Lobby Howls at Hillary

Israel Lobby Howls at Hillary
by Ari Berman


In her 2000 race for the US Senate, Hillary Clinton was loudly denounced by uncritical right-wing supporters of Israel for a 1999 trip to Ramallah, where she kissed Palestinian First Lady Suha Arafat and listened as Arafat denounced Israel (in Arabic). Pictures of "the kiss" were repeatedly slapped across the cover of the New York Post, in TV ads and invoked by the campaigns of Rudy Giuliani and Rick Lazio. The flap almost derailed Clinton's campaign.


Clinton learned her lesson and for nearly a decade afterward offered only boilerplate praise of Israel, which made her a favorite of the right-leaning Israel Lobby.


Now, as Secretary of State, she's forced to confront another reality: the difficulty of forging peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Anything she says that might be perceived as even slightly critical of Israel will land her in hot water with right-wingers back home. Just ask Chas Freeman, who Barack Obama appointed to head the National Intelligence Council despite fierce opposition from war-hungry neoconservatives.


In advance of her trip to the Holy Land next week, Clinton advisers sent word that the United States was unhappy with Israel for blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza, which was further devastated by Israel's recent military incursion.


According to Haaretz:


"Israel is not making enough effort to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza," senior US officials told Israeli counterparts last week, and reiterated Washington's view by saying that "the U.S. expects Israel to meet its commitments on this matter."


It didn't take long for so-called "pro-Israel" leaders back home to howl with protest. "I am very surprised, frankly, at this statement from the United States government and from the secretary of state," said New York Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman. "I liked her a lot more as a senator from New York," added Brooklyn assemblyman Dov Hikind.


Since when did starving the people of Gaza become good for Israel? Before we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict we have to be able to have a rational conversation about it. The Zuckermans and Hikinds of the world make that nearly impossible. They're doing neither Israel nor the United States any favors.


Politically, Senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton knows that the only safe words to say in US political campaigns are "I support Israel" -- no if ands or buts. Israel is the victim and the righteous warrior. Palestinians are terrorists who can't be trusted to negotiate. Hamas must be eliminated. Iran must be obliterated. End of story.


Unfortunately, such insane demagoguery doesn't come in very handy when it comes to the actual practice of diplomacy.


So, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, rightly, is trying to make sure that Israel doesn't turn Gaza into an even bleaker post-apocalyptic wasteland. Kudos to her for trying and lets hope there's more tough love to come.




Washington DC-based Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine.


Copyright ©2009 The Nation -- distributed by Agence Global

Canadian Assistance to Israel's Genocide

Canadian Military Exports to Israel: Aiding and Abetting War Crimes in Gaza (2008-2009)
By Richard Sanders, Coordinator, Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT); Editor, Press for Conversion! magazine

http://coat.ncf.ca/ARMX/cansec/Tables.htm

In response to the bombing of Gaza and the deaths of hundreds of innocent children and other civilians, the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT) -- an Ottawa-based, Canadian anti-war network -- has produced this research report on Canadian military companies that have direct or indirect export links to Israel.

Included below are links to ten tables of data providing detailed information about over 200 Canadian military exporters.

CADSI and CANSEC 2009
CADSI: About half of the companies listed in these tables are members of an Ottawa-based business association/lobby group called the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI). CADSI supports its 540 members by highlighting their capabilities on its website and sponsoring events to assist their domestic sales and international exports. In 2004, CADSI organised a "Canada / Israel Industry Partnering Mission" to "advance industrial partnerships between Canadian and Israeli companies." Speakers at the event included Canada's Minister of National Defence, Israel's Ambassador to Canada, a representative from Israel's Ministry of Defense, and top bureaucrats from Canadian government departments. Canadian military companies heard presentations from Israel's top weapons industries and then held 20-minute, face-to-face "Company One-on-Ones" with Elbit, Elisra, Israeli Aircraft Industries, Israeli Military Industries, Rafael, Simigon and Soltam. (Source)

Since 2006, when Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade began proactively disclosing "grants and and contributions over $25,000," CADSI has received three government donations totaling $192,000 for "generic international business development activities." These government "contributions" come from the "International Trade" division of DFAIT.

CANSEC 2009: CADSI's primary function is to organise Canada's top military industry trade show, known as CANSEC. This international arms bazaar is now scheduled for May 2009 at the City of Ottawa's largest municipal facility, Lansdowne Park. This is the first time in 20 years that the City of Ottawa has hosted such an weapons trade show. COAT, which launched the 1989 campaign that led Council to ban the leasing of City property for international arms shows, is calling on City Council to honour its historic motion. (Click here for details on this campaign, upcoming events and how you can get involved.)

Data Tables on Canada's Exports to Israel
Table 1:
Master Table: CADSI This master table for all of the CADSI-linked companies in COAT's report, lists 105 Canadian military companies, some general facts about each company (including figures on sales, exports and number of employees), their city location(s), links to their websites, summaries of their main military products and/or services, their status as current or former members of CADSI, whether they exhibited at CADSI's most recent military trade show (CANSEC 2008) and whether they report having "export experience" with Israel or are now "actively pursuing" such exports.

CADSI members,
current or former,
with Export Links to Israel

Canadian Complicity in the production of Major US Weapons Systems used by Israel
COAT's report lists more than 50 Canadian military exporters that have supplied a wide range of essential components and/or services for three major US weapons systems that are used by the Israeli Air Force: the F-15, F-16 and AH-64. These fighter/bomber aircraft and helicopter attack gunships were the main varieties of weapons systems employed by Israel during the recent aerial bombardments of Gaza. In an effort to document Canadian contracts that have supplied these US weapons systems, COAT's report provides hundreds of links to corporate and government sources:


Table 2a:
F-15 "Eagle"


This table compiles data on 31 Canadian military exporters and provides internet links to about 100 sources detailing their complicity in the production of the F-15 weapons system. More than half of these companies are now members of CADSI, while 16% are former members. Almost 40% of these military companies exhibited their products at CANSEC 2008.

Canadian War Industries
supplying Parts and/or Services
to the USA for the F-15
"Eagle" Tactical Fighter/Bomber
(a major Weapons System
used by Israel)


Table 2b:
F-16 "Fighting Falcon"
This table compiles data on 39 Canadian military exporters and provides internet links to about 100 sources detailing their complicity in the production of the F-16 weapons system. About 40% of these companies are now members of CADSI, while over 20% are former members. One third of these military companies exhibited their products at Ottawa's CANSEC arms show in 2008.

Canadian War Industries
supplying Parts and/or Services
to the USA for the F-16
"Fighting Falcon" Fighter/Bomber
(a major Weapons System
used by Israel)


Table 2c:
AH-64 "Apache"
This table compiles data on 18 Canadian military exporters and provides internet links to about 100 sources detailing their complicity in the production of the AH-64 weapons system. Over 60% of these companies are now members of CADSI, while 17% are former members. More than two thirds of these military companies exhibited their products at the CANSEC arms show in 2008.

Canadian War Industries
supplying Parts and/or Services
to the USA for the AH-64
"Apache" Helicopter Gunship
(a major Weapons System
used by Israel)
Table 2d:
F-15, F-16 and AH-64 This table compiles the data from the three preceding tables and lists 53 Canadian military exporters. The table includes detailed contact information for all of the companies and indicates that 40% are current members of CADSI while an additional 21% are former members. Among the current CADSI members in this group, 73% exhibited their wares at the CANSEC arms show in 2008.

Canadian War Industries Supplying Parts and/or Services
for three Major US Weapons Systems
(F-15, F-16, AH-64) used by Israel
Table 3:
Canada Pension Plan (CPP) This table contains annual details on CPP investments since 2003 in Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the US weapons makers that manufacture the AH-64, F-15 and F-16 weapons systems. CPP investments in these prime contractors increased from about $14 million (between 2003-2005) to about $100 million (between 2006-2008). This more than seven-fold increase occurred suddenly in 2006, the year that Israel bombed Lebanon and killed about 1300 people, mostly innocent civilians. The table also shows that these war manufacturers and/or their Canadian subsidiaries are members of CADSI and exhibited at CANSEC 2008.

Canada Pension Plan Investments (2003-2008)
in Prime Contractors for
Three Major US Weapons systems used by Israel
against Lebanon (2006)
and Gaza (2008-2009)

Direct Exports to Israel by Canadian Military Companies

There are more than 140 Canadian military industries now reporting that they have exported their products directly to Israel. COAT's report divides the data on these companies into two tables based on whether they are known to have ever been members of CADSI. More than one third of these Canadian military companies have known links to CADSI.
Table 4a:
Direct Exports: CADSI This table listing 53 Canadian companies includes summaries describing their main military products and/or services, provides links to their websites, notes their status as current or former members of CADSI and whether they exhibited their wares at CADSI's most recent military trade show, CANSEC 2008.

Canadian Exports to Israel
by corporate members, current or former, of the
Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries
Table 4b:
Direct Exports: non-CADSI This table listing 89 Canadian companies includes summaries describing their main military products and/or services, some general facts about each company (including figures on sales, exports and number employees), links to their websites, and detailed contact information.

