Information Cleansing, Canadian Style
by Bill Berkowitz
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 18, 2006
If you're a teacher, student, journalist or just a plain concerned citizen interested in finding well-researched documentation about climate change, you can no longer depend on the Canadian government to supply that information.
According to Canada's Liberal Party, since early July, the country's government -- under conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper -- has been systematically scrubbing its websites of information regarding global warming and the Kyoto Protocol treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
(As of Wednesday, Aug. 16, when you visit the government of Canada's Climate Change website, you find the following message: "The Government of Canada Climate Change site is currently unavailable.")
Despite its relatively short time in office, the Harper government has been repeatedly accused of following the lead of the George W. Bush administration in the United States.
Now, it appears it has taken up the Bush administration's habit of mixing science and politics by purposefully expunging information from federal websites dealing with climate change and its ramifications. In addition, in designing its new "Made in Canada" plan to deal with the environment and global warming -- a plan due to be unveiled in October -- government officials are working in secrecy and without significant participation from environmental organizations.
Harper's skepticism about global warming seems in line with the position of Pres. Bush, who has repeatedly claimed that the "jury is still out" on the issue. The prime minister has himself questioned the science of climate change, calling it a "controversial hypothesis."
His former environment critic, Bob Mills, has described the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to address climate change, which had been ratified by Canada's parliament during the previous government, "a great socialist plot."
According to a statement issued in late July by the Liberal Party, the Harper team "is engaging in revisionist science by systematically removing references to climate change from government websites."
"This is a government in denial about climate change," said Liberal Environment Critic Hon. John Godfrey. "They don't like the science, and now they want to censor it. This is Orwellian."
MP Mark Holland pointed out that the Harper "government is tied closely to leading climate change skeptics in the United States and the petroleum industry. This government has a track record of listening to people with dubious views on the environment and climate change. They pretend to be interested in a 'Made in Canada' approach, but this is code for doing nothing."
"The feds' own climate change site once offered a verbose, but realistic analysis of the problem [of global warming] and a high-minded, but unconvincing account of what the government was doing about it," wrote Richard Littlemore in a commentary posted in mid-July at DeSmogBlog.com.
"Never mind removing a reference to Kyoto; the words 'climate change' have been expunged from everything except the website title," maintained Littlemore, a journalist, speechwriter and senior counselor at James Hoggan & Associates, a Canadian public relations firm.
"The government's strategy of pretending to be concerned about the environment while both dismantling programs to address climate change and scrubbing government websites clean of any information proving that global warming exists has Frank Luntz written all over it," added Liberal Party MP Mark Holland.
Luntz, who met with Harper and his conservative colleagues earlier this year, is a high-profile political pollster and strategist, who has helped shape the U.S. Republican Party's political agenda and messaging for more than a decade. The New Yorker magazine's Hendrik Hertzberg recently described Luntz as the "Johnny Appleseed of such linguistic innovations as 'death tax' for estate tax and 'personal accounts' for Social Security privatization."
One section of an infamous 2002 Luntz-authored memorandum, instructing Republican congressional candidates, was titled "Winning the Global Warming Debate: An Overview." Luntz advised candidates to "continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."
He maintained that "The most important principle in any discussion of global warming is your commitment to sound science... The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science."
Ironically, while the Bush administration, and the Harper government, may still be sticking with this script, Luntz appears to have changed his mind on global warming. In a recent documentary first aired on the BBC, Luntz said that he "think[s] most people would conclude that there is global warming taking place, and that the behaviour of humans is affecting the climate."
When asked about the advice about climate change that he had been giving for years, Luntz said it was fair when he gave it. He added that if the Bush administration is still questioning the science, "That's up to the [them]. I'm not the administration. What they want to do is their business. And it's nothing to do with what I write. And it's nothing to do with what I believe."
The Liberal Party's press release also pointed to Harper's "close friendship" with former EnCana President and CEO Gwyn Morgan, "a leading climate change skeptic in Alberta, who Harper tried unsuccessfully to appoint to a position overseeing government patronage appointments."
"This is all about controlling information and not about controlling greenhouse gases," said Godfrey. "The government would be thrilled if the Canadian public simply forgot about global warming, and we're simply not going to allow that to happen."
Meanwhile, the Harper government has pledged to produce a comprehensive environmental initiative in October that will supposedly include programs dealing with curbing greenhouse emissions blamed for global warming. Still in its formative stages, government officials maintain that they have been seeking a broad range of views on the issue, but according to a recent report by the Chronicle Herald, "many environmental groups say they've been shut out."
"The reality is that the public has not been consulted at all," said Ann Coxworth of the Saskatchewan Environmental Society, one of the groups in the Climate Action Network, a coalition of environmental groups that has organized public forums and workshops in a number of Canadian cities.
Shortly after taking office, Harper put the kybosh on the Liberals' Project Green. The creation of the new environmental initiative appears to follow in the footsteps established by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney when he set about developing the Bush administration's energy plan. The Cheney Energy Task Force worked in secret and saw the Bush administration lean heavily on advice from utility companies, and the oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy industries, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The Harper project has thus far pretty much excluded environmental groups, and has been working "under tight secrecy," The Chronicle Herald reported.
"They're not giving us enough of what they intend to do for us to give them any significant advice on how to proceed," said John Bennett, executive director of the Climate Action Network. "We need to have a plan that all Canadians can work together on and you don't get a plan like that by going into a back room and then making an announcement six months later."
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange.com column Conservative Watch documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.
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Friday, August 18, 2006
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Beyond Chutzpah: Israel Hints at Canadian Military Aid Request
PEJ News - C. L. Cook - The Canwest News "Service" is reporting today, Israel's ambassador to Canada, Alan Baker "floated" the idea of Canadian naval vessels "patrolling" the now oil soaked coastal Mediterranean stretch between Lebanon and Syria. Baker's trial balloon, delivered to the press in Ottawa today, is just one facet of Israel's endgame in its "war" against Hezbollah, the attempt to draw international forces to clean up the mess they initiated in battered Lebanon.
www.PEJ.org
www.PEJ.org
Beyond Chutzpah: Israel Hints at Canadian Military Aid Request
C. L. Cook
PEJ News
August 16, 2006
It must seem a perfectly reasonable expectation, from the Israeli government's point of view; isn't that how things work in post-modern warfare? It worked in Yugoslavia, where "NATO" pulverized the population and civil infrastructure, then leaving the remnant Former Republic of Yugoslavia to be garrisoned by someone else, it's crippled economy gifted to off-shore corporate interests. It's what's happened in Afghanistan, and Iraq. So, why not Lebanon?
Canwest makes no mention in today's piece of Canadian civilians slaughtered by the Israeli Defence Force. Not a discouraging word is heard in Kelly Patrick's screed of the unarmed four U.N. peacekeepers deliberately murdered, one of them Canadian. But then, why should Patrick go out further on a limb than the Canadian government, by reminding Canwest's diminishing readership of unpleasant truth's concerning cap-in-hand Israel's authorship of the unfolding disaster over there? For their part, the government of Stephen Harper is staying mum, the pm's director of communications, Sandra Buckler coyly saying, "I don't wish to speculate on calls that have yet to take place."
Under Security Council Resolution SCR 1701, the UN calls for a 15,000 member bolstering of the current United Nations' Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), the same Israel recently targeted, to work in conjunction with the Lebanese Army to ensure Hezbollah does not threaten northern Israel. The UN also proposes the international force disarm Hezbollah and ensure no weapons come into the country. No demands of Israel are apparent, save they train their fire solely on the residents of Prison Camp Palestine, sparing the Lebanese the treatment so familiar there.
Ambassador Baker acknowledges, Canada is "pretty heavily engaged in Afghanistan," but says he still believes "Canada can do more now."
And, I suppose he's right. Now that Iraq is destroyed, and the murderous sanctions regime officially ended, those Canadian naval vessels that worked so diligently to enforce the starvation of the Iraq people can now be resourced to do similar duty in the Med. That is if they can muster the bodies.
According to Canada's military strong man and chief of defence staff, General Rick Hillier, "Whether we have the capability to contribute there would be entirely dependent on the kind of mission, the kind of mandate, and the kind of job that a force would have to do." I guess it "kind of" depends too on whether the Canadian people are prepared to foot the bill for yet another foreign occupation, and whether the Canadian Forces have the boots at command to handle three simultaneous occupations.
