To Investigate CIA You Must Target Cheney

Published on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 by The Nation

Vice President, High-Level Wrongdoing Must Be Focus of Inquiries

by John Nichols

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, the chief critic of executive excess and wrongdoing in the Senate during recent Republican and Democratic administrations, wants Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a prosecutor to investigate the CIA's harsh interrogation program.

But Feingold wants Holder to do it right.

The chair of the Constitution subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee is concerned that the appointment of a prosecutor by Holder -- which now seems increasingly likely -- come with a charge by the attorney general "to focus on holding accountable the architects of the CIA's interrogation program."

In a letter to Holder, Feingold, who also sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote:

Dear Attorney General Holder:

Recent news stories indicate that you have reviewed the highly classified 2004 CIA Inspector General report on the CIA's interrogation program, and that as a result you are considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate individuals who may have gone beyond the legal authorization for that program provided by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Department of Justice. I write to encourage you to do so, but also to urge you to focus on holding accountable the architects of the CIA's interrogation program. While allegations that individuals may have even gone beyond what was justified by those now-public OLC memos are extremely disturbing, we should not lose sight of the fact that the program itself –- as authorized –- was illegal, not to mention immoral and unwise.

As I said in a letter to President Obama in April, the OLC documents make clear that the details of this program were authorized at the highest levels of government, which is where the need for accountability is most acute. Those who developed, authorized and provided legal justification for the interrogations should be held responsible.

I understand this is a difficult decision for you, and I want to assure you that you will have my full support if you take this important step in furtherance of the rule of law.

This is an essential message, and an essential step in the process.

Official Washington does not like accountability.

Holder will be under pressure to organize a narrow inquiry that focuses on the misdeeds of underlings.

But this investigation needs to go where the real wrongdoing took place.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney was a principle proponent of harsh interrogation during the Bush-Cheney years, and has since emerged as the primary defender of the initiative.

When asked about the use of torture tactics late last year, Cheney told ABC News, "I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency, in effect, came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

That is an invitation -- from Cheney himself -- to, as Feingold suggests, investigate the extent to which illegal activity was "authorized at the highest levels of government" and to "(hold) accountable the architects of the CIA's interrogation program."

Americans should tell the Attorney General to accept this invitation, and the Credo Action project of Working Assets is offering them an opportunity to do just that with a new campaign to "Tell Eric Holder to Start His Torture Investigation with Dick Cheney."

© 2009 The Nation

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy - from The New Press. Nichols' latest book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

Hope, Caught Up in a Sea of Obstruction

Published on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 by The Boston Globe

by Neal Gabler

Here's the situation: President Obama maneuvered a stimulus package through Congress that, after being reduced to attract additional senators, has proven insufficient to stimulate the economy. Now, given the political calculus, it would be nearly impossible for him to introduce an additional boost. He also proposed a regulatory scheme for Wall Street that was so riddled with compromises and concessions that it was unlikely to prevent another economic meltdown. And he has pushed a national healthcare plan that is almost certain to be eviscerated, and that even in its disemboweled form may not pass Congress.

Obviously, we face daunting problems, but we nevertheless continue to operate with a kind of hopefulness that we will meet the challenges and triumph. Historically, we have reason to feel this way. In the last 70 years , this country faced down the Great Depression, Nazism, and Jim Crow. The system, however balky and tardy it may have been, has always worked.

But today, beneath the optimistic rhetoric, lurks another possibility that no politician and few pundits want to admit: that the system is no longer up to the task and that the factors that once brought relief are no longer operable. There is the real possibility that this time we will not win but rather founder the way Japan has done since its economic catastrophe. There is the possibility that this time it is hopeless.

How has it come to pass that the most powerful (and most self-confident) nation in the world now seems helpless? The short answer is that political action is a function of political will - the public's more than the politicians' - and that ours has been steadily sapped. Rahm Emanuel, the president's chief of staff, has said that crisis creates opportunity, but he is only partly right. Crisis creates pain. It is the pain that creates the opportunity.

The New Deal, that great spasm of political initiative, arose out of a national agony: 25 percent of Americans were unemployed, and with absolutely no safety net to catch them. There is plenty of agony now, but it is not as deep nor as wide, in part because of the programs of the New Deal, including unemployment insurance. President Roosevelt had the advantage of an angry citizenry who wanted him to do anything to rescue them. Obama has the disadvantage of a passive citizenry that, frankly, may never hurt enough to demand what might finally cure what ails them.

Obama is also the victim of a much different and more complex political system than the one FDR faced - a system with far more interests to broker among. The number of lobbyists in Washington, a good indicator of how many interests must be served and how vested those interests are in maintaining the status quo, has more than doubled since 2000. There are now roughly 40,000, 2,000 more since last November alone. In the last year nearly 2,500 began lobbying on the single issue of climate change. By a political Newton's Law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, which means that there are thousands of thrusts and parries on any major piece of legislation - a sure prescription for inaction or for tepid action.

Then there is the new media ecology. Yes, Roosevelt had his enemies in the press - almost all of which was arrayed against him. But he did not have a 24/7 cable antagonist dedicated to his presidential demise or hundreds of Internet bomb-throwers as Obama does, and he did not have a press whose baseline was skepticism about any possible government initiative. It is not the right-wing media that inhibit change; it is the mainstream media with their own attachment to the status quo, their own loaded questions about dramatic new policies and their predilection to identify potential missteps rather than to extol potential boldness. On healthcare, for example, the press has yet to ask one simple and critical question: Why can France have vastly superior care at half the cost per person of ours?

But finally, and most importantly, our own political institutions have been steadily and deliberately hogtied or even dismantled so that they cannot effectively do very much. In truth, the system was never very good at meeting crises; it was designed for incrementalism, not daring leaps. Our Founding Fathers, worrying about demagogues and runaway democratic effusions, created a number of institutions and rules, from the aristocratic Senate, which was devised to put the brakes on what they feared might be the careening of the more democratic House, to the entire system of checks and balances. The object was to prevent change, not facilitate it.

What those Fathers could not have anticipated was a political party dedicated to total obstructionism - dedicated to making certain that the government would fiddle while the nation burned. For this we have the Republicans to blame for their actions and the Democrats to blame for their inaction. As comedian Bill Maher recently put it, "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital.''

Americans forget that after four years of Herbert Hoover's dithering during the Great Depression members of his party almost unanimously opposed FDR's economic stimulus, and that in the procedural run-up to Social Security, they held ranks against it, too. Twelve of the 19 Republican senators voted to have Social Security scrapped. Old age security, they argued, would spoil Americans.

