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By Nile Bowie
20 November, 2013
The double suicide bombing targeting the Iranian embassy in a Shiite district of southern Beirut is directly linked to the Syrian conflict and the external sponsors of fundamentalist militias losing ground to Assad’s forces.
The brutal attack on the morning of November 19th was carried out by a motorcyclist who detonated himself near the Iranian diplomatic compound attempting to breach the walls to make way for another man in a car who attempted to drive as close to the embassy building as possible before detonating his device. The attackers failed to substantially damage the embassy, but the double-tap bombing took the lives of two-dozen bystanders and first-responders, while injuring over a hundred more. These tactics directly reflect the methods used by al-Qaeda against Shiite communities throughout Iraq in the worsening terror campaign raging between Sunnis and Shiites. For the first time, Iranian diplomats were targeted on Lebanese soil, and the attack undoubtedly represents deteriorating relations between Shiite-Iran and Sunni-Saudi Arabia, the latter serving as the principle financier and arms supplier of the hardline Salafist militias fighting to topple the Syrian government (and losing). The use of Iraqi-style terror tactics on Lebanese soil could be interpreted by some as a spillover from worsening fighting and lawlessness in Syria, but it is more accurately a measure taken by Salafist fighters in response to strategic victories by Assad’s forces, who have the upper-hand and are quickly reconsolidating power.
The Qalamoun front
Lebanese sources indicate that the bombers acted in retaliation to the Syrian government forces’ offensive on the strategic rebel stronghold of Qalamoun, allegedly with assistance from Hezbollah and Iranian advisers, which resulted in the capturing of a key town, Qara. Qalamoun is located in a mountainous region northwest of Damascus and is fairly close to the Lebanese border where the Sunni majorities in the area of Arsal support anti-Assad fighters. The Syrian army’s capturing of the regional town of Qara, one of the last remaining supply routes for the militias into Lebanon, gives Damascus full control over the road linking the capital to the coast in the northwest, while cutting out a crucial corridor that previously linked networks of anti-Assad militias to sympathetic areas in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Meanwhile in Aleppo, where rebel-control has been most notably entrenched, government forces captured Safira in early November, a key town and crossroads for rebel supply routes.
The Syrian army will soon reach the Turkish border if the current northern campaign trajectory is kept up, meaning that heavy fighting will ensue as hardliners who have occupied the area attempt to maintain their foothold; they could eventually be forced to withdraw into southern Turkey to regroup and likely plan attacks similar to that seen in Beirut. Policy makers in Istanbul and other capitals in the region that previously lent full-on support to hardline rebel brigades will probably come to regret those decisions if they haven’t by now. (Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been unusually withdrawn in recent times in contrast to the early and middle periods of the Syrian conflict where it looked like the rebels might have had a chance.) Daraa, the southern region adjacent to the Jordanian border where the conflict began, is seen as the main entry point for foreign interference – predominately Saudi and US intelligence.
The United States, along with Britain and France, have openly trained anti-Assad militias on bases within Jordanian territory near Daraa, officially to provide a counterweight to al-Qaida-linked militias, but their genuine motive has always been toppling the Syrian government – directly training and equipping rebels is only to help ensure that foreign powers have sway in a post-Assad Syria, a scenario that is looking more distant and hypothetical by the day. Government forces control the areas east of Daraa, in addition to the region adjacent to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in the west. Considering the government’s current winning streak in offensive after offensive, Assad’s forces are conceivably in a strong position to secure the southern region – another step to ending the war, with a military solution being the only viable option as scattered hardline militias have refused to take part in Geneva-2.
Whodunnit?
The Iranian foreign ministry has laid the blame for the bombing in Beirut on Israel’s shoulders, despite the al-Qaeda-linked Abdullah Azzam Brigades claiming responsibility, which is a collection of Sunni jihadist units with networks in Lebanon and the Arabian Peninsula who have forewarned further attacks across Lebanon until Iranian forces withdraw from Syria. It appears to be a favorite tactic of those opposing Assad to dramatically inflate the footprint of Iran in the Syrian conflict; there are no Iranian soldiers on the ground, only military personnel tasked with training and advising Syrian forces. The influence and interference of Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries is by every conceivable measure more extensive, broad, and detrimental to civilians – even the leader of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Majid Bin-Muhammad al-Majid, is a Saudi national! The group has taken it upon itself to “protect” Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims against the “Shiite domination” of Lebanon.
Members of the group have allegedly called for the overthrow of the Saudi government, though their motives and tactics completely serve the interests of the House of Saud. The social contract between the Saudi royal elite and their domestic branches of al-Qaeda (who interpret the former as opulent and unfit to rule) is essentially a promise that the House of Saud will quietly support their brand of puritanical Islam abroad on condition that they do not challenge the leadership in Riyadh. Unless Iran has compelling evidence directly linking Israel to the Beirut bombing that they have not made public, Tel Aviv’s complicity cannot be fully confirmed, but it is clear that those who oppose a political solution to the Syrian conflict – and a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear issue – are complicit in this terrorist attack by various degrees of separation. The bombing in Beirut actually speaks volumes of the ill health and desperation of the Salafist networks systematically waging war on Shiite communities from Beirut to Baghdad.
An Ashura to remember
Lebanese authorities had much evidence to suggest that al-Qaeda was preparing to launch terrorist attacks against recent rallies to celebrate Ashura – a religious event recognized by Shiite Muslims – in Lebanon, but jihadists were unable to due so because of impeccable security provided by thousands of Hezbollah contingents. Shiites commemorate the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Iman Hussein bin Ali, who was beheaded in 680 AD for opposing the repressive Umayyad caliphate. In remembering Iman Hussein’s act of heroic defiance, Lebanese Shiites have embraced Ashura ceremonies as an expression of defiance against attempts by Sunni Salafist movements to subjugate and oppress them. Given the geopolitical layout of the region in this ongoing Islamic cold war, this year’s Ashura celebrations had deep ideological characteristics, namely, a collective will to resist against those who seek to impose hegemony and dominate the Islamic world while perverting the values of the faith and unjustifiably cursing others as heretics – hopefully the House of Saud and their liver-eating friends will get the message.
By Hossein Mousavian
19 November 2013
@ Financial Times
Tehran suggested strong measures similar to recent proposals in 2005, says Hossein Mousavian
As Iran meets world powers in Geneva on Wednesday for this month’s second round of talks on its nuclear programme, there is much self-congratulation about the supposed effectiveness of the sanctions after decades of intransigence.
But the idea that it is sanctions that have brought Tehran to the table is wrong. The real cause is the desire of new President Hassan Rouhani to reach a rapprochement with the US, the EU, its neighbours and other world powers, alongside the fact that the US red line has changed from “no enrichment of uranium” to “no nuclear bomb”.
In fact, Tehran has not left the table since the start of talks in 2003, even under Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad. While I was a member of the Iranian nuclear negotiating team from 2003 to 2005, the country was not under crippling sanctions. Yet in March 2005 it suggested strong measures similar to recent proposals: first, to ensure transparency at its nuclear sites; and second, on objective guarantees not to divert its nuclear programme towards weaponisation.
