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By Robert Reich

12 October 13

@ Robert Reich’s Blog

Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama and a fierce critic of the Affordable Care Act, has just changed his tune. He now says: “My primary focus is on minimizing risk of insolvency and bankruptcy. There are many paths you can take to get there. Socialized medicine is just one of the component parts of our debt and deficits that put us at financial risk.”

Translated: House Republicans are under intense pressure. A new Gallup poll shows the Republican Party now viewed favorably by only 28% of Americans, down from 38% in September. That’s the lowest favorable rating measured for either party since Gallup began asking this question in 1992. The Democratic Party is viewed favorably by 43%, down four percentage points from last month.

So Republicans are desperately looking for a way of getting out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves – and the President has given them one. He told them that if they agree to temporarily fund the government and raise the debt ceiling without holding as ransom the Affordable Care Act or anything else, negotiations can begin on reducing the overall budget deficit.

What’s the lesson here? The radicals who tried to hijack America didn’t understand one very basic thing. While most Americans don’t like big government, Americans revere our system of government. That’s why even though a majority disapprove of the Affordable Care Act, a majority also disapprove of Republican tactics for repealing or delaying it.

Government itself has never been popular in America except during palpable crises such as war or deep depression. The nation was founded in a revolution against an abusive government – that was what the original Tea Party was all about – and that distrust is in our genes. The Constitution reflects it. Which is why it’s hard for government to do anything very easily. (I’ve never been as frustrated as when I was secretary of labor – continuously running into the realities of separation of power, checks and balances, and the endless complications of federal, state, and local levels of authority. But frustration goes with the job.)

No one likes big government. If you’re on the left, you worry about the military-industrial-congressional complex that’s spending zillions of dollars creating new weapons of mass destruction, spying on Americans, and killing innocents abroad. And you don’t like government interfering in your sex life, telling you how and when you can have an abortion, whom you can marry. If you’re on the right, you worry about taxes and regulations stifling innovation, out-of-control bureaucrats infringing on your freedom, and government deficits as far as the eye can see.

So when Tea Party Republicans, bankrolled by a handful of billionaires, began calling the Affordable Care Act a “wholesale takeover of American health care,” many Americans were inclined to believe them. Health care is such a huge and complicated system, affecting us and our families so intimately, that our inherent distrust of government makes us instinctively wary. It’s no accident we’re still the only advanced nation not to have universal health care. FDR decided against adding it to his plan for Social Security because he didn’t want to jeopardize the rest of the program; subsequent presidents never got close, at least until Obama.

The best argument for the Affordable Care Act is that our current healthcare system is so dysfunctional – the most expensive in the world with the least healthy outcomes (highest infant mortality, shortest life spans, worst rates of chronic disease) of any advanced nation – that we had no choice but to try to fix it. Even so, it’s a typical American fix: It’s still based on private health providers and private insurers. All government does is subsidize the poor, require insurers to take in people with pre-existing health problems, and pay for it by requiring everyone to be insured.

The Tea Party Republicans’ mistake was to assume that Americans’ distrust of big government, and, by extension, the Affordable Care Act, would allow them to ride roughshod over the process we have for making laws.

Their double-barreled threat to shut down the government and cause the United States to default on its obligations if the Affordable Care Act isn’t repealed or at least delayed is a direct assault on our system of government: If even unpopular laws can be gutted by a majority in one house of Congress holding the rest of government hostage, there’s no end to it. No law on the books will be safe. (Their retort that Congress holds the “purse strings” and can therefore decide to de-fund what it dislikes is bunk; appropriation bills have to be agreed to by both houses and signed into law by the president, like any other legislation.)

While most of us distrust government, we’re indelibly proud of our system of government. We like to think it’s just about the best system in the world. We don’t much like politicians but we canonize the Founding Fathers, the Framers of the Constitution. And we revere the fading parchment on which the Constitution is written. When we pledge allegiance to the United States we bind ourselves to that system of government. Anyone who seeks to overthrow or undermine that system is deemed a traitor.

And that’s exactly what some Tea Partiers have begun sounding like – traitors to the system, radicals for whom the end they seek justifies whatever means they think necessary to achieve it. As such, they began losing support even among Americans who had bought their view of the Affordable Care Act.

So they’ve had to back down, and soon, hopefully, we can move to the next stage – negotiating over the size of government. That should be stronger ground for the Tea Partiers. But the President, Democrats, and any moderate Republican who dares show his face can still gain ground by framing the question properly: The size of government isn’t the real issue. It’s who government is for. The best way to reduce future budget deficits is to ensure it’s for all of us and not just a privileged few.

That means revenues should be raised from the wealthy, who have never been wealthier – limiting their deductions and tax credits, closing loopholes like “carried interest,” and taxing financial transactions. Spending should be cut by ending corporate welfare – terminating tax subsidies to oil and gas, ballooning payments to agribusiness, sweetheart deals for military contractors, and the “too big to fail” subsidy for Wall Street’s biggest banks. Future health-care costs should be contained by using the government’s bargaining leverage over providers (through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act) to force a shift from fee-for-service to payments-for-healthy-outcomes. And we should spend more on high-quality education and infrastructure for everyone.

Americans distrust big government, and always will. There’s ample reason – especially given the huge sums now bankrolling politicians, coming from a relative handful of billionaires, big corporations, and Wall Street. But we love our system of government. That’s what must be strengthened.

By using tactics perceived to violate that system, the Tea Partiers have overplayed their hand. If they don’t stop their recklessness, they’ll be out of the game.

Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers “Aftershock” and “The Work of Nations.” His latest is an e-book, “Beyond Outrage.” He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.

 

By Karthick RM

12 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

“Successes send weak souls to sleep; they spur strong souls on.” -Maximilien Robespierre

When a band of Vietnamese communists overran a garrison of French Far East Expeditionary Corps in Dien Bien Phu on May 1954, it created shockwaves across the world. It pricked the sensors of military minds in the West, even as it reinforced the thoughts of revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara that successful guerrilla wars against colonial and neo-colonial forces can be waged. If the brains behind this historical victory were to be sought, it would be this diminutive person called Vo Nguyen Giap.

It is, I would say, Hegelian irony that General Giap is popularly called ‘Red Napoleon’. Unlike Hegel’s vision of the French leader as the world-soul on a horseback, the Vietnamese General who played crucial roles in campaigns against the Japanese, the French and the Americans cut no grand picture in appearance. A person with a keen desire for social change, witnessing close relatives fall prey to the cruelties of French colonial rule, he joined the resistance movement young. After a brief career as a teacher of history, he began creating it. But this article is not so much about the man’s life as it is about the relevance of his thought.

Giap’s most popular statement is his observation on armed struggle. “Violence is the universal objective law of all thorough national liberation revolutions, of all revolutions which are truly popular in character.” While being a Vietnamese nationalist, Giap was profoundly Universalist in orientation. He did not wax on the particularities of the Vietnamese people, but rather focused on what the superior knowledge of the Leninist revolution of the USSR, and the French and American revolutions before that, could teach the Vietnamese in liberation of their country. And, he believed that “Marxism-Leninism never disowns the history and the great constituent virtues of a nation; on the contrary, it raises these virtues to new heights in the new historical conditions.” The race-gender-sexuality pseudo-radicals of today would, of course, call him a totalitarian, an upholder of metanarratives and whatever.

It was not idealism alone that fuelled Giap, but a cold and pragmatic assessment of the forces at home and the forces abroad. The Vietnamese war against the US was not just won, as some leftists romantically put it, by peasants with pitchforks, but rather by the ability of the Vietnamese leaders to adopt the right military strategy and tactics as according to time, their understanding of the Sino-Soviet relation and receiving help from both powers, and their recognition of the strategic importance of a rear base. As Giap observed in the context of Dien Bien Phu, “a strong rear is always the decisive factor for victory in a revolutionary war.”

The strategic directive of the Vietminh to apply “dynamism, initiative, mobility and rapidity of decision in the face of new situations” was to General Giap a military art “whose characteristic is to defeat material force with moral force, defeat what is strong with what is weak, defeat what is modern with that is primitive, defeat the modern armies of the aggressive imperialists with the people’s patriotism and determination to carry out a thorough revolution.” A down-to-earth realist, he implored revolutionaries to “strike to win, strike only when success is certain, if it is not, then don’t strike.”

Critics of Giap generally pick on the fact that the Vietnamese lost so many in their war of liberation. Many of the obituaries for Giap in the western media have referred to the criticism of Giap’s nemesis, US Army General William Westmoreland, who followed a strategy of attrition (simply called body counts) against the Vietnamese rebels. The good General, with his deep concern for the loss of Vietnamese lives, said of Giap “Now such a disregard for human life may make a formidable adversary, but it does not make a military genius. An American commander losing men like that would hardly have lasted more than a few weeks.” Leaving aside the criminal irony in Mr. Westmoreland’s observations, no less a person than Martin van Creveld, a leading military historian and strategist of contemporary times, said emphatically in his book The Changing Face of War that “Cruel as it sounds, history shows that a tenth of the population dying in a protracted struggle is not necessarily too high a price to pay to fend off the yoke of a foreign power”. Indeed, freedom never comes free.

The real tragedy, as far as Vietnam is concerned, is not the atrocities of French or American imperialism. It is rather the 1979 invasion of Vietnam by China; the latter’s response to the former’s deposing of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Though the Chinese got a miserable drubbing at the hand of the Vietnamese, this event raises a lot of questions on both the practical and ethical possibilities of ‘Socialism in One Country’ (SOC). Though ‘Permanent Revolution’ is only an ideological pipedream, the regression of countries that adopted the SOC model into state capitalism – quite brutal in many cases – must compel activists and ideologues on the left to seriously rethink what was wrong in the original theory in the first place.

This is all the more necessary now at a time when ‘revolutions’ and ‘springs’ in the middle-east and elsewhere are simulated by Western powers or have been hijacked by them, at a time when counterinsurgency has become a highly professional academic discipline, at a time when obsessing about identities, ‘lived experiences’ and particularities is an intellectual fashion, and worse, to take from Oscar Wilde who wrote this well over a century ago, at a time when “it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.”

But even this rethinking, this ‘military art’ of asking the right questions, requires strategic formulation. Sadly, people associate strategy and tactics with armed struggle – in fact, the most non-violent struggle requires it. We need to know who the enemy is, we need to know on what grounds is his superiority, and we need to know how to pull him into a terrain where we can strike to win. And let us learn from the man who defeated the best military minds at their own game. Comrade Hero of Dien Bien Phu.