Flash-forward 30 years, and the party was back to its shenanigans, opposing Medicare. Exactly half the Republicans in the House voted against it while Senate Republicans voted 17-13 to stop it. Only overwhelming Democratic majorities in 1935 and 1965 led to Social Security and Medicare - and this at a time when the GOP had a moderate wing. The conclusion: in times of dire need the system only works when there is a huge one-party majority and a popular, muscular president of the same party to keep the legislators in line.

Things have only gotten worse - much worse - since then. It is not only the 30-year Republican drumbeat that government is the problem, a cliche that has helped drain political will; or the tax cuts that, as Reagan's budget director David Stockman candidly admitted, were largely enacted to starve government and render it ineffective; or the incompetency of George W. Bush's appointees that was intended to discredit government. It is the Republican lurch rightward that has purged those few moderates and gamed the filibuster so that any piece of legislation is now held hostage to 40 votes. This generates cries for bipartisanship, neglecting the fact that there is one party adamantly opposed to any change whatsoever.

How obstructionist is the GOP? From 1927 to 1962, cloture - the vote to end a filibuster - was invoked only 11 times! In 2007 alone, with Republicans trying to derail initiatives in the Democratic Congress as disparate as an increased minimum wage, a climate change bill, campaign finance reform, and an energy bill, there were 62 cloture votes. When you consider that conservative Democrats are being hammered by Republicans as well as by lobbying interests who provide them with campaign contributions, you can readily see that not even the Democrats' 60 votes in the Senate are sufficient to move legislation even if there is a public outcry for action. According to polls, roughly 70 percent of Americans want a public option in healthcare. With that kind of support, the fact that it is even being debated is testament to how decrepit our system has become.

And so we are now a nation with great professions of faith that we will succeed but little real confidence that we will, a nation that focuses more on what can go wrong than on what can go right, a nation that can't seem to get action. We are a timid nation with small dreams and even smaller plans - a nation that seems to have lost its capacity to do big things. We all know the nation is broken, but we may no longer have the will or the institutions to fix it.

© 2009 The Boston Globe

Neal Gabler is the author most recently of "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.''

First Steps Taken to Implement Preventive Detention, Military Commissions

Published on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 by Salon.com

by Glenn Greenwald

A task force appointed by President Obama to issue recommendations on how to close Guantanamo announced yesterday it will miss its deadline and instead needs a six-month extension, potentially jeopardizing Obama's promise to close Guantanamo within a year.  The announcement was made in a briefing given by four leading Obama officials, where the condition of the briefing was that none of the officials could be named (why not?) and all media outlets agreed to this condition (why?). 

Though the Task Force's final recommendations were delayed, it did release an interim report (.pdf) which -- true to Obama's prior pledges -- envisions an optional, three-tiered "system of justice" for imprisoning accused Terrorists, to be determined by the Obama administration in each case:  (1) real trials in real courts for some; (2) military commissions for others; and (3) indefinite detention with no charges for the rest.  This memo is the first step towards institutionalizing both a new scheme of preventive detention and Obama's version of military commissions.

From this interim report, it's more apparent than ever that the central excuse made by Obama defenders to justify preventive detention and military commissions -- there are dangerous Terrorists who cannot be released but also cannot be tried because Bush obtained the evidence against them via torture -- is an absolute myth.  That's clear for multiple reasons:

First, the Task Force is formulating detention policy not only for detainees already at Guantanamo, but also for future, not-yet-abducted detainees as well.  From the first paragraph of the memo (click image to enlarge):

The memo goes on to state that they are examining "what the rules and boundaries should be for any future detentions under the law of war."  The anonymous Obama officials emphasized in the briefing that "the goal . . .  is to build a 'durable and effective' framework for dealing with the detainees at Guantánamo and future detainees captured in the fight against terrorists."

Nobody is talking about confining the power of preventive detention or military commissions to current Guantanamo detainees who were tortured.  The opposite is true:  this is to be a permanent, institutionalized detention scheme with the power vested in the President going forward to imprison people with no charges.  Claiming this is necessary because of what Bush did to the 230 remaining Guantanamo detainees is a total nonsequitur.  If, as Obama defenders claim, that is really the justification, why will these powers apply well beyond that?  And relatedly, as I've asked dozens of times with no answer:  how can Obama's military commissions be a solution to the problem of torture-obtained evidence when, according to Obama, those commissions -- exactly like federal courts -- also allegedly won't allow evidence obtained by torture?

Second, as a result of breathtakingly broad criminal laws in the U.S. defining "material support for terrorism," there are few things easier than obtaining a criminal conviction in federal court against people accused of being Terrorists.  Even if the only thing someone has done is joined a group decreed to be a Terrorist organization, without even engaging in (or even planning) any violent acts, federal prosecutors are well-armed to convict them.  In May, the DOJ obtained a conviction in a federal court of a Somalian-Canadian on "material support" charges for doing little more than expressing loyalty to Al Qaeda.  Two other Americans of Somalian descent were just indicted on the same charge as a result of their alleged membership in a "militant Islamic group," Shabaab.  The FBI website even boasts:

Since the 1990s, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) has investigated and successfully prosecuted a wide range of international and domestic terrorism cases—including the bombings of the World Trade Center and U.S. Embassies in East Africa in the 1990s. More recent cases include those against individuals who provided material support to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, as well as against international arms trafficker Monzer al Kassar and the Somalian pirate charged in the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama.

To convict accused Terrorists in court, they need not engage in any violent acts; any involvement with Al Qaeda or other Terrorist groups will suffice.  The Task Force's interim report released yesterday itself recognized that the Federal Government is already equipped with extremely broad powers to obtain convictions of Terrorists in federal court:

If we can't even prove in a real court that someone has such minimal involvement with a Terrorist group, then should we be imprisoning them indefinitely?  And if the only evidence we have against them was obtained by torture -- evidence which, one should recall, Democrats and progressives insist is unreliable -- then should we really seek to imprison them indefinitely based on such evidence?

Manifestly, this isn't about anything other than institutionalizing what has clearly emerged as the central premise of the Obama Justice System:  picking and choosing what level of due process each individual accused Terrorist is accorded, to be determined exclusively by what process ensures that the state will always win. If they know they'll convict you in a real court proceeding, they'll give you one; if they think they might lose there, they'll put you in a military commission; if they're still not sure they will win, they'll just indefinitely imprison you without any charges [a document accompanying the interim report (.pdf) states:  "if the prosecution team concludes that prosecution is not feasible in any forum, it may recommend that the case be returned to the Executive Order 13492 Review for other appropriate disposition"].  It's Kafkaesque show trials in their most perverse form:  the outcome is pre-determined (guilty and imprisoned) and only the process changes.  That's especially true since, even where a miscalculation causes someone to be tried but then acquitted, the power to detain them could still be asserted.

