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U.S. Spy Chief: 9/11 ‘Could Have Been Prevented’
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
Director of National Intelligence Says U.S. Didn’t Connect Available Information
By JASON RYAN and THERESA COOK
(AP Photo)
Six years after the deadliest attack on U.S. soil, the head of U.S. spy operations admitted to lawmakers that “9/11 should have and could have been prevented.”
Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, told members of the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday that “it was an issue of connecting information that was available.”
McConnell, explaining that the intelligence community was, at the time, very focused on foreign threats, said the community allowed itself “to be separated from anything that was potentially domestic,” and that domestic threats were “not something we [were] supposed to be concerned with.”
“Yeah, that translates to negligence,” charged committee chairman John Conyers, D-Mich.
“Or interpretation of the law — of how the culture had evolved,” McConnell countered.
Given the vast resources of the intelligence community, along with the FBI’s and CIA’s knowledge that al Qaeda had an interest in flight training, and had sent 9/11 hijackers Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi and terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui to undertake such training in the United States, McConnell said, “For whatever reason, we didn’t connect the dots.”
A federal judge in Virginia sentenced Moussaoui, the only person indicted in connection with the 9/11 attacks, to life in prison without the possibility of parole, in May 2006. He is serving his time at a super-maximum security federal facility in Florence, Colo.
“We could have done a better job as a community,” McConnell told the House panel.
McConnell’s admissions before the panel took a statement he made on June 29 a few steps further.
In his earlier remarks, McConnell said, “The rules that were established during the Cold War and post-70s served us well, but it created seams. In my view, the 9/11 tragedy should have been prevented. It was preventable. But, I think the terrorists took advantage of the seams that had been created in the process for how we conduct our affairs, both intelligence and law enforcement.”
The 9/11 Commission criticized the National Security Agency and its ability to analyze intercepted communications, noting in its final report, “While the NSA had the technical capability to report on communications with suspected terrorist facilities in the Middle East, the NSA did not seek FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court warrants to collect communications between individuals in the United States and foreign countries, because it believed that this was an FBI role.
“It also did not want to be viewed as targeting persons in the United States and possibly violating laws that governed NSA’s collection of foreign intelligence,” the report continued.
Intelligence officials had previously stated that the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program was established after analyzing the pre-9/11 movements and communications of the hijackers after the attacks.
After poring over the hijackers’ phone calls and e-mails, investigators noticed missed opportunities — communications that could have been intercepted, and possibly would have tipped investigators to the coming attacks.
After a review by lawyers from the White House, NSA and Justice Department, the program operated at the NSA, and allowed the agency to perform warrantless electronic surveillance of suspected al Qaeda members in the United States.
Much of Tuesday’s hearing focused on changes in the FISA law, and technical aspects of the government’s data collection programs.
Shortly after the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program was transferred to the FISA court’s jurisdiction in January 2007, a secret order from the court required intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant to intercept foreign-to-foreign communications that were routed on U.S. communication networks.
Given the NSA’s ability to collect communications and data from around the world and the Internet, the nation’s security officials faced a daunting task. McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee that, in some cases, this meant that the U.S. was required to get a warrant to intercept Iraqi insurgent communications.
He added that the changes made to FISA under the Protect America Act, signed into law in August, provided wider surveillance coverage of terrorism targets by freeing up resources.
Civil liberties groups have long voiced concerns about the changes in the law, and over the NSA program. The Terrorist Surveillance Program had operated covertly until it was revealed in a December 2005 story by the New York Times. A pending leak investigation is underway by the Justice Department over the disclosure.
Congress is currently holding hearings on making changes in the FISA law permanent. At the Tuesday hearing, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said, “The power to invade people’s privacy cannot be exercised unchecked.”
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Bush calls for expansion of spy law
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
President Bush, right, accompanied by Raul Yanes, Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary, waves as they leave the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2007, as the president left for a trip to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds )
President Bush said Wednesday that a law hastily passed in August to temporarily give the government more power to eavesdrop without warrants on foreign terror suspects must be made permanent and expanded.
If this doesn’t happen, Bush said, “Our national security professionals will lose critical tools they need to protect our country.”
“Without these tools, it will be harder to figure out what our enemies are doing to train, recruit and infiltrate operatives into America,” he said on a visit to the super-secret National Security Agency’s headquarters in suburban Fort Meade, Md. “Without these tools, our country will be much more vulnerable to attack.”
The 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act governs when warrants for eavesdropping must be obtained from a secret intelligence court. This year’s update—approved by the Senate and House just before Congress adjourned for an August break—allows more efficient interceptions of foreign communications.
Under the new law—the Protect America Act—the government can eavesdrop, without a court order, on communications conducted by a person reasonably believed to be outside the United States, even if an American is on one end of the conversation—so long as that American is not the intended focus or target of the surveillance.
That change was urgently requested by the Bush administration, which said that the modernization of communications technology had created a dire gap in the nation’s terrorism intelligence collection capabilities.
Such surveillance was generally prohibited under the original FISA law if the wiretap was conducted inside the United States, unless a court approved it. Because of changes in telecommunications technology, many more foreign communications now flow through the United States. The new law allows those to be tapped without a court order.
But civil liberties groups and many Democrats say the new changes
go too far. Congress’ Democratic leaders set it to expire in six months so that it could be fine-tuned, and that process is beginning on Capitol Hill now.
Democrats hope to change the law to provide additional oversight when the government eavesdrops on U.S. residents communicating with overseas parties.
Bush timed his visit to the NSA facility to press his case.
“The threat from al Qaida is not going to expire in 135 days,” he said, “so I call on Congress to make the Protect America Act permanent.”
He also pleaded with lawmakers to expand the law, not restrict it. One provision particularly important to the administration, but opposed by many Democrats, would grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies which may have helped the government conduct surveillance prior to January 2007 without a court order.
Bush was joined at the podium in an NSA hallway by Vice President Dick Cheney, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and others.
The president received private briefings from intelligence officials and mingled with employees in the National Threat Operations Center. While cameras and reporters were in the room, the large video screens that lined the walls displayed unclassified information on computer crime and signal intelligence.
Along one wall at NSA is a sign that says, “We won’t back down. We never have. We never will.”
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Safer society or Big Brother state?
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
Marcel Berlins
The Guardian
The question we need to ask about the storing of DNA samples is the same as the one bedevilling our approach to identity cards, and stiff anti-terrorism legislation. Crudely, it is this: how much interference with our liberties are we - as a society, as individuals - prepared to countenance in the cause of public safety? The question can be put more emotionally. Would we accept giving the police draconian powers of interrogation and detention (or introducing compulsory ID cards) if we knew that it would prevent 100 people from being blown up by terrorists? But what if only 10 lives would be saved? Or would we need 1,000 to die before we readily relinquished our civil liberties? These are, of course, absurd questions; yet that is the balancing exercise we (and our MPs) are constantly being asked to consider, even if we don’t articulate the issue in precisely those terms. Yesterday’s thoughtful report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on the retention of DNA samples discusses the various options open to the government. At one extreme is the permanent storage of DNA taken from convicted criminals, and from no one else; at the other, a national DNA database of the whole population. There are many possibilities in between. Broadly speaking, the police would favour a large DNA library, which, they say, would help them to solve a lot of crime. The civil libertarian doesn’t accept that such a conclusion follows from the available statistics.
The trouble is that no one has any real idea of the consequences of the various models, in terms of crime detection. Still less can we calculate the balance between retaining DNA samples and public safety. Just how many extra crimes, of what seriousness, would be committed if the police were denied their wish for an expanding DNA database? We don’t know. Even assuming a more successful detection rate, would it be enough to compensate for the inevitable human mistakes and computer foul-ups that would occur, breaching people’s privacy and putting the innocent at risk of an injustice? We cannot know, just as we have no provable or even vaguely persuasive way of assessing whether identity cards will result in a safer society or a Big Brother state.
At present, the police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, in the course of investigating crime, are entitled to take DNA from a suspect, victim or witness, and to store the sample (even that of an acquitted defendant) for ever. This has enabled them to collect the DNA of four million people, the vast majority innocent of any crime. It is different in Scotland, where they can permanently retain samples only from convicted criminals and, for three years, samples from those charged with a serious sexual or violence offence, even if not convicted. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics strongly urges the government to adopt the Scottish practice throughout Britain. I fear it will not. It is not in the mood to give in to civil liberties concerns. The official inquiry currently under way will, I predict, meet the police’s demands. If it’s the police versus the rights lobby, there can be only one winner.
It is precisely because Michael Palin is so good and so popular that his series on “New Europe” - mainly the countries of the old Soviet bloc - leaves me a little uneasy. It has something to do with the combination of the subject matter and Palin’s personality. I’m not saying that he makes a joke of everything - there was some moving and thought-provoking stuff in the first programme, last Sunday, about the aftermath of the Balkan tragedies of the 1990s - but I don’t think I am being unfair in saying that his main stock-in-trade is a kind of light-hearted approach to whatever and whoever he encounters, punctuated by the occasional self-deprecating tomfoolery. He chats to many eccentrics and discovers strange and silly local customs. He plays himself, beautifully, to the satisfaction of a very large audience (7.5 million watched the first episode).
So what is my problem? What bothers me is that the countries Palin visits emerge to the viewers as seen through his eyes and humour, and that means as somewhat dotty people in dotty places. (I haven’t seen the whole series, but I have seen the ads and trailers, and read what he himself has written and, besides, the evidence is in his previous television series).
So what? Does it matter? I think it does, in a way that Palin’s presentation of nations and peoples in his other series didn’t.
Europe and the European Union matter. The British, whether Europhobe or -phile, are curiously edgy, confused and sensitive about the EU. They should be absorbing information that brings them closer to understanding their new fellow members. Palin is wonderful at what he does, but you don’t go to him for insight.