Canadian Exports to Israel by
Military Companies NOT linked to the
Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries

Canadian Military Companies "Actively Pursuing" Direct Exports to Israel

There are 45 other Canadian military exporters now reporting that they are "actively pursuing" direct exports to Israel. In COAT's report, the data on these companies is divided into two tables based on whether the companies are known to have membership links to CADSI. Almost two thirds of these companies are known to be current or former members of CADSI.
Table 5a:
Actively Pursuing Exports: CADSI This table lists 28 Canadian companies, provides links to their websites, data on the location of their operations, and summaries describing their main military products and/or services and gives their status as current or former members of CADSI and whether they exhibited their wares at CADSI's most recent military trade show, CANSEC 2008.

Current and/or past members of the
Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries
"Actively Pursuing" Exports to Israel
Table 5b:
Actively Pursuing Exports: non-CADSI This table lists 17 Canadian companies includes summaries describing their main military products and/or services, some general facts about each company (including figures on sales, exports and number employees), links to their websites, and detailed contact information.

Canadian Military Companies
"Actively Pursuing" Exports to Israel
(Not current &/or past members of CADSI)

Some Goals of this Research
During the recent bombardment of Gaza, Canada's mainstream corporate media did not ask any questions, let alone investigate, Canada's role in supplying military hardware to Israel. In fact, very little has ever been published examining Canadian military exports to Israel. It is therefore hoped that the data compiled in this report will provide:
(1) a useful initial resource for those concerned about Canadian military exports and their impact on peace and human rights in the occupied territories,
(2) a starting point for further research into Canadian corporate and government complicity in supplying Israel's military forces, and
(3) an impetus for peace and human rights activists and organisations to focus on particular companies, the CADSI military exporters association, the CANSEC arms bazaar, as well as municipal, provincial and federal government institutions and programs that facilitate the international arms trade.

Take Action!
Please join COAT's "Stop Ottawa Arms Shows" campaign
(Click here for an even more detailed and comprehensive list of things that you can do to help)

PETITION
* Sign our ONLINE PETITION now!
* Circulate paper petitions (print a copy)

Contact City Hall
* Click here to Contact Ottawa's Council and Mayor
* Read a SAMPLE LETTER
(from the Ottawa Presbytery of the United Church of Canada, the regional umbrella group for 65 congregations in Ottawa!)

Attend upcoming events:

Information and Strategy Session to Oppose CANSEC
Tuesday, March 24, 7 pm
Southminster United Church,
15 Aylmer Ave at Bank Street.
(Just south of the Rideau Canal. Enter from the Galt St. entrance at the back of the complex.)

Speakers, Music and Candlelight Vigil
Wednesday, May 27 (time to be announced)
Southminster United Church,
(Speakers and Music in the Sanctuary followed by a Candlelight procession just across the bridge to Lansdowne Park. )

Related event (Film Documentary - OTTAWA PREMIERE)
>
> MYTH FOR PROFIT: CANADA'S ROLE IN INDUSTRIES OF WAR AND PEACE
> Hintonburg Community Centre
> 1064 Wellington Street (3 blocks west of Somerset)
> Wednesday, March 18, 2009, 7:00 pm
>
> More info and a trailer at: http://www.wideopenexposure.com/M4P.php
> The film will be followed by a discussion with the film makers, Amy Miller and Boban Chaldovich.

* Spread the word:
Spreading the word about this campaign online and off.
Post a link to this page on listserves, blogs and relevant websites.
Raise the issue at meetings and public events.

* Media: Encourage the media to cover Canada's war exports, not cover them up.

* Divest: Promote divestment from military industries

* Endorsements: Get group endorsements for the campaign against CANSEC 2009

* The Feds: Insist that the Canadian government immediately stop permitting, facilitating, financing and otherwise encouraging and promoting Canadian military exports, especially to those governments that are either currently at war, preparing for war and/or violating the human rights of those inside or outside of their boundaries.

* Volunteer: Volunteer some time to help promote this campaign
* Support COAT: Donate to COAT and subscribe to COAT's magazine, Press for Conversion!

This web page is part of an online report called:
Canadian Military Exports to Israel: Aiding and Abetting War Crimes in Gaza (2008-2009).

The report includes 10 detailed tables filled with data detailing about 200 Canadian military companies that have direct or indirect export links to Israel.

Prepared by the Ottawa-based Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT) -- this report is part of a campaign to expose and oppose CANSEC 2009, Canada's largest military industry trade show. CANSEC 2009 will be hosted by the City of Ottawa at Lansdowne Park, May 27-28, 2009. Please join us in exposing and opposing CANSEC! Click here to read more about our CAMPAIGN.

Here is an article that ties together the issues in this report and the campaign against CANSEC:
Canadian Military Exports, War Crimes in Gaza and Ottawa's Arms Bazaar

Canadian "Intelligence" Agency Exposes Colombian Refugee's Family

CSIS endangering `lives of my sons'
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/591039

Colombian union activist says agency gave media family addresses Feb 21, 2009 04:30 AM Lesley Ciarula Taylor Immigration Reporter

The case of a 53-year-old Colombian refugee fighting deportation on evidence she is forbidden to read has taken a chilling turn with something she can read. A Colombian newspaper, citing Canada's security service as the source, printed her sons' names and locations, making them targets in the country's bloody civil war.

"This was shocking to me," said Amparo Torres. "This puts in danger the lives of my sons. If they are killed, the responsibility belongs to CSIS." Torres survived a wave of bloodshed that left 3,000 Patriotic Union members dead and destroyed the movement in Colombia. "But I have no defence against this."

Torres, a well-known trade union activist, has been through years of deportation hearings and Federal Court challenges, most recently invoking the Supreme Court of Canada decision that security certificates used to invoke secret evidence to try to deport non- citizens as security threats were unconstitutional.

Neither she nor her lawyer, Raoul Boulakia, is allowed to see the evidence against her.

Torres had fled Colombia for Mexico and then Canada in 1996, a political refugee who had survived a kidnapping. Canada gave her refugee status and permanent residence. At the time, she admitted her brother and former husband were leaders of FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and that she helped create Colombia's Patriotic Union Movement, a consortium of left-wing political parties.

When she applied for citizenship in 2000, the government asked CSIS for a formal security clearance. CSIS countered that Torres herself belonged to FARC but refused to give her more than a summary of its evidence.

"We came to Canada to protect our lives," said Torres, who lives in Etobicoke with her second husband, a retired University of Toronto professor. "It is very surprising to me that Canada would do this because it is famous for respecting human rights. That is the reason I am in Canada."

Torres's first deportation hearing went on for a few years, said Boulakia, but just as a decision was due, the Immigration and Refugee Board official retired. "We had to start all over again a year ago."

This time, because the Supreme Court in February 2007 had struck down a law allowing the government to use secret evidence, Torres could name a special advocate to examine and challenge the classified documents on her behalf.

Her special advocate, Lorne Waldman, has himself represented the last of the five men held in prison on security certificates as part of the government's anti-terrorism campaign. A legal challenge to those certificates led to the high court ruling allowing special advocates. Waldman said he expects to soon have a date to review the evidence.

In three interviews, Torres said, CSIS asked about her brother, her sons, her politics. "They talked to me very ruthlessly, with shouts and insults and accusations." She denied belonging to FARC, which Canada declared a terrorist organization in 2003, and denies it still.

A summary of one interview said she "argued for violence." Her friends in Canada have been questioned. But late last year, "they did the worst that they have done, something very dangerous."

The largest newspaper in Colombia, El Tiempo, published an article about what it called the children of FARC living in comfort while Colombians were being killed. The article named Torres's two sons, Canadian citizens previously unknown to the Colombian media and university graduates, ages 24 and 26, and described where they were working and studying.

A spokesperson for CSIS, Manon Bérubé, said yesterday, "CSIS does not provide such information to any news media outlet." As to whether the information came via CSIS to Colombian security, she said, "CSIS does not divulge details of information shared with any foreign entity."

Island Uproar Over Logging in Watershed

Island Community in Uproar Over Logging in Watershed

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/12618/


By Joan Delaney
Epoch Times Staff Feb 24, 2009�




�
Trees lie abandoned on the ground after old-growth Douglas fir was heli-logged from a small island in Englishman River on Vancouver Island. (Scott Tanner)


A serene Sunday afternoon hike through what was�until very recently�pristine forest turned into a life-threatening situation for four residents of a Vancouver Island community.�


Two local filmmakers, a city councillor and his eight-year-old son had to run for their lives when a Skycrane helicopter appeared suddenly and began removing massive 500-year-old trees from right where the group had been hiking on a small island.


�It was pretty scary. People could have been killed for sure. They hadn�t really marked off the trails or given any warning to the public,� said environmentalist and documentary filmmaker Richard Boyce, who had to dive for cover amid flying branches and debris generated by the intense downdraft from the helicopter blades.


Councillor Chris Berger called 9-1-1 to get a message relayed to logging company Island Timberlands that people were in danger, and the helicopter left10 minutes later. Owned by Island Timberlands, the island is just one kilometre from the boundary of Englishman River Falls Provincial Park.


