Tag: Government

If you think waterboarding isn’t torture, think again


waterboardingWaterboarding is torture, pure and simple.  Those brave and stupid enough to try it have come away with that conclusion, even the ones who have been waterboys for neocon arguments and excuses, which we have already discounted, which claimed waterboarding helped saved lives and is nothing more than an enhanced interrogation technique.  The latest waterboy who agreed to be waterboarded, one of the faux pas conservative radio talk show hosts, Eric Mancow Muller tried it and didn’t last 6 seconds on the waterboard, embarrassing himself  live during his radio talk show on WLS radio.  There’s video of his experience at the above link as well.  Muller went on to say afterwards

“It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.“

That should have come as no surprise to him.  Christopher Hitchens, another writer, media star of neocon bent was waterboarded and came to the same conclusion.  Why he had to experience it to be convinced is beyond me, especially after he was obliged to sign a statement BEFORE being waterboarded that read in part

“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.

Hitchens was lucky enough to have been forewarned and any senility evident in post waterboard writings is due to his ignoring the above indemnification and most likely not hereditary as I was earlier led to believe. Yet after all that, Hitchens managed to say succinctly, unambiguously that waterboarding is torture.  I have a few more pundits and media personalities I would like to see undergo the waterboard to determine for themselves whether it is torture or not, but in their absence there’s certainly more than enough anecdotal evidence, backed by the rule of law that substantiates the conclusion of the two mentioned in this article.  That said, why isn’t Dick Cheney facing indictment for torture?

Torture’s benefits don’t exist


I watched an hilarious exchange between former Minnesota governor, Jesse Ventura and a Fox TV chat show host who I must admit I was not very impressed with at all.  However they talked about whether waterboarding was torture and necessary for today’s American body politic.  The Fox host repeated several canards that weren’t really addressed by Ventura although he made up for a lack of response with passion and directing the argument in ways he wanted.  I want to briefly address some of the points from a document put together by the folks at Think Progress which I have alluded to in another post.

1. Information from enhanced techniques is unreliable.

This has been stated by several branches of government from the military to the FBI who have all concluded torture doesn’t yield any actionable intelligence and the opposite of torture, rapport building gives a far higher yield.  It’s not as gory or satisfying to the sadistic nature of today’s neocons but it gets results. In fact, according to some, torture gets in the way of intelligence gathering and has negative effects.

2. The torture of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and Abu Zubayday produced no valuable intelligence.

CIA and FBI officials have gone on record saying nothing was gained from torturing either of those two individuals and they were both tortured scores of time.

“The proponents of torture say, ‘Look at the body of information that has been obtained by these methods.’ But if K.S.M. and Abu Zubaydah did give up stuff, we would have heard the details,” says Cloonan. “What we got was pabulum.” A former C.I.A. officer adds: “Why can’t they say what the good stuff from Abu Zubaydah or K.S.M. is? It’s not as if this is sensitive material from a secret, vulnerable source. You’re not blowing your source but validating your program. They say they can’t do this, even though five or six years have passed, because it’s a ‘continuing operation.’ But has it really taken so long to check it all out?”

And again, there’s this:

As for K.S.M. himself, who (as Jane Mayer writes) was waterboarded, reportedly hung for hours on end from his wrists, beaten, and subjected to other agonies for weeks, Bush said he provided “many details of other plots to kill innocent Americans.” K.S.M. was certainly knowledgeable. It would be surprising if he gave up nothing of value. But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”

I strongly urge you to go to the document linked above to read it in its entirety.  It’s very well sourced and proves conclusively that torture was not responsible for any intelligence which prevented further attacks against America, that it was viewed as illegal by many of the people the Bush Administration sought to envelope in the torture fabric and that it is prosecutable should the legal community have the will to press charges against those responsible.  Why that hasn’t happened is something politicians in the next election should have to answer.

From the ‘he’s an idiot department’


idiotOur parents always told us never speak ill of the dead, but in the case of the guy in this post, I want to wake him up from the dead and slap him silly.  He’s the poster child for stupid behavior.  Why anyone would point a gun to their own head and claim they’re doing that to show people the importance of gun safety is S-T-U-P-I-D.  It’s not enough that firearms owners are given the evil eye by non-owners, and are always threatened or feel threatened with confiscation of their weapons by an over reaching government, but to give opponents of private ownership of weapons the ammunition, pardon the pun, to berate, deride, ridicule, encroach and infringe on that right, is……….well suicide as Mr. Benally found out.  For all the do gooders out there, here’s a tip for you.  Never point a weapon at your head, ever!  And if you’re not smart enough to follow that rule, then don’t do it in front of people and claim to give them a safety demonstration of how to use a firearm!  Jeez.