Just look at this intrinsically absurd declaration from the Memo:

For "enemy terrorists" who "have violated our criminal laws," the Obama administration will give people trials "where feasible"  -- meaning where it's definite that the Government will win.  If everyone the President wants to imprison is going to end up in a cage no matter what -- remember:  we're not going to release anyone the President decrees dangerous under any circumstances -- then, other than creating a mirage of due process, what's the point of giving some of them trials?  By definition, it's just all for show.  I quoted this once before, but it's so apropos; this approach is exactly what is hauntingly described as the Queen's justice in Chapter 12 of Alice in Wonderland:

"Let the jury consider their verdict," the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

"No, no!” said the Queen. "Sentence first -- verdict afterward."

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Alice loudly. "The idea of having the sentence first!"

"Hold your tongue!" said the Queen, turning purple.

"I won’t!" said Alice.

"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

The Queen's pronouncement -- "Sentence first -- verdict afterward" -- is a fine expression of Obama's approach here:  these prisoners are decreed to be Dangerous and Guilty and are sentenced to prolonged, indefinite imprisonment and must not be released; now let's tailor a process for each of them to ensure that this verdict is produced.  It's far better to dispense with the ludicrous facade, simply imprison everyone the President wants with no charges, and let the world and the citizenry see what we're really doing.

Third, equally false is the Task Force's claim that Obama's military commissions are nothing more than a continuation of longstanding military tradition and, worse, that Obama's commissions resolve the objections long raised by Democrats to Bush's military commissions.  Here's what the Task Force asserts in order to make it seem like Obama's military commissions are perfectly normal and consistent with past Democratic objections:

These claims are demonstrably false.  While it's true that the Bush/Cheney military commissions were initiated with no Congressional authorization, the commissions were eventually authorized by Congress when it passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 -- with the opposition of most Democrats, including then-Sen. Obama.  As I documented at length here, Democratic objections to Bush's military commissions -- including from key Obama officials -- were not dependent upon any specific procedures, but were opposed to the entire idea of military commissions themselves.  If anyone has any doubts about that, just go read the excerpts I posted there from progressives, Democrats and leading newspapers objecting to military commissions themselves, not to the specific Bush/Cheney incarnation of them.  What happened to all of that?

The principal argument that was made in the Bush era was that military commissions may be appropriate for standard wars between uniformed armies, but not for the abduction of accused Terrorists far away from battlefields, which -- in terms of the potential both for error and abuse -- far more resemble the apprehension of accused criminals.  A November, 2001 New York Times Editorial said the "plan to use secret military tribunals to try terrorists is a dangerous idea" because "by ruling that terrorists fall outside the norms of civilian and military justice . . . . Mr. Bush has essentially discarded the rulebook of American justice painstakingly assembled over the course of more than two centuries."  The NYT argued: "American civilian courts have proved themselves perfectly capable of handling terrorist cases."  During the 2004 campaign, Obama's current Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal vowed that "a John Kerry administration would scrap the military commissions now being used at Guantanamo Bay and replace them with a system patterned on military courts-martial" and he concluded:

The danger with these commissions comes not only in their threat to our Constitution, and our standing in the world as a beacon of fairness, but also in their challenge to the perception of military justice. Our nation—whomever the next president may turn out to be—should admit it made a mistake and return to using our powerful and fair system of courts martial—a system that would generate swifter convictions of terrorists. As our nation's great Chief Justice John Marshall put it in 1803, ours is a "government of laws, and not of men."

Obama State Department counsel Harold Hongju Koh wrote in 2003 that creating military commissions and/or using a new tribunal "are wrong because both rest on the same faulty assumption: that our own federal courts cannot give full, fair and swift justice in such a case," and argued: "No country with a well functioning judicial system should hide its justice behind military commissions." Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy condemned all military commissions, arguing:  "it sends a terrible message to the world that, when confronted with a serious challenge, we lack confidence in the very institutions we are fighting for- beginning with a justice system that is the envy of the world."  And current Obama State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter said that, in the past, military commissions had "been used to try spies that we find behind enemy lines" where "you can't ship them to national court, so you provide a kind of rough battlefield justice in a commission," but with the "War on Terror":  "That's not this situation. It's not remotely like it."

In fact, the entire 2004 campaign the Democrats ran was based on the argument that Terrorism should be treated far more like a law enforcement problem than a "war."  John Kerry famously said:  "The war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law-enforcement operation."  After a series of Terrorist plots were disrupted using normal law-enforcement means, even George Will wrote a column declaring that Kerry was right about this.  That the extant system of American justice was perfectly adequate to try accused Terrorists -- and that whole new systems of "justice" need not be created in the name of so-called "war powers" -- was long a central plank of Democratic and progressive objections to the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism.  

What happened to all of that?  As of January 20, 2009, it seems to have disappeared in a cloud of obfuscating smoke, replaced by chest-beating "war"-rhetoric used to justify the creation of whole new "systems of justice" and, worse, locking people up with no trial. Like all new powers vested in the President, once this system is institutionalized, it will be virtually impossible ever to abolish it, or even to prevent its continued expansion.

UPDATE:  I was on The Young Turks last night and was interviewed by Cenk Uygur regarding the media's role in investigations and towards the government generally and the Chuck Todd interview specifically.  It was roughly 15 minutes long; those interested can listen to it here.

© 2009 Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.

US Military Presence Continues To Imperil Lives of Afghan Women

Published on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Lucinda Marshall

I have a vintage 1960’s poster on my wall that says, “War is not good for children and other living things.”  Those sentiments were true then, have always been true and and are certainly still true today.  As the Feminist Peace Network website has noted  since it  began in 2001, military actions of all kinds also perpetrate specific forms of violence against women, including:

• Mass rape, military sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced “marriages” and forced pregnancies.
• Multiple rapes and gang rape (with multiple perpetrators) and the rape of young girls.
• Sexual assault associated with violent physical assault.
• Resurgence of female genital mutilation, within the community under attack, as a way to reinforce cultural identity.
• Women forced to offer sex for survival, or in exchange for food, shelter, or “protection.”

