Tues., October 25, 2011
Protest Condoleezza Rice speech in Charlotte!
Arrest Condi for War Crimes!
The Iraq War has cost us over $1 trillion!
March from Occupy Charlotte at 5:30 pm
Protest starts at 6:00 pm
We'll be there the whole time
Belk Theater
130 N. Tryon St.
Charlotte, NC 28202
For more information:
Action Center For Justice
704.759.6529
www.charlotteaction.blogspot.com
Showing posts with label war crimes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war crimes. Show all posts
Free SPC Bradley Manning, Arrested for Exposing U.S. War Crimes in Iraq & Afghanistan
Sign to FREE SPC BRADLEY MANNING NOW!
Free SPC Bradley Manning, Arrested for Exposing U.S. War Crimes in Iraq & Afghanistan
End the Occupations Now
Stop the Murder and Abuse of Civilians by U.S. and NATO Military
Sign the Petition Now:
http://www.iacenter.org/iraq/freebradleymanning
A 22 year old U.S. soldier, Bradley Manning, has been arrested on suspicion of leaking classified combat video footage and secret documents to a whistle-blower website. SPC Manning, from Potomac, Maryland, is assigned to the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division and was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, located east of Baghdad. SPC Manning was arrested in Iraq and is currently being held in Kuwait pending further investigations. The WikiLeaks website posted a video which shows U.S. occupation forces shooting civilians on a Baghdad street during 2007.
The video, which was filmed by the U.S. military, shows a horrendous massacre of unarmed civilians on the ground by a helicopter gunship, accompanied by crude and insensitive remarks by the crew and ground troops associated with the assault. A Reuters reporter and two children were also wounded in the assault. The Pentagon has not questioned the validity or authenticity of the video.
Two U.S. soldiers who were part of the ground unit which took part in the attack, Josh Stieber and Ethan McCord, have written and published a letter of apology to the Iraqi people for their actions.
But those who are really responsible for this war crime, the U.S. military, far from apologizing have chosen to track down and arrest the person whom they believe released the video, Bradley Manning.
If Bradley Manning did courageously leak the video, he is to be commended for exposing a war crime, not punished. According to international law, and even the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), combatants are required to report violations of rules of combat outlined in the Geneva Conventions first laid down in 1950. And those rules of combat explicitly list the intentional shooting of unarmed civilians as a war crime.
At the Nuremberg trials in 1946, Nazi war criminals were tried and punished, not only for their own despicable acts, but for remaining silent while others committed atrocities. The operable phrase was "silence equals consent".
Many of the mainstream press and other apologists for U.S. and NATO wars and occupations have attacked Bradley Manning as a threat to national security because the video was classified. It has long been known that the U.S. government routinely classifies not only information directly associated with weapons and tactics, but anything that might make them look bad, or call into question their attempts to justify unjust wars and occupations.
There have also been reports that other classified documents and videos may have been released by Manning. The existence of such material shows that this case goes beyond a single war crime incident. It points to a broad program of criminal planning and conspiracy to commit or to cover up war crimes by the U.S. Military.
Progressive and peace-loving people everywhere must rally to defend Bradley Manning, and condemn the war crimes which he is accused of revealing.
Sign the Petition Now: http://www.iacenter.org/iraq/freebradleymanning
Petition Text:
To: President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Dana K. Chipman, Congressional leaders, U.N. Secretary General Ban, members of the U.N. Security Council, U.N. member states
cc: Major media representatives, International Red Cross
Free Bradley Manning!!
End the Wars and Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan!
Bring the Troops Home Now!
Bring to Justice the U.S. Perpetrators of War Crimes, including the Pentagon
I am writing to demand that Bradley Manning, a courageous soldier deployed in Iraq, be immediately be released from custody, and that any and all charges against him be immediately dropped and that any administrative or military sanctions against him be suspended.
Bradley Manning is suspected of being responsible for the leak of a classified video filmed by the U.S. military, which shows in graphic detail the massacre of civilians by a U.S. helicopter gunship in Iraq in 2007.
Far from being punished, Bradley Manning should be commended. In fact, the Geneva Conventions of 1950, the Nuremberg war crimes trials of 1946, and even the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice, not only permit, but require that violations of international law and the rules of engagement be reported. Silence equals consent!
U.S. and NATO troops who are sent to fight and occupy other countries are placed in an impossible situation. They are forced to fight and die in unjustified wars and inevitably many come to regard the entire population as their enemy.
I therefore further demand that the United States stop its aggressive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring the troops home immediately.
I also demand that a commission independent of the U.S. government or its allies be established to thoroughly and publicly investigate the events portrayed by the video allegedly leaked by Bradley Manning.
Free SPC Bradley Manning, Arrested for Exposing U.S. War Crimes in Iraq & Afghanistan
End the Occupations Now
Stop the Murder and Abuse of Civilians by U.S. and NATO Military
Sign the Petition Now:
http://www.iacenter.org/iraq/freebradleymanning
A 22 year old U.S. soldier, Bradley Manning, has been arrested on suspicion of leaking classified combat video footage and secret documents to a whistle-blower website. SPC Manning, from Potomac, Maryland, is assigned to the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division and was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, located east of Baghdad. SPC Manning was arrested in Iraq and is currently being held in Kuwait pending further investigations. The WikiLeaks website posted a video which shows U.S. occupation forces shooting civilians on a Baghdad street during 2007.
The video, which was filmed by the U.S. military, shows a horrendous massacre of unarmed civilians on the ground by a helicopter gunship, accompanied by crude and insensitive remarks by the crew and ground troops associated with the assault. A Reuters reporter and two children were also wounded in the assault. The Pentagon has not questioned the validity or authenticity of the video.
Two U.S. soldiers who were part of the ground unit which took part in the attack, Josh Stieber and Ethan McCord, have written and published a letter of apology to the Iraqi people for their actions.
But those who are really responsible for this war crime, the U.S. military, far from apologizing have chosen to track down and arrest the person whom they believe released the video, Bradley Manning.
If Bradley Manning did courageously leak the video, he is to be commended for exposing a war crime, not punished. According to international law, and even the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), combatants are required to report violations of rules of combat outlined in the Geneva Conventions first laid down in 1950. And those rules of combat explicitly list the intentional shooting of unarmed civilians as a war crime.
At the Nuremberg trials in 1946, Nazi war criminals were tried and punished, not only for their own despicable acts, but for remaining silent while others committed atrocities. The operable phrase was "silence equals consent".
Many of the mainstream press and other apologists for U.S. and NATO wars and occupations have attacked Bradley Manning as a threat to national security because the video was classified. It has long been known that the U.S. government routinely classifies not only information directly associated with weapons and tactics, but anything that might make them look bad, or call into question their attempts to justify unjust wars and occupations.
There have also been reports that other classified documents and videos may have been released by Manning. The existence of such material shows that this case goes beyond a single war crime incident. It points to a broad program of criminal planning and conspiracy to commit or to cover up war crimes by the U.S. Military.
Progressive and peace-loving people everywhere must rally to defend Bradley Manning, and condemn the war crimes which he is accused of revealing.
Sign the Petition Now: http://www.iacenter.org/iraq/freebradleymanning
Petition Text:
To: President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Dana K. Chipman, Congressional leaders, U.N. Secretary General Ban, members of the U.N. Security Council, U.N. member states
cc: Major media representatives, International Red Cross
Free Bradley Manning!!
End the Wars and Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan!
Bring the Troops Home Now!
Bring to Justice the U.S. Perpetrators of War Crimes, including the Pentagon
I am writing to demand that Bradley Manning, a courageous soldier deployed in Iraq, be immediately be released from custody, and that any and all charges against him be immediately dropped and that any administrative or military sanctions against him be suspended.
Bradley Manning is suspected of being responsible for the leak of a classified video filmed by the U.S. military, which shows in graphic detail the massacre of civilians by a U.S. helicopter gunship in Iraq in 2007.
Far from being punished, Bradley Manning should be commended. In fact, the Geneva Conventions of 1950, the Nuremberg war crimes trials of 1946, and even the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice, not only permit, but require that violations of international law and the rules of engagement be reported. Silence equals consent!
U.S. and NATO troops who are sent to fight and occupy other countries are placed in an impossible situation. They are forced to fight and die in unjustified wars and inevitably many come to regard the entire population as their enemy.
I therefore further demand that the United States stop its aggressive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring the troops home immediately.
I also demand that a commission independent of the U.S. government or its allies be established to thoroughly and publicly investigate the events portrayed by the video allegedly leaked by Bradley Manning.
The Failings of the UN War Crimes Mission to Gaza
By Peter Eyre, The Palestine Telegraph, Oct. 9, 2009
Gaza - We had all hoped that the findings of the UN investigation team into war crimes would have delivered swift and severe justice for the people of Gaza. The US on the other hand had other ideas and once again intervened.
We have over many years seen the manipulation and interference by the United States in not allowing the UN to carry out its rightful duties. Could anyone imagine stalling the outcome of a murder case because the pending result may convict a killer and upset the family?
What gives Hillary Clinton the right to say that such an outcome may directly affect any future peace plans with Israel? Does this mean that war crimes can be swept under the carpet as she shakes hands with the perpetrators and pretends nothing ever happened? Doesn't Clinton and the President understand that in carrying out swift action will gain respect from the Arab world. This is truly a sad day for international justice.
The extensive report highlighted the many crimes that had taken place but then backed off when it came to more serious issues. The report fell short of investigating some very serious allegations that had been made; both in submissions made or pointed out to them whilst in Gaza. It was also disgraceful that this investigation had been given time constraints. Since when have investigations into murder been restricted by time?
Let's take a look at some of the more important aspects of this report and reveal the many flaws associated with it and how some of the genuine serious allegations were swept under the carpet.
The remit for this investigation was to investigate events occurring between the ceasefire of 18th June 2008 and the Israeli attack on the 27th of December 2008 and during Operation Cast Lead.
On Page 16 Paragraph 48 of the report they talk about certain weapons used such as White Phosphorus (WP): Based on its investigation of incidents involving the use of certain weapons such as white phosphorous and flechette missiles, the Mission, while accepting that white phosphorous is not at this stage proscribed under international law, finds that the Israeli armed forces were systematically reckless in determining its use in built-up areas. Moreover, doctors who treated patients with white phosphorous wounds spoke about the severity and sometimes untreatable nature of the burns caused by the substance. The Mission believes that serious consideration should be given to banning the use of white phosphorous in built-up areas.
The wording in the above paragraph indicates that WP is not proscribed under international law and yet when one looks towards Geneva we find the following:
The use of White Phosphorus of densely populated areas - In violation of the Geneva Convention: Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons (Protocol III).
"Certain uses of incendiary weapons, in particular the use of air delivered incendiary weapons against targets situated amongst concentrations of civilians" (Protocol III to the Conventional Weapons Convention).
I am sure that we all agree that these weapons were continuously rained down on the densely populated city of Gaza and yet the Mission appeared to have played down is usage and made the recommendation "The Mission believes that serious consideration should be given to banning the use of white phosphorous in built-up areas". Didn't they know this was already covered under the above Protocol?
Let's go back to Page 8 Paragraph (F) when it states that forensic analysis of weapons and ammunitions collected at incident sites would be used. Again it appears that the Mission did not apply the forensic analysis it talked about.
Even if one had the name "Sherlock Holmes" and walked around Gaza with a spy glass in hand you would find more evidence that these forensic scientist found.
Why did the Mission not follow up on the issue of Flechette or DIME weapons that were reportedly used on Gaza? The doctors explained to them their findings, they had victims with such injuries and they had a multitude of fragments to show? The report gives clear indications of their usage but falls short of condemning Israel and obviously must leave this aspect of such an enquiry open pending further investigation. Why is this not being carried out?
In their report the following comment was made: "Mission notes that they are an area weapon incapable of discriminating between objectives after detonation. They are; therefore, particularly unsuitable for use in urban settings where there is reason to believe civilians may be present". Did they again forget to mention that these weapons are also in violation of the Geneva Convention?
Whilst on the subject of weapons used what happened to the more serious allegation that DU/EU weapons had been used on Gaza? They were raised in the submissions made to the UN before their visitation and by other third parties. If one again looks at the report we will see some small reference on this topic namely: The Mission received allegations that depleted and none depleted
uranium was used by Israeli forces in Gaza. These allegations were not further investigated by the Mission.
Of all the alleged war crimes committed the most evil act that anyone could inflict on a nation is that of DU/EU weapons. They are totally indiscriminate, totally illegal and lethal. So why did such an important allegation also get swept under the carpet. Did the Missions Sherlock Homes run out of spy glasses, were their sun glasses so dark they couldn't find any evidence or did they just simply run out of time? This report like all the previous UN reports concerning DU/EU weapons usage in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon are deeply flawed so why should we expect any inspiration from the Gaza report?
Perhaps we must once again remind the Mission of the following:
Weaponry containing Depleted Uranium (DU) with indiscriminate effect or of a nature to cause superflouus injury or unnecessary suffering.
Protocols I to the Geneva Conventions have an obligation to ascertain that new weapons do not violate the laws and customs of war or any other international law. The International Court of Justice considers this rule binding customary humanitarian law.
Let's just help refresh their memory of the multiple attacks on Gaza using weapons containing uranium components. In the photograph on the left we see two such weapons exploding with another two on the way in. We have seen such explosions in many parts of Gaza and also in the Rafah.
If one looks at this investigation by the Mission you will once again see that these other extremely serious issues of DU/EU, WP, DIME, Flechette bombs have been bypassed and become insignificant. I again emphasise that this report into Israel's activities in Gaza should remain open pending further investigations.
The report also focused on the Palestinian rocket attacks but went outside of its remit in doing so. The Missions remit clearly states to investigate events between the ceasefire period and the end of Operation Cast Lead. The report failed to highlight the fact that the Palestinians held true its promise of a ceasefire for the entire duration and then only broke that ceasefire as a result of the continued intimidation by Israel.
Regarding Page 31 Paragraph 103 of the report. Why did the Mission go outside of their remit to quote the following? - "Palestinian armed groups have launched about 8000 rockets and mortars into southern Israel since 2001". In Paragraph 105 on the same page it again went outside of its remit to refer to data received in October of 2007: "The Mission has taken particular note of the high level of psychological trauma suffered by the civilian population inside Israel. Data gathered by an Israeli organization in October 2007 found that 28.4% of adults and 72-94% of children in Sderot suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" Based on this comment would it not be true to say the Palestinians have been under constant intimidation from the Israeli's since their States inception? Would it be true to say that the trauma of constant degradation, humiliation and land grabs goes beyond imagination.