Somalia-Somalis trying to stay out of the bullseye


There’s been a lot written about Somalia, Muslims, piracy, and terrorism and most likely most of it like all the rest of the news on those subjects  is hyperbole.  In order to combat even that, however, a group of Somalis in Washington state came out in strong denouncement of piracy and terrorism.

“We, the Somali-Americans in Washington State, are denouncing our youth to participate in any kind of violence here and back home. We see this as an opportunity to clarify our perspective, as a community and United States citizens, and we (are denouncing) the piracy act in Somali shores.”

I applaud their unequivocal stand on the issues at hand which affect their community, even though they like most other Americans are not as informed about them as we should be.  In typical western arrogance we have ascribed bad motives to a group of people who take over ships on the high seas, even though  the idea based on what we know about Somalia is rather preposterous, and we never once considered that perhaps these people are acting in the best interests of their country with noble intentions.  So it is that a reporter raises that possibility by suggesting these “pirates” are themselves trying to stop illegal activity on the part of shippers in Somali waters.  It seems the international community has taken advantage of the absence of a controlling legal authority in Somalia and decided to dump its waste, toxic, nuclear and otherwise  in Somali waters, wrecking havoc on fishing for Somalis and endangering the lives of Somalis.

As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to”dispose” of cheaply.

It’s really the typical imperial trick of using or abusing the natural resources of a hapless nation state and then waging war on that country when it decides to mount even a minimal protest  at being raped and plundered.  Which is why we see this sudden interest in east Africa and the presence of a couple dozen Taliban/al-Qaida types infiltrating the area and causing widespread panic and concern in the halls of this once great republic, America; justification for intervention when all that is needed is adherence to the rule of law. Then there’s this:

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

In the past, American heroes would wax poetic about the importance of liberty and how insignificant death is in comparison, but such sentiments are not allowed for an agrarian society whose only importance, it seems, to imperial designs is as either an international garbage dump or a source for fish. Instead of taking advantage of a lawless vacuum, western powers should start negotiating with the government, any government is better than no government, to define territorial integrity and fishing/dumping rights off the Somali coast.  We know however why they don’t do that; caught up in the grips of Islamophobia and unable to seat a government to their liking, western powers are pillaging the coast of Somali for every industrial advantage available to them and labelling any resistance to this policy piracy.  Change anyone?

No doubt about it! The Fix is in!!!


LiebermanWe are constantly reminded of Pope Benedict’s nefarious past with the Nazis and how that impacts life today as he visits the Middle East.  Why don’t we read in the western press about the past connections of Avigdor Lieberman with Kach, a terrorist organization on the US’ terrorist watch list and the attendant public outrage as he travels the world?  Lieberman isn’t the first Israeli politician cleaned and spruced up after an ugly and bloodthirsty past for public consumption and if you can’t remember who else in recent Israeli history shares such a distinction it is an indication of the power of the Lobby to remove their logs,  murderous politicians,  from  the eyes of the public while magnifying the specks in the public eye of others who oppose them.

A thumbs up appointment


daliaGlad to see it, although I don’t know what it is she’ll be doing exactly. President Obama signed an executive order setting up a new body at the White House called the “Office of Religious Partnerships” to support religious institutions and strengthen inter-faith dialogue and government ties. The advisory group, consisting of 25 religious and secular representatives, is to report to the president on the role religion can play in resolving social problems and addressing civil rights issues. Dalia Mogahed, seen here on the left, has been given a position in the advisory group.  It’s really about time. This country is made up of many different types, shapes, colors, sizes of  individuals many of them not represented enough in our government, so it’s appropriate to see a Muslim woman who at least externally, takes her religion, way of life seriously.  I look forward to seeing and hearing a Muslim describe her own religion rather than have it filtered by someone who knows it but doesn’t live it. It’s time to remove the filters that have confined social discourse and let the “objects” speak for themselves.  I hope Ms. Mogahed can live up to what is really  a daunting task.

Israel Warns EU to tone down


Warnings usually accompany threats, as in ‘if you don’t stop doing this I’m going to do something in response’, so what is Israel’s warning of consequence?

