Category: Uncategorized

So anyway, Imshin, since you’re such a faithful reader of JWN, why don’t you tell us all here: How do you feel about what your society has become…
That you have a political leadership there in Israel that is prone to making emotional and ill-considered decisions to use massive lethal force against your neighbors in Lebanon?
That you have an entire, extremely lethal military apparatus that is primed to wreak havoc, death, and devastation on your neighbors, and that is staffed by individual operatives prepared to push the relevant buttons to activate hi-tech weapons that will directly kill civilians, sometimes tens or scores at a time?
That just such an operative pushed the button that killed my children’s second cousin Colette Rashed along with four other civilian refugees, one hors de combat Lebanese army soldier, and a Red Cross volunteer, near Joub Jannine just 11 days ago?
(What did any of them ever do to you, or anyone you care about, Imshin?)
How do you feel about the fact that members of your country’s armed forces used finely-tuned, highly targetable weapons to knock out power plants, water pumping stations, and other parts of the Lebanese infrastructure vital to the survival of the most vulnerable Lebanese civilians: the sick, the old, the weak?
That you yourself seem to have become– for at least a moment back there– a hate-filled proponent of mass death in Lebanon?
How do you feel about all this, Imshin? Don’t you feel, at least, that there might just possibly be a better way to order your country’s relations with its neighbors than through this extreme (and at the end of the day, extremely counter-productive) recourse to violence?
And now that your country’s leadership is in such a cul-de-sac, which way will you urge it to turn– toward greater use of violence, or toward– finally!– giving peacemaking a serious chance?
I think we’ll need to carry on this conversation here, Imshin,since for some reason you’ve closed down the comments on your blog…

Sgt.Major Herbert A. Friedman (Retd.) has pulled together some very useful resources on Israeli psyops during the assault against Lebanon. He has a good collection of the leaflets the IAF dropped in various parts of the country, and refers to other psyops operations including the cellphone text messages, their efforts at hacking into Manar broadcasts, etc.
Halfway down that web-page he refers to the “All4lebanon” website the Israelis put up in the early days of the war. Originally, it had Arabic, French, and English-language editions, but they seem to have taken the English-language one down for now.
I actually first saw reference to “All4Lebanon” on Imshin’s blog, on July 22nd, when she wrote: “This site is where you go if you are Lebanese and you want to actively help in ridding Lebanon of Hizballah.” This and a few other things she has written recently make me think maybe she or her spouse works for the Israeli security services in some capacity?
Anyway, if you go to the All4Lebanon site, they give potential Lebanese collaborators two numbers to call– one in Switzerland, one someplace in Asia– and they promise you that “Confidentiality and financial recompense are assured to you.”
When I first saw that, I was going to blog about it. I thought it showed how truly desperate the Israelis were for informants/collaborators, that they would have to trawl for them in that way. Unlike in the 1982 assault , when they had networks of Phalangists, SLA, etc, working for them in Lebanon– and even then, they weren’t able to impose their will on the country…
Anyway, their whole “psyops” operation this time round looks just as Keystone Cops-ish (i.e. amateur-ish) as the military parts of the war. Except of course the Keystone Cops never killed anyone.

I’m dealing with a lot in the ‘real’ world. There’s a lot to discuss. I have a list of six or seven posts that I’ve been intending to put up. But no time, no time.
Y’all take over the shop for a couple of days. Send in posts and links on the global-affairs issues that concern you. I’ll get back ‘soon as I can.

CBS News’ website has a little poll asking “Iraq, three years later; Was it worth it?” I just voted “no” and thereby discovered that 68.82% of respondents there agreed with me. Maybe if enough of us also voted there we could push that percentage even higher!

Atwar Bahjat, a talented and gutsy 26-year-old Iraqi t.v. reporter was killed, along with two crew members, near Samarra yesterday.
The clear implication is that she was killed purely because she was a well-known Sunni Muslim public face.
She had just finished recording a report that told the wide viewership of Al-Arabiyya satellite t.v. all about the terrible destruction of the Askariya Mosque.
The BBC report I linked to there ssays:

A member of the al-Arabiya TV team who escaped described how two gunmen showed up as they stood in a crowd of Iraqis.
They dragged Bahjat and her colleagues away and shot them.