*All quotes of General Vo Nguyen Giap have been sourced from “The Military Art of People’s War: Selected Writings of General Vo Nguyen Giap”. Edited and with an introduction by Russell Stetler, published by Monthly Review Press, London, 1970.

Karthick RM is a research scholar at the University of Essex, UK

 

By Francis A. Boyle

12 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Indictment of the Federal Government of the U.S. for the commission of international crimes and petition for orders mandating its proscription and dissolution as an international criminal conspiracy and criminal organization, 18 September 1992

Introduction

All citizens of the World Community have both the right and the duty under public international law to sit in judgment over a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental norms of international criminal law committed by any member state of that same World Community. Such is the case for the International Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nationalities in the United States of America that convenes in San Francisco during the weekend of October 1-4, 1992. Its weighty but important task is to examine the long history of international criminal activity that has been perpetrated by the Federal Government of the United States of America against the Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America since it was founded in 1787.

Toward that end, I have the honor to present to the Members of this Tribunal the following charges against the Federal Government of the United States of America under international criminal law. In light of the gravity, severity, and longstanding nature of these international crimes and also in light of the fact that the Federal Government of the United States of America appears to be irrevocably committed to continuing down this path of lawlessness and criminality against Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America and elsewhere, I hereby petition the Members of this Tribunal to issue an Order proscribing the Federal Government of the United States of America as an International Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles as well as the other sources of public international law specified below. For that reason, I also request that the Members of this Tribunal issue an Order dissolving the Federal Government of the United States of America as a legal and political entity. Finally, I ask this Tribunal to declare that international legal sovereignty over the Territories principally inhabited by the Native American Peoples, the New Afrikan People, the Mexicano People, and the People of Puerto Rico resides in the hands of these respective Peoples Themselves.

In this regard, I should point out that the final Decision of this Tribunal will qualify as a judicial decision within the meaning of article 38(1)(d) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice and will therefore constitute a subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law for international law and practice. The Statute of the International Court of Justice is an integral part of the United Nations Charter under article 92 thereof. Thus, this Tribunal’s Decision can be relied upon by some future International Criminal Court or Tribunal, as well as by any People or State of the World Community that desires to initiate criminal proceedings against named individuals for the commission of the following international crimes. The Decision of this Tribunal shall serve as adequate notice to the appropriate officials in the United States Federal Government that they bear personal criminal responsibility under international law and the domestic legal systems of all Peoples and States in the World Community for designing and implementing these illegal, criminal and reprehensible policies and practices against Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America. Hereinafter, the Federal Government of the United States of America will be referred to as the Defendant.

BILL OF PARTICULARS AGAINST THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The Native American Peoples

1. The Defendant has perpetrated innumerable Crimes Against eace, Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes against Native American Peoples as recognized by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles.

2. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Genocide against Native American Peoples as recognized by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

3. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against Native American Peoples as recognized by the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.

4. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of Native American Peoples as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

5. The Defendant has perpetrated numerous and repeated violations of the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination against Native American Peoples.

6. The Defendant has systematically violated 371 treaties it concluded with Native American Peoples in wanton disregard of the basic principle of public international law and practice dictating pacta sunt servanda.

7. The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of Native American Peoples to self-determination as recognized by the 1945 United Nations Charter, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, fundamental principles of customary international law, and jus cogens.

8. The Defendant has violated the seminal United Nations Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Territories of 1960 with respect to Native American Peoples and Territories. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize Native American Territories immediately and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the Native American Peoples.

9. The Defendant has illegally refused to accord full-scope protections as Prisoners-of-War to captured Native American independence fighters in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I thereto of 1977. The Defendant’s treatment of captured Native American independence fighters as common criminals and terrorists constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Accords and thus a serious war crime.

10. The Defendant has deliberately and systematically permitted, aided and abetted, solicited and conspired to commit the dumping, transportation, and location of nuclear, toxic, medical and otherwise hazardous waste materials on Native American Territories across North America and has thus created a clear and present danger to the lives, health, safety, and physical and mental well-being of Native American Peoples in gross violation of article 3 and article 2(c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention, inter alia: Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; …

The New Afrikan People

11. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Slavery upon the New Afrikan People as recognized in part by the 1926 Slavery Convention and the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. The Defendant has illegally refused to pay reparations to the New Afrikan People for the commission of the International Crime of Slavery against Them in violation of basic norms of customary international law requiring such reparations to be paid.

12. The Defendant has perpetrated innumerable Crimes Against Humanity against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles.

13. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of genocide against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

14. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1973 Apartheid Convention.

15. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the New Afrikan People as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two aforementioned United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966.

16. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the 1965 Racism Convention against the New Afrikan People. The Defendant is the paradigmatic example of an irremediably racist state in international relations today.

17. The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of the New Afrikan People to self-determination as recognized by the United Nations Charter, the two United Nations Human rights Covenants of 1966, customary international law, and jus cogens.

18. The Defendant has illegally refused to apply the United Nations Decolonization Resolution of 1960 to the New Afrikan People and to the Territories that they principally inhabit. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize New Afrikan Territories immediately and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the New Afrikan People.

19. The Defendant has illegally refused to accord full-scope protections as Prisoners-of-War to captured New Afrikan independence fighters in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I thereto of 1977. The Defendant’s treatment of captured New Afrikan independence fighters as common criminals and terrorists constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Accords and thus a serious war crime.

The Mexicano People

20. In 1821, Mexico obtained its independence from colonial Spain as a sovereign Mestizo State, extending from Yucatan and Chiapas in the south, to the northern territories of California and New Mexico, which areas the Defendant today calls the states of Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. Nevertheless, in 1836 so-called settlors under the sponsorship of the Defendant began the division of the Mexicano People and State by causing the division of the Mexican state of Coahuila-Texas into the Mexican state of Coahuila and the so-called republic of Texas.

21. In 1846, the Defendant perpetrated an unjust, illegal and unjustifiable war upon the remainder of the sovereign People and State of Mexico that violated every known principle of public international law in existence at that time, including, but not limited to, the Christian Doctrine of just war, which was the then reigning standard of customary international law. As a result thereof, the Defendant illegally annexed close to 51% of the territories of the sovereign State of Mexico by means of forcing it to conclude the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo under military duress. For these reasons, this Treaty was and still is null and void ab initio as a matter of public international law. The Defendant acquired more Mexican territory through the Gadsen Treaty (Purchase) of 1854.

22. Since these 1848 and 1854 Treaties, the Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Genocide against the Mexicano People living within these occupied territories, as recognized by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

23. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against the Mexicano People living within these occupied territories, as recognized by the 1973 Apartheid Convention.

24. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the Mexicano People living within these occupied territories, as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two aforementioned United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966.

25. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the 1965 Racism Convention against the Mexicano People living within these occupied territories.

26. The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of the Mexicano People living within these occupied territories to self-determination, as recognized by the United Nations Charter, the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966, customary international law, and jus cogens.

27. Since the militarily-imposed division of the Mexican State, the Defendant and its agents have militarily occupied other portions of the Mexican State, have sought to influence the outcome of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, have practiced a consistent pattern of intervention into Mexico’s internal affairs, all of which have resulted in the arresting distortion and deformation of the Mexican social and economic order. In this regard, Defendant’s so-called North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) constitutes nothing more than an attempt to impose its hegemonial imperialism, economic colonialism, and human exploitation upon the People and State of Mexico.

28. The Defendant has illegally refused to apply the United Nations Decolonization Resolution of 1960 to the Mexicano People and to these occupied territories that they inhabit. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize both the Mexican occupied territories and the Republic of Mexico immediately, and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the Mexicano People.

The People and State of Puerto Rico

29. Since its illegal invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898, the Defendant has perpetrated innumerable Crimes against Peace, Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes against the People and State of Puerto Rico as recognized by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles.

30. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Genocide against the Puerto Rican People as recognized by the 1948 Genocide Convention.

31. The Defendant has perpetrated the International Crime of Apartheid against the Puerto Rican People as recognized by the 1973 Apartheid Convention.

32. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the most fundamental human rights of the Puerto Rican People as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human rights and the two aforementioned United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966.

33. The Defendant has perpetrated a gross and consistent pattern of violations of the 1965 Racism Convention against the Puerto Rican People.

34. The Defendant has denied and violated the international legal right of the Puerto Rican People to self-determination as recognized by the United Nations Charter, the two United Nations Human Rights Covenants of 1966, customary international law, and jus cogens.

35. The Defendant has illegally refused to apply the United Nations Decolonization Resolution of 1960 to Puerto Rico. Pursuant thereto, the Defendant has an absolute international legal obligation to decolonize Puerto Rico immediately and to transfer all powers it currently exercises there to the Puerto Rican People.

36. The Defendant has illegally refused to accord full-scope protections as Prisoners-of-War to captured Puerto Rican independence fighters in violation of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and Additional Protocol I thereto of 1977. The Defendant’s treatment of captured Puerto Rican independence fighters as common criminals and terrorists constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Accords and thus a serious war crime.

An International Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization

37. In light of the foregoing international crimes, the Defendant constitutes an International Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization in accordance with the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles and the other sources of public international law specified above. The Federal Government of the United States of America is legally identical to the Nazi government of World War II Germany. Indeed, the Defendant’s President, George Bush, has proclaimed a so-called New World Order that sounds and looks strikingly similar to the New Order proclaimed by Adolph Hitler over fifty years ago.

Conclusion

Like unto a pirate, the Defendant is hostis humani generis: The enemy of all humankind! For the good of all humanity, this Tribunal must condemn and repudiate the Federal Government of the United States of America and its grotesque vision of a New World Order that is constructed upon warfare, bloodshed, violence, criminality, genocide, racism, colonialism, apartheid, massive violations of fundamental human rights, and the denial of the international legal right of self-determination to the Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America and elsewhere around the world. Consequently, this Tribunal must find the Defendant guilty as charged on all of the counts specified above beyond a reasonable doubt. This Tribunal must also issue an Order that formally proscribes the Federal Government of the United States of America as an International Criminal Conspiracy and a Criminal Organization. This Tribunal must also issue a separate Order mandating the dissolution of the Federal Government of the United States of America as a legal and political entity. Finally, this Tribunal must declare that international legal sovereignty over the Territories principally inhabited by the Native American Peoples, the New Afrikan People, the Mexicano People, and the People of Puerto Rico resides, respectively, in the hands of these Peoples Themselves. The very lives, well-being, health, welfare, and safety of the Indigenous Peoples and Peoples of Color living in North America and elsewhere around the world depend upon the ultimate success of your deliberations.