Proposals included implementing the International Atomic Energy Agency Additional Protocol enabling on-site inspections; limiting the expansion of the enrichment programme; capping enrichment at 5 per cent, enabling its use for fuel but not weapons; and converting all enriched uranium to fuel rods, ensuring there would be no reprocessing and plutonium separation at the heavy water reactor southwest of Tehran – a process that could facilitate weaponisation. Tehran also suggested rules to guarantee the permanent ban on developing, stockpiling and using nuclear weapons in return for respect for its right to enrich uranium under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The proposals are similar to demands François Hollande, the French president, made of Iran on his trip to Israel on November 17.
The talks failed in 2005 as a result of US insistence on preventing Iran from exercising its legitimate rights to enrichment. The west missed the chance to resolve the disagreement and instead imposed sanctions. Contrary to the claims of some US lawmakers and Israeli officials, sanctions only caused a dramatic rise in nuclear capability, as Tehran sought to show it would not respond to pressure. Before, Iran was enriching uranium to below 5 per cent at one site with 3,000 centrifuges and possessed a minute stockpile of enriched uranium. Today, it is enriching to 20 per cent at two sites with 19,000 centrifuges. It has a stockpile of 8,000kg of enriched uranium and more sophisticated centrifuges.
A draft agreement reached between Iran and the six powers (except France) in the first round of the Geneva talks covers all the world powers’ big concerns. France blocked that deal because it was drafted primarily by Iran and the US, to the exclusion of other nations. Furthermore, Israel succeeded in pressing France not to compromise. Israel also campaigned for the US Congress to block the draft and to impose more aggressive sanctions on the grounds that this would force Iran into making more concessions.
The Obama administration is seeking to avoid a war in the region that would jeopardise American lives; Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, wants to take military action because it is in line with his vision of eliminating the Islamic Republic as a regional power. Mr Obama and Congress should prioritise American lives as the supreme national interest. Detente with Tehran is the short and long-term US interest in the region.
Like Russia, other European countries and China, the Obama administration is optimistic that the world powers and Iran can reach a deal. Overstressing sanctions and undervaluing the opportunities offered by the Iranians could lead once more to unintended consequences – this time potentially disastrous. Instead, the world powers should grab this opportunity, bring an end to years of negotiations and end up with a realistic, face-saving and peaceful resolution to the nuclear dilemma, opening the door for co-operation on peaceful crisis management in the Middle East.
The writer is a research scholar at Princeton, a former spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiators and author of ‘The Iranian Nuclear Crisis’
20 January 2013
@ Assyrian International New Agency
(AINA) — A top secret memo sent by the Ministry of Interior in Saudi Arabia reveals the Saudi Kingdom sent death-row inmates, sentenced to execution by decapitation, to Syria to fight Jihad against the Syrian government in exchange for commuting their sentences.
According to the memo, dated April 17, 2012, the Saudi Kingdom negotiated with a total of 1239 inmates, offering them a full pardon and a monthly salary for their families, who were to remain in the Kingdom, in exchange for “…their training in order to send them to Jihad in Syria.”
The memo was signed by Abdullah bin Ali al-Rmezan, the “Director of follow up in Ministry of Interior.”
According to the memo, prisoners were of the following nationalities: Yemenis, Palestinians, Saudis, Sudanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Somalis, Afghanis, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and Kuwaitis.
There were 23 Iraqi prisoners.
A former member of the Iraqi parliament, who spoke to AINA on condition of anonymity, confirmed the authenticity of the document and said most of the Iraqi prisoners Saudi Arabia sent to Syria returned to Iraq and admitted that they had agreed to the deal offered by the Saudi Kingdom, and requested the Iraqi government to petition the Saudi government to release their families, who were being held hostage in Saudi Arabia.
Yemeni nationals who were sent to Syria also returned to Yemen and asked their government to secure the release of their families, according to the former Iraqi MP, who said there are many more documents, like the one shown below, about Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Initially Saudi Arabia denied the existence of this program. But the testimony of the released prisoners forced the Saudi government to admit, in private circles, its existence.
According to the former Iraqi MP, the Russians threatened to bring this issue to the United Nations if the Saudis continued working against President Bashar al-Assad. The Saudis agreed to stop their clandestine activities and work towards finding a political solution on condition that knowledge of this program would not be made public.
Here is the translation of the memo:
| This is a document issued by | ||
| Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Ministry of Interior Follow-up |
LOGO | Number: 71466/J/H Attachments: Date: 25/5/1433 H. [April /17/2012 AD] |
| (Top Secret) | ||
| His Excellency General Suood Al-Thnayyan The Classified [Secret] Office at the Ministry of Interior |
May Allah protect him | |
| Peace be upon you and Allah’s mercy and blessings | ||
| In reference to the Royal Court telegram No. 112, dated on 04/19/1433 H [March 3, 2012], referring to those held in the Kingdom jails accused with crimes to which Islamic Sharia law of execution by sword [decapitation] applies, we inform you that we are in dialogue with the accused criminals who have been convicted with smuggling drugs, murder, rape, from the following nationalities: 110 Yemenis, 21 Palestinians, 212 Saudis, 96 Sudanese, 254 Syrians, 82 Jordanians, 68 Somalis, 32 Afghanis, 94 Egyptians, 203 Pakistanis, 23 Iraqis, and 44 Kuwaitis.
We have reached an agreement with them that they will be exempted from the death sentence and given a monthly salary to their families and loved ones, who will be prevented from traveling outside Saudi Arabia in return for rehabilitation of the accused and their training in order to send them to Jihad in Syria. Please accept my greetings. [Signed] CC: |
||
By Patrick L. Smith, Salon
17 November 13
@ readersupportednews.org
More misleading half-truths from a paper too cowed by power and myth to tell the truth about U.S. foreign policy.
Never before have I written a column concerning nothing more than a pair of quotation marks. Then again, never until now have I seen the power of punctuation so perniciously deployed.
It is not a new trick. Very popular in hackdom during the Cold War decades. Enclose something in quotation marks and all between them is instantly de-legitimized; no argument or explanation need be made. Here, try it:
“… the Cuban ‘doctors’ sent to Angola…”
Or:”… Soviet-made ‘farm equipment’ in Portugal since its 1974 revolution…”
Well, they were doctors and it was farm equipment. In the latter category I sat in a Soviet tractor out in the Portuguese vineyards, and damn it if the camponês did not find it useful.
In the end, this kind of thing is simply passive aggression, my least favorite neurosis. No one actively lies such that one can confront and reveal. It is lying by misleading and by implication, so sending us off full of groundless conviction and prejudice.
In this case, we have the irresponsible use of inverted commas, as the Brits say, to shape national opinion on a question of vital importance. The question is Iran. And now to the supine, corrupted and corrupting organ.
You have taken a wild guess, and you are right. We have our familiar problem with our friends on Eighth Avenue, the New York Times, faithful servants of the sanctioned orthodoxy. I give these folks an “A” for clever disguise this time, and I flunk them in the professional ethics class. Simply shameful, this round of reckless chicanery.