Israel warned the European Union on Thursday to tone down its criticism of the new Israeli government or risk forfeiting the bloc’s role as broker in Mideast peace efforts.

So my question is what is it Israel can threaten the European Union with? Israeli military threats against Europe have been made before and with rabid Israeli politicians now in power, the implication of Israel’s warning is probably not lost on Europeans.  Also, Israel has never accepted the EU’s role as a peace broker, the latest Gaza offensive, is proof of that when the Israelis bombed, strafed and blocked aid supplies to Palestinians in Gaza which came from Europe.  What is really at stake here is Israeli access to European markets.  The Israelis want to ply their trade of espionage, industrial, political and military and they can’t do that now as easily as they can in the US.  Evidently old habits die hard in the relations between Europeans and Jews.

The bastardization of American justice


The depths with which people with political agendas go through to promote that agenda even at the expense of the rule of law never ceases to amaze me.  One would think after the last 8 years of such criminalization of law to infringe upon the rights of American and other citizens of the world, some sort of self correction in the American legal system, as well as in the psyche of Americans, would take place and rights would be respected and recognized.  Guess again.

Local Muslim leaders and advocates on Tuesday demanded that U.S. immigration officials release Youssef Megahed, who was detained just three days after a jury acquitted him of federal explosives charges.

“This seems to be a double jeopardy. What kind of message are they sending to the jury and the honorable Judge (Steven) Merryday?” Ramzy Kilic, executive director for the Tampa chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said of Megahed’s Monday arrest.

Dozens of immigration attorneys have offered free legal representation to the former University of South Florida student, his father said. But the Megahed family has yet to retain a lawyer to fight their son’s latest battle.

Immigration officials have charged Megahed with possessing items that could be assembled into a destructive device.

He was found not guilty on a similar charge in federal court, where public defenders represented him. Jurors acquitted him of illegal transportation of explosive materials and illegal possession of a destructive device, charges that could have each carried 10 years in prison.

Even the jurors who acquitted the defendant are up in arms of the government’s handling of this case.  Megahed is a permanent legal resident of the US, but that status allows him to be tried in immigration court if charges brought out in federal court aren’t able to stick.  The government has therefore found a way around all the acquittals many Muslim immigrants to America have received because of faulty federal prosecutions to arrest, detain and deport people who are innocent.  The burden of proof in immigration court is also not as restrictive and easier for the prosecution of such cases, so it is possible for the government to continue its WOM, read war on Muslims.  At the moment Megahed’s family doesn’t know where he is, nor have they talked to him.  Welcome to America.

Let them eat cake


Republicans are up in arms about the declaration of Homeland Security which warns ‘the consequences of a prolonged economic downturn—including real estate foreclosures, unemployment, and an inability to obtain credit—could create a fertile recruiting environment for rightwing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and
government authorities similar to those in the past; right wing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first
African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda’,  They claim the federal government is picking on them.  Glen Greenwald who eviscerates the right in his column which you can read here,  points out how the same people from the right were cheering on the federal government’s usurpation of power when fighting Islamic terrorism, rousing from the sidelines a behemoth federal government to its  slow but steady encroachment of the rights of its citizens until they too became  the vanquished.  It serves them right, but there is a kernel of truth to the feds assessment of the threat from the right  which you can read about here.   That was/is easily forgotten however and so the whining continues from the newly dispossessed who also say they’re being singled out by a vengeful leftist, fascist government, but  that notion too has been discredited.  What we have here is basically a ‘chickens coming home to roost’ situation where the political right is now reaping what it sowed the last eight years, which is why Marie Antoinette’s disdainful ‘let them eat cake’ couldn’t be a more appropriate epithet.