Professor Francis A. Boyle is an international law expert and served as Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, as well as to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, where he drafted the Palestinian counter-offer to the now defunct Oslo Agreement. His books include “ Palestine, Palestinians and International Law” (2003), and “ The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law” (2010).

See USA on Trial: The International Tribunal on Indigenous Peoples’and Oppressed Nations in the United States. The Book and Verdict are available from Editorial El Coqui, 1671 N. Claremont,Chicago Illinois 60647. Or you can try calling the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Chicago at 312-342-4295. The Video can be obtained from Mission Creek Video, PO Box 411271 San Francisco CA 941141 (phone:415-695-0931).

By Human Rights Watch
12 October, 2013
Hrw.org
Download the full report

(New York) – Armed opposition groups in Syria killed at least 190 civilians and seized over 200 as hostages during a military offensive that began in rural Latakia governorate on August 4, 2013, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. At least 67 of the victims were executed or unlawfully killed in the operation around pro-government Alawite villages.

The 105-page report, “‘You Can Still See Their Blood’: Executions, Indiscriminate Shootings, and Hostage Taking by Opposition Forces in Latakia Countryside,” presents evidence that the civilians were killed on August 4, the first day of the operation. Two opposition groups that took part in the offensive, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham and Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, are still holding the hostages, the vast majority women and children. The findings strongly suggest that the killings, hostage taking, and other abuses rise to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said.

“These abuses were not the actions of rogue fighters,” said Joe Stork, acting Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “This operation was a coordinated, planned attack on the civilian population in these Alawite villages.”

To provide victims a measure of justice, the UN Security Council should immediately refer Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC), Human Rights Watch said. Human Rights Watch has also documented war crimes and crimes against humanity by Syrian government forces.

For the report Human Rights Watch conducted an on-site investigation and interviewed more than 35 people, including residents who survived the offensive, emergency response staff, and fighters and activists on both government and opposition sides.

Human Rights Watch found that at least 20 distinct armed opposition groups participated in the operation they alternately termed the “campaign of the descendants of Aisha, the mother of believers,” the “Barouda offensive,” or the “operation to liberate the coast,” which lasted until August 18. It is not clear whether all or most of these groups were in the villages on August 4 when the vast majority of abuses apparently took place.

However, five groups that were the key fund-raisers, organizers, and executors of the attacks were clearly present from the outset of the operation on August 4: Ahrar al-Sham, Islamic State of Iraq and Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra, Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, and Suquor al-Izz. Human Rights Watch concluded through multiple interviews, the on-site investigation, and a review of opposition statements and videos that these five armed groups are responsible for specific incidents that amount to war crimes.

Through the on-site investigation, witness statements, videos and photographs, and a review of hospital records, Human Rights Watch determined that opposition forces unlawfully killed at least 67 of the 190 dead civilians who were identified. For the rest of those killed, further investigation is required to determine the circumstances of their deaths and whether the victims died as a result of unlawful killings.

The high civilian death toll, the nature of the recorded wounds – for example, multiple gunshot or stabbing wounds – and the presence of 43 women, children, and elderly among the dead together indicate that opposition forces either intentionally or indiscriminately killed most of the remaining victims.

The scale and pattern of the serious abuses carried out by opposition groups during the operation indicate that they were systematic and planned as part of an attack on a civilian population. The evidence strongly suggests that the killings, hostage taking, and other abuses committed by opposition forces on and after August 4 rise to the level of crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said.

The local and senior commanders of Ahrar al-Sham, Islamic State of Iraq and Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra, Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, and Suquor al-Izz who led the operation may bear criminal responsibility for the killings, hostage taking, and other abuses. For both war crimes and crimes against humanity the principle of “command responsibility” applies to military commanders and others in position of authority who can be held criminally liable for crimes committed by forces under their effective command and control.

This covers situations in which the commanders knew or should have known of crimes being committed by their subordinates and failed to prevent the crimes or hand over those responsible for prosecution. Fighters from these and other groups who directly ordered or carried out abuses should also be held criminally accountable.

Human Rights Watch has previously documented war crimes and crimes against humanity by Syrian government and pro-government forces. These include systematic torture and summary and extrajudicial executions after ground operations, such as in Daraya (a suburb of Damascus) and in Tartous, Homs, and Idlib governorates. Abuses by opposition forces under no circumstances justify violations by the Syrian government.

The UN Security Council should impose an arms embargo on groups on all sides against whom there is credible evidence of widespread or systematic abuses or crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch also urged the UN Security Council to promote justice for victims of abuse by all sides by referring the situation in Syria to the ICC.
“Syrian victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity have waited too long for the Security Council to send a clear message that those responsible for horrible abuses will be held to account,” Stork said. “The ICC referral is long overdue.”

Attacks and Killings
The opposition fighters attacked between 4:30 and 5 a.m. on August 4, the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday, which marks the end of Ramadan. The fighters overran government army positions guarding the area and entered more than 10 Alawite villages. The government began an offensive to retake the area on August 5, regaining full control on August 18.

In separate interviews local residents and a government military intelligence officer serving in the area told Human Rights Watch that opposition fighters first entered the Sheikh Nabhan area of Barouda, where government soldiers were positioned. Once the opposition overtook that and other neighboring military positions, they attacked the villages of Barouda, Nbeiteh, al-Hamboushieh, Blouta, Abu Makkeh, Beyt Shakouhi, Aramo, Bremseh, Esterbeh, Obeen, and Kharata. In the following days, opposition fighters also gained control of Qal’ah, Talla, and Kafraya.
Fourteen residents from eight of these villages told Human Rights Watch that they awoke to the sounds of gun and mortar fire and the voices of incoming opposition fighters. They described frantically attempting to flee as opposition fighters stormed the area, opening fire apparently indiscriminately, and in some cases deliberately shooting at residents.

In some cases, opposition fighters executed or gunned down entire families. In other cases, surviving family members had to leave loved ones behind. One resident of the hamlet between Blouta and al-Hamboushieh described fleeing his home with his mother as opposition fighters entered his neighborhood, and having to leave his elderly father and blind aunt behind because of their physical infirmities. He said that when he returned to the neighborhood after the government retook the area, he found that his father and aunt had been killed:
My mom was here in the house with me. She came out of the house first, and I was behind her. We saw the three fighters just in front of us, and then we fled on foot down behind the house and into the valley. The three fighters that I saw were all dressed in black. They were shooting at us from two different directions. They had machine guns and were using snipers. My older brother came down and hid with us as well. We hid, but my dad stayed in the house. He was killed in his bed. My aunt, she is an 80-year-old blind woman, was also killed in her room. Her name is Nassiba.

Fourteen residents and first responders, interviewed separately, told Human Rights Watch that they witnessed executions or saw bodies that bore signs of execution, including some corpses that were bound and others that had been decapitated. A doctor working in the National Hospital in Latakia, which received the casualties from the countryside, told Human Rights Watch that the hospital received 205 corpses of civilians killed during the August 4-18 operation.

The doctor showed Human Rights Watch a medical report the hospital prepared on August 26 stating that the “[c]ause of death in several of [the bodies] was multiple gunshot wounds all over the bodies, in addition to stab wounds made with a sharp instrument, given the decapitation observed in most bodies … Some corpses were found in a state of complete charring, and others had their feet tied …” The medical report reflected that the degree of decomposition of the corpses was consistent with the victims having been killed around August 4.

Hostage Taking
According to opposition sources, including an opposition military officerfrom Latakia involved in negotiations, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham and Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, are holding over 200 civilians from the Alawite villages as hostages, the vast majority women and children. Nine residents from the Latakia countryside separately told Human Rights Watch that their relatives had been taken hostage. Three of these residents said they saw their relatives in the background of a video published on YouTube on September 7. The video showed civilians from the area held hostage by Abu Suhaib, the Libyan local leader of Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar.

A Barouda resident told Human Rights Watch that 23 of her relatives were missing. She said she saw several of them on the YouTube video: “The oldest son of my brother… [who was executed] would have just been starting school … He has two sons, [one] who is six, and [another] who is four-and-a-half.”

Other residents told Human Rights Watch about cases in which opposition fighters executed adult male family members, and then captured women and children from the family as hostages.
Groups that hold hostages should ensure they are treated humanely and immediately released, Human Rights Watch said. Countries with influence over these groups should urge them to release the hostages.

Some of the opposition atrocities during the operation had clear sectarian motivation. For example, in Barouda, opposition fighters intentionally damaged an Alawite maqam (a site where a religious figure is buried) and appear to have intentionally damaged and dug up the grave of the religious figure buried there. On August 4, opposition fighters abducted and later executed Sheikh Bader Ghazzal, the local Alawite religious authority in Barouda who presided over the maqam. The opposition group Jabhat al-Nusra released a statement on what is believed to be their website acknowledging that its members executed the sheikh, who was a relative of Fadl Ghazzal, an adviser to former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, because the sheikh supported the Syrian government.

Recommendations for Neighboring and Other Concerned Governments
All concerned governments with influence over these armed opposition groups should press them to end deliberate, indiscriminate, and disproportionate attacks on civilians, Human Rights Watch said. In addition, all governments, companies, and individuals should immediately stop selling or supplying weapons, ammunition, materiel, and funds to these groups, given the compelling evidence that they have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Support for these five groups should continue to be withheld until the groups stop committing these crimes and those responsible are fully and appropriately held to account. Anyone providing or selling arms and military assistance to the groups may be complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Governments should also not permit the use of their national territory for shipment of arms, ammunition, and other materiel to these groups, Human Rights Watch said. According to Syrian security officials, media reports, Western diplomats, and observations by journalists and humanitarian workers, foreign fighters in these groups enter Syria from Turkey, from which they also smuggle their weapons and obtain money and other supplies, and to which they retreat for medical treatment.