Boyce had taken city councillor Chris Berger to the island in the Englishman River to show him how logging is affecting the drinking water supply for the nearby city of Parksville and the surrounding region.


Locals are concerned about logging activities in the area, not only because of the rapidly disappearing old-growth Coast Douglas-fir but also because of risks to drinking water and efforts to restore salmon habitat in the Englishman River.�


Over two million provincial and federal dollars�and much local effort�have been spent to rehabilitate the Englishman, which up until last year was designated one of the most endangered rivers in British Columbia.�


�The company is claiming they�re only taking 20 trees from the island, but the bigger picture is that the watershed has very little old growth left, and what is left they�re cutting it down,� said Boyce.�




�
A 'bear den' cedar tree on the island, located metres from where the logging took place. (Richard Boyce)
Only one percent of the entire Douglas-fir ecosystem remains today, making it the most endangered forest ecosystem in Canada. Because it is located in sensitive areas, this one percent has historically been left alone by logging companies�until now.


�They didn�t log those areas in the past but today they have no scruples�they�re just logging them anyway,� Boyce said. In all, 47 trees between the ages of 150 and 550 were cut on the one-hectare island.


�With the zillion trees available for sensible harvest you can�t help but wonder why, for the few dollars involved, Island Timberlands would take trees away from a very sensitive spot �� said city councillor Barry Avis.


In order to log the largest and healthiest old growth, surrounding �habitat trees� must be cut down. Worthless to the logging companies, habitat trees are trees that have died but remain standing, often for hundreds of years. Though rotting inside, they become an invaluable source of food and shelter for small animal, bat, bird, and insect life.


�That�s the sad thing about the habitat trees that we lost on that island,� says Annette Tanner, chairperson of the mid-Island chapter of Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WCWC).�


�There were 500-year-old habitat trees that are now lying on the ground. They were providing such an important function because there is so little old-growth habitat left in the area. It�s just incredible what a habitat tree does when it reaches that point in its life.�


A fight is also underway to protect Vancouver Island�s Cathedral Grove, the country�s most famous old-growth forest within MacMillan Provincial Park, visited each year by millions of tourists. Island Timberlands logged Douglas-firs and red cedars from the perimeter of the park in the fall of 2008 and has plans for further logging the area in the future.


While the company claims it will leave a 300-metre buffer between its clear cut and the park boundary, locals are worried more logging will expose the grove to flooding and �blow-down.��


�The community is outraged and we�re asking for a stop to the logging in Cathedral Grove,� said Tanner, adding that a new group has been formed to �get involved with the decision makers� to see what can be done to save what�s left of the grove.


�Those trees in the park are not going to survive the vast visitor use and all the impacts that are done upstream if we don�t stop it now�it�s been over-logged.�


What visitors don�t see on a pleasant drive through the grove is the �total devastation� on the other side of the mountain, said Tanner.�


�It�s just wasted, wasted forest all over the ground. They don�t even pick stuff up. They just grab those big old money trees and leave the rest.�


Vancouver Island�s diverse forests include the world�s largest Douglas-fir (the Red Creek Fir) and western red cedar (the Cheewhat Cedar). There are towering red cedar and Douglas-fir trees in Cameron River Canyon on the east side of the island that are thought to be between 800 and 1,000 years old.


Only 110 hectares of Douglas-fir forest on the east coast of Vancouver Island have been protected, while just two percent have been set aside as federal, provincial and regional parks.�


Last November, WCWC called on the government to end old-growth logging on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland in regions where the trees are most scarce. For other forests, the committee wants old-growth logging phased out completely by 2015.
South of the border, old-growth forests are also facing increasing pressure from logging and development, said Jonathan Jelen, old growth campaigner with Oregon Wild, a Portland-based environmental organization.


�We do not have adequate protection for our old growth here in Oregon, in Washington, or Northern California, where, with the Pacific Northwest, those are the forests that most closely mimic a lot of the old-growth that you all have in Canada.�


Jelen said there is only an estimated 10 percent of old-growth left in the U.S. Northwest. Oregon Wild is currently fighting a rule pushed through in the last days of the Bush administration that increases old-growth logging by 300 percent in parts of Oregon.


�Old-growth logging is still very controversial � there is more and more consensus amongst folks that old growth should be just taken completely off the table�that we just should not be logging it any more,� he said.


With these ancient trees so close to extinction on the west coast of both countries, environmentalists say that if they disappear, salmon, spotted owl, and a host of other species will be unable to survive. The ability of old growth to cleanse rivers and streams and stabilize soil will also be lost.


Meanwhile, in an effort to protect both salmon and drinking water, Parksville city council has passed a special resolution demanding that the provincial government put a stop to logging on Englishman River. A similar resolution will be taken to the Council of B.C. Municipalities in hopes that municipalities across the province will adopt a policy preventing logging in river beds and watersheds.


�The government has a responsibility to its citizens to protect the watersheds,� said Boyce. �They plan to do a lot more logging along the banks of this river. Hopefully we can stop that by getting the government to intervene � The government sooner or later has to start listening.�
Last Updated
Feb 24, 2009�

Rolling Back the Environmental Clock with Gord Campbell

1882 Act protects citizens' right of access to rivers, lakes, ocean inlets.
By Andrew MacLeod


TheTyee.ca
The premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell, wants the federal government to repeal a major piece of legislation that helps protect the environment.

The attack, which comes at a time when the federal government is already trying to weaken the act in question, at first appeared inconsequential. It rated just one sentence deep in Feb. 16's 40-page speech from the throne.

"The federal Navigable Waters Act [sic] should be repealed and replaced by legislation that meets the legitimate needs of the 21st century," said the speech, which sets out the government's priorities. "A unified major project review process will speed up job creation in mining, energy, resort development and other areas."

As it happens, the B.C. government had the name of the federal act wrong, leaving out the word "protection" from the Navigable Waters Protection Act.

The act's primary purpose is protecting people's right of access to rivers, lakes and any body of water it is possible to travel by boat or ship, an environmental lawyer explained. By helping protect waterways, the act has the side benefit of keeping them in their natural state.

That law's too old: Campbell

Reporters, curious about why the provincial government dislikes the act, got little help from Campbell during a scrum in his office.


"Let's put this in context for you," said Campbell responding to a question from CKNW's Sean Leslie. "That act was passed in 1882. I would suggest that the world has changed dramatically in the 21st century from what it was like in 1882."

The act slows development, he said. "Right now across the West, literally every economic development minister will tell you that the federal Navigable Waters Act [sic] is a huge impediment to investments and to jobs."

He added, "If there are legitimate needs for the Navigable Waters Act [sic], put them in place in a 21st-century bill, but don't hold up 21st-century investment and jobs because of a 19th-century piece of legislation."

Just what projects are being slowed by the act?

"You name it. Name a project that's a significant project. If it involves any kind of watersheds, it could do that, sometimes if it involves an agricultural ditch it, may be called on."

The act is supposed to ensure people can travel the country's waterways, he said. "We're capable of doing that in British Columbia without checking with the federal government."

'Profound misunderstanding'

Campbell's right that the Navigable Waters Protection Act is old, said Will Amos, a staff lawyer for Ecojustice in Ottawa. That's not a reason to get rid of it, he said, asking rhetorically, "Is the Constitution outdated?"

In fact, the principle the act is based on goes back much further, he said, to the Magna Carta, signed in 1215. Since then, common law in many countries, including Canada, has protected the public's right to use waterways.

The public has that right, said Amos, and the federal government is mandated to protect it.

"The suggestion of a repealing of the Navigable Waters Protection Act is ridiculous and inappropriate," said Amos. "It's a legally and historically incorrect view... It's a profound misunderstanding of navigation history and law."

Amos said he can, however, understand why Campbell wants it killed. "The provinces don't like any federal environmental regulation and enforcement."

Or as Linda Duncan, the MP for Edmonton-Strathcona and the federal NDP's environment critic, put it, "Provincial premiers always want to get rid of the federal government."

Told of Campbell's comments about the age of the act, she said, "Yes, they are very old laws. People have guarded them."

Environmental assessments

The Navigable Waters Protection Act will trigger an environmental assessment whenever a structure goes over a river or a lake, Duncan said. "It sounds like a minor thing, but it's an important part of federal responsibility," she said. "This is not an insignificant law."

In B.C., for starters, thousands of salmon streams could be affected, she said.

Campbell's are strange remarks from a premier working on his green reputation, she said. "He's showing his true colours. Unbelievable he would single it out."

That leaves observers wondering why exactly Campbell wants the act gone.

"It's a major trigger for the Environmental Assessment Act," said Andrew Gage, staff counsel for the West Coast Environmental Law group. It affects proposals such as a controversial one now being debated to add a marina to Victoria's inner harbour.

Provincial NDP environment critic Shane Simpson said Campbell has all kinds of reasons to oppose the federal regulations. The act affects run of the river hydro projects, gravel extraction and aquaculture, he said. "This could certainly relate to issues around oil tankers."

"I think it really does have to do with beginning to reduce environmental oversight," he said.

Last week's B.C. budget cut the province's environment ministry by 11 per cent, said Simpson. "Instead of putting resources in to deal with these in a more thoughtful way, the other option is just get the rules out of the way totally."

