of the invasion, though hardly anything else. There is, however, a submission from the defence minister “circulated in the cabinet room on 17 and 18 March” intended to convince cabinet on possible military operations in Iraq. In anticipation of a formal request to commit troops, the ADF had already been authorised to pursue “prudent contingency planning” on the matter. The two stated war aims of Washington are outlined (vassal, take note): “regime change” and crippling Iraq’s “delivery of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)”. On this point, the Howard government dawdles, if ever so slightly, notably on the issue of regime change, admitting, ultimately, that “this may be a desirable, even inevitable, outcome of military action”.
The now infamous memorandum of advice authored by the first assistant secretaries of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Attorney-General’s department is also to be found. The memorandum offers the shakiest of justifications for invading Iraq, also drawing from unsubstantiated reasons from their UK counterparts. It was subsequently and rightly excoriated by an irate Gavan Griffith, the then unconsulted Solicitor-General. Not only were both bits of legal advice “entirely untenable”, they were also “arrant nonsense”, furnishing “no threads for military clothes.” Nothing from President George W. Bush’s remarks had revealed any desire “to clothe American action with the authority of the Security Council.” Thuggish unilateral action seemed the order of the day.
For Griffith, certain omissions were almost unpardonable. What, for instance, of such authorities as Canberra’s veteran authority, Henry Burmester, the former head of the Office of International Law, subsequently appointed Chief Counsel of the AG’s department. Or for, that matter, of the now late James Crawford of Cambridge University, commonly retained for the giving of advice on international law. Cautious experience had been elbowed out in favour of the gun.
The latest documents from the NSC are more sleet than snow. They do confirm that the parliamentary system, more than ever, should be involved in reining in the wild impulses of war makers. In the meantime, drawing up an indictment for Howard to stand trial in the International Criminal Court is overdue. The same goes for a number of his cabinet. We would not want them to go stale before justice.
The post Predictable Outcomes: Australia, the National Security Committee, and Invading Iraq first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.