Here is the situation.
As all know, a deal with Iran over its nuclear program is the biggest game going these days – an historic opportunity, as previously asserted in this space. Fumble this, and the Obama administration will go down as hopelessly moronic on the foreign-relations side.
You may know, too, that a round of talks between six world powers and the Iranians just hit a pothole. It is essential to understand why.
The paradox is apparent, not real. Knowing why reveals what a nation with imperial ambitions looks like when it is nearing exhaustion and would rather decline than shape up, re-imagine itself, and take a new and constructive place in the global community. Not knowing why encourages Americans to preserve their righteous self-image even as the moths of history chew holes in it.
Best, in Washington’s view, that we do not know why talks in Geneva last weekend failed.
Complex story, but we can take care of it simply. Iran wants a nuclear program, and this includes the capacity to enrich uranium. This is Iran’s right under international law. Washington and the major European powers do not want Iran to have such a program because they worry Iran will eventually build a nuclear weapon. The talks in Geneva went sour because the U.S. and the Europeans demanded that Iran surrender its right.
O.K. Here is the lead in the Times report from the City of Diplomacy:
The Iranian government’s insistence on formal recognition
of its “right” to enrich uranium emerged as a major obstacle,
diplomats said Sunday.
Two big problems. Nothing emerged as an obstacle in Geneva other than Secretary of State Kerry’s duplicity, given that his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, now charges him with misleading Iran as to demands to be made on the enrichment question. Iran has been quite clear all along: Enrichment under law will never get on the table. Zarif would have skipped the trip had he known Kerry’s plans; Kerry knew this.
Then the quotation marks. With them, the Times proposes to deprive Iran of its statutory rights so that Washington can lie to us as well as to the Iranians.
You are all set now for the corker. You search through the piece to understand the quotation marks, and you come to this, edited down so as to get to the point:
Iran has asserted repeatedly that it has the right to enrich uranium….
The Obama administration is prepared to allow Iran to enrich
uranium to the low level of 3.5 percent…. But the administration
is not prepared to acknowledge at this point that Iran has a “right”
to enrich….
This is how the consciousness of empire is dribbled into us and sustained, one touch at a time. Iran asserts only the validity of international law. What the administration is prepared to allow or acknowledge has nothing to do with what Iran can and cannot do as a sovereign nation.
This is also why these talks are very likely to fail. If they do, it will be the fault of Washington and its allies and the complicit media. It is this kind of language that enables Congress to begin debates on new sanctions against Iran. Concessions and demands are different: Iran may choose to concede this or that; the U.S. cannot demand those things by pretending international law does not (somehow) apply.
In my view, we are amid a pandemic of misinformation as to our global behavior. The dishonesty with which we are given the world – an essentially fantastic version of it – is becoming abject to the point of danger. And it is frighteningly willful. Here is the paradox: We cannot bear to see things as they are because things as they are constitute a refutation of our dearest mythologies, but we must see things as they are if we are to make sense of ourselves in the 21st century.
The Iran case has just become urgent in this regard. As I have asserted previously, it will be profoundly detrimental if the U.S. and the Europeans do not pursue what is a patently serious effort on Iran’s part to claim its rights and ease the world’s worries as to its nuclear program.
If the honorable editor will permit the unconventional, two things belong in caps so that a modest few Americans might stop wandering in the dark purposely created by the Times and all the other media too weak-minded to make judgments without reference to the Times:
ONE: IRAN HAS AN UNAMBIGUOUS RIGHT UNDER LAW TO A NUCLEAR PROGRAM, INCLUDING ENRICHMENT, EVEN IF THIS MAKES IT (AS IT WILL) NEARLY CAPABLE OF WEAPONIZING. READ YOUR DAILY NEWS DOSAGE WITH THIS IN MIND.
TWO. THERE IS ZERO EVIDENCE THAT IRAN DESIRES A NUCLEAR WEAPON, AND DECADES OF POLICY TO INDICATE IT PREFERS A NUCLEAR-FREE MIDDLE EAST. THERE IS ONLY ONE REASON IRAN WOULD CHANGE ITS MIND: ISRAEL’S NEVER-MENTIONED ARSENAL OF NUKES. THE MOTIVE WOULD BE DETERRENCE, AND MOST OF US WORSHIPPED AT THE ALTAR OF DETERRENCE WELL ENOUGH DURING THE COLD WAR. IRAN HAS SIGNED THE NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY; ISRAEL DECLINES TO DO SO.
The adage among properly cynical diplomats used to be that they were sent abroad to lie for their country. During the Cold War, as Washington’s sponsored atrocities grew evident, the thought took a turn: Diplomats were sent abroad to lie to their country.
Consider it a template and apply it to our press folk.
Correspondents used to be sent abroad to keep the country informed (in theory, at least). Now correspondents go forth to send home a simulacrum of truth, a semblance, while keeping their country misinformed.
It is no good positing some golden age of spotless integrity, some yesteryear when newspapers, the wires and broadcasters glistened with high principle. There never was such a time. A good press is ever a work in progress, requiring the calloused hands of each generation to make it however good it can, always and by definition short of any ideal.
Too far short when one considers this columnist’s cohort.
By Uri Avnery, Gush-Shalom
16 November 13
@ Readersupportednews.org
FROM THE first moment, I did not have the slightest doubt that Yasser Arafat was assassinated.
It was a matter of simple logic.
On the way back from the funeral, I happened upon Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Knesset for the nationalist Arab Balad party, who is a highly qualified doctoral pharmacist. We exchanged views and came to the same conclusion.
The findings of the Swiss experts last week only confirmed my conviction.
FIRST OF all, a simple fact: people don’t just die for no reason.
I visited Arafat a few weeks before it happened. He seemed in reasonably good health. Upon leaving, I remarked to Rachel, my wife, that he seemed more sharp and alert than during our last visit.
When he suddenly became very ill, there was no obvious cause. The doctors at the French military hospital, to which he was transferred at the insistence of Suha, his wife, and where he died, conducted a thorough examination of his body. They found no explanation for his condition. Nothing.
That by itself was very strange. Arafat was the leader of his people, the de facto head of a state, and one can be sure that the French doctors left no stone unturned to diagnose the case.
That left only radiation or poison. Why was no poison detected at the autopsy? The answer is simple: in order to detect a poison, one must know what one is looking for. The list of poisons it almost unlimited, and the routine search is restricted to a small number.
Arafat’s body was not examined for radioactive polonium.
WHO HAD the opportunity to administer the poison?
Well, practically anybody.
During my many visits with him, I always wondered at the lax security precautions.
At our first meeting, in besieged Beirut, I wondered at the trust he put in me. It was known at the time that dozens of Mossad agents and Phalangist spies were combing the city for him. He could not be sure that I was not a Mossad agent myself, or that I was not followed, or that I was not unwittingly carrying some locating device.