The report even passed comment about Hamas fighting from within Gaza city and putting the civilian population at risk. Perhaps the Mission could explain how does want fight and defend such a densely populated city without being in amongst your own population? Does the Mission appreciate that the distance from the city to the border is very short and had Hamas taken up position in such an area the Israel Air Force with its sophisticated Fighter, Helicopters and UAV's would have picked them off without any effort. It is obvious that the experts writing this report have no understanding of the disproportionate force that Hamas faced and had no choice but to fight from within their city.
On Page 29 Paragraph 92 the report even extended into the West Bank when it stated: "In the West Bank, Israel has long imposed a system of movement restrictions. Movement is restricted by a combination of physical obstacles such as roadblocks, checkpoints and the Wall, but also through administrative measures such as identity cards, permits, assigned residence, laws on family reunification, and policies on the right to enter from abroad and the right of return for refugees" etc.
What the report did not point out was that the West Bank remains under total occupation and that two thirds of this so called Palestinian enclave is not available to the rightful owners. The Israelis in their usual arrogant way continue to land grab and take control of vast tracts of land. We have reason to believe that much of the land on the Dead Sea side is extremely rich in natural resources and therefore they have no intention of allowing the rightful owners to benefit from those resources.
Finally I would like to point out that the report draws attention to the odd missile or bomb here and there when in actual fact the strip was bombarded with a vast array of high tech weaponry. It is obvious that yet again the UN is playing down these serious violations and really has no intention of revealing the truth behind the use of these dirty weapons. Independent experts have received samples from Gaza in much the same way as they did from Lebanon and the findings were extremely upsetting. I again as the question of the UN Mission Team.....why didn't they use forensic evidence from the many missile/bomb sites to analyse exactly what had be used during the conflict and why wasn't these forensic experts used as stipulated at the beginning of their report?
The Palestinian people and their brothers in the Middle East should apply pressure on the UN to proceed without delay and bring justice to the people of Gaza. The manipulation by the US and the announced delay is appalling.
- Peter Eyre, Middle East Consultant
Gaza - We had all hoped that the findings of the UN investigation team into war crimes would have delivered swift and severe justice for the people of Gaza. The US on the other hand had other ideas and once again intervened.We have over many years seen the manipulation and interference by the United States in not allowing the UN to carry out its rightful duties. Could anyone imagine stalling the outcome of a murder case because the pending result may convict a killer and upset the family?
What gives Hillary Clinton the right to say that such an outcome may directly affect any future peace plans with Israel? Does this mean that war crimes can be swept under the carpet as she shakes hands with the perpetrators and pretends nothing ever happened? Doesn't Clinton and the President understand that in carrying out swift action will gain respect from the Arab world. This is truly a sad day for international justice.
The extensive report highlighted the many crimes that had taken place but then backed off when it came to more serious issues. The report fell short of investigating some very serious allegations that had been made; both in submissions made or pointed out to them whilst in Gaza. It was also disgraceful that this investigation had been given time constraints. Since when have investigations into murder been restricted by time?
Let's take a look at some of the more important aspects of this report and reveal the many flaws associated with it and how some of the genuine serious allegations were swept under the carpet.
The remit for this investigation was to investigate events occurring between the ceasefire of 18th June 2008 and the Israeli attack on the 27th of December 2008 and during Operation Cast Lead.
On Page 16 Paragraph 48 of the report they talk about certain weapons used such as White Phosphorus (WP): Based on its investigation of incidents involving the use of certain weapons such as white phosphorous and flechette missiles, the Mission, while accepting that white phosphorous is not at this stage proscribed under international law, finds that the Israeli armed forces were systematically reckless in determining its use in built-up areas. Moreover, doctors who treated patients with white phosphorous wounds spoke about the severity and sometimes untreatable nature of the burns caused by the substance. The Mission believes that serious consideration should be given to banning the use of white phosphorous in built-up areas.
The wording in the above paragraph indicates that WP is not proscribed under international law and yet when one looks towards Geneva we find the following:
The use of White Phosphorus of densely populated areas - In violation of the Geneva Convention: Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons (Protocol III).
"Certain uses of incendiary weapons, in particular the use of air delivered incendiary weapons against targets situated amongst concentrations of civilians" (Protocol III to the Conventional Weapons Convention).
I am sure that we all agree that these weapons were continuously rained down on the densely populated city of Gaza and yet the Mission appeared to have played down is usage and made the recommendation "The Mission believes that serious consideration should be given to banning the use of white phosphorous in built-up areas". Didn't they know this was already covered under the above Protocol?
Let's go back to Page 8 Paragraph (F) when it states that forensic analysis of weapons and ammunitions collected at incident sites would be used. Again it appears that the Mission did not apply the forensic analysis it talked about.
Even if one had the name "Sherlock Holmes" and walked around Gaza with a spy glass in hand you would find more evidence that these forensic scientist found.
Why did the Mission not follow up on the issue of Flechette or DIME weapons that were reportedly used on Gaza? The doctors explained to them their findings, they had victims with such injuries and they had a multitude of fragments to show? The report gives clear indications of their usage but falls short of condemning Israel and obviously must leave this aspect of such an enquiry open pending further investigation. Why is this not being carried out?
In their report the following comment was made: "Mission notes that they are an area weapon incapable of discriminating between objectives after detonation. They are; therefore, particularly unsuitable for use in urban settings where there is reason to believe civilians may be present". Did they again forget to mention that these weapons are also in violation of the Geneva Convention?
Whilst on the subject of weapons used what happened to the more serious allegation that DU/EU weapons had been used on Gaza? They were raised in the submissions made to the UN before their visitation and by other third parties. If one again looks at the report we will see some small reference on this topic namely: The Mission received allegations that depleted and none depleted
uranium was used by Israeli forces in Gaza. These allegations were not further investigated by the Mission.
Of all the alleged war crimes committed the most evil act that anyone could inflict on a nation is that of DU/EU weapons. They are totally indiscriminate, totally illegal and lethal. So why did such an important allegation also get swept under the carpet. Did the Missions Sherlock Homes run out of spy glasses, were their sun glasses so dark they couldn't find any evidence or did they just simply run out of time? This report like all the previous UN reports concerning DU/EU weapons usage in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon are deeply flawed so why should we expect any inspiration from the Gaza report?
Perhaps we must once again remind the Mission of the following:
Weaponry containing Depleted Uranium (DU) with indiscriminate effect or of a nature to cause superflouus injury or unnecessary suffering.
Protocols I to the Geneva Conventions have an obligation to ascertain that new weapons do not violate the laws and customs of war or any other international law. The International Court of Justice considers this rule binding customary humanitarian law.
Let's just help refresh their memory of the multiple attacks on Gaza using weapons containing uranium components. In the photograph on the left we see two such weapons exploding with another two on the way in. We have seen such explosions in many parts of Gaza and also in the Rafah.
If one looks at this investigation by the Mission you will once again see that these other extremely serious issues of DU/EU, WP, DIME, Flechette bombs have been bypassed and become insignificant. I again emphasise that this report into Israel's activities in Gaza should remain open pending further investigations.
The report also focused on the Palestinian rocket attacks but went outside of its remit in doing so. The Missions remit clearly states to investigate events between the ceasefire period and the end of Operation Cast Lead. The report failed to highlight the fact that the Palestinians held true its promise of a ceasefire for the entire duration and then only broke that ceasefire as a result of the continued intimidation by Israel.
Regarding Page 31 Paragraph 103 of the report. Why did the Mission go outside of their remit to quote the following? - "Palestinian armed groups have launched about 8000 rockets and mortars into southern Israel since 2001". In Paragraph 105 on the same page it again went outside of its remit to refer to data received in October of 2007: "The Mission has taken particular note of the high level of psychological trauma suffered by the civilian population inside Israel. Data gathered by an Israeli organization in October 2007 found that 28.4% of adults and 72-94% of children in Sderot suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" Based on this comment would it not be true to say the Palestinians have been under constant intimidation from the Israeli's since their States inception? Would it be true to say that the trauma of constant degradation, humiliation and land grabs goes beyond imagination.
The report even passed comment about Hamas fighting from within Gaza city and putting the civilian population at risk. Perhaps the Mission could explain how does want fight and defend such a densely populated city without being in amongst your own population? Does the Mission appreciate that the distance from the city to the border is very short and had Hamas taken up position in such an area the Israel Air Force with its sophisticated Fighter, Helicopters and UAV's would have picked them off without any effort. It is obvious that the experts writing this report have no understanding of the disproportionate force that Hamas faced and had no choice but to fight from within their city.
On Page 29 Paragraph 92 the report even extended into the West Bank when it stated: "In the West Bank, Israel has long imposed a system of movement restrictions. Movement is restricted by a combination of physical obstacles such as roadblocks, checkpoints and the Wall, but also through administrative measures such as identity cards, permits, assigned residence, laws on family reunification, and policies on the right to enter from abroad and the right of return for refugees" etc.
What the report did not point out was that the West Bank remains under total occupation and that two thirds of this so called Palestinian enclave is not available to the rightful owners. The Israelis in their usual arrogant way continue to land grab and take control of vast tracts of land. We have reason to believe that much of the land on the Dead Sea side is extremely rich in natural resources and therefore they have no intention of allowing the rightful owners to benefit from those resources.
Finally I would like to point out that the report draws attention to the odd missile or bomb here and there when in actual fact the strip was bombarded with a vast array of high tech weaponry. It is obvious that yet again the UN is playing down these serious violations and really has no intention of revealing the truth behind the use of these dirty weapons. Independent experts have received samples from Gaza in much the same way as they did from Lebanon and the findings were extremely upsetting. I again as the question of the UN Mission Team.....why didn't they use forensic evidence from the many missile/bomb sites to analyse exactly what had be used during the conflict and why wasn't these forensic experts used as stipulated at the beginning of their report?
The Palestinian people and their brothers in the Middle East should apply pressure on the UN to proceed without delay and bring justice to the people of Gaza. The manipulation by the US and the announced delay is appalling.
- Peter Eyre, Middle East Consultant
U.S. troops stormed Afghan hospital, aid group says
CNN, Sept. 7, 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. soldiers searched a hospital in central Afghanistan for Taliban fighters, tying up hospital guards and entering women's wards in violation of local customs, an aid worker said Monday.
The soldiers raided the hospital Wednesday night in Wardak province, said Anders Fange, the country director of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan.
The troops, from the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division, said they were looking for suspected Taliban fighters in the hospital, he said.
They tied up four hospital guards and searched patients' relatives, broke into the nutrition ward and ultrasound room, and searched the female ward of the hospital, according to the aid worker. He said the actions were disrespectful of Afghan culture.
He called the incident "simply not acceptable."
"It is not only a clear violation of globally recognized humanitarian principles about the sanctity of health facilities and staff in areas of conflict, but also a clear breach of the civil-military agreement between NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and ISAF," he said, referring to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
In a statement, the ISAF said it met Monday with staff at the medical clinic "to discuss the force's relationship with the clinic."
"Afghan National Police and International Security Assistance Forces entered the clinic on September 2, acting on a report that an insurgent commander was being treated on the premises," the statement said.
Assisted by ISAF troops, Afghan police searched the clinic to determine if the insurgent leader, who was suspected of being responsible for an earlier attack on a convoy in the area, was present, according to the statement. The ISAF said it informed the clinic staff of its reasons for entering the hospital.
Earlier, Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, an ISAF spokeswoman, said the matter was under investigation. Any operation in the area would have been Afghan-led, supported by ISAF forces, she added. The U.S. Army does operate in the area.
The Swedish aid group reported the matter to Afghanistan's public health minister, who in turn was to take up the matter with the U.S. ambassador, Fange said.
The U.S. Embassy said it had heard of the allegations and was checking to see if the Ministry of Public Health had lodged a complaint or discussed the matter with American officials.
Fange said he is trying to arrange a meeting with a senior U.S. commander in Wardak province.
The Afghan Ministry of Public Health subcontracts aid groups in Afghanistan to provide what's called "Basic Package Health Services."
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan is responsible for Wardak province. The staff at the hospital work directly for the committee.
CNN's Ingrid Formanek and Wahid Mayar contributed to this report.
*************
International military violently entered SCA Hospital in Wardak
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, PRESS RELEASE, Kabul, September 6, 2009
On Wednesday evening September 2 at 10 pm coalition vehicles drove up at SCA’s Hospital in Shaniz, Wardak province along the main highway from Kabul to Ghazni. They entered the hospital compound, reportedly without giving any reason or justification for entering the hospital compound. They searched all rooms, even bathrooms, male and female wards. Rooms that were locked were forcefully entered and the doors of the malnutrition ward and the ultrasound ward were broken by force to gain entry. Upon entering the hospital they tied up four employees and two family members of patients at the hospital. SCA staffs as well as patients (even those in beds) were forced out of rooms/wards throughout the search.
On leaving the hospital at around 12 pm, IMF issued verbal "orders"/instructions; that on receiving any patient that could be an insurgent the hospital staff has to report to the Coalition Forces who would then determine if the hospital would be permitted or not of treating such patient.
“This is simply not acceptable. It is not only a clear violation of globally recognized humanitarian principles about the sanctity of health facilities and staff in areas of conflict but also a clear breach of the civil-military agreement between NGOs and ISAF. We demand guarantees from the IMF command that such violations will not be repeated and that this is made clear to commanders in the field. SCA can not and will not tolerate this kind of treatment by the IMF. Nor is the SCA bound by any orders from IMF regarding to whom treatment can be given” says Anders Fange, Country Director, SCA.
The hospital is located in an area where community acceptance is essential to the continued functioning and safety of the hospital and its staff. The hospital has faced a further intrusion on 13 July, when private security guards escorting a convoy came under attack from insurgents and sought shelter/treatment in a very aggressive manner in the hospital and proceeded to assault staff and damage property.