Hillier appears on another page, opposite the graveside photo of Corporal Sarah Keller. Keller's husband Bryce is, to use the pm's phraseology when referring to dead Canadians, "one of about 30 killed" so far in Afghanistan. No doubt dying "doing the job he loved." On this page, Hillier opines it will take "years and years" to rebuild that battered nation. These are years on top of the five years Canadian taxpayers have ponied up to piece together the remains of America's bloody bombing campaign and occupation there. How to do that with Canada's tiny military? Not to worry, Rick's boss Stephen "just call me Steve, Dubya" has the answer.
The Conservatives [sic] say they want to see thirteen thousand more boots filled to be shipped overseas. But, recruitment and retention is apparently a problem for the Forces here. The press coverage of one sombre ceremony after another probably isn't helping (one reason perhaps Sandra Buckler advised "Steve" not allow coverage of such dreary events). But Hillier is optimistic about new recruitment directives saying, "We've thrown, if you will, a transformational grenade in the middle of our recruiting process." Sounds great, Rick. Do go on!
Meanwhile in Sherwood Park, Alberta, widowed Corporal Sarah Keller is comforted by her family and friends, commiserating the loss of her husband, one of seven Canadian killed in Afghanistan in August alone. But, perhaps not only seven dead; another attack in Afghanistan wounded six more Canadian soldiers yesterday. There the Canadian "forward operating base," where Canadians have been mounting their search and destroy missions across Panjwaii district, came under mortar fire. And if Canwest is to be believed, there is more to come, as "Taliban" fighters are massing.
Expect this week to hear the official Israeli request for Canadian "aid." And expect too to hear your pm Harper accept the challenge to "keep Canada free, etc." But, this mission won't be free; it will cost Canadian prestige, Canadian tax dollars, and perhaps, as we've seen in Afghanistan and Haiti, Canadian blood as well.
Chris Cook is a contributing editor to PEJ News and hosts Gorilla Radio, a weekly public affairs program. You can check out the GR Blog here.
C. L. Cook
PEJ News
August 16, 2006
It must seem a perfectly reasonable expectation, from the Israeli government's point of view; isn't that how things work in post-modern warfare? It worked in Yugoslavia, where "NATO" pulverized the population and civil infrastructure, then leaving the remnant Former Republic of Yugoslavia to be garrisoned by someone else, it's crippled economy gifted to off-shore corporate interests. It's what's happened in Afghanistan, and Iraq. So, why not Lebanon?
Canwest makes no mention in today's piece of Canadian civilians slaughtered by the Israeli Defence Force. Not a discouraging word is heard in Kelly Patrick's screed of the unarmed four U.N. peacekeepers deliberately murdered, one of them Canadian. But then, why should Patrick go out further on a limb than the Canadian government, by reminding Canwest's diminishing readership of unpleasant truth's concerning cap-in-hand Israel's authorship of the unfolding disaster over there? For their part, the government of Stephen Harper is staying mum, the pm's director of communications, Sandra Buckler coyly saying, "I don't wish to speculate on calls that have yet to take place."
Under Security Council Resolution SCR 1701, the UN calls for a 15,000 member bolstering of the current United Nations' Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), the same Israel recently targeted, to work in conjunction with the Lebanese Army to ensure Hezbollah does not threaten northern Israel. The UN also proposes the international force disarm Hezbollah and ensure no weapons come into the country. No demands of Israel are apparent, save they train their fire solely on the residents of Prison Camp Palestine, sparing the Lebanese the treatment so familiar there.
Ambassador Baker acknowledges, Canada is "pretty heavily engaged in Afghanistan," but says he still believes "Canada can do more now."
And, I suppose he's right. Now that Iraq is destroyed, and the murderous sanctions regime officially ended, those Canadian naval vessels that worked so diligently to enforce the starvation of the Iraq people can now be resourced to do similar duty in the Med. That is if they can muster the bodies.
According to Canada's military strong man and chief of defence staff, General Rick Hillier, "Whether we have the capability to contribute there would be entirely dependent on the kind of mission, the kind of mandate, and the kind of job that a force would have to do." I guess it "kind of" depends too on whether the Canadian people are prepared to foot the bill for yet another foreign occupation, and whether the Canadian Forces have the boots at command to handle three simultaneous occupations.
Hillier appears on another page, opposite the graveside photo of Corporal Sarah Keller. Keller's husband Bryce is, to use the pm's phraseology when referring to dead Canadians, "one of about 30 killed" so far in Afghanistan. No doubt dying "doing the job he loved." On this page, Hillier opines it will take "years and years" to rebuild that battered nation. These are years on top of the five years Canadian taxpayers have ponied up to piece together the remains of America's bloody bombing campaign and occupation there. How to do that with Canada's tiny military? Not to worry, Rick's boss Stephen "just call me Steve, Dubya" has the answer.
The Conservatives [sic] say they want to see thirteen thousand more boots filled to be shipped overseas. But, recruitment and retention is apparently a problem for the Forces here. The press coverage of one sombre ceremony after another probably isn't helping (one reason perhaps Sandra Buckler advised "Steve" not allow coverage of such dreary events). But Hillier is optimistic about new recruitment directives saying, "We've thrown, if you will, a transformational grenade in the middle of our recruiting process." Sounds great, Rick. Do go on!
Meanwhile in Sherwood Park, Alberta, widowed Corporal Sarah Keller is comforted by her family and friends, commiserating the loss of her husband, one of seven Canadian killed in Afghanistan in August alone. But, perhaps not only seven dead; another attack in Afghanistan wounded six more Canadian soldiers yesterday. There the Canadian "forward operating base," where Canadians have been mounting their search and destroy missions across Panjwaii district, came under mortar fire. And if Canwest is to be believed, there is more to come, as "Taliban" fighters are massing.
Expect this week to hear the official Israeli request for Canadian "aid." And expect too to hear your pm Harper accept the challenge to "keep Canada free, etc." But, this mission won't be free; it will cost Canadian prestige, Canadian tax dollars, and perhaps, as we've seen in Afghanistan and Haiti, Canadian blood as well.
Chris Cook is a contributing editor to PEJ News and hosts Gorilla Radio, a weekly public affairs program. You can check out the GR Blog here.
Stay informed. Subscribe and get the best of PEJ News by email. Free.
Lebanon's Pawns Back on the Board: IDF Threatens Move
IDF: We'll disarm Hizbullah if UN can't
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gil Hoffman, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 16, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The IDF will have to resume operations in Lebanon if the expanded United Nations force being assembled does not fulfill its obligation to dismantle Hizbullah, an official in the Prime Minister's Office warned on Tuesday.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah reportedly reached a deal allowing Hizbullah to keep its weapons but refrain from exhibiting them in public. Israeli officials called the arrangement a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which passed over the weekend and was approved on Sunday by the cabinet.
"The resolution is clear that Hizbullah needs to be removed from the border area, embargoed and dismantled," the official said. "If the resolution is not implemented, we will have to take action to prevent the rearming of Hizbullah. I don't think backtracking will serve any useful purpose. There has to be pressure on Hizbullah to disarm or there will have to be another round."
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is expected to raise the issue when she meets in New York on Wednesday with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Annan angered Israeli officials when he told Channel 2 on Tuesday that "dismantling Hizbullah is not the direct mandate of the UN," which could only help Lebanon disarm the organization. Annan upset officials further when he said that deploying international forces in Lebanon would take "weeks or months," and not days as expected.
Israeli officials said the IDF would not complete its withdrawal from southern Lebanon until the international force was deployed - even if it took months - to prevent a vacuum in Lebanon that could endanger Israeli civilians. An official in the Prime Minister's Office accused Annan of having an anti-Israel agenda.
"He has been one-sided," the official said. "He tried to be even-handed in a situation that was clearly asymmetrical. When one side committed crimes against humanity and engaged in genocide and the other side defended itself, he cannot treat us in the same manner."
Annan rejected charges of bias, saying, "I have been very hard on Hizbullah and condemned Hizbullah for what it has done. I have condemned Israel for what I consider excessive use of force but it doesn't mean I am taking one side."
Livni will also meet with US diplomatic officials and Jewish leaders during her 24-hour visit. The goals of the trip include advancing Israel's interests in talks on implementing the cease-fire in Lebanon, expediting the deployment of an international force and bringing about the return of the kidnapped IDF soldiers.
