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By Brett Wilkins

In an urgent appeal for financial and other resources, two top United Nations human rights officials on Tuesday condemned the world’s inadequate response to a nascent famine in Sudan.

The U.N. Famine Review Committee announced last week that famine now exists in the Zamzam refugee camp near al-Fashir in North Darfur, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Sudanese are sheltering amid 15 months of a civil war that’s displaced more than 10 million people and cut off delivery of desperately needed food and other aid.

Other parts of Sudan—including Greater Darfur, South Kordofan, and Khartoum—are at risk of famine.

“This announcement should stop all of us cold because when famine happens, it means we are too late,” Edem Wosornu, director of the Operations and Advocacy Division at the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said Tuesday.

“It means we did not do enough. It means we, the international community, have failed,” she added, pointing to the numerous warnings of imminent famine over recent months. “This is an entirely man-made crisis and a shameful stain on our collective conscience.”

[https://twitter.com/UN_News_Centre/status/1820905232127164855]

As U.N. News reported:

The Sudanese National Army and a rival, formerly allied military, known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), have been battling since April 2023, pushing “millions of civilians into a quagmire of violence and with it, death, injury, and inhumane suffering treatment.”

A staggering 26 million people are facing acute hunger… More than 10 million people have been forced to flee their homes, including some 726,000 displaced from Sennar state following recent RSF advances.

Sudan’s once vibrant capital, Khartoum, now lies in ruins, the national healthcare system has collapsed, and recent heavy rains in Kassala and North Darfur have increased the risk of cholera and other waterborne diseases. An entire generation of children is missing out on a second straight year of education.

“Let me be clear: It is still possible to stop this freight train of suffering that is charging through Sudan,” Wosornu stressed. “But only if we respond with the urgency that this moment demands.”

Justin Brady, who heads OCHA’s Sudan office, toldU.N. News on Monday that “if we don’t have enough resources and we don’t have enough access, it is going to be very difficult to stop famine conditions from taking hold” in other parts of Sudan.

“Access continues to be a major problem,” he continued. “And some donors have seen that and said, well, we’ll give you funding when you get access.”

[https://twitter.com/JustinTBrady/status/1820817468954169706]

“Second of all, when we do get access, we need to take advantage of those openings very quickly,” Brady added. “If we don’t, they will close very quickly. So not having enough resources… Our appeal for this year is only a third funded, under $900 million received.”

Echoing Brady, Wosornu said that “we are pushing from every possible angle to stop this catastrophe from getting worse, but we cannot go very far without the access and resources we need.”

Wosornu outlined the humanitarian community’s four key demands:

• Warring parties must end the conflict;
• They must uphold their obligations under international law;
• They must allow rapid, safe, and unimpeded humanitarian access across all possible routes; and
• The international community must provide adequate funding—OCHA is seeking $2.7 billion—to support aid operations.

“Assistance delayed is assistance denied for the many Sudanese civilians who are literally dying of hunger during the time it takes for clearances to come through, permits to be granted, and flood waters to subside,” Wosornu warned.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

7 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ralph Nader

Soldiers saw the body parts of little children, heard the screams, the cries, and groans of the dying, smelled the stench of rotting corpses being eaten by stray dogs, and saw their victims—mothers and fathers—begging in vain for help to save their dismembered children.

Israeli soldiers, like soldiers in other countries, bask in the self-serving effusive praise showered upon them by politicians, but privately they know BS when they hear it.

Right from the start on October 7th, the soldiers knew that the sudden collapse of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s state-of-the-art multitiered border defense system left the door open for the Hamas attack. Still denied an official investigation by Netanyahu, people know that had the border defense been in place, all the terrible consequences never would have occurred. (See, the open letter by six very prominent Israelis in The New York Times on June 26, 2024: “We Are Israelis Calling On Congress to Disinvite Netanyahu.”)

The soldiers also know that the small Hamas militia of some 25,000 fighters hidden in tunnels, having only small arms with dwindling ammunition, is up against the 465,000-person military armed with 1,500 F-16 fighter pilots and nuclear weapons. The Israeli military is also equipped daily by U.S. President Joe Biden with the most modern weapons. All this makes Netanyahu’s absurd description of Hamas as an existential threat sheer propaganda designed to protect his job.

The evidence is on the bloody body-strewn ground of tiny Gaza and its crowded 2.3 million people. The Israeli military has dropped over 100,000 precision bombs, countless artillery shells from hundreds of tanks, and even naval missiles to kill over 300,000 innocent Gazan civilians, mostly children, women, and elderly, who had nothing to do with October 7th. (See also my March 5, 2024 column “Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza”). Most of the remaining people in Gaza are sick, injured, or both. (See the open letter to Biden and the U.S. Congress titled, “45 American Health Workers’ Letter on Their Experiences in Gaza” dated July 25, 2024.)

How many Israeli soldiers have died? The official figure is 395 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers—many from friendly fire in the fog of explosions, accidents such as collapsing buildings, and diseases. The exaggerated “Hamas battalions” send fighters popping up from their underground tunnels to fire rifles or grenade launchers before most are immediately extinguished by overwhelming firepower.

The largest number of Israeli casualties are the soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including moral traumas, being treated in the thousands by Israeli psychologists and mental health specialists. These are the soldiers who will tell the stories of who they were ordered to kill and what they were ordered to destroy. The lack of a truthful account of the atrocities in Gaza—because of Netanyahu blocking war correspondents from Israel and other nations from freely reporting there—will be brought to light by the reports of these soldiers.

To be sure, the thirst for vengeance after October 7th animated most of the soldiers at the outset—especially those screened for having no qualms about killing innocent children, women, and men and destroying civilian facilities.

But as the weeks became months, the Torah’s instruction of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” to limit escalating cycles of revenge, according to Biblical scholars, became a hundred and then a thousand eyes for an eye and a thousand teeth for a tooth. More soldiers and generals are questioning why they are still there amidst the smoldering ruins and ghastly slaughters.

Netanyahu’s drive to remain in power has stoked the carnage in Gaza. Despised by 3 out of 4 Israelis for earlier moving to weaken the judiciary, under indictment for political corruption by Israeli prosecutors, and soundly condemned for his defense failure on October 7th, ending this one-sided annihilation of defenseless people would mean the end of his political career.

Consider what these soldiers have witnessed or done: Powerful precision bombs blowing to bits babies, children, pregnant women, refugee camps, apartments, schools, health clinics, hospitals, ambulances, water mains, and electricity networks; families starving on genocidal orders from the Israeli military “no food, water, medicine, electricity, fuel”; and homeless people trapped, unable to escape, surrender, or shelter.

The soldiers have seen their bulldozers flatten critical civilian infrastructure, even cemeteries and agricultural crops. F-16s have blown up universities, government buildings, and many schools, mosques, and historic churches. Snipers, among the most brutal of the army, kill patients in broken hospitals and survivors desperately try to pull their crushed families out from under the rubble.

Already, several reservists have told reporters in Israel that the military has no operating “rules of engagement.” They could blow up or shoot and kill anyone who moves, including United Nations relief workers, journalists, and health workers protected by international law. The laws of war—the duty to disobey illegal orders—don’t exist in Gaza.

Soldiers saw the body parts of little children, heard the screams, the cries, and groans of the dying, smelled the stench of rotting corpses being eaten by stray dogs, and saw their victims—mothers and fathers—begging in vain for help to save their dismembered children.

Unlike other wars, Israeli soldiers were not allowed to facilitate the emergency rescue crews that still exist in Gaza such as those with Doctors Without Borders, the Palestinian Red Crescent, and several internationally respected providers of food and water—themselves subject to Israeli attacks. (See December 13, 2023, an open letter titled, “Stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe” to Biden by 16 Israeli human rights groups which appeared in The New York Times).

Soldiers obeyed their commanders’ orders to repeatedly push hundreds of thousands of desperate Gazans on foot, exposed to the stifling heat and lethally polluted air, from one Israeli-designated area to another. The treachery is unlimited.

Other soldiers were told to block thousands of trucks ready to enter from Egypt, packed with humanitarian aid of food, water, medicine, and other critical supplies. Still, other soldiers were ordered to kidnap thousands of Gazans, including women and children, and send them without charges to be tortured in Israeli jails, as documented in a just-released U.N. Human Rights Office report titled, Detention in the Context of the Escalation of Hostilities in Gaza.

Of course, there are plenty of soldiers happy to have such sadistic and unlawful commands. How dare the Gazans revolt against the decades of violent Israeli bombing, occupation, invasions, and military embargoes? That’s historically been the imperious attitude of cruel, colonizing, land-seizing regimes. The ranks will grow to join past “refuseniks” who in 2002 courageously declared their refusal to go and beat up people, demolish homes, and otherwise rampage against defenseless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

From The Combatants’ Letter, January 2002:

We, combat officers and soldiers who have served the state of Israel for long weeks every year, in spite of the dear cost to our personal lives, have been on reserve duty in the occupied territories, and were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people.

[…]

We hereby declare that we shall not continue to fight this war of the settlements.

We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people.

Dozens of Israeli human rights organizations and leading advocates will record these reservists’ recollections, their remorse, and their recurring nightmares. The vicious omnicidal extremists who make up Netanyahu’s ruling coalition will be exposed for their war crimes and destruction of their own country’s freedoms. Returning war veterans have credibility that will fortify the forthcoming entry into Gaza of international commissions of inquiry and scores of investigative journalists. (See the new documentary The Night Won’t End.)

The violent Netanyahu knows all this, which is why he is now scheming to provoke a wider regional war by dragging spineless Biden and the U.S. military directly into the fighting. Remember Biden’s intense backing of the Bush/Cheney criminal invasion/war in Iraq.

If you don’t care what Netanyahu is doing over there, you’d better care about what he’s doing to America, our Congress, our tax dollars, our freedom of speech, and our national security.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future” (2012). His new book is, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All” (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).

5 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jake Johnson

Israeli forces killed dozens of displaced Palestinians—mostly children—on Sunday with attacks on a pair of United Nations-run schools in the Gaza Strip as diplomats in the region worked to prevent all-out war from breaking out in the aftermath of Israel’s latest assassination spree.