The BBC could have made programmes on the same subject, treated more seriously and with a more earnest presenter - but they would have attracted a fraction of the viewers. Indeed, there have been such programmes, especially at the time of the enlargement of the EU in 2004, mainly consigned to late-evening slots or the less watched channels. I am blaming neither Palin nor the network. I just wish the British television watcher had been given something a little more substantial on which to judge and understand the countries of new Europe.
This week Marcel read Foreigners by Caryl Phillips: “Three stories about how the white English exploited and destroyed black men in their midst. The one about Randolph Turpin, once a world boxing champion, is particularly moving.” Marcel watched on television: “Two world cups, with England men rubbish at rugby and England women terrific at football.”
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Is the mis-use of IT destroying our civil liberties?
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
This is a question that we all must think hard about because many Governments and private companies around the world are building up vast databases of personal data, biometrics and more.
The UK Government has already begun the roll out of biometric technology in passports, fingerprinting of school children and is well underway with the the UK National ID card and National Identity Register which will allow private companies and public sector to verify UK citizens using a single card and record all this activity. The UK ID card will also make use of iris scans, DNA and fingerprints. The UK Govt. also embarked on the NHS NPfIT (National Health Service National Programme for IT) in which all patient records will be centralised and can be accessed from anywhere.
Former PM Tony Blair and his successor have already shown their support for a national DNA database holding DNA for every UK citizen and the Home Office IPS (Identity & Passport Service) are also looking at RFID implants.
The UK Govt. like others has a terrible record when it comes to delivering IT projects and recent cases where NHS staff where viewing the records of a celebrity being treated at a different hospital, CSA (Child Support Agency) failing to deliver anything, NHS staff swapping swipe cards and leaving passwords at computer terminals and a report from the US about a company forcing RFID implants upon it’s staff are all signs of what is to come.
Should we be embarking on these projects to use this IT technology to monitor, track, document and watch citizens 24/7?
HM Government and UK citizens have no formal relationship documented in the form of a constitution and this therefore allows this UK Government and future ones the right to use these systems as they like.
What implications for the future?
Do you want the police and Government to know your entire private life?
Is it the job of Govt. to award citizens identity or is it just the job of Govt. to serve the people?
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/forums/0,1000000782,39289511-39001037c-20087441o,00.htm
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America’s PSI Spies Penetrate the Kremlin: The Secret History of Remote Viewing
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
By Jim Marrs
RINF Alternative News
Behind the doors of the CIA and U.S. Army Intelligence, science and ESP come together like a movie in the electrifying scenes of Jim Marrs’ new book, PSI Spies: the True Story of America’s Psychic Warfare Program. The author of best-sellers that have revealed the secrets and the conspiracies of the Federal Government, Marrs traces in PSI Spies the evolution of remote viewing and the use of this mental technology from the hidden laboratories of the 1970s to a new generation of viewers now being trained by former PSI spies.
At the height of the Cold War an American intelligence officer prowled the hallways of the Kremlin in Moscow. Creeping up a staircase at the center of Soviet Russia’s most secret intelligence operations, he suddenly froze when he saw a Soviet soldier on guard. Holding his breath, he slipped past the guard, who showed no reaction. Reaching his destination, the American passed through a locked doorway and began to study the maps on the walls.
He was no ordinary spy. Unseen by the guard, he had literally passed through a locked door because he was one of America’s PSI Spies–military men trained in the use of a psychic technique known as remote viewing.
The PSI spy was able to penetrate the Kremlin with his mind, while his body lay on a cot in an obscure wood-framed building on the grounds of Fort Meade, Maryland. As he practiced a skill called “bi-location”, physically he was in one place while mentally he was on the other side of the planet.
Previously known as clairvoyance, remote viewing is the ability to perceive people, places and things beyond the reach of our normal five senses. In one of the most rigorous and secret scientific investigations in history, it has been discovered that most humans can develop this skill that, scientists have found, is confined by neither time nor distance.
Despite extensive scientific study and operational use over a quarter of a century and through four separate White House administrations, few Americans know the true story of the remote viewing as it was studied and used by tax-supported government agencies, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the United States Army. Begun as an experimental response to psychic research that was being conducted behind the Iron Curtain in the 1960s, the use of secret remote viewing by both the East and the West may have helped end the Cold War. Remote viewing of distant planets has been verified by NASA space missions, and it may have explained the mysterious loss of both the Soviet Phobos II in 1989 and the U.S. Mars Observer in 1993; contact with these craft was lost as they entered orbit around the planet Mars.
I reveal the history and the discoveries of the U.S. Army’s formerly Top Secret remote viewing unit in my new book from Career Press/New Page Books entitled PSI Spies: The True Story of America’s Psychic Warfare Program. The book traces the history of remote viewing from the Cold War all the way back to the Bible, detailing research results from Stanford Research Institute proving that unlimited by time and space, remote viewing is available to everyone.
At one time a closely guarded government secret, the truth about remote viewing has filtered into some aware segments of the public where it continues to attract fascination and interest. Today, several former military viewers are currently teaching the skill, while others reveal the details in books, articles and in public appearances. Some PSI entrepreneurs even advertise psychic readings reportedly accomplished by remote viewing.
As one of the first non-government researchers to study remote viewing, I have examined the transition from Top Secret government project to public fad, interviewing many members of the original PSI Spies unit as well as people connected to the unit as supervisors or consultants. First studied by the CIA in the 1970s, remote viewing as a psychic technology for espionage was used by U.S. Army, which formed a small unit of viewers who spied for America during the Cold War and later. Overseen at the time by hundreds of people in oversight committees and by congressional supervisors, the study and use of the extraordinary psychic program has been described as “the most severely monitored scientific experiment in history.”
Gaining covert knowledge about a variety of government and military activities around the world, the soldiers turned psychic spies were asked to stop a Soviet plot to kill President Ronald Reagan by mentally prowling the halls of the Kremlin, and in later years they probed Iraq’s hidden weapons sites in preparation for the 1991 Gulf War. Lyn Buchanan, former training officer for the PSI Spies, has described how it feels to lose integration with our material plane as he mentally steps into the trajectory of a particle beam weapon. From insights into our future to the mysteries of UFOs and crop circles, no subject has been immune to penetration by the military remote viewers.
About the author:
An award-winning Texas journalist and author, Jim Marrs served in Military Intelligence with the U.S. Army before becoming an independent journalist/author, and he worked for and owned several Texas newspapers. His in-depth overview of the UFO phenomenon in the book, Alien Agenda, has been cited as the best-selling non-fiction book on UFOs in the world, having been translated into several languages. Marrs is also the author of the New York Times best-sellers, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, a basis for the Oliver Stone film JFK; and Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons and the Great Pyramids. He is a frequent guest on nationwide radio talk show programs and has appeared on major TV networks, and on Good Morning America, Geraldo, Larry King and the Today Show, among others.
Prior to the recent publication of PSI Spies: The True Story of America’s Psychic Warfare Program, Marrs’ latest book was The Terror Conspiracy: Deception, 9/11 and the Loss of Liberty.
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UK TV Documentary about surveillance and privacy needs YOU!
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
Are you concerned about government surveillance? Or do you think we’re heading for an Orwellian mass surveillance system?
Firecracker Films are making a documentary about surveillance society and individuals increasing loss of privacy and would like to hear from anyone who is either actively campaigning against surveillance, or anyone who takes measures to avoid it.
Email webmaster@rinf.com
Have Your Say: UK TV Documentary about surveillance and privacy needs YOU!
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Calls grow for Bush war crimes trial
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
U.S. President George W. Bush will definitely be tried at an international tribunal, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said in a sermon at this week’s Friday prayers in Tehran.
The Mehr News Agency interviewed a number of political figures on Saturday and Sunday to learn their views on the issue.
“World public opinion, even U.S. public opinion, is demanding that Bush be put on trial,” Center for Contemporary Iranian History Chairman Abbas Salimi Namin said.
“Of course, it seems somewhat difficult under the current circumstances, in which the Western states dominate international organizations, but it is most unlikely that the current state of affairs will last forever,” he added.
“The rising tide of protests against the White House and Bush and the opposition to the unilateral and warmongering approaches of the United States will change the situation over time,” Salimi Namin noted.
“Saddam was a criminal, but we see that during the occupation of Iraq, there has been a rise in terrorism and other criminal activities, and the same happened in Afghanistan, where drug trafficking and terrorism increased,” he observed.
He described Bush as a “pawn” on the political chessboard, saying, “Those who control the White House would probably like to blame a pawn named Bush for all their crimes.”
Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami of the Assembly of Experts said, “The words of the Supreme Leader on the trial of Bush reflect a global desire.”
Ayatollah Khamenei spoke about a global demand and not just calls for a trial from the Islamic world, he added.
Kuwaiti national security advisor Sami Naser Khalifa said U.S. policies have caused a rise in terrorism and instability in the Middle East.
“Bush is responsible for countless crimes against humanity, and most people on this Earth want to see him tried in an international court,” he stated.
“The U.S. government used to interfere in the internal affairs of regional countries until it chose military intervention for the liberation of Kuwait in the early 1990s, and since then it uses direct military force to confront any group that does not kowtow to its Middle East policies,” he explained.
“The U.S. is entrapped in the Iraqi quagmire and cannot do anything,” he said.
Iranian-American anti-war activist Ardeshir Ommani emphasized the need to put Bush on trial for committing war crimes and said the anti-war movement in the U.S. will make the utmost efforts to show U.S. citizens that their government’s adventurism in regard to Iran would have serious repercussions since Iranians would definitely defend their country in the event of a foreign attack.