But the devastation experienced by women during conflict goes beyond that. War today is not fought on some obscure battlefield.  It is fought in cities and towns where people live. When hospitals and homes and fields and schools are destroyed, there is no place for women to obtain medical care, or a warm shelter to call home, food to put on the table or a way to educate themselves or their children. As the human rights organization Madre notes, the impact of U.S. military action in Afghanistan has had  truly horrific implications for Afghan women:

The US and NATO did manage to oust the Taliban in 2001. Afghan women then gained some relief from a regime that publicly beat and executed women, and denied them education, healthcare, employment, participation in public life and any recourse from widespread domestic abuse. But that relief was short-lived. Today, a resurgent Taliban controls most of Afghanistan’s southern provinces and is encroaching on Kabul, the capital. In 2007, the number of US/NATO troops was increased by 45 percent. During that surge, more civilians were killed than in the previous four years combined. Each year that the occupation drags on, more Afghan civilians are killed. In 2008 alone, more than 2100 civilians were killed, a 40 percent jump over 2007.

The Bush Administration justified the invasion of Afghanistan by pointing to the Taliban’s systematic abuse of women. But subsequent US policies in Afghanistan did not uphold women’s human rights. As a result: 1.    One in every three women experience physical, psychological or sexual violence 2.    70 to 80 percent of women face forced marriages 3.    Every 30 minutes, a woman dies in childbirth 4.    87 percent of women are illiterate 5.    70 percent of girls have no access to education 6.    44 years is the average life expectancy rate for women

Madre also notes that, “According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “The mere presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the resurgence of the Taliban.” All of which makes it baffling and quite discouraging that  the Feminist Majority’s Eleanor Smeal would state  that FMF supports the continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan:

Though we’d prefer that all U.S. funding be spent on development aid, we cannot in good conscience advocate the immediate military pullout that some are suggesting. The 2009 UN Humanitarian Action Plan noted that in 2008, “Approximately 40% of the country, including much of the South, remains inaccessible for most humanitarian organizations.” Last year, 92 aid workers were abducted and 36 were killed, double the number from 2007. In recent public opinion polls, Afghans put security in their top three concerns right after food. Without stabilizing the country, there can be no significant redevelopment effort.

Smeal feels that,

If the U.S. were to pull out of Afghanistan, the United States would be once again breaking our promise to the Afghan people, and the country would likely fall under Taliban control.

This statement is naive at best.  Our promises to the Afghan people were never more than window dressing to make our actions more palatable both here and in Afghanistan.  Our mission there has never been for the sake of Afghanis, it is to further our own perceived interests and to fight that ever elusive enemy called “terrorism”. Smeal also expresses gratitude for what she terms “substantial U.S. funding for women and girls programs in Afghanistan — $367 million to date.”  Is she kidding?  That is a mere drop in the war funding bucket. As Tom Hayden points out,

it’s still hard to believe that they (FMF) think Afghan women can be liberated by an invading, bombing, imprisoning American army. It’s hard to believe that Predators, drones, Special Forces, detention camps and foreign occupiers are solutions to Taliban fundamentalism. Even the US-supported Kabul government showed its real character this year by passing a law requiring women to obey their husbands in sexual matters, in violation of the country’s own constitution and international norms. A top United Nations official this month told a Kabul audience “that violence against women is not being challenged or condemned.” This was eight years following the Bonn Agreement which included human rights at its core. In northern areas under Western occupation, the UN report found that in 39 percent of rapes “that perpetrators were directly linked to power brokers who are, effectively, above the law and enjoy immunity from arrest as well as immunity from social condemnation.”

At the end of the day, militarism is not about upholding human rights,  it is about asserting control and the cost of that is always  the loss of life and  liberty for those who have the misfortune to be in the line of fire.  The U.S. is not waging war in Afghanistan for the benefit of Afghanis and their welfare is purely incidental to that mission.  As  FPN noted in April, the AP reported that President Obama has stated that,

(W)hile improving conditions in Afghanistan is a commendable goal, people need to remember that the primary reason that U.S. troops are fighting there is to protect Americans from terrorist attacks.

Our continued military presence will not benefit the Afghan people, only make their lives more precarious, and is doomed to failure as Sonali Kolhatkar makes clear.

The likelihood of American success in Afghanistan is at best dim and, at worst, heading inevitably toward a lose-lose situation. Given the impossibility of surgically identifying and killing a moving and elusive target, there are only two possible outcomes: killing a lot of civilians, or pushing the insurgency to the rest of the country, or both. After the Iraq debacle, are Americans ready for yet another unpopular occupation, protracted war and thousands of U.S. casualties?

However we do need to re-frame what is indeed a human rights disaster for women in Afghanistan and ask what is to be done.  Hayden offers this,

Ending a military occupation through a negotiated settlement among countries in the region, and parties in Afghanistan, is the only way out of this latest adventure in The Long War. Making any future economic or diplomatic assistance contingent upon women’s rights to health care, child care, education and dignity should be among the terms for a US and NATO withdrawal. In all seriousness, top US officials in a future Kabul embassy could be feminists linked to Afghan women’s groups. Hillary Clinton knows how to be relentless if she chooses. The struggle will be long and bitter, won in civil society, not on battlefields. Even if all the Taliban are killed, Afghanistan will be a deeply patriarchal Muslim country where change will emerge from outside and inside pressures.

It is also important to note that women in the U.S. military are also grievously harmed.  There is an epidemic of sexual assault and rape within the ranks which has been the subject of countless hearings and reports and recent hearings and reports also shed light on the difficulties being faced by women veterans. Those harms are a result of the culture of impunity that is a de facto part of military ethos and are not resolvable within the mindset that issues can be resolved by the usurpation of power. Moreover, they are intimately linked to the harms experienced by those that we fight against.  We are naive to think that they can be addressed separately or as problems that can be resolved without addressing their root cause.

And finally, it needs to be said that while we prioritize our spending on military destruction, funding for services that protect women’s lives are woefully lacking.  There is not funding for shelters in our own country or for fighting maternal mortality (which kills more than 500,000 every year), an entirely solvable problem that would require far less money than we  spend saving ourselves from ‘terrorism’.

Smeal’s statement is damaging and unfortunate. It displays a woeful lack of understanding of American politics, militarism and global realities. For a major feminist organization not to understand the truly damaging impact that militarism has on women’s lives is unacceptable and does not represent the truly feminist thinking, nor should it be taken to speak for the feminist body politic.

Lucinda Marshall is the Director of the Feminist Peace Network, feministpeacenetwork.org

Anti-Racist Australians And Jews Against Zionism, War And Genocide

By Dr Gideon Polya

21 July, 2009

The following Open Letter letter is addressed to Australians, Australian media and Australian MPs.

Dear Sir/Madam,

Why anti-racist Australians and anti-racist Jewish Australians oppose racist Zionism, War and Genocide and cannot vote Labor.