Federal threat

While repealing the act is not something on the federal agenda, the Conservative government is in the process of significantly weakening it.

On behalf of various clients, including environmental groups and Mountain Equipment Co-op, Amos will appear before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance today (Feb. 23) to oppose the changes, which the Conservative government announced with the budget in late January and detailed in the Feb. 6 Budget Implementation Act.

Harper's proposed amendments would make it easier to skip the approval process and environmental assessments, said Amos, who wrote an Ecojustice memo on the issue. "The [Transport] minister will be able to exempt whole classes of waterways and works from the approval process and environmental assessments."

The minister could, for example, decide that aquaculture projects are no longer subject to the approval process, he said. He or she could do the same for micro-hydro projects, a controversial topic in B.C..

For such projects there would no longer even be any need to notify the public, Amos said, threatening both long-standing access rights and possibilities for protecting waterways. With the stroke of the pen, he said, "They could do a lot of damage and nobody would know."

The Harper government argues the changes are needed to accelerate infrastructure spending, said Amos. "Wrecking the environment to stimulate the economy is not the direction we need to go."

Sneaky bill

A better way to accelerate approvals would be to invest money in the government departments that do the work, he said. "They could do that and they ought to do that." Instead ,Harper is choosing a deregulation approach. "We saw where deregulation got the U.S. economy. We don't need to go down the same route with the environment."

That Harper's government has brought the changes forward as part of an unrelated bill is outrageous, he said. "The real problem is we weren't consulted," he said. "There's a lot of people really concerned about this... We're finally going to get the opportunity to be heard."

Stories are starting to emerge from the paddling community, and there is concern among environmentalists, though the issue has received little media attention.

Amos said he'll tell the Feb. 23 committee meeting the amendments are contrary to the interests of many Canadians, including those in the ecotourism business, sport fishers and outdoors stores. "You're going to hear more about this soon."

The NDP's Duncan said bringing the changes forward as part of a budget bill is sneaky. "It should be done in an open forum so people can understand what they're up to," she said. "Shouldn't they come forward in a way the public can discuss and debate?"

The federal Liberals were in a position to ask for the amendments to be removed before they pledged support for Harper's budget, she said, but failed to do that.

Green edges

Campbell's attack on the federal laws is just another sign his commitment to the environment is weak, said the provincial NDP's Simpson. "It was always very narrow," he said. There was the introduction of the carbon tax to show Campbell's interest in the environment, but little more. "If you looked past that there's not much in the way of green initiatives that you can find on the agenda."

While Campbell has received credit for the carbon tax, a lot of environmentalists have ignored his brown side and what's actually happening on the land, said Vicky Husband. A long time conservationist, Husband describes herself as a "free radical" since her parting a few years ago from the Sierra Club.

In a recent e-mail, she listed a number of things the Campbell government has done: subsidizing the oil and gas industry, promoting coal bed methane exploration, encouraging "ruin of river" private hydro projects, funding advocates of offshore oil and gas development, allowing the removal of land from management under tree farm licenses, removing control over forest industry practices, promoting fish farms, ignoring the evidence on sea lice and salmon, proposing pipelines across Northern B.C. and building more highways in the Lower Mainland.

"A lot of the leading environmental groups are caught up in climate change and if there's a carbon tax, things are good. I've always said, 'show me,'" she said. "It's a total sham... He's going green around the edges and that's it. There's no green in the centre."

Pressing Harper to get rid of an act that helps protect waterways is just one more example, she said.

Three Strategies Against Obama

Netanyahu's Three Strategies Against Obama
by Patrick Seale


Having been asked by Israel’s President Shimon Peres to form a government, Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party, has until 17 March to try to put together a ruling coalition. Looming over his horse-trading with possible partners is the shadow of Barack Obama, America’s new President.


As he goes about his task, Netanyahu’s prime concern will be to find a way to defuse the threat from Obama, whose views about Iran, about the desirability of a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and about relations with the Muslim world in general, are diametrically opposed to his own.


Early indications suggest that Netanyahu will resort to three distinct strategies to reduce, evade and eventually dispel any likely pressure from Washington, especially on the Palestine question, to which, unlike Obama, he intends to give no priority whatsoever.


His first strategy will be to seek to cobble together a ‘moderate’ coalition of the Likud (27 seats), with Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima party (28 seats), and Ehud Barak’s much reduced Labour party (13 seats). Such a coalition could no doubt attract smaller factions, so as to produce a reasonably comfortable majority in the 120-seat Knesset. The only problem is that Tzipi Livni is demanding real decision-making powers in the coalition, which Netanyahu is unwilling to grant her, while Barak seems to think it wiser to rebuild his shattered party in opposition.


From Netanyahu’s perspective, a ‘moderate’ coalition would be better able to neutralise pressure from Obama. The alternative would be a right, far-right and ultra-religious coalition of Likud with Avigdor Lieberman’s unashamedly racist Israel Beiteinu, and other hard-line factions. But such an extremist grouping would attract international opprobrium and further damage Israel’s image -- already severely battered by the Gaza war. In Washington, Israel’s friends and lobbyists would be hard put to protect it against Obama.


Netanyahu’s second strategy might be to extend feelers to Syria in order to attempt to revive the indirect Israeli-Syrian talks, which Turkey has been mediating in recent months, but which Syria broke off because of the Gaza war. Syria might be inclined to agree to resume them as part of its current diplomatic campaign to improve its relations with the European Union and the United States.


In seeking to revive the Syrian track, Netanyahu’s main motive would be to provide him with a pretext for resisting American pressure to advance on the Palestinian track. The argument that it cannot focus on two tracks at the same time is one Israel has long used to prevent any move towards a comprehensive peace.


In any event, Netanyahu has no intention of meeting Syria‘s bottom line demand -- the return of the Golan Heights. Syria, in turn would have no real expectations from revived talks. It knows that it cannot consider reaching a peace agreement with Israel, unless there is substantial progress on the Palestinian track as well. So, if talks were eventually revived, there would be a good deal of cynicism on both sides, and no serious expectation of a favourable outcome.


Netanyahu’s third strategy in dealing with Obama is to play up the alleged danger from Iran and its nuclear programme. It is his way of relegating the Palestinians’ political aspirations to a distant -- very distant -- horizon. Even as he accepted the task of attempting to form a government, Netanyahu lashed out at Iran.


There was no doubt, he declared, that Iran was seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel was faced with its greatest threat since the creation of the State in 1948. Terrorist forces were gathering in the north – his reference to the Hizbullah resistance movement in Lebanon -- and more in the same alarmist vein.


Whipping up hysteria about Iran has long been a familiar Netanyahu tactic. He is desperately anxious to prevent a U.S.-Iranian dialogue such as Obama has proposed, and to which Iran has reacted positively. The same scare tactic -- the allegation that Saddam Hussein was acquiring weapons of mass destruction -- was used by American pro-Israeli neocons in 2002 to push America into war with Iraq.


In testimony this month before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Admiral Dennis Blair, America’s Director of National Intelligence, predicted a confrontation this year between Israel and Iran over the Islamic Republic’s uranium enrichment programme. But few observers in Washington believe that Israel would dare launch an attack against Iran without an American green light -- which the Obama administration would be most unlikely to give.


Instead, as London’s Daily Telegraph reported, Israel is using covert activities -- sabotage, front companies, double agents, assassination -- to disrupt Iran’s nuclear activities. According to the newspaper, Mossad is rumoured to be behind the death of Ardeshire Hassanpour, a top Iranian nuclear scientist at Isfahan’s uranium plant, who died in mysterious circumstances in 2007. Zbigniew Brzezinski , President Jimmy Carter’s former national security adviser and now an American elder statesman critical of Israel, has advised the United States and Iran to proceed to negotiations as soon as possible.


Netanyahu will need to act quickly and be highly resourceful if he is to dent Obama’s determination to turn a new page with Iran, promote Israeli-Palestinian peace, and build bridges with the entire Arab and Muslim world.




Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.

Saving the Dolphins

"We didn't get any response from [the Department of Fisheries and Oceans]. It takes so long to get things done when you go through government departments," said Mayor Winston May. "So, some local guys decided to put out their small speedboat and put on their survival suits, and didn't they put a channel through the water to where the dolphins was at."




'Local boys' free dolphins trapped by ice: N.L. mayor 16-year-old wades into frigid waters to help animal

Becky Rynor,
Canwest News Service

Norma Miller for Canwest News Service

Here is some video on You Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mkwQDDQ59M

A group of local men braved dangerous broken ice and frigid waters in a fibreglass speedboat to rescue a pod of dolphins and help them back to open water, the mayor of Seal Cove, N.L., said Thursday.

"We didn't get any response from [the Department of Fisheries and Oceans]. It takes so long to get things done when you go through government departments," said Mayor Winston May. "So, some local guys decided to put out their small speedboat and put on their survival suits, and didn't they put a channel through the water to where the dolphins was at."

The dolphins had been stranded by a slab of ice since Sunday in White Bay off the coast of Seal Cove, a village of about 400 people. A chunk of ice was rapidly closing in around the mammals and threatening to suffocate them.