Annan is set to make key decisions about the role of the multinational force. Livni had planned to visit New York over the weekend but her original trip was blocked by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Foreign Ministry Director-General Aharon Abramovich said implementation of the cease-fire was "good so far" and "going according to plan." He said Livni wanted to make sure that UNIFIL's effectiveness would be maximized.
According to Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev, the two main tasks of the expanded force would be enforcing a "Hizbullah-free zone" in south Lebanon and an international arms embargo on Hizbullah. He said the resolution detailed the placement of international forces at all crossing points into Lebanon, comprising those from Syria as well as airports and seaports.
"The resolution meets Israel's expectations," Regev said. "The focus now is on ensuring its full and complete implementation. Unfortunately, there have been too many UN resolutions on Lebanon that have gathered dust in the archives and have not changed anything. The challenge now is to bring about the expeditious implementation of 1701."
Under the UN resolution, 15,000 Lebanese troops, with the help of an expanded UNIFIL, would take over the area between the Litani River, 30 kilometers north of Israel, and the frontier to create a buffer zone free of Hizbullah gunmen.
"She will discuss [with Annan] the importance of having the international forces in Lebanon as expeditiously as possible," Regev said of Livni.
Israel wants a speedy deployment "firstly to allow the Israeli troops to pull out of south Lebanon and to ensure the creation of the Hizbullah-free zone in the south... and secondly to make sure that the international arms embargo on Hizbullah is implemented," he said.
"We have to have the resolution translated into reality," Regev said.
Forty-five countries have attended technical sessions for potential contributors to a beefed-up UNIFIL, and the United Nations is hopeful that the first announcements of new troop commitments will be made at a formal meeting expected to take place on Thursday, UN officials said.
France and the United States have sent military planners to meet with UN peacekeeping planners to determine how countries could participate in the proposed 15,000-strong UN force, said a UN official familiar with the process.
The doctrine of operations for the force is reportedly in draft form and will be shared with the potential troop contributors at Thursday's meeting, the UN official said.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that 28 countries had attended a technical meeting on Saturday and 17 countries had attended a similar meeting on Monday.
"We hope to have a more formal meeting with troop contributors on Thursday," he said.
The UN has not received any formal offers of troops for UNIFIL, although France, Italy, Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia have indicated they would make significant contributions. A dozen other countries have also expressed a willingness to help.
"We would like to get firm commitments of troops as soon as possible," Dujarric said.
France is expected to lead the expanded force, which currently has 2,000 troops and is commanded by French Maj.-Gen. Alain Pellegrini. But UN officials and diplomats said France had not made any announcement of how many troops it planned to send, and that this was holding up announcements of troop commitments from other countries.
"It's a chicken and egg situation, as it often is in our efforts to generate a force," Dujarric said. "We're dependent on the member states to come up with firm offers... We're in intensive discussions with them, and hopefully we'll flush out and get some firm commitments."
US President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are also making calls to drum up troops for the expanded UN force, US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton said.
A French colonel started working with UN military planners on Tuesday, and Bolton said the Pentagon was also sending a military planner. A French general is expected at UN headquarters on Wednesday to work as a liaison between the UN Peace-keeping Department and Paris, UN diplomats said.
AP contributed to this report.
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This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525882124&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
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Gil Hoffman, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 16, 2006
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The IDF will have to resume operations in Lebanon if the expanded United Nations force being assembled does not fulfill its obligation to dismantle Hizbullah, an official in the Prime Minister's Office warned on Tuesday.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah reportedly reached a deal allowing Hizbullah to keep its weapons but refrain from exhibiting them in public. Israeli officials called the arrangement a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which passed over the weekend and was approved on Sunday by the cabinet.
"The resolution is clear that Hizbullah needs to be removed from the border area, embargoed and dismantled," the official said. "If the resolution is not implemented, we will have to take action to prevent the rearming of Hizbullah. I don't think backtracking will serve any useful purpose. There has to be pressure on Hizbullah to disarm or there will have to be another round."
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is expected to raise the issue when she meets in New York on Wednesday with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Annan angered Israeli officials when he told Channel 2 on Tuesday that "dismantling Hizbullah is not the direct mandate of the UN," which could only help Lebanon disarm the organization. Annan upset officials further when he said that deploying international forces in Lebanon would take "weeks or months," and not days as expected.
Israeli officials said the IDF would not complete its withdrawal from southern Lebanon until the international force was deployed - even if it took months - to prevent a vacuum in Lebanon that could endanger Israeli civilians. An official in the Prime Minister's Office accused Annan of having an anti-Israel agenda.
"He has been one-sided," the official said. "He tried to be even-handed in a situation that was clearly asymmetrical. When one side committed crimes against humanity and engaged in genocide and the other side defended itself, he cannot treat us in the same manner."
Annan rejected charges of bias, saying, "I have been very hard on Hizbullah and condemned Hizbullah for what it has done. I have condemned Israel for what I consider excessive use of force but it doesn't mean I am taking one side."
Livni will also meet with US diplomatic officials and Jewish leaders during her 24-hour visit. The goals of the trip include advancing Israel's interests in talks on implementing the cease-fire in Lebanon, expediting the deployment of an international force and bringing about the return of the kidnapped IDF soldiers.
Annan is set to make key decisions about the role of the multinational force. Livni had planned to visit New York over the weekend but her original trip was blocked by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Foreign Ministry Director-General Aharon Abramovich said implementation of the cease-fire was "good so far" and "going according to plan." He said Livni wanted to make sure that UNIFIL's effectiveness would be maximized.
According to Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev, the two main tasks of the expanded force would be enforcing a "Hizbullah-free zone" in south Lebanon and an international arms embargo on Hizbullah. He said the resolution detailed the placement of international forces at all crossing points into Lebanon, comprising those from Syria as well as airports and seaports.
"The resolution meets Israel's expectations," Regev said. "The focus now is on ensuring its full and complete implementation. Unfortunately, there have been too many UN resolutions on Lebanon that have gathered dust in the archives and have not changed anything. The challenge now is to bring about the expeditious implementation of 1701."
Under the UN resolution, 15,000 Lebanese troops, with the help of an expanded UNIFIL, would take over the area between the Litani River, 30 kilometers north of Israel, and the frontier to create a buffer zone free of Hizbullah gunmen.
"She will discuss [with Annan] the importance of having the international forces in Lebanon as expeditiously as possible," Regev said of Livni.
Israel wants a speedy deployment "firstly to allow the Israeli troops to pull out of south Lebanon and to ensure the creation of the Hizbullah-free zone in the south... and secondly to make sure that the international arms embargo on Hizbullah is implemented," he said.
"We have to have the resolution translated into reality," Regev said.
Forty-five countries have attended technical sessions for potential contributors to a beefed-up UNIFIL, and the United Nations is hopeful that the first announcements of new troop commitments will be made at a formal meeting expected to take place on Thursday, UN officials said.
France and the United States have sent military planners to meet with UN peacekeeping planners to determine how countries could participate in the proposed 15,000-strong UN force, said a UN official familiar with the process.
The doctrine of operations for the force is reportedly in draft form and will be shared with the potential troop contributors at Thursday's meeting, the UN official said.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that 28 countries had attended a technical meeting on Saturday and 17 countries had attended a similar meeting on Monday.
"We hope to have a more formal meeting with troop contributors on Thursday," he said.
The UN has not received any formal offers of troops for UNIFIL, although France, Italy, Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia have indicated they would make significant contributions. A dozen other countries have also expressed a willingness to help.
"We would like to get firm commitments of troops as soon as possible," Dujarric said.
France is expected to lead the expanded force, which currently has 2,000 troops and is commanded by French Maj.-Gen. Alain Pellegrini. But UN officials and diplomats said France had not made any announcement of how many troops it planned to send, and that this was holding up announcements of troop commitments from other countries.
"It's a chicken and egg situation, as it often is in our efforts to generate a force," Dujarric said. "We're dependent on the member states to come up with firm offers... We're in intensive discussions with them, and hopefully we'll flush out and get some firm commitments."
US President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are also making calls to drum up troops for the expanded UN force, US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton said.
A French colonel started working with UN military planners on Tuesday, and Bolton said the Pentagon was also sending a military planner. A French general is expected at UN headquarters on Wednesday to work as a liaison between the UN Peace-keeping Department and Paris, UN diplomats said.
AP contributed to this report.