Turkey should increase border patrols and prevent the entry of fighters and arms for groups credibly implicated in systematic human rights violations. Turkey should also investigate and prosecute, under the principle of universal jurisdiction and in accordance with national laws, anyone in Turkey suspected of committing, being complicit in, or having command responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The UN Security Council and Turkey’s allies should call on Turkey in particular to do more to verify that no arms are passing through Turkey to abusive groups, Human Rights Watch said.
Public statements by fundraisers and financiers, opposition activists, and opposition fighters reveal that at least some of the funding for the Latakia operation came from individuals residing in Kuwait and other Gulf countries. Governments should restrict money transfers from Gulf residents to groups credibly implicated in systematic human rights abuses.
Universal jurisdiction laws also are a key backstop against impunity for heinous abuses, especially when no other viable justice options exist, Human Rights Watch said. Countries, such as Turkey should investigate people credibly linked to atrocities in Syria and avoid being a safe haven for human rights abusers.
© Copyright 2013, Human Rights Watch

Where America brings drones, the Chinese build roads. Al-Shabaab and co march in lockstep with this new imperialism
By John Pilger
9 October, 2013
@ The Guardian
Countries are “pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world”, wrote Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India, in 1898. Nothing has changed. The shopping mall massacre in Nairobi was a bloody facade behind which a full-scale invasion of Africa and a war in Asia are the great game.
The al-Shabaab shopping mall killers came from Somalia. If any country is an imperial metaphor, it is Somalia. Sharing a language and religion, Somalis have been divided between the British, French, Italians and Ethiopians. Tens of thousands of people have been handed from one power to another. “When they are made to hate each other,” wrote a British colonial official, “good governance is assured.”
Today Somalia is a theme park of brutal, artificial divisions, long impoverished by World Bank and IMF “structural adjustment” programmes, and saturated with modern weapons – notably President Obama’s personal favourite, the drone. The one stable Somali government, the Islamic Courts, was “well received by the people in the areas it controlled”, reported the US Congressional Research Service, “[but] received negative press coverage, especially in the west”. Obama crushed it; and last January Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, presented her man to the world. “Somalia will remain grateful to the unwavering support from the United States government,” effused President Hassan Mohamud. “Thank you, America.”
The shopping mall atrocity was a response to this – just as the Twin Towers attack and the London bombings were explicit reactions to invasion and injustice. Once of little consequence, jihadism now marches in lockstep with the return of unfettered imperialism.
Since Nato reduced modern Libya to a Hobbesian state in 2011, the last obstacles to Africa have fallen. “Scrambles for energy, minerals and fertile land are likely to occur with increasingly intensity,” report Ministry of Defence planners. As “high numbers of civilian casualties” are predicted, “perceptions of moral legitimacy will be important for success”. Sensitive to the PR problem of invading a continent, the arms mammoth BAE Systems, together with Barclays Capital and BP, warns that “the government should define its international mission as managing risks on behalf of British citizens”. The cynicism is lethal.British governments are repeatedly warned, not least by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, that foreign adventures beckon retaliation at home.
With minimal media interest, the US African Command (Africom) has deployed troops to 35 African countries, establishing a familiar network of authoritarian supplicants eager for bribes and armaments. In war games a “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. The British did this in India. It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, is consigned to oblivion by a new master’s black colonial elite – whose “historic mission”, warned Frantz Fanon half a century ago, is the subjugation of their own people in the cause of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged”. The reference also fits the son of Africa in the White House.
For Obama, there is a more pressing cause – China. Africa is China’s success story. Where the Americans bring drones, the Chinese build roads, bridges and dams. What the Chinese want is resources, especially fossil fuels. Nato’s bombing of Libya drove out 30,000 Chinese oil industry workers. More than jihadism or Iran, China is Washington’s obsession in Africa and beyond. This is a “policy” known as the “pivot to Asia”, whose threat of world war may be as great as any in the modern era.
This week’s meeting in Tokyo between John Kerry, the US secretary of state, Chuck Hagel, the defence secretary, and their Japanese counterparts accelerated the prospect of war. Sixty per cent of US naval forces are to be based in Asia by 2020, aimed at China. Japan is re-arming rapidly under the rightwing government of Shinzo Abe, who came to power in December with a pledge to build a “new, strong military” and circumvent the “peace constitution”.
A US-Japanese anti-ballistic-missile system near Kyoto is directed at China. Using long-range Global Hawk drones the US has sharply increased its provocations in the East China and South China seas, where Japan and China dispute the ownership of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Both countries now deploy advanced vertical take-off aircraft in Japan in preparation for a blitzkrieg.
On the Pacific island of Guam, from where B-52s attacked Vietnam, the biggest military buildup since the Indochina wars includes 9,000 US marines. In Australia this week an arms fair and military jamboree that diverted much of Sydney is in keeping with a government propaganda campaign to justify an unprecedented US military build-up from Perth to Darwin, aimed at China. The vast US base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs is, as Edward Snowden disclosed, a hub of US spying in the region and beyond; it is also critical to Obama’s worldwide assassinations by drone.
‘We have to inform the British to keep them on side,” McGeorge Bundy, an assistant US secretary of state, once said. “You in Australia are with us, come what may.” Australian forces have long played a mercenary role for Washington. However, China is Australia’s biggest trading partner and largely responsible for its evasion of the 2008 recession. Without China, there would be no minerals boom: no weekly mining return of up to a billion dollars.
The dangers this presents are rarely debated publicly in Australia, where Rupert Murdoch, the patron of the prime minister, Tony Abbott, controls 70% of the press. Occasionally, anxiety is expressed over the “choice” that the US wants Australia to make. A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute warns that any US plan to strike at China would involve “blinding” Chinese surveillance, intelligence and command systems. This would “consequently increase the chances of Chinese nuclear pre-emption … and a series of miscalculations on both sides if Beijing perceives conventional attacks on its homeland as an attempt to disarm its nuclear capability”. In his address to the nation last month, Obama said: “What makes America different, what makes us exceptional, is that we are dedicated to act.”
John Pilger’s new film, Utopia, is released on 15 November.

Sectarian hatred is moving from Syria  into the mainstream  of Turkey’s political life. Patrick Cockburn explains the complex battle lines
By Patrick Cockburn
6 October 2013
@ The Independent
The poison of sectarian hatred is spreading to Turkey from Syria as a result of the Turkish government giving full support to militant Sunni Muslims in the Syrian civil war.
The Alevi, a long-persecuted Shia sect to which 10-20 million Turks belong, say they feel menaced by the government’s pro-Sunni stance in the Shia-Sunni struggle that is taking place across the Muslim world.
Nevzat Altun, an Alevi leader in the Gazi quarter in Istanbul, says: “People here are scared that if those who support sharia come to power in Syria, the same thing could happen in Turkey.” He says that the Alevi of Turkey feel sympathy for the Syrian Alawites, both communities holding similar, though distinct, Shia beliefs and the Alevi oppose Turkey’s support for rebels fighting to overthrow Syria’s Alawite-dominated government.
Sectarian faultlines between the Sunni majority and the Alevi, Turkey’s largest religious minority, have always existed but are becoming deeper, more embittered and openly expressed. Atilla Yeshilada, a political and economic commentator, says that “anything [Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan says against the Alawites of Syria is full of sectarian innuendoes for the Alevi”.
Alawites who have fled to Turkey to escape the violence in Syria often find they are little safer after they have crossed the Turkish border. They say they dare not enter government-organised refugee camps because they are frightened of being attacked by the rebel Free Syrian Army as soon as it is discovered they are not Sunni.
Some Alawites have found their way to Istanbul where they are being looked after by the Alevi community. “A month ago we found Alawites wandering the streets of Istanbul and sleeping in parks where they earned a little money selling water and paper bags,” says Zaynal Odabashi, the head of the Pir Sultan Abdal Alevi cultural and religious centre in Gazi district where 180,000 out of a population of 520,000 are Alevi. He says that “we decided to take them in though the governor of Istanbul told us not to”, explaining that some 40 Syrian Alawite refugees are living in large tents at his centre alone and another 400 have been found places to sleep in houses nearby. The three million Syrian Arab Alawites may differ in religious practices from the Turkish Alevi, but they both follow core Shia beliefs such as reverence for the Twelve Imams. They both feel threatened by Sunni militants and know they are easily identifiable as even the poorest house has pictures of the Shia saints on the walls.
“They consider us as non-believers,” says Mr Odabashi, adding: “Of course, our people feel sympathy for the Alawites and we are against Turkey’s involvement in the war in Syria.”
Alawite refugees fed and housed by the Alevi tell grim tales of torture, disappearances and death. On a mat outside a big tent at the Pir Sultan centre lay an elderly looking man who said he is a Turkoman Alawite from Damascus whose district had been captured by the Free Syrian Army that held him and his 12-year-old daughter for up to 27 days.
His frightened eyes darted nervously around as he said his name was Ali Jabar and he was not sure of some details of what had happened to him because he had been blindfolded all the time he was held. His captivity began when there was a ring at his door at midnight and a voice said a neighbour needed to see him, but when he opened the door a man hit him on the head with his gun butt.
He was blindfolded by his captors whom he identified as the Free Syrian Army. They asked him if he believed in Bashar al-Assad and demanded he curse Imam Ali, but he had said: “No, not even if you cut my throat.”
They whipped him and set fire to a plastic bag so molten plastic dripped on to to his back. He rolled up his shirt to reveal half-healed whip marks and burns and took off his shoes to show where several of his toenails had been ripped out with pliers. He expected to be killed, but instead the men who held him threw him out of a car on a country road where he was found by a shepherd. He does not know what has happened to his daughter.
Ali Jabar later met other Alawite Turkomans who had fled from Aleppo and were sleeping in parks in Damascus. They managed to secure enough money to take 42 of them to Turkey in a bus, but they thought it was too dangerous for them to enter Turkish refugee camps. They finally reached Istanbul where they did not know where to go until the Alevi of Gazi offered to help them. Turkish government supporters deny or play down the connection between the Alevi and the Alawites but there is a common bond as both feel endangered by growing Sunni hostility to all Shia sects, regardless of their precise religious beliefs. Dogan Bermek, the president of the Alevi Foundation, a lobbying group mostly made up of better-off Alevi, asserts: “In Syria and in Turkey we are all the same Alevi. The differences between us are only regional because we have developed in different regions without contacts. We are on the same road though it has a thousand paths.”
How great is the danger of Sunni-Shia hostilities that have torn apart Iraq, Syria and Bahrain in the last decade erupting in Turkey? There are marked differences in religious observances between the Sunni majority and the Alevi who do not use mosques, but worship in some 3,000 prayer houses where men and women dance and sing during services. As a large Shia minority under the Ottoman Empire, the Alevi were persecuted and massacred as dissidents and potential sympathisers with the rival Shia Safavid empire in Iran. Oppression of the Alevi was much like that of Roman Catholics in Ireland by Britain from the 16th century on and it continued after the foundation of the modern Turkish state, with at least 8,000 Alevi Kurds of Dersim in the south-east being slaughtered in the late 1930s.
The Alevis became the bedrock of opposition movements in Turkey and make up much of the membership of leftist parties. In 1993 their spiritual leaders, intellectuals and artists held a festival in the eastern city of Sivas to celebrate a 15th-century poet. Trapped in a hotel by a mob of thousands of Sunnis protesting, among other  things, at the presence of the Turkish translator of Salman Rushdie, some 35 people were burned to death without the police intervening.
Three years later there was an assault on Alevis by the police, killing 20 people in the same Gazi quarter where Syrian Alawites are now taking refuge.
Since Erdogan won his first general election in 2002 there has been less state violence. But during the protests that started in Gezi Park in Istanbul this summer, all five of the demonstrators killed across the country came from the Alevi community.
This is probably as much a token of their prominence in protests as it is of the police targeting them. It is also a sign that Alevi anger is growing because of memories of past violence against them; discrimination which turned them into second-class citizens and lack of state recognition or support for their religion.
I attended a meeting in an Alevi prayer house called a Cem in Umraniye district on the Asian side of Istanbul, where Alevi activists were setting up an organisation to fight for their rights. Complaints about discrimination abounded: an attempt to set up a joint Sunni mosque and Alevi prayer hall in Ankara was condemned as an attempt to assimilate them and as unworkable because the Alevi would be singing when the Sunni were praying. A delegate said Alevi did not fast at Ramadan but at another time of year, making cohabitation in the same building difficult. There was a lack of state education about Alevi beliefs and resentment at Sunni slanders about their religion.
“The government doesn’t treat us as human beings,” said one delegate. “We pay taxes but we don’t get anything back.”
Resentful though the Alevi are at their treatment, they are at least dealing with a powerful government capable of meeting many of their demands. Mr Erdogan has no difficulty in apologising for events like the Dersim massacres carried out on behalf of a secular authoritarian state in the past. The Alevi do not forget past persecution, objecting to the government’s intention to name the third Bosphorus bridge after Selim the Grim, an Ottoman Sultan of the early 16th century regarded as an ogre by the Alevi, whom he slaughtered by the thousand. Not all the reasons are negative for the greater Alevi sense of identity and willingness to be more vocal in demanding their rights: Turkish security forces under Mr Erdogan are less violent  than they used to be and protesters are less likely to be imprisoned or harassed by the state.
But the Sunni-Shia civil wars exploding in Syria and Iraq are deepening sectarian differences among the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world.
Turkey is no exception to this trend, has a large Shia minority and is close to the heart of the turmoil. There is already talk of the “Pakistanisation” of Turkish provinces like Hatay and Mardin, which are used by al-Qa’ida-linked groups fighting in Syria as their rear bases. Turkey’s open border policy for rebels means that the Syrian war is spilling across the frontier.
Successful though Turkey has been politically and economically in the past decade, the long battle for power between the AK party and an authoritarian, secular state has created lasting divisions in society. The rising political temperature in Turkey and the region makes rising sectarian differences ever more explosive.