About 100,000 people participated in a demonstration in front of the White House and the Congress on Saturday to protest against Bush’s warmongering policies in Iraq. At least 190 demonstrators were arrested by the police.
Anti-war demonstrations, led by a few peace groups, are going to be held in response to the statements of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, which these groups believe are attempting to justify the continued presence of U.S. forces in Iraq, Ommani explained.
The demonstrations, organized by the International Action Center, the UFTJ, and Answer, will continue until September 29, he said.
“In our gathering in Washington, we will try to neutralize the propaganda of Gen. Petraeus and Ryan Crocker,” Ommani added.
He went on to say that former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has recently called for Bush to be tried as a war criminal since he is not really trying to resolve the Iraq crisis.
http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=153054
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“Unrecognized” Palestinians
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News
Israel’s population today is about 7,150,000. About 5.4 million are Jews (76%) plus another 400,000 Jewish settlers in over 200 expanding settlements on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank that includes Palestinian East Jerusalem. They’re the chosen ones afforded full rights and privileges under the laws of the Jewish state for Jews alone.
Palestinian Arabs are another story. Their population is around 5.3 million (plus six million or more in the Palestinian diaspora). Around 3.9 million live in occupied Gaza and the West Bank, and another 1.4 million are Arab citizens of Israel (20% of the population), including about 260,000 classified as internally displaced. Palestinians get no rights afforded Jews even though those inside Israel are citizens of the Jewish state, have passports and IDs, and can vote in Knesset elections for what good it does them. They’re subjected to constant abuse and neglect, are confined to 2% of the land plus 1% more for agricultural use, and are treated disdainfully as nonpersons.
Arab Israeli citizens live mainly in all-Arab towns and villages in three heartlands - the Galilee in the north; what’s called the “Little Triangle” in the center that runs along the Israeli side of the Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank; and the Negev desert region in the country’s south. These communities aren’t geographically consolidated and are surrounded by established Jewish communities, hostile to Arab neighbors, and with Israel’s full military might backing them. A minority of Palestinians also live uneasily in mixed Jewish-Arab cities like Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Jerusalem in the West Bank and others.
The Plight of Palestinian Nonpersons in “Unrecognized Villages”
The term is Orwellian in its worst sense. How can something real not officially exist? Around 150,000 or more (accurate numbers are hard to come by) Palestinian Arabs today live in over 100 so-called “unrecognized villages,” mainly in the Galilee and the Negev desert. They’re unrecognized because their inhabitants are considered internal refugees who were forced to flee their original homes during Israel’s 1948 “War of Independence” and were prevented from returning when it ended.
These villages were delegitimized by Israel’s 1965 Planning and Construction Law that established a regulatory framework and national plan for future development. It zoned land for residential, agriculture and industrial use, forbade unlicensed construction, banned it on agricultural land, and stipulated where Israeli Jews and Palestinians could live. That’s how apartheid worked in South Africa.
Existing communities are circumscribed on a map with blue lines around them. Areas inside the lines can be developed. Those outside cannot. For Jewish communities, great latitude is allowed for future expansion, and new communities are added as a result. In contrast, Palestinian areas are severely constricted leaving no room for expansion. Their land was reclassified as agricultural meaning no new construction is allowed. This meant entire communities became “unrecognized” and all homes and buildings there declared illegal, even the 95% of them built before the 1965 law passed. They’re subject to demolition and inhabitant displacement at the whim of Israeli officials. They want new land for Jews and freely take it from Arab owners, helpless to stop it.
All Israeli public land is administered by the Israel Land Authority (ILA) that has a legal obligation to treat all its citizens fairly. Instead and with impunity, it serves Jewish interests only using various methods to do it.
It restricts and prohibits Palestinian land development by:
– putting large Arab areas under its control through the creation of regional councils;
– zoning restrictions mentioned above;
– transferring public land adjacent to Arab communities to Jewish National Fund (JNF) ownership that mandates it’s only for Jews;
– connecting the cost of leasing land to military service that discriminates against Palestinians not required to serve and almost none do;
– declaring national priority town areas for Jews only;
– delaying, restricting and prohibiting local development in Arab communities;
– ignoring Arab needs in regional and national plans;
– allowing Palestinians little or no representation on national planning committees;
– enforcing a policy of forced evictions and demolitions of buildings without appropriate permits. In “unrecognized villages,” no permits are allowed Palestinians on their own land. Entire villages thus face prosecution in the courts and loss of their homes, land and possessions through a state-sponsored policy to remove them judicially.
It gets worse. No new Palestinian communities are allowed, and existing “unrecognized villages” are denied essential municipal services like clean drinking water, electricity, roads, transport, sanitation, education, healthcare, postal and telephone service, refuse removal and more because under the Planning and Construction Law they’re illegal. The toll on their people is devastating:
– clean water is unavailable almost everywhere unless people have access to well water,
– the few available health services are inadequate,
– many homes have no bathrooms, and no permits are allowed to build them,
– only villages with private generators have electricity enough for lighting only,
– no village is connected to the main road network,
– some villages are fenced in prohibiting their residents from access to their traditional lands,
– in the North, only one school remains open and children must travel 10 - 15 kilometers to attend another; as a result, achievement levels are low and dropout rates high.
It’s worse still when home demolitions are ordered. It may stipulate Palestinians must do it themselves or be fined for contempt of court and face up to a year in prison. They may also have to cover the cost when Israeli bulldozers do it under a system of convoluted justice penalizing Palestinians twice over.
Discriminatory Israeli Law
Israel is a signatory to the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Its Preamble states “the obligation of (signatory) States under the Charter of the United Nations to promote universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and freedom.” It then covers what states must observe in 53 Articles that stipulate the following:
– “All people have the right of self-determination.”
– “Each state party….undertakes to respect and ensure to all individuals within its territory the rights in this Covenant, without distinction of any kind” for any reason.
– “Every human being has the inherent right to life,” to “be protected by law,” and no activity may be undertaken to destroy any rights and freedom covered under this Covenant.
– “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
– “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention.”
– “Everyone….within the territory (shall) have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to chose his residence (and) to be free to leave any country (and not be) deprived of the right to enter (or return to) his own country.”
– “All persons shall be equal before the courts and tribunals.”
– “Everyone shall have the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”
– “All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law.”
– In states with “ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities (those persons) shall not be denied the (same) right(s)….as the other members.”
In Israel, for all intents and purposes, the ICCPR is a nonstarter. It applies to Jews alone, not to Arabs and other non-Jews. Israeli laws allow it by subjecting non-Jews, and specifically Arabs, to three types of discrimination:
– legal direct discrimination guaranteeing Jews alone the right to immigrate and become citizens; it also gives various Jewish organizations in the country quasi-government status serving Jews only.
– indirect discrimination through “neutral” laws and criteria applying principally to Palestinians; government preferences and benefits are predicated on prior military service most Palestinians don’t perform; the categorization of the country into preferential zones for Jews provides them privileges and benefits denied Palestinians.
– institutional discrimination through a legal framework facilitating a pattern of privileges afforded Jews only; they’re allocated through budgets and resources showing preferential treatment for Jews and discrimination against Palestinians; Israeli courts enforce the bias by refusing to hear cases where Palestinians claim their rights have been denied;
– even when courts hear cases and rule favorably, Palestinians get only crumbs; an example was in the early September Supreme Court decision that Israel reroute part of its illegal apartheid wall and return a small portion of stolen land to the people of Bil’in; a far greater issue was ignored by allowing the illegal Modiin Illit settlement on Bil’in land to remain intact; for anti-occupation Gush Shalom, the court decision message to settlers is do as you please, build fast and expect court approval retrospectively.
Israel professes to be a democracy. It is not by any reasonable standard. It defines itself as a Jewish state which contradicts its claimed democratic credentials. It treats Jews preferentially and entitles them to special consideration denied non-Jews who are discriminated against as second-class citizens and denied comparable rights.
Israel has no formal constitution and instead is governed by its Basic Laws that before 1992 guaranteed no basic rights. That year, the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom passed authorizing the Knesset to overturn laws contrary to the right to dignity, life, freedom, privacy, property and to leave and enter the country. The law states “There shall be no violation of the life, body or dignity of any person. All persons are entitled to protection” of these rights, and “There shall be no deprivation or restriction of the liberty of a person by imprisonment, arrest, extradition or otherwise.”
For a nation committed to violence, the irony is particularly galling that a section of the Basic Law also deals with “The Right to Life and Limb in Israeli Law.” It states “Israeli law has abolished the death penalty for murder (and corporal punishment).” It notes this penalty exists in principle but only under limited circumstances such as for treason during war and under the Law for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. It further notes Israel’s 1998 Good Samaritan Law requires assistance be given in situations “of immediate and severe danger to another.” Omitted from the Basic Law is the right to equality so all rights in it apply to Jews only.
Palestinian Arabs have none, yet can stand for public office in the Knesset. Some do, a few are elected but have no power beyond a public stage to state their views and be shouted down or ignored. They’re also constrained by the 1992 Law of Political Parties and section 7A(1) of the Basic Law that prohibits candidates for office from denying “the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.” No candidate may challenge the fundamental Jewish character of the state or demand equal rights, privileges and justice under the law for Arabs and Jews. The essential Zionist identity is inviolable, the rule of law works for Jews alone, and Palestinians are denied all rights, equal treatment and justice under a legal system for Jews that discriminates against Arab Muslims. In South Africa it was called apartheid.