This latest incident comes at a time when a clinic in Paktika was attacked on 26 August by ANSF/IMF following reports of an alleged AOG commander inside. At issue, in addition to the safety of staff and patients, are perceptions amongst all parties as to the status of clearly marked hospital/medical facilities. When such facilities are no longer regarded with the sanctity which has previously been accorded, then hospitals merely become buildings and a legitimate arena to continue the conflict. Such intrusions have previously been recorded by both sides in the conflict.
For more information please contact:
Anders Fänge
Country Director SCA
+93-(0)700-299 288
anders.fange@sca.org.af
Dr. Shams
Coordinator Health Technical Unit
+93-(0)700-395 401
s.s.shams@sca.org.af
Information Unit
+93-(0)700-078 103
Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, Main Jalalabad Road, Paktia Kot. Behind UNO Printing Press.
Kabul, Afghanistan. PO Box 5017
info@sca.org.af.
KABUL, Afghanistan - U.S. soldiers searched a hospital in central Afghanistan for Taliban fighters, tying up hospital guards and entering women's wards in violation of local customs, an aid worker said Monday.
The soldiers raided the hospital Wednesday night in Wardak province, said Anders Fange, the country director of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan.
The troops, from the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division, said they were looking for suspected Taliban fighters in the hospital, he said.
They tied up four hospital guards and searched patients' relatives, broke into the nutrition ward and ultrasound room, and searched the female ward of the hospital, according to the aid worker. He said the actions were disrespectful of Afghan culture.
He called the incident "simply not acceptable."
"It is not only a clear violation of globally recognized humanitarian principles about the sanctity of health facilities and staff in areas of conflict, but also a clear breach of the civil-military agreement between NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and ISAF," he said, referring to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
In a statement, the ISAF said it met Monday with staff at the medical clinic "to discuss the force's relationship with the clinic."
"Afghan National Police and International Security Assistance Forces entered the clinic on September 2, acting on a report that an insurgent commander was being treated on the premises," the statement said.
Assisted by ISAF troops, Afghan police searched the clinic to determine if the insurgent leader, who was suspected of being responsible for an earlier attack on a convoy in the area, was present, according to the statement. The ISAF said it informed the clinic staff of its reasons for entering the hospital.
Earlier, Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, an ISAF spokeswoman, said the matter was under investigation. Any operation in the area would have been Afghan-led, supported by ISAF forces, she added. The U.S. Army does operate in the area.
The Swedish aid group reported the matter to Afghanistan's public health minister, who in turn was to take up the matter with the U.S. ambassador, Fange said.
The U.S. Embassy said it had heard of the allegations and was checking to see if the Ministry of Public Health had lodged a complaint or discussed the matter with American officials.
Fange said he is trying to arrange a meeting with a senior U.S. commander in Wardak province.
The Afghan Ministry of Public Health subcontracts aid groups in Afghanistan to provide what's called "Basic Package Health Services."
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan is responsible for Wardak province. The staff at the hospital work directly for the committee.
CNN's Ingrid Formanek and Wahid Mayar contributed to this report.
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International military violently entered SCA Hospital in Wardak
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, PRESS RELEASE, Kabul, September 6, 2009
On Wednesday evening September 2 at 10 pm coalition vehicles drove up at SCA’s Hospital in Shaniz, Wardak province along the main highway from Kabul to Ghazni. They entered the hospital compound, reportedly without giving any reason or justification for entering the hospital compound. They searched all rooms, even bathrooms, male and female wards. Rooms that were locked were forcefully entered and the doors of the malnutrition ward and the ultrasound ward were broken by force to gain entry. Upon entering the hospital they tied up four employees and two family members of patients at the hospital. SCA staffs as well as patients (even those in beds) were forced out of rooms/wards throughout the search.
On leaving the hospital at around 12 pm, IMF issued verbal "orders"/instructions; that on receiving any patient that could be an insurgent the hospital staff has to report to the Coalition Forces who would then determine if the hospital would be permitted or not of treating such patient.
“This is simply not acceptable. It is not only a clear violation of globally recognized humanitarian principles about the sanctity of health facilities and staff in areas of conflict but also a clear breach of the civil-military agreement between NGOs and ISAF. We demand guarantees from the IMF command that such violations will not be repeated and that this is made clear to commanders in the field. SCA can not and will not tolerate this kind of treatment by the IMF. Nor is the SCA bound by any orders from IMF regarding to whom treatment can be given” says Anders Fange, Country Director, SCA.
The hospital is located in an area where community acceptance is essential to the continued functioning and safety of the hospital and its staff. The hospital has faced a further intrusion on 13 July, when private security guards escorting a convoy came under attack from insurgents and sought shelter/treatment in a very aggressive manner in the hospital and proceeded to assault staff and damage property.
This latest incident comes at a time when a clinic in Paktika was attacked on 26 August by ANSF/IMF following reports of an alleged AOG commander inside. At issue, in addition to the safety of staff and patients, are perceptions amongst all parties as to the status of clearly marked hospital/medical facilities. When such facilities are no longer regarded with the sanctity which has previously been accorded, then hospitals merely become buildings and a legitimate arena to continue the conflict. Such intrusions have previously been recorded by both sides in the conflict.
For more information please contact:
Anders Fänge
Country Director SCA
+93-(0)700-299 288
anders.fange@sca.org.af
Dr. Shams
Coordinator Health Technical Unit
+93-(0)700-395 401
s.s.shams@sca.org.af
Information Unit
+93-(0)700-078 103
Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, Main Jalalabad Road, Paktia Kot. Behind UNO Printing Press.
Kabul, Afghanistan. PO Box 5017
info@sca.org.af.
Video: Scores killed in Nato air strike in Afghanistan
A Nato air strike is said to have killed between 70 and 130 people in the Afghan province of Kunduz.
Nato say they targeted Taliban fighters who had seized two fuel tankers.
Al Jazeera's James Bays reports from a nearby village, where locals say many of the killed were civilians.
Ex-Soldier Gets 5 Life Sentences for Iraqi Girl Rape, Family Murders
FOX61 WDSI, Sept. 4, 2009
A former soldier received five consecutive life sentences Friday for his role in the rape and murder of an Iraqi teenager and the slaying of three of her family members.
"What the defendant did was horrifying and inexcusable," U.S. District Judge Thomas Russell said in sentencing to Steven Dale Green, 24, of Midland, Texas. "The court believes any lesser sentence would be insufficient."
A civilian jury in western Kentucky convicted Green in May of raping Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, conspiracy and multiple counts of murder.
Green shot and killed the teen's mother, father and sister, then became the third soldier to rape her before shooting her in the face. Her body was set on fire March 12, 2006, at their rural home outside Mahmoudiya, Iraq, about 20 miles south of Baghdad.
The panel couldn't reach an unanimous decision about whether Green should get a death sentence, automatically making Green's sentence life in prison. Barring a successful appeal or presidential pardon, Green will not be eligible for release from prison.
Green told the judge he merely followed orders from other soldiers involved in the attack.
"You can act like I'm a sociopath. You can act like I'm a sex offender or whatever," Green said. "If I had not joined the Army, if I had not gone to Iraq, I would not have got caught up in anything."
At a hearing in May, Green repeatedly apologized to the al-Janabi family, saying he knew little about Iraqis and realizes now his actions then were wrong. Green described the attacks as "evil" and said when he dies "there will be justice and whatever I deserve, I'll get."
During Green's trial, defense attorneys never contested Green's role in the attacks. Instead, they focused on saving his life by putting on witnesses that testified that the military failed Green on multiple fronts — by allowing a troubled teen into the service, not recognizing and helping a soldier struggling emotionally and providing inadequate leadership.
During the sentencing hearing, defense attorney Patrick Bouldin said Green tried to take responsibility for his role in the attacks, twice offering to plead guilty and serve life in prison. Assistant U.S. Attorney Marisa Ford said one offer came on the eve of jury selection, the other two weeks into jury selection.
Green and four other soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division based at Fort Campbell, Ky., were investigated after the killings. Three who went to the family's home, along with Green, received lengthy sentences up to 110 years but will become eligible for parole in seven years. Another who had a lesser role was released from military prison after serving 27 months.
All except Green were charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and faced a military trial, known as a court martial. Two of the soldiers who were at the home when Green shot the family pleaded guilty and a military jury convicted a third.
Green said the idea of his co-defendants being out of prison one day is "all right with me."
"They planned it," Green said. "All I ever did was what they told me to do."
Green was the first person charged under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, a law passed in 2000 that allows U.S. authorities to prosecute former military personnel, contractors and others for crimes committed overseas.
By the time the Army pressed charges in June 2006, Green had been honorably discharged with a personality disorder and returned to the United States. Because Green had been discharged, prosecutors filed an indictment against him as a civilian.
Green's attorneys have 10 days to file notice of an appeal.
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Brian DePalma made a "fictional" movie about this "Redacted" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0937237/
A former soldier received five consecutive life sentences Friday for his role in the rape and murder of an Iraqi teenager and the slaying of three of her family members.
"What the defendant did was horrifying and inexcusable," U.S. District Judge Thomas Russell said in sentencing to Steven Dale Green, 24, of Midland, Texas. "The court believes any lesser sentence would be insufficient."
A civilian jury in western Kentucky convicted Green in May of raping Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, conspiracy and multiple counts of murder.
Green shot and killed the teen's mother, father and sister, then became the third soldier to rape her before shooting her in the face. Her body was set on fire March 12, 2006, at their rural home outside Mahmoudiya, Iraq, about 20 miles south of Baghdad.
The panel couldn't reach an unanimous decision about whether Green should get a death sentence, automatically making Green's sentence life in prison. Barring a successful appeal or presidential pardon, Green will not be eligible for release from prison.
Green told the judge he merely followed orders from other soldiers involved in the attack.
"You can act like I'm a sociopath. You can act like I'm a sex offender or whatever," Green said. "If I had not joined the Army, if I had not gone to Iraq, I would not have got caught up in anything."
At a hearing in May, Green repeatedly apologized to the al-Janabi family, saying he knew little about Iraqis and realizes now his actions then were wrong. Green described the attacks as "evil" and said when he dies "there will be justice and whatever I deserve, I'll get."
During Green's trial, defense attorneys never contested Green's role in the attacks. Instead, they focused on saving his life by putting on witnesses that testified that the military failed Green on multiple fronts — by allowing a troubled teen into the service, not recognizing and helping a soldier struggling emotionally and providing inadequate leadership.
During the sentencing hearing, defense attorney Patrick Bouldin said Green tried to take responsibility for his role in the attacks, twice offering to plead guilty and serve life in prison. Assistant U.S. Attorney Marisa Ford said one offer came on the eve of jury selection, the other two weeks into jury selection.
Green and four other soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division based at Fort Campbell, Ky., were investigated after the killings. Three who went to the family's home, along with Green, received lengthy sentences up to 110 years but will become eligible for parole in seven years. Another who had a lesser role was released from military prison after serving 27 months.
All except Green were charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and faced a military trial, known as a court martial. Two of the soldiers who were at the home when Green shot the family pleaded guilty and a military jury convicted a third.
Green said the idea of his co-defendants being out of prison one day is "all right with me."
"They planned it," Green said. "All I ever did was what they told me to do."
Green was the first person charged under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, a law passed in 2000 that allows U.S. authorities to prosecute former military personnel, contractors and others for crimes committed overseas.
By the time the Army pressed charges in June 2006, Green had been honorably discharged with a personality disorder and returned to the United States. Because Green had been discharged, prosecutors filed an indictment against him as a civilian.
Green's attorneys have 10 days to file notice of an appeal.
***************
Brian DePalma made a "fictional" movie about this "Redacted" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0937237/
Videos: Israeli soldiers fire on Al Jazeera correspondent & nonviolent protesters
Israeli soldiers have fired tear gas on Palestinians protesting against the Israeli separation barrier which cuts through their West Bank village.
The soldiers also fired tear gas at Jacky Rowland, Al Jazeera's correspondent who was covering the event live from near the village of Bilin.
Palestinian villagers protest land seizure
Hundreds of Palestinian villagers have made a short but symbolic march to the separation wall that Israel has built on their land, a non-violent protests that they regularly undertake.
Equally, the protesters, marching from the village of Bilin, are regularly met with a violent response from the Israeli army.
"The village of Bilin is literally on the frontline of Israel's confiscation of Palestinian land and the construction of its separation barrier," Jacky Rowland, Al Jazeera's correspondent reporting from the village, said.
"Later today the villagers of Bilin will protest the fact that not only they, but also five neighbouring villages, have lost their land which has been seized to build an Israeli settlement.
"This huge settlement will result in 40,000 Jewish settlers living on occupied land here in the West Bank and as Prime Minister [Binyamin] Netanyahu is planning to give the go ahead for even more of these settlement homes to be built," she said.
Netanyahu is set to approve plans to build hundreds of new homes on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, before considering US demands for a construction freeze.
US War against Iraq: Destruction of a Civilization
By James Petras, The Palestine Chronicle, Aug. 21, 2009
Introduction
The US seven-year war and occupation of Iraq is driven by several major political forces and informed by a variety of imperial interests. However these interests do not in themselves explain the depth and scope of the sustained, massive and continuing destruction of an entire society and its reduction to a permanent state of war. The range of political forces contributing to the making of the war and the subsequent US occupation include the following (in order of importance):
The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional Jewish supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the State Department. These committed Zionists ‘insiders’ were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a US war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-US puppet regime. If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the ‘Liberal’ President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than several ‘client regimes’.
Top Zionist policymakers who promoted the war did not initially directly pursue the policy of systematically destroying what, in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and design of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state apparatus and recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their ‘expertise’ in interrogation techniques, repression of civilian resistance and counter-insurgency. Israeli expertise certainly played a role in fomenting the intra-Iraqi religious and ethnic strife, which Israel had mastered in Palestine. The Israeli ‘model’ of colonial war and occupation – the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 – and the practice of ‘total destruction’ using sectarian, ethno-religious division was evident in the notorious massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which took place under Israeli military supervision.
The second powerful political force behind the Iraq War were civilian militarists (like Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney) who sought to extend US imperial reach in the Persian Gulf and strengthen its geo-political position by eliminating a strong, secular, nationalist backer of Arab anti-imperialist insurgency in the Middle East. The civilian militarists sought to extend the American military base encirclement of Russia and secure control over Iraqi oil reserves as a pressure point against China. The civilian militarists were less moved by Vice President Cheney’s past ties with the oil industry and more interested in his role as CEO of Halliburton’s giant military base contractor subsidiary Kellogg-Brown and Root, which was consolidating the US Empire through worldwide military base expansion. Major US oil companies, who feared losing out to European and Asian competitors, were already eager to deal with Saddam Hussein, and some of the Bush’s supporters in the oil industry had already engaged in illegal trading with the embargoed Iraqi regime. The oil industry was not inclined to promote regional instability with a war.