"You'd hear them crying, every night," said one of the men in the boat, Rodney Rice, 39. "I went down there last night and you could hear them trying to break up more ice. . . . They wouldn't have lasted another day."

Mr. May said it took the four men about three hours to break a channel in the ice with their boat, and one - Brandon Banks, 16 - got into the water and helped calm one of the dolphins weakened by the ordeal so they could tow it to open water.

"I had a floater suit on," said Mr. Banks, "And they would come up and rest their head on me and I would keep their head out of the water so they can breathe through their blowhole."

Mr. May said the men carved a channel by ramming the five-metre fibreglass-hulled boat up onto the ice, then jumping out and onto the ice to hack away at it. He said it took them three hours before they had a path from the main body of water to the pool of slush and water where the dolphins were trapped, a distance of about 250 metres, he said.

"One of the dolphins was really weak, and one of the young guys who had a survival suit on got into the water with it and stayed with it, and the dolphin just kind of wrapped his fins around him. . . . It was amazing."

He said two of the dolphins made for the open water, while the third, weaker one "they had to give some help," Mr. May said. "They put a harness around it and gradually took it out to the main body of water. . . . And local boys done it."

Mr. May said they were at the point where something had to be done to save the dolphins.

"The mammals were getting so weak, if somebody didn't do something in the next 12 to 48 hours, they would have died."

Mr. May acknowledges what the men did was "pretty dangerous. It was pretty scary... but I guess they felt that somebody had to help."

Lydia Banks is the mother of 16-year-old Brandon, the youth who went into the water in a survival suit to help the weakest of the pod.

"I'm proud of him. It was good what he done," she said. "Before, everybody was saying somebody's got to get out there and help them. So they took action."

She said her son told her the dolphins "had cuts on them everywhere where they were beating themselves up on the ice."

The dolphins were initially frightened by the boat and the men, but after a few minutes, "the mammals were so friendly once they got to know the boat. The two just followed the boat right out to open water," May said.

"It's a beautiful ending. It's been an emotional last few days," he said. "The one was really weak, but even he swimmed away. Once they get out to open water, they'll get food and we'll just pray and hope that nature will look after them."

Seal Cove is about 600 kilometres northwest of St. John's.

with files from Tiffany Crawford

Privacy Commissioner Quashes B.C.-Washington State Data Sharing

Canada recalls personal database in border project The Canadian government is repatriating a database of personal information about British Columbia citizens after warnings the U.S. government might misuse it.



OTTAWA - The Canadian government is repatriating a database of personal information about British Columbia citizens after warnings the U.S. government might misuse it.

The information on several hundred Canadians was provided to U.S. Customs and Border Protection last year as part of a project to issue "enhanced driver's licenses" instead of passports to streamline land border crossings.

The pilot project is the first step in a Canada-wide program in which personal information on hundreds of thousands of Canadians could have been handed over to the U.S. agency.

Instead, the Canada Border Services Agency has bowed to pressure from privacy advocates and is recalling the database, and Canadian officials say the U.S. border agency has promised to erase its records.

As the project expands, the personal databanks will be kept in Canada, but will be accessible electronically - within strict limits - by U.S. border officials.

"The data will remain in Canada, and it will be accessed remotely," said David Loukidelis, British Columbia's privacy commissioner and a critic of the original plan.

Washington has been toughening rules for people entering the United States from Canada, requiring passports for air passengers in 2007 and for those arriving by land and water since June 1.

U.S. officials also accept so-called "enhanced driver's licenses" at land and marine border points in lieu of a passport, through a joint program developed with Ottawa.

In the British Columbia pilot project, 521 citizens enrolled as volunteers and were each issued a special driver's license with an embedded chip known as a radio-frequency identification device or RFID.

The chip, which can be read by electronic scanners as far as about 15 feet away, contains a unique identifying number for each cardholder.

In the pilot phase, U.S. border officials scanned the RFID and used the unique number to locate the personal information of the bearer in the database supplied by Canada - full name, birth date, gender, citizenship and other information that is ordinarily contained in a passport, as well as a digital image of the bearer.

The Canada agency signed an agreement with its U.S. counterpart that the information would be accessed only by U.S. officers at the time of crossing and for only border purposes, but the USA Patriot Act could trump that clause, forcing the border officers to turn over information to U.S. security agencies.

"It is clear that there is potential for secondary use," says a Canada-British Columbia review of the project dated Aug. 14 and obtained by Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

"Further, it is possible that if there was disclosure pursuant to the USA Patriot Act that CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) may not be legally able to advise CBSA."

Joanne Ferreira, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Washington, D.C., confirmed that the agency plans to return the pilot database to Canada.

"Phase 1 data currently resides in a secure CBP database and will be transitioned to a CBSA database," Ferreira said. "CBP will delete Phase 1 records from the CBP database - coordinated with CBSA - so there will be no overlap."

Obama Batting for Rove: Delay, Delay, Delay

Obama, not Bush, now seeking delay of Rove deposition
by John Byrne

Former Bush Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove has a new president urging Congress not to force him to testify next week.

President Barack Obama.

In a court brief quietly filed Monday, Michael Hertz, Obama's acting assistant attorney general, said it was necessary to delay an effort to force Rove to be deposed in a congressional investigation into the firing of nine US Attorneys and the alleged political prosecution of a former Alabama governor.

Hertz said an effort was underway to find a "compromise" for Rove, and requested two weeks to broker a deal before proceeding in court.

"The inauguration of a new president has altered the dynamics of this case and created new opportunities for compromise rather than litigation," Hertz wrote in the brief released late Monday by McClatchy's Washington, D.C. bureau. "At the same time, there is now an additional interested party — the former president — whose views should be considered."

The House Judiciary Committee sued the Bush Administration to force Rove to testify last year, saying that Rove shouldn't be covered by executive privilege. They won. But their case has been held up by an appeal, and Hertz's filing was the Obama administration's first legal weighing-in on the matter. Obama's Justice Department has supplanted the role of Bush's Justice Department in the case, and their position will likely inform the terms under which Rove is questioned by Congress.

Hertz's statement mirrors a statement from Obama White House Counsel Gregory Craig published Saturday.

"The president is very sympathetic to those who want to find out what happened," Craig told The Washington Post. "But he is also mindful as president of the United States not to do anything that would undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency. So, for that reason, he is urging both sides of this to settle."

Both Hertz's and Craig's statement point to an underlying challenge Obama faces with regard to Rove. Since former President Bush still claims that Rove is protected from testifying to Congress by executive privilege, even after departing office, Obama must decide whether he wants to risk diluting his own executive privilege in the future.

These statements, however, stand in contrast to Obama's previous rhetoric.

In 2007, while in the Senate, Obama rebuked Bush's White House as "the most secretive in modern history," which aimed "to hide its abuse of our justice system."

Responding to a Bush claim of executive privilege, he said, "By continuing to act as the most secretive White House in modern history, the Bush Administration has once again placed itself above the law in order to hide its abuse of our justice system from the American people. On the first day of an Obama Administration, we will launch the most sweeping ethics reform in history to shed sunlight on the decisions made by government and put the interests of the American people at the center of every decision that's made."

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), who subpoenaed Rove as recently as last week and demanded that he come before Congress Feb. 23, refused a request from Rove's attorney seeking a delay. Rove didn't show up on two previous occasions he was subpoenaed, once in 2008 and again in January. He didn't honor a 2007 Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena either.

The White House indicated in their latest filing that negotiations are ongoing between representatives of the Bush White House and the Obama team.

Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, told Raw Story last week that no agreement had been reached.

A special prosecutor continues to probe what role White House officials may have had in the firings of the US Attorneys -- which Democrats say were politically motivated.

Rove also has been called to testify about his knowledge of an alleged political prosecution in Alabama, where a Democratic governor was jailed on corruption charges that may have been politically motivated. A whistleblower fingered Rove as pushing for the prosecution behind the scenes, which Rove vehemently and categorically denies.

source

Fair Game in Gaza

Israel’s Rationale for Murder: No One is Innocent


by M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
February 14th, 2009

When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.

– Israeli Army Chief of Staff Raphael Eitan, 1983

Before [the Palestinians] very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they, and their ancestors, have lived… We are the generation of colonizers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a home.

– Famous Israeli Army Commander Moshe Dayan

Israel’s official excuses for extinguishing over 1,300 Palestinian lives—half of them civilian and one-third of them children— are oft-repeated by its apologists: Hamas’ rocket fire made the invasion unavoidable, and its tactics made civilian casualties inevitable.

Do these positions dovetail with—or decapitate—history? Are they logical? Are they moral? Or are they smokescreens, designed to disguise troublesome facts about both Israel’s strategy and its very origins?

The reality behind the rockets

Israel’s first argument about Hamas’ rockets fails on several levels.

It neatly—and falsely—posits Hamas as the attacker and Israel as the defender. The only problem with this pleasant fiction is that Israel has been expelling, occupying, and imprisoning Palestinians long before Hamas even came into existence.

As Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote in January, “Gaza is not a military power that attacked its tiny, peace-loving neighbor, Israel. Gaza is a territory that Israel occupied in 1967, along with the West Bank. Its residents are part of the Palestinian people, which lost its land and its homeland in 1948.”