At least I hope her death was quick and as painless as possible. The report also says:

The channel named the other dead team members as cameraman Adnan Khairallah and soundman Khaled Mohsen, who both worked for the local Wassan production company.
At least eight employees of al-Arabiya have died in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion, some of them killed by US forces and others by suspected militants.
They are among more than 60 journalists who have fallen in the conflict, making Iraq one of the most deadly and hard-to-cover stories.

Atwar was a real heroine. I Googled her (as much as I could in this Google-restricted place that I now am) and found out the following:
She was arrested by the US forces in September 2003… But still she kept on working as a reporter.
She helped to publicize the mysterious killings of some 250 Iraqi scientists that have occurred under the aegis of the US-UK occupation.
She used to work for Jazeera and later switched to Arabiyya…
Well, that’s about it for what I learned about her. But I have huge admiration for her and for all the other young (and older) journos out there risking their lives to bring us this story.
I just hope to heck that her killing doesn’t provoke whoever’s holding Jill Carroll and the four CPTers to “retaliate” in kind.
Pray for mercy and peace for all in Iraq.

So the Iranian authorities have said they will help the incoming Palestinian ‘government’ to meet the budget shortfall created by Israel’s decision not to hand over the customs revenues that they’ve been collecting on the Palestinians’ behalf (less a 3.5% ‘collection fee’) for several years now.
Why should anyone be surprised that the Hamas leadership, having already learned of the intention of the US and the EU to cut off governmental aid, would be looking for alternative sources of funding?
Of course, the very best thing of all would be if the dead hand of the Israeli occupation could be lifted from the lives of the Palestinians and they could get back to running their own economy free of the movement controls and the many other Israeli-imposed regulations that today stifle all their attempts to do so. But I guess that ain’t about to happen?
I was at a seminar today where Maher Masri, a recent Palestinian Economy Minister, and Alon Liel, the former director-general of Israel’s foreign ministry, were discussing some of these economic issues. Liel appeared to be generally quite level-headed. But he seemed to lose his rationality completely as soon as there was mention of Iran… In one breath he moved from referring to the possibility of Iranian economic aid reaching the Palestinians to the idea that there would be “Iranian tanks and bullets on our border.”
How’s that again? Money=money. Tanks= well, something very different indeed, I’d say.
Actually, since Israel sits completely astride all financial streams going into the Palestinian areas it will, I’m sure, stop any aid that it disapproves of from getting in… Which gives them, ultimately, the primary responsibility for what happens regarding the provision or non-provision of vitally needed economic aid. Anyway, as is spelled out in the Geneva Conventions, an occupying power really does bear the responsibility for the welfare of the residents of the occupied areas, and this is a very concrete example of that. So the decision is quite clearly going to be Israel’s…
Who knows what that decision will be after the Israeli election of March 28? I see that Acting PM Ehud Olmert today said that he does not see Hamas as a strategic threat... Which given that he’s in the middle of an election campaign seems like a gutsily moderate and non-escalatory thing to say.
But still, actions speak louder than words. And no action that continues to starve Palestinians of vital funds (including, of funds that are theirs anyway!) can be seen as helping the movement toward a just peace.

Susan (NC)– who also posts on Today in Iraq as ‘Dancewater’– put a great post up there last night reminding us that December 20, 2005 is the 22nd anniversary of the famous Rumsfeld-Saddam handshake in Baghdad that sealed the rapid improvement in US-Iraq relations of those months.
Susan also linked to this recent article by Norman Solomon, in which Solomon noted the following:

Christmas came 11 days early for Donald Rumsfeld two years ago when the news broke that American forces had pulled Saddam Hussein from a spidery hole. During interviews about the capture, on CBS and ABC, the Pentagon’s top man was upbeat. And he didn’t have to deal with a question that Lesley Stahl or Peter Jennings could have logically chosen to ask: “Secretary Rumsfeld, you met with Saddam almost exactly 20 years ago and shook his hand. What kind of guy was he?”
Now, Saddam Hussein has gone on trial, but such questions remain unasked by mainstream U.S. journalists.…
As it happens, the initial trial of Saddam and co-defendants is focusing on grisly crimes that occurred the year before Rumsfeld gripped his hand. “The first witness, Ahmad Hassan Muhammad, 38, riveted the courtroom with the scenes of torture he witnessed after his arrest in 1982, including a meat grinder with human hair and blood under it,” the New York Times reported Tuesday. And: “At one point, Mr. Muhammad briefly broke down in tears as he recalled how his brother was tortured with electrical shocks in front of their 77-year-old father.”