Agenda driven politics at the expense of human misery


pistolI knew it wouldn’t take long before the hue and cry for some type of government control on citizen behavior would start, led of course by a compliant mainstream media, and so it has with the issue of gun control.  Excuse me while I  gloat and say I told you this would happen when we embarked on our outrageous WOT  and our discrimination against Muslims the world over because particularly some segments of American society wanted to settle a centuries old feud with their Muslim cousins/brothers. It was easy to use 911 to incite passions against a targeted group of people, just as it probably, over time, will be easy to inflame the public for more “gun control” as MSM focuses on those occasions in social interaction where some people just loose their handle on reality and go crazy.  Why don’t we have a war on mental illness or on human insanity, or better yet, a war on evil, which is colorless, stateless and sexless.  But the latter is just the reason why we don’t wage such wars; they are not sexy enough, not divisive enough to sustain and so we suffer at the hands of kooks who commit crimes and kooks who profit from the commission of crimes who go on to advance their own political agendas.   Outrageous crimes of passion, murder and mayhem course through the veins of humanity and date back to the beginning of time and Cain and Able, or further. None of us are immune from this genetic imprint on our behavior; the rule of Law is what keeps some of us in line more than others of us, but even when that doesn’t work, the punishment of the law equally applied to all lawbreakers should.  Of course, there is a group of people, notably lawyers, whose job it is to make sure that doesn’t always happen.  They too are agenda driven, but humanity has been smart enough to erect, over time, a legal system capable of  dealing with almost any human transaction that insures social cohesion and the continuation of the species.  Piling on that system of laws, as has happened at the proclamation of every other War we have waged,  is draconian at best, oppressive at worse, and not the role of government.

The Art of Changing Reality


altered_statesYou really have to love how some within the Israeli establishment can change reality to suit their agendas.  In the photo above women who are members of the Israeli government were removed and another photo used with men replacing the legally elected women of the government, because some within Israeli society think it’s not appropriate to have women seen in public.   When Israelis do this kind of thing even to themselves it lets you know how callous they have become, and begs the question, what other alterations have they made for their interests?  In the past, America has invaded countries that casually dismissed women in the manner some within Israeli media have done.  It’s amazing how immobile US policy makers are when it comes to Israeli transgressions!  Stay tuned.

America and immigrants


Why is it that a country of immigrants, and lets face it we are all immigrants to this country whether recent or from a very long time ago, some of us willing and others of us unwilling conscripts,  have such a disdain for today’s immigrants?  The deaths of immigrants while under federal government custody is a stain upon the tradition of America and its rule of law.  It is unconscionable that people are left to die in federal immigration detention facilities yet there seems to be a pattern of such abuse taking place on our shores.

What does 50 billion dollars get you?


aircraft_carrierThe more I think about Bernard Madoff and his crime of stealing 50 billion dollars of other people’s money the more I’m amazed at what he got away with.  Fifty billion dollars gets you about 10 Nimitz class nuclear powered aircraft carriers and I don’t see anything like that  parked in front of his NYC apartment or in the garage of any of his houses or those of his relatives.  So in addition to wondering how much is 50 billion US dollars is the question, where did it go? That’s a whole lot of money.  Even if it’s squirreled away somewhere, there’s no chance Madoff himself will be able to use it since he’ll be in prison for the rest of his life, and at 70 years of age, that might not be long.

Finally there’s the question, how did this guy manage to steal such a large amount of money from so many people over so long a period of time without getting caught?  The  answer is Madoff has connections who ignored pleas to  officials over a number of years of Madoff’s crimes that he was crooked.  Let’s not forget we’re not talking about a couple of million dollars.  At the time officials were warned Madoff had already squandered several billion dollars and as early as 2001 people were saying there’s something rotten in Denmark with this guy.  Now, I would just love to blame the Republicans for this 50 billion heist because they were the ones who were negligent, and ignored Madoff until the end of Bush’s term.  But accounts claim that Democrats were the recipients of Madoff’s stolen money with contributions he gave to Democratic office holders/seekers, so the responsibility for regulatory blinders  is  no doubt shared.  The question then becomes, is there anyone  in government who thinks it’s wrong to steal 50 billion dollars?  Apparently not. Are all politicians and their political appointees  that crooked?  Apparently so. Fifty billion dollars can buy a lot of influence as well.  Spread out over several decades among money hungry, greedy politicians, no doubt that amount of money can vanish, but with huge rewards for the one distributing it.  It wouldn’t take much for a politician to turn a blind eye to repeated requests to investigate someone who is lining their pockets with untoward amounts of money.

I’ve often read about sleeper cells of Islamic terrorists in the US, which haven’t been discovered yet by the way despite the repeated claims of their existence, but Madoff’s financial manipulation and graft are on a scale that Muslims and any other terrorists would “die” for.  Quite simply, Madoff’s stolen money was used to influence legislation for Madoff’s interests and those of his clients.  He did that while wearing expensive suits, a firmly entrenched member of the financial side of society who was loved and respected by all, yet he bought politicians and advanced causes, especially his own, that were in direct contravention to the interests of America.  He should be water boarded until he tells us where the money went, to whom and for what purpose.  Nothing less than that should be acceptable.