But how did it “lose” its homeland? After unearthing their country’s declassified archives, honest Israeli scholars have pointed to an Israeli campaign of rape, murder, and ethnic cleansing that entered full swing in 1947. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said to a colleague shortly after Israel’s expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians, “They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Why indeed? For one country to rain down rockets on another is an unprovoked crime. But for a people without a country to fire rockets on those who forcibly took their country—and who then corralled them into camps, isolated them from the world, and regularly slaughter them with weapons far deadlier than unguided projectiles—is a rather different matter.

Just as we would not begin a 10-minute tape of a batterer abusing his wife at the nine-minute mark where she may have struck back, we cannot skip through decades of Israeli ethnic cleansing, occupation, and bombardment and finger Hamas rocket fire as the starting point.

Quite apart from historical considerations, the invasion cannot be justified by rocket fire because scarcely any rockets were being fired before Israel’s own escalation. According to the Israeli military, in the ceasefire months of July, August, September, and October, the numbers of rockets fired from Gaza were one, eight, one, and two, respectively. Even those few rockets were likely fired by smaller militant groups not under Hamas’ control. In short, Hamas abided by the truce—a fact Israel recognized during those months. On November 5th, Israel itself broke the truce by launching a military operation that killed six Hamas gunmen.

On the moral level, too, the terror Israel unleashed on the Palestinian population is indefensible. A total of 23 Israelis were killed by Palestinian rockets from November 2001 to June 2008, according to a pro-Israel website. During the Gaza “war,” a total of three Israeli civilians were killed by rockets. If Israel’s recent rapid-fire slaughter of 600 civilians is “justified” by rockets that caused the death of a small number of Israeli civilians, then—applying Israel’s own logic—is Hamas not now more “justified” in continuing to launch those rockets than ever before?

How can the Israeli establishment claim the moral high ground if it borrows from the Hamas formula but ups its application of the deadly dosage one-hundred fold?

Blaming the victim

Israel’s apologists would respond here with their second argument: it is not Israel, but Hamas, that is responsible for Israel’s killing.

This, too, is specious.

Perhaps it is quaint to insist on ideas that slip out of fashion at convenient intervals, but it should be an accepted principle that those who do the killing should be held responsible for it. Israel’s partisans insist Israel is an exception (is Israel ever not an exception?) because Hamas “hides among civilians” or “uses civilians as shields” or “fires from civilian areas,” thus absolving the attacker of culpability for civilian deaths.

The force of historical truth again intercedes. The people living in Gaza’s squalid refugee camps are not there by choice or because of Hamas: they are trapped by Israel. Ethnically cleansed when Israel stole their lands in 1948, they fled to the tiny strip, which borders the sea. Then Gaza, too, was captured by Israel in 1967, leaving the people occupied by the Israeli military and surrounded by radical Jewish settlers who took the stolen land.

When this occupation “ended” in 2005 after decades of humiliation, the jailer simply moved from inside to outside the cell to better manage the inmates. Most of the Jewish settlers relocated to more stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank and Israel imposed a full-scale siege on Gaza itself as a form of collective punishment when Gazans elected Hamas, as the alternative choice, Fatah, was hopelessly venal.

The siege destroyed the economy and was never lifted even during the ceasefire. Israel barred Palestinians entry into Israel for employment, closed the sea route, and shut off fuel and food aid at will, inducing widespread suffering in one of the most densely-populated spaces on earth. One Israeli official boasted of the devastating effect in 2006, “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Let them suffer, the Israelis said at the time, but do not let them die. That would come later.

Even the Vatican, not often inclined to pro-Muslim utterances, was recently moved to describe Gaza as a “concentration camp.”

Thus while Israel’s apologists argue that Israel should be cleared of responsibility for civilian deaths because Hamas “chose” to engage in “civilian areas”, the truth is that the Palestinians had no choice of any areas—they are trapped within the confines of the cage Israel kicked them into by dint of ethnic cleansing, occupation, and the siege.

Even on the street level, Israel has herded Palestinian civilians for easy killing. Several extended families in one part of Gaza, Zeitoun, tell the same story: soldiers forced family members to congregate in one building, fired at it, and massacred the fleeing inhabitants even as they emerged with white flags in hand. Breaking army orders, one Israeli soldier who was in Zeitoun confessed to a British newspaper that his unit had been instructed to “fire on anything that moves.” The unit was told to “shoot first and ask questions later,” he said.

Israel did not provide Hamas with an empty meadow in Switzerland on which to duel. It did not bestow Hamas with its state-of the-art American weaponry to even the odds. It did not give civilians any exit avenues before, during, or after the “fighting.” It even began its bombardment mid-day when children were out in the open switching classes. Israel, far from concerning itself with the fate of civilians, created a dense killing corridor over a period of decades and took advantage of it.

One can argue that even in the most difficult circumstances, militant groups should do their best to avoid mingling with the civilian population during active fighting. If the majority of Palestinian civilian casualties had occurred because Hamas was grabbing civilians left and right to use as shields, there should be abundant evidence.

But where is this evidence? For all its sophisticated spying equipment, satellites, reconnaissance drones, and cameras, the Israeli government has never produced any compelling proof of such a pattern. In fact, Israel officially banned reporters from even entering Gaza during its operation. Why hide the horrific practices of Hamas from the world’s eyes?

The answer, of course, is that Israel was hiding its own horrors instead. In the few cases where this was not possible—where international institutions, such as the UN, independent relief agencies, and Reuters reporters, were involved—a pattern of a different kind emerged: Israel blew up civilians and civilian supplies, agency officials decried the attack, and Israel accused Hamas of having fired from nearby. Each time, agency representatives emphatically stated that Hamas was not operating in the area and demanded proof of Israel’s claims. None was ever forthcoming.

Only in one case—the killing of 40 civilians taking shelter at a UN building—did Israel confidently claim that it had proof of Hamas fighters firing rockets nearby. But the Israeli military soon changed its story and was forced to invent a new excuse.

As if that weren’t enough, it turns out that Israel itself repeatedly used Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Even in these specific cases where Israel should have exercised restraint for sheer public-relations purposes, it displayed absolutely none. Such is the arrogance afforded overwhelming power. We can only imagine under what cruel circumstances most Palestinians, far removed from international institutions or Western journalists, were ground to dust.

This combination of history and ground reality demolishes the credibility of Israel’s excuse. For a bully to blame the victim is one thing—commonplace, even, among colonizers. But for Israel to expel its victims from their homes, force them into inhuman camps, and then fault them for dying en masse when Israel decided to kill them in a cramped cage of its own design—this is a truly novel achievement in the sphere of cruelty.

Israel is therefore no less responsible for killing civilians than slaughterhouse machinery is responsible for processing cattle.

Killing civilians as a strategy

The mountain of excuses offered by Israel strikes the honest observer as too tortuous to trek and too steep to scale. Puzzling and poring over its rationalizations is an endeavor that yields diminishing returns.

It is time to consider an obvious alternative to the official line: Israel did not “accidentally” kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians while “targeting” Hamas for launching aimless rockets. Rather, Israel purposely targeted all Palestinians because it wanted to teach them a severe lesson for not being defeated after 60 years of ongoing brutalization. The pile of civilian corpses produced by the invasion was not accidental—it was integral—to the administration of this lesson.

Advocating and applauding this approach last month was Thomas Friedman, who occasionally comments on Middle East affairs to puff and pout on Israel’s behalf from his privileged perch.

Responding to the growing perception that Israel’s stated aim of destroying Hamas outright was not feasible, Friedman defended Israel’s Gaza strategy in a January 14th New York Times column by approvingly pointing to the example of Lebanon.

In Friedman’s view, the 2006 Lebanon campaign, during which Israel killed about 1,000 Lebanese civilians and 250 Hezbollah fighters, convinced Hezbollah that trading blows with Israel was a bad idea.

To dismantle Friedman’s fantasies about Lebanon—what he smugly calls “the education of Hezbollah”—would require another article. What is important for our purposes is to see how this “education” was carried out.

Hezbollah, Friedman asserts, “challenged Israel to inflict massive civilian casualties in order to hit Hezbollah fighters.” These civilians, he continues, were “intertwined” with Hezbollah, and were also, by the way, “the families and employers of the militants.”

Translation: the guilty mingled with the innocent and the innocent were practically guilty.

Therefore, concludes Friedman, “the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians…” Israel was forced to inflict “substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large” in order to faze Hezbollah.

Translation: the only thing Israel could do—“it was not pretty, but it was logical”, Friedman avers—was to strike at civilian populations and buildings in order to teach those Arabs a lesson (“educate”) about the consequences of raising their heads.

This refreshing way of thinking neatly solves any moral problems Israel’s actions might pose.

The innocent, as we have seen, were not really innocent: they were somehow related to the militants or related to someone who might have employed militants at the local bakery. Therefore, it was permissible to kill women and children as part of a careful calculation to inflict “enough pain” and make militants think twice about future resistance.

Yes, the “education” of the Arabs is not “pretty”—but who said tuition was free?