Al Jazeera reported that 80% of the roughly 30 people killed in the Israeli attacks on two schools in Gaza City were children, strikes that came shortly after Israel’s military bombed a hospital complex in central Gaza, killing at least five people.

“This is beyond horror now,” David Shoebridge, an Australian senator, wrote in response to the attacks on schools-turned-shelters.

Tareq Abu Azzoum of Al Jazeera noted that rescue teams were still searching the rubble of the two schools for survivors on Monday.

“At least 16 Palestinians are still missing, including children, under the remnants of these areas that were targeted by Israel without any prior warning,” Azzoum wrote. “Civil defense crews have been using only their bare hands in order to look for survivors. They have been saying that sometimes the process for recovering and pulling out victims can take days simply because there isn’t enough fuel to operate the vast majority of bulldozers, and due to the Israeli attacks on bulldozers at the municipal facilities, used in the initial months of the war to rescue victims.”

[https://twitter.com/PalestineRCS/status/1820104591565795824]

Israel’s monthslong war on the Gaza Strip has devastated the territory’s children, killing more than 14,000, wounding more than 12,000, and leaving over 20,000 missing. The physical toll has been compounded by what one Gaza mother recently described as the “complete psychological destruction” of the enclave’s youth.

Becky Platt, a British pediatric nurse who recently returned from Gaza after a stint at a field hospital there, wrote Monday that “the psychological distress that I witnessed among children and young people is like nothing I’d ever seen before.”

“It’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the numbers when we watch the news or read about what’s happening in Gaza,” Platt continued. “Remember that each one of those numbers is one person, a child who has been forever changed by what’s happened. Then multiply that one child by thousands. That’s the work that needs to be done.”

Israel’s attacks came after a round of cease-fire talks in Cairo concluded without a deal to end the assault on Gaza. Critics, including some Israeli officials, believe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is actively sabotaging cease-fire talks in a bid to remain in power.

Axiosreported Sunday that “Israeli officials and families of hostages are concerned Netanyahu, who recently toughened his demands and presented new conditions for a hostage and cease-fire deal, sent the delegation [to Cairo] only to create an appearance of negotiations to relieve some of the pressure from” U.S. President Joe Biden, who has called for a cease-fire while continuing to provide military support for the war on Gaza.

“Hamas rejected Netanyahu’s new conditions, which include forming an international mechanism to prevent weapons transfers from southern Gaza to the north,” according to Axios. “Israeli officials say this and other new demands are making a deal impossible.”

Meanwhile, diplomats are trying to prevent the region from descending into full-scale military conflict following Israel’s assassination of a Hezbollah commander and Hamas’ political leader.

Iran’s supreme leader has reportedly ordered an attack on Israel in retaliation for the killing of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told G7 nations on Sunday that Iran’s military response could begin as soon as Monday.

Late last week, the Pentagon announced it would “deploy additional fighter jets and Navy warships to the Middle East” as lawmakers and anti-war campaigners warned of deepening U.S. involvement in the regional war.

“Americans do not want to fight another war in the Middle East,” Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, said last week, “and the path out of the unimaginable death and destruction in Gaza that threatens to engulf the region is through a cease-fire.”

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

5 August 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Richard D. Wolff

2 Aug 2024 – Fans of capitalism like to say it is democratic or that it supports democracy. Some have stretched language so far as to literally equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably. No matter how many times that is repeated, it is simply not true and never was. Indeed, it is much more accurate to say that capitalism and democracy are opposites. To see why, you have only to look at capitalism as a production system where employees enter into a relationship with employers, where a few people are the boss, and most people simply work doing what they are told to do. That relationship is not democratic; it is autocratic.

When you cross the threshold into a workplace (e.g., a factory, an office, or a store), you leave whatever democracy might exist outside. You enter a workplace from which democracy is excluded. Are the majority—the employees—making the decisions that affect their lives? The answer is an unambiguous no. Whoever runs the enterprise in a capitalist system (owner[s] or a board of directors) makes all the key decisions: what the enterprise produces, what technology it uses, where production takes place, and what to do with enterprise profits. The employees are excluded from making those decisions but must live with the consequences, which affect them deeply. The employees must either accept the effects of their employers’ decisions or quit their jobs to work somewhere else (most likely organized in the same undemocratic way).

The employer is an autocrat within a capitalist enterprise, like a king in a monarchy. Over the past few centuries, monarchies were largely “overthrown” and replaced by representative, electoral “democracies.” But kings remained. They merely changed their location and their titles. They moved from political positions in government to economic positions inside capitalist enterprises. Instead of kings, they are called bosses or owners or CEOs. There they sit, atop the capitalist enterprise, exercising many king-like powers, unaccountable to those over whom they reign.

Democracy has been kept out of capitalist enterprise for centuries. Many other institutions in societies where capitalist enterprises prevail—government agencies, universities and colleges, religions, and charities—are equally autocratic. Their internal relationships often copy or mirror the employer/employee relationship inside capitalist enterprises. Those institutions try thereby to “function in a businesslike manner.”

The anti-democratic organization of capitalist firms also conveys to employees that their input is not genuinely welcomed or sought by their bosses. Employees thus mostly resign themselves to their powerless position relative to the CEO at their workplace. They also expect the same in their relationships with political leaders, the CEOs’ counterparts in government. Their inability to participate in running their workplaces trains citizens to presume and accept the same in relation to running their residential communities. Employers become top political officials (and vice versa) in part because they are used to being “in charge.” Political parties and government bureaucracies mirror capitalist enterprises by being run autocratically while constantly describing themselves as democratic.

Most adults experience working at least eight hours for five or more days per week in capitalist workplaces, under the power and authority of their employer. The undemocratic reality of the capitalist workplace leaves its complex, multilayered impacts on all who collaborate there, part time and full time. Capitalism’s problem with democracy—that the two basically contradict one another—shapes many people’s lives. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Walton family (descendants of Walmart’s founder), along with a handful of other major shareholders, decide how to spend hundreds of billions. The decisions of a few hundred billionaires bring economic development, industries, and enterprises to some regions and lead to the economic decline of other regions. The many billions of people affected by those spending decisions are excluded from participating in making them. Those countless people lack the economic and social power wielded by a tiny, unelected, obscenely wealthy minority of people. That is the opposite of democracy.

Employers as a class, often led by major shareholders and the CEOs they enrich, also use their wealth to buy (they would prefer to say “donate” to) political parties, candidates, and campaigns. The rich have always understood that universal or even widespread suffrage risks a nonwealthy majority voting to undo society’s wealth inequality. So, the rich seek control of existing forms of democracy to make sure they do not become a real democracy in the sense of enabling the employee majority to outvote the employer minority.

The enormous surpluses appropriated by “big business” employers—usually corporations—allow them to reward their upper-level executives lavishly. These executives, technically also “employees,” use corporate wealth and power to influence politics. Their goals are to reproduce the capitalist system and thus the favors and rewards it gives them. Capitalists and their top employees make the political system depend on their money more than it depends on the people’s votes.

How does capitalism make the major political parties and candidates dependent on donations from employers and the rich? Politicians need vast sums of money to win by dominating the media as part of costly campaigns. They find willing donors by supporting policies that benefit capitalism as a whole, or else particular industries, regions, and enterprises. Sometimes, the donors find the politicians. Employers hire lobbyists—people who work full time, all year round, to influence the candidates that get elected. Employers fund “think tanks” to produce and spread reports on every current social issue. The purpose of those reports is to build general support for what the funders want. In these and other ways, employers and those they enrich shape the political system to work for them.

Most employees have no comparable wealth or power. To exert real political power requires massive organization to activate, combine, and mobilize employees so their numbers can add up to real strength. That happens rarely and with great difficulty. Moreover, in the U.S., the political system has been shaped over the decades to leave only two major parties. Both of them loudly and proudly endorse and support capitalism. They collaborate to make it very difficult for any third party to gain a foothold, and for any anti-capitalist political party to emerge. The U.S. endlessly repeats its commitment to maximum freedom of choice for its citizens, but it excludes political parties from that commitment.

Democracy is about “one person, one vote”—the notion that we all have an equal say in the decisions that affect us. That is not what we have now. Going into a voting booth once or twice a year and picking a candidate is a very different level of influence than that of the Rockefeller family or George Soros. When they want to influence people, they use their money. That’s not democracy.

In capitalism, democracy is unacceptable because it threatens the unequally distributed wealth of the minority with a majority vote. With or without formal institutions of democracy (such as elections with universal suffrage), capitalism undermines genuine democracy because employers control production, surplus value, and that surplus value’s distributions. For capitalism’s leaders, democracy is what they say, not what they do.

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York.

5 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Jeremy Scahill

Amal Saad, a leading expert on the Lebanese resistance movement, says all-out war could lead to Israel’s downfall.

30 Jul 2024 – Yesterday, flights at Beirut’s airport were canceled as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to carry out a “harsh” military attack on Lebanon, following Saturday’s deadly strike on a Syrian Druze community in the Israeli-occupied Golan town of Majdal Shams. The horrifying incident killed 12 children on a soccer field.

Israel and the U.S. immediately accused Hezbollah of hitting the town with a Falaq-1 rocket launched from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah has denied it was behind the attack and both it and the Lebanese government have called on the United Nations to undertake an independent investigation.

The way that blame for this incident unfolded publicly lends itself to competing theories of responsibility. Earlier Saturday, Hezbollah had announced it had launched a series of attacks on nearby Israeli military installations in retaliation for the killing of four Hezbollah fighters in an Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon. When news of the deaths at the soccer field began to emerge, Hezbollah swiftly issued a statement saying that it had “no connection to the [Majdal Shams] incident at all, and categorically denies all false allegations.” Hezbollah charged that an Israeli Iron Dome interceptor missile had missed its target and hit the town. Israel has claimed it identified the Hezbollah commander of the strike.

“Despite [Hezbollah’s] denials, it’s their rocket, it was launched from an area that they control,” said White House national security spokesperson John Kirby on Monday.

