Author: Helena

Post-combat birth defects in Fallujah population

I didn’t have time to blog this when the BBC first reported it last Wednesday. But the report that found that the rate of birth defects in Fallujah since the U.S. military’s April 2004 assault against it has been higher than that in post-bombing Hiroshima is one that no U.S. citizen should ignore.
Patrick Cockburn had a lot more details about the study underlying the BBC report, in Saturday’s Independent, here.
He writes,

    Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.
    Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.
    … The study, entitled “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009”, is by Dr Busby, Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, and concludes that anecdotal evidence of a sharp rise in cancer and congenital birth defects is correct. Infant mortality was found to be 80 per 1,000 births compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and 9.7 in Kuwait. The report says that the types of cancer are “similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout”.
    Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. At Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia, but in Fallujah Dr Busby says what is striking is not only the greater prevalence of cancer but the speed with which it was affecting people…

The study was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. You can download the PDF here.

Afghanistan War Logs on US extra-judicial killings

I’ve begun reading the accounts from Wikileaks’s Afghanistan War Logs (AWL) that are being provided by the NYT, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel.
The revelations that have interested me most have been those about the extra-judicial killings (assassinations) that have been carried out by the U.S. military against suspected (or merely accused) Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Conducting extra-judicial killings is, of course, a tactic the US military has picked up from Israel, which has used them for many years now.
An “extra-judicial” killing is, of course, just that. It is a killing in which any “evidence” there is against the target is compiled and judged only in secret, by secret accusers.
In the U.S. military, the tendency is to say that the orders that result from this process are to “capture or kill” those designated as targets. But as this Guardian review of the AWL material reveals,

    In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.

The Guardian piece, which was written by Nick Davies, says that,

    The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed “black” unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a “kill or capture” list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list.

Both the Guardian account and the Der Spiegel account note that U.S. military commanders have gone to great lengths to conceal he existence of TF-373, which it describes as,

    The unit of elite soldiers, which includes members of the Navy Seals and the Delta Force, get their orders directly from the Pentagon in Washington and operate outside of the chain of command of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

I note parenthetically that ABC News had a story today about the Taliban in Afghanistan having claimed that they had killed one U.S. Navy member and captured another one.
What on earth were two U.S. “sailors” doing in seriously landlocked Afghanistan, I wondered?
The Spiegel story notes that,

    [T]he new information about the secret commando missions could… prove embarrassing for the German government. Roughly 300 men with TF 373 have been stationed on the grounds of Camp Marmal, the German field base in Mazar-e-Sharif, since the summer of 2009. The special unit has chosen a strategically advantageous and shielded location at the airfield, where it operates from the Regional Command North, which is under the command of Germany’s armed forces, the Bundeswehr.
    The stationing of the unit was a sensitive issue from the very beginning, and officials in Berlin persistently sought to prevent much discussion of the issue.

The Spiegel story also gives the distinct impression that the activities of the JPEL-related teams have been stepped up in recent months.
So much for Pres. Obama having brought a new respect for the rule of law into the conduct of U.S. government activities overseas.
The Guardian account gives many details of instances in which there have been significant killings of bystanders in conjunction with the activities of TF 373. The killing of bystanders (a.k.a. “collateral damage”) is indeed horrendous, and tragic. But even if no bystanders were killed at all, the idea of designating individuals for execution based on secret accusations against them is itself inherently anti-democratic and repellent.
I really don’t see why Pres. Obama and his advisers don’t understand this.
(Perhaps he listens too much to the advice he gets from his many Israeli friends? Of course, Israel’s longstanding and persistent use of this grisly tactic hasn’t “solved” its many remaining problems with its neighbors, has it? Indeed, by most accounts, it has merely exacerbated those problems. Obama might usefully ponder on that… )

Watch Emily Henochowizc’s transformational song

Here.
Hat-tip, Phil Weiss.
Henochowicz is the young Jewish-American artist who lost an eye to an IDF tear-gas canister while protesting the continued building of the Apartheid Wall.
She is amazing. Especially when she sings that people need “open their eyes.” And then she turns and looks at the camera with one of the lenses in her glasses deliberately clouded over so we don’t see her own tragically emptied eye-socket. Actually, with or without those socket-obscuring glasses, Emily Henochowicz both looks and acts like one of the most beautiful young women in the world.