The Current Plight of Palestinian Israeli Citizens in the Negev
About half the 160,000 Bedouin Arabs today face forced displacement in the Negev. Why? Because they live in dozens “unrecognized villages” making their homes illegal under Israeli law. They face imprisonment and fines if they refuse to leave so their land can be cleared, homes demolished, and the area Judaised for a Negev development plan. It’s described as “A Miracle in the Desert” that aims to populate the area with a half million new Jewish residents in the next decade. Plans are for 25 new communities and 100,000 homes on cleared Bedouin lands. For the past two years, Israel has been ethnically cleansing the Negev and erasing Bedouin villages to make it possible.
All Bedouin Arabs in “unrecognized villages” face what those living in Tawil Abu Jarwal endured in January. The entire village was destroyed when the Israeli military (IDF), a large police contingent and special task forces, a helicopter and bulldozers came in January 9. They demolished all 21 of its homes that consisted of shacks, brick rooms and tents. It followed a month earlier assault when 17 other homes were destroyed and their residents forcibly displaced. The people became homeless, and 63 of them in January were children. In late 2006, Israel’s interior minister, Roni Bar-On, announced his intention to destroy all 42,000 “illegal structures” in the Negev in a bandit declaration of planned forced ethnic cleansing against people helpless to stop it.
It’s happening in Al-Sadir, Tel-Arad, Amara-Tarabin and on June 25 to Bedouin families in the small villages of Um al-Hiran and Atir that are homes to about 1000 people. Hundreds of police and Israeli security forces destroyed over 20 of their homes to make way for a Jewish community called Hiran to replace them. People living in them lost everything including their possessions they had no chance to remove. Haaretz reported Atir villagers lived there for 51 years after being transferred to the area in 1956 under martial law. The article continued saying the Israeli Regional Council of “Unrecognized Villages” will move displaced families to a refugee camp in the center of Jerusalem (where Bedouins don’t wish to live) “as part of the government’s (forced ethnic cleansing) relocation project” to make the “desert bloom” for new Jewish only communities.
This is what all Negev Bedouin Arabs now face unless something can stop it. Large numbers of them attended an early August protest conference. It was held in solidarity with unaffected Palestinians who together called on Arab and other countries to support their right to remain in their homes and denounce Israel’s racist apartheid laws.
Arab Knesset member, Talab Al Sane, spoke on their behalf. So did Hussein Al Rafay’a, head of the regional council of the “unrecognized villages,” who said Israel wants Palestinians to be refugees in their own lands and has been forcing them into this status by a policy of home demolitions and continued displacement. Arabs once owned 5.5 million dunams of land (550,000 hectares) in the Negev, he said. They now own less than 200,000 (20,000 hectares) and are threatened with losing all of it. “We will resort to the Security Council, and the international court (in the Hague) to provide the residents and their lands with needed protection.”
With an assured US veto in the Security Council and Israel’s record of ignoring UN resolutions and World Court rulings against it, there’s little chance for success and every likelihood legal Israeli Arab citizens will continue being displaced from their own land.
Advocacy for Palestinian Arabs in “Unrecognized Villages”
Israel denies all Palestinians their basic rights. However, those living in so-called “unrecognized villages” face a special threat - demolition of their homes, loss of their land and possessions, and frightening displacement that will make them refugees along with millions of others in their own land. Few organizations advocate on their behalf, but a group that does is called The Association of Forty.
It’s a grassroots NGO in Israel committed to promoting social justice for Israeli Arabs and to gain official recognition for their “unrecognized villages.” It was formed in December, 1988 when Arab and Jewish residents from several of the affected villages and other areas formed the Association. It now “represents the residents of the ‘unrecognized villages’ and their problems, and promotes support locally and internationally” on their behalf. It seeks official recognition for the villages, an improvement in their living conditions, and “full rights and equality for the Arab citizens of the state” of Israel.
Its work consists of initiating “the preparation and implementation of active projects within these villages such as paving roads, improving existing roads and helping the residents to achieve their rights, to connect their villages to the network of water, electricity and telephones, to establish and operate kindergartens and clinics for mother and child care, and to obtain educational non-curricular activities for the schoolchildren….” It publishes a monthly newspaper, Sawt Al-Qura, has photographic exhibitions, films and documentaries that reflect the plight of the villages. It also organizes study days, holds local and international conferences, and participates in other international ones.
The Palestinians Enduring Struggle for Freedom and Justice
Palestinians today live under horrendous conditions. By any standard, they’re appalling, repressive and in violation of fundamental human rights principles under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stating:
– “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
– “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms….in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind.”
– “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.”
– “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”
– “All are equal before the law and are entitled….to equal protection.”
– “Everyone has the right to own property (nor shall anyone) be arbitrarily (be) deprived of his property.”
Israel offers these rights to Jews alone. It denies them to Palestinian Arab Muslims in violation of its own Basic Law professing “Fundamental human rights….founded upon recognition of the value of the human being, the sanctity of human life, and the principle that all persons are free.” It continues stating the Basic Law of Israel “is to protect human dignity and liberty….(that) There shall be no violation of the property of a person….(that) All persons are entitled to protection of their life, body and dignity….(that) All government authorities are bound to respect the rights under this Basic Law.”
The Basic Law also states Israel is a Jewish state, and the message is clear. All rights, benefits, privileges and protections are for Jews alone. All others are unwelcome, unwanted, unprotected, and unequal under the law. For them, justice unrecognized is justice denied and for Palestinians it’s willful and with malice.
They face constant harassment, abuse and near daily assaults in the West Bank and even worse treatment under virtual imprisonment in Gaza. Their democratically elected government was ousted by a US-Israeli orchestrated coup in June to the shameless applause of Western leaders and silence from Arab ones. They’re now isolated, surrounded and dangerously close to a humanitarian disaster affecting 1.4 million people.
It’s no better for Israeli Palestinian citizens. They’re nonpersons in their own land, are treated like intruders, given no rights, face constant harassment and mistreatment, get no justice, and face imminent loss of their homes, land, freedom and lives any time Israeli authorities wish to act against them. Yet they persist and endure as do their brethren in the Occupied Territories. They reach out to the world community, press their case, and a delegation from occupied Palestine stated it at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya in January.
It was a call to action and cry for help for “freedom, justice and (a) durable peace” and an end to six decades of repression. It called for a “global Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel until it ends its apartheid-like regime of discrimination, occupation and colonization, and respects the right of return of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons.”
It called for “Consumer boycotts of Israeli products; boycott of Israeli academic, athletic and cultural events and institutions complicit in human rights abuses; divestment from Israeli companies (and) international companies involved in perpetuating injustice, and pressuring governments to impose sanctions on Israel….”
Silence is not an option, and people of conscience can help. Noted author and documentary filmmaker, John Pilger, believes “something is changing,” and he saw it in a recent full page New York Times ad having a “distinct odour of panic.” It called for boycotting Israel, and Pilger senses the “swell….is growing inexorably, as if an important marker has been passed (and it’s) reminiscent of the boycotts that led to sanctions against apartheid South Africa…..once distant voices,” notes Pilger, have “gone global,” it caught Israel off guard and may signal change. But not easily or fast and may not happen at all unless global pressure becomes mass public outrage that this injustice no longer will be tolerated by people of conscience anywhere.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to the Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.
Have Your Say: “Unrecognized” Palestinians
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The Greatest Story Never Told
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
By Stephen Lendman
RINF Alternative News
No issue is more sensitive in the US than daring to criticize Israel. It’s the metaphorical “third rail” in American politics, academia and the major media. Anyone daring to touch it pays dearly as the few who tried learned. Those in elected office face an onslaught of attacks and efforts to replace them with more supportive officials. Former five term Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney felt its sting twice in 2002 and 2006. So did 10 term Congressman Paul Findley (a fierce and courageous Israeli critic) in 1982 and three term Senator Charles Percy in 1984 whom AIPAC targeted merely for appearing to support anti-Israeli policy.
DePaul University Professor Norman Finkelstein has long been a target as well for his courageous writing and outspokenness. Depaul formally denied him tenure June 8 even though his students call him “truly outstanding and among the most impressive” of all university political science professors. It’s why his Department of Political Science endorsed his tenure bid stating his academic record “exceeds our department’s stated standards for scholarly production (and) department and outside experts we consulted recognize the intellectual merits of his work.”
It didn’t help, and on August 26 got worse. The university acknowledged “Professor Finkelstein is a prolific scholar and an outstanding teacher.” Yet it issued a brief statement canceling his classes and placing him on administrative leave “with full pay and benefits for the 2007-8 academic year (that) relieves professors from their teaching responsibilities.” For now, Finkelstein’s long struggle with the university ended the first day of classes, September 5. Both sides agreed to a settlement, and a planned day of protests was curtailed. But as Chicago Tribune writer Ron Grossman put it in his September 6 column headlined “Finkelstein deal ends DePaul tiff….the underlying struggle between supporters of Israel and champions (like Finkelstein) of the Palestinians continues, not just at the North Side campus but across the academic world.”
That struggle is nowhere in sight in the dominant media that includes major print publications, commercial radio, television and so-called Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio both of which long ago abandoned the public trust in service to their corporate and government paymasters.
In all parts of the major media, no Israeli criticism is tolerated on-air or in print, and any reporter, news anchor, pundit or on-air guest forgetting the (unwritten) rules, won’t get a second chance. Support for Israel is ironclad, absolute, and uncompromising on everything including its worst crimes of war and against humanity. Open debate is stifled, and anyone daring to dissent or demur is pilloried, ridiculed, called anti-semetic, even threatened, ostracized, and finally ignored. In his seminal work on Middle East affairs, “Fateful Triangle,” Noam Chomsky put it this way: “….Israel has been granted a unique immunity from criticism in mainstream journalism and scholarship….”