No comment


“This is an action that sowed massive destruction among civilians. It is not certain that it was possible do have done it differently, but ultimately we have emerged from this operation and are not facing real paralysis from the Qassams. It is very possible that we will repeat such an operation on a larger scale in the years to come, because the problem in the Gaza Strip is not simple and it is not at all certain that it has been solved. What we want this evening is to hear from the fighters.”

Aviv: “I am squad commander of a company that is still in training, from the Givati Brigade. We went into a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Altogether, this is a special experience. In the course of the training, you wait for the day you will go into Gaza, and in the end it isn’t really like they say it is. It’s more like, you come, you take over a house, you kick the tenants out and you move in. We stayed in a house for something like a week.

“Toward the end of the operation there was a plan to go into a very densely populated area inside Gaza City itself. In the briefings they started to talk to us about orders for opening fire inside the city, because as you know they used a huge amount of firepower and killed a huge number of people along the way, so that we wouldn’t get hurt and they wouldn’t fire on us.

“At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then … I call this murder … in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified – we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?

“From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn’t fled. I didn’t really understand: On the one hand they don’t really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they’re telling us they hadn’t fled so it’s their fault … This also scared me a bit. I tried to exert some influence, insofar as is possible from within my subordinate position, to change this. In the end the specification involved going into a house, operating megaphones and telling [the tenants]: ‘Come on, everyone get out, you have five minutes, leave the house, anyone who doesn’t get out gets killed.’

“I went to our soldiers and said, ‘The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out … This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment. One of my soldiers came to me and asked, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘What isn’t clear? We don’t want to kill innocent civilians.’ He goes, ‘Yeah? Anyone who’s in there is a terrorist, that’s a known fact.’ I said, ‘Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.’ He says, ‘That’s clear,’ and then his buddies join in: ‘We need to murder any person who’s in there. Yeah, any person who’s in Gaza is a terrorist,’ and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.

“And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we’ll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor – something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn’t really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it’s cool.

“You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won’t say anything. To write ‘death to the Arabs’ on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It’s what I’ll remember the most.”

“One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious – I don’t know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood.”

Zamir: “I don’t understand. Why did he shoot her?”

Aviv: “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn’t see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her.”

Zvi: “Aviv’s descriptions are accurate, but it’s possible to understand where this is coming from. And that woman, you don’t know whether she’s … She wasn’t supposed to be there, because there were announcements and there were bombings. Logic says she shouldn’t be there. The way you describe it, as murder in cold blood, that isn’t right. It’s known that they have lookouts and that sort of thing.”

Gilad: “Even before we went in, the battalion commander made it clear to everyone that a very important lesson from the Second Lebanon War was the way the IDF goes in – with a lot of fire. The intention was to protect soldiers’ lives by means of firepower. In the operation the IDF’s losses really were light and the price was that a lot of Palestinians got killed.”

Ram: “I serve in an operations company in the Givati Brigade. After we’d gone into the first houses, there was a house with a family inside. Entry was relatively calm. We didn’t open fire, we just yelled at everyone to come down. We put them in a room and then left the house and entered it from a different lot. A few days after we went in, there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sharpshooters’ position on the roof. The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn’t understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go, and it was was okay and he should hold his fire and he … he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders.”

Question from the audience: “At what range was this?”

Ram: “Between 100 and 200 meters, something like that. They had also came out of the house that he was on the roof of, they had advanced a bit and suddenly he saw then, people moving around in an area where they were forbidden to move around. I don’t think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to … I don’t know how to describe it …. The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way.”

Yuval Friedman (chief instructor at the Rabin program): “Wasn’t there a standing order to request permission to open fire?”

Ram: “No. It exists, beyond a certain line. The idea is that you are afraid that they are going to escape from you. If a terrorist is approaching and he is too close, he could blow up the house or something like that.”

Zamir: “After a killing like that, by mistake, do they do some sort of investigation in the IDF? Do they look into how they could have corrected it?”

Ram: “They haven’t come from the Military Police’s investigative unit yet. There hasn’t been any … For all incidents, there are individual investigations and general examinations, of all of the conduct of the war. But they haven’t focused on this specifically.”

Moshe: “The attitude is very simple: It isn’t pleasant to say so, but no one cares at all. We aren’t investigating this. This is what happens during fighting and this is what happens during routine security.”