Powerful rebuke of SA Chief Rabbi over Goldstone

The great, strongly anti-Apartheid South African journo Allister Sparks has penned a powerful rebuke of his country’s Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, over the latter’s strongly expressed criticism of Constitutional Court member Richard Goldstone, and Goldstone’s role in heading the UN’s fact-finding mission for Gaza.
(HT: Dominic.)
Sparks starts by noting that three of the major IDF war crimes reported by the Goldstone commission in Gaza were in fact recently confirmed to have been such by a military investigation undertaken by the IDF high command itself.
He comments, “the real importance of this military investigation is that it vindicates the Goldstone commission,” adding:

    For Judge Richard Goldstone, particularly, this is a personal vindication, for he was excoriated by leading members of the local Jewish community for chairing the commission. He was told his commission’s findings were lies; that he was naive and gullible for accepting the version of events given by terrorists; and that, since he is a Jew, he was a traitor to his people.
    His critics were given support by Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein, who chastised Goldstone for “doing great damage to the state of Israel”. He should have recused himself instead, Goldstein said, and taken no part in the investigating mission.

He then issues this important reproach to Goldstein:

    We secularists need to know what a religious leader in our community means when he seeks to impose such an ethical dictum on a prominent member of his faith — someone who was a founding father of our Constitutional Court and an interpreter of our infinitely important national constitution in this new democracy.
    I am reminded here of the conflict between the Dutch Reformed Church and Beyers Naude over the issue of apartheid.
    I attended the Dutch Reformed Church service in Linden, Johannesburg, at which Naude had to respond to the church leaders’ demand that he choose between the church’s doctrine of support for apartheid and his commitment to the nonracial Christian Institute he had founded.
    In other words, Naude was forced to choose between his moral principles and his loyalty to his own people and their church.
    I heard Naude announce his decision that memorable day before the glitterati of Afrikaner nationalism in the packed pews before him. Smilingly, boldly, he told them simply: “I choose God before man.”
    In other words, principles, truth and justice before ethnic or group loyalty. It was the defining moment of that great man’s life.
    So I ask the chief rabbi that same question today: what is your choice? Then, at the level of plain human decency, don’t you think, Chief Rabbi Goldstein and those members of the Orthodox Jewish community and the South African Zionist Federation whom you lead, that you owe Judge Goldstone an apology? A public, abject apology.
    Leaders of the federation went to the extremes of cruelty when they took their religious war against Judge Goldstone (dare I call it a fatwa?) into the heart of his family by trying to ban him from his grandson’s bar mitzvah. Eventually, but it seemed to me somewhat reluctantly, negotiations enabled the family to celebrate this important event together.
    But I’m sorry, that wasn’t enough. In this land of ubuntu, this land of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, you must stand up, Chief Rabbi Goldstein, and on behalf of the co-religionists you supported in this calumny, bow your head, apologise and, like the man of God I’m sure you are, beg forgiveness of Judge Richard Goldstone.

550 IDF soldiers interrogated re possible war crimes in Gaza war

Huge kudos to Max Blumenthal, who found a report in yesterday’s Yediot stating that (in Max’s translation),

    More than 550 officers and men of IDF who participated in the “Cast Lead” operation have been interrogated by the investigative military police of the IDF in the last 18 months.

The Yediot report, by Yossi Yehoshua, notes,

    So far the interrogations gave rise to a considerable number of disciplinary – and legal – steps. The most serious one was taken last week when the Chief Military Prosecutor, Aloof Avihai Mandelblit, decided to charge a Giv’ati soldier for committing murder. On another occasion he decided to court-martial a Golani battalion commander for ignoring IDF instructions forbidding “use of neighbor” tactics.

As Max notes there: “’Use of neighbor’ tactic is the act where soldiers preparing to enter a suspected house force the neighbors to walk in front of them as a human shield.”
His laconic comment is, “Maybe Judge Goldstone wasn’t so crazy after all.” Indeed he wasn’t.
I guess my additional comment is that there does seem to be something of a battle going on for the “soul” of the IDF. An army that commits war crimes is not, in most circumstances, a disciplined fighting force. But today’s IDF has increasing numbers of military religio-nationalists rising up in its officer ranks (and in the IDF rabbinate), and many of those emerging leaders have racist, brutal views of any non-Jews. Thus we saw those outrageous hate-tracts that were distributed by some portions of the IDF rabbinate among soldiers during the assault of 2008-09… The military police (and thus, presumably, some portions of the general staff who support them) seem to have been rattled enough by the emergence of this openly racist religio-nationalism that they are trying to fight back and curb it? Maybe. Anyway, worth watching what’s going on there.

