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By Douglas Quan

30 January 2013

@ Postmedia News

Saudi police may receive ‘investigative training’ from the RCMP. Hassan Ammar / The Associated Press

RCMP officials are negotiating with their counterparts in Saudi Arabia to provide training in “investigative techniques,” Postmedia News has learned.

While such a deal could bolster international cooperation and the fight against terrorism, some observers question whether Canada’s national police force should be providing support to the oil-rich kingdom, whose human-rights record has long been criticized.

“Unless they’re going in to revolutionize Saudi police, it’s hard to imagine they’ll do anything good,” said Toby Jones, a professor of Middle East history at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “The Saudis have a terrible record on human rights and police brutality.”

Amnesty International’s 2012 report on Saudi Arabia said planned demonstrations were “ruthlessly suppressed.”

RCMP briefing notes obtained under access-to-information legislation show that the Mounties have been trying to forge closer ties with Saudi police. Darryl Dyck / The Canadian Press

“Cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments, particularly flogging, continued to be imposed and carried out. Women and girls faced severe discrimination in law and practice, as well as violence,” the report said.

In 2011, German federal police came under criticism for their involvement in training Saudi Arabian security forces, news media in that country reported.

The federal government has said it is trying to “diversify” its relationship with Saudi Arabia beyond trade and economic interests. This month, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews each held meetings with Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Naif bin Abdulaziz, the interior minister, during a visit to Canada, according to a posting on the Saudi ministry’s website.

Rick Roth, a spokesman for Mr. Baird, said Wednesday the men discussed a number of bilateral and regional issues, including the ongoing crisis in Syria, but declined to elaborate.

Julie Carmichael, a spokeswoman for Mr. Toews, who visited Saudi Arabia in May, 2012, said his meeting focused on “matters related to policing and mutual interests in areas of security.”

Meanwhile, RCMP briefing notes obtained under access-to-information legislation show that the Mounties have been trying to forge closer ties with Saudi police.

A Dubai-based RCMP liaison, who is responsible for 12 Middle East countries, regularly travels to Saudi Arabia for the purposes of “conducting inquiries and cultivating working relationships,” the documents state. Cooperation with Saudi police is described as “very good.”

An RCMP corporal participates in a collision analysis training exercise in 2011 at Regina’s RCMP Academy. Don Healy / Postmedia News

In November, 2011, Saudi officials made a formal request to the RCMP-run Canadian Police College — which provides advanced and specialized police training courses and workshops — to establish a memorandum of understanding to provide “various training products.”

RCMP spokesman Sgt. Greg Cox said in an email this week that negotiations are continuing.

“The Canadian Police College (CPC) is in negotiations with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to provide investigative technique training to its law enforcement,” he said. “There is no signed agreement in place at this time.”

Deputy Commissioner Mike Cabana said the discussions revolve around providing the Saudis with training in evidence collection and software tools for major case management. Sgt. Cox said the force receives many requests to provide training and that law enforcement officers from the Middle East and the Arab peninsula have attended courses on investigative techniques at the Canadian Police College.

The RCMP provides a lot of training to many countries in the world and even some questionable ones

If the deal with Saudi Arabia is approved, it would mark the first time the college has delivered training in the Middle East, Sgt. Cox said.

Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former senior manager and intelligence officer at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said the negotiations do not surprise him.

“The RCMP provides a lot of training to many countries in the world and even some questionable ones. For example, the RCMP gave riot-control training to Chinese police in preparation for the Olympics a few years ago,” he said.

Plus, he said, the Saudi royals love the Mounties and their horses.

Mr. Jones, the Rutgers expert, cited an arms-transfer database maintained by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that showed Canada has sold billions of dollars worth of military equipment, including armoured vehicles, to Saudi Arabia over the last several years.

By Bill Van Auken

30 January, 2013

@ WSWS.org

Washington has secured an agreement with the government of Niger to establish a US military base in the Northwest African country, which borders Mali. The agreement comes in the midst of the French intervention in Mali, employing ground troops and warplanes.

The deal, first reported Monday by the New York Times, citing unnamed US officials, would clear the way for the Pentagon to set up a base for drone flights over the entire region.

While US officials and the media have placed the base agreement in the context of the French war in Mali, it is evident that Washington had been negotiating with the Niger government well before the advance of Islamist militias toward southern Mali triggered the French intervention on January 11. It appears more the case that the recent Mali events have served as a pretext for an already planned US militarization of the region.