Later, in Tunis, the security search of his visitors was perfunctory. The security precautions of the Israeli Prime Minister were immeasurably more stringent.
In the Ramallah Mukata’a (“compound”), no security measures were added. I had meals with him several times, and wondered again at his openness. American and other foreign guests, who were (or seemed to be) pro-Palestinian activists were invited by him freely, sat next to him and could easily have slipped poison into his food. Arafat would joke with his guests and feed them choice tidbits with his hand.
Certain poisons do not need food. Slight physical contact is enough.
YET THIS man was one of the most threatened persons in the world. He had many deadly enemies, half a dozen secret services were bent on his destruction. How could he be so lax?
When I remonstrated with him, he told me that he believed in divine protection.
Once, when he was flying in a private jet from Chad to Libya, the pilot announced that the fuel had run out. He was going to crash land in the middle of the desert. Arafat’s bodyguards covered him with cushions and formed a ring around him. They were killed, but he survived almost without a scratch.
Since then he became even more fatalistic. He was a devout – though unostentatious – Muslim. He believed that Allah had entrusted him with the task of liberating the Palestinian people.
SO WHO carried out the assassination?
For me, there cannot be any real doubt.
Though many had a motive, only one person had both the means and a profound and lasting hatred for him – Ariel Sharon.
Sharon was furious when Arafat slipped through his fingers in Beirut. Here was his quarry, so near yet so far. The Arab-American diplomat Philip Habib managed to make an arrangement which allowed the PLO fighters, including Arafat, to withdraw with honor from the city, with their arms. I was lying on the roof of a warehouse in Beirut Harbor when the PLO troops, flags flying, were driving by to the ships.
I did not see Arafat. His men were hiding him in their midst.
Since then, Sharon made no secret of his determination to kill him. And when Sharon was resolved to do something, he never, but never, gave up. Even in much smaller matters, if he was thwarted, he would return to his effort again and again and again, until he succeeded.
I knew Sharon well. I knew of his determination. Twice, when I felt that Sharon was nearing his goal, I went with Rachel and some colleagues to the Mukata’a to serve as a human shield. Later we had the satisfaction of reading an interview with Sharon, in which he complained that he had not been able to carry out the planned assassination because “some Israelis were staying there”.
THIS WAS much more than a personal vendetta. He – and not only he – saw it as a national aim.
For Israelis, Arafat was the embodiment of the Palestinian people, an object of abysmal hatred. He was hated more than any other human being after Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann. The generations-old conflict with the Palestinian people was personified by this man.
It was Arafat who had resurrected the modern Palestinian national movement, whose supreme aim was to thwart the Zionist dream of taking possession of all the country between the sea and the Jordan. It was he who had led the armed struggle (a.k.a. terrorism). And when he turned towards a peaceful settlement, recognized the State of Israel and signed the Oslo Accords, he was even more hated. Peace was bound to give back a lot of territories to the Arabs, and what could be worse?
The hatred of Arafat had long since ceased to be rational. For many, it was a total, physical rejection, a deadly brew of hate, aversion, enmity, mistrust. In the forty or so years after he appeared on the stage, millions upon millions of words had been written about him in Israel, but I truly believe that I have never seen a single positive word about him.
For all those years, an entire army of paid propaganda hacks conducted a relentless demonization campaign against his person. Every conceivable accusation was thrown at him. The assertion that he had AIDS, which is now so prominent in the Israeli covert propaganda effort, was invented then in order to mobilize homophobic prejudices. Needless to say, no evidence of homosexuality was ever presented. And the French doctors found no trace of AIDS.
IS THE Israeli government capable of deciding to carry out such a deed? It is an established fact that it is.
In September 1997, an Israeli hit squad was sent to Amman to assassinate Khalid Mishal, the Hamas leader. The chosen instrument was levofentanyl, a deadly poison that leaves no traces and produces effects like a heart attack. It was administered by a slight physical touch.
The act was bungled. The killers were detected by passers-by and fled into the Israeli embassy, where they were besieged. King Hussein, generally an Israeli collaborator, was furious. He threatened to hang the perpetrators unless a life-saving antidote was provided at once. The then Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, caved in and sent the Chief of the Mossad to Amman with the required medicine. Mishal was saved.
Later, in 2010, another squad was sent to assassinate another Hamas operative, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel. They bungled the job, too – though they succeeded in killing their prey by paralyzing and then suffocating him, they were filmed by the hotel cameras and their identity disclosed.
God knows how many un-bungled murders have been carried out this way.
Israel, of course, is not alone in this field. Before, a Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, was ill-advised enough to displease Vladimir Putin. He was killed by the same radioactive polonium as Arafat, but before he died an alert doctor detected the poison. Even before, a Bulgarian dissident was poisoned by a tiny pellet fired from an umbrella,. One must assume that every self-respecting secret service has suchlike means of murder.
WHY DIDN’T Sharon kill Arafat before? After all, the Palestinian leader was besieged for a very long time in his Ramallah compound. I myself saw Israeli soldiers a few meters away from his office.
The answer is political. The US was afraid that if Israel was seen killing the PLO chief, a hero to tens of millions around the Arab world, the region would explode against the US. George Bush the son forbade it. The answer was to do it in a way that could not be traced to Israel.
This, by the way, was quite usual for Sharon. A few weeks before his 1982 invasion of Lebanon, he told the US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, about his plan. Haig forbade it – unless there was a credible provocation. Lo and behold, a dastardly attempt was made on the life of the Israeli ambassador in London, the provocation was duly deemed to be intolerable and the war started.
For the same reason, the Netanyahu government now strenuously denies Israeli involvement in the assassination of Arafat. Instead of bragging about the successful operation, our powerful propaganda machine asserts that the Swiss experts are incompetent or lying (probably they are also anti-Semites), and that the conclusions are wrong. A respected Israeli professor is trotted out to declare that it is all nonsense. Even the good old story about AIDS is called out of retirement.
Sharon himself, in his endless coma, cannot react. But his old assistants, all of them seasoned liars, repeat their mendacious stories.
TO MY mind, the assassination of Arafat was a crime against Israel.
Arafat was the man who was ready to make peace and who was able to get the Palestinian people to accept it. He also laid down the terms: a Palestinian state with borders based on the Green Line, with its capital in East Jerusalem.
This is exactly what his assassins aimed to prevent.
By Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers
14 November, 2013
@ Countercurrents.org
Time to end the failed experiment with rigged corporate trade and put in place fair trade for the people and planet before profits
Momentum is growing in the campaign to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yesterday, the TPP was dealt two blows. Each could be lethal but the TPP, and its Atlantic counterpart, called TAFTA, are not dead yet. It is time for the movement of movements that formed to oppose the TPP to stand in solidarity, defeat these agreements and end the era of rigged corporate trade.
Yesterday’s first blow came from Wikileaks, showing once again that when government works in secret with big corporations, exposure by whistle blowers is critical to changing the corrupt direction of government and the economy. Wikileaks published the full text of the intellectual property chapter; the leaked document included the positions of all the parties. It will take time for all the corporate rigging in this lengthy document to be understood, but already it is evident that Internet freedom will be curtailed, access to healthcare will become more expensive and access to information will be undermined.