Just World Books update #4

We’re still tweaking the website at Just World Books, so until it’s ready to roll out, I’ll be sending out my updates from here.
I’ve signed three new contracts in the past couple of weeks. Two are with Manan Ahmed, who’s the principal blogger (Sepoy) at Chapati Mystery and also blogs at Informed Comment: Global Affairs. He’ll be publishing one book with JWB on the impact of the ‘Global war on Terror’ on society, culture, and politics, in Pakistan, and on relations between the majority-Muslim world and westerners. The other will be on the impact of the internet and other social and technological innovations on society and culture in Pakistan, and on the “desi” community worldwide.
Those books will both be author-curated compilations of Ahmed’s blog posts and other writings.
The third contract I signed is with Ron Mock, who’s a professor of political science and peace studies at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. His book will be an exploration of the challenges Christian pacifism has faced over the centuries, and continues to face today. It will be coming out next year.
In 2004 Ron (who’s an old friend, and an excellent writer and thinker) published a very thoughtful and timely book called Loving Without Giving In: Christian Responses to Terrorism and Tyranny. This one develops and deepens some of the arguments he was making there.
When I was talking with Ron about publishing this new book, I thought it would be nice to make this into the “flagship” book– or whatever the nonviolent equivalent of that would be– of a new series of books that JWB might publish on issues in nonviolence. If any JWN readers know people who are doing interesting writing in this field and might want to be included in this series, please let them know about this opportunity and have them contact me!
Finally, since I’m sure people are all excited about Laila El-Haddad’s book(s), I should tell you that after further consideration and discussion I have decided her manuscript will be published as one book, after all. It will be a big one– maybe 350 pages. But it’s going to be great. The title we’ve chosen is Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything In Between. Expected Publication date: October or November 2010.
Amb. Chas Freeman’s first book with us is now in editing. Its title is America’s Misadventures in the Middle East. Publication date October 2010.

Plea of the Israeli political prisoner’s wife

Read this powerful article penned for Electronic Intifada by Janan Abdu, spouse of Palestinian-Israeli political prisoner Ameer Makhoul, who has shockingly been held without trial since May.
Abdu quotes the stirring (but possibly empty?) words that Secretary Clinton uttered recently at the 10th anniversary meeting of the Community of Democracies in Krakow, Poland:

    “Democracies don’t fear their own people… They recognize that citizens must be free to come together to advocate and agitate.”

Well, that would be assuming that Israel is an actual democracy, wouldn’t it?
Anyway, go read the whole of Abdu’s stirring article there.

Is an attack on Iran really more ‘do-able’ now?

Time magazine’s often well informed Joe Klein has a significant piece on their website today, tellingly titled An Attack on Iran: Back on the Table.
He argues there that Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other high-ups in the Obama administration are now more optimistic than they were a year ago about the chances of “succeeding” in using military force to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.
This looks like part of a concerted campaign to make the launching of a military attack against Iran– by the U.S. or by Israel– seem more “feasible”, and less disastrous all round for the American people’s true interests.
The money quote in Klein’s piece is, however, this one:

    Israel has been brought into the [U.S.] planning process, I’m told, because U.S. officials are frightened by the possibility that the right-wing Netanyahu government might go rogue and try to whack the Iranians on its own.

How’s that again?
U.S. officials are frightened that the Netanyahu government might “go rogue and try to whack the Iranians on its own”? But, um, the U.S. has for many decades been the main backer of Israel and continues to be so; and if Israel should “go rogue” and take acts that harm the American people’s interests then the U.S. could just stop that aid cold. Right?
Why on earth would we have to accede to the blackmail threat wielded by the government of a very small country on this or any other point?
If a person or entity is subjected to blackmail, the very best policy is always to go to the authorities. In this case, the U.S. government can simply go to the U.N. and invite the other members of the Security Council to join it in fashioning a response to the blackmailer.
… I have to note that the argument of Klein’s (presumably American?) source on this point is absolutely analogous to the kinds of arguments that the dreadful Mr. Blair made to his public in late 2002 about “having to go along with” George W. Bush’s increasingly escalatory policies towards Iraq because sticking close to Bush was, Blair argued to some people then, the best way to prevent Bush from jumping off the cliff and actually attacking Iraq.
Which Bush did anyway. The fact that his “good friend” Blair had indulged his warmongering up until then in fact made it far, far easier for him to launch the war than it would have been otherwise.
Now, from these unidentified informants of Klein’s we are getting the same sick argument. That Washington “has to go along with” Netanyahu in his policies towards Iran because that’s “the only way” to prevent him from jumping off the cliff and actually launching an attack against Iran.
It isn’t “the only way”. Indeed, it’s not a way to restrain Netanyahu, at all. The only way to restrain a blackmailer is by calling his bluff. Take the whole tangled case to the proper authorities and don’t think that by appeasing the blackmailer you’re going to get off the hook…
As for the broader argument Klein is trying to make there, that an Israel or U.S. (or U.S.-Israeli) attack against Iran need not necessarily be as downright damaging and disastrous all round as all the experts have thought until now… Well, actually, nothing has changed to make it seem more “do-able”.
And among the so-called “western” nations, remember that it is still us Americans who have by far the most to lose in the region… including many thousands of U.S. service-members strung out along very vulnerable supply lines all around Iran.
The Israelis? They barely have any skin in this game. They need, quite simply, to butt out, and let the U.S. and the other adult nations of the world negotiate a resolution to the multiple, overlapping security challenges in the Gulf region.
By the way, the always intelligent and estimable Paul Rogers has a very good analysis of this whole question on Open Democracy today.
He argues that,