The militarist strategy of conquest and occupation was designed to establish a long-term colonial military presence in the form of strategic military bases with a significant and sustained contingent of colonial military advisors and combat units. The brutal colonial occupation of an independent secular state with a strong nationalist history and an advanced infrastructure with a sophisticated military and police apparatus, extensive public services and wide-spread literacy naturally led to the growth of a wide array of militant and armed anti-occupation movements. In response, US colonial officials, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agencies devised a ‘divide and rule’ strategy (the so-called ‘El Salvador solution’ associated with the former ‘hot-spot’ Ambassador and US Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte) fomenting armed sectarian-based conflicts and promoting inter-religious assassinations to debilitate any effort at a united nationalist anti-imperialist movement. The dismantling of the secular civilian bureaucracy and military was designed by the Zionists in the Bush Administration to enhance Israel’s power in the region and to encourage the rise of militant Islamic groups, which had been repressed by the deposed Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Israel had mastered this strategy earlier: It originally sponsored and financed sectarian Islamic militant groups, like Hamas, as an alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization and set the stage for sectarian fighting among the Palestinians.
The result of US colonial policies were to fund and multiply a wide range of internal conflicts as mullahs, tribal leaders, political gangsters, warlords, expatriates and death squads proliferated. The ‘war of all against all’ served the interests of the US occupation forces. Iraq became a pool of armed, unemployed young men, from which to recruit a new mercenary army. The ‘civil war’ and ‘ethnic conflict’ provided a pretext for the US and its Iraqi puppets to discharge hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police and functionaries from the previous regime (especially if they were from Sunni, mixed or secular families) and to undermine the basis for civilian employment. Under the cover of generalized ‘war against terror’, US Special Forces and CIA-directed death squads spread terror within Iraqi civil society, targeting anyone suspected of criticizing the puppet government – especially among the educated and professional classes, precisely the Iraqis most capable of re-constructing an independent secular republic.
The Iraq war was driven by an influential group of neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues with strong ties to Israel. They viewed the success of the Iraq war (by success they meant the total dismemberment of the country) as the first ‘domino’ in a series of war to ‘re-colonize’ the Middle East (in their words: “to re-draw the map”). They disguised their imperial ideology with a thin veneer of rhetoric about ‘promoting democracies’ in the Middle East (excluding, of course, the un-democratic policies of their ‘homeland’ Israel over its subjugated Palestinians). Conflating Israeli regional hegemonic ambitions with the US imperial interests, the neo-conservatives and their neo-liberal fellow travelers in the Democratic Party first backed President Bush and later President Obama in their escalation of the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan. They unanimously supported Israel’s savage bombing campaign against Lebanon, the land and air assault and massacre of thousands of civilians trapped in Gaza, the bombing of Syrian facilities and the big push (from Israel) for a pre-emptive, full-scale military attack against Iran.
The US advocates of sequential and multiple simultaneous wars in the Middle East and South Asia believed that they could only unleash the full strength of their mass destructive power after they had secured total control of their first victim, Iraq. They were confident that Iraqi resistance would collapse rapidly after 13 years of brutal starvation sanctions imposed on the republic by the US and United Nations. In order to consolidate imperial control, American policy-makers decided to permanently silence all independent Iraqi civilian dissidents. They turned to the financing of Shia clerics and Sunni tribal assassins, and contracting scores of thousands of private mercenaries among the Kurdish Peshmerga warlords to carry out selective assassinations of leaders of civil society movements.
The US created and trained a 200,000 member Iraqi colonial puppet army composed almost entirely of Shia gunmen, and excluded experienced Iraqi military men from secular, Sunni or Christian backgrounds. A little known result of this build up of American trained and financed death squads and its puppet ‘Iraqi’ army, was the virtual destruction of the ancient Iraqi Christian population, which was displaced, its churches bombed and its leaders, bishops and intellectuals, academics and scientists assassinated or driven into exile. The US and its Israeli advisers were well aware that Iraqi Christians had played a key role the historic development of the secular, nationalist, anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their elimination as an influential force during the first years of US occupation was no accident. The result of the US policies were to eliminate most secular democratic anti-imperialist leaders and movements and to present their murderous net-work of ‘ethno-religious’ collaborators as their uncontested ‘partners’ in sustaining the long-term US colonial presence in Iraq. With their puppets in power, Iraq would serve as a launching platform for its strategic pursuit of the other ‘dominoes’ (Syria, Iran, Central Asian Republics…).
The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7 years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion. This enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial strategy for the entire Middle East/South and Central Asia region. Washington’s policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious differences, arming and encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity and resistance. The ‘divide and rule’ tactics and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation. To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.
The Destruction of a Modern Arab Civilization
Independent, secular Iraq had the most advanced scientific-cultural order in the Arab world, despite the repressive nature of Saddam Hussein’s police state. There was a system of national health care, universal public education and generous welfare services, combined with unprecedented levels of gender equality. This marked the advanced nature of Iraqi civilization in the late 20th century. Separation of church and state and strict protection of religious minorities (Christians, Assyrians and others) contrasts sharply with what has resulted from the US occupation and its destruction of the Iraqi civil and governmental structures. The harsh dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein thus presided over a highly developed modern civilization in which advanced scientific work went hand in hand with a strong nationalist and anti-imperialist identity. This resulted especially in the Iraqi people and regime’s expressions of solidarity for the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli rule and occupation.
A mere ‘regime change’ could not extirpate this deeply embedded and advanced secular republican culture in Iraq. The US war planners and their Israeli advisers were well aware that colonial occupation would increase Iraqi nationalist consciousness unless the secular nation was destroyed and hence, the imperial imperative to uproot and destroy the carriers of nationalist consciousness by physically eliminating the educated, the talented, the scientific, indeed the most secular elements of Iraqi society. Retrogression became the principal instrument for the US to impose its colonial puppets, with their primitive, ‘pre-national’ loyalties, in power in a culturally purged Baghdad stripped of its most sophisticated and nationalistic social strata.
According to the Al-Ahram Studies Center in Cairo, more that 310 Iraqi scientists were eliminated during the first 18 months of the US occupation – a figure that the Iraqi education ministry did not dispute.
Another report listed the killings of more than 340 intellectuals and scientists between 2005 and 2007. Bombings of institutes of higher education had pushed enrollment down to 30% of the pre-invasion figures. In one bombing in January 2007, at Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University 70 students were killed with hundreds wounded. These figures compelled the UNESCO to warn that Iraq’s university system was on the brink of collapse. The numbers of prominent Iraqi scientists and professionals who have fled the country have approached 20,000. Of the 6,700 Iraqi university professors who fled since 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported than only 150 had returned by October 2008. Despite the US claims of improved security, the situation in 2008 saw numerous assassinations, including the only practicing neurosurgeon in Iraq’s second largest city of Basra, whose body was dumped on the city streets.
The raw data on the Iraqi academics, scientists and professionals assassinated by the US and allied occupation forces and the militias and shadowy forces they control is drawn from a list published by the Pakistan Daily News (www.daily.pk) on November 26, 2008. This list makes for very uncomfortable reading into the reality of systematic elimination of intellectuals in Iraq under the meat-grinder of US occupation.
Assassinations
The physical elimination of an individual by assassination is an extreme form of terrorism, which has far-reaching effects rippling throughout the community from which the individual comes – in this case the world of Iraqi intellectuals, academics, professionals and creative leaders in the arts and sciences. For each Iraqi intellectual murdered, thousands of educated Iraqis fled the country or abandoned their work for safer, less vulnerable activity.
Baghdad was considered the ‘Paris’ of the Arab world, in terms of culture and art, science and education. In the 1970’s and 80’s, its universities were the envy of the Arab world. The US ‘shock and awe’ campaign that rained down on Baghdad evoked emotions akin to an aerial bombardment of the Louvre, the Sorbonne and the greatest libraries of Europe. Baghdad University was one of the most prestigious and productive universities in the Arab world. Many of its academics possessed doctoral degrees and engaged in post-doctoral studies abroad at prestigious institutions. It taught and graduated many of the top professionals and scientists in the Middle East. Even under the deadly grip of the US/UN-imposed economic sanctions that starved Iraq during the 13 years before the March 2003 invasion, thousands of graduate students and young professionals came to Iraq for post-graduate training. Young physicians from throughout the Arab world received advanced medical training in its institutions. Many of its academics presented scientific papers at major international conferences and published in prestigious journals. Most important, Baghdad University trained and maintained a highly respected scientific secular culture free of sectarian discrimination – with academics from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.
This world has been forever shattered: Under US occupation, up to November 2008, eighty-three academics and researchers teaching at Baghdad University had been murdered and several thousand of their colleagues, students and family members were forced to flee.
The Selection of Assassinated Academics by Discipline
The November 2008 article published by the Pakistan Daily News lists the names of a total of 154 top Baghdad-based academics, renowned in their fields, who were murdered. Altogether, a total of 281 well-known intellectuals teaching at the top universities in Iraq fell victim to the ‘death squads’ under US occupation.
Prior to the US occupation, Baghdad University possessed the premier research and teaching medical faculty in the entire Middle East attracting hundreds of young doctors for advanced training. That program has been devastated during the rise of the US-death squad regime, with few prospects of recovery. Of those murdered, 25% (21) were the most senior professors and lecturers in the medical faculty of Baghdad University, the highest percentage of any faculty. The second highest percentage of butchered faculty were the professors and researchers from Baghdad University’s renowned engineering faculty (12), followed by the top academics in the humanities (10), physical and social sciences (8 senior academics each), education (5). The remaining top academics murdered at Baghdad University spread out among the agronomy, business, physical education, communications and religious studies faculties.
At three other Baghdad universities, 53 senior academics were slaughtered, including 10 in the social sciences, 7 in the faculty of law, 6 each in medicine and the humanities, 9 in the physical sciences and 5 in engineering. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s August 20, 2002 pre-invasion joke, “…one has to assume they (scientists) have not been playing ‘tiddlywinks’(a child’s game)”( justifying the bloody purge of Iraq’s scientists in physics and chemistry. An ominous signal of the academic bloodletting that followed the invasion.
Similar bloody purges of academics occurred in all the provincial universities: 127 senior academics and scientists were assassinated at the various well-regarded universities in Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra and elsewhere. The provincial universities with the highest number of murdered senior faculty members were in cities where the US and British military and their Kurdish mercenary allies were most active: Basra (35), Mosul (35), Diyala (15) and Al-Anbar (11).
The Iraqi military and allied death squads carried out most of the killing of academics in the cities under US or ‘allied’ control. The systematic murder of academics was a nation-wide, cross-disciplinary drive to destroy the cultural and educational foundations of a modern Arab civilization. The death squads carrying out most of these assassinations were primitive, pre-modern, ethno-religious groups ‘set loose’ or instrumentalized by US military strategists to wipe out any politically conscious intellectuals and nationalist scientists who might pursue an agenda for re-building a modern, secular society and independent, unified republic.
In its panic to prevent the US invasion, the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate provided a list, which identified over 500 key Iraqi scientists to the UN on December 7, 2002. There is little doubt that this list became a core element in the US military’s hit list for eliminating Iraq’s scientific elite. In his notorious pre-invasion speech to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell cited a list of over 3,500 Iraqi scientists and technicians who would have to be ‘contained’ to prevent their expertise from being used by other countries. The US had even created a ‘budget’ of hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from the Iraqi ‘Oil for Food’ money held by the United Nations to set up ‘civilian re-education’ programs to re-train Iraqi scientists and engineers. These highly touted programs were never seriously implemented. Cheaper ways of containing what one American policy expert termed Iraq’s ‘excess scientists, engineers and technicians’ in a Carnegie Endowment Paper (RANSAC Policy Update April 2004) became clear. The US had decided to adopt and expand the Israeli Mossad’s covert operation of assassinating selected key Iraqi scientists on an industrial scale.
The US ‘Surge’ and ‘Peak Assassination’ Campaigns: 2006-2007
The high tide of terror against academics coincides with the renewal of the US military offensive in Baghdad and in the provinces. Of the total number of assassinations of Baghdad-based academics for which a date is recorded (110 known intellectuals slaughtered), almost 80% (87) occurred in 2006 and 2007. A similar pattern is found in the provinces with 77% of a total of 84 scholars murdered outside of capital during the same period. The pattern is clear: the murder rate of academics grows as the occupying US forces organize a mercenary Iraqi military and police force and provide money for the training and recruitment of rival Shia and Sunni tribesmen and militia as a means of decreasing American casualties and of purging potential dissident critics of the occupation.
The terror campaign against academics intensified in mid-2005 and reached its peak in 2006-2007, leading to the mass flight of tens of thousands of Iraqi scholars, scientists, professionals and their families overseas. Entire university medical school faculties have become refugees in Syria and elsewhere. Those who could not afford to abandon elderly parents or relatives and remained in Iraq have taken extraordinary measures to hide their identities. Some have chosen to collaborate with the US occupation forces or the puppet regime in the hope of being protected or allowed to immigrate with their families to the US or Europe, although the Europeans, especially the British are disinclined to accept Iraqi scholars. After 2008, there has been a sharp decline in the murder of academics – with only 4 assassinated that year. This reflects the massive flight of Iraqi intellectuals living abroad or in hiding rather than any change of policy on the part of the US and its mercenary puppets. As a result, Iraq’s research facilities have been decimated. The lives of those remaining support staff, including technicians, librarians and students have been devastated with few prospects for future employment.
The US war and occupation of Iraq, as Presidents Bush and Obama have declared, is a ‘success’ – an independent nation of 23 million citizens has been occupied by force, a puppet regime is ensconced, colonial mercenary troops obey American officers and the oil fields have been put up for sale. All of Iraq’s nationalist laws protecting its patrimony, its cultural treasures and national resources, have been annulled. The occupiers have imposed a ‘constitution’ favoring the US Empire. Israel and its Zionist flunkies in the Administrations of both Bush and Obama celebrate the demise of a modern adversary…and the conversion of Iraq into a cultural-political desert. In line with an alleged agreement made by the US State Department and Pentagon officials to influential collectors from the American Council for Cultural Policy in January 2003, the looted treasures of ancient Mesopotamia have ‘found’ their way into the collections of the elite in London, New York and elsewhere. The collectors can now anticipate the pillage of Iran.