That Israel intentionally terrorizes and kills civilians should not surprise honest observers. Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s National Security Council, bluntly stated what Friedman, with his penchant for unctuous prose, could not bring himself to openly say about the 2006 war:

“The only good thing that happened in the last war was the relative damage caused to Lebanon’s population…The destruction of thousands of homes of ‘innocents’ preserved some of Israel’s deterrent power. The only way to prevent another war is to make it clear that should one break out, Lebanon may be razed to the ground.”

Can any honest person describe Eiland’s logic of mass terror as “self-defense?”

That this logic was also applied in Gaza was confirmed by the news side of the New York Times. In an elliptical January 18th analysis, Times’ correspondent Ethan Bronner, a pro-Israel journalist, writes about Hamas’ tactical caution during the fighting:

“The caution is at least in part because Hamas wants to keep ruling in Gaza, not return to its previous role as a pure resistance movement. Therefore, Israeli officials say, an offensive that caused average people to suffer put pressure on Hamas in real and specific ways.”

This can easily be rephrased as, “Israeli officials launched an offensive that caused average people to suffer in order to put pressure on Hamas in real and specific ways.” Friedman’s prayers were answered—and Eiland’s ideology, implemented.

The Times also quotes an anonymous top Israeli military official as saying, “Hamas is the dominant organization in Gaza. They are the regime and feel very connected to the people. They do not want to lose that connection to the people.”

How does one make Hamas lose “that connection to the people” in an offensive that “caused average people to suffer?” The question answers itself: kill the people.

Bronner writes that the logic behind the punishing offensive is popularly referred to within Israel as the Hebrew equivalent of “the boss has lost it”—a kind of “calculated rage” that “evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.”

It is an “image” that long ago consumed Israel proper.

A madman is by definition someone who has gone insane. Israel is a state founded on ethnic cleansing—a massive attack on civilians. Instead of confronting its original sin, it has simply repeated the same crime in various ways, each time believing that it will crush the Palestinians once and for all. Repeating the same action over and over again while expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity.

The reality of a “madman who cannot be controlled” is a traumatic one. The madman declares civilians and combatants alike guilty and subjects them all to “education” through indiscriminate killing. Though the madman arrogates the right to determine the guilt of others for acts that are both in response to and dwarfed by his own far greater atrocities, the madman himself goes unquestioned. Like a convicted batterer presiding over the trial and sentencing of his victims, the Israeli “madman” judges and punishes the very people it has brutalized and dispossessed.

Unfortunately, the prevailing attitude of allowing Israel to rain down its “calculated rage” on Palestinians is applauded not only by the Israeli military and Times newspaper columnists, but also by many American liberals, whose moral senses are conveniently swallowed up by the same serpent that slips away with their spines whenever the subject of the Israeli settler-state presents itself.

Who, then, will stand up for the Palestinians? Who will control the madman?

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam blogs about America and Islam at Crossing the Crescent and writes about American Muslim identity for WireTap magazine. Co-founder of Left Hook, a youth journal that ran from Nov. 2003 to March 2006, he works as a communications coordinator for an anti-domestic violence agency in the NYC area. He can be reached at: junaidalam1 AT gmail.com. Read other articles by M. Junaid.

Tanker Threat to B.C. Coast and Waterways

A letter from Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline (Feb. 7) suggests that supertankers carrying crude oil through the Douglas Channel would be business as usual

by Ingmar Lee

To the editor of the Victoria Times-Colonist
Re: "Tankers won't be travelling Inside Passage route," letter,
Feb. 7.

image: Condensate laden tanker burns following a collision in February

Steven Greenaway, writing on behalf of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, uses an old-school propaganda trick to side-track concern about the giant supertanker traffic-jam that Enbridge envisions for the crystal clear fiords of the Central Coast.

Greenaway tosses out a confusing red herring, as though the chosen access route for hundreds of tankers was the issue here.

Of course it makes no difference to the 80 per cent of British Columbians who oppose super-tanker traffic off our coast, whether through the Inside Passage, or via Principe Channel, Caamano Sound or Douglas Channel.

British Columbians are very clear. We will not accept oil tanker activity in our coastal waters, no matter which route. Scientific consensus demands that we take action to drastically reduce greenhouse emissions. We are in a global ecological emergency and must not burn more dirty oil. And we don't want the inevitable Exxon-sized oil slick here.

People on the Central Coast are gearing up for the battle of our lives to oppose the Enbridge Gateway mega-project. We love our coast and will defend it, especially from giant corporations who try to hoodwink the public by tossing out red herrings.

Ingmar Lee

Shearwater

A Doctor's Examination of the Wounds of Gaza

The Wounds of Gaza
February 2nd 2009
source

Two Surgeons from the UK, Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and Dr Swee Ang, managed to get into Gaza during the Israeli invasion. Here they describe their experiences, share their views, and conclude that the people of Gaza are extremely vulnerable and defenseless in the event of another attack.

The wounds of Gaza are deep and multi-layered. Are we talking about the Khan Younis massacre of 5,000 in 1956 or the execution of 35,000 prisoners of war by Israel in 1967? Yet more wounds of the First Intifada, when civil disobedience by an occupied people against the occupiers resulted in massive wounded and hundreds dead? We also cannot discount the 5,420 wounded in southern Gaza alone since 2000. Hence what we are referring to below are only that of the invasion as of 27 December 2008,

Over the period of 27 December 2008 to the ceasefire of 18 Jan 2009, it was estimated that a million and a half tons of explosives were dropped on Gaza Strip. Gaza is 25 miles by 5 miles and home to 1.5 million people. This makes it the most crowded area in the whole world. Prior to this Gaza has been completely blockaded and starved for 50 days. In fact since the Palestinian election Gaza has been under total or partial blockade for several years.

On the first day of the invasion, 250 persons were killed. Every single police station in Gaza was bombed killing large numbers of police officers. Having wiped out the police force attention was turned to non government targets. Gaza was bombed from the air by F16 and Apache helicopters, shelled from the sea by Israeli gunboats and from the land by tank artillery. Many schools were reduced to rubble, including the American School of Gaza, 40 mosques, hospitals, UN buildings, and of course 21,000 homes, 4,000 of which were demolished completely. It is estimated that 100,000 people are now homeless.

Israeli weapons
The weapons used apart from conventional bombs and high explosives also include unconventional weapons of which at least 4 categories could be identified.

* Phosphorus Shells and bombs

The bombs dropped were described by eye witnesses as exploding at high altitude scattering a large canopy of phosphorus bomblets which cover a large area.

During the land invasion, eyewitnesses describe the tanks shelling into homes first with a conventional shell. Once the walls are destroyed, a second shell - a phosphorus shell is then shot into the homes. Used in this manner the phosphorus explodes and burns the families and the homes. Many charred bodies were found among burning phosphorus particles.

One area of concern is the phosphorus seems to be in a special stabilizing agent. This results in the phosphorus being more stable and not completely burning out. Residues still cover the fields, playground and compounds. They ignite when picked up by curious kids, or produce fumes when farmers return to water their fields. One returning farming family on watering their field met with clouds of fumes producing epistaxis. Thus the phosphorus residues probably treated with a stabilizer also act as anti-personnel weapons against children and make the return to normal life difficult without certain hazards.

Surgeons from hospitals are also reporting cases where after primary laparotomy for relatively small wounds with minimal contamination find on second look laparotomy increasing areas of tissue necrosis at about 3 days. Patients then become gravely ill and by about 10 days those patients needing a third relook encounter massive liver necrosis. This may or may not be accompanied by generalized bleeding , kidney failure and heart failure and death. Although acidosis, liver necrosis and sudden cardiac arrest due to hypocalcemia are known to be a complication of white phosphorus it is not possible to attribute these complications as being due to phosphorus alone.

There is real urgency to analyze and identify the real nature of this modified phosphorus as to its long term effect on the people of Gaza. There is also urgency in collecting and disposing of the phosphorus residues littering the entire Gaza Strip. As they give off toxic fumes when coming into contact with water, once the rain falls the whole area would be polluted with acid phosphorus fumes. Children should be warned not to handle and play with these phosphorus residues.

* Heavy Bombs

The use of DIME (dense inert material explosives) were evident, though it is unsure whether depleted uranium were used in the south. In the civilian areas, surviving patients were found to have limbs truncated by DIME, since the stumps apart from being characteristically cut off in guillotine fashion also fail to bleed. Bomb casing and shrapnel are extremely heavy.

* Fuel Air Explosives

Bunker busters and implosion bombs have been used . There are buildings especially the 8 storey Science and Technology Building of the Islamic University of Gaza which had been reduced to a pile of rubble no higher than 5-6 feet.

* Silent Bombs

People in Gaza described a silent bomb which is extremely destructive. The bomb arrives as a silent projectile at most with a whistling sound and creates a large area where all objects and living things are vaporized with minimal trace. We are unable to fit this into conventional weapons but the possibility of new particle weapons being tested should be suspected.

* Executions

Survivors describe Israeli tanks arriving in front of homes asking residents to come out. Children, old people and women would come forward and as they were lined up they were just fired on and killed. Families have lost tens of their members through such executions. The deliberate targeting of unarmed children and women is well documented by human right groups in the Gaza Strip over the past month.