For several months there has been a drumbeat in the media and official circles about Africa being the “new front” in the war on terror, along with reports that AFRICOM (Africa Command), the US military command set up for operations in Africa, was seeking to establish bases on the continent and deploy for the first time a combat brigade on African soil.

The deal reached with the Niger government is a status of forces agreement of the kind demanded by the Pentagon wherever US forces are deployed. It grants blanket immunity to American troops for any crimes committed on the country’s soil.

According to the Times, it is anticipated that some 300 US troops and private contractors will be stationed at the Niger base. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that there are already some 50 US military personnel deployed in Niger.

The US had previously set up drone bases in Ethiopia and Djibouti, the tiny semi-colonial African territory at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, where the US and France jointly operate Camp Lemonnier, the site of a 2,000-member American special operations task force. These bases, together with secret air fields in the Arab peninsula, have been used to carry out drone missile strikes and assassinations in Somalia and Yemen. However, they are some 3,000 miles away from Mali.

Washington has also deployed turboprop spy planes flying from secret fields in Burkina Faso and Mauritania, as the Washington Post reported last year, based on secret US diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks as well as military contracting documents. US officials, however, have reported that these spy flights have proven less than effective in terms of intelligence gathering over Mali and other parts of Northwest Africa.

“For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the [Niger] base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens,” the Times reported Tuesday.

This seems hardly credible. While drones may well be used to collect intelligence on potential targets that would be handed off to the French for execution, there is little doubt that the Obama administration intends to spread its drone killing spree to Northwest Africa.

This was implicitly threatened by US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta following the hostage siege at the gas facility in Algeria earlier this month. “We have a responsibility to go after Al Qaeda wherever they are,” Panetta stated, adding that the US was “going after” it in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia—all the scene of continuous drone missile strikes—and would act to deny Al Qaeda a “a base for operations in North Africa and Mali.”

As the Wall Street Journal noted, the moves toward a permanent base in Niger “show the extent to which the US and France are girding for what could be an open-ended campaign against the militants in North and West Africa.”

Indeed, one of the top US State Department officials in charge of Africa warned Monday that the present offensive in Mali “could take years.”

“This is only the first phase,” Don Yamamoto, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told the Associated Press. “I think people should not be into the illusion that it is going to be quick,” he added. “It’s going to take a long time and time means that it could take several years … you got do it right.”

Yamamoto noted that Washington has already begun training and equipping troops from Niger, Chad, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Togo and will transport them to Mali for use in an African proxy force. AFRICOM has also announced that it is backing the French intervention by providing military transport planes to move French troops and weaponry and by flying refueling missions for French warplanes.

The US State Department official also told the AP the following: “A lot of the rebel groups that are now fighting in the region were under Gaddafi’s troops. They were trained for over a decade. You have rebel groups that are well trained and well armed and very aggressive. And so if you have any problems in governance in the country, that would allow these extremist groups to come and that’s what happened in Mali.”

This is a grossly distorted and self-serving presentation of the events in Mali. The reality is that the crisis was precipitated by the US-NATO war for regime-change that ended in Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s assassination. The bringing down of the Libyan regime served to destabilize the entire region. It sent Tuaregs, a nomadic population that is present in Libya, Mali, Niger and elsewhere in the region, fleeing to Mali under conditions in which US-backed “rebels” were hunting down and killing black people in Libya.

The Tuaregs, who had fought on the side of Gaddafi, brought with them large quantities of weapons, reigniting a revolt that has erupted at least four times since Mali’s independence in 1960. Entire Tuareg units of the Malian army went over to the rebels.

However, better armed and better funded Islamists, affiliated with Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb, entered northern Mali and gained control of large swathes of territory. These were the very forces that the US and NATO has backed and armed in Libya, utilizing them as a proxy ground force in the war to topple Gaddafi.

Yamamoto’s remarks strongly suggest that US imperialism is intervening in Mali not merely to drive out or destroy its erstwhile allies, the Islamists (the same forces that it is still backing in Syria), but also to crush the Tuareg revolt.

Given that the same Tuareg population exists to the east in Niger, the US intervention has the potential of spreading this revolt and igniting a bitter ethnic-based transnational civil war.