Warning to Iran
The US invasion, occupation and destruction of a modern, scientific-cultural civilization, such as existed in Iraq, is a prelude of what the people of Iran can expect if and when a US-Israeli military attack occurs. The imperial threat to the cultural-scientific foundations of the Iranian nation has been totally absent from the narrative among the affluent Iranian student protesters and their US-funded NGO’s during their post-election ‘Lipstick Revolution’ protests. They should bear in mind that in 2004 educated, sophisticated Iraqis in Baghdad consoled themselves with a fatally misplaced optimism that ‘at least we are not like Afghanistan’. The same elite are now in squalid refugee camps in Syria and Jordan and their country more closely resembles Afghanistan than anywhere else in the Middle East. The chilling promise of President Bush in April 2003 to transform Iraq in the image of ‘our newly liberated Afghanistan’ has been fulfilled. And reports that the US Administration advisers had reviewed the Israeli Mossad policy of selective assassination of Iranian scientists should cause the pro-Western liberal intellectuals of Teheran to seriously ponder the lesson of the murderous campaign that has virtually eliminated Iraqi scientists and academics during 2006-2007.
Conclusion
What does the United States (and Britain and Israel) gain from establishing a retrograde client regime, based on medieval ethno-clerical socio-political structures in Iraq? First and foremost, Iraq has become an outpost for empire. Secondly, it is a weak and ackward regime incapable of challenging Israeli economic and military dominance in the region and unwilling to question the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian Arabs from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Thirdly, the destruction of the scientific, academic, cultural and legal foundations of an independent state means increasing reliance on the Western (and Chinese) multinational corporations and their technical infrastructure – facilitating imperial economic penetration and exploitation.
In the mid 19th Century, after the revolutions of 1848, the conservative French sociologist Emil Durkheim recognized that the European bourgeoisie was confronted with rising class conflict and an increasing anti-capitalist working class. Durkheim noted that, whatever its philosophical misgivings about religion and clericalism, the bourgeoisie would have to use the myths of traditional religion to ‘create’ social cohesion and undercut class polarization. He called on the educated and sophisticated Parisian capitalist class to forego its rejection of obscurantist religious dogma in favor of instrumentalizing religion as a tool to maintain its political dominance. In the same way, US strategists, including the Pentagon-Zionists, have instrumentalized the tribal-mullah, ethno-religious forces to destroy the secular national political leadership and advanced culture of Iraq in order to consolidate imperial rule – even if this strategy called for the killing off of the scientific and professional classes. Contemporary US imperial rule is based on supporting the socially and politically most backward sectors of society and applying the most advanced technology of warfare.
Israeli advisers have played a major role in instructing US occupation forces in Iraq on the practices of urban counter-insurgency and repression of civilians, drawing on their 60 years of experience. The infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinian families at Deir Yasin in 1948 was emblematic of Zionist elimination of hundreds of productive farming villages, which had been settled for centuries by a native people with their endogenous civilization and cultural ties to the soil, in order to impose a new colonial order. The policy of the total deracination of the Palestinians is central to Israel’s advise to the US policymakers in Iraq. Their message has been carried out by their Zionist acolytes in the Bush and Obama Administrations, ordering the dismemberment of the entire modern Iraqi civil and state bureaucracy and using pre-modern tribal death squads made up of Kurds and Shia extremists to purge the modern universities and research institutions of that shattered nation.
The US imperial conquest of Iraq is built on the destruction of a modern secular republic. The cultural desert that remains (a Biblical ‘howling wilderness’ soaked in the blood of Iraq’s precious scholars) is controlled by mega-swindlers, mercenary thugs posing as ‘Iraqi officers’, tribal and ethnic cultural illiterates and medieval religious figures. They operate under the guidance and direction of West Point graduates holding ‘blue-prints for empire’, formulated by graduates of Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale and Chicago, eager to serve the interests of American and European multi-national corporations.
This is called ‘combined and uneven development’: The marriage of fundamentalist mullahs with Ivy League Zionists at the service of the US.
- James Petras’ most recent books are: What's Left in Latin America? coauthored with Henry Veltmeyer (Ashgate Press, 2009), and Global Depression and Regional Wars (Clarity Press, 2009). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
If you like this article, please consider making a contribution to the Palestine Chronicle.
Introduction
The US seven-year war and occupation of Iraq is driven by several major political forces and informed by a variety of imperial interests. However these interests do not in themselves explain the depth and scope of the sustained, massive and continuing destruction of an entire society and its reduction to a permanent state of war. The range of political forces contributing to the making of the war and the subsequent US occupation include the following (in order of importance):
The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional Jewish supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the State Department. These committed Zionists ‘insiders’ were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a US war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-US puppet regime. If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the ‘Liberal’ President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than several ‘client regimes’.
Top Zionist policymakers who promoted the war did not initially directly pursue the policy of systematically destroying what, in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and design of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state apparatus and recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their ‘expertise’ in interrogation techniques, repression of civilian resistance and counter-insurgency. Israeli expertise certainly played a role in fomenting the intra-Iraqi religious and ethnic strife, which Israel had mastered in Palestine. The Israeli ‘model’ of colonial war and occupation – the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 – and the practice of ‘total destruction’ using sectarian, ethno-religious division was evident in the notorious massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which took place under Israeli military supervision.
The second powerful political force behind the Iraq War were civilian militarists (like Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney) who sought to extend US imperial reach in the Persian Gulf and strengthen its geo-political position by eliminating a strong, secular, nationalist backer of Arab anti-imperialist insurgency in the Middle East. The civilian militarists sought to extend the American military base encirclement of Russia and secure control over Iraqi oil reserves as a pressure point against China. The civilian militarists were less moved by Vice President Cheney’s past ties with the oil industry and more interested in his role as CEO of Halliburton’s giant military base contractor subsidiary Kellogg-Brown and Root, which was consolidating the US Empire through worldwide military base expansion. Major US oil companies, who feared losing out to European and Asian competitors, were already eager to deal with Saddam Hussein, and some of the Bush’s supporters in the oil industry had already engaged in illegal trading with the embargoed Iraqi regime. The oil industry was not inclined to promote regional instability with a war.
The militarist strategy of conquest and occupation was designed to establish a long-term colonial military presence in the form of strategic military bases with a significant and sustained contingent of colonial military advisors and combat units. The brutal colonial occupation of an independent secular state with a strong nationalist history and an advanced infrastructure with a sophisticated military and police apparatus, extensive public services and wide-spread literacy naturally led to the growth of a wide array of militant and armed anti-occupation movements. In response, US colonial officials, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agencies devised a ‘divide and rule’ strategy (the so-called ‘El Salvador solution’ associated with the former ‘hot-spot’ Ambassador and US Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte) fomenting armed sectarian-based conflicts and promoting inter-religious assassinations to debilitate any effort at a united nationalist anti-imperialist movement. The dismantling of the secular civilian bureaucracy and military was designed by the Zionists in the Bush Administration to enhance Israel’s power in the region and to encourage the rise of militant Islamic groups, which had been repressed by the deposed Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Israel had mastered this strategy earlier: It originally sponsored and financed sectarian Islamic militant groups, like Hamas, as an alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization and set the stage for sectarian fighting among the Palestinians.
The result of US colonial policies were to fund and multiply a wide range of internal conflicts as mullahs, tribal leaders, political gangsters, warlords, expatriates and death squads proliferated. The ‘war of all against all’ served the interests of the US occupation forces. Iraq became a pool of armed, unemployed young men, from which to recruit a new mercenary army. The ‘civil war’ and ‘ethnic conflict’ provided a pretext for the US and its Iraqi puppets to discharge hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police and functionaries from the previous regime (especially if they were from Sunni, mixed or secular families) and to undermine the basis for civilian employment. Under the cover of generalized ‘war against terror’, US Special Forces and CIA-directed death squads spread terror within Iraqi civil society, targeting anyone suspected of criticizing the puppet government – especially among the educated and professional classes, precisely the Iraqis most capable of re-constructing an independent secular republic.
The Iraq war was driven by an influential group of neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues with strong ties to Israel. They viewed the success of the Iraq war (by success they meant the total dismemberment of the country) as the first ‘domino’ in a series of war to ‘re-colonize’ the Middle East (in their words: “to re-draw the map”). They disguised their imperial ideology with a thin veneer of rhetoric about ‘promoting democracies’ in the Middle East (excluding, of course, the un-democratic policies of their ‘homeland’ Israel over its subjugated Palestinians). Conflating Israeli regional hegemonic ambitions with the US imperial interests, the neo-conservatives and their neo-liberal fellow travelers in the Democratic Party first backed President Bush and later President Obama in their escalation of the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan. They unanimously supported Israel’s savage bombing campaign against Lebanon, the land and air assault and massacre of thousands of civilians trapped in Gaza, the bombing of Syrian facilities and the big push (from Israel) for a pre-emptive, full-scale military attack against Iran.
The US advocates of sequential and multiple simultaneous wars in the Middle East and South Asia believed that they could only unleash the full strength of their mass destructive power after they had secured total control of their first victim, Iraq. They were confident that Iraqi resistance would collapse rapidly after 13 years of brutal starvation sanctions imposed on the republic by the US and United Nations. In order to consolidate imperial control, American policy-makers decided to permanently silence all independent Iraqi civilian dissidents. They turned to the financing of Shia clerics and Sunni tribal assassins, and contracting scores of thousands of private mercenaries among the Kurdish Peshmerga warlords to carry out selective assassinations of leaders of civil society movements.
The US created and trained a 200,000 member Iraqi colonial puppet army composed almost entirely of Shia gunmen, and excluded experienced Iraqi military men from secular, Sunni or Christian backgrounds. A little known result of this build up of American trained and financed death squads and its puppet ‘Iraqi’ army, was the virtual destruction of the ancient Iraqi Christian population, which was displaced, its churches bombed and its leaders, bishops and intellectuals, academics and scientists assassinated or driven into exile. The US and its Israeli advisers were well aware that Iraqi Christians had played a key role the historic development of the secular, nationalist, anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their elimination as an influential force during the first years of US occupation was no accident. The result of the US policies were to eliminate most secular democratic anti-imperialist leaders and movements and to present their murderous net-work of ‘ethno-religious’ collaborators as their uncontested ‘partners’ in sustaining the long-term US colonial presence in Iraq. With their puppets in power, Iraq would serve as a launching platform for its strategic pursuit of the other ‘dominoes’ (Syria, Iran, Central Asian Republics…).
The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7 years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion. This enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial strategy for the entire Middle East/South and Central Asia region. Washington’s policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious differences, arming and encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity and resistance. The ‘divide and rule’ tactics and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation. To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.
The Destruction of a Modern Arab Civilization
Independent, secular Iraq had the most advanced scientific-cultural order in the Arab world, despite the repressive nature of Saddam Hussein’s police state. There was a system of national health care, universal public education and generous welfare services, combined with unprecedented levels of gender equality. This marked the advanced nature of Iraqi civilization in the late 20th century. Separation of church and state and strict protection of religious minorities (Christians, Assyrians and others) contrasts sharply with what has resulted from the US occupation and its destruction of the Iraqi civil and governmental structures. The harsh dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein thus presided over a highly developed modern civilization in which advanced scientific work went hand in hand with a strong nationalist and anti-imperialist identity. This resulted especially in the Iraqi people and regime’s expressions of solidarity for the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli rule and occupation.
A mere ‘regime change’ could not extirpate this deeply embedded and advanced secular republican culture in Iraq. The US war planners and their Israeli advisers were well aware that colonial occupation would increase Iraqi nationalist consciousness unless the secular nation was destroyed and hence, the imperial imperative to uproot and destroy the carriers of nationalist consciousness by physically eliminating the educated, the talented, the scientific, indeed the most secular elements of Iraqi society. Retrogression became the principal instrument for the US to impose its colonial puppets, with their primitive, ‘pre-national’ loyalties, in power in a culturally purged Baghdad stripped of its most sophisticated and nationalistic social strata.
According to the Al-Ahram Studies Center in Cairo, more that 310 Iraqi scientists were eliminated during the first 18 months of the US occupation – a figure that the Iraqi education ministry did not dispute.
Another report listed the killings of more than 340 intellectuals and scientists between 2005 and 2007. Bombings of institutes of higher education had pushed enrollment down to 30% of the pre-invasion figures. In one bombing in January 2007, at Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University 70 students were killed with hundreds wounded. These figures compelled the UNESCO to warn that Iraq’s university system was on the brink of collapse. The numbers of prominent Iraqi scientists and professionals who have fled the country have approached 20,000. Of the 6,700 Iraqi university professors who fled since 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported than only 150 had returned by October 2008. Despite the US claims of improved security, the situation in 2008 saw numerous assassinations, including the only practicing neurosurgeon in Iraq’s second largest city of Basra, whose body was dumped on the city streets.
The raw data on the Iraqi academics, scientists and professionals assassinated by the US and allied occupation forces and the militias and shadowy forces they control is drawn from a list published by the Pakistan Daily News (www.daily.pk) on November 26, 2008. This list makes for very uncomfortable reading into the reality of systematic elimination of intellectuals in Iraq under the meat-grinder of US occupation.
Assassinations
The physical elimination of an individual by assassination is an extreme form of terrorism, which has far-reaching effects rippling throughout the community from which the individual comes – in this case the world of Iraqi intellectuals, academics, professionals and creative leaders in the arts and sciences. For each Iraqi intellectual murdered, thousands of educated Iraqis fled the country or abandoned their work for safer, less vulnerable activity.