This is not the first leak of TPP text. Previous leaks are consistent with the Wikileaks leak – enhanced corporate power that puts profits before the needs of the people and the protection of the planet. The Wikileaks release shows that the United States is by far the most aggressive advocate for trans-national corporate interests, often isolated in pushing for harmful policies.
The second blow came from members of the U.S. House of Representatives. In recent days, several letters were sent to President Obama opposing Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority. Fast Track undermines Congress’ responsibility under the Commerce Clause to regulate trade between nations by allowing the president to sign the agreement before Congress even sees it. The letters made public on November 13 th demonstrate broad bi-partisan opposition to Fast Track with 179 Members signing at least one of the three letters.
A letter spearheaded by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) garnered the support of three-quarters of House Democrats with 151 Members telling President Obama they oppose Fast Track, writing:
“we will oppose ‘Fast Track’ Trade Promotion Authority or any other mechanism delegating Congress’ constitutional authority over trade policy that continues to exclude us from having a meaningful role in the formative stages of trade agreements and throughout negotiating and approval processes.”
Important leaders of the Democratic Party signed the letter including 18 out of 21 Ranking Members who would chair committees if the Democrats were in the majority. This means that to pursue Fast Track authority, President Obama will need to challenge three-quarters of his own party.
But, that is not all. In another letter , organized by Mike Thompson (D-CA) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and signed by 12 of the 16 Democratic Party members of the Ways and Means Committee, which is primarily responsible for Fast Track legislation, members expressed opposition to Fast Track unless it was radically different from previous grants of authority. The letter says it “cannot just be an extension of earlier trade promotion authorities. Any new proposed TPA must . . . ensure Congress plays a more meaningful role in the negotiating process.”
And, the opposition is bi-partisan. Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) drafted a letter signed by 23 Republicans . The Republican letter emphasized that Congress has the “exclusive authority to set the terms of trade.” Further, “The Founders established this clear check and balance to prevent the president from unilaterally negotiating with foreign nations and imposing trade policies that Congress would deem to be against the national interest.” They write that they refuse to “cede our constitutional authority to the executive” through Fast Track.
These are just the latest problems in the quest for Fast Track, indeed a bill has yet to be introduced. The previous US Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, said in 2012 “We’ve got to have it.” He wanted the authority by the end of 2012. In April, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) promised Obama Fast Track by June of 2013. The broad bi-partisan opposition announced this week shows that winning Fast Track has very little support in Congress. In fact, the letters may be the death knell for such legislation.
The Wikileaks documents show there is a lot of division among the negotiating nations with important disagreements on key aspects of the text. Without Fast Track to guarantee passage of the TPP, these nations will be even less likely to agree to demands by the U.S. Further, Asian countries are negotiating their own competing agreement , which does not include the United States but, unlike the TPP, does include China.
Latin American countries are also speaking out against the TPP. Earlier this year, Rodrigo Contreras , Chile’s lead TPP negotiator quit to warn people of the dangers of the TPP – highlighting how big financial institutions will dominate their governments and how the TPP “will become a threat for our countries: It will restrict our development options in health and education, in biological and cultural diversity, and in the design of public policies and the transformation of our economies. It will also generate pressures from increasingly active social movements, who are not willing to grant a pass to governments that accept an outcome of the TPP negotiations that limits possibilities to increase the prosperity and well-being of our countries.” And, recently the Parliament of Peru passed a resolution “requesting that the government open a ‘public, political, and technical debate’ on the binding rules being negotiated in the TPP.”
In the United States, cities and counties are beginning to pass TPP Free Zones , saying they will not obey the TPP if it becomes law. These local governments are concerned with provisions that would not allow them to give preference to buying local, buying U.S. made goods or other provisions that undermine their sovereignty.
In addition to opposition in the U.S. government and foreign governments, a mass citizen uprising is developing against the TPP. There have been large protests in many of the countries involved in the negotiations as well as in the United States. The night before the Wikileaks documents were released, 13 cities did visibility protests opposing the TPP in light shows. In September we joined with activists in Washington, DC in a series of protests, including covering the office building of the US Trade Representative in banners to expose their secret trade agreement. Protests are scheduled for Salt Lake City, UT on November 19 th where lead negotiators from 12 countries will hold meetings. A global day of protest is planned for December 3 against not only the TPP but also the WTO and all toxic trade agreements.
The TPP is running into resistance in Congress, local governments and among Pacific nations in Asia and Latin America; and by people who oppose the agreement all over the world. This is part of a growing movement of movements – all of the movements impacted by corporate trade, e.g. labor, environmental, Internet freedom, healthcare, food sovereignty, immigrant’s rights, banking regulation – are joining together to defeat it.
The people are winning. Fourteen trade agreements have been stopped in the last 14 years and as Tom Donohue of the US Chamber of Commerce wrote this week “the WTO has not concluded a single new multilateral trade agreement since it was created in 1995.” Mass protest against rigged corporate trade agreements can end the experiment in trade that puts profits ahead of the people and planet.
We are on the verge of defeating Fast Track. It is important that we keep the pressure on Congress. Neither the TPP nor TAFTA will become law if people learn what is in them and Congress fulfills its constitutional responsibility to review their impact. Denying the President Fast Track is the essential step to defeat both of these agreements.
Once we defeat Fast Track and prevent TPP and TAFTA from becoming law, we need to remain in solidarity and work to transform trade so it becomes “fair” trade that puts the necessities of the people and the protection of the planet first. The people will have firmly established that they will not tolerate rigged corporate trade deals. If corporations want to see trade between nations, they need a new approach – transparent, participatory and fair – with new goals of serving the people and planet.
To get involved in the campaign to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership visit http://www.FlushTheTPP.org .
Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD are participants in PopularResistance.org ; they co-direct It’s Our Economy and co-host Clearing the FOG shown on UStream TV and heard on radio. Their twitters are @KBZeese and MFlowers8 .
By Colin Todhunter
13 November, 2013
@ Countercurrents.org
2014 will witness India’s general election. And the choice available from the two biggest national parties seems to be more globalisation or more globalisation. In other words, continued acquiescence to Wall Street’s economic agenda.
Globalisation, the type we are witnessing, reflects the needs of the extremely wealthy of the world. They are ultimately setting the agenda at the G8, G20, NATO, the World Bank, and the WTO and are from the highest levels of finance capital and transnational corporations. They dictate global economic policies.
In India, many people are resisting state-corporate policies because they are in the main merely facilitating corporate takeovers of food, agriculture, resources, land, public infrastructure and water.Successive governments have abused and removed some the nation’s poorest people from their lands. Killings and human rights abuses have gone hand in hand with the destruction of the environment as profiteering industries linked with resource extraction and processing have moved in. Parts of agriculture have already been placed in the hands of powerful Western agribusiness. The effects include seed patenting and seed monopolies, increasing levels of cancer due to contamination, the destruction of rural economies, farmer suicides and water run offs from depleted soil leading to climate change and severe water resource depletion.
