Month: May 2009

Despite Smiles, Obama, Netanyahu Seem Far Apart

When 'Bibi' met Obama

Here’s Jim Lobe’s (IPS) analysis of yesterday’s meeting between Obama and Netanyahu:

While reaffirming the “special relationship” between their two countries, U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared unable to bridge major differences in their approaches to Iran and Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts following their White House meeting here Monday.

And while Obama repeatedly stressed the importance of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Netanyahu never uttered the phrase or alluded to the possibility of a Palestinian state during a 30-minute press appearance with the U.S. president after their meeting in the Oval Office.

While Obama said he may be prepared to impose additional sanctions against Iran early next year if diplomatic efforts to persuade it to curb its nuclear programme fail to make progress, he refused to set what he called “an arbitrary deadline.” Israeli officials had pressed Washington for an early October deadline.

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Reinstatement of military commissions a ‘war crime’

Francis Boyle
Francis Boyle

Obama’s outrageous decision to reinstate military commissions at Guantanamo has come as a hard blow to human rights campaigners in the US. Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois puts the legal implications of the reinstatement of these “kangaroo courts” in stark terms: “The laws of war would permit (Guantanamo detainees) to be prosecuted in either a U.S. Federal District Court organised under Article III of the United States Constitution or in a military court-martial proceeding organised under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. To do otherwise would be a war crime.” William Fischer of IPS reports.

Human rights advocates are furious at President Barack Obama’s decision to prosecute some Guantanamo detainees through the same military commissions he criticised during his campaign as a “flawed” system that “has failed to convict anyone of a terrorist act since the 9/11 attacks”.

The White House said Friday that the commissions would be used to prosecute terrorism suspects who can’t be tried in the civilian criminal justice system, but added that detainees would have expanded legal rights to make the proceedings fairer. The military commission system, rebuked several times by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional, was a centrepiece of the George W. Bush administration’s strategy for fighting “the global war on terror”.

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Obama’s Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice – James Petras

“The Deltas are psychos… You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.

The point of the ‘Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT’s ‘counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance.

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Spinelessness and hypocrisy

Any colonial or imperial project requires ample doses of hypocrisy, cynicism and sadism. In times of on-going wars and dispossession these ingredients are in ample supply. Media Lens, a great media analysis project, specializes in highlighting the media’s role in peddling the hypocrisy and hiding the cynicism or sadism of the major powers and their sidekicks. The latest Media Lens release analyses the release of an abridged version of the UN Board of Inquiry report into the Israeli bombing of United Nations premises in Gaza (Dec. 2008 – Jan. 2009). The spineless Ban Ki Moon was party to the suppression of most of the report and blocking further investigations. Media Lens analyzes the way this event was spun or ignored.

Beholden to the big powers: Israel, Gaza and the UN

On December 27, 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a massive assault on Gaza. 22 days later, around 1,400 Palestinians, including over 300 children, and 13 Israelis were dead; about 5,000 Palestinians were wounded. Israeli forces bombed and shelled schools, medical centres, hospitals, ambulances, United Nations buildings (including UN schools), power plants, sewage plants, roads, bridges and civilian homes. This was described in much of the press as hitting “Hamas targets” (e.g. David Gardner, ‘U.S. accused of white phosphorus against Taliban’, Daily Mail, May 11, 2009).

Earlier this month, the UN announced the results of an inquiry into attacks on its buildings and personnel in Gaza. It concluded that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) were:

“involved in varying degrees of negligence or recklessness with regard to United Nations premises and to the safety of United Nations staff and other civilians within those premises, with consequent deaths, injuries, and extensive physical damage and loss of property.” (Donald Macintyre, ‘UN retreats after Israel hits out at Gaza report’, Independent, May 6, 2009)

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Two Plays for Gaza

For any readers in the London area, the Hackney Empire will be hosting a fund raising event on Wednesday for the Gaza Music School and Stop the War Coalition.  The evening will include a performance of the short play Seven Jewish Children (see previous post on PULSE).

U.S. stirs a hornet’s nest in Pakistan

Eric Margolis presents an overly idealized portrait of the Pakhtun but is otherwise astute in his analysis. One thing however needs to be made clear: while Margolis is right to point out that the government fails to make a distinction between Taliban and Pakhtun, the actual Taliban constitute a very small and radical minority within the larger Pakhtun nation. In the past they were completely marginal. If today they have turned into a political force requiring large scale military operation to tame them it testifies to the fact that the grievances run deeper and the way this operation has been conducted it will only confirm the view that this is a war on the indigent Pakhtuns, and is a war wage for the US. Despite the Pakistani elite’s embrace of the war as ‘our war’, let us not forget that it has taken the US invasion of Afghanistan, the drone attacks across the border, and the Pakistani military’s indiscriminate operations to turn a domestic nuisance into a national predicament.

