Archive for the ‘war crimes’ tag
Happy Thanksgiving! Let’s talk about old ladies, Jiu-Jitsu, and war crimes
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Citizen Radio talks old ladies, Jiu-Jitsu, war crimes, Goldman Sachs’ asshole CEO, and the awesome decision by students at Harvard.
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World’s worst person receives irony medal
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will receive the Liberty Medal on Monday for his global human rights work, even as his new autobiography has reignited debate over his political leadership.
The medal is given annually by the Philadelphia-based National Constitution Center to individuals or organizations whose actions strive to bring liberty to people worldwide.
Who or what is the National Constitution Center claiming Tony Blair liberated? The only thing Blair ever freed were Dubya’s balls when the former Prime Minister publicly fellated the First Cock.
Oh well. Congrats to Tony on being the bestest poodle ever.
Maybe he and Barry can get together and play with their medals neither of them deserve.
SCOTUS and Obama broadly define 'material support' of 'terrorist organizations'
Jesus, take the wheel. SCOTUS recently handed down a decision — reenforcing an Obama administration policy — that is so dumb it rivals John Roberts’s “what is this ‘email’ you speak of?” moment of shame.
The court, and Obama, broadly defined “material support” of so-called terrorist organizations.
While the relevant statute defines “material support” to include a long list of items that are clearly connected to the violent activities of terrorists, it also includes more ambiguous terms such as “any…service,…training, expert advice or assistance.”
Basically, this decision means peacekeepers like Jimmy Carter could be accused of offering “material support,” meaning any service, which could include counsel or mediation, to groups like the democratically elected Hamas.
Also, notice the term “terrorist group” is a completely arbitrary label. Hamas, though they came to power in a democratic election, is a terrorist group, while Israel, which receives billions of dollars in aid from the US, and uses illegal weapons like white phosphorous against a civilian population, and continues to exercise collective punishment unabated by western bystanders, is an “important ally.”
McChrystal admits Afghan atrocities, press yawns
Image via Wikipedia
KABUL, Afghanistan — American and NATO troops firing from passing convoys and military checkpoints have killed 30 Afghans and wounded 80 others since last summer, but in no instance did the victims prove to be a danger to troops, according to military officials in Kabul.
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year. His comments came during a recent videoconference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.
– via New York Times: Tighter Rules Fail to Stem Deaths of Innocent Afghans at Checkpoints
This is an amazing admission. Here is General Stanley McChrystal, the highest ranking US military official in Afghanistan, openly admitting that the US military has killed a whole lot of people, none of whom posed a threat.
The Times continues the Iraq revision fun
Image via Wikipedia
I recently wrote about Thomas Friedman’s cute interpretation of the Iraq war. Basically, Dubya was right, and even though Saddam didn’t have any weapons, Iraqis got to vote in an election, so everything evens out. And even if one argues it doesn’t really “even out,” per se, that’s a matter for historians to settle, and anyone who says otherwise is a shrill, extremist liberal hippie.
Now, Ross Douthat is joining the revisionist action. Specifically, the new Matt Damon film, “Green Zone,” has given him a case of the vapors because the film casts the administrative actions of misusing and disregarding intelligence, which led the US into war, in a negative light.
Things are just more complex than all that. “The narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told, resembles a story out of Shakespeare,” writes Douthat. But here, he appears to be conflating the complexity of the war’s players with the initial Grand Lie itself.
Yoo argues president has authority to massacre entire villages
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
On the season premiere of Real Time with Bill Maher, former governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, explained that war criminal, Dick Cheney, cannot be prosecuted even though Cheney confessed to war crimes on ABC News.
I’m paraphrasing Spitzer’s words (I can’t find the transcript or video online, but if someone sends it to me, I’ll include his exact phrasing in an update,) but he essentially said that once Cheney received the blessing of a lawyer to facilitate the culture of torture, he eliminated the possibility that he would ever be held accountable for his actions.