Traditional agriculture is being destroyed by Western agribusiness and petro-chemical farming. Both food sovereignty and the health of the nation are under threat as the structural adjustment of Indian agriculture leads to a shift away from the production of bio-diverse food crops for local consumption to commodities for exports.
The secretive corporate-driven EU-India Free Trade Agreement currently under negotiation could well entail India’s finance sector and food retail/processing sectors and investment rules being restructured in favour of transnational corporations. Industrial developments built with public money and strategic assets, such as energy sources, ports, airports and seeds and infrastructure support for agriculture, are already being sold off.
If people are to have any hope of reversing these trends, before casting their votes next year they should at least take a look at some of the backers behind those running for high office. And that includes ALL major candidates, whichever party they represent.
In the meantime, however, let us turn to Narendra Modi, not least because of his phenomenal reinvention as a political figure and subsequent rise to the pinnacle of national politics.
While many hold Modi personally responsible for the killings of Muslims and atrocities that took place in Gujarat back in 2002, Brand Modi has reinvented and remarketed himself. Modi and his backers have had considerable success in forwarding the message that he is a visionary and a hero of development in Gujarat, where he is Chief Minister. He has even been selected as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Indian general election. Modi’s recent story has been one of remarkable repositioning and self promotion.
The future is bright, the future is Modi? Would you trust him? It is clear that 960,000 followers on Google plus do. And it is clear that his six million ‘likes’ on his official ‘fan page’ on Facebook do. On that page, it says: “the man endeared as a visionary & an untiring, selfless worker who has made Gujarat the cynosure of all eyes across the world.”
While not denying Modi has a mass support base, especially among young middle class voters, his backers have a record of setting up ‘grass root’ groups tailored for specific causes. On other pages across the internet, the words ‘fascist’ and ‘spin’ often appear in forums about Modi.
Modi’s party, the Hindu-nationalist BJP, promoted the phrase ‘India shining’ in 2004 in an attempt to hoodwink the electorate that all was well in India as a result of its neo-liberal economic policies. That electioneering slogan was as bogus as the ‘Gujarat shining’ one we hear now, given that Modi’s record on development in Gujarat is not all it appears to be.
It seems you can sell anything to anyone given these days with the right backing and strategy.
And who are among Modi’s backers? Look no further than the US-based PR/lobby giant APCO Worldwide, which, as outlined by researcher Shelly Kasli (see the article at the end of this piece) has strong links with bodies such as the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group. Pro-Wall Street and very well-connected to key US/Israeli political, financial and security-intelligence institutions, this firm has been instrumental in helping to give Modi a much needed makeover, remarketing him as prime ministerial material and promoting Brand Modi and Brand Gujarat.
Behind the glossy spin promoting Modi, there lies a rather different reality; that of APCO and its lobbyists, who it is reasonable to assume would benefit from having what could be a former client as India’s top politician. Regardless of any nationalist sentiments that certainly play well with sections of the Indian electorate, if Modi becomes PM, he would in principle be well placed to allow what could arguably amount to further international corporate-financial power grab in India facilitated by APCO. That would only serve to further accelerate the processes discussed in the first half of this article.
In APCO’s India Brochure, there is the claim that India’s resilience in weathering the recent global downturn and financial crisis has made governments, policy-makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that India can play a significant role in the recovery of the global economy in the months and years ahead. APCO describes India as a trillion dollar market. The emphasis is not on redistributing the country’s wealth among its citizens or their genuine empowerment via common ownership of production, but on the opposite – recovery of ‘the economy’, which means positioning international funds and corporations to exploit markets and extract profit the best way they can.
In the mainstream media and among many leading politicians and economists, this constitutes growth and development; but it’s neither. It’s plunder. The evidence doesn’t lie – in the West, decades of such policies have culminated in austerity, disempowerment and increasing hardship for the masses and the concentration of ever more wealth and power in the hands of the relative few.
In India, the horse is in position. And the vultures are circling.
For revealing insight into APCO – who it is, what it does, its clients and outlook – see the following article by Shelley Kasli: http://greatgameindia.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/mechanics-of-narendra-modis-pr-agency-apco-worldwide-orchestrating-our-future/
Colin Todhunter : Originally from the northwest of England, Colin Todhunter has spent many years in India. He has written extensively for the Deccan Herald (the Bangalore-based broadsheet), New Indian Express and Morning Star (Britain). His articles have also appeared in various other newspapers, journals and books. His East by Northwest website is at: http://colintodhunter.blogspot.com
By Nicola Nasser
13 November, 2013
@ Countercurrents.org
More than two years on since the “revolution” of Feb. 2011, the security crisis is exacerbating by the day threatening Libya with an implosion charged with potential realistic risks to the geopolitical unity of the Arab north African country, turning this crisis into a national existential one. Obviously the status quo is unsustainable.
“Libya is imploding two years after the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi” was captured and killed on October 20,” Patrick Cockburn wrote in British The Independent on last Oct. 10.
Libya’s oil industry has become the target of violent attacks and civil protests, closing export terminals in east and west or/and creating an oil black market. “Security guards” at the country’s main ports are on strike and selling oil independently in spite of a 67% in pay for employees of the state oil sector on last Oct. 31. Libyan oil minister, Abdulbari Ali al-Arousi, told the Financial Times on last April 29 that disruptions to production and export cost the country about $1bn over the previous five months only.
On this Nov. 11 Reuters reported that Protesters shut Libya’s gas export pipeline to Italy, its only customer, in the Mellitah complex, some 100 km west of Tripoli, after shutting down oil exports from there as well. A day earlier, Reuters reported that the separatist self-declared autonomous Cyrenaica government set up a regional firm called “Libya Oil and Gas Corp” to sell oil independently after seizing several ports in the east of the country, where Libya’s two most important oil ports, Sidra and Ras Lanuf, were blockaded by protestors.
Libya is Europe’s single largest oil supplier. Cutting the Libyan oil and gas supplies to Europe on the eve of a winter that weather forecasts predict to be a very cold one would be an excellent pretext for inviting a European military intervention in the country, which seems the only option left for the transitional government of Prime Minister Ali Zeidan that ran out of options for its survival.
It is noteworthy here that while the U.N. Support Mission in Libya can obviously “support” nothing, France, Italy, the UK and the U.S., who spearheaded the NATO campaign to topple the former ruling regime, in a joint statement on this Nov. 8, expressed their concern “at the instability in Libya and the threat that (it) poses to the successful achievement of the democratic transition” and reiterated their “support to the elected political institutions,” i.e. to Zeidan’s government.
Ironically, Zeidan on this Nov. 10 warned his compatriots of a possible “intervention of foreign occupation forces” in order to protect civilians under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter because “the international community cannot tolerate a state in the middle of the Mediterranean that is a source of violence, terrorism and murder,” which was the same pretext for the NATO military intervention that contributed mainly, if not created, the security crisis in the first place by destroying the military and police infrastructure of the central government and turned the country practically into a sponsor of regional terrorism in general and an exporter of arms and “Jihadists” to Syria in particular.