Call it the myth of the free press in a nation claiming to have the freest of all. It’s pure fantasy now and in an earlier era, journalist A.J Liebling said it was only for “those who own(ed) one.” Today, they’re giants operating the way Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explained in their classic book on the media titled “Manufacturing Consent.” The authors developed their “propaganda model” to show all news and information passes through a set of “filters.” “Raw material” goes through them, unacceptable parts are suppressed, and “only the cleansed residue fit to print (and broadcast on-air)” reaches the public. The New York Times calls it “All The News That’s Fit to Print.” By its standard, it means sanitized news only leaving out the most important parts and what readers want most - the full truth and nothing else.
The same goes for the rest of the dominant media that serve as collective national thought control police gatekeepers “filtering” everything we read, see and hear. They manipulate our minds and beliefs, program our thoughts, and effectively destroy the free marketplace of ideas essential to a healthy democracy. In America, that’s nowhere in sight.
The problem is most acute in reporting on Israel. Criticism of the Jewish state is stifled in an effort to portray it as a model democracy, the only one in the region, and surrounded by hostile Palestinians, other Arab/Muslim extremists and whoever else Israel cites as a threat, real or contrived. The truth is quite opposite but absent from corporate-controlled media spaces.
How “The Newspaper of Record” Reports on Israel
This article focuses mainly on the media’s lead and most influential voice, The New York Times. It’s been around since 1851 when it quietly debuted saying “….we intend to (publish) every morning (except Sundays) for an indefinite number of years to come.” Today, it’s the pillar of the corporate media and main instrument of fake news making it the closest thing in the country to an official ministry of information and propaganda. But here’s the Times 1997 Proxy Statement quote media critic Edward Herman used in his April, 1998 Z Magazine article titled “All The News Fit to Print (Part I).” Its management then (and now) claimed The Times to be “an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare.” It leaves one breathless and demands an earlier used quote - “phew.”
No media source anywhere has more clout than the Times, none manipulates the public mind more effectively, and where it goes, others follow. It’s most visible supporting all things corporate, foreign wars of aggression, and everything favoring Israel it views one way. That’s the focus below - how the New York Times plays the lead cheerleading role for Israel even when its actions are unjustifiable, unconscionable and criminal.
Freelance journalist Alison Weir founded “If Americans Knew” as an “independent research and information-dissemination institute (to provide) every American (what he or she) needs to know about Israel/Palestine.” That includes “inform(ing) and educat(ing) the American public on issues of major significance that are unreported, underreported, or misreported in the American media.” Below is an account of her in-depth study of how the New York Times betrays its readers by distorting its coverage on Israel.
It was in her April 24, 2005 article called “New York Times Distortion Up Close and Personal.” It drew on the findings from her 23-page report, and 40 pages of supportive data, titled “Off the Charts - Accuracy in Reporting of Israel/Palestine (by) The New York Times.” To be as objective as possible, the study “count(ed) the deaths reported on both sides of the (Israeli-Palestinian) conflict, and then compare(d) these to the actual number….that had occurred.” The findings showed a “startling disparity….depending on the ethnicity of the victim(s).”
The study covered two periods. The first was from the September 29, 2000 beginning of the Al-Aqsa Mosque (or second) Intifada (ignited by Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount Al-Aqsa Mosque site) through September 28, 2001. The second ran from January 1, 2004 through December 31, 2004. Deaths counted were only those resulting from Israeli - Palestinian confrontations.
The first study showed the New York Times reported 2.8 times the number of Israeli deaths to Palestinian ones when, in fact, three times more Palestinians were killed than Israelis. In the second one, the ratio increased to 3.6 adding further distortion to the coverage. Reporting children’s deaths was even more skewed, coming in at a ratio of 6.8 for Israeli children compared to Palestinian ones and then at 7.3 in the later study. The latter ratio is particularly startling since 22 times more Palestinian children were killed, in fact, than Israelis in 2004 according to B’Tselem - the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Terroritories. The Times simply ignored them.
In all its reporting in both periods, the Times distorted the facts egregiously. It highlighted Israeli deaths by headlining and repeating them. In contrast, there was silence on most Palestinian ones. The impression given was that more Jews died than Arabs or at times the numbers were equal on both sides. Most often, they weren’t even close.
It was startling to learn that Israeli and other human rights groups documented 82 Palestinian children killed at the Intifada’s outset (most by “gunfire to the head” indicating deliberate targeting) before a single Israeli child died. The Times willfully ignored this in its coverage the same way it obsessed last summer over Hamas’ capture of a single Israeli soldier while ignoring around 12,000 Palestinian men, women and children political detainees held by Israelis illegally. For the Times, they’re non-persons, but everyone in Israel and many outside it know that soldier’s name and still do.
Weir calls this coverage a “highly disturbing pattern of bias.” She presented her findings (”complete with charts, spread-sheets, clear sourcing, and extensive additional documentation”) to the Times’ Public Editor, Daniel Okrent, in a face-to-face meeting, but came away disappointed. It was because of a 1762-word column Okrent wrote in response. It ignored or misrepresented the facts, was unconcerned that most Times reporters covering Israel/Palestine are Jewish, all live inside Israel, and the paper claimed it’s impossible finding “sufficient numbers of high quality journalists of Muslim or Arab heritage to work on this issue.” It is when you don’t look.
Yet, it’s worth noting what Weir believes was a “personal confession” in a single line. Okrent may have slipped up saying: “I don’t think any of us (at the Times) can be objective about our own claimed objectivity.” Confession or not, it led to no change in the Times’ reporting.
Weir updated her report to include Palestinian children’s deaths in 2004 and 2005 from documented information on the “Remember These Children” web site. It uses Israeli and other human rights organizations’ sources with these findings through June, 2007:
– 118 Israeli children under 18 years years of age killed compared to 973 Palestinian youths, most shot in the head or chest indicating deliberate targeting by Israeli soldiers. This information never appears in Times’ reports.
Instead, The Times “marginalizes Palestinian women and Palestinian rights” according to a November 17, 2006 Electronic Intifada (EI) report. Its authors (Patrick O’Connor and Rachel Roberts) state: “The New York Times pays little attention to human rights in Israel/Palestine, downplays….violence against Palestinian women and generally silences (their) voices.”
Since the second Intifada began, B’Tselem, Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) published 76 reports documenting Israeli abuses of Palestinian rights and four others on Palestinian violations against Israelis or other Palestinians. The Times, however, wrote only four articles on them all - two on Israeli abuses and two others on what Palestinians did suggesting both sides shared equal guilt.
Three other Times articles on the conflict focused on a Human Rights Watch report criticizing Palestinian suicide bombings, another HRW one on Israeli actions in Jenin in 2002, and a B’Tselem report on the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) exoneration of soldiers for killing a Palestinian child. The Times also published one article criticizing Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon and one other one critical of Hezbollah during that conflict. It’s the Times’ idea of fairness and balance, that distorts facts, ignores truth, and in every instance betrays its readers.
EI’s writers refer to thousands of New York Times articles on Israel/Palestine since the second Intifada began September 29, 2000. Yet in them all, it “quoted, cited or paraphrased just 4187 words….from human rights organizations in 62 articles, snippets (only) averaging just 69 words per article.” In the same articles, far more space was given to Israeli government denials even when clear evidence proved them false.
Other research shows The New York Times op ed page marginalizes Palestinian voices and completely shuts out its women who are portrayed as passive, docile and at the mercy of men. Readers aren’t told they “balance their dual commitment to the national (and feminist) struggle(s)” by courageously leading the fight against domestic and Israeli violence in the Occupied Territories. The Times also ignores Amnesty International’s emphasis on the occupation’s harmful effects on women in detention centers and from “military checkpoints, blockades and curfews” even though they cause sick and pregnant women to die for lack of aid.
It’s part of the same pattern of selective disclosure and distortion so readers don’t know what’s happening and are led to believe victims are the victimizers. Facts are ignored, international law is unmentioned and reporting “contributes to the dangerous pattern of Western disparagement of Muslim society,” made easy post-9/11.
EI sums up its article stating “If the Times cared about human rights in Israel/Palestine, (balanced reporting, and) valued independent third party perspectives, (it) would have published more than 6256 (total) words….of major human rights organizations (reports) in its thousands of articles” for the past seven years. Instead, the impression given is Israeli crimes are marginal, sporadic, inconsequential, acts of self-defense and not crimes at all. This type reporting sets the (low) standard for the rest of the dominant media and highlights why few Americans question their government’s full and unconditional support for Israeli policy.
The Times willfully ignores the following type information B’Tselem posts and updates on its website (www.btselem.org). From September 29, 2000 through August 31, 2007, it documented 4274 Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces or civilians including 857 children. That compares to 1024 Israelis killed by Palestinians including 119 children.
Throughout this period, The Times low-keyed Israeli violence in its coverage but featured dozens of articles on Palestinian suicide bombings and other acts of self-defense it portrays as “terrorism” against innocent Israelis. Left out is what B’Tselem, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), AI, HRW, ICRC and other human rights organizations report:
– willful violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention’s protections of civilians in times of war and under occupation by a foreign power.
– excessive use of force and abuse;
– policy of collective punishment and economic strangulation;
– growing numbers of expanding illegal settlements;
– home demolitions;
– random IDF invasions, air and ground attacks;
– many dozens of extrajudicial assassinations;
– administrative detentions without charge and routine use of torture of thousands of Palestinians including young children treated like adults;
– land expropriation;
– crop destruction;
– policies of closure, separation, checkpoints, ghettoization and curfews;
– denial of the most basic human rights and civil liberties; and
– an overall Kafkaesque “matrix of control” designed to extinguish Palestinians’ will to resist.
The Times willful distortion and indifference to Palestinian suffering highlights its coverage. Like others in the dominant media, it displays no sense of fairness, accuracy or balance in portraying Palestinians as militants, gunmen and terrorists - never as oppressed human beings under occupation struggling for freedom in their own land. In sharp contrast, Israelis are seen as surrounded, beleaguered, and innocent victims acting in self-defense. It’s sheer fantasy, the facts on the ground prove it, but Times readers aren’t given them.