Ram: “What I do remember in particular at the beginning is the feeling of almost a religious mission. My sergeant is a student at a hesder yeshiva [a program that combines religious study and military service]. Before we went in, he assembled the whole platoon and led the prayer for those going into battle. A brigade rabbi was there, who afterward came into Gaza and went around patting us on the shoulder and encouraging us, and praying with people. And also when we were inside they sent in those booklets, full of Psalms, a ton of Psalms. I think that at least in the house I was in for a week, we could have filled a room with the Psalms they sent us, and other booklets like that.

“There was a huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out. The Education Corps published a pamphlet for commanders – something about the history of Israel’s fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present. The rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles, and … their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war. From my position as a commander and ‘explainer,’ I attempted to talk about the politics – the streams in Palestinian society, about how not everyone who is in Gaza is Hamas, and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us. I wanted to explain to the soldiers that this war is not a war for the sanctification of the holy name, but rather one to stop the Qassams.”

Hat tip.

It just keeps getting worse


News from Israel that genocide was the intent of the Gazan intrusion and nothing less grows stronger everyday with the release of soldier testimony to that effect. A word on the cartoon posted below; it clearly shows a dementia that has nothing at all to do with terrorism, the use of deadly force or American interests, nor Israeli interests for that matter.  With the exception of one drawing, no one who appears in the cartoons is even remotely connected to the “terrorism” the Israelis claim they are fighting.  One of the cartoon’s panels shows a blatant act of homosexuality as an act of war which speaks to the mindset of today’s modern armies.  What it does show is a hatred for Arabs and a willingness to kill women and infants, something we’ve seen in the latest “war” in Gaza and something which is underscored with this latest news

“Rules of Engagement: Open fire also upon rescue,” was handwritten in Hebrew on a sheet of paper found in one of the Palestinian homes the Israel Defense Forces took over during Operation Cast Lead. A reservist officer who did not take part in the Gaza offensive believes that the note is part of orders a low-level commander wrote before giving his soldiers their daily briefing.

One of the main themes in news reports during the Gaza operation, and which appears in many testimonies, is that IDF soldiers shot at Palestinian and Red Cross rescuers, making it impossible to evacuate the wounde.d and dead. As a result, an unknown number of Palestinians bled to death as others cowered in their homes for days without medical treatment, waiting to be rescued.

The bodies of the dead lay outside the homes or on roadsides for days, sometimes as long as two weeks. Haaretz has reported a number of such cases, some of them as they happened. The document found in the house provides written proof that IDF commanders ordered their troops to shoot at rescuers.

It is significant to remember that those who lay bleeding to death easily within reach of rescue personnel who perhaps could have been saved were the likes of women and children.


What do you do when you’re not wanted? BEG!


Dignity means not begging for inclusion.  CAIR and other Muslim organizations had done a somewhat decent job of not begging when it came to the federal government and it’s law enforcement arm, the FBI; that was until the FBI decided to end the love fest with CAIR and stop doing community outreach programs with them.  The FBI has been infested with Islamophobes the likes of Steve Emerson and Daniel Pipes whose hatred of anything Islamic is as rabid, demented and misguided as anyone from your local insane asylum.  As long as the federal government is under the sway of folks like the two above there’s very little CAIR can do to get the feds to change their mind.  I was a little upset therefore to read this “plea” from CAIR for the FBI to justify their breaking of relations.  I think it’s more dignified for CAIR to continue with its program of uncovering abuse directed towards Muslim Americans and working with those institutions that are willing to work with them to stop such abuse, but if anyone wants to give in to the rhetoric and racism of Islamophobes there’s nothing you can do to change that, and begging them to like you certainly won’t work.

And speaking of CAIR did you read where they have changed leadership and gone more “local” as it were.  The former head of the organization, a Palestinian-American was just the lightening rod the likes of Pipes and Emerson needed  to make and then make stick the accusation that CAIR was somehow affiliated with home grown Islamic terrorism.  Yes, we all know no such thing exists, but that didn’t stop Pipes, et.al  from slinging the mud.  Larry Shaw a North Carolina state representative is now taking over the reigns of CAIR and showing another dimension to Islam in America.

Shaw, who has served in the senate for seven terms, has a reputation for honesty and fair dealing. A champion of interfaith understanding, he has gained support in the Jewish community, too.

“I’m very much impressed with his fine personality,” says Rabbi Yosef Levanon of Congregation Beth Israel in Fayetteville. “I think he has good intentions, and I’m praying he will avoid the pitfalls that have plagued this organization.”