PARIS — Pakistan finally bowed to Washington’s angry demands last week by unleashing its military against rebellious Pashtun tribesmen of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) — collectively mislabelled “Taliban” in the West.

The Obama administration had threatened to stop $2 billion US annual cash payments to bankrupt Pakistan’s political and military leadership and block $6.5 billion future aid, unless Islamabad sent its soldiers into Pakistan’s turbulent NWFP along the Afghan frontier.

The result was a bloodbath: Some 1,000 “terrorists” killed (read: mostly civilians) and 1.2 million people — most of Swat’s population — made refugees.

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Ausländer

Before Rage Against the Machine there was Living Colour, an all black comprising of four virtuoso musicians who recorded some of the most politically charged music of the late 80s and early 90s. The vocalist Corey Glover appeared in Oliver Stone’s Platoon (and contrary to what I wrote earlier based on an old Circus magazine article, has no relation to Danny Glover) and the guitarist Vernon Reid I’m told has divine relations. The bassist Doug Wimbish went on to play with guitar legend Joe Satriani and the drummer Will Calhoun was likewise an honored graduate of the Berkeley School of Music.

This anti-Fascist classic was inspired by the rampant anti-immigrant violence against Turks in Germany.

The war against Gaza continues; the siege is still in place

Journalists and politicians tend to refer mistakenly to the ongoing siege of Gaza as a “blockade”. The word “blockade” is a rather neutral and tepid term that doesn’t indicate that such policies can be part of warfare. On the other hand, the word “siege” clearly indicates that it is part of warfare or ethnic cleansing. The courageous Israeli journalist Amira Hass recently returned from a long stay in Gaza, and she makes it abundantly clear that the Israeli policies regarding what is allowed to enter Gaza amount to a siege. Toilet paper, shampoo, building materials, window panes… these are basic necessities of life and living, yet they are barred from entering Gaza. Most houses in Gaza today don’t have window panes; they were destroyed during the Gazan Massacre in January 2009 and they haven’t been fixed. The nature of banned products also renders the usual description of the tunnels between Gaza and Egypt as used for “smuggling” as simply absurd. The tunnels are merely “siege busting” means to enable the population to survive. Furthermore, Sam Bahour, the Palestinian businessman and writer living in Ramallah comments on Amira Hass’ article:

As a prelude to this article, I should note that dear friends in Gaza are telling me that Israeli warships along the coast of Gaza are closer than ever and can be clearly seen by the naked eye, which is not usually the case. They shell warning shots all day, really creating a renewed sense of fear that round two (or is that 1,002) of the onslaught against Gaza is about to begin any day.
No headlines does not mean no war crimes.

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Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies

Necessary Illusions is a Noam Chomsky Massey Lecture from 1988, the same year as his groundbreaking text Manufacturing Consent was first published.

The lecture examines “the ways in which thought and understanding are shaped in the interest of domestic privilege” and a year later was developed into a book of the same name.

For more on this topic I’d recommend the two texts already mentioned along with with Chomsky’s Media Control and, for a UK perspective, A Century of Spin by David Miller and William Dinan.
necessary illusions

Necessary Illusions (53:58): MP3

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EU obligated to prosecute war crime suspects

An excellent article by Daniel Machover and Adri Nieuwhof on the failure of most EU member states to invoke the principle of universal jurisdication when suspected Israeli (and other) war criminals enter their territory, as called for by the 4th Geneva Convention. For more background info on EU-Israel and attempts by Israel to push for an ‘upgrade’ of existing relations, see this article by Pepijn van Houwelingen.

Over the past year, the European Union and Israel have deepened their relationship. The enhanced partnership that provides for closer political and mutually beneficial trade and investment relations as well as economic, social, financial, civil scientific, technological and cultural cooperation. The EU will pump 14 million euros ($18 million) of taxpayer money into the cooperation over the next seven years. However, talks to upgrade the current association agreement were suspended in January 2009 because of Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip. On 23 April, EU commissioner for external relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner said in a statement that “the EU deeply deplores the loss of life during this conflict, particularly the civilian casualties, and would follow closely investigations into alleged violations of international humanitarian law.” Ferrero-Waldner chastised Israel’s refusal to endorse a Palestinian state. Israel quickly responded, warning the EU to tone down its criticism.

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