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This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525882124&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Lebanon's Pawns Back on the Board: IDF Threatens Move
IDF: We'll disarm Hizbullah if UN can't
The IDF will have to resume operations in Lebanon if the expanded United Nations force being assembled does not fulfill its obligation to dismantle Hizbullah, an official in the Prime Minister's Office warned on Tuesday.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora and Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah reportedly reached a deal allowing Hizbullah to keep its weapons but refrain from exhibiting them in public. Israeli officials called the arrangement a violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which passed over the weekend and was approved on Sunday by the cabinet.
"The resolution is clear that Hizbullah needs to be removed from the border area, embargoed and dismantled," the official said. "If the resolution is not implemented, we will have to take action to prevent the rearming of Hizbullah. I don't think backtracking will serve any useful purpose. There has to be pressure on Hizbullah to disarm or there will have to be another round."
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is expected to raise the issue when she meets in New York on Wednesday with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Annan angered Israeli officials when he told Channel 2 on Tuesday that "dismantling Hizbullah is not the direct mandate of the UN," which could only help Lebanon disarm the organization. Annan upset officials further when he said that deploying international forces in Lebanon would take "weeks or months," and not days as expected.
Israeli officials said the IDF would not complete its withdrawal from southern Lebanon until the international force was deployed - even if it took months - to prevent a vacuum in Lebanon that could endanger Israeli civilians. An official in the Prime Minister's Office accused Annan of having an anti-Israel agenda.
"He has been one-sided," the official said. "He tried to be even-handed in a situation that was clearly asymmetrical. When one side committed crimes against humanity and engaged in genocide and the other side defended itself, he cannot treat us in the same manner."
Annan rejected charges of bias, saying, "I have been very hard on Hizbullah and condemned Hizbullah for what it has done. I have condemned Israel for what I consider excessive use of force but it doesn't mean I am taking one side."
Livni will also meet with US diplomatic officials and Jewish leaders during her 24-hour visit. The goals of the trip include advancing Israel's interests in talks on implementing the cease-fire in Lebanon, expediting the deployment of an international force and bringing about the return of the kidnapped IDF soldiers.
Annan is set to make key decisions about the role of the multinational force. Livni had planned to visit New York over the weekend but her original trip was blocked by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Foreign Ministry Director-General Aharon Abramovich said implementation of the cease-fire was "good so far" and "going according to plan." He said Livni wanted to make sure that UNIFIL's effectiveness would be maximized.
According to Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev, the two main tasks of the expanded force would be enforcing a "Hizbullah-free zone" in south Lebanon and an international arms embargo on Hizbullah. He said the resolution detailed the placement of international forces at all crossing points into Lebanon, comprising those from Syria as well as airports and seaports.
"The resolution meets Israel's expectations," Regev said. "The focus now is on ensuring its full and complete implementation. Unfortunately, there have been too many UN resolutions on Lebanon that have gathered dust in the archives and have not changed anything. The challenge now is to bring about the expeditious implementation of 1701."
Under the UN resolution, 15,000 Lebanese troops, with the help of an expanded UNIFIL, would take over the area between the Litani River, 30 kilometers north of Israel, and the frontier to create a buffer zone free of Hizbullah gunmen.
"She will discuss [with Annan] the importance of having the international forces in Lebanon as expeditiously as possible," Regev said of Livni.
Israel wants a speedy deployment "firstly to allow the Israeli troops to pull out of south Lebanon and to ensure the creation of the Hizbullah-free zone in the south... and secondly to make sure that the international arms embargo on Hizbullah is implemented," he said.
"We have to have the resolution translated into reality," Regev said.
Forty-five countries have attended technical sessions for potential contributors to a beefed-up UNIFIL, and the United Nations is hopeful that the first announcements of new troop commitments will be made at a formal meeting expected to take place on Thursday, UN officials said.
France and the United States have sent military planners to meet with UN peacekeeping planners to determine how countries could participate in the proposed 15,000-strong UN force, said a UN official familiar with the process.
The doctrine of operations for the force is reportedly in draft form and will be shared with the potential troop contributors at Thursday's meeting, the UN official said.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters that 28 countries had attended a technical meeting on Saturday and 17 countries had attended a similar meeting on Monday.
"We hope to have a more formal meeting with troop contributors on Thursday," he said.
The UN has not received any formal offers of troops for UNIFIL, although France, Italy, Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia have indicated they would make significant contributions. A dozen other countries have also expressed a willingness to help.
"We would like to get firm commitments of troops as soon as possible," Dujarric said.
France is expected to lead the expanded force, which currently has 2,000 troops and is commanded by French Maj.-Gen. Alain Pellegrini. But UN officials and diplomats said France had not made any announcement of how many troops it planned to send, and that this was holding up announcements of troop commitments from other countries.
"It's a chicken and egg situation, as it often is in our efforts to generate a force," Dujarric said. "We're dependent on the member states to come up with firm offers... We're in intensive discussions with them, and hopefully we'll flush out and get some firm commitments."
US President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are also making calls to drum up troops for the expanded UN force, US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton said.
A French colonel started working with UN military planners on Tuesday, and Bolton said the Pentagon was also sending a military planner. A French general is expected at UN headquarters on Wednesday to work as a liaison between the UN Peace-keeping Department and Paris, UN diplomats said.
AP contributed to this report.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154525882124&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Sunday, August 13, 2006
"You Did It Too" - Israel's Kosovo Redux
PEJ News - C. L. Cook - So it's come back? Israel sniped this past week at the growing chorus coming out of civilized Europe against their murder spree in Lebanon, and continued practice of routine atrocity in Gaza and the West Bank, with a tart retort to the Germany's, France's, and lesser's, of their own complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo not so many years ago. The implication is simple enough to see, as is its logical presumption: "My evil is no greater than yours."
Well, then: Bombs away!
www.PEJ.org
Well, then: Bombs away!
www.PEJ.org
"You Did It Too"
Israel's Kosovo Redux
C. L. Cook
PEJ News
August 12, 2006
How fitting Israel should retaliate European criticism of its murderous rampage, currently burning nicely, with its most lethal, but rarely used, diplomatic Weapon of Sass Destruction: The Truth.
Europeans, at least those that rule over the major, and aspiring nations of Europe, are complicit in the abortion of justice and abrogation of the duty to Humanity during what was the NATO scourge of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. Fitting for the lessons learnt, and practiced with precedent-following impunity in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewheres.
Apt, when considering the use of cluster bombs, and depleted uranium munitions, drones, and satellites, missiles, and smart bombs, and on, and on, combined as it is with the systematic brutalisation of prisoners, and the deliberate targeting of essential civic services; services like: Water, and sewage; power, and communications; transit routes, and hospitals; houses, schools, fire and police stations; ambulances, fire trucks, and now "any vehicle" piloted by one so desperate to risk flight 'neath the IDF terror being wreaked about her, and her children's ears.
Yes, it sounds a lot like the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo.
Appropriate too, remembering the involvement of Osama, and his crew, in complicity with their then-C.I.A. paymasters, and the similar brand of carnage loosed largely against the citizenry. All done then, Israel implies now, with the official imprimatur of both NATO, and the UN.
Just so!
Amazingly, Israel - and, I beg pardon of those Arab and "fringe" Israeli's opposing the fanatical fascism currently made most starkly visible, hath spake two truths in a single day! But, the amazing parallels well exceed that, when looking a little more deeply into the goings-on, both today, and in those benighted days in the Balkans.
In those dark times, an entire people, identify racially, were driven from the land they'd lived upon for millennia; driven wholesale from their purchase. These same were strewn, the survivors of the onslaught, to the winds; scattered to find some new landing, the only certainty being they could not now, nor perhaps ever, go home.
They speaking for the so-called Israeli nation have put on notice all that would dare oppose naked, military conquest, and their neighbours too targeted should they interfere. In Lebanon, Robert Fisk reports today, leaflets falling the heavens, each one an identical indictment of international criminality; each an admission of the abandonment of the Geneva Conventions, the rules that have ostensibly guided the world in this unprecedented time.
Israel's blood-stained ministers are correct in their condemnation of NATO, its members, and the public that allowed the destruction of a nation, all conducted in the name of justice, and based on lies and blatant, criminal deception. They are correct too in wondering: "Why complain of we when doing your dirty business?"
And, that is the heart of it.