Continue reading “This day in history (Rumsfeld-Saddam)”

AP is reporting that the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS) in Iraq is calling for the release of the four CPT people abducted on Saturday as well as the German woman who was (separately) abudtced in Iraq last Friday.
In addition to the AMS, the (also Sunni) Chief Mufti of Palestine, Ikrema Sabri, has also called for the CPTers’ release.
AP reported that,

“These aid workers have stood beside (the) Palestinian people and it’s our duty now to stand beside them,” [Sabri] said.
Palestinians in several towns said they had worked with the activists and asked Sabri to issue the appeal.

Actually, I’m not sure if any of the four CPT men abducted in Iraq have actually worked in Palestine, or not. (Their names, ages, and nationalities are listed here.) But CPT has maintained a well-respected presence in Hebron, and worked in other Palestinian towns, for several years now.
If you have the stomach to read something quite distasteful (and almost literally nauseating) about the abductions, you could read these comments by the sadly deluded rightwing talkshow host, and one-time pill addict, Rush Limbaugh…

The international Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) came into force in 1997, and the US was a founding signatory of it.
As part of the US’s obligations under the CWC, the US Congress had to enact legislation that embedded the provisions of the CWC into the US legal code, which it did through the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act of 1998. The definitions spelled out in Art. II of the CWC, including those highlighted in my previous post here, were incorporated as a body into Sec. 3 of this Act.
Sec. 229 of the Act, “Prohibited activities”, spells out that:

“(a) Unlawful Conduct.–Except as provided in subsection (b), it shall be unlawful for any person knowingly–
“(1) to develop, produce, otherwise acquire, transfer directly or indirectly, receive, stockpile, retain, own, possess, or use, or threaten to use, any chemical weapon; or
“(2) to assist or induce, in any way, any person to violate paragraph (1), or to attempt or conspire to violate paragraph (1).M
“(b) Exempted Agencies and Persons.–
“(1) In general.–Subsection (a) does not apply to the retention, ownership, possession, transfer, or receipt [but note that use and/or threatened use of a chem weapon is NOT exempted there ~HC] of a chemical weapon by a department, agency, or other entity of the United States, or by a person described in paragraph (2), pending destruction of the weapon.
“(2) Exempted persons.–A person referred to in paragraph (1) is–
“(A) any person, including a member of the Armed Forces of the United States, who is authorized by law or by an appropriate officer of the United States to retain, own, possess, transfer, or receive [but again, no exemption here for a person using or threatening to use one ~HC] the chemical weapon; or
“(B) in an emergency situation, any otherwise nonculpable person if the person is attempting to destroy or seize the weapon.
“(c) Jurisdiction.–Conduct prohibited by subsection (a) is within the jurisdiction of the United States if the prohibited conduct–
“(1) takes place in the United States;
“(2) takes place outside of the United States and is committed by a national of the United States;
…

Sec. 229A “Penalties” stipulates that:

“(a) Criminal Penalties.–
“(1) In general.–Any person who violates section 229 of this title shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned for any term of years, or both.
“(2) Death penalty.–Any person who violates section 229 of this title and by whose action the death of another person is the result shall be punished by death or imprisoned for life.
…

That is the US civil code.
The military code, as laid down in the US Army Field Manual 27-10 “The Law of Land Warfare” uses language that harks back to some of the earliest provisions of international humanitarian law– that is, the Hague Conventions of 1908. Ch. 2, sec II of FM 27-10 states the following:

Continue reading “White Phosphorus, the CWC, and U.S. legislation”