Underlying Washington’s incendiary activities in Northwest Africa are not, fundamentally, concerns about a supposed terrorist threat, but rather the determination of US imperialism, like its French counterpart, to lay hold of the region’s strategically vital energy and mineral wealth.

The US is flexing is military muscle under conditions where it has been outstripped in terms of trade and investment by its ascendant rival in the region, China.

As the secret diplomatic cables disclosed by WikiLeaks made clear, China’s economic activities have been a central preoccupation of the US spies and diplomats assigned to Niamey, the capital of Niger.

As one such cable to Washington warned: “China is building a major portfolio in Niger’s resource sectors and will probably replace France as Niger’s top foreign investor when projects under construction are fully operational. Chinese investments include oil and gas production, refining, uranium mining, and infrastructure. There are no current examples of US-China collaboration in Niger.”

The move to militarize Africa’s Sahel region is part and parcel of the Obama administration’s so-called “pivot” to Asia, based on a steady escalation of Washington’s confrontation with China. This extends to Africa, where the attempt to militarily assert US dominance over resource-rich territories in which China has developed significant economic interests has the potential of contributing to a far wider war.

By Countercurrents.org

30 January, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Israel has hit Syria.

Citing a Western diplomat and regional security sources a London datelined Reuters report [1] said on January 30, 2013:

Israeli forces attacked a convoy on the Syrian-Lebanese border overnight.

Earlier, Israel expressed concern over the fate of Syrian chemical and advanced conventional weapons.

The sources, four in total, all of whom declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, had no further information about what the vehicles may have been carrying, what forces were used or where precisely the attack happened.

In the run-up to the raid, Israeli officials have been warning very publicly of a threat of high-tech anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles reaching Israel’s enemies in the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah from Syria. They have also echoed U.S. concerns about Syria’s presumed chemical weapons arsenal.

The Lebanese army reported a heavy presence of Israeli jets over its territory throughout the night.

“There was definitely a hit in the border area,” one security source said. A Western diplomat in the region who asked about the strike said “something has happened”, without elaborating.

An activist in Syria who works with a network of opposition groups around the country said that she had heard of a strike in southern Syria from her colleagues but could not confirm it. A strike just inside Lebanon would appear a less diplomatically explosive option for Israel to avoid provoking Syrian ally Iran.

Israeli Vice Premier Silvan Shalom said on Sunday that any sign that Syria’s grip on its chemical weapons was slipping, as President Bashar al-Assad fights rebels trying to overthrow him, could trigger Israeli intervention.

Israeli sources said on Tuesday that Syria’s advanced conventional weapons would represent as much of a threat to Israel as its chemical arms should they fall into the hands of Islamist rebels or Hezbollah guerrillas based in Lebanon.

Interviewed on January 30, 2013, Shalom would not be drawn on whether Israel was operating on its northern front, instead describing the country as part of an international coalition seeking to stop spillover from Syria’s two-year-old insurgency.

“The entire world has said more than once that it takes developments in Syria very seriously, developments which can be in negative directions,” he told Israel Radio, recalling that President Barack Obama has warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of U.S. action if his forces use chemical weapons.

“The world, led by President Obama who has said this more than once, is taking all possibilities into account,” Shalom added. “And of course any development which is a development in a negative direction would be something that needs stopping and prevention.”

Border Strike

Whether the strike took place within Syrian territory, or over the border in Lebanon, could affect any escalation from the incident. Iran, Israel’s arch-foe and one of Damascus’s few allies, said on Saturday it would consider any attack on Syria as an attack on itself. During and since Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah, there have been unconfirmed reports of Israeli strikes on convoys just after they entered Lebanon from Syria.

Israel has long made clear it claims a right to act preemptively against enemy capabilities.

Alluding to this, air force chief Major-General Amir Eshel on Tuesday said his corps was involved in a covert and far-flung “campaign between wars”.

“This campaign is 24/7, 365 days a year,” Eshel told an international conference. “We are taking action to reduce the immediate threats, to create better conditions in which we will be able to win the wars, when they happen.”

He did not elaborate on any operations, but did single out the threat Israel saw from Syria’s arsenal, calling it “huge, part of it state-of-the-art, part of it unconventional”.

Israeli jets regularly enter Lebanese airspace, but its forces have been more discreet about Syrian incursions.

Israel’s bombing of a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007, though revealed by then U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, is still not formally acknowledged by the Israelis.