Zeidan’s warning of foreign “intervention” could also be interpreted as an implicit threat to ask for it to help rein in the security crisis lest it boils to an implosion of the country.
Forbes on last Aug. 30 reported that Libya’s “energy protection” was failing and quoted PM Zeidan as saying that his government would impose “order by force” when it came to protecting the oil and gas industry and expanded the Petroleum Facility Guards (PFG) to 18,000 members.
Months on, his efforts and threats failed to deter targeting pipelines, refineries and export terminals. His renewed threats since early last September to “bomb from the air and the sea” any oil tanker entering Libya’s territorial waters illegally and trying to pick up illicit Libyan oil have proved hollow and without teeth.
Libya is the second largest oil producer in Africa and the continent’s fourth largest natural gas supplier and already dominates the Southern Mediterranean’s petroleum sector. According to the Libyan National Oil Corporation (NOC), more than 50 international oil companies were already present in the Libya on the eve of the “revolution.” The country’s potential is more promising; Austria’s OMV said on last Oct. 21 it had struck oil in Libya in its first new discovery since 2011.
On last Oct. 18, CNBC.com quoted Paolo Scaroni, the CEO of the Italian oil and gas firm ENI, which is Libya’s largest foreign partner, as saying: “Everyone is going to be wealthy” in Libya, citing statistics of what could be: “Five million people and 2 million barrels of oil (per day), which means that this country can be a paradise, and I am doubtful that Libyans will not catch this opportunity of becoming the new Abu Dhabi, or the new Qatar or the new Kuwait.”
Libyan Copy of Iraq’s “Green Zone”
Yet Libyans seem determined to miss “this opportunity.” “Revolutionary” Libya, reminiscent of the U.S. – engineered “democratic” Iraq after some ten years of the U.S. invasion, is still unable to offer basic services to its citizens. Real unemployment is estimated at over 30%. Economy has stalled and frustration is growing. Gone are the welfare days of Gaddafi’s state when young families could get a house with benefits for free, people’s medication and treatment were paid by the state and free education made available to everyone. About one million supporters of the Gaddafi regime remain internally displaced; hundreds of thousands more fled for their lives abroad.
Remnants of the destroyed institutional infrastructure of law, order and security is hardly capable of protecting the symbolic central government in Tripoli, reminiscent of its Iraqi counterpart, which is still besieged in the so-called “Green Zone” in Baghdad. Late last October Libya’s central bank was robbed of $55m in a broad daylight robbery. More than one hundred senior military and police commanders were assassinated.
“Libya isn’t just at a crossroads. We are at a roundabout. We keep driving round in circles without knowing where to get off,” Libya’s Minister of Economy, Alikilani al-Jazi, said at a conference in London last September, quoted by The Australian on last Oct. 14.
On last Aug. 30, the Swiss-based group Petromatrix said: “We are currently witnessing the collapse of state in Libya, and the country is getting closer to local wars for oil revenues.” Four days later Patrick Cockburn reported in British The Independent that “Libyans are increasingly at the mercy of militias” and that the “Government authority is disintegrating in all parts of the country.”
Ironically, an estimated one-quarter of a million heavily armed militiamen, who are the main obstacle to creating and empowering a central government, are on government payroll.
Writing in The Tripoli Post on Oct. 31, Karen Dabrowska said that, “Local notables, tribal groups, Islamists and militias are all vying to keep the centre from extending its authority to their fiefdoms and this explains why disparate social groupings can only unite temporarily to prevent the centre from gaining power over them.”
It “goes without saying that the post – Moammar Gaddafi Libya is purely a failed state” governed by militia, Adfer Rashid Shah of the Jamia Millia Islamia, Central University in New Delhi, wrote on last Oct. 15.
Following the heavy infighting in the Libyan capital on this Nov. 7, Italian foreign minister Emma Bonino told newspaper La Republicca that the country was “absolutely out of control” and the situation is worsening, hinting that Italian oil and gas firm ENI was prepared to close its oil wells.
Zeidan’s abduction from his Tripoli’s Corinthia Hotel on last Oct. 10, which the British Economist described as “the shortest coup,” highlighted the country’s deteriorating security crisis. It was interpreted as a “reprisal” for kidnapping five days earlier of Abu Anas al-Libi on suspicion of links with al-Qaeda by U.S. special forces, an act which exposed the inability of the central government to cooperate and coordinate with the American “ally” in his arrest on the one hand and on the other exposed its failure in protecting Libya’s sovereignty against a flagrant U.S. violation thereof.
Last July Zeidan threatened that his government may have to “use force” in Benghazi, the cradle of the “revolution” and the current focus of insecurity, tribalism, separatism, Islamist rebels, decentralization of government, assassination of regular army and security officers and attacks on foreign diplomatic missions who mostly closed their consulates in Libya’s second largest city, where the U.S. ambassador was killed in September last year.
Ahead of his visit to the eastern city on Monday, when he promised reinforcements and logistical support to the security forces there, Zeidan launched a show of force into the city the previous Friday with hundreds of armored troop carriers and army trucks mounted with guns.
But Zaeidan’s threat to “use force” will inevitably be counterproductive, not only because his government’s lack of “force” would compromise his credibility, but because, within the current balance of power between his government and the militias, it will make the security situation worse if it does not ignite a civil war.
Zeidan said his government would give the “revolutionaries” who have turned into rival and vying militias and warlords until next Dec. 31 to join the regular army and police or they will be cut from government payroll, that is if his coffers could afford to sustain their payroll if they accepted and if they did not accept his offer it will be another reason for more mutiny and rebellion.
More likely the government payroll may not be rolling because the government is facing a budget crisis and “from next or the following month, there could be a problem covering expenditure” according to Zeidan himself, as the security crisis has brought oil production to a standstill or out of its control because the “militia groups are behaving like terrorists, using control over oil as political leverage to extract concessions,” according to Dr. Elizabeth Stephens, head of political risk at insurers Jardine Lloyd Thompson, quoted by British The Telegraph on last Aug. 29.
An imminent constitutional crisis could create a power vacuum that in turn would worsen the security crisis. Published by RT on this Nov. 7, analyst Nile Bowie wrote: “In accordance with the transitional roadmap adopted by the transitional government in May 2011, the mandate of the current government in Tripoli is set to expire on February 8, 2014. Failure to implement a new constitution by then would either force Tripoli into extending its mandate – a move which is seen as highly unpopular – or a potential power vacuum scenario which could set off a chain of events that could lead to a civil war or dissolution.”
Pentagon’s Plans No Help
Short of western “boots on the ground” it is doubtful that Zeidan’s government will survive. The U.S. administration of President Barak Obama was repeatedly on record against any U.S. boots on the ground in the Middle East. With the exception of France, which might be ready for the appropriate price to repeat its recent limited and temporary military intervention in Mali, Europe seems against it too.
Zeidan, with less than three months remaining for him in office, seems relying on Pentagon’s plans to arm and train, through “AFRICOM,” a new Libyan army called “a general purpose force.”