For anti-racist Jews and indeed all anti-racist humanitarians the core moral messages from the Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) and from the more general WW2 European Holocaust (30 million Slav, Jewish and Gypsy dead) are “zero tolerance for racism”, “never again to anyone”, “bear witness” and “zero tolerance for lying”.

However, as perceived in particular by outstanding Jews against racist Zionism, these sacred injunctions are grossly violated by the anti-Arab anti-Semitic racist Zionists running Apartheid Israel and their Western backers variously involved in the ongoing Palestinian Genocide, Iraqi Genocide and Afghan Genocide (post-invasion violent and non-violent excess deaths 0.3 million, 2.3 million and 3-7 million, respectively; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths 0.2 million, 0.6 million and 2.3 million, respectively; refugees totalling 7 million, 5-6 million and 3-4 million, respectively, plus a further 2.5 million NW Pakistan Pashtun refugees - Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention).

All decent, anti-racist, humanitarian Australians must vigorously oppose and sideline those who support racist Zionism, Apartheid Israel, racist Western wars and occupations and who are currently complicit in (1) 0.7 million non-violent Indigenous excess deaths annually in US- or US surrogate-occupied countries; (2) continuing, racist perversion of human rights, humanitarian values and rational discourse in the Western democracies; (3) ignoring of worsening climate genocide set to kill 10 billion non-Europeans this century (including 6 billion infants, 3 billion Muslims, 2 billion Indians and 0.3 billion Bangladeshis) due to unaddressed climate change, principally by the Zionist-backed US Empire and Anglo world; and (4) egregious anti-Jewish anti-Semitism through variously falsely identifying decent, anti-racist Jews with these appalling crimes.

Unfortunately, as succinctly summarized below, the pro-coal, pro-war, pro-Zionist, pro-Apartheid Israel, pro-US Empire Australian Labor Government grossly offends and grossly violates its duty of care to Jewish Australians and to Australians in general through its ignorant, pro-war, pro-Zionist, pro-US, anti-Indigenous, anti-Arab anti-Semitic and indeed intrinsically anti-Jewish anti-Semitic policies, impelled no doubt in part by huge funding for the Australian Labor Party from dual citizen racist Zionists, including Australia’s biggest corporate crook.

1. Israeli state terrorists are free to come and go in Australia after shelling and bombing Australian citizens in the Middle East (e.g. shelling and bombing 25,000 Australian citizens in Lebanon in 2006).

2. Australian financial support for the Palestinian Genocide is tax deductible.

3. Racist Zionist criminal proceeds in Australia go to support the Palestinian Genocide as well as the Australian Labor Party.

4. The core Muslim zakkat (alms giving) religious obligation has been criminalized in Australia (potentially life imprisonment under pro-Zionist anti-terrorism laws for humane donations to the West Bank or the Gaza Concentration Camp).

5. Australians were endangered in the Israeli bombardments of what the Catholic Church describes as the Gaza Concentration Camp.

6. Politicized or intimidated security services turn a blind eye to Israeli state terrorists bombing and killing Australian citizens or their relatives in the Middle East.

7. Australia and other pro-Zionist, colonization-and genocide-based Anglo countries, including the US, refused to ratify the UN Indigenous Rights Declaration and the Australian Labor Government continues to trash Australia’s reputation internationally through its support for racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel.

8. Australian Labor supported the race-based exclusion of Northern Territory Indigenous Australians from the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act (cf “And then they came for me” by Pastor Martin Niemöller - will anti-racist Jews be next in Apartheid Australia?).

9. Australia gives extraordinary “special treatment” to war criminal, racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel which: is the world #1 in the Ecstasy trade according to the US State Department; has imprisoned, killed or forced into hiding the Hamas MPs who won 76 seats out of 132 in the Occupied Palestinian elections held under Israeli guns in 2006 (Australia has criminalized democratically-elected Hamas and only recognizes the racist Zionist-backed Fatah minority); has occupied 5 other countries; continues to occupy the territory of 4 other countries; has militarily attacked 10 other countries and daily threatens to attack remote and peaceful Iran (Iran is #1 in the World for defending Australia and the World from the World-dominating, US-restored and US-protected Afghan heroin trade); has been criminally involved in US “dirty tricks” from Latin America to the Pacific and Australasia; has abusively kidnapped and imprisoned Occupied Palestinians for 42 years (50% children, 75% women and children; now 4 million held without charge or trial with 1.5 million incarcerated in what the Catholic Church describes as the Gaza Concentration Camp); denies equal rights to Arab Israelis by Nazi-style Apartheid race laws; and is a nuclear-armed, terrorist “rogue state” according to Jewish Israeli Oxford Professor of International Relations, Professor Avi Shlaim.

10. 300 Australians die annually (0.1 million people globally) due to Australian and US Alliance restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from 6% world market share (2001) to currently 93%.

11. 16,000 Australians die annually due to the Government-sanctioned and largely UK-US-owned tobacco industry.

12. The pro-coal Australian Government ignores about 5,000 Australian deaths annually from coal burning-derived pollutants.

13. About 9,000 Indigenous Australians die avoidably each year out of a population of 0.5 million due to warped Australian Government pro-war funding priorities.

14. About 90,000 Indigenous Australians have died avoidably in the last dozen years due to racist Government policies.

15. About 1/3 of Australian women and 1/6 of Australian men have been sexually abused as children (see the “Little Children are Sacred” report).

16. The Australian Government accepts the Big Lie of the holocaust-complicit racist Zionists of only ONE holocaust (ignoring the murder of 24 million Slavs, 1 million Gypsies, 35 million Chinese and 6-7 million Indians in WW2 and numerous holocaust events before and after WW2) [few people know that the racist Zionists (RZs) were complicit in the Nazi murder of 0.2-0.4 million Hungarian Jews in 1944-1945 by rejecting and getting pro-Zionist Churchill to reject the Joel Brand plan to save 0.7 million Hungarians Jews from the Nazis].

17. The Australian Government is complicit in entrenched, racist Zionist-promoted holocaust-ignoring and holocaust-denial by academics, media, schools, universities, and the taxpayer-funded ABC [e.g. Australia has participated in all post-1950 US Asian wars but resolutely ignores the associated Indigenous excess deaths that total 25 million, so far].

18. The Australian Government is complicit in the ongoing Aboriginal Genocide in gross violation of humanitarian International Conventions (Indigenous medical funding is 2-3 times lower than required).