Indeed, some have suggested that Shaw was chosen to lead CAIR precisely because he can soften its sometimes combative image.

Khalilah Sabra, a Raleigh activist who directs the local chapter of the Muslim American Society’s Freedom Foundation and consults with Shaw on a weekly basis, says Shaw brings a uniquely American political vision to CAIR.

I don’t know what all happened to make Mr. Shaw’s leadership at CAIR possible but I think it has something to do with the group’s tarnished image, a la Mr. Pipe and Emerson.  Perhaps Shaw can transform that image and focus the vision of the group to pursuits that will make it more necessary to the American fabric.

The Mixed messages of the Obama White House


Dick Cheney deserves to be in jail.  He is perhaps one of the biggest war criminals the US has produced in recent memory, ranking right up there with Henry Kissinger and Lyndo Johnson.  So why did he go and put his foot in his mouth about Obama endangering the American public because of his reversal of some of Cheney/Bush’s illegal adventures the last 8 years?  I guess to Dick the fact that the US has invaded two countries that were otherwise not hostile or a threat to US interests doesn’t matter a hill of beans to how people think of this country or how angry and unstable they must feel about American intervention.  All of the displaced Iraqis leaving in countries other than their own must be really happy about Bush’s decision to invade their country while extremely upset with Obama’s decision to close down Guantanamo Bay or stop torture and rendition of people we suspect of terrorism.  Go figure, and did you catch Cheney’s really flippant remark about the role his administration played in the economic downturn?!  Stuff happens.  Wow.  Cheney doesn’t have a clue or doesn’t give a damn.  His deflection of his responsibility for what he took this country through is sad, pathetic and embarrassing for us as a nation.  This was the best we could do?  Brilliant  Someone lock him up and throw away the key, please!

So after this really lame appearance on CNN, the Obama administration reacted to Cheney’s remarks with an equally flippant and faux indignation only politicans can muster.  The longer Obama stays in office the easier it is to see how the saying, the more things “change” the more they remain the same, should have been his campaign slogan, for while he has tossed us the platitudes of closing Guantanamo Bay, he has also repeated a Bush administration policy of citing “state secrets” to prevent the release of evidence concerning extraordinary renditions as well as argued that all cases being brought against the Bush administration for torture related offenses should be dismissed! What Cheney’s remarks were meant to do were to get Obama to continue to toe the line by making the new government appear to be soft on terrorism, when it really isn’t, and in order to project the tough guy image, do even more along the lines of draconian measures instituted by Bush/Cheney to prove it.  Meanwhile the two sides appear to be at odds with one another when they really aren’t.  Obama’s chief concern must be the economy, while issues of foreign policy will be largely seen as a battle ground between the two parties but left as they were under Bush.  The drama continues.

Toilet paper as a political weapon


I never knew just how incendiary toilet paper could be.  First it was given a heightened status for the military personnel at Guantanamo Bay who were told how the maniacally trained terrorists could fashion knives from toilet paper and kill all the guards there and then swim to mainland USA and continue their killing rampage with other improvised weapons equally deadly.  Of course it’s hilarious, but there were some misguided souls who believed it.  Now comes word toilet paper is too dangerous to allow the citizens of Gaza to have and so all aide shipments that include toilet paper cannot be allowed. In the light of that explanation, I can understand why hummus is not allowed in either, seeing as how hummus creates the condition that calls for the use of toilet paper. Next we’ll be told how feminine products such as pads and tampons aren’t allowed for adult women.

More evidence of Bush administration criminality


Bush and Cheney need to be in jail now.  This all started back in 2003 when the Bush administration gave tacit approval to the notion that Israelis could kill their political opponents no matter where they were, even on American soil.  Such are the depths at which the Bush administration went to circumvent the rule of law and plunge America into the abyss of an international pariah.  Imagine for a moment, taking an unpopular position against the US government during the height of any government sponsored initiative and finding yourself the target of a group supported by that same government sent to kill you.  Our government was set up to avoid just this type of criminality; offering everyone of us, citizens and by extension the rest of the world community with whom we have signed treaties, recourse to judicial review and representative deliberation, not exclusively executive orders, which this “death squad” was a part of and out of access to the other branches of government.  This looks like the banana republics of old that sent their legionnaires of death throughout their territories on the prowl for those who opposed such tactics to silence, torture or kill them.  We were better than that; whether we can still claim that is anyone’s guess.