    An Israeli security perspective, for example, is concerned almost as much with Iran’s development of medium-range solid-fuel missiles as with its nuclear projects; so missile-research, development and production sites would be key targets. Moreover, the people who design, develop and build the nuclear and missile programmes – and the facilities that train these specialists – are as significant as the physical infrastructure; so housing-complexes around nuclear and missile plants, key research-centres, factories, and even university departments training scientists and engineers would also be in the line of fire.
    In practice, then, military action will be much more generic than specific; it will certainly involve raids in and around greater Tehran; and it will be seen as more an act of war against the country as a whole than a limited dropping of bombs in remote locations.

Rogers quotes from a longer study he has undertaken (PDF linked to here), noting that it concludes that

    a war to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions will “lead to sustained conflict and regional instability”, and that it is “unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and might even encourage it.” Thus, “military action against Iran should be ruled out as a means of responding to its possible nuclear ambitions.”
    The crisis sparked by an Israeli assault on Iran could indeed become at least as destructive as have been the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. The fact that the United States and Israel itself are using an undefined threat of military action to reinforce diplomatic pressure on Tehran actually makes other approaches more difficult. This predicament has to be faced, and innovative thinking needed soon, if the region and the world are to avoid catastrophe.

Rogers was one of that stalwart band of informed observers (myself included) who correctly predicted that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would turn out very badly for all concerned– including, very rapidly, the U.S.
So will members of the policy elite in the U.S. be more inclined to listen to us this time– or to the war-mongering enablers of escalation whom Joe Klein has evidently been talking to?

More on America’s pro-Israeli warmongers

Over at Lobelog, Eli Clifton and Daniel Luban have been doing a great job of keeping tabs on the many neocon and tightly pro-Likud groups that have been springing up in the U.S., trying to create the impression there’s a “growing groundswell of opinion” that wants the U.S. to attack Iran, and thereby trying to push Pres. Obama into doing so.
These groups are often called “astroturf” groups, since they simulate the actions of more genuine grassroots movements.
Read Eli and Daniel’s recent posts on this here: 1, 2, 3, 4.
You would think that the people who jack-knifed the U.S. power elite and a large chunk of the U.S. public into supporting the disastrous and tragic invasion of Iraq seven years ago would have been too ashamed to show their faces in public, ever again. But no. Here they are. Again. These people have no shame.
“Keep Israel Safe!” “Emergency Committee for Israel”, etc etc. What arrant and mendacious nonsense.
What these people propose certainly won’t do anything to bring safety to the peoples of either the U.S., or Israel.
As Steve Walt writes about the so-called “Emergency Committee”: “Its members must think Israel is in real trouble, but what they don’t seem to realize is that it is their advice that has helped lead to its current difficulties…”
Anyway, if you’re concerned about the machinations of these well-funded astroturf warmongers, head over to Lobelog and learn all about them.

Military spending: The real crisis for Israel and the U.S.

Thanks to the ever-vigilant Didi Remez we learn that many of the ‘scare stories’ about Hizbullah, Lebanon etc, that have been coming out of Israel’s defense ministry in recent days have been motivated by– no, not any real concern about new developments in Lebanon, but more by a desire by defense minister Ehud Barak to fight hard against… the finance ministry’s current demands for spending cutbacks.
Remez translates into English an article in today’s Maariv that starts with this:

    “Ehud Barak is the most expensive defense minister in Israel’s history”; “The IDF is impertinently disregarding all of the Brodet Commission’s findings, while deceiving the public”; “it’s interesting how every time the military budget is on the table, they release from the stocks Hezbollah’s missile array and expose sensitive classified material,” — these are just some of the harsh statements that were heard over the weekend among senior Finance Ministry officials and directed against the IDF and the security establishment.
    A brutal struggle over the Defense Ministry’s budget is expected next week. Finance Ministry officials, headed by the finance minister versus the security establishment headed by the defense minister. A personal dual in which Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is to give the final ruling.

