A recipe for creating terrorists
February 19th, 2009 § 1 Comment
‘Rimington is right,’ writes Seumas Milne. ‘This is a recipe for creating terrorists. New Labour’s sins in the war on terror are catching up with it,’ he writes, ‘but ministers want to shift blame on to the Muslim community’.
I never imagined I would say this, but Stella Rimington is right. The former head of MI5 who made her career running the security service’s dirtiest operations in the 1980s, against the miners’ union and the IRA, has warned that the government has given terrorists the chance to find “greater justification” by making people feel they “live in fear and under a police state”. Naturally, ministers described her remarks as nonsense and accused her of playing “into the hands of our enemies”.
But the damage is done. To have the woman once hailed as Britain’s Queen of Spies accusing the government of recklessly counter-productive authoritarianism carries a special weight – and incidentally turns the traditional relationship between Labour and the secret state on its head. Rimington went further, denouncing the US for Guantánamo and torture, but reverted to type by insisting MI5 “doesn’t do that”.
Afghan Pitfalls
February 18th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Into the Chasm. M. Shahid Alam offers a reality check to the new imperialists in Washington.
As the United States prepares to escalate its eight-year war against the Taliban, it might be useful to weigh its chances of success.
Consider, first, the fate of three previous invasions of Afghanistan by two great European powers, Britain and Soviet Union, since the nineteenth century.
These invasions ended in defeat – for the Europeans.
St Andrews University Student Occupation
February 18th, 2009 § 6 Comments
Having presented a petition signed by over 30 academics and 700 students to the Principal of the University, around 50 St Andrews University students have occupied Lower College Hall in protest at the University’s links with the Israeli occupation.
We, the concerned students of the University of St. Andrews demand that the university condemns the illegal bombing and genocide in Gaza and Israel’s indiscriminate targeting of civilians. In particular, as an educational establishment we urge that it shows practical solidarity with the Islamic university of Gaza and other schools and colleges damaged during the bombing.
« Read the rest of this entry »
Cancel ZF Propaganda Effort ‘Israel Day of Science’
February 18th, 2009 § 1 Comment
On the 16th the following letter appeared in the Guardian calling on two UK science museums to cancel Israel’s Day of Science in light of the attack on Gaza.
Today a letter in defence was published by Clive Margolis. He believes that Israel shouldn’t be accused of criminality “unless the facts have been put before a court of law and found to be true.” Clive should examine the verdict of the International Court of Justice which, in 2004, found Israeli colonisation of Occupied Palestinian Territory illegal: “Recalling that the Security Council described Israel’s policy of establishing settlements in that territory as a ‘flagrant violation’ of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Court finds that those settlements have been established in breach of international law.“ The whole action in Gaza is a crime in defence of 60 years of illegal colonisation and occupation. Not to mention that many of those refugees bombed in Gaza have been denied their right, enshrined in International human rights law and UN Resolution 194, to return to their homes in Israel from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948. The smaller war crimes he disputes are of lesser significance and I’m not sure what more evidence he needs than the photographs of White Phosphorus landing on civilians.
The Socialist Worker reports that the Stop the War Coalition and activists in the UCU union in Manchester are mobilising to stop this insulting event from happen at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi). Could we be in for more occupations?
Science should not be used as a PR tool to gloss over the crimes of Apartheid Israel.
Quite extraordinarily, the Science Museum in London and the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry have both been made available (on 3 and 5 March respectively) for an event called “Israel Day of Science”. The museums argue they are not sponsoring the event, but have merely hired out their premises. This subtle distinction is unlikely to be appreciated by the many thousands of all ages and faiths who have repeatedly taken to the streets round the country to protest against Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
The Independent’s Knee and Jerk
February 18th, 2009 § 6 Comments
Hugo Chavez’s activities usually elicit a knee-jerk response from most of the British media. The title of the latest Independent’s leading article summarizes it well: “A perilous new twist in the Venezuelan revolution“. Now consider, Venezuela conducts an open and fair referendum on the term limits on the president, and this is termed “perilous” and “… hope that, for the sake of the Venezuelan people, it does not end up dragging the country back into the mire of authoritarianism.” Why should a referendum be construed as a peril? If anything a referendum is a bona fide democratic procedure and thus it should enhance the democratic nature of Venezuelan society.
The Independent’s editorial writers state: “The scrapping of term limits will do nothing to help build confidence in the rule of law. All free nations need firm checks on executive power. Developing nations like Venezuela need these checks just as much as richer countries.” Why do they criticise a Venezuelan referendum meant to expand term limits while in the UK there are no term limits at all for Prime Ministers, and most other political offices? Technically, in the UK, the same Prime Minister could cling on to power for decades, but, for some unspecified reason, it is only when Chavez seeks an extension of his term that there is a problem with it. And is the extension of president’s term really detrimental in Venezuela’s observance of “the rule of law”? And when was the last time these same editorial writers pontificated about Hosni Mubarak’s investiture-for-life as Egypt’s decades-long president? The simple answer is: they haven’t done so. In the case of corrupt and dictatorial “presidents” who cling on to power for decades, e.g., Hosni Mubarak, or the autocratic monarchs of the Gulf States, the editorial writers are mostly silent. It is clear that a double standard seems to apply.