But “the case of a separate and underreported U.S. effort to train a small Libyan counterterrorism unit inside Libya earlier this year is instructive,” Frederic Wehrey wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, adding: The absence of clear lines of authority — nearly inevitable given Libya’s fragmented security sector — meant that the force’s capabilities could just have easily ended up being used against political enemies as against terrorists. In August militias launched a pre-dawn raid on the training camp which was not well-guarded. There were no U.S. soldiers at the camp, but the militia took a great deal of U.S. military equipment from the site, some of it sensitive. The U.S. decided to abort the program and the U.S. forces supposedly went home.
The obvious alternative to Zeidan’s western supported government would be a stateless society governed by militia warlords, while the survival of his government promises more of the same.
At the official end of the NATO war for the regime change in Libya on Oct. 31, 2011 U.S. President Obama proclaimed from the White House Rose Garden that this event signaled the advent of “a new and democratic Libya,” but more than two years later Libya is recurring to the pre-Gaddafi old undemocratic tribal and ethnic rivalries with the added value of the exclusionist terrorist religious fundamentalism wearing the mantle of Islamist Jihad.
In the wake of late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s death on October 20, a Saudi Arabian Arab News’ editorial said: “The point about Qaddafi’s death is that it makes the next transition stage that much easier, that much safer. As long as he remained at large, he would have been in a position to destabilize the country.” More than two years after Gaddafi’s death, Libya is more destabilized, insecure and fractured that its future is now questionable enough not to vindicate the Saudi daily’s prediction.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com
By Jonathan Cook
13 November, 2013
@ Countercurrents.org
Nazareth: It seems there are still plenty of parties who would prefer that Arafat’s death continues to be treated as a mystery rather than as an assassination.
It is hard, however, to avoid drawing the logical conclusion from the finding last week by Swiss scientists that the Palestinian leader’s body contained high levels of a radioactive isotope, polonium-210. An inconclusive and much more limited study by a Russian team published immediately after the Swiss announcement also suggests Arafat died from poisoning.
It is time to state the obvious: Arafat was killed. And suspicion falls squarely on Israel.
Israel alone had the means, track record, stated intention and motive. Without Israel’s fingerprints on the murder weapon, it may not be quite enough to secure a conviction in a court of law, but it should be evidence enough to convict Israel in the court of world opinion.
Israel had access to polonium from its nuclear reactor in Dimona, and it has a long record of carrying out political assassinations, some ostentatious and others covert, often using hard-to-trace chemical agents. Most notoriously, Israel tried to quietly kill another Palestinian leader, Khaled Meshal of Hamas, in Jordan in 1997, injecting a poison into his ear. Meshal was saved only because the assassins were caught and Israel was forced to supply an antidote.Israeli leaders have been queuing up to deny there was ever any malign intent from Israel’s side towards Arafat. Silvan Shalom, the energy minister, claimed last week: “We never made a decision to harm him physically.” Shalom must be suffering from a memory lapse.
There is plenty of evidence that Israel wanted Arafat – in the euphemism of that time – “removed”. In January 2002, Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s military chief of staff, was caught on a microphone whispering to Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, about Arafat: “We have to get rid of him.”
With the Palestinian leader holed up for more than two years in his battered compound in Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli tanks, the debate in the Israel government centred on whether he should be exiled or killed.
In September 2003, when Shalom was foreign minister, the cabinet even issued a warning that Israel would “remove this obstacle in a manner, and at a time, of its choosing.” The then-deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, clarified that killing Arafat was “one of the options”.
What stayed Israel’s hand – and fuelled its equivocal tone – was Washington’s adamant opposition. In the wake of these threats, Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, warned that a move against Arafat would trigger “rage throughout the Arab world, the Muslim world and in many other parts of the world”.
By April 2004, however, Sharon declared he was no longer obligated by his earlier commitment to President George Bush not to “harm Arafat physically”. “I am released from that pledge,” he observed. The White House too indicated a weakening of its stance: an unnamed spokesman responded feebly that the US “opposed any such action”.
Unknown is whether Israel was able to carry out the assassination alone, or whether it needed to recruit a member or members of Arafat’s inner circle, with him inside his Ramallah compound, as accomplices to deliver the radioactive poison.
So what about motive? How did Israel gain from “removing” Arafat? To understand Israel’s thinking, one needs to return to another debate raging at that time, among Palestinians.
The Palestinian leadership was split into two camps, centred on Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s heir apparent. The pair had starkly divergent strategies for dealing with Israel.
In Arafat’s view, Israel had reneged on commitments it made in the Oslo accords. He was therefore loath to invest exclusively in the peace process. He wanted a twin strategy: keeping open channels for talks while maintaining the option of armed resistance to pressure Israel. For this reason he kept a tight personal grip on the Palestinian security forces.
Abbas, on the other hand, believed that armed resistance was a gift to Israel, delegitimising the Palestinian struggle. He wanted to focus exclusively on negotiations and state-building, hoping to exert indirect pressure on Israel by proving to the international community that the Palestinians could be trusted with statehood. His priority was cooperating closely with the US and Israel in security matters.
Israel and the US strongly preferred Abbas’s approach, even forcing Arafat for a time to reduce his own influence by appointing Abbas to a newly created post of prime minister.
Israel’s primary concern was that, however much of a prisoner they made Arafat, he would remain a unifying figure for Palestinians. By refusing to renounce armed struggle, Arafat managed to contain – if only just – the mounting tensions between his own Fatah movement and its chief rival, Hamas.
With Arafat gone, and the conciliatory Abbas installed in his place, those tensions erupted violently into the open – as Israel surely knew they would. That culminated in a split that tore apart the Palestinian national movement and led to a territorial schism between the Fatah-controlled West Bank and Hamas-ruled Gaza.
In Israel’s oft-used terminology, Arafat was the head of the “infrastructure of terror”. But Israel’s preference for Abbas derived not from respect for him or from a belief that he could successfully persuade Palestinians to accept a peace deal. Sharon famously declared that Abbas was no more impressive than a “plucked chicken”.
Israel’s interests in killing Arafat are evident when one considers what occurred after his death. Not only did the Palestinian national movement collapse, but the Palestinian leadership got drawn back into a series of futile peace talks, leaving Israel clear to concentrate on land grabs and settlement building.
Contemplating the matter of whether Israel benefited from the loss of Arafat, Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani observed: “Hasn’t Abu Mazen’s [Abbas’] exemplary commitment to Oslo over the years, and maintenance of security cooperation with Israel through thick and thin, already settled this question?”
Abbas’ strategy may be facing its ultimate test now, as the Palestinian negotiating team once again try to coax out of Israel the barest concessions on statehood at the risk of being blamed for the talks’ inevitable failure. The effort already looks deeply misguided.
While the negotiations have secured for the Palestinians only a handful of ageing political prisoners, Israel has so far announced in return a massive expansion of the settlements and the threatened eviction of some 15,000 Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.
It is doubtless a trade-off Arafat would have rued.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.