By Stephen Lendman
October 09, 2013
@ Global Research
On October 5, US Delta Force commandos, CIA operatives, and FBI agents abducted Abu Anas al-Liby. Doing so highlights what’s been out-of-control since 9/11.
In the 1980s, al-Liby was one of many CIA-recruited mujahideen fighters. They were used against Afghanistan’s Soviet occupiers.
Ronald Reagan called them “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.” He characterized Contra killers the same way.
Bin Laden, al-Liby, and many other Al Qaeda fighters were used strategically as both allies and enemies. Most recently, al-Liby was an anti-Gaddafi “freedom fighter.”
In 2000, he was indicted for his alleged role in bombing US Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies in 1998.
He was one of the FBI’s most wanted. He had a $5 million bounty on his head. Washington abducted him lawlessly. It did so on Libyan territory.
US policy is out-of-control. Obama authorizes whatever he wants anywhere worldwide. Rogue leaders operate that way.
On October 8, AP headlined ”Did Obama Swap ‘Black’ Detention sites for ships?”
He ordered alleged “terrorists (interrogated) for as long as it takes aboard US naval vessels.” Al-Libi is held on the USS San Antonio. It’s an amphibious warship.
Throughout his tenure, Obama continued the worst of odious Bush administration practices. The Clinton administration began them. Guilt or innocence doesn’t matter. Suspects are lawlessly abducted.
They’re denied all rights. They’re held secretly at US black sites. Confessions are extracted through torture. Detainees say anything to stop pain.
Guantanamo is the tip of the iceberg. Dozens of US torture prisons operate globally. Afghanistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and many other complicit US allies host them.
They permit indefinite detention, interrogations, torture and other forms of abuse.
They assist in capturing and transporting detainees. They allow use of their domestic airspace. They provide intelligence information.
America is by far the world’s leading human rights abuser. No nation in history matches its ruthlessness. It’s out-of-control. It’s unaccountable. It’s waging war on humanity. It’s doing it globally.
Reprieve is UK-based. It promotes rule of law accountability. It works to “secure each person’s right to a fair trial.” It tries to “save lives.”
In June 2008, it said America “may have used as many as 17 ships as floating prisons.”
“About 26,000 people are being (lawlessly) held by the US in secret prisons – a figure that includes land-based detention centers.”
“(I)nformation suggests up to 80,000 have been ‘through the system’ since 2001.”
So have thousands more under Obama.
Former Pentagon spokesman Navy Commander Jeffrey Gordon lied earlier, saying:
“We do not operate detention facilities on board Navy ships.” They’re in “Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.”
They’re in at least 54 complicit countries. According to Reprieve:
“Prison ships have been used by the US to hold terror suspects illegally since the days of President Clinton.”
“US government sources have confirmed that both the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu have been used to hold prisoners.”
“Reprieve investigations suggest that a further 15 ships have been used to hold prisoners beyond the rule of law since 2001.”
They’re “interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations.”
Reprieve legal director Clive Stafford later said:
“(W)e’ve identified thirty-two prison ships, sort of prison hulks you used to read about in Victorian England, which have been converted to hold prisoners, and we’ve got pictures of them in Lisbon Harbor, for example.”
“And these are holding prisoners around the world, as well. And there’s a bunch of proxy prisons – (in) Morocco, Egypt, Jordan and other countries – where this stuff is going on.”
“And this is a huge concern, because the world focus is on Guantanamo Bay, which really is a diversionary tactic in the whole war of terror or war on terror, whatever you’d like to call it.”
“And actually, most of these people who have been severed from their legal rights are in these other secret prisons around the world.”
According to a former detainee:
“One of my fellow prisoners in Guantanamo was at sea on an American ship before coming to Guantanamo.”
“He was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other prisoners on the ship.”

 
“They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV.”
“The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantanamo.”
Reprieve calls the USS Bataan one of America’s “most infamous ‘floating prisons.’ ”
John Walker Lindh was sent there. So was Australian David Hicks. Lindh was maliciously called the “American Taliban.”
Hicks was sold to US forces for bounty. Both men were lawlessly held. They were brutally tortured. Thousands of others have been treated the same way.
Obama promised to end lawless Bush administration practices. They continue out-of-control.
America’s war on terror authorizes anything goes. On September 18, 2001, Congress passed a joint House-Senate Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for “the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.”
On October 26, Patriot Act lawlessness followed. On November 13, Military Order Number 1 authorized the president to capture, kidnap or otherwise arrest non-citizens anywhere in the world for any reason.
US citizens are now vulnerable. Anyone can be arrested or abducted. They can be held indefinitely without charge, evidence, due process, trial, or other judicial fairness protections.
Torture is official US policy. Bush established it. On September 17, 2001, he signed a secret finding.
It authorized the CIA to “Capture, Kill, or Interrogate Al-Queda Leaders.”
It mandated establishing secret global facilities to detain and interrogate them. Doing so without guidelines on proper treatment was OK’d.
Detainees were declared “unlawful enemy combatants.” Obama calls them “unprivileged enemy belligerents.”
He authorized their murder or capture and indefinite detention. Torture remains official US policy. The worst of Bush administration practices continue.
International, constitutional and US statute laws no longer apply. Diktat power replaced them. Today’s America reflects out-of-control lawlessness.
In 2007, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) published a report titled “Off the Record: US Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the ‘War on Terror.’ ”

It discussed ghost detainees held in secret black sites. It revealed how America lawlessly uses “proxy detention.”
It demonstrates that “far from targeting the ‘worst of the worst,’ the system sweeps up low-level detainees and even involves the detention of the wives and children of the ‘disappeared.’ ”
Doing so violates core rule of law principles. CCR documented torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Obama continues the worst of Bush administration policies.
Separately, CCR discussed ghost detainees and black sites. Forced disappearance victims became “ghosts.”
“Black sites” are secret US prisons operating globally – on land and at sea.
“What is ‘enforced disappearance,’ ” asked CCR? “Is it legal?”
The practice violates “numerous treaties binding on the United States” It spurns “international humanitarian law.”
It occurs when Washington “arrests, detains or abducts a person (without) acknowledg(ing) (having done so) or the location” where targeted individuals are detained.
Doing so denies them core legal protections. It’s official US policy. American citizens are vulnerable. No one anywhere is safe.
“What are conditions like in the ‘black sites,’ ” asked CCR?
CIA officials admit using so-called “enhanced interrogation (or ‘alternative interrogation’) techniques.”
Doing so constitutes the worst kind of cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Nothing too brutal is out of bounds. Virtually everything is OK.
Former detainees reveal horrific torture they experienced. They were fortunate to survive and be able to explain.
“What do CIA secret prisons have to do with other US detentions?”
Washington operates global black sites. It does so separately or jointly with host countries. It transfers some detainees to foreign-controlled facilities.
“In all cases, (they’re) deprived of any substantive protection of their rights, and reports of torture and abuse are common.”
“Who is held in CIA secret detention?”
Numerous individuals from many countries are targeted. Many were sold for bounty. Some were held because of mistaken identity. The great majority of victims committed no crimes.
Guilt or innocence doesn’t matter. Once abducted, all rights are lost. Boys young as seven were abducted.
“What should be done?”
Lawless abductions, secret detentions, torture and other forms of abuse violate core international, constitutional and US statute law provisions.
America remains unaccountable. So are complicit countries. CCR and other human rights organizations demand these practices cease. Obama pays them no heed.
“What is CCR doing about ghost detention?”
It filed lawsuits demanding release of information. It did so under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
It wants the shroud of secrecy removed. It largely remains. What’s known about Guantanamo diverts from full disclosure about America’s global black sites.
They hold the vast majority of US ghost detainees. They do so lawlessly. Globalized torture is official US policy. So are worldwide secret prisons.
Obama continues the worst Bush administration practices. He added more of his own. He governs by diktat authority. What he says goes.
He operates as judge, jury and executioner. He authorizes cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. He does so at home and abroad. It continues unabated. Millions are grievously harmed globally.
Rogue leaders govern this way. He’s Caligula writ large. He’s America’s worst ever. He threatens humanity’s survival. It may not survive on his watch.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