According to Bush, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sought to keep the matter quiet so as to reduce the risk of Assad feeling public pressure to retaliate. Syria and Israel are technically at war but have not exchanged fire in a significant way in decades.

Israeli media reported this week that the country’s national security adviser, Yaakov Amidror, was sent to Russia and its military intelligence chief Major-General Aviv Kochavi to the United States for consultations.

Shashank Joshi of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London said that there are indications that Hezbollah is training near chemical weapons sites in Syria, with which the Shi’ite Lebanese militia has historically had a strong alliance.

“We also know that (Syria’s) use of tactical ballistic missiles has been escalating – presumably as air power becomes harder to use in contested areas, and rebels seize larger targets like bases that are amenable to missile attack,” he said.

Worries about Syria and Hezbollah have sent Israelis lining up for government-issued gas masks. According to the Israel post office, which is handling distribution of the kits, demand roughly trebled this week.

“It looks like every kind of discourse on this or that security matter contributes to public vigilance,” its deputy director Haim Azaki told Israel’s Army Radio. “We have really seen a very significant jump in demand.”

Israeli warplane ‘struck target on Syria-Lebanon border’ amid weapons fears

Harriet Sherwood reported [2] from Jerusalem:

Israeli warplanes have attacked a target on the Syrian-Lebanese border, according to unconfirmed reports.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had no comment on the report.

The report followed claims in the Lebanese media that IDF fighter planes had flown sorties over Lebanon’s airspace from January 29, 2013 afternoon until January 30, 2013 morning.

A Lebanese army statement, quoted by local news agencies, said: “Four Israeli planes entered Lebanese airspace at 4.30pm on Tuesday. They were replaced four hours later by another group of planes, which overflew southern Lebanon until 2am, and a third mission took over, finally leaving at 7.55am on Wednesday morning.” The IDF also declined to comment on these reports.

It was also reported that the IDF’s intelligence chief, Major-General Aiv Kochavi, arrived in Washington on Tuesday for private talks with the US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Martin Dempsey, at the Pentagon.

Hezbollah is also believed to have extensive stockpiles of conventional weapons in warehouses inside Syria. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nazrallah, “wants to remove everything from Syrian soil to Lebanon”, said Amnon Sofrin, a former head of intelligence in the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. Israel, he added, was “looking very carefully at convoys heading from Syria to Lebanon”.

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, was reported earlier this week to be conducting intense security consultations on the possible response to the movement of weapons.

The deputy prime minister, Silvan Shalom, told Army Radio on Sunday: “If there is a need, we will take action to prevent chemical weapons from being transferred to Islamic terror organizations. We are obligated to keep our eye on it at all times, in the event chemical weapons fall into Hezbollah’s hands.”

Israel’s concern over the civil war in Syria has mounted over recent months as Bashar al-Assad’s regime has come closer to collapse and fighting has bordered on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Although Israel has been technically at war with Syria since 1967, the Golan Heights has been mostly quiet since Israel occupied it almost 46 years ago.

But Israel fears that the implosion of the Assad regime could herald an Islamist Syria, which could seek to reignite hostilities with its neighbor.

Alex Fishman, defense analyst for the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, wrote earlier this week: “In the light of Assad’s increasingly unsteady status, Hezbollah figures have understood that [its stockpiles of conventional] weapons cannot remain there. And as soon as these weapons reach Lebanon, they are swallowed up in secret underground stockpiles. Looking for them will be like searching for a needle in a haystack.

“If chemical weapons are brought into Lebanon, Israel will probably not hesitate – and will attack.”

According to Sofrin, the Israeli military would be more inclined to deploy “specialist skilled units” on the ground to secure depots of chemical weapons, rather than use air strikes, which risked dispersing chemicals over a wide area. But any such operation would be complicated and risky, he added.

Israel’s primary concern was to prevent Hezbollah acquiring chemical warheads that it could mount on existing missiles, he said.

Netanyahu told Sunday’s cabinet meeting Syria was “increasingly coming apart”. He added: “The reality is developing apace. In the east, north and south, everything is in ferment, and we must be prepared: strong and determined in the face of all possible developments.”