The dichotomy is an illusion: "Israel" and "America" are a single entity. This is no news to those living beneath the boot of the rising tide of oppression in those far-flung places. It seems only in the United States, where the results of a recent poll - if you believe in such things - claimed: More than half of "Americans" asked didn't know which year the rather well publicized 9/11 attacks occurred. This of course played in conjunction with the ceaseless 24/7 "news" cycle reportage of the next, newest "terrorist plot;" a convenient distraction from military reversals in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the continuing hammering of the populace in Occupied Palestine.
What differs, during the most recent outrages against humaneness is the Israeli State's official, literal declaration of war against a civil population has not been seen since the Nazi occupation of Greece. Collective Punishment of civilians is clearly indicated upon the thousands of leaflets dropped before the bombs in Lebanon; as the most knowing English-language reporter from the scene, Robert Fisk reports.
These are clearly open declarations, on the part of the current Israeli leadership, of defiance to any and all conventions yet constructed in hopes of making of this world a more equitable place. And, the lack of effective reaction to these obvious transgressions on the part of the "world" community are a Damnation of collusion in ethnic cleansing; a cleansing some are already calling "Holocaust."
Chris Cook is a contributing editor to PEJ News, and host of Gorilla Radio, a weekly exploration of the muck and mire comprising what is today, laughingly referred to as civilization. You can check the GR Blog here.
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WATCHING LEBANON
WATCHING LEBANON
SEYMOUR M. HERSH
The New Yorker
Washington’s interests in Israel’s war. Issue of 2006-08-21
Posted 2006-08-14
SEYMOUR M. HERSH
The New Yorker
Washington’s interests in Israel’s war. Issue of 2006-08-21
Posted 2006-08-14
In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”
The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.
Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.”
Hezbollah is seen by Israelis as a profound threat—a terrorist organization, operating on their border, with a military arsenal that, with help from Iran and Syria, has grown stronger since the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended, in 2000. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said he does not believe that Israel is a “legal state.” Israeli intelligence estimated at the outset of the air war that Hezbollah had roughly five hundred medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and a few dozen long-range Zelzal rockets; the Zelzals, with a range of about two hundred kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv. (One rocket hit Haifa the day after the kidnappings.) It also has more than twelve thousand shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three thousand of these have been fired at Israel.
According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings. “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it.”
The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on, “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.”
Administration officials denied that they knew of Israel’s plan for the air war. The White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions. In response to a separate request, a National Security Council spokesman said, “Prior to Hezbollah’s attack on Israel, the Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning to attack. Even after the July 12th attack, we did not know what the Israeli plans were.” A Pentagon spokesman said, “The United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program,” and denied the story, as did a State Department spokesman.
The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and enjoyed close military coöperation for decades, but early this spring, according to a former senior intelligence official, high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.
“The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.
“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”
A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.” He added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.” (As this article went to press, the United Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear if it would change the situation on the ground.)
According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term—and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah “may be the A team of terrorists”—Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. “If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Forces—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million,” Armitage said. “The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.”
Several current and former officials involved in the Middle East told me that Israel viewed the soldiers’ kidnapping as the opportune moment to begin its planned military campaign against Hezbollah. “Hezbollah, like clockwork, was instigating something small every month or two,” the U.S. government consultant with ties to Israel said. Two weeks earlier, in late June, members of Hamas, the Palestinian group, had tunnelled under the barrier separating southern Gaza from Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. Hamas also had lobbed a series of rockets at Israeli towns near the border with Gaza. In response, Israel had initiated an extensive bombing campaign and reoccupied parts of Gaza.
The Pentagon consultant noted that there had also been cross-border incidents involving Israel and Hezbollah, in both directions, for some time. “They’ve been sniping at each other,” he said. “Either side could have pointed to some incident and said ‘We have to go to war with these guys’—because they were already at war.”
David Siegel, the spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said that the Israeli Air Force had not been seeking a reason to attack Hezbollah. “We did not plan the campaign. That decision was forced on us.” There were ongoing alerts that Hezbollah “was pressing to go on the attack,” Siegel said. “Hezbollah attacks every two or three months,” but the kidnapping of the soldiers raised the stakes.
In interviews, several Israeli academics, journalists, and retired military and intelligence officers all made one point: they believed that the Israeli leadership, and not Washington, had decided that it would go to war with Hezbollah. Opinion polls showed that a broad spectrum of Israelis supported that choice. “The neocons in Washington may be happy, but Israel did not need to be pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of Hezbollah,” Yossi Melman, a journalist for the newspaper Ha’aretz, who has written several books about the Israeli intelligence community, said. “By provoking Israel, Hezbollah provided that opportunity.”
“We were facing a dilemma,” an Israeli official said. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “had to decide whether to go for a local response, which we always do, or for a comprehensive response—to really take on Hezbollah once and for all.” Olmert made his decision, the official said, only after a series of Israeli rescue efforts failed.
The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me, however, that, from Israel’s perspective, the decision to take strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier, after the Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now living in Damascus.
One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political and military leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone. “Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code,” the consultant said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was “ ‘Let’s go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.’ ” The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be “a full-scale response.” In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 “picked up signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm up’ the north.” In one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming to be weak,” in comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said “he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in the past.”
Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.” The consultant added, “Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” After that, “persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,” the consultant said.
The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. The airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to Hezbollah; the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the transport of weapons.)
The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.” (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former officials. They argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.)
Uzi Arad, who served for more than two decades in the Mossad, told me that to the best of his knowledge the contacts between the Israeli and U.S. governments were routine, and that, “in all my meetings and conversations with government officials, never once did I hear anyone refer to prior coördination with the United States.” He was troubled by one issue—the speed with which the Olmert government went to war. “For the life of me, I’ve never seen a decision to go to war taken so speedily,” he said. “We usually go through long analyses.”
The key military planner was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the I.D.F. chief of staff, who, during a career in the Israeli Air Force, worked on contingency planning for an air war with Iran. Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and Peretz, a former labor leader, could not match his experience and expertise.
In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by the Middle East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. The NATO forces commanded by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian forces to withdraw from Kosovo. “Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model,” the government consultant said. “The Israelis told Condi Rice, ‘You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that—thirty-five days.’ ”
There are, of course, vast differences between Lebanon and Kosovo. Clark, who retired from the military in 2000 and unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for the Presidency in 2004, took issue with the analogy: “If it’s true that the Israeli campaign is based on the American approach in Kosovo, then it missed the point. Ours was to use force to obtain a diplomatic objective—it was not about killing people.” Clark noted in a 2001 book, “Waging Modern War,” that it was the threat of a possible ground invasion as well as the bombing that forced the Serbs to end the war. He told me, “In my experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the will and capability to finish the job on the ground.”
Kosovo has been cited publicly by Israeli officials and journalists since the war began. On August 6th, Prime Minister Olmert, responding to European condemnation of the deaths of Lebanese civilians, said, “Where do they get the right to preach to Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer before that from a single rocket. I’m not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo. But please: don’t preach to us about the treatment of civilians.” (Human Rights Watch estimated the number of civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five thousand.)
Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”
Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”
The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”
The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition—including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney’s office and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private talks, that those nations would moderate their public criticism of Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war. Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to intervene immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported that Washington had hoped to enlist moderate Arab states “in an effort to pressure Syria and Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the Saudi move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative.”
The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”
Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”
In the White House, especially in the Vice-President’s office, many officials believe that the military campaign against Hezbollah is working and should be carried forward. At the same time, the government consultant said, some policymakers in the Administration have concluded that the cost of the bombing to Lebanese society is too high. “They are telling Israel that it’s time to wind down the attacks on infrastructure.”
Similar divisions are emerging in Israel. David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that his country’s leadership believed, as of early August, that the air war had been successful, and had destroyed more than seventy per cent of Hezbollah’s medium- and long-range-missile launching capacity. “The problem is short-range missiles, without launchers, that can be shot from civilian areas and homes,” Siegel told me. “The only way to resolve this is ground operations—which is why Israel would be forced to expand ground operations if the latest round of diplomacy doesn’t work.” Last week, however, there was evidence that the Israeli government was troubled by the progress of the war. In an unusual move, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, Halutz’s deputy, was put in charge of the operation, supplanting Major General Udi Adam. The worry in Israel is that Nasrallah might escalate the crisis by firing missiles at Tel Aviv. “There is a big debate over how much damage Israel should inflict to prevent it,” the consultant said. “If Nasrallah hits Tel Aviv, what should Israel do? Its goal is to deter more attacks by telling Nasrallah that it will destroy his country if he doesn’t stop, and to remind the Arab world that Israel can set it back twenty years. We’re no longer playing by the same rules.”