Since Saturday, Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials have weaponized the deaths in the Golan Heights to preemptively justify a larger scale attack on Lebanon. “We are all Druze,” proclaimed a post on the state of Israel’s official Twitter/X account on Saturday. “These children are our children,” Netanyahu said when he visited Majdal Shams on Monday — though the vast majority of the estimated 20-25,000 Druze residents of occupied Golan Heights have rejected Israeli citizenship and have regularly protested Israel’s wars and policies. None of the 12 victims held Israeli citizenship. “Israel will not and cannot let this simply pass on by,” Netanyahu declared. “Our response will come, and it will be harsh.”

A crowd of residents gathered to confront Netanyahu, chanting at times in Hebrew for him to go away. Others chanted “Killer! Killer!” and accused Netanyahu of coming to “dance on our children’s blood.” Some locals told journalists they did not want to be used by any side as fuel for a war between Israel and Hezbollah and questioned why either would attack their town.

Families of the Majdal Shams victims refused to meet Netanyahu, according to Ha’aretz. The visit was under a media censorship restriction until Netanyahu departed the town. Ronen Bar, the director of the Shin Bet intelligence agency, accompanied Netanyahu on the trip and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant visited the site a day earlier.

Israel first occupied large swaths of the Golan region in southwestern Syria in 1967 and formally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981. Under international law it remains Syrian territory. In 2019, President Donald Trump reversed decades of U.S. policy and officially recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli territory. No other nations have followed suit.

Despite written requests from community leaders in Majdal Shams that no Israeli officials attend the funerals, far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and a handful of other Israeli officials showed up at a funeral Sunday for 10 of the victims. Mourners shouted them down and demanded they leave. Some denounced Smotrich as a “murderer.”

The Biden-Harris administration, while publicly affirming that Israel would be justified in attacking Lebanon in response to the Majdal Shams incident, has claimed it does not want a wider regional conflict or a full-scale war between Israel and Lebanon. In a call with reporters, Kirby said talk of a broader war was “exaggerated,” adding, “I’m confident that we’ll be able to avoid such an outcome.” Hezbollah and Israel have both conducted military strikes on each other since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks, but to date there has been no escalation that has sparked the type of ground and air battles that ensued in 2006 when Israel and Hezbollah fought a 34-day war.

Since Saturday, Israel has launched a series of attacks in southern Lebanon, though they have been similar in scope to its previous strikes over the past ten months. On Sunday, Gallant said, “Hezbollah will pay a heavy price for this.”

While the Netanyahu regime has consistently threatened war against Lebanon over the past 10 months and specifically against Hezbollah, many leading regional analysts believe such action would result in catastrophe for Israel, militarily and politically. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, far less sophisticated and armed groups, have managed to wage a nearly 10-month insurgency against Israeli ground forces in Gaza while enduring sustained bombardment from U.S.-provided weapons.

Iran has also shown a willingness to attack Israel. The rise of the Axis of Resistance, which, in addition to Iran, includes Ansar Allah (the Houthis) in Yemen, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as the Syrian government and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, introduces an array of other forces that could join Hezbollah’s side in a war with Israel.

I discussed all this today with Amal Saad, one of the leading experts on Hezbollah and the Axis of Resistance. Saad is a lecturer on international relations and politics at Cardiff University in the UK and author of Hizbu’llah: Politics and Religion and The Iran Connection: Understanding the Alliance with Syria, Hizbu’llah and Hamas. She is currently in Lebanon.

My Interview with Amal Saad

Jeremy Scahill: You’ve suggested that you do not believe that Hezbollah was behind this attack in the occupied Syrian Golan.

Amal Saad: Yes. So I said that Hezbollah, it’s very unlikely that they are behind it, not just because they issued the statement. Yes, it was uncharacteristic, and it was the first time they’ve issued such a statement—I don’t know about ever—but they have not issued such a statement once since October 8 [when Hezbollah announced it would engage in “solidarity” strikes against Israel in support of the Hamas-led October 7 attacks]. So that indicated, obviously, the seriousness of the situation and that they were indeed denying responsibility for the attack.

But also beyond that, just on the basis of logic and precedent and so on. First of all, this town, Majdal Shams, it’s not Israeli territory. It’s occupied Syrian territory and its inhabitants are Syrian Druze. The majority of them have refused to take Israeli citizenship and to serve in the army. And they are staunch supporters of the resistance axis. They’ve supported Bashar al Assad’s government in Syria. They’ve supported Hezbollah and Hamas. And so it would be extremely absurd for Hezbollah to attack its own allies.

Now, beyond that as well, I would say, I don’t think Hezbollah would attack Israeli civilians either in terms of a deliberate target. They would not attack them because that would lead to all-out war. That’s very, very provocative. And I know that [Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan] Nasrallah has quite recently actually threatened Israel with such retaliation, saying if you keep targeting our civilians, we’re going to have to do the same sort of thing. But even then, I don’t think Hezbollah would seek out civilians and massacre them like that. They would probably target civilian objects, which is very different from targeting civilians, and we still haven’t seen that to be fair. We haven’t seen any real civilian casualties in Israel [from Hezbollah attacks]—there have been quite few. So based on these factors, I think it’s very unlikely that it would be a deliberate strike at least.

Jeremy Scahill: It seems that the dominant theories are: either it was a misfire or a mistake on Hezbollah’s part or it was an Israeli failure of its Iron Dome system and one of Israel’s munitions hit the soccer field. I’ve also seen people suggest that it’s a false flag, that Israel intentionally hit the town and they wanted to blame it on Hezbollah.

Amal Saad: There are several theories, but I think the one that is less of a theory and more empirically backed is that it was an Israeli interceptor missile that misfired, was trying to intercept an incoming rocket. And I say it has some empirical evidence for this because on Arab TV, and obviously, we didn’t see this in Western media, but we saw several reports talking to eyewitnesses who said they actually saw that interceptor missile from the Iron Dome strike the target. And one correspondent said that an Israeli paramedic told her that, but he said he couldn’t say it on air because he would be arrested. So there have been several such reports, and it does seem like the most likely explanation.

But there is also the possibility that other [anti-Israel resistance] groups were responsible for this. And Hezbollah is not alone in fighting Israel. Ever since they established this so-called solidarity front, there have been several other groups, in fact, some secular, some Islamist. One of them is, for example, Jamaa Al-Islamiya, the [Lebanese Sunni] Islamic group, which has been involved quite a bit recently in these cross border strikes. And their members have been targeted by Israel quite often. So they may have potentially mistakenly hit that target. If it was another group, it was obviously a mistake. That was not going to be a deliberate target for anyone.

Jeremy Scahill: If it was, though, a Hezbollah misfire, is there a precedent for Hezbollah taking responsibility if they inadvertently kill civilians?

Amal Saad: Yes, that’s a good question because in 2006, there was such an incident during the July war when Hezbollah, one of its rockets, mistakenly landed in a Palestinian town. And not only did Hezbollah issue a statement taking responsibility and apologizing, but Nasrallah himself personally apologized on TV and paid condolences to the victim’s family. [In that incident, Hezbollah rockets killed two Arab children in Nazareth. “In my name and on behalf of my brothers, I apologize to this family,” Nasrallah said in an interview broadcast on Al Jazeera. “Of course, the word apology is not sufficient. I bear full responsibility. That was not intended at all.”] So Hezbollah has a history of claiming responsibility, of admitting to such errors. And I think that also lends more credence to its argument, or rather its assertion, that it was not behind this.

I think another point also that we need to look at is sort of the timing of this as well. Last week, Hezbollah issued the third in a series of drone footage videos. It was surveilling a specific military base over Israel and it was threatening Israel that we will target this military base. In previous such videos, they threatened others, not just military, but also civilian targets. Why would Hezbollah do all that to deter Israel from striking it, if it was just going to provoke Israel a couple of days later with this? It makes absolutely no sense, as Hezbollah knows that Israel, if it has decided to launch an all-out war, if that decision has been taken, and we’re all assuming it’s not a likely scenario, but there is always a possibility that such a decision has been taken. If it has, then why would Hezbollah want to give Israel ammunition to escalate further? Even if it’s not to launch an all-out war, but to escalate further against itself, that makes absolutely no sense. And the purpose of that video was to deter such a strike. So it makes no sense that it would be deliberately targeted.

Now, again, going back to was it an error? You know, some people said that Hezbollah, just like seconds earlier, had issued a statement declaring responsibility for striking something in the Golan which was 3 km away from Majdal Shams. I tried to sort of get to the bottom of this. It’s very hard to tell, but it’s not very likely that they would miss by that far. I spoke to military experts who—and I think this is much more convincing—who said that if it was the Falaq-1 [missile], because Hezbollah used the Falaq-1 to strike that target that they announced in the statement, an Israeli brigade. And if they had used the Falaq-1, we would have seen a much larger crater, and the crater was much smaller than would be expected from such a heavy warhead, which is 53 kilos. It would be much, much bigger and there would be much more destruction.

Jeremy Scahill: Why then is Israel so quick to seize on this and to blame Hezbollah? Do you really believe that Israel wants a full war with Hezbollah?

Amal Saad: There are two reasons it could be doing this. I think the more likely one isn’t that it wants a full war. First of all, it wants to deflect attention away from its own genocidal crimes and killing of children on a daily basis. Now, just one or two days earlier, it had struck a children’s school and scores of children were massacred. So this is very convenient for Israel, and this has [allowed Israel] to say, ‘Look, Hezbollah is a child killer.’ So it definitely serves a propaganda purpose. There is definitely that element. In terms of what kind of military or strategic value can it derive from this, I think it can use this to pressure Hezbollah through its allies, Western mediators and so on. And they have been doing this. They have been now pressuring Hezbollah not only to not respond to Israel, to absorb an Israeli strike, but also to stop all the clashes across the border. So it’s used to apply this sort of pressure on [Hezbollah] because it assumes that there will be a lot of internal as well, pressure domestically, from the state, from the population. And, in terms of the state, I wouldn’t say that’s been forthcoming. So there is that element of pressure, of propaganda value.