They’re also not told how Israel discriminates against Palestinian Arab Israeli citizens. Patrick O’Connor explained in his March 30, 2006 Electronic Intifada article titled “The New York Times Covers Up Discrimination against Palestinian Citizens of Israel.” He noted the rise to prominence of Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman and his extremist Yisrael Beiteinu party. It advocates “transferring a number of Palestinian towns in Israel to Palestinian Authority (PA) control,” thereby revoking the legalized status of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. They’re already second class ones and are treated unequally under Israel’s Basic Law that affords rights and benefits to Jews only.
O’Connor notes the Times plays “a leading role collaborat(ing) with this strategy.” It characterizes all Palestinians as militants, gunmen and terrorists while suppressing their “experiences under….occupation (victimized by) Israeli state terrorism, and (the) systemic Israeli discrimination against Palestinian (citizens) living in Israel….”
An instance of Times distortion was from a March 21, 2006 article by Dina Kraft. In it, Israel dismissively refers to “Israeli Arabs” and so does Kraft. They’re not called Palestinian Israeli citizens “to divide and rule, and to cover up the familial, historical and cultural relationship between Palestinians” inside Israel to those in the Territories and diaspora. The Times goes along without challenge, never questioning if a self-declared Jewish state can be democratic without ensuring equal rights to its non-Jewish minority. Ignored as well is Yisrael Beiteinu’s outlandish proposal to revoke citizenship rights for Arabs inside Israel because they’re not Jews.
O’Connor stresses how the Times, Kraft and the major US media collaboratively perpetuate the myth that Israel is “a liberal, democratic state inexplicably beset by Arab/Muslim terrorism.” In so doing, they suppress the historical record that Israel ethnically cleansed 800,000 Palestinians, killed many thousands of others, and destroyed 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods in cities like Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem in its 1948 “War of Independence.” They also deny that Palestinians everywhere have close historical, family and cultural ties, yet Israel discriminates against them all unfairly.
In her report, Weir noted what all people of conscience believe: that “readers of The New York Times (and all Americans) are entitled to full and accurate reporting on all issues, including the topic of Israel/Palestine.” In her study period, the Times covered it in “well over 1000 stories,” so it’s deeply troubling how much critical information was omitted.
A 9/11/07 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) Action Alert provides more evidence of NYT cover-up and distortion. It’s titled “Whose Human Rights Matter? NYT on Hezbollah and Israeli attacks on civilians.” FAIR cites two recently released Human Rights Watch (HRW)investigations of Israel’s war against Lebanon in which The New York Times highlighted “unlawful attacks against Israel” while giving short shrift to “unlawful attacks committed by Israel.” This is de rigueur at The Times so the FAIR report is no surprise.
It noted the NYT ran its own 800 word story supportive of Israel on 8/31/07 titled “Rights Group Accuses Hezbollah of Indiscriminate Attacks on Civilians in Israel War” accompanied by a photo of “Israeli civilians at risk from Hezbollah rockets.” In sharp contrast, it settled for a 139 word AP report on Israeli unlawful attacks under its own headline titled “Israel Criticized Over Lebanon Deaths” with no photo. Even worse, The Times report on Israeli infractions omitted key information about the claim that Hezbollah used Lebanese people as human shields. HRW found no supportive evidence, and its executive director, Kenneth Roth, said the Israeli government’s assertion was false.
The Times also failed to reflect the dramatic disparity in civilian deaths on each side. HRW estimated Israel killed about 900 Lebanese civilians out of a total 1200 death toll in the country while Hezbollah killed 43 Israeli civilians plus about 80 IDF personnel. FAIR’s conclusion: The Times values Israeli lives far more than Lebanese ones. No surprise.
FAIR raised an additional point as well from its 12/6/06 Action Alert. It refuted a Times report as false that Israeli attacks on civilians were legitimate “since Hezbollah fired from civilian areas, itself a war crime, which made those areas legitimate targets.” Again, standard practice at The Times that values fake news above truth, accuracy, fairness and balance.
Weir hoped a public airing of her findings on The Times would lead to better reporting at the “paper of record.” It never did and just got worse following Hamas’ dramatic democratic January, 2006 electoral victory. Afterwards, all outside aid was cut off, Hamas was marginalized and politically isolated, and Israeli repression got stepped up in an effort to crush the fledging government by making the Territories “scream.”
It came to a head June 14 following weeks of US-Israeli orchestrated violence. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas declared a “state of emergency” and illegally dismissed Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh and his national unity government. He appointed his own US-Israeli vetted replacements days later with The New York Times in the lead supporting the new quisling coup d’etat government. Noted journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger explains the first casualty of war is good journalism. It’s as true for reporting on Israel, especially on the pages of “the newspaper of record” that sets the low standard others then follow.
That standard excludes discussion of the powerful Israeli lobby with AIPAC just one part of it. Noted figures like John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government are persona non grata for their heroic work documenting its powerful influence on US policy toward Israel and the Middle East. Noted scholar and activist James Petras makes the same compelling case in his revealing 2006 must-read book titled “The Power of Israel in the United States.” The record of “the newspaper of record” includes none of their findings and conclusions proving when it comes to truth in reporting, it’s absent from its pages. It’s especially pronounced in its coverage of Israel/Palestine.
More Evidence of Corporate Media Distortion on Israel-Palestine
When it comes to shoddy reporting, most notably on Israel/Palestine, there’s plenty of blame to go around. It’s found on major US broadcast and cable channels, most all corporate-owned publications here and abroad, the BBC, CBC, Deutche Welle, other European broadcasters, and what passes for so-called public radio and broadcasting in the US. An exception is Pacifica Radio, the original and only real public radio in the US. Its provides excellent coverage, especially on KPFA’s daily Flashpoints Radio with the best of it anywhere on-air from its co-hosts, contributors and top quality guests.
The opposite is true for so-called National Public Radio’s (NPR), but its public broadcast (PBS)counterpart shares equal guilt. Many people naively turn to NPR as an acceptable alternative to corporate media disinformation without realizing it’s as corrupted by capital interests and big government as all the others. Its president, Kevin Klose, is the former head of US propaganda that includes Voice of America (VOA), Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Worldnet Television and the anti-Castro Radio/TV Marti. He’s ideal for the same role at National Public Radio, and it’s why he got the job.
NPR never met a US war of aggression it didn’t love, and it’s especially attentive to the interests of its corporate paymasters like McDonald’s (with $225 million of it), Allstate, Merck, Archer Daniels Midland, and the worst of all worker rights’ abusers, Wal-Mart, that NPR welcomes anyway. In its space, there never is heard a discouraging word on any of these or most other major US corporate giants.
Then, there’s the issue of fair and balanced reporting on Israel/Palestine that’s absent from NPR programs all the time. The media watchdog group FAIR exposed it in its study of NPR’s coverage of Israeli/Palestinian violence in the first six months of 2001. Over virtually any period, Palestinian deaths way outnumber Israeli ones. Yet NPR in the period studied reported 62 Israeli deaths compared to 51 Palestinian ones at a time 77 Israelis and 148 Palestinians were killed. It meant “there was an 81% likelihood an Israeli death would be reported on NPR, but only a 34% likelihood” a Palestinian one would be.
The findings were similar each way FAIR examined the data. They showed one-sided pro-Israel reporting the way it is throughout the dominant media. The result (then and now) is NPR betrays the public trust. It suppresses real news in favor of the fake kind it prefers. It violates its claim to be “an internationally acclaimed producer of noncommercial news, talk and entertainment programming” and its mission statement pledge “to create a more informed public - one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciations of events, ideas and cultures (through) programming that meets the highest standards of public service in journalism and cultural expression.” It’s pure nonsense. On all counts, NPR fails badly.
The Electronic Intifada web site showed how badly. It was in a February 19, 2002 article titled “Special Report: NPR’s Linda Gradstein (its Israel correspondent) Takes Cash Payments from Pro-Israel Groups.” Ali Abunimah and Nigel Parry (its co-founders) discovered Gradstein violated professional journalistic and NPR ethics and policy by accepting cash honoraria from pro-Israeli organizations in the past and currently to the date of the article.
Gradstein is notorious for her pro-Israeli bias and being paid for it makes it worse. Hillel is one of her paymasters, and in one instance openly acknowledged it considered Gradstein an Israeli propagandist. Other Israeli groups apparently do as well as Gradstein openly violated NPR’s stated (but uninforced) policy not to accept these fees. Instead, she regularly takes them and likely still does.
The EI writers concluded “for some reason or other, Gradstein is effectively exempt from NPR’s own regulations. These revelations only broaden existing concerns about the integrity of NPR’s Middle East reporting and honesty of Linda Gradstein….the sad truth is that Linda Gradstein rarely meets (the minimum) standard(s)” of journalistic ethics and integrity. This is common practice at NPR and at the rest of the major media as well.
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA)
The dominant US media have loads of firepower and freely unleash it supporting Israel. They need no backup help but get it anyway from CAMERA, a powerful Boston-based pro-Israeli media lobby group. The organization was founded by Charles Jacobs in 1982 and claims to be “non-partisan….regard(ing)….American or Israeli political issues (and takes no position) regard(ing)….ultimate solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” It calls itself “a media-monitoring, research and membership organization devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East.”
It claims “Inaccurate and distorted accounts of events in Israel and the Middle East are….found everywhere from college radio stations to network television, from community newspapers to national magazines (to the) Internet.” They’re also in “fashion magazines, architectural publications, encyclopedias….travel guides, and even dictionaries.” They’re “inaccurate (and) skewed (and) may fuel anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice.”