A European intelligence officer told me, “The Israelis have been caught in a psychological trap. In earlier years, they had the belief that they could solve their problems with toughness. But now, with Islamic martyrdom, things have changed, and they need different answers. How do you scare people who love martyrdom?” The problem with trying to eliminate Hezbollah, the intelligence officer said, is the group’s ties to the Shiite population in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s southern suburbs, where it operates schools, hospitals, a radio station, and various charities.
A high-level American military planner told me, “We have a lot of vulnerability in the region, and we’ve talked about some of the effects of an Iranian or Hezbollah attack on the Saudi regime and on the oil infrastructure.” There is special concern inside the Pentagon, he added, about the oil-producing nations north of the Strait of Hormuz. “We have to anticipate the unintended consequences,” he told me. “Will we be able to absorb a barrel of oil at one hundred dollars? There is this almost comical thinking that you can do it all from the air, even when you’re up against an irregular enemy with a dug-in capability. You’re not going to be successful unless you have a ground presence, but the political leadership never considers the worst case. These guys only want to hear the best case.”
There is evidence that the Iranians were expecting the war against Hezbollah. Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite Muslims and Iran, who is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, said, “Every negative American move against Hezbollah was seen by Iran as part of a larger campaign against it. And Iran began to prepare for the showdown by supplying more sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah—anti-ship and anti-tank missiles—and training its fighters in their use. And now Hezbollah is testing Iran’s new weapons. Iran sees the Bush Administration as trying to marginalize its regional role, so it fomented trouble.”
Nasr, an Iranian-American who recently published a study of the Sunni-Shiite divide, entitled “The Shia Revival,” also said that the Iranian leadership believes that Washington’s ultimate political goal is to get some international force to act as a buffer—to physically separate Syria and Lebanon in an effort to isolate and disarm Hezbollah, whose main supply route is through Syria. “Military action cannot bring about the desired political result,” Nasr said. The popularity of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a virulent critic of Israel, is greatest in his own country. If the U.S. were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Nasr said, “you may end up turning Ahmadinejad into another Nasrallah—the rock star of the Arab street.”
Donald Rumsfeld, who is one of the Bush Administration’s most outspoken, and powerful, officials, has said very little publicly about the crisis in Lebanon. His relative quiet, compared to his aggressive visibility in the run-up to the Iraq war, has prompted a debate in Washington about where he stands on the issue.
Some current and former intelligence officials who were interviewed for this article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with Bush and Cheney about the American role in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said that “there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded in his approach to the Israeli war.” He added, “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.”
A Western diplomat said that he understood that Rumsfeld did not know all the intricacies of the war plan. “He is angry and worried about his troops” in Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in the White House during the last year of the war in Vietnam, from which American troops withdrew in 1975, “and he did not want to see something like this having an impact in Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s concern, the diplomat added, was that an expansion of the war into Iran could put the American troops in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by pro-Iranian Shiite militias.
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on August 3rd, Rumsfeld was less than enthusiastic about the war’s implications for the American troops in Iraq. Asked whether the Administration was mindful of the war’s impact on Iraq, he testified that, in his meetings with Bush and Condoleezza Rice, “there is a sensitivity to the desire to not have our country or our interests or our forces put at greater risk as a result of what’s taking place between Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety of risks that we face in that region, and it’s a difficult and delicate situation.”
The Pentagon consultant dismissed talk of a split at the top of the Administration, however, and said simply, “Rummy is on the team. He’d love to see Hezbollah degraded, but he also is a voice for less bombing and more innovative Israeli ground operations.” The former senior intelligence official similarly depicted Rumsfeld as being “delighted that Israel is our stalking horse.”
There are also questions about the status of Condoleezza Rice. Her initial support for the Israeli air war against Hezbollah has reportedly been tempered by dismay at the effects of the attacks on Lebanon. The Pentagon consultant said that in early August she began privately “agitating” inside the Administration for permission to begin direct diplomatic talks with Syria—so far, without much success. Last week, the Times reported that Rice had directed an Embassy official in Damascus to meet with the Syrian foreign minister, though the meeting apparently yielded no results. The Times also reported that Rice viewed herself as “trying to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending parties” within the Administration. The article pointed to a divide between career diplomats in the State Department and “conservatives in the government,” including Cheney and Abrams, “who were pushing for strong American support for Israel.”
The Western diplomat told me his embassy believes that Abrams has emerged as a key policymaker on Iran, and on the current Hezbollah-Israeli crisis, and that Rice’s role has been relatively diminished. Rice did not want to make her most recent diplomatic trip to the Middle East, the diplomat said. “She only wanted to go if she thought there was a real chance to get a ceasefire.”
Bush’s strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but many in Blair’s own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat said, believe that he has “gone out on a particular limb on this”—especially by accepting Bush’s refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “Blair stands alone on this,” the former diplomat said. “He knows he’s a lame duck who’s on the way out, but he buys it”—the Bush policy. “He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington.” The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, “when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.”
Even those who continue to support Israel’s war against Hezbollah agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals—to rally the Lebanese against Hezbollah. “Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. “The warfare of today is not mass on mass,” he said. “You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.” 
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Iraq's Shia in 'million man march'
Thursday 03 August 2006, 16:45 Makka Time, 13:45 GMT
Al-Sadr's call is being heeded
Related:
Saudi Shias in pro-Hezbollah march
Iraq Shia in show of force
Shias from southern and central Iraq have begun travelling to Baghdad in answer to Muqtada al-Sadr's call for a "million man march" in support of Lebanon's Hezbollah.
Waving Iraqi flags and chanting "Death to America! Death to Israel", the demonstrators mounted convoys of buses and headed for the capital on Thursday, some of them wearing white shrouds symbolising their readiness to accept martyrdom.
The demonstration is to be held following Friday prayers in the teeming Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, home to some two million people, and comes at a tense time for the capital.
Sahib al-Ameri, general director of the Foundation for God's Martyrs, part of Sadr's movement said: "Thousands of Najaf people have set off for Baghdad as a response to Moqtada al-Sadr's invitation to take part."
Anger over Israeli attacks on Lebanon - which target Hezbollah but have caused widespread civilian casualties - has raised passions in Iraq, where Shia militias have an uneasy relationship with the US-backed government.
US forces have visibly tightened security around Sadr City, a working class Shia district where Sadr's supporters are openly armed.
"Fifteen-hundred of Sadr's followers from Basra have arrived to take part in the demonstration that had been called in Baghdad," said Sadr spokesman Akil al-Bahadli.
Blast kills 9
Meanwhile, a roadside blast has killed at least nine people in al-Amin, an eastern district of Baghdad, a police source says.
Violence in Baghdad is claiming
100 lives a day
The powerful blast, which also left 14 wounded, hit Shorjah market in an area selling electrical appliances, sending a dirty plume of yellow dust up over the city skyline.
The attack near Rusafi Square in the shopping area of Rashid Street apparently targeted vendors and commercial stalls, said police Lt Ahmed Mohammed Ali.
He said the bomb was hidden in a parked motorcycle.
Another police source said casualties appeared to be civilians, rather than members of the security forces.
The attack occurred as Taro Aso, the Japanese foreign minister, was visiting Baghdad.
Violence in Iraq's capital and other restive areas is claiming around 100 lives every day.
Thursday's attack followed a bomb blast in Baghdad on Wednesday evening next to a soccer pitch which killed 12 and wounded 13, most of whom were players and spectators.
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Dumping Musharraf
Is Pakistan Expendable?
Dumping Musharraf
By CONN HALLINAN
http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan07082006.html
Weekend Edition
Weekend Edition
July 8 / 9, 2006
There is a whiff of "regime change" in the air these days, but not where you might expect it. Not in Iraq, where the conservative U.S.-backed Shiites are already in power. Not in Iran, where White House threats have served to unite, rather than divide, that country. But in Pakistan, where President Pervez Musharraf has recently fallen out of U.S. favor.
Consider the following developments.
The Bush administration's "man in Kabul," Afghan President Hamid Karzai, recently fingered Pakistan as the source of the current fighting in the southern part of his country. "The world should go where terrorism is nourished, where it is provided money and ideology," he told a Kabul press conference this past June. "The war in Afghanistan should not be limited to Afghanistan."