And third, it would allow Israel then—there could be this bank of targets it has, military targets which it hasn’t dared to strike before because it’s a bit risky, perhaps, because there would be quite significant strikes in areas outside of the usual sort of zone of operations. It might be outside of that and they may now think they can get away with it, with striking those targets, if it looks like it’s engaged in a counter strike, because this is the first time that we see that happen in this conflict so far, that Hezbollah has denied responsibility and Israel is saying, nonetheless, we have the right to counter strike. So I do think they’re trying to milk this as much as they can.

Now, there’s always the possibility with Israel, because we’re not dealing here with a rational actor necessarily, we can’t take for granted Israel’s rationality, I think, and there is always the possibility that an irrational decision will be made and one that tries to drag the U.S. into a wider war because it would have to do that if it wants to strike Hezbollah and risk all out war, it would need U.S. military support, in fact. So there could always be that possibility.

Jeremy Scahill: When you say that there are targets that Israel might want to strike that are outside of the normal zone of their military attacks on Hezbollah, what types of targets are you referring to?

Amal Saad: Well, I mean, I personally don’t know, but they could be, not in terms of just strategic value, it could be their location. So, for example, the Bekaa is kind of more off limits than these border areas in the south. So they might strike the Bekaa, for instance. They have done such strikes, but not anywhere near as many as in the south. So the Bekaa is more off limits. And Hezbollah has adopted a new equation. Whenever Israel strikes the Bekaa, [Hezbollah] strikes the Golan in response. So they might, there might be certain parts of the Bekaa it hasn’t struck. It might be another area altogether. I don’t really know. But I don’t think Beirut would be—if we assume [Israel] doesn’t want to risk a war, I don’t think they would come near Beirut. But again, here it’s very difficult to foresee the extent to which Israel is being rational here because it might actually also not just be not rational, it might also be extremely foolish and think that if it does strike Beirut, Hezbollah would kind of absorb it if it’s a military target. We don’t know. I doubt that. I doubt that. And I know the U.S., according to various reports, has warned Israel not to strike Beirut or heavily populated areas. So that they will most likely, I think, subscribe to those kind of limits.

Jeremy Scahill: There were even some rumors that Israel was contemplating bombing Beirut airport.

Amal Saad: I saw that. I don’t really—I think that Israelis make a lot of noise and there’s a lot of accounts on Twitter which spread so much disinformation and they’re people who are not—sometimes journalists, sometimes activists or whatever, and even Israeli officials. I mean, they spread so much misinformation and rumors, and even Western governments. For example, what they’ve been doing recently is alerting their citizens and urging them to leave Lebanon. It’s not a new trend. It’s been going on since the start of the war, but these past two days have been crazy. They’ve started sending texts to American citizens, France has joined the fray, Germany, many other countries, all Western, urging them to leave in a way that they haven’t before. And this is part and parcel of the intimidation campaign. It’s to put pressure on the Lebanese, which in turn puts pressure on Hezbollah and sort of threatens them with a huge response on Israel’s part. So, there is that at work as well.

Jeremy Scahill: How does Hezbollah view this kind of insane moment in the context of American politics where you have Joe Biden, who’s been a lifelong dedicated promoter of Israel, a self-described Zionist, he’s now stepping down from seeking another term. You likely now have Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump. You have Netanyahu clearly playing his own game in part based on American politics. What’s your best sense of how the Hezbollah movement sees the US role in this, given the political uncertainty of the next few months in the United States?

Amal Saad: I think Hezbollah, especially Nasrallah, has on several occasions declared that the U.S. is ultimately responsible for all of this. And Hezbollah sees Israel as a proxy of the U.S. Now, yes, [Israel] does have some sort of room for maneuver. As a proxy, it’s not entirely beholden. I don’t think [Hezbollah leaders] view it that way. And they do see Netanyahu as having his own kind of personal agenda and reasons for not always abiding by the wishes of the U.S. But at the same time, they don’t believe the U.S. is serious enough about preventing an escalation. I think they do tend to believe that it’s not in the U.S.’s interests. And they have said as much. This is not my own analysis. This is what they’ve said publicly, that the U.S. doesn’t want an all-out war. However, they also don’t think it’s doing enough to prevent one. And that’s sort of the contradiction here.

In terms of candidates, I think it’s quite difficult. There is, and if you speak to people here—it’s not just Hezbollah—people are generally unsure about who would be the worst candidate because in one sense, how much more Zionist can you get than Biden? So in terms of Trump—we’ve seen Trump make a lot of contradictory messages. There have been instances where he hasn’t been as conciliatory towards Israel as in other cases, so it’s a bit confusing. However, he is also the same president who assassinated [Iranian General] Qassem Soleimani and [Iraqi resistance commander] Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis [in a drone strike in Baghdad on January 3, 2020]. So he is not risk averse. He’s even irrational, some would say. And I think that’s very true. And so the idea of: would Kamala be better than both Biden and Trump? I think there is a general sense—I’m not talking about Hezbollah here, but generally in Lebanon—that she might be the lesser evil based on some of her statements so far and some reports. But I don’t think Hezbollah is banking on any specific candidate in the same way that Israel is banking on Trump winning.

Jeremy Scahill: If Israel does commit and they do want war with Hezbollah, what does that look like from the Lebanese side, based on the history of these conflicts and wars and Hezbollah’s response to Israel? If Israel does send in ground forces or engages in a very heavy, wider bombing campaign, what could we expect Hezbollah’s response to look like?

Amal Saad: Well, I think the Israeli intelligence is quite aware because I’ve read a lot of these analyses in Israeli and U.S. intelligence reports and others, which is that Hezbollah—first of all, I don’t think we would see what we saw in 2006. I don’t think Israel would even get to invade Lebanon in the same way. I don’t think it would be able to stage a ground incursion, definitely not of that magnitude. And Israel would not be in a purely offensive position. Israel would be also in a defensive position because Hezbollah would also infiltrate and make incursions into Israel proper. So, it’s going to look very different, just in terms of the overall strategy of the war, that it will be an offensive defense on Hezbollah’s part. It won’t just be defense.

Secondly, the fact that Hezbollah has now fully conventionalized, it’s no longer even a hybrid force. I’ve spoken to military experts here, and I’ve been curious myself to see what they think. Where is [Hezbollah] on the spectrum of guerrilla to conventional army? Is it sort of in the middle, like in 2006? They’ve said, “No, it’s actually a fully fledged conventional force now. But obviously it has these sort of capabilities of an irregular armed force. It still retains them and has that experience.” So we’re talking here about a much more sophisticated military organization with well over 100,000 fighters, well over that number, over 150,000 missiles and rockets. You know, back in 2006, Hezbollah had just a few thousand fighters, far fewer rockets, much less sophisticated missiles and rockets. Basically everything that Iran has, all the weapons Iran has, you can be certain Hezbollah has them, too. That’s what we know. And that’s aside from the things that Hezbollah is manufacturing domestically, like it’s drone technology—it’s manufacturing its own drones now. So, we’re talking here about a vastly different military creature than 2006.

And, again, the tactics will not just be purely defensive. They will be offensive. And that’s not even factoring in other actors in the resistance axis who are itching to join the fight and have declared their intent to send hundreds of thousands of fighters, such as the Houthis [from Yemen], to Lebanon.

From all the information I’ve been gathering, it would actually lead to the unraveling of the Israeli state. We’re not talking here about just a defeat for Israel like in 2006. It would be the sort of defeat that would actually lead to its demise. This is why, when we talk about “the great war,” which is not a matter of if, it’s when, when that war happens, which is an inevitability, [Hezbollah] have always said that that is going to be the war that will change the face of the region. So, we are talking here about a scenario which would definitely lead to the destruction of a lot of Lebanon — no one is discounting that or belittling that. But at the same time, it would lead to the destruction of Israel and while it would lead to the destruction of Lebanon in material terms, that destruction would not lead to the unraveling of the Lebanese state in the same way that it would lead to the unraveling of the Israeli or Zionist regime. I think that’s one way of looking at it.

Jeremy Scahill: Short of an all-out war between Israel and Lebanon, what does the future of the resistance axis or the axis of resistance look like? This has been an unprecedented moment. You don’t have Arab nation states stepping in to say, ‘We’re going to defend the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank and Jerusalem militarily,’ but you do have a multifaceted response that is also multinational and involves both state and non-state actors. What does the future look like for this resistance axis?

Amal Saad: Well, this is the consolidation phase of the resistance axis. It first emerged in Syria, I would say, like in 2014 especially—that was sort of its peak, 2015, but it wasn’t as large as it is today. It didn’t include Hamas, obviously, and it didn’t include the Houthis. Today it’s a much larger axis in terms of state and non-state—I don’t even know if we should call them non-state. They’re quasi-states and sometimes, you know, virtual states like the Houthis are now Yemen. I think it’s a misnomer to call it a non-state actor. This is the consolidation phase. This war has been actually sort of a testing grounds for how tightly knit this alliance is, weapons and training, transfer of weapons, military knowledge, weapons manufacturing, you name it. Coordination, both tactical and strategic. It’s taken root here. So we can only assume that level of coordination and cooperation and consolidation among its ranks will only grow stronger, not only, by the way, on the level of political elites or the different militaries of these organizations, but we’re talking about the popular level as well, that the massive constituencies that each of these actors has is almost fully behind this alliance.

So I think we’re in for a further deepening of this alliance, and we’re going to start seeing how it sort of significantly departs from any Western alliances or any alliances we’ve known so far. It’s going to need its own model, its own theoretical model, to study it and to understand it. It’s a new paradigm, really.

Jeremy Scahill – Journalist at Drop Site News, co-founder of The Intercept, author of the books Blackwater and Dirty Wars. Reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, etc.

5 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By The Cradle

28 Jul 2024 – The Syrian Foreign Ministry said in a statement today that Israel is trying to ignite the region by blaming Hezbollah for the strike in the Syrian Druze town of Majdal Shams in the occupied Golan Heights a day earlier.