Baghdad was considered the ‘Paris’ of the Arab world, in terms of culture and art, science and education. In the 1970’s and 80’s, its universities were the envy of the Arab world. The US ‘shock and awe’ campaign that rained down on Baghdad evoked emotions akin to an aerial bombardment of the Louvre, the Sorbonne and the greatest libraries of Europe. Baghdad University was one of the most prestigious and productive universities in the Arab world. Many of its academics possessed doctoral degrees and engaged in post-doctoral studies abroad at prestigious institutions. It taught and graduated many of the top professionals and scientists in the Middle East. Even under the deadly grip of the US/UN-imposed economic sanctions that starved Iraq during the 13 years before the March 2003 invasion, thousands of graduate students and young professionals came to Iraq for post-graduate training. Young physicians from throughout the Arab world received advanced medical training in its institutions. Many of its academics presented scientific papers at major international conferences and published in prestigious journals. Most important, Baghdad University trained and maintained a highly respected scientific secular culture free of sectarian discrimination – with academics from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.
This world has been forever shattered: Under US occupation, up to November 2008, eighty-three academics and researchers teaching at Baghdad University had been murdered and several thousand of their colleagues, students and family members were forced to flee.
The Selection of Assassinated Academics by Discipline
The November 2008 article published by the Pakistan Daily News lists the names of a total of 154 top Baghdad-based academics, renowned in their fields, who were murdered. Altogether, a total of 281 well-known intellectuals teaching at the top universities in Iraq fell victim to the ‘death squads’ under US occupation.
Prior to the US occupation, Baghdad University possessed the premier research and teaching medical faculty in the entire Middle East attracting hundreds of young doctors for advanced training. That program has been devastated during the rise of the US-death squad regime, with few prospects of recovery. Of those murdered, 25% (21) were the most senior professors and lecturers in the medical faculty of Baghdad University, the highest percentage of any faculty. The second highest percentage of butchered faculty were the professors and researchers from Baghdad University’s renowned engineering faculty (12), followed by the top academics in the humanities (10), physical and social sciences (8 senior academics each), education (5). The remaining top academics murdered at Baghdad University spread out among the agronomy, business, physical education, communications and religious studies faculties.
At three other Baghdad universities, 53 senior academics were slaughtered, including 10 in the social sciences, 7 in the faculty of law, 6 each in medicine and the humanities, 9 in the physical sciences and 5 in engineering. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s August 20, 2002 pre-invasion joke, “…one has to assume they (scientists) have not been playing ‘tiddlywinks’(a child’s game)”( justifying the bloody purge of Iraq’s scientists in physics and chemistry. An ominous signal of the academic bloodletting that followed the invasion.
Similar bloody purges of academics occurred in all the provincial universities: 127 senior academics and scientists were assassinated at the various well-regarded universities in Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra and elsewhere. The provincial universities with the highest number of murdered senior faculty members were in cities where the US and British military and their Kurdish mercenary allies were most active: Basra (35), Mosul (35), Diyala (15) and Al-Anbar (11).
The Iraqi military and allied death squads carried out most of the killing of academics in the cities under US or ‘allied’ control. The systematic murder of academics was a nation-wide, cross-disciplinary drive to destroy the cultural and educational foundations of a modern Arab civilization. The death squads carrying out most of these assassinations were primitive, pre-modern, ethno-religious groups ‘set loose’ or instrumentalized by US military strategists to wipe out any politically conscious intellectuals and nationalist scientists who might pursue an agenda for re-building a modern, secular society and independent, unified republic.
In its panic to prevent the US invasion, the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate provided a list, which identified over 500 key Iraqi scientists to the UN on December 7, 2002. There is little doubt that this list became a core element in the US military’s hit list for eliminating Iraq’s scientific elite. In his notorious pre-invasion speech to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell cited a list of over 3,500 Iraqi scientists and technicians who would have to be ‘contained’ to prevent their expertise from being used by other countries. The US had even created a ‘budget’ of hundreds of millions of dollars, drawn from the Iraqi ‘Oil for Food’ money held by the United Nations to set up ‘civilian re-education’ programs to re-train Iraqi scientists and engineers. These highly touted programs were never seriously implemented. Cheaper ways of containing what one American policy expert termed Iraq’s ‘excess scientists, engineers and technicians’ in a Carnegie Endowment Paper (RANSAC Policy Update April 2004) became clear. The US had decided to adopt and expand the Israeli Mossad’s covert operation of assassinating selected key Iraqi scientists on an industrial scale.
The US ‘Surge’ and ‘Peak Assassination’ Campaigns: 2006-2007
The high tide of terror against academics coincides with the renewal of the US military offensive in Baghdad and in the provinces. Of the total number of assassinations of Baghdad-based academics for which a date is recorded (110 known intellectuals slaughtered), almost 80% (87) occurred in 2006 and 2007. A similar pattern is found in the provinces with 77% of a total of 84 scholars murdered outside of capital during the same period. The pattern is clear: the murder rate of academics grows as the occupying US forces organize a mercenary Iraqi military and police force and provide money for the training and recruitment of rival Shia and Sunni tribesmen and militia as a means of decreasing American casualties and of purging potential dissident critics of the occupation.
The terror campaign against academics intensified in mid-2005 and reached its peak in 2006-2007, leading to the mass flight of tens of thousands of Iraqi scholars, scientists, professionals and their families overseas. Entire university medical school faculties have become refugees in Syria and elsewhere. Those who could not afford to abandon elderly parents or relatives and remained in Iraq have taken extraordinary measures to hide their identities. Some have chosen to collaborate with the US occupation forces or the puppet regime in the hope of being protected or allowed to immigrate with their families to the US or Europe, although the Europeans, especially the British are disinclined to accept Iraqi scholars. After 2008, there has been a sharp decline in the murder of academics – with only 4 assassinated that year. This reflects the massive flight of Iraqi intellectuals living abroad or in hiding rather than any change of policy on the part of the US and its mercenary puppets. As a result, Iraq’s research facilities have been decimated. The lives of those remaining support staff, including technicians, librarians and students have been devastated with few prospects for future employment.
The US war and occupation of Iraq, as Presidents Bush and Obama have declared, is a ‘success’ – an independent nation of 23 million citizens has been occupied by force, a puppet regime is ensconced, colonial mercenary troops obey American officers and the oil fields have been put up for sale. All of Iraq’s nationalist laws protecting its patrimony, its cultural treasures and national resources, have been annulled. The occupiers have imposed a ‘constitution’ favoring the US Empire. Israel and its Zionist flunkies in the Administrations of both Bush and Obama celebrate the demise of a modern adversary…and the conversion of Iraq into a cultural-political desert. In line with an alleged agreement made by the US State Department and Pentagon officials to influential collectors from the American Council for Cultural Policy in January 2003, the looted treasures of ancient Mesopotamia have ‘found’ their way into the collections of the elite in London, New York and elsewhere. The collectors can now anticipate the pillage of Iran.
Warning to Iran
The US invasion, occupation and destruction of a modern, scientific-cultural civilization, such as existed in Iraq, is a prelude of what the people of Iran can expect if and when a US-Israeli military attack occurs. The imperial threat to the cultural-scientific foundations of the Iranian nation has been totally absent from the narrative among the affluent Iranian student protesters and their US-funded NGO’s during their post-election ‘Lipstick Revolution’ protests. They should bear in mind that in 2004 educated, sophisticated Iraqis in Baghdad consoled themselves with a fatally misplaced optimism that ‘at least we are not like Afghanistan’. The same elite are now in squalid refugee camps in Syria and Jordan and their country more closely resembles Afghanistan than anywhere else in the Middle East. The chilling promise of President Bush in April 2003 to transform Iraq in the image of ‘our newly liberated Afghanistan’ has been fulfilled. And reports that the US Administration advisers had reviewed the Israeli Mossad policy of selective assassination of Iranian scientists should cause the pro-Western liberal intellectuals of Teheran to seriously ponder the lesson of the murderous campaign that has virtually eliminated Iraqi scientists and academics during 2006-2007.
Conclusion
What does the United States (and Britain and Israel) gain from establishing a retrograde client regime, based on medieval ethno-clerical socio-political structures in Iraq? First and foremost, Iraq has become an outpost for empire. Secondly, it is a weak and ackward regime incapable of challenging Israeli economic and military dominance in the region and unwilling to question the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian Arabs from Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Thirdly, the destruction of the scientific, academic, cultural and legal foundations of an independent state means increasing reliance on the Western (and Chinese) multinational corporations and their technical infrastructure – facilitating imperial economic penetration and exploitation.
In the mid 19th Century, after the revolutions of 1848, the conservative French sociologist Emil Durkheim recognized that the European bourgeoisie was confronted with rising class conflict and an increasing anti-capitalist working class. Durkheim noted that, whatever its philosophical misgivings about religion and clericalism, the bourgeoisie would have to use the myths of traditional religion to ‘create’ social cohesion and undercut class polarization. He called on the educated and sophisticated Parisian capitalist class to forego its rejection of obscurantist religious dogma in favor of instrumentalizing religion as a tool to maintain its political dominance. In the same way, US strategists, including the Pentagon-Zionists, have instrumentalized the tribal-mullah, ethno-religious forces to destroy the secular national political leadership and advanced culture of Iraq in order to consolidate imperial rule – even if this strategy called for the killing off of the scientific and professional classes. Contemporary US imperial rule is based on supporting the socially and politically most backward sectors of society and applying the most advanced technology of warfare.
Israeli advisers have played a major role in instructing US occupation forces in Iraq on the practices of urban counter-insurgency and repression of civilians, drawing on their 60 years of experience. The infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinian families at Deir Yasin in 1948 was emblematic of Zionist elimination of hundreds of productive farming villages, which had been settled for centuries by a native people with their endogenous civilization and cultural ties to the soil, in order to impose a new colonial order. The policy of the total deracination of the Palestinians is central to Israel’s advise to the US policymakers in Iraq. Their message has been carried out by their Zionist acolytes in the Bush and Obama Administrations, ordering the dismemberment of the entire modern Iraqi civil and state bureaucracy and using pre-modern tribal death squads made up of Kurds and Shia extremists to purge the modern universities and research institutions of that shattered nation.
The US imperial conquest of Iraq is built on the destruction of a modern secular republic. The cultural desert that remains (a Biblical ‘howling wilderness’ soaked in the blood of Iraq’s precious scholars) is controlled by mega-swindlers, mercenary thugs posing as ‘Iraqi officers’, tribal and ethnic cultural illiterates and medieval religious figures. They operate under the guidance and direction of West Point graduates holding ‘blue-prints for empire’, formulated by graduates of Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Yale and Chicago, eager to serve the interests of American and European multi-national corporations.
This is called ‘combined and uneven development’: The marriage of fundamentalist mullahs with Ivy League Zionists at the service of the US.
- James Petras’ most recent books are: What's Left in Latin America? coauthored with Henry Veltmeyer (Ashgate Press, 2009), and Global Depression and Regional Wars (Clarity Press, 2009). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
If you like this article, please consider making a contribution to the Palestine Chronicle.
Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder
By Jeremy Scahill, The Nation, Aug. 4, 2009
A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."
In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.
These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Susan Burke, a private attorney working in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights, is suing Blackwater in five separate civil cases filed in the Washington, DC, area. They were recently consolidated before Judge T.S. Ellis III of the Eastern District of Virginia for pretrial motions. Burke filed the August 3 motion in response to Blackwater's motion to dismiss the case. Blackwater asserts that Prince and the company are innocent of any wrongdoing and that they were professionally performing their duties on behalf of their employer, the US State Department.
click here to read the full article
A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."
In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.
These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Susan Burke, a private attorney working in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights, is suing Blackwater in five separate civil cases filed in the Washington, DC, area. They were recently consolidated before Judge T.S. Ellis III of the Eastern District of Virginia for pretrial motions. Burke filed the August 3 motion in response to Blackwater's motion to dismiss the case. Blackwater asserts that Prince and the company are innocent of any wrongdoing and that they were professionally performing their duties on behalf of their employer, the US State Department.
click here to read the full article
AROUND 30 ISRAELI SOLDIERS TESTIFY ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCES IN OPERATION CAST LEAD – A NEW BOOKLET BY "BREAKING THE SILENCE"
Breaking The Silence, July 15, 2009
click here to read the Israeli Soldiers Testimonies
"You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them."
Fifty-four testimonies of Israeli combat soldiers who participated in Operation Cast Lead reveal gaps between the reports given by the army following January’s events; the needless destruction of houses; firing phosphorous in populated areas and an atmosphere that encouraged shooting anywhere.
Half a year after Operation Cast Lead, the organization "Breaking the Silence" is announcing the release of a new booklet today (Wed. 7/15) that includes numerous testimonies by soldiers who participated in the operation. The testimonies expose significant gaps between the official stances of the Israeli military and events on the ground.
Among the 54 testimonies are stories revealing the use of "accepted practices," the destruction of hundreds of houses and mosques for no military purpose, the firing of phosphorous gas in the direction of populated areas, the killing of innocent victims with small arms, the destruction of private property, and most of all, a permissive atmosphere in the command structure that enabled soldiers to act without moral restrictions. The booklet compiles the testimonies of about 30 reserve and regular combat soldiers from various units that participated in the fighting. The testimonies demonstrate that the soldiers were not given directives stating the goal of the operation and, as one soldier testifies, "there was not much said about the issue of innocent civilians."
Many soldiers said that they fought without seeing "the enemy before their eyes." "You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them," one of the soldiers testified that "a 20-year-old kid should not have to do these kinds of things to other people."
"The testimonies prove that the immoral way the war was carried out was due to the systems in place and not the individual soldier," said Mikhael Mankin from "Breaking the Silence." What was proven yesterday is that through the IDF the exception becomes the norm, and this requires a deep and reflective discussion. This is an urgent call to Israel's society and leadership to take a sober look at the foolishness of our policies."
click here for more information
click here to read the Israeli Soldiers Testimonies
"You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them."
Fifty-four testimonies of Israeli combat soldiers who participated in Operation Cast Lead reveal gaps between the reports given by the army following January’s events; the needless destruction of houses; firing phosphorous in populated areas and an atmosphere that encouraged shooting anywhere.
Half a year after Operation Cast Lead, the organization "Breaking the Silence" is announcing the release of a new booklet today (Wed. 7/15) that includes numerous testimonies by soldiers who participated in the operation. The testimonies expose significant gaps between the official stances of the Israeli military and events on the ground.