Source:

[1] “Israel hits target in Syria border area: sources” http://news.yahoo.com/israel-hits-target-syria-border-area-sources-113955592.html

[2] guardian.co.uk, Jan 30, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/30/israeli-warplane-syria-lebanon-border

By Countercurrents.org

30 January, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

As thousands of Egyptians defy emergency and curfew imposed in cities the army warns of collapse of the Egypt state. The opposing camps turn visible: progressives oppose emergency while the Islamists and the US back Morsi, the Muslim brotherhood leader imposing emergency.

People in Suez, Port Said and Ismailia rose in protests defying emergency. Thousands of demonstrators marched to Shura Council’s headquarters to oppose policies of president Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood while the Shura Council endorses emergency measures.

Patrick Kingsley reported [1] from Cairo:

Continuing civil unrest may soon cause the collapse of the Egyptian state, the head of the country’s armed forces warned.

Parts of Egypt are in turmoil following five days of rioting in which 52 people have been killed and more than 1,000 injured after protests against president Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood and police brutality turned violent.

General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s comments have sparked fears that the military might once again intervene in the day-to-day governance of Egypt.

Writing on the army’s Facebook page, Sisi said: “The continuation of the struggle of the different political forces … over the management of state affairs could lead to the collapse of state.”

Sisi said the army would remain a “solid and cohesive block” on which the state could rely.

Egypt’s new constitution underwrites the army’s judicial independence. The army was also asked to help restore order on the streets of Port Said this week, prompting reminders of Mubarak-era state governance.

The military still controls large parts of the Egyptian economy.

Yasser el-Shimy, Egypt analyst for the International Crisis Group, described Sisi’s statement as a “gentle reminder” of the army’s influence.

“The army is very happy to pass the buck – they really have been burnt by their involvement [in politics] over the last two years,” said Shimy.

“But there is a point after which the army will feel that they cannot just stand back if they feel the integrity of the state is in danger.”

Asked by the Guardian whether he feared military intervention should the unrest continue, Gehad al-Haddad, a spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, said: “No. I know enough about the way President Morsi removed General Tantawi to not be worried.”

On a street near Tahrir Square protesters also said they did not fear a military intervention, arguing that either regime was undesirable. “If the army comes, we will still be on the street,” said Mina Remond, a 20-year-old student standing among demonstrators on the banks of the Nile.

The offices of the Cairo Governorate, a mile from Tahrir Square, were attacked.

In another attempt to lessen some of the violence, Egypt’s prosecutor-general also ordered the arrest of the Black Bloc, a new group of young masked protesters that emerged for the first time in Egypt last Thursday, and which has been involved in many of the most aggressive clashes. Dressed in black and in balaclavas, the Black Bloc appears to be inspired by a similar approach used by anti-capitalist protesters in Europe and America throughout much of the past two decades.

Little is known about the group, which first appeared on Facebook on 21 January, and purports to act solely against the Muslim Brotherhood.

Emergency and curfew defied

The cities of Egypt’s Suez Canal – Suez, Port Said and Ismailia – continued to witness protests on January 29, 2013 against a government-declared state of emergency featuring a daily 9pm-to-6am curfew [2].

On January 27, 2013 night, president Morsi announced a state of emergency in the three cities.

Protesters chanted against the emergency measures, slamming Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood group from which he hails.

A solidarity demonstration also took place in Cairo on January 29 at 9pm, when the curfew goes into effect in the canal cities. Hundreds gathered in downtown Cairo’s Talaat Harb Square for the occasion.

A solidarity football match has also been planned at the same time outside the Presidential Palace in Cairo in imitation of a match held in Ismailia on January 29, when city residents played the country’s most popular sport with military personnel who refused to enforce the curfew.

Clashes continue

An earlier report [3] said:

Clashes between hundreds of protesters and police forces have continued for the third consecutive day in Port Said.

The clashes centered on Al-Arab police station and the surrounding area.

According to eye witnesses there are injured among the protesters, although there is no official confirmation of the numbers of injured as yet. Gunfire and live ammunition have been heard in the area.

On January 28, thousands of mourners in Port Said joined a mass funeral held for seven civilians who were killed on January 27 when police clashed with thousands of mourners marching in a funeral procession for those slain in the clashes the previous day.

 

Mourners chanted against Morsi, calling for him to leave power.

Major-General Ahmed Wasfy, the commander of Egypt’s Second Army (a regional sub-division of Egypt’s armed forces) who was assigned to restore order in the city held a press conference on Monday.