By Gloria Guillo

30 Jul 2024 – Sanctions are a misnomer when it comes to Venezuela. Here, the U.S. isn’t “just” illegally punishing a nation-state to effect regime change by withholding necessary resources and key inputs that cause food shortages, grave illness, death and economic instability.

In Venezuela, the United States is also committing racketeer-level crimes against its people for not handing over their sovereignty and oil to Washington’s oligarchy on a silver platter.

That is a serious charge. But the proof is in plain sight for anyone not brainwashed by The New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Facebook, Google, and the rest of our state-controlled corporate media, which has been infiltrated and corrupted by the CIA.

Venezuela is recognized as having the largest proven oil reserves in the world.

So, when it comes to having their bulletproof electoral process maligned, electoral results contested, and its results ignored by the United States—a country with an electoral process that is a farce in comparison since it is contested by both its major political parties—the Venezuelan people were not perturbed and still unwaveringly voted their conscience.

Essentially, Washington’s smear campaign against President Maduro failed miserably as did their extremist puppet leader, Maria Corina Machado’s alleged “threat of violence that will be unleashed with support from abroad” after the election. This threat has President Maduro’s main opponent Edmundo Gonzalez supposedly “preparing to flee the country” to Hollywood, Florida, on Monday, July 29.

Voters remember what it is like living under Washington’s boot and they know the outstanding progress Venezuela has made under Presidents Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.

So, without much surprise, the people of Venezuela re-elected President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday, July 28, for his third term with 5,150,092 votes (51.2%). The official election results were announced shortly after 12:00 a.m. on July 29.

Maduro’s opponent, who was heavily supported by the U.S., Edmundo González, received 4,445,978 votes, or 44.2% of the total. Voter turnout was approximately 59% of the electorate of over 21.3 million people.

It was clear going into the vote, from Maduro’s massively attended political rallies, that he remained their favorite. Link to rally here.

Coup Attempt

At approximately 11:00 p.m. on the night of the election (July 28), the Venezuelan government alerted the world of foreign interventions against the electoral process, right to self-determination, and sovereignty of the homeland.

Accordingly, “the infamous defunct and defeated Lima Group – that includes government officials from Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama and other countries, along with a group of ultra-right-wing political hitmen specialized in destabilizing governments in Latin America, such as Iván Duque, Mauricio Mácri, Andrés Pastrana, Oscar Arias, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott – aimed to distort what had been a peaceful electoral process.”

No further information is known but election results were announced shortly thereafter.

The president of the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE), Elvis Amoroso, called upon the attorney general to investigate the attacks on the electoral transmission system. Allegedly, local polling stations were attacked.

Beyond Sanctions

Both U.S. Democrats and Republicans are on the same side when it comes to: assassination attempts against President Maduro; the double kidnapping, torture, and imprisonment of diplomat Alex Saab; the piracy against vessels carrying its fuel, approximately 1.1 million barrels; the robbery of its Citgo gas stations and refinery, valued between $32-40 billion; the theft of its funds held by the New York Federal Reserve Bank (NY Fed), estimated to be between $3 and $5 billion and also those of countries, like Puerto Rico doing business with Venezuela.

Sanctions against trade partners create a chilling effect on countries and corporations that would like to do business with Venezuela but fear U.S. repercussions.

Additionally, the U.S. has encouraged countries such as the U.K. to steal $1 billion in Venezuela’s gold. The U.S. claims Venezuela’s assets are frozen when they are not. Instead, the “frozen” funds are used in the repurchasing market by the NY Fed’s “dealer” banks for leveraged profits.

These extensive and pervasive sanctions have decimated Venezuela’s economy which is, fortunately, on the mend under President Maduro’s leadership. Consider that in 2020, Venezuela obtained oil revenues in the order of US$743 million, which represented 99% less than in 2012, which was US$ 50 billion. However, this information is not widely known since armchair reporters and the mockingbird media repeat Washington’s lies without blinking and shadow-bans boots-on-the-ground investigative journalists.

Airport Interview

While at the Caracas airport awaiting my departure on July 29th, I interviewed a middle-class white woman approximately 50 years old. She was friendly, as she initially identified with me due to physical similarities and we were on a long and boring line and both open to killing time.

Apparently, many middle-class white people flew into Venezuela to vote for the opposition candidate and were returning to their homes outside the country as the airport was very crowded with similar types. The woman stated that she “felt that the voting process was good but didn’t like the outcome because her candidate didn’t win.” She unsolicitedly started to speak about how terrible the president was.

I asked if she understood how U.S. sanctions make it very difficult for the government of Venezuela to serve the people as well as they would like. She said she “didn’t know.” I then asked if she “didn’t know or didn’t want to know.” She then ignored me. So, I assume many Venezuelans practice willful ignorance for various reasons, just like Americans in the United States do to maintain their worldview and cognitive dissonance.

As the comic Roseanne Barr said, “You can’t wake those pretending to be asleep.”

Beyond Lies/High Stakes

Not only does the U.S. want Venezuela’s natural resources, but it also wants another geopolitical victory in Latin America.

To achieve this objective, Washington has conducted a relentless media war that baselessly calls Venezuela’s electoral process a sham, and at its biased best calls President Maduro “an authoritarian strongman” and his prime right-wing competitor, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia “a quiet, bird-loving grandfather.” While there are 10 candidates, there are only two real contenders as shown in the photos taken from the Venezuela Analysis website.

The claim of voter fraud is particularly hypocritical coming from a country whose 2020 election was considered stolen by President Trump’s supporters and many Americans. Without surprise, “grandpa” Gonzalez is Washington’s new choice puppet. He is rumored to have been a CIA asset in the 1970s. However, this has not been confirmed.

It seems Washington gave up on Juan Guaido, the once self-proclaimed and U.S.-anointed “interim president” who never ran in a presidential election and was previously unknown to Venezuelans.

Economic Recovery Program

In August 2018, President Maduro presented the Economic Recovery Program to resolve the economic problems affecting the country. The four structural measures used to stabilize the economy:

1. Stimulated and diversified national production, which resulted in 60,000 new brands and achieved food sovereignty. Venezuela no longer imports 85% of its food; it now produces 96%.
2. Increased tax collection by 105% to guarantee social investments in family income and public services that did not entirely rely on oil revenues.
3. Fostered non-traditional exports.
4. Provided support for one million entrepreneurs.

In the first quarter of 2024, the economy grew by 7%, giving it 12 consecutive quarters of growth. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) considers Venezuela’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at 4.0% to lead the region. Venezuela has the lowest inflation rate for a month of June in 39 years at 1%, as compared to 96.7% in June 2018, and the most stable dollar price in 13 years – thanks to a new exchange market that promotes the stability of the bolivar. Overall, this means that the prices of products do not suffer large variations, which strengthens the population’s income and consumption capacity.

Bulletproof Electoral System

Voting is handled by the independent National Electoral Council (CNE). Venezuela’s presidential elections are a single-round process won by plurality: whichever candidate gets the most votes wins.

The CNE set up 16,025 polling stations across the country, which can have one or more voting booths. Voting is held on a Sunday to enable most Venezuelans to vote on their day off. The polls are open from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.; however, in cases where there are still lines after 6:00 p.m., the polls are permitted to remain open later to accommodate voters in queues.

Venezuela’s electoral system puts the U.S. to shame. Unlike in the United States, Venezuela’s electoral system is automated, manual, and auditable.

Venezuelans go through a so-called “electoral horseshoe” to cast their votes. First, voters run their fingerprints through a biometric ID machine. Once cleared, they move to the second step, where a touchscreen machine is unlocked. After picking their preferred candidate, the machine prints a paper backup confirming the choice that is to be deposited in a ballot box. The fourth and final station has voters sign and stamp their fingerprints on the electoral record. Please refer to the video link here and the photos detailed below of the process.

Before President Maduro voted, a polling station member showed proof that the voting machine was at zero here.

As an added safeguard, Venezuela’s machines confirm that the voter selected their desired candidate by showing them again in the touchscreen and requiring the voter to confirm their selection with a “yes or no” answer. A “no” answer permits the voter to correct their electronic ballot.

Venezuela’s electronic voting machines run on open-source code and are not connected to the internet. Participating political parties monitor all processes through a series of 16 real-time audits that occur before, during, and after election day. They verify that all components, from the voting software to data transmission, are working properly. Fifty-four percent of voting machines are randomly chosen for an audit to compare the electronic totals with the paper tallies. The total number of votes must match.

All participating organizations must enter a unique, partially encrypted key to validate the results. In addition, they sign off on the final tally, which must match the results published on the CNE website. The tallies are distributed to witnesses for each political faction after all voting is over.

In contrast, in Brooklyn, New York, where I am registered to vote, I do not need to present any identification. The poll worker merely compares my signature with the one that is on file. The machines do not confirm my choice of candidate but only acknowledge that my vote was cast. There are no paper tallies or receipts, the machines connect to the internet and run on secret proprietary software.

Voter Requirements/Demographics

Venezuelans must register to vote and be at least eighteen years old to cast a ballot. Voting is not mandatory but optional. Venezuela permits voting outside the country. According to the CNE’s registry published in early July, there were 21,392,464 people eligible to vote on July 28.

However, given recent migration, the actual total is expected to be 3-4 million below that. In addition, because of a convoluted registration process coupled with Western countries that do not recognize the Venezuelan government (i.e., there are no diplomatic relations or functional embassies) only 69,000 Venezuelans abroad are eligible to participate.

Election Observers

The elections also count on several observation missions, including teams from the Latin American Council of Electoral Experts and the Carter Center, the African Union, and the Latin American Council of Electoral Experts (CEELA), as well as a United Nations expert panel that will produce a report for the organization’s Secretary General.

According to the United States-based National Lawyers Guild electoral observers, there were more than 910 electoral observers from 95 countries on the ground, of which this United States citizen and author is one. Electoral accompaniment teams visit voting centers on election day and witness the audit processes. There were more than 1,300 accredited journalists.