Among the 54 testimonies are stories revealing the use of "accepted practices," the destruction of hundreds of houses and mosques for no military purpose, the firing of phosphorous gas in the direction of populated areas, the killing of innocent victims with small arms, the destruction of private property, and most of all, a permissive atmosphere in the command structure that enabled soldiers to act without moral restrictions. The booklet compiles the testimonies of about 30 reserve and regular combat soldiers from various units that participated in the fighting. The testimonies demonstrate that the soldiers were not given directives stating the goal of the operation and, as one soldier testifies, "there was not much said about the issue of innocent civilians."
Many soldiers said that they fought without seeing "the enemy before their eyes." "You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them," one of the soldiers testified that "a 20-year-old kid should not have to do these kinds of things to other people."
"The testimonies prove that the immoral way the war was carried out was due to the systems in place and not the individual soldier," said Mikhael Mankin from "Breaking the Silence." What was proven yesterday is that through the IDF the exception becomes the norm, and this requires a deep and reflective discussion. This is an urgent call to Israel's society and leadership to take a sober look at the foolishness of our policies."
click here for more information
Israeli Military Official Threatens New Lebanon War - Officials Admit Last War Was Planned
Marking the third anniversary of the July War
Lebanon remembers as Israeli official says war planned in advance
By NOW Staff, NOW Lebanon, July 12, 2009
Today marks the third anniversary of the outbreak of the 2006 July War. The 34-day conflict killed over 1000 Lebanese civilians, forced nearly one million from their homes and left swathes of the country in ruins.
Three years on, an Israeli official used the occasion to admit the country had planned war against Lebanon prior to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and that it was intended to eliminate Hezbollah. A former head of the National Security Council also warned of future conflict if Hezbollah is included in the next cabinet.
Within Lebanon, Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri used the occasion to emphasize the need for a national-unity cabinet, while opposition politicians called for unity in the face of Israeli threats and de-mining teams continue to remove unexploded cluster bombs in the South.
The 2006 War
On June 12, 2006, Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, and killed three during an assault on a patrol on the Israeli side of Lebanon’s southern border.
Israel, which was already involved in a military operation in the Gaza Strip to free another captured soldier, immediately responded by sending ground forces into southern Lebanon for the first time since its 2000 withdrawal.
The Israeli Defense Force carried out massive airstrikes against Lebanon, paralyzing major points of infrastructure such as the country’s only international airport, bridges and power plants, and subjected it to a punishing air and naval blockade.
Hezbollah strongholds in the South, the Bekaa Valley and Dahiyeh in southern Beirut were particularly targeted by Israeli strikes.
Hezbollah responded by engaging in guerilla battles against advancing Israeli units and fired approximately 4,000 unguided rockets into northern Israel.
According to AFP reports, the 34-day Israeli offensive left at least 1,287 Lebanese dead and 4,054 wounded. Four UN observers and one UNIFIL member were also killed by Israeli strikes. The UNHCR estimates nearly one million Lebanese were displaced by the war.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said 119 Israeli soldiers and 44 civilians were killed during the conflict. Hezbollah and Amal announced they lost 91 combatants.
A ceasefire came into effect on August 14 after UN Security Council Resolution 1701 was unanimously approved by the UN Security Council on August 11, and by the Lebanese and Israeli governments the following days. The resolution called for a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarmament of Hezbollah.
In the final stages of the conflict, Israel rained millions of cluster bomblets on southern Lebanon, many of which failed to detonate on impact and have killed and injured dozens of civilians in the last three years, despite ongoing de-mining efforts. After considerable international pressure, Israel handed maps of the locations of the cluster bombs to UNIFIL in May this year.
The conflict cost Lebanon billions of dollars. At the 2006 Stockholm and 2007 Paris III donor conferences, governments and organizations pledged close to 8.5 billion dollars in grants and loans to help Lebanon rebuild and recover from the devastating war.
Hezbollah returned the bodies of the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers on July 16, 2008, in return for the release of Palestinian Liberation Front member Samir Kuntar, who was convicted of murder by an Israeli court, four Hezbollah members and the bodies of 200 Lebanese and Palestinians.
The 2009 Israeli response
Former and current Israeli officials used the anniversary to warn of future attacks against Lebanon if Hezbollah is legitimized by being included in the cabinet. They also acknowledged the 2006 attack had been planned well in advance and was intended to destroy Hezbollah.
NOW Lebanon’s correspondent in South Lebanon also reported on Sunday that Israeli fighter jets conducted low flights over Nabatiyeh, Marjayoun and Hasbaya and launched mock air raids against southern areas.
Israeli Brigadier General Dan Halutz, IDF Chief of Staff during the 2006 July War, told a conference at Tel Aviv University's Center for Strategic Research on Sunday that Israel had planned for war against Lebanon long before Hezbollah abducted the two IDF soldiers and its principle aim was “the total elimination of Hezbollah.”
He said former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Amir Peretz had erred when they refused his proposal to attack the Lebanese cabinet and infrastructure during the war, which he said paved the way for Hezbollah to later strengthen its military capabilities.
Former head of the Israeli National Security Council, Giyora Giora Eiland, also warned on Sunday that Israel will wage war against Lebanon, its infrastructure and all those who support Hezbollah, if the new Lebanese cabinet legitimizes the party.
He warned that Israel will wage in the future a stronger offensive than that witnessed during the 2006 July War.
Eiland called on the Israeli cabinet to urge the international community, particularly the United States, France and Saudi Arabia, to put pressure on the Lebanese cabinet in order to change its policy toward Hezbollah.
An Israeli official preempted the anniversary on Saturday by warning Hezbollah had expanded its arsenal after the 2006 war, and cautioned the militant group against carrying out further acts of sabotage against Israel or abducting its citizens and soldiers.
“After 2006, Hezbollah has not attempted to attack northern Israel, which proves that the party incurred heavy losses during the war and the Israeli Defense Forces were capable of restoring their deterrent capacity,” Israeli Northern Command chief Alon Friedman told Israeli public radio.
The Lebanese commemoration
Lebanese politicians praised the unity and courage of the Lebanese people during the July War, and used the occasion to emphasize the importance of a national unity government.
Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah met on Sunday with Vice President of the Higher Shia Islamic Council Sheikh Abdel Amir Qabalan to commemorate the anniversary, saying it is “necessary to confront Israeli aggression against domestic Lebanese affairs with a unified national front.”
They also discussed the ongoing threat posed by Israel, referring to its ongoing occupation of Lebanese land, its violations of Lebanese sovereignty by land, air and sea, as well as the establishment of spy networks that threatened Lebanon’s stability and security.
Speaker Nabih Berri used the occasion to call for all compensation issues related to the conflict to be finalized and said Lebanon defeated Israel in 2006 because of national unity.
“The Resistance and the army’s martyrs achieved something glorious for the Lebanese people,” Berri said.
Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh said the conflict had destroyed Israel’s deterrent force. He called for the cabinet to be formed quickly, so the country can confront Israel’s “threats and intimidation, in addition to its daily violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty and UN Security Council Resolution 1701.”
Speaking on Saturday after meeting President Sleiman at Baabda, Prime Minister-elect Saad Hariri said the occasion had prompted the president and himself to stress the importance of forming a national-unity cabinet.
In a statement issued earlier on Saturday, Sleiman praised the “victorious” efforts of the Lebanese Armed Forces, the Resistance and ordinary civilians during the conflict.
“Israel learned a tough lesson after the war, which led them to resort to threats and intimidation instead of the attacks that have proceeded each summer,” the president added.
He also criticized Israel for continuing to violate UN Security Council Resolution 1701 on a daily basis.
Lebanon remembers as Israeli official says war planned in advance
By NOW Staff, NOW Lebanon, July 12, 2009
Today marks the third anniversary of the outbreak of the 2006 July War. The 34-day conflict killed over 1000 Lebanese civilians, forced nearly one million from their homes and left swathes of the country in ruins.Three years on, an Israeli official used the occasion to admit the country had planned war against Lebanon prior to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and that it was intended to eliminate Hezbollah. A former head of the National Security Council also warned of future conflict if Hezbollah is included in the next cabinet.
Within Lebanon, Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri used the occasion to emphasize the need for a national-unity cabinet, while opposition politicians called for unity in the face of Israeli threats and de-mining teams continue to remove unexploded cluster bombs in the South.
The 2006 War
On June 12, 2006, Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, and killed three during an assault on a patrol on the Israeli side of Lebanon’s southern border.
Israel, which was already involved in a military operation in the Gaza Strip to free another captured soldier, immediately responded by sending ground forces into southern Lebanon for the first time since its 2000 withdrawal.
The Israeli Defense Force carried out massive airstrikes against Lebanon, paralyzing major points of infrastructure such as the country’s only international airport, bridges and power plants, and subjected it to a punishing air and naval blockade.
Hezbollah strongholds in the South, the Bekaa Valley and Dahiyeh in southern Beirut were particularly targeted by Israeli strikes.
Hezbollah responded by engaging in guerilla battles against advancing Israeli units and fired approximately 4,000 unguided rockets into northern Israel.
According to AFP reports, the 34-day Israeli offensive left at least 1,287 Lebanese dead and 4,054 wounded. Four UN observers and one UNIFIL member were also killed by Israeli strikes. The UNHCR estimates nearly one million Lebanese were displaced by the war.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said 119 Israeli soldiers and 44 civilians were killed during the conflict. Hezbollah and Amal announced they lost 91 combatants.
A ceasefire came into effect on August 14 after UN Security Council Resolution 1701 was unanimously approved by the UN Security Council on August 11, and by the Lebanese and Israeli governments the following days. The resolution called for a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarmament of Hezbollah.
In the final stages of the conflict, Israel rained millions of cluster bomblets on southern Lebanon, many of which failed to detonate on impact and have killed and injured dozens of civilians in the last three years, despite ongoing de-mining efforts. After considerable international pressure, Israel handed maps of the locations of the cluster bombs to UNIFIL in May this year.
The conflict cost Lebanon billions of dollars. At the 2006 Stockholm and 2007 Paris III donor conferences, governments and organizations pledged close to 8.5 billion dollars in grants and loans to help Lebanon rebuild and recover from the devastating war.
Hezbollah returned the bodies of the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers on July 16, 2008, in return for the release of Palestinian Liberation Front member Samir Kuntar, who was convicted of murder by an Israeli court, four Hezbollah members and the bodies of 200 Lebanese and Palestinians.
The 2009 Israeli response
Former and current Israeli officials used the anniversary to warn of future attacks against Lebanon if Hezbollah is legitimized by being included in the cabinet. They also acknowledged the 2006 attack had been planned well in advance and was intended to destroy Hezbollah.
NOW Lebanon’s correspondent in South Lebanon also reported on Sunday that Israeli fighter jets conducted low flights over Nabatiyeh, Marjayoun and Hasbaya and launched mock air raids against southern areas.
Israeli Brigadier General Dan Halutz, IDF Chief of Staff during the 2006 July War, told a conference at Tel Aviv University's Center for Strategic Research on Sunday that Israel had planned for war against Lebanon long before Hezbollah abducted the two IDF soldiers and its principle aim was “the total elimination of Hezbollah.”
He said former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Amir Peretz had erred when they refused his proposal to attack the Lebanese cabinet and infrastructure during the war, which he said paved the way for Hezbollah to later strengthen its military capabilities.
Former head of the Israeli National Security Council, Giyora Giora Eiland, also warned on Sunday that Israel will wage war against Lebanon, its infrastructure and all those who support Hezbollah, if the new Lebanese cabinet legitimizes the party.
He warned that Israel will wage in the future a stronger offensive than that witnessed during the 2006 July War.
Eiland called on the Israeli cabinet to urge the international community, particularly the United States, France and Saudi Arabia, to put pressure on the Lebanese cabinet in order to change its policy toward Hezbollah.
An Israeli official preempted the anniversary on Saturday by warning Hezbollah had expanded its arsenal after the 2006 war, and cautioned the militant group against carrying out further acts of sabotage against Israel or abducting its citizens and soldiers.
“After 2006, Hezbollah has not attempted to attack northern Israel, which proves that the party incurred heavy losses during the war and the Israeli Defense Forces were capable of restoring their deterrent capacity,” Israeli Northern Command chief Alon Friedman told Israeli public radio.
The Lebanese commemoration
Lebanese politicians praised the unity and courage of the Lebanese people during the July War, and used the occasion to emphasize the importance of a national unity government.
Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah met on Sunday with Vice President of the Higher Shia Islamic Council Sheikh Abdel Amir Qabalan to commemorate the anniversary, saying it is “necessary to confront Israeli aggression against domestic Lebanese affairs with a unified national front.”
They also discussed the ongoing threat posed by Israel, referring to its ongoing occupation of Lebanese land, its violations of Lebanese sovereignty by land, air and sea, as well as the establishment of spy networks that threatened Lebanon’s stability and security.
Speaker Nabih Berri used the occasion to call for all compensation issues related to the conflict to be finalized and said Lebanon defeated Israel in 2006 because of national unity.
“The Resistance and the army’s martyrs achieved something glorious for the Lebanese people,” Berri said.
Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh said the conflict had destroyed Israel’s deterrent force. He called for the cabinet to be formed quickly, so the country can confront Israel’s “threats and intimidation, in addition to its daily violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty and UN Security Council Resolution 1701.”
Speaking on Saturday after meeting President Sleiman at Baabda, Prime Minister-elect Saad Hariri said the occasion had prompted the president and himself to stress the importance of forming a national-unity cabinet.
In a statement issued earlier on Saturday, Sleiman praised the “victorious” efforts of the Lebanese Armed Forces, the Resistance and ordinary civilians during the conflict.
“Israel learned a tough lesson after the war, which led them to resort to threats and intimidation instead of the attacks that have proceeded each summer,” the president added.
He also criticized Israel for continuing to violate UN Security Council Resolution 1701 on a daily basis.
Letter from an Israeli Jail, by Cynthia McKinney
Free Gaza Movement, July 4, 2009
Original audio message available here:
http://freegaza.org/it/home/56-news/984-a-message-from-cynthia-from-a-cell-block-in-israel
This is Cynthia McKinney and I'm speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies - and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.
At the outbreak of Israel's Operation ‘Cast Lead' [in December 2008], I boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day's notice and tried, as the US representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver 3 tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.
During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16's rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full scale outright genocide. U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs - new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel's onslaught that Gaza had become Israel's veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.
The world saw Israel's despicable violence thanks to al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water ... It's a miracle that I'm even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.
The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime ... I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons to kids?
Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else's children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza's children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.
I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza's children could color & paint, that Gaza's wounded could be healed, and that Gaza's bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.
But I've learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it's incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream ... like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better ... The once proud, never colonized Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than human rights and self-determination.
My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn't cheap. Many of them represent their family's best collective efforts for self-fulfilment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel only after they arrived Israel told them "there is no UN in Israel."
The police here have license to pick them up & suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world's first Jews and Christian. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.
The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle's detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for 6 months. As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and ‘yes we can' were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfilment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed in.
It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel's marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.
We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr. Martin Luther King Junior's letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to do so. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the U.S. have a lot to atone for, for what they've done to others around the world.
What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people's children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I'm experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. [But] I'm lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?
Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:] what are you willing to do?
Let's change the world together & reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State's Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.
I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I've met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.
---
Cynthia McKinney is a former U.S. Congresswoman, Green Party presidential candidate, and an outspoken advocate for human rights and social justice. The first African-American woman to represent the state of Georgia, McKinney served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1993-2003, and from 2005-2007. She was arrested and forcibly abducted to Israel while attempting to take humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to Gaza on June 30th. For more information, please see http://www.FreeGaza.org
Original audio message available here:
http://freegaza.org/it/home/56-news/984-a-message-from-cynthia-from-a-cell-block-in-israel
This is Cynthia McKinney and I'm speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies - and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.
At the outbreak of Israel's Operation ‘Cast Lead' [in December 2008], I boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day's notice and tried, as the US representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver 3 tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.
During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16's rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full scale outright genocide. U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs - new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel's onslaught that Gaza had become Israel's veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.
The world saw Israel's despicable violence thanks to al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water ... It's a miracle that I'm even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.
The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime ... I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons to kids?
Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else's children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza's children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.
I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza's children could color & paint, that Gaza's wounded could be healed, and that Gaza's bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.
But I've learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it's incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream ... like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better ... The once proud, never colonized Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than human rights and self-determination.
My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn't cheap. Many of them represent their family's best collective efforts for self-fulfilment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel only after they arrived Israel told them "there is no UN in Israel."
The police here have license to pick them up & suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world's first Jews and Christian. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.
The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle's detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for 6 months. As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and ‘yes we can' were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfilment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed in.
It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel's marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.
We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr. Martin Luther King Junior's letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to do so. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the U.S. have a lot to atone for, for what they've done to others around the world.
What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people's children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I'm experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. [But] I'm lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?
Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:] what are you willing to do?
Let's change the world together & reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State's Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.
I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I've met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.
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Cynthia McKinney is a former U.S. Congresswoman, Green Party presidential candidate, and an outspoken advocate for human rights and social justice. The first African-American woman to represent the state of Georgia, McKinney served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1993-2003, and from 2005-2007. She was arrested and forcibly abducted to Israel while attempting to take humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to Gaza on June 30th. For more information, please see http://www.FreeGaza.org
In blockaded Gaza, Israeli tanks kill again
Press TV, July 2, 2009
A seventeen-year-old Palestinian girl has reportedly been killed and four others have suffered wounds in Israeli tank fire in the Gaza Strip.
According to the Palestinians who said they witnessed the incident, Hyam Ayash lost her life after an Israeli tank fired a mortar toward a target near the al-Bureij refugee camp at a central area in the impoverished strip. Medical workers meanwhile said that one of those wounded in the attack is in critical condition.
The Israeli military account of the incident was that its forces had come under fire by Palestinian fighters in the area.
The incident took place after the London-based human rights group Amnesty International announced on Thursday that Israeli army soldiers picked and used Gazan children as human shields during the latest major Israeli military operation in the besieged Gaza Strip.
In its 117-page report on the offensive, the rights group leveled accusations of war crimes against Tel Aviv, saying Israeli forces inflicted "wanton destruction" in attacks that targeted civilians.
Based on the report, Israeli troops forced Palestinians to stay in one room at their home while turning the rest of the house into a base and sniper positions, effectively using the families, both adults and children, as human shields and putting them at risk.
There have been intermittent skirmishes between Israeli troopers and Palestinian fighters in the Gaza-Israel border region after Israel brought its three-week war on Gaza to a halt.
Three weeks of Israeli air strikes and a ground incursion resulted in the death of over 1,500 Palestinians and the injury of about 5,450 people in the Gaza Strip. Most of the victims were civilians. The offensive also inflicted more than USD 1.6 billion of damage on the economy in the Gaza Strip.
MP/AA
A seventeen-year-old Palestinian girl has reportedly been killed and four others have suffered wounds in Israeli tank fire in the Gaza Strip.
According to the Palestinians who said they witnessed the incident, Hyam Ayash lost her life after an Israeli tank fired a mortar toward a target near the al-Bureij refugee camp at a central area in the impoverished strip. Medical workers meanwhile said that one of those wounded in the attack is in critical condition.
The Israeli military account of the incident was that its forces had come under fire by Palestinian fighters in the area.
The incident took place after the London-based human rights group Amnesty International announced on Thursday that Israeli army soldiers picked and used Gazan children as human shields during the latest major Israeli military operation in the besieged Gaza Strip.
In its 117-page report on the offensive, the rights group leveled accusations of war crimes against Tel Aviv, saying Israeli forces inflicted "wanton destruction" in attacks that targeted civilians.
Based on the report, Israeli troops forced Palestinians to stay in one room at their home while turning the rest of the house into a base and sniper positions, effectively using the families, both adults and children, as human shields and putting them at risk.
There have been intermittent skirmishes between Israeli troopers and Palestinian fighters in the Gaza-Israel border region after Israel brought its three-week war on Gaza to a halt.
Three weeks of Israeli air strikes and a ground incursion resulted in the death of over 1,500 Palestinians and the injury of about 5,450 people in the Gaza Strip. Most of the victims were civilians. The offensive also inflicted more than USD 1.6 billion of damage on the economy in the Gaza Strip.
MP/AA
UN Expert denounces seizure of aid boat by Israeli forces
Free Gaza Movement, July 3, 2009
2 July 2009 - GENEVA - The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Richard Falk, denounced the unlawful naval seizure by an Israeli gunboat on the high seas of a ship carrying medicine and reconstruction material to blockaded people of Gaza.
“This Israeli action implements its cruel blockade of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza, in violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that prohibits any form of collective punishment directed at an occupied people”, said the human rights expert.
Mr. Falk pointed to a recent report on the impact on health resulting from the two year blockade, issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross, stressing that Israeli actions not only restrict such vital supplies as food, medicine, and fuel to bare subsistence levels, but has in unprecedented fashion, disallowed the entry to Gaza of building materials and spare parts needed for repairing some of the widespread damage caused by its attacks on the Strip that took place for 22 days starting on December 27, 2008.
“Such a pattern of continuing blockade under these conditions amounts to such a serious violation of the Geneva Conventions as to constitute a continuing crime against humanity”, added the independent human rights expert.
The boat in question had been inspected in response to Israeli demands before departure by the port authorities in Cyprus to determine whether there were weapons on board. None were found, and Israeli authorities were so informed.
Nonetheless, the 21 peace activists on the boat were arrested, held in captivity, and have been charged with ‘illegal entry’ to Israel even though they had no intention of going to Israel. The group included such prominent figures as the Irish winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Mairead Maguire, and the former American congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.
For more information on the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967: http://www.ohchr.org/SP/countries/MENARegion/Pages/PSIndex.aspx
For interview requests, please contact Linnéa Arvidsson (+41 22 928 9126, larvidsson[at]ohchr.org)
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights - Media Unit
Rupert Colville, Spokesperson: + 41 22 917 9767
Xabier Celaya, Information Officer: + 41 22 917 9383
For inquiries and media requests: press-info[at]ohchr.org
2 July 2009 - GENEVA - The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Richard Falk, denounced the unlawful naval seizure by an Israeli gunboat on the high seas of a ship carrying medicine and reconstruction material to blockaded people of Gaza.
“This Israeli action implements its cruel blockade of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza, in violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that prohibits any form of collective punishment directed at an occupied people”, said the human rights expert.
Mr. Falk pointed to a recent report on the impact on health resulting from the two year blockade, issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross, stressing that Israeli actions not only restrict such vital supplies as food, medicine, and fuel to bare subsistence levels, but has in unprecedented fashion, disallowed the entry to Gaza of building materials and spare parts needed for repairing some of the widespread damage caused by its attacks on the Strip that took place for 22 days starting on December 27, 2008.
“Such a pattern of continuing blockade under these conditions amounts to such a serious violation of the Geneva Conventions as to constitute a continuing crime against humanity”, added the independent human rights expert.
The boat in question had been inspected in response to Israeli demands before departure by the port authorities in Cyprus to determine whether there were weapons on board. None were found, and Israeli authorities were so informed.
Nonetheless, the 21 peace activists on the boat were arrested, held in captivity, and have been charged with ‘illegal entry’ to Israel even though they had no intention of going to Israel. The group included such prominent figures as the Irish winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Mairead Maguire, and the former American congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.
For more information on the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967: http://www.ohchr.org/SP/countries/MENARegion/Pages/PSIndex.aspx
For interview requests, please contact Linnéa Arvidsson (+41 22 928 9126, larvidsson[at]ohchr.org)
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights - Media Unit
Rupert Colville, Spokesperson: + 41 22 917 9767
Xabier Celaya, Information Officer: + 41 22 917 9383
For inquiries and media requests: press-info[at]ohchr.org
UN Fact-finding committee arrives in Gaza
by Saed Bannoura, IMEMC & Agencies, June 27, 2009
The United Nations Fact-finding Committee arrived in the Gaza Strip on Friday evening through the Rafah border terminal, and would be holding hearing sessions with the residents and the victims of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Public hearing sessions would be held on Sunday and Monday in Gaza city, and on Tuesday in Geneva.
The sessions are meant to collect testimonies and information and would give the victims and international experts the chance to present their testimonies to the international community.
Media outlets would be stationed in a hall separated from the place where the hearing session would be held. Reporters would be connected via satellite.
Members of the committee would interview at the UNRWA headquarters victims, eyewitnesses, and experts.
Two TV stations, who signed contracts with the UN, would be broadcasting the sessions from the headquarters of the Red Crescent Society in Tal Al Hawa neighborhood, in Gaza City. All TV stations can catch the broadcast from the above mentioned location.
The hearing sessions would be conducted during the following times and dates;
Sunday, June 28, from 8:30 – 13:00, and from 14:30 – 16:30 local Palestinian time.
Monday., June 29, 8:30 – 13:00, and from 14:30 – 17:00.
Audio production would be available in English and Arabic. Middle-Eastern and European stations can catch the broadcast at W2A in both English and Arabic.
Photos can only be taken by photo-journalists contracting with the UN, and would be published using FTP protocol during lunch break and after the sessions are concluded.
The United Nations Fact-finding Committee arrived in the Gaza Strip on Friday evening through the Rafah border terminal, and would be holding hearing sessions with the residents and the victims of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Public hearing sessions would be held on Sunday and Monday in Gaza city, and on Tuesday in Geneva.
The sessions are meant to collect testimonies and information and would give the victims and international experts the chance to present their testimonies to the international community.
Media outlets would be stationed in a hall separated from the place where the hearing session would be held. Reporters would be connected via satellite.
Members of the committee would interview at the UNRWA headquarters victims, eyewitnesses, and experts.
Two TV stations, who signed contracts with the UN, would be broadcasting the sessions from the headquarters of the Red Crescent Society in Tal Al Hawa neighborhood, in Gaza City. All TV stations can catch the broadcast from the above mentioned location.
The hearing sessions would be conducted during the following times and dates;
Sunday, June 28, from 8:30 – 13:00, and from 14:30 – 16:30 local Palestinian time.
Monday., June 29, 8:30 – 13:00, and from 14:30 – 17:00.
Audio production would be available in English and Arabic. Middle-Eastern and European stations can catch the broadcast at W2A in both English and Arabic.
Photos can only be taken by photo-journalists contracting with the UN, and would be published using FTP protocol during lunch break and after the sessions are concluded.
Free Gaza boat convoy delayed in Cyprus
by Saed Bannoura, IMEMC News, June 27, 2009
The Free Gaza Movement was ready to set sail yesterday from Larnaca Cyprus on their eighth mission, bringing Human rights workers, dignitaries and construction materials to help rebuild the devastated region of Gaza, but their ships were not given permission to leave due to concerns about their welfare and safety.
The group stated on their website that “Our friends in Cyprus tell us that the voyage to Gaza is too dangerous, and they are worried we will be harmed at sea.”
The most recent post on their web site states “Monday, maybe Tuesday, we have satisfied all requests. No reason to be held. Most passengers staying. Permission for 20. We will go.”
Two of their boats, the Free Gaza and the Spirit of Humanity are standing ready proudly displaying flags from sixteen nations who are determined not to forget the horror of an occupation by Israel that has lasted over forty years.
During the infamous attack on Gaza by Israel last December, another of their boats, the Dignity, was rammed three times in international waters while it was on its way to deliver emergency medical supplies to the people of Gaza.
The Free Gaza Movement is a human rights group who has sent as many as eight missions since last August to Gaza. Their boats represent the first international boats to land in port in over forty years of Israel’s occupation.
The Free Gaza Movement was ready to set sail yesterday from Larnaca Cyprus on their eighth mission, bringing Human rights workers, dignitaries and construction materials to help rebuild the devastated region of Gaza, but their ships were not given permission to leave due to concerns about their welfare and safety.
The group stated on their website that “Our friends in Cyprus tell us that the voyage to Gaza is too dangerous, and they are worried we will be harmed at sea.”
The most recent post on their web site states “Monday, maybe Tuesday, we have satisfied all requests. No reason to be held. Most passengers staying. Permission for 20. We will go.”
Two of their boats, the Free Gaza and the Spirit of Humanity are standing ready proudly displaying flags from sixteen nations who are determined not to forget the horror of an occupation by Israel that has lasted over forty years.
During the infamous attack on Gaza by Israel last December, another of their boats, the Dignity, was rammed three times in international waters while it was on its way to deliver emergency medical supplies to the people of Gaza.
The Free Gaza Movement is a human rights group who has sent as many as eight missions since last August to Gaza. Their boats represent the first international boats to land in port in over forty years of Israel’s occupation.
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