By Nile Bowie

11 October, 2013
Although the detention of Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan only lasted a few hours, it was a bold indication of the country’s deepening instability since the civil war that toppled strongman Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. In the early hours of October 10th, militants whisked Zeidan out of a luxury suite in the Corinthia Hotel, regarded as one of the most secure places in Tripoli, without a shot being fired. The gunmen who abducted the prime minister belonged to one of the many former rebel militias now interwoven into Libya’s fragmented power structure as an improvised police force. Militants were angered by the capture of suspected militant Abu Anas al-Libi, who was abducted days earlier off the streets of Tripoli by US Special Forces in connection to the 1998 bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Prime Minister Zeidan was held over suspicion that he allowed al-Libi’s abduction to take place, despite publically raising concerns over the illegality of the snatch to US authorities.
Reports indicate that Zeidan’s abductors were not willing to let him go, and that another militia – calling itself the ‘Reinforcement Force’ – intervened and freed the prime minister by force. The Libyan leader escaped unharmed, certainly the best scenario that could have resulted from this crisis. Information trickled out slowly in the tense few hour period during which Zeidan’s whereabouts were unknown, and had allied militias not come to his aid, the situation could have spiraled into a hostage crisis or worse. This embarrassing incident speaks volumes about the state of affairs in Libya today, and casts doubt on the government’s ability to maintain order in a state that is now struggling to contain rival tribal militias and Islamist militants with separatist ambitions. The irony is that since NATO provided funding, arms, and air support to topple the previous regime on the basis of “humanitarian intervention,” the country become more lawless, fractured, and unstable, while ongoing violations of Libya’s sovereignty by the US add more fuel to the fire.
Washington’s snatch-and-grab
Since al-Libi’s capture near his home in Tripoli, the militant has been kept captive aboard the USS San Antonio warship in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and faces interrogations by the CIA, FBI, and US military without access to a lawyer or notification of his legal rights. The use of a US warship as a floating ‘black-site’ where legal rights are withheld violates Article 22 of the Third Geneva Convention, which mandates that any detention premises be located on land. The Obama administration has gotten around international law by justifying al-Libi’s detention under the laws of war, in much the same process used by the Obama Administration for Somali militant Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame in 2011 prior to being taken to the US to face charges. Prime Minister Zeidan – whether or not he colluded with the US over al-Libi’s capture – was detained as a result of the US sidelining international law and operating with impunity inside Libyan territory.
Zeidan gently raised the issue in a press conference days ago in a bid to appease popular outrage over the US commando raid, but stated that the incident would not seriously harm relations with the US. The fragile Libyan government denied that it had played a role in the commando operation, but the New York Times reports that the authorities were “willing to tacitly support the raid as long as they could protest in public.” After less than a year in office, Zeidan could find himself sacked by members of the Libyan Parliament that have sworn to remove him if evidence emerges that he had prior knowledge of the US raid. The growing perception among militias that Libya’s government has become subservient to the United States is inherently dangerous, as it provides a powerful pretext for those groups to challenge Tripoli by force. Libya’s militias were happy to receive support from NATO and the United States – who had the mutual aim of giving Gaddafi an early funeral – but “the revolutionaries” were naïve if they thought that Washington’s interests would be anything other than a main priority in their new state. Although there is a parliament and a prime minister, political power still grows from the barrel of a gun, and militiamen clearly wield control in the absence of an army and police force.
Closing the Pandora’s box of extremism?
During his recent speech to the UN, President Obama offered a weak defense of US foreign policy in Libya, claiming that “countless lives were saved, and a tyrant could not kill his way back to power,” and that “without international action, Libya would now be engulfed in civil war and bloodshed.” As al-Qaeda-linked groups carry out waves of assassinations and thousands of prisoners are held in militia-run clandestine detention centers throughout the country, the Obama administration is clearly not being honest. The widespread persecution of dark-skinned Libyans native to the south of the country continues, while the current government uses Gaddafi-era tactics to track dissenters and loyalists with impunity. The West was correct in thinking that Gaddafi could eventually be toppled with enough force, but they were simply wrong to assume that Libya – with its complex tribal and ethnic demographics – would become a compliant satellite state under the umbrella of a transitional government run by bureaucrats with European-dual citizenship.
PM Zeidan spent the last three decades in exile in Geneva, and though he played a crucial role in persuading France to lend their firepower to the rebels, he came within a hair’s breadth of being consumed by the “revolution” he helped create. Libya holds enormous fresh-water aquifers and the largest oil reserves in Africa, and gaining preferential access to exploit these resources was a major factor in persuading Western states to support the rebels – but instability has caused chaos in the oil sector as militias vie for control over oil fields. Reports indicate that as of July 2013, oil production fell to about 200,000 barrels a day from around 1.3 million, resulting in $5 billion in losses. The absence of a strong and inclusive central government, a state-backed reconciliation process, and a post-Gaddafi constitution all pose major challenges to the stability of the state. There is little to applaud as momentum grows in the provinces of Cyrenaica and Fezzan to break away from the government in Tripoli. Libya is hemorrhaging, and recent events indicate a growing divide between the Western-backed government and the armed groups who are now overtly challenging the fragile state apparatus.