Conclusion

On December 20, 2022, I waited with other U.S. journalists and human rights defenders to hear if Judge Robert N. Scola, Jr., would grant Venezuelan Ambassador Alex Saab’s motion to dismiss his case and release him so he could return to his country and family. Although his defense team presented many logical arguments and documents that should have secured his release, Judge Scola denied the motion and justified it by stating: “Alex Saab is not recognized by the State Department as a diplomat because the U.S. president [Joe Biden] does not recognize Nicolas Maduro as the President of Venezuela.”

Hearing the absurdity of the prosecution’s case with one’s own ears is very different from reading about it. The fact that the decisions made by tens of millions of Venezuelans in a sovereign country are somehow less than the judgment of one man who resides in another is beyond galling. I cannot find the words that properly describe this outrageous level of evil arrogance.

We watched in tears as Diplomat Saab, a man who risked his life to arrange for food for the people of Venezuela, was led back to his prison cell in shackles. Thankfully, he has been released now that the United States and Europe blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline and aren’t too proud to negotiate with Venezuela for oil.

What Washington does not understand is that injustice unifies people and toughens their resolve.

Everyone in the Miami courtroom that fateful day learned firsthand how the people of Venezuela and their newly re-elected president, Nicolas Maduro, find the personal strength necessary, despite all obstacles, to carry on.

It is because with open eyes we are all witnesses to U.S. crimes and what is seen can never be unseen.

Gloria Guillo is CAM’s correspondent on location and a former NYC Urban Planner, Public Administrator, singer, songwriter.

5 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox

As in Gaza, the Deprivation Is Deliberate

30 Jul 2024 – For months, we’ve all been able to stay reasonably informed about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But there’s another horrific war that’s gotten so little coverage you could be excused for not knowing anything about it. What we have in mind is the seemingly never-ending, utterly devastating war in Sudan. Think of it as the missing war. And if we don’t start paying a lot more attention to it soon — as in right now — it’s going to be too late.

After 15 months of fighting in that country between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), experts in food insecurity estimate that almost 26 million people (no, that is not a misprint!), or more than half of Sudan’s population, could suffer from malnutrition by September. Eight and a half million of those human beings could face acute malnutrition. Worse yet, if the war continues on its present path, millions will die of hunger and disease in just the coming months (and few people in our world may even notice).

By now, those warring armies have driven Sudan to the brink of all-out famine, partly by displacing more than a fifth of the population from their homes, livelihoods, and farms, while preventing the delivery of food to the places most in need. And you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, with their foreign-policy eyes focused on Gaza and Ukraine, our country’s government and others around the world have paid remarkably little attention to the growing crisis in Sudan, making at best only half-hearted (quarter-hearted?) gestures toward helping negotiate a cease-fire between the SAF and RSF, while contributing only a small fraction of the aid Sudan needs to head off a famine of historic magnitude.

From Emergency to Catastrophe

In late June, the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, which monitors regions at risk of starvation, reported “a stark and rapid deterioration of the food security situation” in Sudan. It noted that the number of people suffering hunger severe enough to qualify, in IPC terms, as Phase 3 (“Crisis”) or Phase 4 (“Emergency”) has ballooned 45% since the end of last year. In December 2023, no Sudanese had yet made it to Phase 5 (“Catastrophe”), a condition characteristic of famines. Now, more than three-quarters of a million people are in that final phase of starving to death. Indeed, if the conflict continues to escalate, large parts of Sudan may spiral into full-blown famine, a state that exists, according to the IPC, when at least 20% of an area’s population is suffering Phase-5 hunger.

Until recently, the worst conflict and hunger were concentrated in western Sudan and around Khartoum, the country’s capital. Now, however, they’ve spread to the east and south as well. Worse yet, the war in Sudan has by now displaced an astounding 10 million people from their homes, more than four million of them children — a figure that looks like but isn’t a misprint. Many have had to move multiple times and two million Sudanese have taken refuge in neighboring countries. Worse yet, with so many people forced off their land and away from their workplaces, the capacity of farmers to till the soil and other kinds of workers to hold down a paycheck and so buy food for their families has been severely disrupted.

Not surprisingly, 15 months of brutal war have played havoc with crop production. Cereal grain harvests in 2023 were far smaller than in previous years and stocks of grain (which typically supply 80% of Sudanese caloric intake) have already been fully consumed, with months to go before the next harvest, a stretch of time known, even in good years, as the “lean season.” And with war raging, anything but a bumper crop is expected this year. Indeed, just as planting season got underway, fierce fighting spilled over into wheat-growing Gezira, one of Sudan’s 18 “states” and renowned as the nation’s breadbasket.

Sudan desperately needs food aid and it’s simply not getting enough. The U.N. High Commission for Refugees has received less than 20% of the funds necessary to help feed the Sudanese this year and has had to “drastically cut” food rations. As Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, head of the aid nonprofit Mercy Corps, told the New York Times, “World leaders continue to go through the motions, expressing concern over Sudan’s crisis. Yet they’ve failed to rise to the occasion.”

Worse yet, in the swirling chaos, even the food aid that does make it to Sudan is largely failing to reach starving populations in anything approaching adequate quantities — and when available, it’s usually unaffordable. Famished people are reportedly boiling leaves, as well as eating grass, peanut shells, and even dirt.

Starvation: “A Cheap and Very Effective Weapon”

For many families, the one thing keeping starvation at bay may be a local free soup kitchen. In a report published in May, Timmo Gaasbeek of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations noted, “Sudan has a long tradition of sharing food. After the war broke out and hunger spread, community-level initiatives for sharing food sprang up across the country. These ‘soup kitchen’ initiatives are often informal but can be very well organized.”

Gaasbeek warned, however, that soup kitchens can fill only so many gaping holes in a system shattered by wartime destruction, displacement, and crop failure. His institute estimates that at current rates of food sharing, 2.5 million people could die of hunger and disease by the time crops are harvested in September. In other words, a shocking 10-20% of the Sudanese in the hardest-hit areas could die — mortality rates similar to ones suffered during horrendous famines in parts of Nigeria in 1969, Ethiopia in 1984, and Somalia in 1992.

By Gaasbeek’s calculations, more aggressive food sharing through soup kitchens and other means could cut the total death toll to a still-appalling one million. But that seems unlikely since even the existing efforts by local mutual-aid groups and international organizations to provide food have come under attack from both sides in the war. Six international experts writing for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have accused SAF and RSF of “using food as a weapon and starving civilians.” They also found that the “deliberate targeting of humanitarian workers and local volunteers has undermined aid operations, putting millions of people at further risk of starvation.”

We recently got in touch with Hadeel Mohamed, an educator with whom we’d spoken last October after she fled Sudan for Egypt. In a July 16th email to us, she wrote that “the war in Sudan, like many wars, has proved to be more an attack on civilians than on any armed forces.” Still in contact with neighbors who stayed behind in Khartoum, she reports that neither army is protecting civilians. In fact, the two at times appear to be tag-teaming to do them in. When, for instance, RSF forces carry out a raid, her contacts tell her, SAF troops are often “removed from the locations hours before the attacks occur.” Worse yet, for those now trying to flee as she did last year, “Some said that, in their attempts to escape Khartoum, they’ve encountered RSF forces waiting to loot them. All their supplies were stolen once again!”

Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation told the BBC that the RSF paramilitary is “essentially a looting machine. They rampage through the countryside and towns, stealing everything there is.” They even bombed and looted the last hospital still functioning in Northern Darfur state. No less horribly, the government’s SAF troops are guilty of trying to starve people in areas now occupied and controlled by the RSF and, according to De Waal, neither side is willing to “relinquish what is a cheap and very effective weapon.”

Echoes from a Thousand Miles Away

Is Sudan’s nightmare starting to sound grimly familiar?

* Families displaced multiple times, with war following hot on their heels.

* Food aid falling desperately short of what’s needed.

* Humanitarian aid intercepted by soldiers and other armed men before it can reach intended recipients.

* Soup kitchens attacked.

* Aid workers targeted for death.

* Hospitals bombarded, invaded, and shut down.

* Crop production capacity sabotaged during a hunger emergency.

* Washington doing little or nothing to stop the horror.

Might we be thinking, perhaps, of a small 25-mile strip of territory a thousand miles directly north of Khartoum, just on the other side of Egypt?

Sadly enough, there are many striking parallels between the wars being waged on the civilian populations of Sudan and Gaza. It would nonetheless be wrong to blame world interest in the nightmare in Gaza for drawing attention away from the civil war in Sudan. Neither of those crimes against humanity, in their scale and ghastliness, should be exploited by anyone to minimize the weight and urgency of the other. Worse yet, simply paying more attention to the nightmare in Sudan and sending its people more food aid won’t address the imbalance. The fact is that neither the Sudanese nor the Gazans have received what they most urgently need right now: an end to their respective conflicts.

Efforts by the U.S. and other countries to push for cease-fires in both places and an end to each of those wars have proven almost cataclysmically inadequate and ineffective. For Sudan, it’s been especially discouraging. Talks last year between the SAF and RSF brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States failed to even reduce the fighting there and recent attempts to revive those talks all too expectably broke down. In early June, Egypt hosted supporters of both of Sudan’s warring parties in Cairo for negotiations. The only outcome: the creation of a supremely bureaucratic subcommittee to draft a meaningless communique.

Collective Courage

Last October, Hadeel Mohamed wrote that there was then only one modest hope in Sudan. For the millions of Sudanese living through their latest national nightmare, she told us, “You really come back to more community-based aid. With our limited resources, with our limited abilities, we still find people rising up to take care of each other.” And they’re still doing it. It’s just not enough to prevent a disastrous famine, as long as the sectarian fighting continues.

With weak support from the outside world, civilians in Sudan have little choice but to rely on long traditions of social cohesion and mutual aid as they work to survive and somehow bring the war in their country to an end. In that, there’s yet another parallel with the war on Gaza’s civilians: the coordinated service, heroism, and sacrifice personified by Palestinian journalists, taxi drivers, first responders, healthcare professionals, and countless other people is now legendary.