“We are not here to wage war against the people. We are the Egyptian army; we are here to serve the people,” he said, adding that the curfew imposed by president Morsi on Suez, Port Said and Ismailia Sunday is in the best interest of people to restore order.

The commander of the second army accused people from outside Port Said of distributing weapons inside the city to create chaos. He also added that things would calm down in the city over the next three or four days.

The Ultras Green Eagles, the hardcore football fans of Port Said’s Masry football club, have called on its members, Masry fans and the people of Port Said to gather at 8pm in order to continue what the group called “retribution” for the “martyrs of Port Said”, those who have been killed in the past 48 hours, in a statement on its official Facebook page.

Several political groups have already announced that they will organize rallies and protests in Port Said starting from 8pm and 9pm, in defiance of the presidential decree which imposed a curfew in the three Suez Canal cities for the next 30 days.

Shura Council opposed

Sarah El-Rashidi reported [4]:

Around three thousand protesters set out from Cairo’s Sayida Zeinab Mosque on January 28 afternoon towards the Shura Council, the upper house of Egypt’s parliament, which is currently endowed with full legislative powers.

The march, which marks the second anniversary of Egypt’s 28 January 2011 ‘Friday of rage,’ is meant to protest the recent death of dozens of protesters in clashes with security forces across the country and to demand the suspension of Egypt’s newly-approved constitution and the dismissal of the cabinet.

Leading the march is renowned leftist activist Kamal Khalil, who chanted anti-Muslim Brotherhood slogans and demanded “vengeance for the martyrs.”

“We are not going to leave it to Badie,” protesters chanted in reference to Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie.

Activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah told Ahram Online that the march was meant to protest the Brotherhood’s perceived monopolization of state institutions.

“We want to stop the Brotherhood’s attempts to take over state institutions… and pass illegitimate laws through them,” said Abdel-Fattah.

“And now Morsi has reinstated the emergency law, which reflects his failure as a legitimate democratic leader,” he added.

Also present at Monday’s protest were members of the Revolutionary Socialists, the Socialist Popular Alliance and the National Association for Change.

Meanwhile, members of the 6 April youth movement held up trash bins as shields bearing the word ‘Peaceful.’

“We want freedom. We want to get rid of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Amr, a masked 14-year-old member of Egypt’s ‘Black Bloc,’ told Ahram Online.

Hisham Sabra, a protester and consulting engineer, told Ahram Online that Monday’s protests were “a chance for freedom to be gained and a democratic stable Egypt.”

“We were naïve…we used to have a semi-military dictatorship. Now we have a theocratic dictatorship, which is more dangerous,” added Sabra.

Sabra praised the National Salvation Front (NSF) opposition group’s decision to boycott the president’s calls for dialogue.

The NSF announced its rejection of Morsi’s invitation to dialogue, describing it as a “façade” that would not benefit Egyptians.

Two police officers were killed in the city of Port Said while one conscript was killed in Suez.

Shura Council backs emergency

Gamal Essam El-Din reported [5]:

The Islamist-dominated Shura Council (the upper house of Egypt’s parliament, currently endowed with full legislative powers) on January 28 ratified new security measures at the request of president Morsi.

In a plenary session, the Shura Council approved the laws, which had been rammed through a joint closed-room session of the council’s national security and legislative affairs committees on January 28.

The law states that army officers helping to maintain security will be granted judicial powers in accordance with the Criminal Procedures Law and the Police Law. It further states that military courts will be charged with trying those convicted of crimes of sabotage.

The Shura Council’s joint committee had emphasized that the use of the armed forces in restoring order should not be upon the request of the president, but rather with the approval of Egypt’s National Defense Council (of which the president is a member).

The law was rejected, however, by Ihab El-Kharat, chairman of the Shura Council’s human rights committee and member of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party. “There is no need for emergency measures because ordinary laws already allow the military to help the police,” he said. “There is no need at the moment to give the armed forces judicial powers.”

He added: “Egypt is suffering from a political crisis. There must be a political solution to this crisis rather than the imposition of draconian measures.”

Emad Gad, political analyst and leading member of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, told Al-Ahram Online: “The Shura Council’s endorsement of Morsi’s authoritarian measures gives renewed proof that the council is just an Islamist-dominated parliament, designed mainly to rubberstamp Morsi’s draconian decrees and serve the interests of his Muslim Brotherhood.”