By Richard Falk
10 October, 2013
@ Richard Falk Blog
Background
If the politics of deflection exhibit the outward reach of Israel’s grand strategy of territorial expansionism and regional hegemony, the politics of fragmentation serves Israel’s inward moves designed to weaken Palestinian resistance, induce despair, and de facto surrender. In fundamental respects deflection is an unwitting enabler of fragmentation, but it is also its twin or complement.
The British were particularly adept in facilitating their colonial project all over the world by a variety of divide and rule tactics, which almost everywhere haunted anti-colonial movements, frequently producing lethal forms of post-colonial partition as in India, Cyprus, Ireland, Malaya, and of course, Palestine, and deadly ethnic strife elsewhere as in Nigeria, Kenya, Myanmar, Rwanda. Each of these national partitions and post-colonial traumas has produced severe tension and long lasting hostility and struggle, although each takes a distinctive form due to variations from country to country of power, vision, geography, resources, history, geopolitics, leadership.
An additional British colonial practice and legacy was embodied in a series of vicious settler colonial movements that succeeded in effectively eliminating or marginalizing resistance by indigenous populations as in Australia, Canada, the United States, and somewhat less so in New Zealand, and eventually failing politically in South Africa and Namibia, but only after decades of barbarous racism.
In Palestine the key move was the Balfour Declaration, which was a colonialist gesture of formal approval given to the Zionist Project in 1917 tendered at the end of Ottoman rule over Palestine. This was surely gross interference with the dynamics of Palestinian self-determination (at the time the estimated Arab population of Palestine was 747,685, 92.1% of the total, while the Jewish population was an estimate 58,728, which amounted to 7.9%) and a decisive stimulus for the Zionist undertaking to achieve supremacy over the land embraced by the British mandate to administer Palestine in accordance with a framework agreement with the League of Nation. The agreement repeated the language of the Balfour Declaration in its preamble: “Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”(emphasis added) To describe this encouragement of Zionism as merely ‘interference’ is a terribly misleading understatement of the British role in creating a situation of enduring tension in Palestine, which was supposedly being administered on the basis of the wellbeing of the existing indigenous population, what was called “a sacred trust of civilization” in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, established for the “well-being and development” of peoples “not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” The relevance of the politics of fragmentation refers to a bundle of practices and overall approach that assumed the form of inter-ethnic and inter-religious strife during the almost three decades that the mandate arrangements were in effect.*
At the same time, the British was not the whole story by any means: the fanatical and effective exploitation of the opportunity to establish a Jewish homeland of unspecified dimensions manifested the dedication, skill, and great ambition of the Zionist movement; the lack of comparable sustained and competent resistance by the indigenous population abetted the transformation of historic Palestine; and then these developments were strongly reinforced by the horrors of the Holocaust and the early complicity of the liberal democracies with Naziism that led the West to lend its support to the settler colonial reality that Zionism had become well before the 1948 War. The result was the tragic combination of statehood and UN membership for Israel and the nakba involving massive dispossession creating forced refugee and exile for most Palestinians, and leading after 1967 to occupation, discrimination, and oppression of those Palestinians who remained either in Israel or in the 22% of original Palestine.
It should be recalled that the UN solution of 1947, embodied in GA Resolution 181, after the British gave up their mandatory role was no more in keeping with the ethos of self-determination than the Balfour Declaration, decreeing partition and allocating 55% of Palestine to the Jewish population, 45% to the Palestinians without the slightest effort to assess the wishes of the population resident in Palestine at the time or to allocate the land in proportion to the demographic realities at the time. The UN solution was a new rendition of Western paternalism, opposed at the time by the Islamic and Middle Eastern members of the UN. Such a solution was not as overbearing as the mandates system that was devised to vest quasi-colonial rule in the victorious European powers after World War I, yet it was still an Orientalist initiative aimed at the control and exploitation of the destiny of an ethnic, political, and economic entity long governed by the Ottoman Empire.
The Palestinians (and their Arab neighbors) are often told in patronizing tones by latter day Zionists and their apologists that the Palestinians had their chance to become a state, squandered their opportunity, thereby forfeiting their rights to a state of their own by rejecting the UN partition plan. In effect, the Israeli contention is that Palestinians effectively relinquished their statehood claims by this refusal to accept what the UN had decreed, while Israel by nominally accepting the UN proposals validated their sovereign status, which was further confirmed by its early admission to full membership in the UN. Ever since, Israel has taken advantage of the fluidity of the legal situation by at once pretending to accept the UN approach of seeking a compromise by way of mutual agreement with the Palestinians while doing everything in its power to prevent such an outcome by projecting its force throughout the entirety of Palestine, by establishing and expanding settlements, the ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem, and by advancing an array of maximalist security claims that have diminished Palestinian prospects. That is, Israel has publicly endorsed conflict-resolving diplomacy but operationally has been constantly moving the goal posts by unlawfully creating facts on the ground, and then successfully insisting on their acceptance as valid points of departure. In effect, and with American help, Israel has seemingly given the Palestinians a hard choice, which is tacitly endorsed by the United States and Europe: accept the Bantustan destiny we offer or remain forever refugees and victims of annexation, exile, discrimination, statelessness.
Israel has used its media leverage and geopolitical clout to create an asymmetric understanding of identity politics as between Jews and Palestinians. Jews being defined as a people without borders who can gain Israeli nationality no matter where they live on the planet, while Palestinians are excluded from Israeli nationality regardless of how deep their indigenous roots in Palestine itself. This distinction between the two peoples exhibits the tangible significance of Israel as a ‘Jewish State,’ and why such a designation is morally and legally unacceptable in the 21st century even as it so zealously claimed by recent Israeli leaders, none more than Benyamin Netanyahu.
Modalities of Fragmentation
The logic of fragmentation is to weaken, if not destroy, a political opposition configuration by destroying its unity of purpose and strategy, and fomenting to the extent possible conflicts between different tendencies within the adversary movement. It is an evolving strategy that is interactive, and by its nature becomes an important theme of conflict. The Palestinians in public constantly stress the essential role of unity, along with reconciliation to moderate the relevance of internal differences. In contrast, the Israelis fan the flames of disunity, stigmatizing elements of the Palestinian reality that are relevantly submissive, and accept the agenda and frameworks that are devised by Tel Aviv refusing priorities set by Palestinian leaders. Over the course of the conflict from 1948 to the present, there have been ebbs and flows in the course of Palestinian unity, with maximum unity achieved during the time when Yasir Arafat was the resistance leader and maximum fragmentation evident since Hamas was successful in the 2006 Gaza elections, and managed to seize governmental control from Fatah in Gaza a year later. Another way that Israel has promoted Palestinian disunity is to favor the so-called moderates operating under the governance of the Palestinian Authority while imposing inflicting various punishments on Palestinians adhering to Hamas.
–Zionism, the Jewish State, and the Palestinian Minority. Perhaps, the most fundamental form of fragmentation is between Jews and Palestinians living within the state of Israel. This type of fragmentation has two principal dimensions: pervasive discrimination against the 20% Palestinian minority (about 1.5 million) affecting legal, social, political, cultural, and economic rights, and creating a Palestinian subjectivity of marginality, subordination, vulnerability. Although Palestinians in Israel are citizens they are excluded from many benefits and opportunities because they do not possess Jewish nationality. Israel may be the only state in the world that privileges nationality over citizenship in a series of contexts, including family reunification and access to residence. It is also worth observing that if demographic projections prove to be reliable Palestinians could be a majority in Israel as early as 2035, and would almost certainly outnumber Jews in the country by 2048. Not only does this pose the familiar choice for Israel between remaining an electoral democracy and retaining its self-proclaimed Jewish character, but it also shows how hegemonic it is to insist that the Palestinians and the international community accept Israel as a Jewish state.
This Palestinian entitlement, validated by the international law relating to fundamental human rights prohibiting all forms of discrimination, and especially structural forms embedded in law that discriminate on the basis of race and religion. The government of Israel, reinforced by its Supreme Court, endorses the view that only Jews can possess Israeli nationality that is the basis of a range of crucial rights under Israeli law. What is more Jews have Israeli nationality even if lacking any link to Israel and wherever they are located, while Palestinians (and other religious and ethnic minorities) are denied Israeli nationality (although given Israeli citizenship) even if indigenous to historic Palestine and to the territory under the sovereign control of the state of Israel.
A secondary form of fragmentation is between this minority in Israel and the rest of the Palestinian corpus. The dominant international subjectivity relating to the conflict has so far erased this minority from its imaginary of peace for the two peoples, or from any sense that Palestinian human rights in Israel should be internationally implemented in whatever arrangements are eventually negotiated or emerges via struggle. As matters now stand, the Palestinian minority in Israel is unrepresented at the diplomatic level and lacks any vehicle for the expression of its grievances.
–Occupied Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora (refugees and enforced exile). Among the most debilitating forms of fragmentation is the effort by Israel and its supporters to deny Palestinian refugees and Palestinians living in the diaspora) their right of return as confirmed by GA Resolution 184? There are between 4.5 million and 5.5 million Palestinians who are either refugees or living in the diaspora, as well as about 1.4 million resident in the West Bank and 1.6 million in Gaza.
The diplomatic discourse has been long shaped by reference to the two state mantra. This includes the reductive belief that the essence of a peaceful future for the two peoples depends on working out the intricacies of ‘land for peace.’ In other words, the dispute is false categorized as almost exclusively about territory and borders (along with the future of Jerusalem), and not about people. There is a tacit understanding that seems to include the officials of the Palestinian Authority to the effect that Palestinians refugee rights will be ‘handled’ via compensation and the right of return, not to the place of original dispossession, but to territory eventually placed under Palestinian sovereignty.
Again the same disparity as between the two sides is encoded in the diplomacy of ‘the peace process,’ ever more so during the twenty years shaped by the Oslo framework. The Israel propaganda campaign was designed to make it appear to be a deal breaker for the Palestinian to insist on full rights of repatriation as it would allegedly entail the end of the promise of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Yet such a posture toward refugees and the Palestinian diaspora cruelly consigns several million Palestinians to a permanent limbo, in effect repudiating the idea that the Palestinians are a genuine ‘people’ while absolutizing the Jews as a people of global scope. Such a dismissal of the claims of Palestinian refugees also flies in the face of the right of return specifically affirmed in relation to Palestine by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 194, and more generally supported by Article 13 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Two Warring Realms of the Occupation of Palestine: the Palestine Authority versus Hamas. Again Israel and its supporters have been able to drive an ideological wedge between the Palestinians enduring occupation since 1967. With an initial effort to discredit the Palestine Liberation Organzation that had achieved control over a unified and robust Palestine national movement, Israel actually encouraged the initial emergence of Hamas as a radical and fragmenting alternative to the PLO when it was founded in the course of the First Intifada. Israel of course later strongly repudiated Hamas when it began to carry armed struggle to pre-1967 Israel, most notoriously engaging in suicide bombings in Israel that involved indiscriminate attacks on civilians, a tactic repudiated in recent years.
Despite Hamas entering into the political life of occupied Palestine with American, and winning an internationally supervised election in 2006, and taking control of Gaza in 2007, it has continued to be categorized as ‘a terrorist organization’ that is given no international status. This terrorist designation is also relied upon to impose a blockade on Gaza that is a flagrant form of collective punishment in direct violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Palestine Authority centered in Ramallah has also, despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary, refused to treat Hamas as a legitimate governing authority or to allow Hamas to operate as a legitimate political presence in the West Bank and Jerusalem or to insist on the inclusion of Hamas in international negotiations addressing the future of the Palestinian people. This refusal has persisted despite the more conciliatory tone of Hamas since 2009 when its leader, Khaled Meshaal, announced a shift in the organization’s goals: an acceptance of Israel as a state beside Palestine as a state provided a full withdrawal to 1967 borders and implementation of the right of return for refugees, and a discontinuation by Hamas of a movement based on armed struggle. Mashel also gave further reassurances of moderation by an indication that earlier goals of liberating the whole of historic Palestine, as proclaimed in its Charter, were a matter of history that was no longer descriptive of its political program.
In effect, the territorial fragmentation of occupied Palestine is reinforced by ideological fragmentation, seeking to somewhat authenticate and privilege the secular and accommodating leadership provided by the PA while repudiating the Islamic orientation of Hamas. In this regard, the polarization in such countries as Turkey and Egypt is cynically reproduced in Palestine as part of Israel’s overall occupation strategy. This includes a concerted effort by Israel to make it appear that material living conditions for Palestinians are much better if the Palestinian leadership cooperates with the Israeli occupiers than if it continues to rely on a national movement of liberation and refuses to play the Oslo game.
The Israeli propaganda position on Hamas has emphasized the rocket attacks on Israel launched from within Gaza. There is much ambiguity and manipulation of the timeline relating to the rockets in interaction with various forms of Israeli violent intrusion. We do know that the casualties during the period of Hamas control of Gaza have been exceedingly one-sided, with Israel doing most of the killing, and Palestinians almost all of the dying. We also know that when ceasefires have been established between Israel and Gaza, there was a good record of compliance on the Hamas side, and that it was Israel that provocatively broke the truce, and then launched major military operations in 2008-09 and 2012 on a defenseless and completely vulnerable population.
Cantonization and the Separation Wall: Fragmenting the West Bank. A further Israeli tactic of fragmentation is to make it difficult for Palestinians to sustain a normal and coherent life. The several hundred check points throughout the West Bank serious disrupt mobility for the Palestinians, and make it far easier for Palestinians to avoid delay and humiliation. It is better for them to remain contained within their villages, a restrictive life reinforced by periodic closures and curfews that are extremely disruptive. Vulnerability is accentuated by nighttime arrests, especially of young male Palestinians, 60% of whom have been detained in prisons before they reach the age of 25, and the sense that Israeli violence, whether issuing from the IDF or the settlers enjoys impunity, and often is jointly carried out.
The Oslo framework not only delegated to the PA the role of maintaining ‘security’ in Palestinian towns and cities, but bisected the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, with Israeli retaining a residual security right throughout occupied Palestine. Area C, where most of the settlements are located, is over 60% of the West Bank, and is under exclusive control of Israel.
This fragmentation at the core of the Oslo framework has been a key element in perpetuating Palestinian misery.
The fragmentation in administration is rigid and discriminatory, allowing Israeli settlers the benefits of Israel’s rule of law, while subjecting Palestinians to military administration with extremely limited rights, and even the denial of a right to enjoy the benefit of rights. Israel also insists that since it views the West Bank as disputed territory rather than ‘occupied’ it is not legally obliged to respect international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions. This fragmentation between Israeli settlers and Palestinian residents is so severe that it has been increasingly understood in international circles as a form of apartheid, which the Rome Statute governing the International Criminal Court denominates as one type of ‘crime against humanity.’
The Separation Wall is an obvious means of separating Palestinians from each other and from their land. It was declared in 2004 to be a violation of international law by a super majority of 14-1 in the International Court of Justice, but to no avail, as Israel has defied this near unanimous reading of international law by the highest judicial body in the UN, and yet suffered no adverse consequences. In some West Bank communities Palestinians are surrounded by the wall and in others Palestinian farmers can only gain access to and from their land at appointed times when wall gates are opened.
Fragmentation and Self-Determination
The pervasiveness of fragmentation is one reason why there is so little belief that the recently revived peace process is anything more than one more turn of the wheel, allowing Israel to proceed with its policies designed to take as much of what remains of Palestine as it wants so as to realize its own conception of Jewish self-determination. Just as Israel refuses to restrict the Jewish right of return, so it also refuses to delimit its boundaries. When it negotiates internationally it insists on even more prerogatives under the banner of security and anti-terrorism. Israel approach such negotiations as a zero-sum dynamic of gain for itself, loss for Palestine, a process hidden from view by the politics of deflection and undermining the Palestinian capacity for coherent resistance by the politics of fragmentation.
* There are two issues posed, beyond the scope of this post, that bear on Palestinian self-determination emanating from the Balfour Declaration and the ensuing British mandatory role in Palestine: (1) to what extent does “a national home for the Jewish people” imply a valid right of self-determination, as implemented by the establishment of the state of Israel? Does the idea of ‘a national home’ encompass statehood? (2) to what extent does the colonialist nature of the Balfour Declaration and the League mandate system invalidate any actions taken?
Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He is currently serving as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. http://richardfalk.wordpress.com