Civilians in many such situations are too often portrayed in the world media as nearly helpless victims. The Sudanese and Palestinian people are showing that image to be fallacious by acting with the kind of collective courage, endurance, and solidarity that’s all too rare in the comfortably situated societies that are leaving them to starve. They’re being cruelly victimized, yet they’re refusing to play the victim.

The wartime food-sharing movement in Sudan that operates soup kitchens is a good example. It’s led by grassroots neighborhood groups called “resistance committees” that started forming more than a decade ago in the wake of the Arab Spring, with the mission of providing social protection and provisioning in their home communities. They have since proliferated throughout Sudan, operating locally and independently but together forming a remarkably well-integrated national network.

The resistance committees took a leading role in grassroots protests against the October 2021 military coup that cut short a national transition to democratic rule then underway in Sudan. Eighteen months later, the current war erupted when the two generals who had led that coup turned on each other, with one leading the armed forces and the other the Rapid Support Forces. Throughout the ensuing war, at great risk to their own safety, resistance committee members have played essential lifesaving roles. While working to fend off hunger in their communities, they have also prioritized the maintenance of human rights, continuation of social services, and defense of direct democracy, while urging fervent opposition to the SAF, the RSF, and more generally the incessant militarization of their country. Some are also mobilizing their communities for self-defense.

Sudan expert Santiago Stocker suggested recently that the resistance committees, “because of their support among youth and local legitimacy in Sudan, are a voice the international community should support and elevate.” The committees are one part of a broader grassroots civilian movement that participated in those ill-fated Cairo talks. That movement, Stocker argues, could sooner or later help break the deadlock in Sudan by pressing other nations to move decisively to help end the war. They could urge, for example, that “the international community… increase punitive measures, including sanctions, against RSF and SAF leadership and key members of the SAF’s governing coalition, including businesses and hardline religious groups.”

While it’s important indeed that Gaza remains a focus of our attention as long as the nightmarish Israeli campaign there continues, it’s no less important that those of us in the Global North focus on the less visible war in Sudan and push our governments to impose punitive measures on that country’s generals and other elites, while pulling out all the stops (and ample cash) to get food to the millions who desperately need it.

Sudan should simply no longer be callously ignored.

Priti Gulati Cox is an artist and writer. Her work has appeared in Countercurrents, CounterPunch, Salon, Truthout, Common Dreams, the Nation, AlterNet, and more.

Stan Cox is the author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, and the current In Real Time climate series at City Lights Books.

5 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Hugh Turley

8 Jul 2024 – Thomas Merton was the most influential Catholic writer of the 20^th century.

He was almost as well-known in the United States as the author Ernest Hemingway or the popular Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

He had been raised in France where his American mother and New Zealander father had met in a Paris art school, and he was educated as a teenager at a boarding school in England. After a wasted year at Cambridge, he had gone on to Columbia, near his prosperous grandparents’ home.

Shortly after his graduation in 1938, while working on his M.A. in English, he became a Catholic. He interrupted his work toward a Ph.D. to pursue a religious vocation, entering a Trappist monastery just a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He remained at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky until his death in 1968.

A voracious reader and always interested in writing, Merton, encouraged by his first abbot, Frederic Dunne, continued his career as a writer at the monastery, getting books of his poetry published. Then Dunne suggested that he write a book about his eventful and tragic young life.

His mother had died when he was very young, his father had died when he was a boarding student, and his younger brother, his only sibling, had been killed in an accident as a member of the Canadian Air Force in World War II.

The resulting book, The Seven Storey Mountain, became a surprising overnight sensation. He continued writing, and during the 1950s and 1960s, almost every Catholic home in America owned books by Thomas Merton.

In the 1960s his writing turned political, as he wrote about civil rights and non-violence, warning that the press was responsible for promoting wars. If Merton had lived, there is a good chance that he would have become the leading Catholic voice against the Vietnam War.

In 1968, three prominent advocates for peace died under questionable circumstances: Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, and Thomas Merton. It was the last full year of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. King and Kennedy were publicly assassinated, with the identity of their assassin or assassins continuing to remain in doubt, regardless of the press-endorsed lone-crazed-gunman official verdict. Merton’s secret assassination was covered up as an accident. The cover-up succeeded for a half-century.

On December 10, 1968, at around 4:00 p.m. at a cottage at the Red Cross retreat center near Bangkok, Thailand, where they were attending a Catholic monastic conference, three Benedictine monks found Thomas Merton’s body when they entered his room. Abbot Odo Haas, Archabbot Egbert Donovan, and Father Celestine Say immediately recognized that Merton was dead.

Say’s room was just across the hall, and the scene was so odd that Donovan encouraged him to get his camera and photograph what they saw. Say took two photographs of the body just as they had found it. Say intended to give the photographs to the Thai police, but it quickly became clear to him that the police were not doing a proper investigation.

As we can see, Say took his two photographs of Merton’s body from different angles. He later said that he did not tell the police about the photos because he thought that they might confiscate his film and camera. After the film was developed, he sent one of the photographs (the other was underexposed) and a letter on March 18, 1969, to Merton’s Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky.

Burning with curiosity over the odd death scene, Say asked Abbot Flavian Burns if there had been an autopsy to determine the cause of Merton’s death before his burial. The abbot, in fact, had not ordered an autopsy and none had been done, although the doctor’s certificate and the death certificate affirmed that a “post-mortem examination” had been done in accordance with the law.

Abbot Flavian shared Say’s photograph with John Howard Griffin. Griffin, a frequent visitor to the abbey and famous for his civil rights book, Black Like Me, had been authorized by the abbey to be Merton’s biographer.

Griffin immediately recognized the significance of Say’s photographs and joined Abbot Flavian and Merton’s recently named secretary, Brother Patrick Hart, in an effort to secure the film negatives from Say. They praised Say for taking the important pictures and asked him to send them the negatives so that they could be “protected.” Say sent his negatives to the abbot as a gift. The negatives became the property of the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Griffin advised Abbot Flavian and Brother Patrick that the negatives should never be published or available to anyone. What did the Benedictine monks see that prompted them to take photographs of Merton’s body? Why was it deemed necessary at the abbey that these photographs be hidden from the public?

The Associated Press had reported on December 11, 1968, the day after the death, that Merton “was electrocuted Tuesday when he moved an electric fan and touched a short in the cord.” Their source was not the official Thai investigating authorities but rather anonymous “local Catholic sources.” The Gethsemani Abbey quickly echoed the AP conclusion and has adhered to it to the present day.

In 2017, we discovered Say’s negatives in the papers of John Howard Griffin at the Butler Library of Columbia University and quickly realized why they had been hidden. With modern technology we were able to get the underexposed negative developed, and the two photographs reveal what looks very much like a crime scene that had been staged to appear as an accident.

The first thing that the witnesses noticed was the unnatural position of the body. They saw Merton lying flat on his back with his arms straight by his side. People don’t fall like that. And how in the world did the fan, well free of his hands, get across his body? His body had electrical burns, but his hands did not. It looks as though Merton had been rolled over onto his back by someone else. The rolling would have required that his arms be by his side.

Vernon Geberth, author of Practical Homicide Investigation, writes that, “if you have a gut feeling that something is wrong, then, guess what? Something is wrong.” The initial gut feeling of the first witnesses was that things were not what they appeared to be. That was why Donovan had Say take the photographs.

The abbey not only concealed the photographs, but they concealed the official Thai reports. Officially, Merton died of a natural cause. Contrary to the AP report, the Thai police, while deceptively noting the presence of the defective fan, had concluded that Merton had died of “heart failure” and that he was already dead before he encountered the fan. Hardly anything could be more absurd. Like the fan that had been effectively cooling Merton’s room, this defective one had been manufactured by the reliable Hitachi company.

Some of the muddled descriptions of Merton’s death came from his former abbot, James Fox. Fox wrote that Merton had been electrocuted by a faulty wire in a large fan in his room. According to Fox, Merton either had a heart attack and grabbed the fan and it fell with him, or he grabbed the fan and it fell with him, or he had been fixing the fan and grabbed a badly insulated wire.

The staged scene left the public to debate whether the cause of death was an accident or a natural cause. The placement of the fan by the perpetrator directed attention away from a head wound seen by witnesses.

The final authorized biographer, Michael Mott, who took over for Griffin when Griffin became too ill to continue, in The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton revealed that the wound, which was in the back of Merton’s head, had “bled considerably.” In his next sentence Mott writes, “The obvious solution appears to be that it was caused when his head struck the floor.” It is important to point out that neither the Thai police investigators nor anyone in the press made any mention of that bleeding head wound.

Was it obvious to Mott, or did that just appear to be the cause of the long-bleeding wound? Can anyone imagine a person falling backward onto a level floor receiving such a wound? It is very doubtful that Geberth, a long-time homicide investigator for the New York City Police Department, would have seen anything obvious about it.

Say’s photographs were hidden for additional reasons. The photographs prove that Merton’s abbey knowingly spread false information. On December 19, 1968, the abbey circulated a suspicious unsigned letter from a group of conference attendees in response to requests for more details about Merton’s death. The letter stated that it was difficult at that time to determine the cause of Merton’s death and then it speculated that Merton may have had a heart attack or suffered a fatal electric shock.

Detective Geberth tells us that ambiguity is one of the features of a staged crime scene, and it is hard to get any more ambiguous than that. The letter also had several errors of fact, for example, that Merton “could have showered” and that a fan was found “lying across his chest.” The letter accurately stated, though, that Merton was found “in his pajamas.”

In 1973, the abbey shared the letter with a wider audience when it was published in a book, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. The book included a description of Merton’s death by Br. Patrick, who wrote in the postscript that Merton had taken a shower before his “accidental electrocution.” The three words, “in his pajamas,” were removed in the copy of the letter published as an appendix. Those pajamas had no place alongside Brother Patrick’s shower story.

Brother Patrick was working closely with the two other editors of The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, Merton’s New York literary agent, Naomi Burton Stone, and his New York publisher, James Laughlin. All three of them knew about the photograph of Merton in his pajamas, so they had to have known that the shower story was not true. Witnesses in the cottage where Merton died also said that he did not take a shower.