Over at the excellent Global Issues blog, the info page on “World Military Spending” is headed by this great quote from U.S. founding father, proud Virginian, and president James Madison:

    Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Well, the folks in Israel who have turned down every attempt to broker a fair peace with their neighbors might have reflected on those words a few times over the past 62 years.
Israelis have been extremely lucky in the past 40 or so years to have had many of their military costs borne by the U.S. taxpayer through the always generous aid the U.S. congress has continued to send to Israel’s military. But many of Israel’s military costs– especially the manpower-related costs– can’t easily be dollarized, and therefore remain as a burden on the Israeli economy. ( Xinhua had this recent interesting article on the financial burden of Israel’s war-fighting and war-preparing projects.)
But in today’s United States, the picture of bloated military spending being sustained by (and in turn sustaining) the pursuit of numerous, apparently unresolvable wars– or, as it’s also known in mil-speak here, “the long war”– is exactly the same. And this, in the midst of a continuing, deep crisis in the civilian, real-world economy at home.
That page on the Global Issues site contains lots of very informative data, if you scroll down beneath James Madison. Including the stunning big pie chart that shows in ways no-one can misunderstand the fact that the U.S. (which has less than 5% of the world’s population) currently accounts for 46.5% of world military spending.
Of course this is not sustainable. Small wonder that current U.S. defense secretary Robert gates has spent quite a lot of time recently (e.g. here) trying to argue for some serious cuts in military spending.
But where to cut, and how? How to pull back the U.S. military from its present, extremely expensive engagement in war-zones (present and future) in more than 20 distant countries around the world– without further destabilizing those countries? And how to manage the loss of jobs in some U.S. communities that cutbacks of big-ticket weapons-system production would inevitably cause?
Those, of course, are the big strategic questions.
The U.S. public needs to start rationalizing our country’s interaction with the other 95% of humanity– and to start bringing our defense spending under some kind of real control– by taking the following steps:

    1. Let go of the idea that the U.S. is any kind of an “indispensable nation” when it comes to reducing inter-group tensions and building real, inclusive political stability in other countries around the world. We aren’t. Most often– including in Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan– the injection of a heavily militarized U.S. presence has made the situation considerably worse for the peoples of those countries. Those peoples may (or may not) need help from outsiders to get their sharp internal problems resolved. But if they do, there are many, many other international actors– including regional groupings, ad-hoc groups of neighboring countries, or the U.N. itself– that are infinitely better equipped to provide that help than the geographically and culturally distant U.S., whose reliance on a heavily militarized foreign policy only exacerbates tensions wherever it goes.
    2. Work with the other countries of the world to regenerate the U.N. and other international institutions on a basis of real equality and mutual respect among the world’s peoples, rather than continued U.S./western dominance of those bodies.
    3. Start planning to convert our massive and bloated defense industries into industries that serve the regeneration of our civilian national economy. Factories producing MRAPs and Hummers? They could and should be turned into factories producing rail cars and modern, green buses. Factories producing surveillance drones and cruise missiles? Shouldn’t they be producing solar panels and the hardware needed for a decent national broadbank initiative, instead? Etc, etc.
    4. Establish programs around the U.S. to take advantage of the (non-lethal) skill-sets the military has worked hard to inculcate in its members, and put those skills to use in rebuilding our nation, first, from the level of individual communities that are currently under great stress through the level of repair and regeneration of our crumbling infrastructure. Supporters of the military and of military spending make one good argument when they note that the military has done well at building a building a strong workforce that is generally well integrated as between different races, ethnicities, and even (to some extent) between men and women. (Though not, alas, between straight people and gay people.) So now, let’s take some of the money that continues to pour into sustaining those units as military units, and re-form them as a Civilian Community-Building Corps, to work at home.

… Anyway, these are a few of my ideas right now. Not original, I know. But still, increasingly urgent for us all to think about. These wars are dragging us all down. And there is, certainly, a far, far better way for Americans and Israelis to resolve the problems we face in our relations with the rest of the world’s peoples.