Chris Patten, former European Union commissioner for external affairs, echoed this theme in a mid-May commentary in the Wall Street Journal. "The problem in Afghanistan," wrote Patten, "is Islamabad."
When President Bush visited Pakistan in March, he lectured President Musharraf about the need to be more aggressive in the "war on terrorism," although Pakistan has lost more soldiers fighting the Taliban in its northwestern tribal areas than the entire NATO coalition has lost in Afghanistan. And Bush refused to discuss the issue of Kashmir, the major flashpoint in Pakistan-India relations that has brought the two nuclear-armed powers to the brink of war on several occasions.
Indeed, when Musharraf asked for the same nuclear agreement that Washington had just handed New Delhi, Bush openly insulted his Islamabad hosts. With the Pakistani president standing stiffly beside him, Bush told the press, "I explained that Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and histories."
The nuclear deal-which was favorably voted out of House and Senate committees-would let India bypass Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty sanctions slapped on it for secretly developing atomic weapons. The Indians could freely buy uranium for their civilian reactors and in turn divert their meager domestic uranium supplies into constructing more nuclear weapons.
The Bush Administration also cut $350 million in civilian and military aid to Pakistan because of a " failure" to improve democracy and human rights.
And according to Syed Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan bureau chief for the Asia Times, " Western intelligence" has helped funnel money through Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and London to insurgents in Pakistan's Baluchistan Province.
One can hardly blame Pakistan for feeling as though they are in the U.S. crosshairs. But why the sudden thumb's down from Washington? Musharraf has basically done everything the White House wanted him to do, including breaking with the Taliban and sending 90,000 troops to seal the border with Afghanistan.
The answer is not that Pakistan has fallen out of favor, but that it is a pawn that has outlived its usefulness in a global chess match aimed at China.
Chess with China
In 1992 the George H.W. Bush administration drew up a Defense Planning Guidance document that laid out a blueprint for a post-Cold War world. "The United States will attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the United States," the document read, continuing, "Of the major and emerging powers, China has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States."
Jump ahead to the year 2000 and a Foreign Affairs article by soon-to-be national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice: "China is not a 'status quo' power, but one that would like to alter Asia's balance of power in its own favor The United States must deepen its cooperation with Japan and South Korea and maintain its commitment to a robust military presence in the region," she wrote, adding that the United States had to "pay close attention to India's role in the regional balance" to recruit the latter into an anti-China alliance.
While September 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq derailed this grand scheme, recent developments suggest it is back on track, with strong support from the influential American Enterprise Institute, the Project for a New American Century, and wealthy foundations like Scaife, Olin, and Carthage.
The anti-China alliance is already well underway.
Japan and Australia have agreed to field U.S.-supplied anti-ballistic missiles, and the administration is wooing India to do the same. While the rationale for the ABMs is North Korea, the real target is China's twenty intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Japan-which has one of the largest navies in the world-is stepping up its military coordination with the United States and has agreed to support the United States in case it intervenes in a war between China and Taiwan.
In the meantime, the United States is pouring men and materials into Asia and beefing up bases in Japan and Guam. It is also conducting war games with India, and jointly patrolling the Malacca Straits with the Indian Navy.
There is a certain schizophrenia in U.S. policy toward China, because the United States needs China to ramrod the Six Party Talks with North Korea and would like China to join Washington's full court press on Iran. So far, however, China has refused to go along with economic sanctions against either Pyongyang or Tehran, a stance that has chilled relations with the Bush administration even further.
These counter-trends, however, are more than offset by Washington's continuing efforts to build bases in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, plus recent attacks by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on China's military (using some of the same language as in the 1992 document). In short, the Defense Guidance Plan appears to be alive and well.
But while chess is a supremely logical game, diplomacy is considerably messier, and the grand scheme to corner the dragon is stirring up some dangerous regional furies.
Japan Rising?
To get Japan on board the anti-China coalition, Washington has encouraged Tokyo to adopt a more muscular foreign policy. As a result, Japan has sent troops to Iraq and dumped Article Nine of its constitution renouncing war as a "sovereign right of the nation."
When he was secretary of state, Colin Powell told the Financial Times, "If Japan is going to play a full role on the world's stage, Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution will have to be examined."
Japanese right-wingers, with the support of over 100 members of the Diet, as well as powerful industrial organizations like Canon and Mitsubishi, are pushing textbooks that rewrite the history of World War II and downplay Japanese atrocities. But this resurgent Japanese nationalism has angered and frightened nations in the region, many of which have vivid memories of World War II.
Goading the dragon has become almost a sport in Japan. The government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi recently took control of a lighthouse first established by right-wing nationalists on Diaoyu Island, an action China called a "provocation against, and an intrusion into territorial sovereignty." Japan and China have also clashed over the Chunxiao offshore oil field. A Japanese official told the Financial Times that Tokyo was pursuing "proportional escalation" over the fields.
South Korea, which suffered through more than three decades of brutal Japanese occupation, is barely on speaking terms with Tokyo, and has come close to blows with Japan over the Tokdo Islands claimed by both nations.
Washington's support for Japan's growing militarism has also fueled anti-Americanism in South Korea and a growing movement to close U.S. bases in that country. This is hardly the atmosphere for a grand alliance.
From Kashmir to Baluchistan
The law of unintended consequences may be playing itself out with Indian and Pakistan as well. India's central strategy has always been to insure control of Kashmir and to weaken the Pakistani Army, two goals that the Bush administration seems to share.
According to the Asia Times, a CIA official told the Indians that weakening the Pakistani army was central to the U.S. goal of bringing "democracy" to Pakistan, though the lack of it never bothered Washington in the past. The Times also reports that the CIA has been meeting with exiled former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who recently formed the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy.
General Hamid Gul, former head of the Pakistani InterService Intelligence organization, told the PakTribune that he thought the United States was aiming to replace Musharraf.
If the United States sides with India on Kashmir, Pakistan could be looking at a strategic defeat in a long-running dispute that would not only weaken the army but possibly destabilize the entire country.
So could a stalemate in Pakistan's counterinsurgency war in Baluchistan.
The Baluchistan conflict dates back to the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. The Baluchs, who are ethnically distinct from the Punjabis who dominate Pakistan, were forced to become part of the new state. It is Pakistan's poorest province and at the same time home to the country's largest oil and gas deposits, two realities that help fuel the insurgency.
India has been sharply critical of Pakistani actions in Baluchistan, although the Indians are highly aggressive with their own separatist movements.
In a March meeting with U.S. Central Command chief General John Abizaid, Musharraf accused India of aiding the insurgents financially, a charge New Delhi denies.
Is U.S. support for the nuclear deal and the Kashmir policy a quid pro quo for India joining the anti-China alliance? It is hard to fathom what else might explain Washington's relentless criticism of Pakistan for not doing enough in the "war on terrorism," or the recent cut in aid.
Pakistan's response has been to raise defense spending, step up its production of nuclear weapons, and test a new generation of long-range missiles. But there is a significant section of the Indian elite that doesn't particularly fear a nuclear war between the two nations. "India can survive a nuclear attack," says former Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes, "but Pakistan cannot."
Washington's obsession with China is unleashing some particularly malevolent forms of nationalism that threaten to destabilize a broad swath of the region from South Asia to the north Pacific. In this chess match, India, with its enormous population and economic potential, is a major piece on the board. Pakistan, with a sixth the population and a tenth the economic potential, is a pawn.
An expendable one it would appear.
Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus and a lecturer in journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Keeping Up with the Carnage: Israel's Many Slaughters
Israelis Slaughter U.N. Observers
Tuesday July 25th 2006, 5:31 pm
After Israel bombed a U.N. shelter near Khiam, Lebanon, killing four observers, Daniel Ayalon, Israeli ambassador to the United States, had the audacity to tell Wolf Blizter of CNN he expects an apology from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan for complaining.
Of course, this is nothing new, as the Israelis routinely attack the United Nations and little if anything comes of such murderous crimes against humanity.
For instance, on April 18, 1996, in the Lebanese village of Qana, during Israel’s “Operation Grapes of Wrath” invasion, the IOF killed 106 Lebanese refugees seeking protection at a Fijian UNIFIL compound. As usual, the Israeli government expressed regret, but words are cheap, especially considering the fact the IOF consistently issues such meaningless apologies after slaughtering innocents. The Zionist state added insult to injury, or rather mass murder, by not paying compensation to the victims.