After the abbey received Say’s photograph, the abbey continued to state that Merton’s chest had been burned deeply by the fan found lying across his chest. A wound on the chest would suggest that it had something to do with the heart failure. Say’s pictures prove that there was no such burn on the chest.

In 1967 Merton had signed an agreement to create the Merton Legacy Trust, to ensure that his valuable literary estate would belong to the abbey in the event of his death. Hardly a year had passed before Merton was dead. The three original members of the trust included Stone, Laughlin and Merton’s good friend Thomasine “Tommie” O’Callaghan. Only a few people knew about the secret photographs. Stone and Laughlin agreed with Brother Patrick and Griffin to keep the photos a secret from O’Callaghan.

On July 24, 1969, Griffin warned Brother Patrick that O’Callaghan suspected that the abbey was keeping things hidden from her. Griffin advised Brother Patrick to “be as bland and dumb as possible…sending her the vaguest answers.” On August 19, 1969, Stone wrote to Griffin that O’Callaghan was “a hazard we shall just have to live with,” adding that she disliked “the necessity of keeping things from [O’Callaghan] (which I feel is essential and I know [Laughlin] agrees)…” Stone, Griffin and others admitted that they burned and destroyed letters to each other, but a few of their letters have survived.

One obstacle to the truth being known has been the charming, likable nature of Brother Patrick. Many people remember him fondly, making it difficult for them to accept the very solid evidence that he contributed to the cover-up of Merton’s assassination. Brother Patrick had an unwavering loyalty to the abbey and especially to his former abbot James Fox, a central figure in the cover-up. Fox was responsible for the story that the fan was found lying on Merton’s deeply burned chest. Brother Patrick had seen Say’s photograph with the fan across the pelvis and no burns on the chest, so his participation in that lie can be added to his invention of the shower story among his major contributions to the cover-up.

There is popular photograph of Brother Patrick and Merton together.  It cements in the public mind the false impression that Merton and Br. Patrick were friends.  The photograph was taken on the day of Merton’s departure from Gethsemani.  In the original picture, Br. Maurice Flood is standing on the left side of Merton.  Flood was also a secretary to Thomas Merton, but Flood is frequently cropped out of this photograph.

The place where Merton died is significant. In 1968, the Phoenix Program, an assassination operation run by the CIA, was active in Thailand and the agency worked closely with corrupt Thai officials. The U.S. government has admitted committing about 20,000 assassinations in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese estimate the number is closer to 40,000.

Thomas Merton, the peacemaker, was an incorruptible force challenging the propaganda news media and warfare state. Killing Merton in Thailand would have been business as usual for the CIA assassins.

The only possible problem might have come from Merton’s surrogate family at the Abbey of Gethsemani. The killers had to know in advance that they would have no more problem from Merton’s abbey than with the Associated Press, The New York Times, and all the others. That proved to be the case in spades. Had the abbey really cared about knowing the truth, they would have insisted that an autopsy be performed. They did not. The abbey also hid Say’s photograph and the official Thai reports, and they seemed to do everything in their power to persuade the public that Merton had died of a tragic, though bizarre, accident.

Hugh Turley as a volunteer columnist for the Hyattsville Life and Times, is winner of the National Newspaper Association award for best serious column, small-circulation, non-daily division.

5 August 2024

Source: transcend.org

By Ralph Nader

2 Aug 2024 – Israeli soldiers, like soldiers in other countries, bask in the self-serving effusive praise showered upon them by politicians, but privately they know BS when they hear it.

Right from the start on October 7^th, the soldiers knew that the sudden collapse of Netanyahu’s state-of-the-art multi-tiered border defense system left the door open for the Hamas attack. Still denied an official investigation by Netanyahu, people know that had the border defense been in place, all the terrible consequences never would have occurred. (See, the open letter by six very prominent Israelis in the New York Times on June 26, 2024: “We Are Israelis calling on Congress to Disinvite Netanyahu.”)

The soldiers also know that the small Hamas militia of some 25,000 fighters hidden in tunnels, having only small arms with dwindling ammunition, is up against the 465,000–person military armed with 1,500 F-16 fighter pilots and nuclear weapons. The Israeli military is also equipped daily by Biden with the most modern weapons. All this makes Netanyahu’s absurd description of Hamas as an existential threat sheer propaganda designed to protect his job.

The evidence is on the bloody body-strewn ground of tiny Gaza and its crowded 2.3 million people. The Israeli military has dropped over 100,000 precision bombs, countless artillery shells from hundreds of tanks, and even naval missiles to kill over 300,000 innocent Gazan civilians, mostly children, women and elderly, who had nothing to do with October 7^th. (See also my March 5, 2024 column “Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza”). Most of the remaining people in Gaza are sick, injured or both. (See the open letter to President Joe Biden and the U.S. Congress titled, “45 American Health Workers’ Letter on Their Experiences in Gaza” dated July 25, 2024.)

How many Israeli soldiers have died? The official figure is 395 IDF soldiers – many from friendly fire in the fog of explosions, accidents such as collapsing buildings, and diseases. The exaggerated “Hamas battalions” send fighters popping up from their underground tunnels to fire rifles or grenade launchers before most are immediately extinguished by overwhelming firepower.

The largest number of Israeli casualties are the soldiers suffering from PTSD, including moral traumas, being treated in the thousands by Israeli psychologists and mental health specialists. These are the soldiers who will tell the stories of who they were ordered to kill and what they were ordered to destroy. The lack of a truthful account of the atrocities in Gaza— because of Netanyahu blocking war correspondents from Israel and other nations from freely reporting there— will be brought to light by the reports of these soldiers.

To be sure, the thirst for vengeance after October 7^th animated most of the soldiers at the outset – especially those screened for having no qualms about killing innocent children, women and men and destroying civilian facilities.

But as the weeks became months, the Torah’s instruction of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”  to limit escalating cycles of revenge, according to Biblical scholars, became a hundred and then a thousand eyes for an eye and a thousand teeth for a tooth. More soldiers and generals are questioning why they are still there amidst the smoldering ruins and ghastly slaughters.

Netanyahu’s drive to remain in power has stoked the carnage in Gaza. Despised by three out of four Israelis for earlier moving to weaken the judiciary, under indictment for political corruption by Israeli prosecutors, and soundly condemned for his defense failure on October 7^th, ending this one-sided annihilation of defenseless people would mean the end of his political career.

Consider what these soldiers have witnessed or done: Powerful precision bombs blowing to bits babies, children, pregnant women, refugee camps, apartments, schools, health clinics, hospitals, ambulances, water mains, and electricity networks; Families starving on genocidal orders from the Israeli military “no food, water, medicine, electricity, fuel”; and Homeless people trapped, unable to escape, surrender or shelter.

The soldiers have seen their bulldozers flatten critical civilian infrastructure, even cemeteries and agricultural crops. F-16s have blown up universities, government buildings and many schools, mosques and historic churches. Snipers, among the most brutal of the army, kill patients in broken hospitals and survivors desperately try to pull their crushed families out from under the rubble.

Already, several reservists have told reporters in Israel that the military has no operating “rules of engagement.” They could blow up or shoot and kill anyone who moves, including UN relief workers, journalists and health workers protected by international law. The laws of war – the duty to disobey illegal orders – don’t exist in Gaza.

Soldiers saw the body parts of little children, heard the screams, the cries and groans of the dying, smelled the stench of rotting corpses being eaten by stray dogs, and saw their victims – mothers and fathers – begging in vain for help to save their dismembered children.

Unlike other wars, Israeli soldiers were not allowed to facilitate the emergency rescue crews that still exist in Gaza such as those with Doctors Without Borders, the Palestinian Red Crescent and several internationally respected providers of food and water – themselves subject to Israeli attacks. (See December 13, 2023, an open letter titled, “Stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe” to President Biden by 16 Israeli human rights groups which appeared in the New York Times).

Soldiers obeyed their commanders’ orders to repeatedly push hundreds of thousands of desperate Gazans on foot, exposed to the stifling heat and lethally polluted air, from one Israeli-designated area to another. The treachery is unlimited.

Other soldiers were told to block thousands of trucks ready to enter from Egypt, packed with humanitarian aid of food, water, medicine and other critical supplies. Still other soldiers were ordered to kidnap thousands of Gazans, including women and children, and send them without charges to be tortured in Israeli jails, as documented in a just-released UN Human Rights Office report titled, “Detention in the context of the escalation of hostilities in Gaza.”

Of course, there are plenty of soldiers happy to have such sadistic and unlawful commands. How dare the Gazans revolt against the decades of violent Israeli bombing, occupation, invasions and military embargoes? That’s historically been the imperious attitude of cruel, colonizing, land-seizing regimes. The ranks will grow to join past “refuseniks” who in 2002 courageously declared their refusal to go and beat up people, demolish homes and otherwise rampage against defenseless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

[…]

We, combat officers and soldiers who have served the State of Israel for long weeks every year, in spite of the dear cost to our personal lives, have been on reserve duty in the Occupied Territories, and were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people.

[…]

We hereby declare that we shall not continue to fight this War of the Settlements.

We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.

[From The Combatants’ Letter, January 2002]

Dozens of Israeli human rights organizations and leading advocates will record these reservists’ recollections, their remorse, and their recurring nightmares. The vicious omnicidal extremists who make up Netanyahu’s ruling coalition will be exposed for their war crimes and destruction of their own country’s freedoms. Returning war veterans have credibility that will fortify the forthcoming entry into Gaza of international commissions of inquiry and scores of investigative journalists. (See the new documentary “The Night Won’t End”).

The violent Netanyahu knows all this, which is why he is now scheming to provoke a wider regional war by dragging spineless Biden and the U.S. military directly into the fighting.  Remember Biden’s intense backing of the Bush/Cheney criminal invasion/war in Iraq.

If you don’t care what Netanyahu is doing over there, you’d better care about what he’s doing to the US, our Congress, our tax dollars, our freedom of speech and our national security.

Ralph Nader is a US political activist, author, lecturer, and attorney noted for his involvement in consumer protection, environmentalism, and government reform causes.

5 August 2024

Source: transcend.org