By Kourosh Ziabari
11 October, 2013
@ Countercurrents.org
Syria has become a battlefield for the face-off between the forces of government, Al-Qaeda terrorists and foreign-backed mercenaries that are hell-bent on removing President Bashar al-Assad from power. So far, more than 100,000 Syrians have been killed in the civil war which has extricated the Arab country. Thousands of terrorists from different Arab countries and even European nations have been deployed in Syria to fight the government of President Assad.
The U.S. hypocrisy in supporting the Al-Qaeda combatants is the most agonizing reality taking place in Syria. The White House launched a War on Terror following the painful events of September 11, 2001 and killed hundreds of civilians across the world under the guise of fighting terrorism, Al-Qaeda, Taliban and who they call Islamist Jihadists. However, it’s now overtly supporting, funding and arming the same terrorists in Syria just because it cannot reconcile its differences with the Syrian government.
After a chemical attack in the Ghouta district of Damascus killed around 1,400 people, as claimed by the United States, the White House announced that it intends to launch a “surgical”, “limited” military strike against Syria, and that the attack would certainly take place. It later postponed its plans after the Russian government presented a proposal that would demand Syria to destroy its arsenal of chemical weapons. Washington accepted to withdraw its war plans, and as some political analysts noted, suffered a great political setback.
To discuss the ongoing crisis in Syria, the reasons why the United States abandoned its plans for attacking Syria and the future of civil war in the embattled Arab country, Iran Review conducted an interview with prominent political scientist Prof. James Petras.
James Petras is a renowned progressive American philosopher and political scientist and a retired professor of sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He has published over 2,000 articles in such magazines and newspapers as the New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy and Le Monde Diplomatique. His latest book titled “The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack” was published in 2011 by the Clarity Press.
What follows is the text of Iran Review’s exclusive interview with Prof. James Petras.
Q: U.S. President Barack Obama had categorically announced that his country will be launching surgical, limited attacks on certain sites in Syria. However, after the Russian proposal was set forth, he retreated from his position and postponed the strike. Don’t you consider this retreatment a diplomatic failure for the United States?

A: I think it was more a political debacle. Let’s put the decision of Obama in context. First, all the opinion polls in the United States indicated that the public, around 65% of the U.S. citizens, opposed a new war involving the United States and only 20% to 25% were in favor and the rest were, at the time, undecided. That’s one big fact. Secondly, the number of Congressmen opposing the war ran close to 9 to 1. So the Congress people themselves in a strong majority were going to vote against Obama’s authorization to engage in a war. For Obama to proceed to bomb Syria in that context, it was a dire consequence impending, I think it would have been a tremendous political defeat and it would have discredited his government at a time when the U.S. government faces a fiscal crisis as it faces the possibility that the debt limit would not be raised which would send turmoil in the financial market. Now, Obama was in an extremely weak domestic position which no president in the recent history has faced.

In that context, he also faced the defeat in the British Parliament and the strong opposition by the European public opinion which was running about 3 to 1. Public opinion in Turkey also strongly opposed. The only ally that Obama really had internationally was Saudi Arabia which is an autocratic dictatorship, Israel which is a racist, anti-Muslim state, and of course the decrepit socialist Hollande in France who has the lowest popularity among the presidents of the recent history. So internationally Obama was also in an extremely difficult situation and actually we look at it from that perspective. The Putin initiative which Obama quickly agreed to, was a life-saver because it allowed Obama a formula for saving face at least in that particular conjunction. But I do want to raise this question; the recent diplomatic moves by the Secretary of State Kerry indicates that the military, aerial attack is still on the agenda as Kerry tries to push through a clause on the agreement which would allow the U.S. to determine circumstances under which it could launch an air attack. So it may be the case that Obama agreed to this diplomatic initiative of Putin in order to neutralize international and domestic opposition and once the opposition subsided, he may take advantage of that to launch an aerial attack using as pretext that Syria is not destroying the chemical weapons fast enough or that the inventory is incomplete, etc. We cannot discount that because the U.S. has signed a previous international agreement, in the recent case with Russia, and in the UN Security Council, on overflight to Libya which turned into full-scale aerial assaults which destroyed President Qaddafi’s army. And the second case is the agreement between Clinton and Mihailovic which was followed by U.S. bomb attacks for several weeks.

So, the United States has a history of making agreements and then violating them. We have to keep that historical precedence in mind.

Q: How could the United States justify a possible military strike against Syria, while Syria had never threatened the U.S. national interests or security? The only pretext they could resort to was that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the rebels, but they couldn’t substantiate this claim. What’s your take on that?

A: The international law, as far as the United States is concerned, doesn’t exist. It invaded Afghanistan with no logical, factual basis, accusing them of sheltering Al-Qaeda. The U.S. violated international law by invading Iraq despite the fact that it used fabricated evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction. The U.S. supported Israel’s invasion and bombing of Lebanon and Gaza despite the fact that it was a clear violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions. So, the imperial countries have a history, and especially the United States, a recent history of not abiding by the international law. They have refused to accept Iran’s enrichment of uranium despite the fact that dozens of countries enrich uranium and it has based its attacks on the possibility that Iran could develop a capacity to convert enriched uranium into a weapon, based solely on the Israeli fabricated intelligence. The U.S. intelligence agencies have several times issued reports indicating that there’s no positive evidence involving Iran in the conversion of enriched uranium into a single nuclear weapon. So, I think that to be surprised that the United States is violating international law is equivalent to being very naïve.

Q: The United States is continuing to support the rebels, Al-Qaeda terrorists and other foreign-backed mercenaries in Syria. It’s seems hypocritical that the U.S. is supporting terrorists while it has launched a global War on Terror since the 9/11 attacks. How do you explain this dual-track policy of supporting terrorists who are carrying out operations in their favor while fighting other terrorists elsewhere?

A: I think you can’t use abstract criteria here. Washington has an imperial perspective on this. They use strictly imperial-based criteria. In the case of Libya, the U.S.-backed terrorists fought against the nationalist regime of Gaddafi. That has backfired, of course, because many of the Libyan terrorists are now engaged in subversive activities toward the region including the Sub-Sahara Africa. The U.S. supported Sunni terrorists in Iraq for a substantial period of time after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the rise of the Shiite government in Baghdad. So we have look back at the Afghan war. The U.S. provided over $5 million arms and logistical support to the Islamic extremists in overthrowing a secular government in Afghanistan. So the question is, what side are the terrorists on? If they’re fighting against the U.S. adversaries, then Washington supports them. If they fight against a U.S. puppet regime, they’re opposed to it. So, you have to separate here any notion of anti-terrorism as a principle. It is terrorism when a country opposes the United States and it is anti-terrorism when the same forces oppose a U.S. adversary. These terms become meaningless in terms of a cognitive meaning.

Q: It’s a logical demand to call on Syria to declare its chemical weapons and bring them under the UN safeguards. However, we also know that Israel possesses not only chemical weapons, but a large arsenal of nuclear weapons, and is the sole possessor of WMDs in the Middle East. Why doesn’t the United States ask Israel to join the international conventions for the prohibition of Weapons of Mass Destruction?

A: Israel is an ally of the United States. Zionists have enormous influence within the administration of Obama. We have Dennis Ross is a notorious advocate of Israel who was appointed by Obama to be the U.S. representative in the Israel-Palestine talks. Dennis Ross is known in Washington to be the attorney for Israel. His partisanship is so blatant. You have some of the leading advisors allied with Israel. The head of the Treasury Department who is organizing sanctions against Iran is David Cohen and his predecessor was Stewart Levy, life-time Zionists who are in most delicate positions in pressuring countries to uphold sanctions against Iran. One could go down the list and identify the power of Zionism in the United States. I wrote a book about the power of Israel in the United States which has been translated in Farsi. But in any case, I think that the criteria that Washington uses in deciding when the nuclear weapons and chemical weapons are good and bad is based on that country’s relationship. Israel and the U.S. worked close together and Iran is a critic of the U.S. imperialism and Zionism and therefore any effort to create nuclear power becomes a pretext to weaken Iran and strengthen Israeli military superiority in the Middle East.

Q: And the final question. We know that the United States has abandoned its plans for attacking Syria, or at least has postponed such an attack. What do you think is the best and most viable solution for ending the crisis and civil war in Syria? What role can the international community play in bringing to an end this violence and bloodshed?

A: Well, I think the Syrian government has taken some very positive steps. First of all, it called for elections in which the domestic, internal opposition, and not the armed opposition, participated and made a substantial impact in the electoral process. Secondly, Syria has agreed to negotiate with the non-terrorist opposition. Thirdly, the terrorists are assassinating the pro-Western opposition and recently in a village on the Turkish border, we saw cases of assassinations and seizure of power by the Islamists. So I think one has to see that any reasonable settlement would follow the lines of negotiations between Syria and the opposition without prior conditions. You cannot exclude Bashar al-Assad from the procedure. I think out of these negotiations, a free election could be called. Once a ceasefire is in place, I think an election in which the terrorists are excluded would probably have to be enforced by the Syrian army and those groups who are calling for a peaceful settlement. Washington cannot play a bubble role here, talk about peace and ship arms to the terrorists and the opposition. Either there has to be a ceasefire, or there has to be a stopping of arms transfers; there has to be a meeting in which the U.S.-backed opposition sits down and negotiates. There has to be a ceasefire and a subsequent election and probably a power-sharing agreement in which the supporters of Bashar al-Assad are going to have an important role. The U.S. strategy is to isolate Iran, encircle Iran and dictate Iran to surrender its nuclear program. It wants to have a platform for aerial assaults in collaboration with Israel. Syria’s independence is vital to the security of Iran, not only its government, but its people and civilization. And I think that’s one of the big reasons why many of us oppose the U.S. war on Syria, because Syria could serve as a trampoline to eliminate any possible allies of Iran in the Middle East.

Kourosh Ziabari
Journalist, writer and media correspondent
www.KouroshZiabari.com