* Targeting of ambulances

Thirteen ambulances had been fired upon killing drivers and first aid personnel in the process of rescue and evacuation of the wounded.

* Cluster bombs

The first patients wounded by cluster were brought into Abu Yusef Najjar Hospital. Since more than 50% of the tunnels have been destroyed, Gaza has lost part of her lifeline. These tunnels contrary to popular belief are not for weapons, though small light weapons could have been smuggled through them. However they are the main stay of food and fuel for Gaza. Palestinians are beginning to tunnel again. However it became clear that cluster bombs were dropped on to the Rafah border and the first was accidentally set of by tunneling. Five burns patients were brought in after setting off a booby trap kind of device.

Death toll
As of 25 January 2009, the death toll was estimated at 1,350 with the numbers increasing daily. This is due to the severely wounded continuing to die in hospitals. 60% of those killed were children.

Severe injuries
The severely injured numbered 5,450, with 40% being children. These are mainly large burns and polytrauma patients. Single limb fractures and walking wounded are not included in these figures.

Through our conversations with doctors and nurses the word holocaust and catastrophe were repeatedly used. The medical staff all bear the psychological trauma of the past month living though the situation and dealing with mass casualties which swamped their casualties and operating rooms. Many patients died in the Accident and Emergency Department while awaiting treatment. In a district hospital, the orthopaedic surgeon carried out 13 external fixations in less than a day.

It is estimated that of the severely injured, 1,600 will suffer permanently disabilities. These include amputations, spinal cord injuries, head injuries, large burns with crippling contractures.

Special factors
The death and injury toll is especially high in this recent assault due to several factors:

* No escape: As Gaza is sealed by Israeli troops, no one can escape the bombardment and the land invasion. There is simply no escape. Even within the Gaza Strip itself, movement from north to south is impossible as Israeli tanks had cut the northern half of Gaza from the south. Compare this with the situation in Lebanon 1982 and 2006, when it was possible for people to escape from an area of heavy bombardment to an area of relative calm - there was no such is option for Gaza.
* Gaza is very densely populated. It is eerie to see that the bombs used by Israel have been precision bombs. They have a hundred percent hit rate on buildings which are crowded with people. Examples are the central market, police stations. Schools, the UN compounds used as a safety shelter from bombardment, mosques (40 of them destroyed), and the homes of families who thought they were safe as there were no combatants in them and high rise flats where a single implosion bomb would destroy multiple families. This pattern of consistent targeting of civilians makes one suspect that the military targets are but collateral damage, while civilians are the primary targets.
* The quantity and quality of the ammunition being used as described above.
* Gaza’s lack of defense against the modern weapons of Israel. She has no tanks, no planes, no anti-aircraft missiles against the invading army. We experienced that first hand in a minor clash of Israeli tank shells versus Palestinian AK47 return fire. The forces were simply unmatched.
* Absence of well constructed bomb shelters for civilians. Unfortunately these will also be no match for bunker busters possessed by the Israeli Army.

Conclusion
Taking the above points into consideration, the next assault on Gaza would be just as disastrous. The people of Gaza are extremely vulnerable and defenseless in the event of another attack. If the International Community is serious about preventing such a large scale of deaths and injuries in the future, it will have to develop a some sort of defense force for Gaza. Otherwise, many more vulnerable civilans will continue to die.

Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and Dr Swee Ang


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6 Responses to “The Wounds of Gaza”

1. Dr Swee Ang Says:
February 2nd, 2009 at 7:57 pm

Since we wrote this account, we have spoken to senior Palestinian surgeons who described to us strange “penetrating wounds without shrapnels”. The wound track in such patients also has clean sharp margins. Some of them treated the wounds as clean wounds but after several days - mostly 3 days onwards there is necrosis of tissue around the wound track. In the case of skin, it can take the form of abscesses. In the abdomen there are extension of organ necrosis around the track such as liver necrosis, gangrenous bowel and kidney damage. We suspect these wounds are caused by Tungsten DIME explosives.

In experimental animals tungsten is highly carcinogenic, malignant tumours appearing around 5-7 months. However the long term carcinogenic effect on human is not known yet.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza is calling for any one who has shrapnel wounds which are unusual or does not heal to present themselves to any Health clinic.
2. Dr Swee Ang Says:
February 2nd, 2009 at 8:15 pm

The lesson from these wounds without shrapnel is that Tungsten toxicity should always be suspected and primary wide excision of the wound track is mandatory to minimise tissue reaction to it. They must not be confused with what is traditionally thought to be clean cut wounds and merely washed out and closed.

Tissue biopsies are crucial if we are to understand more about these wounds. There is a pressing urgency given that there is a potential carcinogenic effect. DIME as an explosive is highly anti-personnel and can be used safely by an invading neighbouring army without the fear of the side effect of radioactive fallout which other radioactive warheads might carry. Its effect is localised to the target population only - in this case the people of Gaza, with no danger to its neighbour, cf nuclear weapons.

Free Palestine Protest: Vancouver Jan. 3, 2009

Harper Budget: A Profound Lack of Vision for Forestry

Federal Budget - A Profound Lack of Vision for Forestry

By Peter Ewart & Dawn Hemingway
Sunday, February 08, 2009 03:45 AM

Federal budget – A profound lack of vision for forestry
By Peter Ewart & Dawn Hemingway

It is ground zero for forestry in this country. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, over 200 mills have been closed, and many companies are teetering on the edge of shut down or bankruptcy.

This crisis began long before the current economic downturn, and, as a result, many workers and forestry-based communities in Canada have been facing this grim situation for two or three years, or even longer.

They have made repeated calls for assistance over these last several years, but little has been forthcoming from the Federal Government. Now the Government says that, with its new budget, it is ready to take “action.”

Why has it taken so long to respond while thousands of laid-off workers and dozens of forestry communities have been “twisting in the wind” over these last several years? Only Stephen Harper and his government know the answer to that one.

In any case, the Federal Government has now put forth its much anticipated budget. So what is the verdict on it?

The first thing that we would say is that there is a profound lack of vision for the forest industry as a whole. This is reflected in the fact that the amount designated for “forestry” is a paltry $170 million (allocated mainly for research into new products and marketing) out of a total budget, according to the Ministry of Finance, of over $50 billion . That amounts to less than ½ of 1%. Looking at the budget document itself, the section devoted to forestry is barely ½ page in length, contained within a 360 page document. Is there a message being sent here?

In any case, if the Government had a genuine vision for forestry, it would start with the workers, contractors and truck drivers who every day work hard, in often difficult and dangerous conditions, shipping, planting, harvesting, and processing forest products.

These workers who, through their labour over many decades, are the source of a substantial part of the wealth of the country, have been decimated by massive, unprecedented layoffs. These layoffs have caused great hardship for many workers and their families, resulting in loss of homes, property, savings, and well-being.

Various economic analysts are suggesting that this crisis could go on for several years or more. Yet, the Government has only increased the maximum Employment Insurance coverage for these laid-off workers by five weeks to 50 weeks (for the Workshare Program, the weeks have been extended by 14 weeks to 52). Furthermore, the Government has not removed the two week waiting period nor has it raised benefits even by one penny, even though it is well aware that being laid off is a time of great economic dislocation and need for workers and their families.

For forestry based communities, the lack of vision is just as apparent. Several years ago, the Federal Government promised $1 billion over ten years to help communities cope with the devastating effects of the massive pine beetle infestation in the Interior and North of British Columbia.

But, poof! Now you see it, now you don’t. As Gord Hoekstra notes in the PG Citizen (Jan. 28), the Federal Government has indicated in its new budget that the pine beetle funding “will be put on hold for the next two years” and folded into a $1 billion “Community Adjustment Fund” which will be open to all communities across the country. So it appears that, contrary to what Conservative MPs are saying, communities in Northern BC affected by the pine beetle will get little or no new benefit from this Community Adjustment Fund, just repackaged old funding.

The fact that the Federal Government can arbitrarily and so easily suspend an entire ten year, $1 billion forestry funding program that is already in place reveals that it had no vision in the first place as to where forestry communities and the industry itself should go.

A further problem with the “new” funding to communities is that a lot of it requires that municipalities and provincial governments also put up funding for projects. How are communities like Mackenzie, Fort St. James, Kapuskasing and Grand Falls that are already reeling from several years of mill closures supposed to raise substantial amounts of money? Indeed, it appears that the Federal Government is not only planning to go into massive debt over five years ($84 billion), it wants to drag municipalities and provinces down with it. No wonder a number of mayors across the country are worried.

We have entered volatile even tumultuous times, when the livelihood of entire communities and future of entire industries could be at stake. The one lesson that comes out of this Federal Government budget debacle, is that forestry workers and forestry-based communities need to develop their own vision for the years ahead and fight for it. There is no other way forward.

Peter Ewart is a writer and college instructor who can be contacted at: peter.ewart@shaw.ca. Dawn Hemingway is a writer and university professor who can be contacted at: hemingwa@unbc.ca . They are both based in Prince George, BC.
http://www.opinion250.com/blog/view/11929/1/federal+budget+-a+profound+lack+of+vision+for+forestry