Scott Horton explains how this plausible deniability thing works:
When he was informed that CIA seniors believed their palette of techniques went as far as the law allowed, Cheney, drawing on the skills of his counsel David Addington and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, arranged to have John Yoo craft a memorandum (the infamous torture memo) to overrule the CIA and its counsel. It was not a situation in which they proposed and he accepted, but rather one in which he cajoled and pressured them to accept torture techniques, enlisting the Justice Department in the process. Those are the facts; Cheney has, of course, contrived a paper trail that provides him cover and that carefully elides his decisive role in the process from the outset. Throughout his career he has been a master manipulator who gets his results without leaving behind a clean set of fingerprints.
See how that works? Cheney comes up with the idea, and then has Yoo, the lawyer, give him legal cover.
Kinder, gentler Cheney admits to war crimes
Image via Wikipedia
While haunting the nation’s airwaves this past Sunday, Darth Vader dropped The Bomb: he supports repealing DADT.
“The society has moved on,” Cheney said. “It’s partly a generational question.”
Progressives and liberals — as you might expect — reacted like battered puppies. They poked their heads out from under the couch — quizzical, slightly trembling. Really? Are we buds now?
But just in case anyone was confused about who this man is, or where he stands on the great moral and legal issues of our time, Cheney also called his former boss (haha) soft on terrorism:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he disagreed with the Bush administration’s release of prisoners from the Guantanamo Bay detention center and with the decision to subject terrorists to criminal courts.
Cheney says he opposed the Bush administration decision to charge shoe bomber Richard Reid in criminal court rather than declare him an enemy combatant and hold him in military custody.
The Law is Not a Fringe Issue
Barbara Herbert, a course director at Tufts University School of Medicine, made a short, but compelling plea in today’s New York Times. Herbert argued that the United States government should convene a truth and reconciliation commission, using the one in South Africa as a model, to investigate into possible crimes committed by the Bush administration.
Such a commission would allow a nation to (a) find the truth of what happened from multiple perspectives, (b) develop an understanding of how it happened and (c) heal.
A commission isn’t some kind of partisan booby trap thrown together in a frenzied quest for retribution as Harry Reid suggested last week. The formation of a nonpartisan commission also wouldn’t act as a nefarious tool to dismantle the foundation of The American Way (corrupting the sweet “mysteries” of life,) as Bush apologists like Peggy Noonan claim.
A truth commission would use the law as a compass, and its only goal would be to restore order in America. As Herbert wrote, “We need a chance for secular redemption and healing.”
On Tuesday, Jeremy Scahill reported that Rep. John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder officially requesting the appointment of an independent Special Prosecutor to “to investigate and, where appropriate, prosecute torture committed against detainees during the Bush administration.” In order to restore credibility to the Justice Department, Holder must adhere to the rule of law, and not partisan demands. He must investigate into possible crimes committed under the Bush administration.
The law is not a fringe issue. Progressives may be the ones demanding an investigative commission, but the issue at stake here is the law itself. That’s not a partisan issue. The law should be sacred to all Americans: Republicans and Democrats. And if Democrats are proven to have been complicit in torture, then they too must be punished according to the law.
Otherwise, Americans will learn only one lesson: the law does not apply to our leaders. What a terrible lesson to teach young Americans.
Peggy Noonan, Shep Smith, and Jane Harman
Listen here: http://www.breakthruradio.com/index.php?show=6753
Citizen Radio discusses the human disaster known as Peggy Noonan, and her comments about not investigating Bush administration war crimes because life needs to remain “mysterious.” Wow.
Jamie talks about getting screamed at by a New Yorker at one of his Australia shows, and why Americans think they’re exceptional.
Jane Harman got busted trying to do AIPAC spies a solid, and she got caught by the very same wiretapping program she championed. Irony with a capital “I.”
Shepard Smith went crazy on FOX again, and Citizen Radio thinks that’s super!
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Israel Using Illegal Weapons and Not Reporting Deserters
Amnesty International released a report Nov. 5 stating that a five-and-a-half-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas “has brought enormous improvements in the quality of life in Sderot and other Israeli villages near Gaza.” However, it warned that a spate of Israeli and Palestinian attacks and counter-attacks in the previous 24 hours could “once again put the civilian populations of Gaza and southern Israel in the line of fire.”
Seven weeks later, Israel launched a massive military offensive into Gaza that shocked much of the world while gaining widespread support inside the Jewish state.