19. The Australian Government is complicit in the ongoing Iraqi Genocide in gross violation of the Geneva Convention (4.2 million violent and non-violent excess deaths, 1990-2009; 2.3 million post-invasion violent and non-violent excess deaths 2003-2009).

20. The Australian Government is complicit in the ongoing Afghan Genocide in gross violation of the Geneva Convention (3-7 million violent and non-violent excess deaths, 2001-2009).

21. The Australian Government is complicit in business-as–usual, GHG pollution-mediated destruction of Australian ecosystems, notably the Great Barrier Reef (coral death above 450 ppm CO2; CO2 is currently 390 ppm (corresponding to circa 450 CO2-e) and increasing at 2 ppm annually with Australia a world-leading per capita CO2 polluter and CO2-e (CO2-equivalent, greenhouse gas, GHG) polluter).

22. Top climate scientists say we must REDUCE atmospheric CO2 from the current 390 ppm to 300 ppm – but pro-coal Australian Government policies in actuality mean an INCREASE in GHG pollution by 80% on the 2000 value by 2050.

23. Top climate scientists and economists want a Carbon Tax and say Carbon Trading (cap-and-trade Emission Trading Scheme, ETS) is a fraud – but the pro-coal Australian Labor Government opts for ETS fraud.

24. Pro-coal Australia’s annual Domestic and Exported GHG pollution is currently 54 tonnes CO2-e per person per year - 2 times that of the US, 8 times that of the World, 10 times that of China, 25 times that of India, and 60 times that of Bangladesh. The Australian Government is complicit in a new and deadly climate racism and climate terrorism very likely leading to the avoidable deaths of 10 billion non-Europeans in a climate genocide catastrophe this century (see the estimates of top UK climate scientist Dr James Lovelock FRS).

25. The utterly incompetent Australian Labor Government is complicit in comprehensive violation of rational risk management in favour of intranational and international corporate, racist Zionist and American interests.

26. The Australian Labor Government resolutely ignores the expert advice on climate change from top climate scientists and climate economists and ignores the expert advice from outstanding Jewish scholars on Apartheid Israel’s Palestinian Genocide.

27. The Australian Government ignores the Carbon Tax advice of anti-racist Jewish American Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz in favour of advice for ETS fraud from terracidal, pro-coal vested interests and from market manipulators linked to the recent market collapse (it has also run up a circa A$300 billion debt in a mere 18 months in an extraordinary display of economic mismanagement).

28. The Australian Government ignores the humane and anti-racist advice from outstanding anti-racist Jewish scholars, leaders and writers (see Jews Against Racist Zionism) in favour of advice from racist Zionist militant extremists, pro-Apartheid dual citizen Israeli-Australians and US, UK and Israeli state terrorists.

29. The Australian Government is complicit in deliberate manipulation of the truth by oligopoly media including the taxpayer-funded ABC.

30. Rational risk management successively involves (a) accurate data, (b) scientific analysis (the critical testing of potentially falsifiable hypotheses) and (c) systemic change to minimize risk. The Australian Government is complicit in foreign and domestic racist Zionist and neocon perversion of rational risk management through (a) lies, slies (spin-based untruths), propaganda, terror hysteria, intimidation, defamation, and censorship, (b) anti-science spin involving selective use of asserted facts to support a partisan position and (c) blame and shame, with race-specific laws, terror laws, anti-refugee laws and war being the ultimate obscenities.

Decent, anti-racist Jewish Australians and decent, anti-racist Australians in general cannot be party to the above Australian Labor Government-complicit obscenities.

Here are some final statistics that underscore the betrayal of anti-racist Jews, anti-racist Australians and Humanity by this technically and morally incompetent, pro-coal, pro-war and pro-Zionist Australian Labor Government. The “annual death rate” is 2.4% (Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory), 2.5% (for sheep in Australian paddocks) and 7% (for under-5 year old infants in Australia- and US Alliance-occupied Occupied Afghanistan) - as compared to 3% (inmates of the Nazi Buchenwald Concentration Camp), 5% (French Jews in Nazi-occupied France) and 10% (Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War 2).

Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. We cannot walk by on the other side. Tell everyone you can. This has been written in the public interest.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Gideon Polya

Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria 3085, Australia

PS. For detailed documentation of much of the above see:

“Pro-Zionist Western Genocide Denial “: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/29844/26/ .

“300.org – return atmosphere CO2 to 300 ppm”:
http://sites.google.com/site/300orgsite/
300-org---return-atmosphere-co2-to-300-ppm .

“Climate Disruption, Climate Emergency, Climate Genocide & Penultimate Bengali Holocaust through Sea Level Rise”: http://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup/
climate-disruption-climate-emergency-climate-genocide-
penultimate-bengali-holocaust-through-sea-level-rise .

Experts: Carbon Tax needed and NOT Cap-and-Trade Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS):
http://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup
carbon-tax-needed-not-cap-and-trade-emission-
trading-scheme-ets .

“Jews Against Racist Zionism”:
http://sites.google.com/site/jewsagainstracistzionism/home .

Credentials. Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003). He has recently published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://mwcnews.net/Gideon-Polya and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ; see also his contribution “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics”, edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham
/stories/s1445960.htm ) and a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/
bengalfamine_programme.html ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya’s huge paintings see “Art for Peace, Planet, Mother & Child”:
http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ .

Killing “Everything That Moves”

By Uri Avnery

21 July, 2009
Gush Shalom

Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the evil spirit of the Gaza War refuses to leave us in peace. This week it came back to disturb the tranquility of the chiefs of the state and the army.

“Breaking the Silence”, a group of courageous former combat soldiers, published a report comprising the testimonies of 30 Gaza War fighters. A hard-hitting report about actions that may be considered war crimes.

The generals went automatically into denial mode. Why don’t the soldiers disclose their identity, they asked innocently. Why do they obscure their faces in the video testimonies? Why do they hide their names and units?

How can we be sure that they are not actors reading a text prepared for them by the enemies of Israel? How do we know that this organization is not manipulated by foreigners, who finance their actions? And anyhow, how do we know that they are not lying out of spite?

One can answer with a Hebrew adage: “It has the feel of Truth”. Anyone who has ever been a combat soldier in war, whatever war, recognizes at once the truth in these reports. Each of them has met a soldier who is not ready to return home without an X on his gun showing that he killed at least one enemy. (One such person appears in my book “The Other Side of the Coin”, which was written 60 years ago and published in English last year as the second part of “1948: A soldier’s Tale”.) We have been there.