A few days earlier, on April 12, an IOF attack helicopter fired a missile at an ambulance in the village of al-Mansuri, killing two women and four young girls. On the same day the Israelis killed refugees at Qana, a “helicopter gunship attack on a house in the village of Upper Nabatiyeh on April 18, 1996 … killed nine civilians, including a newborn baby, six children under thirteen years old, and their mother,” according to Human Rights Watch.
No word if Daniel Ayalon or his counterpart at the time expected an apology from the families of the victims.
Israel’s IOF has engaged in numerous massacres in Bint Jbeil, Khan Yunis, Maaraka, Jibaa, Qibya, Saida, Trqumia, Homeen al-Tahta, Seer al-Garbiah, Yohmor, Sabra and Shatila, on and on, ad nauseam, killing thousands of Arabs, massacres so common we rarely hear about them here in America, what with our “fair and balanced” corporate media.
The numbers of United Nations personnel killed by the IOF pales in comparison. However, on 3 December 2002, sixty-four U.N. workers issued a petition demanding the Israeli military stop “beating and killing” them, according to the Memory Hole, an appropriate venue, as the corporate media ignored the petition.
“You might think that such a strongly-worded statement sent by more than five-dozen United Nations workers to the ‘Middle East’s only democracy’ would be highly newsworthy. Apparently not. Among the very few media outlets to cover it were Reuters, the BBC, the Independent (London), Ha’aretz (Jerusalem), and the Jerusalem Post. Notice that all these sources are British or Israeli. Not one American media outlet has covered the story.”
“[F]or two years United Nations staff have been subject to escalating harassment and violence by Israel’s military, so that the protection supposed to be afforded by the blue letters of the UN is being steadily eroded,” the petition explains. “UN staff—international and Palestinian alike—have been verbally abused, stripped, beaten, shot at, and killed by Israeli soldiers.”
Tragically Iain Hook was not the first person working with the UN to die at the hands of the IDF this year. In March, Kamal Hamdan was shot and killed while travelling in a clearly marked UNRWA ambulance in the West Bank. In April, Husni Amer died in Israeli military custody in Jenin after, according to witnesses, receiving a brutal beating by the soldiers at the time of his arrest. From its silence, we presume the Israeli authorities have ignored UN requests for an investigation and report of these two incidents, and have not seen fit to take any disciplinary action against the soldiers involved. To us, this seems to confirm a pattern of utter contempt on the part of the Israeli army for the lost lives of these men, the safety of UN staff or the minimum standards imposed by international law which should protect UN staff and other humanitarian workers.
Again, no word if Daniel Ayalon demanded an apology.
Addendum
It appears the IOF targeted UNIFIL for a very specific reason, namely to send the message the Zionist state doesn’t need no stinkin’ peacekeepers, especially peacekeepers who mostly evacuate citizens from Israel’s killing fields. More specifically, it was a message sent in regard to the prospect of yet another multinational peacekeeping force sent to Lebanon. As Bush, or rather the neocons, tell us, Israel must be left alone to go after Hezbollah, that is to say Lebanese resisting invasion and occupation.
It didn’t take long for the corporate media to shellack the murder of the UN observers with sickening excuses. In addition to excuses, the Chicago Tribune felt compelled, as a standard lickspittle for Israeli crimes, to powder puff the invasion:
“The experience for the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, has not been a good one. In place since 1978 and comprising soldiers from France, Poland, India, Italy and a few other countries, UNIFIL was unable to stop the July 12 Hezbollah border raid that resulted in the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. It was also unable to block retaliating Israeli troops from entering Lebanon a few days later.”
As we know, the Israeli soldiers were captured in Lebanon, as reported by Forbes, the Associated Press, ABC News, the Boston Herald, the Hindustan Times, the Bahrain News Agency, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, AFP, Asia Times, and others. For more on the ever-morphing story, see this blog entry.
But then, naturally, the Chicago Tribune would be bucking the pro-Israel corporate media stampede if it told the truth. Imagine Winston Smith rewriting historical documents so that they match the current party line, which changes on a daily basis, over at the Ministry of Truth, and you’ll get a good idea of what’s going on here.
One wonders what the response would be if the Palestinians and Lebanese “retaliated” against Israel for kidnapping their citizens, numbering in the hundreds.
Finally, according to the Washington Post, the IOF continued firing on the targeted shelter, even as rescue workers attempted to clear the rubble. But then this should not be surprising, as the surviving members of the USS Liberty, the intelligence ship attacked by Israel on June 8, 1967, will likely tell you. In that instance, our “friends” attacked lifeboats with torpedoes and machine gun fire, a war crime.
It seems the Israelis are mighty fond of war crimes.
Hezbollah and the Cluelessness of Margaret Beckett
Tuesday July 25th 2006, 2:56 pm
According to Margaret Beckett, foreign secretary, officially known as Rt Hon Margaret Beckett MP, hailing from one of the four Great Offices of State on the other side of the pond, Syria and Iran are to be blamed for supporting Hezbollah and thus responsible for the terrible rain of cluster bombs, bunker busters, and white phosphorous murdering the innocent people of Lebanon, slaughtered in their high rises and minivans.
“Margaret Beckett said the two states’ support for Hezbollah was ‘encouraging extremism’ and putting peace in the Middle East ‘further out of reach,’” reports the BBC. “She acknowledged events there were ‘a tragedy’ for ordinary Lebanese people but said Hezbollah was ‘deliberately siting missiles in the heart of civilian populations…. It is bound to cause difficulty when those missiles are continually raining down on Israel and clearly there is a pressure on Israel to attempt to take out those missile sites.’”
Here in the United States and the United Kingdom our rulers, almost to the man and woman, are making excuses for the Israeli Wehrmacht as it decimates the people of Lebanon, a war crime of immense dimension. Almost everything the corporate media tells us about the “conflict” (massacre) is either an outright lie or obfuscation.
Hezbollah is portrayed as a mindless terrorist group, driven to madness by an irrational hatred for Jews, when in fact Hezbollah was forged out of resistance to Israeli aggression and continues to resist as the Israelis once again invade poor Lebanon.
On numerous occasions, prior to the latest outrage, Israel had violated Lebanese sovereignty, indiscriminately killed Lebanese, shelled Lebanese villages, kidnapped Lebanese as “bargaining chips,” and continues to hold Lebanese land, stolen the during the “Six Day War” of 1967.
Hezbollah was formed after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 as it conspired with the fascist Phalange to kill Palestinians and Shi’a Muslims.
Hezbollah, unlike Margaret Beckett and the criminally apologetic corporate media, understands well the plan to seize Lebanon, formulated many decades ago.
Hezbollah realizes there is no compromise with the Jabotinsky “Iron Wall” version of Zionism, currently ruling Israel.
“Jabotinsky was openly racist. Here he followed Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, who saw the European Jewish colonial settlement of Palestine as ‘the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism,’” writes author John Rose (The Myths of Zionism and Israel: the Hijack State). “The neo-conservative strategy that drives George Bush’s Middle East policies foresees the US and Israel reshaping the whole of the Middle East in their interests, by force if necessary,” and the current campaign—using depleted uranium and white phosphorus, targeting apartment blocks and refugees—is but the latest manifestation of this deadly and criminal force, completely at odds with international and humanitarian law.
“In an echo of the US position, which supports Israel’s right to self-defense, [Beckett] also dismissed growing pressure from MPs for the government to call for an immediate ceasefire and take a harder line on Israel,” reports the Guardian.
“The foreign secretary flatly rejected a claim by Sir Peter Tapsell, a Tory MP, that the prime minister was ‘colluding’ with US President George Bush in giving Israel the go-ahead to wage ‘unlimited war’—a war crime he alleged was ‘gravely reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter of Warsaw.’”
Tapsell is correct, of course—not only is Beckett “colluding” with Bush (or rather the top drawer neocons, who are largely Jabotinsky Zionists), she is facilitating war crimes, as enumerated under the Geneva Conventions, a humanitarian document originated by Henri Dunant, who was outraged by the horrors of war he witnessed at the Battle of Solferino in 1859.
For Beckett—and the neocon choir advocating World War Three, or Four, take your pick—no doubt Henri Dunant was an appeaser and a wuss to boot.
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