CAMERA’s on guard to fight back with plenty of dues-paying members to do it - 55,000 well-heeled ones plus “thousands of active letter writers.” They monitor all media and its journalists everywhere for one purpose - to resolutely support Israel and combat all criticism it calls “anti-Israel bias.” CAMERA tolerates none, not even modest in tone on issues too minor to matter. They do to CAMERA that views everything in black and white terms with no gray allowed.
Muslims are bad because they’re Muslims and not Jews. Jews, on the other hand, are good because they’re Jewish. This for CAMERA is fair and balanced meaning support Israel, right or wrong, and you are. Dare criticize, you’re not, and be targeted full force with all CAMERA’s hard-hitting tools - mass letter-writing, articles, op-eds, monographs, special reports, full-page ads in major publications, the CAMERA Media Report critiquing “bias and error,” CAMERA on Campus doing the same thing, CAMERA Fellows training students in pro-Israeli thinking, and focused attacks on “media bias” and journalists anywhere even mildly critical of Israel.
CAMERA is effective because it’s unrelenting, focused and well-funded. It “systematically monitors, documents, reviews and archives (all) Middle East coverage.” Its staffers “contact reporters, editors, producers and publishers” demanding “distorted or inaccurate coverage” be retracted and replaced by “factual information to refute errors.” For CAMERA, it means support Israel without compromise or be hounded until you do.
Two Examples of Truth in Reporting Banned in the Dominant Media - First from Bethlehem
Pacifica’s KPFA Flashpoints Radio co-host Nora Barrows Friedman has become the electronic media’s most courageous voice on Israel/Palestine. An example was her disturbing story from Bethlehem August 21 for Inter Press Service that was unreported in the dominant media. It’s a dramatic example of sanitizing ugly parts of a story to prettify Israeli actions or simply ignoring it as in this case.
Friedman reported the Israeli military has been cutting and destroying apricot and walnut trees for months to make way for its scheme in the village of Artas, southeast of Bethlehem. It’s a concrete tunnel (along with the apartheid separation wall) for raw Israeli settlement sewage (excrement and waste). It’s to be dumped on Palestinian land even though its toxicity will endanger the health and welfare of its residents. It will destroy crops and poison the land rendering it useless for agriculture.
Artas villagers have been “active and defiant….over the last year after unofficial information” about the plan leaked out. It’s still ongoing, nonetheless, as Israeli bulldozers continue uprooting crops and orchards in preparation for construction to follow. Non-violent protesters (on their own land) “have been shot at, beaten” arrested and imprisoned for defying expropriation of their property. Israel frequently does this throughout the Occupied Territories for the parts it wants. In this case, it’s for land to dump raw untreated toxic sewage waste on from its settlements.
It’s part of an overall ethnic cleansing scheme to dispossess Palestinians from their lands, one parcel, one village at a time, every devious way Israelis can invent to do it. This time, villagers are fighting back in the Israeli Supreme Court. But based on its past rulings, they have little hope for justice and no hope the major media will help stop the abuse by exposing it in its coverage.
A Second Example: Hamas’ “Goals for All of Palestine”
Mousa Abu Marzook, Hamas political bureau deputy, prepared an eloquent op-ed piece July 10 titled “Hamas’ stand” that got rare space in the latimes.com but none in the New York Times, NPR or elsewhere in the dominant media. In it, he explained Hamas’ July rescue of BBC journalist Alan Johnson wasn’t done “as some obsequious boon to Western powers. It was….part of our effort to secure Gaza from (all) lawlessness…. and violence….where journalists, foreigners and guests of the Palestinian people will be treated with dignity.”
He stressed Hamas never supported attacks on Westerners. Instead, its struggle “always….focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it….supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention.” Despite that right of any occupied people, Israel and Washington falsely accuse its leaders of ideologies “they know full well we do not follow, such as the agenda of Al Queda and its adherents.”
Marzook “deplore(d) the current prognosticating over “Fatah-land (in the West Bank) versus “Hamastan (in Gaza). In the end, there can be only one Palestinian state,” and its people have every legal right to demand and expect one. He continued saying its “militant stance” is reasonable in “our fight against the occupation and the right of Palestinians to have dignity, justice and self-rule.” It’s guaranteed all peoples everywhere under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Marzook raised the litmus test issue of Palestinians having to concede Israel’s “putative right to exist as a necessary precondition to discussing grievances, and to renounce” its 1988 charter position “born of the intolerable conditions under occupation more than 20 years ago.” A state “may have a right to exist,” he stated, “but not….at the expense of other states (or more importantly) at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice.”
Marzook justifiably asked “Why should anyone concede Israel’s right to exist, when it….never….acknowledged (its) foundational crimes of murder, ethnic cleansing (and seizure of) our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees? Why should any Palestinian recognize (this) monstrous crime….?” How can Israel “declare itself explicitly to be a state for the Jews (alone)….in a land where millions of occupants are Arabs, Muslims and Christians.”
Marzook continued denouncing Israeli hypocrisy referring back to the writings of its Zionist founders. In them, they made “repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine’s non-Jewish inhabitants” saying: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.” Israeli policy today “advocat(es) for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan (River) to the sea.” The international community voices “no clamor….for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is” for Palestinians alone.
Marzook has no trouble “recognizing” Israel’s right to exist. “Israel does exist,” he says, “as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you.” He referred to a distracting “dance of mutual rejection (while) many are dying (or live) as prisoners….in refugee camps” and Israeli prisons unjustly.
Marzook speaks for all Palestinians saying he “look(s) forward to the day when Israel can say to me, and millions of other Palestinians: ‘Here, here is your family’s house by the sea (we took from you in 1948), here are your lemon trees, the olive grove your father tended: Come home and be whole again.’ Then we can speak of a future together” and can have one in peace but never under occupation.
Try finding that commentary in the New York Times or on NPR. Somehow, it slipped into the latimes.com and maybe in error. Pilger is right. The first casualty of war is good journalism. It applies as well to reporting on Israel/Palestine and most other major world and national issues. Real news and information fall victim to the fake kind in the dominant media. Thankfully, people are catching on, viable alternatives abound in print and online, and web sites like this one provide it.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.
Have Your Say: The Greatest Story Never Told
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Human rights groups accuse MoD of hypocrisy over cluster bombs
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
· Weapon reclassified to escape ban, say critics
· Unexploded munitions are threat to civilians
Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian
Humanitarian organisations accuse the Ministry of Defence today of reclassifying one its newest weapons to escape an expected world ban on cluster bombs.The MoD last year described the Hydra CRV-7 system, which delivers a number of bomblets from a helicopter-mounted rocket pod, as a cluster weapon.
Later in the year, Margaret Beckett, then foreign secretary, said the government did not consider the weapon fell within the term “dumb”, because virtually all the bomblets exploded on impact. Des Browne, the defence secretary, announced earlier this year he had banned the use by Britain’s armed forces of “dumb” cluster bombs. He said Britain would deploy only cluster bombs which had a self-destruct mechanism.
In July, Bob Ainsworth, the armed forces minister, told MPs the CRV-7, equipped with “multi-purpose submunitions” fired from Apache helicopters, did not after all fall within the government’s “understanding of a cluster munition”. Cluster munitions release smaller “bomblets” when fired, posing a danger to civilians during and long after a conflict. Unexploded “bomblets” maim and kill civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon.
Mr Ainsworth said in July CRV-7 bombs were not now cluster weapons because of “direct fire capabilities” and because they had “too few submunitions”.
However, the MoD admitted trials in the US had revealed a 6% failure rate. Though the MoD says the CRV-7 bomb has nine submunitions, critics say today it is a 19-rocket pod, with 171 submunitions in all.
The reclassification is attacked today by Oxfam, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Landmine Action, who also say that Britain has been the world’s third largest user of lethal cluster bombs over the last 10 years. “Ten years after it championed a treaty banning landmines, the UK has a chance to do the same with cluster bombs - but instead it is spinning a cluster bomb con,” said Simon Conway, Director of Landmine Action.
Tom Porteous, London director of Human Rights Watch, said: “Our investigations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon have all shown that cluster munitions, no matter how sophisticated, do not work as advertised, and instead get used in ways that violate international humanitarian law.”
In February 2007, Britain joined 46 other countries in calling for a worldwide ban on cluster bombs. This initiative, the Oslo Process, is expected to lead to a treaty next year, the humanitarian groups say.
Anna MacDonald of Oxfam said: “Current UK policy on cluster bombs makes no sense. They say they want an international treaty but they also want to keep using cluster bombs well known to kill and injure civilians.”
Britain also has in its armoury artillery-delivered M85 cluster bomblets which are supposed to self-destruct if they do not explode on impact. A Commons foreign affairs committee report estimated that the weapons had a 10% failure rate.
“Despite being the third biggest user of cluster bombs in the world over the last 10 years, the government hasn’t made any efforts to asses the harm these weapons cause to civilians,” said Oliver Sprague of Amnesty International.
In a statement last night, the MoD said: “The UK is committed to improving reliability of all munitions, including cluster munitions, with the aim of achieving lower failure rates and leaving less unexploded ordnance. There is no internationally recognised definition for cluster munitions.” The statement added that an MoD assessment concluded “direct fire munitions” should not be classed as cluster weapons and that was the view shared by the Red Cross; “direct fire” normally means the gunner can see the intended target.
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US halts diplomatic convoys in Iraq
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
The US embassy in Baghdad has suspended all diplomatic convoys outside the heavily fortified Green Zone and the rest of Iraq.
The move comes as the Iraqi government said it would review the status of all private security companies working in the country following a deadly shooting on Sunday involving guards from the US firm Blackwater.