The testimonies about the use of phosphorus, about massive bombardment of buildings, about “the neighbor procedure” (using civilians as human shields), about killing “everything that moves”, about the use of all methods to avoid casualties on our side – all these corroborate earlier testimonies about the Gaza War, there can be no reasonable doubt about their authenticity. I learned from the report that the “neighbor procedure” is now called “Johnny procedure”, God knows why Johnny and not Ahmad.

The height of hypocrisy is reached by the generals with their demand that the soldiers come forward and lodge their complaints with their commanders, so that the army can investigate them through the proper channels.

First of all, we have already seen the farce of the army investigating itself.

Second, and this is the main point: only a person intent on becoming a martyr would do so. A solder in a combat unit is a part of a tightly knit group whose highest principle is loyalty to comrades and whose commandment is “Thou shalt not squeal!” If he discloses questionable acts he has witnessed, he will be considered a traitor and ostracized. His life will become hell. He knows that all his superiors, from squad leader right up to division commander, will persecute him.

This call to go through “official channels” is a vile method of the generals – members of the General Staff, Army Spokesmen, Army Lawyers – to divert the discussion from the accusations themselves to the identity of the witnesses. No less despicable are the tin soldiers called “military correspondents”, who collaborate with them.

BUT BEFORE accusing the soldiers who committed the acts described in the testimonies, one has to ask whether the decision to start the war did not itself lead inevitably to the crimes.

Professor Assa Kasher, the father of the army “Code of Ethics” and one of the most ardent supporters of the Gaza War, asserted in an essay on this subject that a state has the right to go to war only in self defense, and only if the war constitutes “a last resort”. “All alternative courses” to attain the rightful aim “must have been exhausted”.

The official cause of the war was the launching from the Gaza Strip of rockets against Southern Israeli towns and villages. It goes without saying that it is the duty of the state to defend its citizens against missiles. But had all the means to achieve this aim without war really been exhausted? Kasher answers with a resounding “yes”. His key argument is that “there is no justification for demanding that Israel negotiate directly with a terrorist organization that does not recognize it and denies its very right to exist.”

This does not pass the test of logic. The aim of the negotiations was not supposed to be the recognition by Hamas of the State of Israel and its right to exist (who needs this anyway?) but getting them to stop launching missiles at Israeli citizens. In such negotiations, the other side would understandably have demanded the lifting of the blockade against the population of the Gaza Strip and the opening of the supply passages. It is reasonable to assume that it was possible to reach – with Egyptian help - an agreement that would also have included the exchange of prisoners.

No only was this course not exhausted – it was not even tried. The Israeli government has consistently refused to negotiate with a “terrorist organization” and even with the Palestinian Unity Government that was in existence for some time and in which Hamas was represented.

Therefore, the decision to start the War on Gaza, with a civilian population of a million and a half, was unjustified even according to the criteria of Kasher himself. “All the alternative courses” had not been exhausted, or even attempted.

But we all know that, apart from the official reason, there was also an unofficial one: to topple the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. In the course of the war, official spokesmen stated that there was a need to attach a “price tag” – in other words, to cause death and destruction not in order to hurt the “terrorists” themselves (which would have been almost impossible) but to turn the life of the civilian population into hell, so they would rise up and overthrow Hamas.

The immorality of this strategy is matched by its inefficacy: our own experience has taught us that such methods only serve to harden the resolve of the population and unite them around their courageous leadership.

WAS IT at all possible to conduct this war without committing war crimes? When a government decides to hurl its regular armed forces at a guerrilla organization, which by its very nature fights from within the civilian population, it is perfectly clear that terrible suffering will be caused to that population. The argument that the harm caused to the population, and the killing of over a thousand men, women and children was inevitable should, by itself, have led to the conclusion that the decision to start this was a terrible act right from the beginning.

The Defense Establishment takes the easy way out. The ministers and generals simply assert that they do not believe the Palestinian and international reports about the death and destruction, stating that they are, again in Kasher’s words, “mistaken and false”. Just to be sure, they decided to boycott the UN commission that is currently investigating the war, headed by a respected South African judge who is both a Jew and a Zionist.

Assa Kasher is adopting a similar attitude when he says: “Somebody who does not know all the details of an action cannot assess it in a serious, professional and responsible way, and therefore should not do so, in spite of all emotional or political temptations.” He demands that we wait until the Israeli army completes its investigations, before we even discuss the matter.

Really? Every organization that investigates itself lacks credibility, not to mention a hierarchical body like the army. Moreover, the army does not – and cannot – obtain testimony from the main eye-witnesses: the inhabitants of Gaza. An investigation based only on the testimony of the perpetrators, but not of the victims, is ridiculous. Now even the testimonies of the soldiers of Breaking the Silence are discounted, because they cannot disclose their identity.

IN A war between a mighty army, equipped with the most sophisticated weaponry in the world, and a guerrilla organization, some basic ethical questions arise. How should the soldiers behave when faced with a structure in which there are not only enemy fighters, which they are “allowed” to hit, but also unarmed civilians, which they are “forbidden” to hit?

Kasher cites several such situations. For example: a building in which there are both “terrorists” and non-fighters. Should it be hit by aircraft or artillery fire that will kill everybody, or should soldiers be sent in who will risk their lives and kill only the fighters? His answer: there is no justification for the risking of the lives of our soldiers in order to save the lives of enemy civilians. An aerial or artillery attack must be preferred.

That does not answer the question about the use of the Air Force to destroy hundreds of houses far enough from our soldiers that there was no danger emanating from them, nor about the killing of scores of recruits of the Palestinian civilian police on parade, nor about the killing of UN personnel in food supply convoys. Nor about the illegal use of white phosphorus against civilians, as described in the soldiers’ testimonies gathered by Breaking the Silence, and the use of depleted uranium and other carcinogenic substances.

The entire country experienced on live TV how a shell hit the apartment of a doctor and wiped out almost all of his family. According to the testimony of Palestinian civilians and international observers, many such incidents took place.

The Israeli army took great pride in its method of warning the inhabitants by means of leaflets, phone calls and such, so as to induce them to flee. But everyone – and first of all the warners themselves - knew that the civilians had nowhere secure to escape to and that there were no clear and safe escape routes. Indeed, many civilians were shot while trying to flee.

WE SHALL not evade the hardest moral question of all: is it permissible to risk the lives of our soldiers in order to save the old people, women and children of the “enemy”? The answer of Assa Kasher, the ideologue of the “Most Moral Army in the World”, is unequivocal: it is absolutely forbidden to risk the lives of the soldiers. The most telling sentence in his entire essay is: “Therefore…the state must give preference to the lives of its soldiers above the lives of the (unarmed) neighbors of a terrorist.”