“Barack of Afpakia”
February 18th, 2009 § 1 Comment
The United Nations is reporting that civilian deaths in Afghanistan increased by 39 percent last year. It claims 39 percent of all the deaths were caused by coalition forces. However, this is clearly an underestimate, since most of these figures are based on official accounts which, as the British government’s insidious attempts to discredit Rachel Reid of Human Rights Watch by enlisting tabloids against her revealed, are an underestimate. The war is increasingly popular. So, as Robert Dreyfuss reveals, Obama has to triangulate by falling back on the support of ‘Bush Republicans and neocons’.
Today’s Wall Street Journal suggests that if President Obama pursues his plans for stepping up the war in Afghanistan, he’ll have to fall back on the support of “Bush Republicans and neocons.” In its lead editorial, it says:
Already, canaries on the left are asking a la columnist Richard Reeves, “Why are we in Afghanistan?” The President’s friends at Newsweek are helpfully referring to “Obama’s Vietnam.” Mr. Obama may find himself relying on some surprising people for wartime support — to wit, Bush Republicans and neocons.
The warfare of inequality management
February 18th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
In this excellent article, Jimmy Johnson explains how the IDF’s long-standing experience with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to quell Palestinian resistance is becoming a central technology of state violence designed to monitor, supress and, if necessary, destroy those social forces around the world which oppose “institutions of 
hegemony and power that seek to keep systems of inequality more or less sustainable.” With the increasing concentration of the dispossessed majority in urban slums, “the pacification laboratory in Gaza, Nablus and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory will continue to be of use for the forces occupying Kabul and Baghdad today, and those who might aim for Karachi, Lagos, Caracas and other centers of ‘desperation and anger’ tomorrow.”
Aeronautics Defense Systems, based in the Israeli city of Yavne, was recently awarded a contract by the Dutch Ministry of Defense “to supply unmanned air vehicle capacity to Dutch troops serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.” [1] The Netherlands is not the only nation to employ Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in foreign occupation. They are also utilized by Canadian, US, UK and Australian forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their foreign sale has developed largely because of significant use in the wars against and occupations of Lebanon and Palestine. A variety of Israeli firms are developing new unmanned aerial, terrestrial and nautical vehicles. As these are proven in combat, here it can be expected that they too will be exported to foreign forces.
Whitehall devised torture policy for terror detainees
February 17th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
It has now been revealled that Miliband’s officials solicited a letter from the US state department to back up his claim that if the evidence [of 42 undisclosed US documents which might contain information on UK interrogation policy] were disclosed, Washington might stop sharing intelligence with Britain.
A policy governing the interrogation of terrorism suspects in Pakistan that led to British citizens and residents being tortured was devised by MI5 lawyers and figures in government, according to evidence heard in court.
« Read the rest of this entry »
Rob Corddry on New Journalism
February 17th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
The Daily Show classics.
$ecret$ of New Journali$m $ucce$$ Say goodbye to Rob Corddry of The Daily Show, and say hello to Dino Ironbody of Freedom-Liberty News.
Criminalising Resistance
February 17th, 2009 § 9 Comments
Following yesterday’s article on the criminalisation of dissent by Seumas Milne in The Guardian (posted below), The Guardian today reveals that the Government’s new ‘counterterrorism’ strategy due next month called Contest 2 will define as ‘extremist’ anyone who believes in ‘armed resistance, anywhere in the world. This would include armed resistance by Palestinians against the Israeli military.’ It would also include those who ‘fail to condemn the killing of British soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.’
The gall of this plan is quite breathtaking. Not content merely with providing political and material support to Israel’s illegal occupation, not to mention launching illegal wars and occupations of its own, the British Government will now explicitly label all resistance to these illegal and unethical projects as ‘extremist’.
This represents a shift from the misuse of anti-terrorist legislation to attack and smear organised resistance as violent or as being infilitrated by violent extremists, towards the active repression of citizens who oppose the policy or ideology of the British Government, apparently even pacifists. A Whitehall source told BBC Panorama that Contest 2 is a “move away from just challenging violent extremism. We now believe that we should challenge people who are against democracy and state institutions “
And of course there is no suggestion that ‘Contest 2′ will cover those who support atrocities by the British or Israeli state. Nothing extreme about massacring Arabs obviously. And those who are “against demoracy”? How about the EU’s response to the election of Hamas?