The government announced the investigation on Tuesday, after the interior ministry decided to “halt the licence” of Blackwater, which provides security to US diplomats in Iraq.
Ali al-Dabbagh, a government spokesman, announced the decision “to review the operations of foreign and local security companies in Iraq”.
He said: “This came after the flagrant assault conducted by members of the American security company Blackwater against Iraqi citizens.”
In a notice sent to Americans in Iraq, the US embassy said it had acted to review the security of its personnel and possible increased threats to those leaving the Green Zone while accompanied by security details after the weekend killing of Iraqi civilians involving Blackwater guards.
“In light of a serious security incident involving a US embassy protective detail in the Mansour District of Baghdad, the embassy has suspended official US government civilian ground movements outside the International Zone [Green Zone] and throughout Iraq,” the notice said.
“This suspension is in effect in order to assess mission security and procedures, as well as a possible increased threat to personnel travelling with security details outside the International Zone,” said the notice.
No official notice
Blackwater said on Monday that it had received no official notice from Iraq’s interior ministry.
The toll from the shooting rose to nine-10 civilians and one policeman - on Tuesday, according to a local hospital medic.
US officials in Baghdad have yet to clarify the legal status of foreign security contractors in Iraq, including whether they could be liable for prosecution by Iraqi authorities.
Riad Kahwaji, director of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military analysis, told Al Jazeera: “Only the party that brought them [the private security firms] into Iraq can take them out of Iraq - and that is the US.”
He said that under their contracts “neither Blackwater nor the other [private security] companies are obliged to obtain a licence from Iraq”.
Kahwaji said: “The chances are they are going to stay. Because a lot of the foreign companies and contractors that are rebuilding Iraq rely totally on these Western, or US-based, security companies.
“They don’t have any confidence in the Iraqi police and the Iraqi security services.”
Regret expressed
Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, telephoned Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, on Monday to express regret over the death of innocent civilians.
US and Iraqi sources said the shooting erupted after a bomb exploded near a US diplomatic convoy, but a US government incident report said armed men fired on the convoy and Blackwater guards responded.
“Blackwater’s independent contractors acted lawfully and appropriately in response to a hostile attack in Baghdad on Sunday,” said a statement from the North Carolina company, reported by CNN on its website.
“Blackwater regrets any loss of life, but this convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job to defend human life.”
Nevertheless, Abdul Sattar Ghafour Bairaqdar, a judge from Iraq’s highest court, the Supreme Judiciary Council, said Blackwater could face trial.
“This company is subject to Iraqi law and the crime committed was on Iraqi territory and the Iraqi judiciary is responsible for tackling the case,” he said.
Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia leader of the al-Mahdi Army militia, added his voice to anger over the incident, urged the government to “cancel this company’s work, and the rest of the criminal and intelligence companies”.
Car-bomb attacks
The Blackwater controversy provided the backdrop to more violence across the country.
Four car bombs in Baghdad on Tuesday killed 17 people and wounded 50 more, according to police.
The deadliest car bomb attack killed eight people and wounded 22 others near a market in the Ur neighbourhood, not far from the Shia-dominated district of Sadr City, police said.
Three other car bombs killed a total of nine people and wounded 28.
An explosion near a US security patrol killed three soldiers and wounded three others in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, the US military said on Tuesday.
London meeting
Also on Tuesday, the top US commander in Iraq briefed British officials on the course of the war.
The visit to Britain by General David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq, came a week after their testimony to US congressmen.
Speaking before a meeting with Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, Petraeus praised British forces serving in Iraq, repeating his assessment of stability in Iraq in the wake of the “surge” of American forces.
He also offered support for Britain’s plan to give Iraqi security forces control of Basra province later this year or earlier next year.
However, Petraeus warned against pulling out too early.
“There are no easy answers or quick solutions to helping the Iraqis build sustainable security and achieve national reconciliation,” he said.
“Our assessments underscore the importance of recognising that a premature drawdown of our forces would likely have devastating consequences not only for Iraq and the region, but for our nations and the world.”
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
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Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.
In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush’s economic policies.
However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.
Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.
Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.
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US agrees further British withdrawal from Iraq
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
· Petraeus and UK officials give upbeat assessment
· Announcement could come next month
Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Black
The Guardian
General David Petraeus holds talks with British officials. Photograph: David Levene
Britain is poised to announce significant cuts in the number of troops in southern Iraq following an upbeat assessment by US and British military officials in London yesterday.This was the message from defence officials last night following talks between ministers and General David Petraeus, the American military commander in Iraq.
Amid concern about the mounting tensions between Washington and Tehran over Iraq and nuclear issues, Gen Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Baghdad, also kept up the pressure on Iran, saying its repeated calls for dialogue with the US were irrelevant as long as it continued supporting Iraqi militias and played what Mr Crocker called a “lethal and damaging” role.
The Guardian understands an announcement on further cuts in British troops could be made as early as October 8 when Gordon Brown is due to make a statement to MPs when the Commons returns after its summer break. A reduction of 500 troops out of a total of 5,500 has already been announced.
At a press conference after talks with Des Browne, the defence secretary, and British military chiefs, Gen Petraeus went out of the way to emphasise the intimate links between the senior commanders of the two countries in Iraq.
He declined to talk figures but said the talks included the “rotation” of British troops in southern Iraq. A change of brigades would take place between the end of October and beginning of December and would provide the opportunity for a new round of cuts in the number of UK troops based in Basra.
He said that, subject to continuing negotiations, he expected Basra province, the last of the four Iraqi provinces controlled by Britain after the 2003 invasion, to be transferred to the Iraqis “later this fall or in the winter”.
He added: “There has been a substantial reduction over the past month and a half in the number of violent attacks [there]. Political deals appear to have been established.”
Gen Petraeus also emphasised “reconciliation”. Referring to the British experience in Northern Ireland, he spoke of coming “to grips with the obvious idea you reconcile with your enemies”.
He said he had discussed “specific tasks” with Mr Browne and British defence chiefs. Officials said this was a reference to the importance of political and economic progress - an issue likely to have been raised in his talks later in Downing Street.
The MoD said last night Mr Browne “re-emphasised the UK’s commitment to Iraq, that we will continue to help build their capabilities - military and civilian - so that they can take full responsibility for the security of their own country”.
At the joint press conference, Mr Crocker said: “We have not witnessed any constructive changes in Iranian behaviour on the ground in Iraq.
“For us the issue is not about the US talking to Iran or the bilateral relationship, which is extraordinarily difficult. It’s about what Iran can and should be doing - and should not be doing - by supporting and training and financing extremist militias that are killing Iraqis and coalition forces.” Iran’s interest was in a stable, democratic and peaceful Iraq, he said. “The Iranians have a decision to make whether their long-term interest overrides their short-term tactical desire to cause problems for us - because they really can’t have both.” Gen Petraeus said he had not sought authorisation to cross the border into Iran.
Two weeks ago George Bush said he had authorised US military commanders in Iraq “to confront Tehran’s murderous activities”.
Gen Petraeus spoke of an unnamed prisoner who had laughed out loud when asked if his group’s activities would be possible without Iranian support. The tape of his interrogation had been shown to Iraqi politicians to prove the extent of Iran’s involvement.
Overall, the message was the same as the two men relayed in their testimony to the US Congress last week.
“Iraq’s problems will require a long-term effort,” Gen Petraeus said.
“These can succeed but they will take time. There are no easy answers or quick solutions to helping the Iraqis build sustainable security and achieve national reconciliation.
“Our assessments underscore the importance of recognising that a premature drawdown of our forces would likely have devastating consequences … for our two nations and the world.”
Mr Crocker spoke of “new momentum” in Iraq following the surge, which had led to a fall in the number of attacks on civilians in 10 out of 13 provinces. “Should we decide that we are tired and want a dramatic political change then I’m certain there will be failure,” he said.
Mr Crocker defined Iraq’s central problem as the absence of “broad agreement on the nature of the state”.
The US, he said, was prepared to talk to those “who are ready to accept the reality of a new Iraqi state and society”. But there had been no contact with “unreconstructed elements” of the Ba’ath party.
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Iraq to review legal status of private security companies
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
By Kim Sengupta
The Iraqi government announced yesterday that it will review the legal status of all private security contractors working in the country in the wake of the banning of the American company Blackwater USA over the killing of civilians.
The death toll from the shooting on Sunday rose to 11, with 13 wounded. Blackwater has refused to apologise and claimed that those shot, who included women and children, were “armed insurgents and our personnel acted lawfully and appropriately”. It has also been claimed that as well as shooting at civilians, the Blackwater guards exchanged fire with Iraqi police and soldiers.
The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, called the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to offer condolences for the deaths and promised a through investigation into what happened. Blackwater had been contracted to provide security to many US officials in Baghdad, including the ambassador.
The radical Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, said yesterday: “This aggression wouldn’t have happened had it not been for the presence of the occupiers who brought these companies. Cancel this company’s work, and the rest of the criminal and intelligence companies.”
An Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said the cabinet “was meeting to review the operations of foreign and local security companies in Iraq”.
Brigadier General Abdul Kareem Khalaf, of the Interior Ministry, said: “Blackwater committed a crime. They carried out a flagrant assault. The judicial system will now take action”.
It remains unclear, however, what legal “action” can be taken. Private military companies were granted immunity from Iraqi prosecution under order number 17 of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Mowaffak Rubaie, the country’s national security advisor, said: “This is a golden opportunity for the government of Iraq to radically review the order.”
There was more violence in Baghdad yesterday as four car bombs in Baghdad killed 21 people. Some of the victims were at the morgue waiting to collect the bodies of relations who had died in Sunday’s shooting.
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UF Student tasered at John Kerry Speech
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
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