These words should be read twice and three times, in order to grasp their full implications. What is actually being said here is: if necessary to avoid casualties among our soldiers, it is better to kill enemy civilians without any limit.

In retrospect, one can only be glad that the British soldiers, who fought against the Irgun and the Stern Group, did not have an ethical guide like Kasher.

This is the principle that guided the Israeli army in the Gaza War, and, as far as I know, this is a new doctrine: in order to avoid the loss of one single soldier of ours, it is permissible to kill 10, 100 and even 1000 enemy civilians. War without casualties on our side. The numerical result bears witness: more than 1000 people killed in Gaza, a third or two thirds of them (depending on who you ask) civilians, women and children, as against 6 (six) Israeli soldiers killed by enemy fire. (Four more were killed by “friendly” fire.)

Kasher states explicitly that it is justified to kill a Palestinian child who is in the company of a hundred “terrorists”, because the “terrorists” might kill children in Sderot. But in reality, it was a case of killing a hundred children who were in the company of one “terrorist”.

If we strip this doctrine of all ornaments, what remains is a simple principle: the state must protect the lives of its soldiers at any price, without any limit or law. A war of zero casualties. That leads necessarily to a tactic of killing every person and destroying every building that could represent a danger to the soldiers, creating an empty space in front of the advancing troops.

Only one conclusion can be drawn from this: from now on, any Israeli decision to start a war in a built-up area is a war crime, and the soldiers who rise up against this crime should be honored. May they be blessed.

Uri Avnery is a journalist, peace activist, former member of the Knesset, and leader of Gush Shalom

Twitterers Paid To Spread Israeli Propaganda

By Jonathan Cook

21 July, 2009

Nazareth: The passionate support for Israel expressed on talkback sections of websites, internet chat forums, blogs, Twitters and Facebook may not be all that it seems.
Israel’s foreign ministry is reported to be establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel.
Internet-savvy Israeli youngsters, mainly recent graduates and demobilised soldiers with language skills, are being recruited to pose as ordinary surfers while they provide the government’s line on the Middle East conflict.
“To all intents and purposes the internet is a theatre in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we must be active in that theatre, otherwise we will lose,” said Ilan Shturman, who is responsible for the project.
The existence of an “internet warfare team” came to light when it was included in this year’s foreign ministry budget. About $150,000 has been set aside for the first stage of development, with increased funding expected next year.
The team will fall under the authority of a large department already dealing with what Israelis term “hasbara”, officially translated as “public explanation” but more usually meaning propaganda. That includes not only government public relations work but more secretive dealings the ministry has with a battery of private organisations and initiatives that promote Israel’s image in print, on TV and online.
In an interview this month with the Calcalist, an Israeli business newspaper, Mr Shturman, the deputy director of the ministry’s hasbara department, admitted his team would be working undercover.
“Our people will not say: ‘Hello, I am from the hasbara department of the Israeli foreign ministry and I want to tell you the following.’ Nor will they necessarily identify themselves as Israelis,” he said. “They will speak as net-surfers and as citizens, and will write responses that will look personal but will be based on a prepared list of messages that the foreign ministry developed.”
Rona Kuperboim, a columnist for Ynet, Israel’s most popular news website, denounced the initiative, saying it indicated that Israel had become a “thought-police state”.
She added that “good PR cannot make the reality in the occupied territories prettier. Children are being killed, homes are being bombed, and families are starved.”
Her column was greeted by several talkbackers asking how they could apply for a job with the foreign ministry’s team.
The project is a formalisation of public relations practices the ministry developed specifically for Israel’s assault on Gaza in December and January.
“During Operation Cast Lead we appealed to Jewish communities abroad and with their help we recruited a few thousand volunteers, who were joined by Israeli volunteers,” Mr Shturman said.
“We gave them background material and hasbara material, and we sent them to represent the Israeli point of view on news websites and in polls on the internet.”
The Israeli army also had one of the most popular sites on the video-sharing site YouTube and regularly uploaded clips, although it was criticised by human rights groups for misleading viewers about what was shown in its footage.
Mr Shturman said that during the war the ministry had concentrated its activities on European websites where audiences were more hostile to Israeli policy. High on its list of target sites for the new project would be BBC Online and Arabic websites, he added.
Elon Gilad, who heads the internet team, told Calcalist that many people had contacted the ministry offering their services during the Gaza attack. “People just asked for information, and afterwards we saw that the information was distributed all over the internet.”
He suggested that there had been widespread government cooperation, with the ministry of absorption handing over contact details for hundreds of recent immigrants to Israel, who wrote pro-Israel material for websites in their native languages.
The new team is expected to increase the ministry’s close coordination with a private advocacy group, giyus.org (Give Israel Your United Support). About 50,000 activists are reported to have downloaded a programme called Megaphone that sends an alert to their computers when an article critical of Israel is published. They are then supposed to bombard the site with comments supporting Israel.
Nasser Rego of Ilam, a group based in Nazareth that monitors the Israeli media, said Arab organisations in Israel were among those regularly targeted by hasbara groups for “character assassination”. He was concerned the new team would try to make such work appear more professional and convincing.
“If these people are misrepresenting who they are, we can guess they won’t worry too much about misrepresenting the groups and individuals they write about. Their aim, it’s clear, will be to discredit those who stand for human rights and justice for the Palestinians.”
When The National called the foreign ministry, Yigal Palmor, a spokesman, denied the existence of the internet team, though he admitted officials were stepping up exploitation of new media.
He declined to say which comments by Mr Shturman or Mr Gilad had been misrepresented by the Hebrew-language media, and said the ministry would not be taking any action over the reports.
Israel has developed an increasingly sophisticated approach to new media since it launched a “Brand Israel” campaign in 2005.
Market research persuaded officials that Israel should play up good news about business success, and scientific and medical breakthroughs involving Israelis.
Mr Shturman said his staff would seek to use websites to improve “Israel’s image as a developed state that contributes to the quality of the environment and to humanity”.
David Saranga, head of public relations at Israel’s consulate-general in New York, which has been leading the push for more upbeat messages about Israel, argued last week that Israel was at a disadvantage against pro-Palestinian advocacy.
“Unlike the Muslim world, which has hundreds of millions of supporters who have adopted the Palestinian narrative in order to slam Israel, the Jewish world numbers only 13 million,” he wrote in Ynet.
Israel has become particularly concerned that support is ebbing among the younger generations in Europe and the United States.
In 2007 it emerged that the foreign ministry was behind a photo-shoot published in Maxim, a popular US men’s magazine, in which female Israeli soldiers posed in swimsuits.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

Dangerous Untreated West Bank Wastewater By Stephen Lendman

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