The Gaza offensive took 13 Israeli lives, including three civilians. Meanwhile more than 1,300 Palestinian lives were lost, more than half of which were civilians, including at least 400 children. At least 5,000 were injured. The price tag for the reconstruction of 21,000 homes, schools, hospitals, mosques and other infrastructure destroyed is estimated at more than $2 billion. The conflict destroyed half of Gaza’s agricultural industry, which provided a quarter of its food.
Gaza is one of the most crowded places on earth; it holds 1.5 million people, half of whom are children under 15. The majority of Gazans are the descendants of Palestinians who were forced to flee during the founding of Israel in 1948. Eighty percent of Gazans subsist on less than $2 a day and depend on the United Nations for basic survival. Israel has imposed a 19-month-long blockade, stopping food, fuel and medical supplies from reaching Gaza despite U.N. pleas that the restrictions be lifted.
Israel stands accused of firing on and killing civilians waving white flags, those it ordered to flee their homes and on aid workers. Israel has also been accused of refusing to let the injured get medical care by impeding and firing on ambulances. A coalition of nine Israeli human rights groups called for an investigation into whether Israel committed war crimes, protesting the “wanton use of lethal force” against Palestinian civilians. The U.N.’s special rapporteur to Palestine said Israel could be in violation of the U.N. Charter, the Geneva Conventions, international law and international humanitarian law. The Israeli explanation for high civilian casualties is that Hamas fighters concealed themselves within the civilian population.
Amnesty International accused Israel of using white phosphorus “in densely populated residential neighborhoods, [which] is inherently indiscriminate,” adding, “Its repeated use in this manner … is a war crime.” Israel has also been accused of using cluster bombs in densely populated areas, as well as using experimental weapons that are illegal under international law, including dense inert metal explosives (DIME) and GPS-guided mortars. A former U.S. Department of Defense official, now with Human Rights Watch, stated, “Experimenting has a different meaning for Americans. We think animal experimenting, but [its use was] indeed a field test.” Israel has dismissed all accusations of using illegal weapons and promised to protect its soldiers from prosecution.
It is difficult to say how many Israeli soldiers and reservists refused to take part in the fighting as the Israeli military was sending military resisters quietly home rather than jailing them and risking puncturing an aura of shared national purpose. One military resister who went public with his opposition was Yitzchak Ben Mocha, who refused to fight in Gaza because, “It’s not a war of defense. … You can’t separate the war in Gaza from the fact that the Palestinian nation is under occupation for more than 40 years.”
A DIFFERENT PATH FORWARD
According to the Israeli group Peace Now, Israel has escalated settlement expansion by 57 percent over the past year. The scope of the Israeli government’s complicity came into focus Jan. 30. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that a secret database developed by the Israeli military confirms that many settlements are built on private Palestinian land and considered illegal under Israeli law. According to Haaretz, “in the vast majority of the settlements — about 75 percent — construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued. The database also shows that, in more than 30 settlements, extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure (roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations) has been carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinian West Bank residents.”
It has been reported that President Barack Obama may start indirect low-level talks with Hamas, similar to those that the Carter administration held with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the late 1970s. In 1982, Israel responded to the PLO’s willingness to negotiate by invading Lebanon, where the PLO was based, in a war that killed as many as 25,000 people. Twenty-seven years later the PLO’s Fatah party has been reduced to the role of collaborating in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and in spite of 16 years of negotiations it has been unable to stop Israeli expansion onto Palestinian lands.
It has been argued that the objective of Israel’s assault on Gaza was to knock out Hamas because it opposes the Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Jerusalem. According to a leading Israeli expert on the conflict Avi Shlaim, the “definition of terror is the use of violence against civilians for political purposes.” So while Hamas is a terrorist organization, “by the same token, Israel is practicing state terror, because it is using violence on a massive scale against Palestinian civilians for political purposes.”
An internationally-backed peace agreement has been on the table for more than 30 years: the creation of a Palestinian state in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. With Hamas now indicating it is willing to negotiate along these lines, the main obstacle to peace remains the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation, which only the U.S. public has the power to end.
To read more coverage on the Arab-Israeli conflict and related activism, click here.