US backs Morsi

Dina Ezzat reported [6]:

A round of talks between Cairo and Washington – some sources suggest it included direct talks between an apprehensive US president Barack Obama and a reassuring President Morsi – concluded that despite the outrage of protestors since the January 25 Revolution anniversary, Morsi’s presidency is weakened but not broken.

“He is still largely in control. Ultimately we think the anger [in Egypt] will calm down – but he will have to give something,” said a Cairo-based Western diplomat.

This view is shared by many foreign diplomats in Egypt: the army is not moving against Morsi – some hasten to add ‘at least not yet’ – and public opinion has not turned enough to see another president fall in less than two years.

Moreover, the call made by a leading member of the National Salvation Front for the West, especially Washington, to put pressure on Morsi, is still being pondered and no serious pressure seems to be building.

According to one informed source in Washington, an expected US State Department statement mildly placing more blame for the current violence on Morsi than on the rest of the political leadership was suspended in favor of a White House statement calling on all leaders to end the violence and pursue dialogue.

The spirit of the statement, the same source says, was largely influenced by the US ambassador to Egypt, who seems to be arguing the case for Morsi even as Washington becomes more sceptical. “It is clear these demonstrations will not bring Morsi down,” the source said.

Overall, Arab diplomats in Washington say the White House is comfortable with the role Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are playing on key Middle East issues: Gaza, Hamas, Iran and Syria. “And above this there is a sense of ease with regards to the positive statement Morsi made on the Prophet Mohamed’s birthday about equal rights for Coptic Christians and Muslims alike,” said one Washington-based Arab diplomat.

Sources who followed recent talks between Washington, Morsi and the Egyptian army say a few concessions might be offered to contain public outrage.

Meanwhile, sources in the Egyptian opposition say their views on how to exit the current crisis have been solicited by the US embassy in Cairo.

Some say these contacts amount to mediation rather than consultation – something a US embassy source declined to confirm, saying it is normal for embassies to talk with political leaders.

This said, an Egyptian military source confirms the US is confident the Egyptian army will stay out of politics. There are certain matters the armed forces “talk frankly about with the presidency but this does not mean the army is at all willing to re-engage in the political process – we are staying out of it,” he said.

A similar assessment is offered by several foreign diplomats in Cairo who essentially agree that Morsi is facing difficulties and that he is also facing pressure from the armed forces on some matters, but things have not reached the point at which the army would ask Morsi to step down.

According to the military source, who spoke to Ahram Online on condition of anonymity, the armed forces are unlikely to repeat the offer it made for a national dialogue last November during the political crisis over the president’s constitutional declaration. “Unless we are asked by the presidency we are not intending to offer our help again. The president is dealing with this matter himself.”

A number of public figures and opposition politicians refused the president’s invitation to join a national dialogue on the current crisis, presidential sources say.

Islamists support Morsi

Another report [7] said:

Salafist Nour Party, Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya say Morsi’s decision was needed to maintain order.

The party spokesman Nader Bakkar said in a statement.

Bakkar said the party “understands the need for such a decision.”

Bakkar went on to commend the president for thanking the police.

Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya also announced its support for Morsi’s decision to declare a state of emergency.

Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya’s political arm, the Construction and Development Party, also welcomed the president’s invitation to opposition forces to enter into a national dialogue.

Source:

[1] guardian.co.uk, Jan 29, 2013, “Egypt’s armed forces chief warns unrest could cause collapse of state”,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/29/egypt-armed-forces-chief-warns-collapse

[2] ahramonline, Jan 29, 2013, “Cities of Egypt’s Suez Canal protest curfew for 2nd consecutive day”,

http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/63626/Egypt/Politics-/Cities-of-Egypts-Suez-Canal-protest-curfew-for-nd-.aspx

[3] ahramonline, Jan 28, 2013, “Port Said: Funerals and clashes continue in besieged city”,

http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/63508/Egypt/Politics-/Port-Said-Funerals-and-clashes-continue-in-besiege.aspx

[4] ahramonline, Jan 28, 2013, “Thousands of anti-Morsi protesters march on Egypt’s Shura Council”,

http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/0/63516/Egypt/0/Thousands-of-antiMorsi-protesters-march-on-Egypts-.aspx

[5] ahramonline, Jan 28, 2013, “Egypt’s Shura Council green-lights president’s emergency measures

http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/0/63512/Egypt/0/Egypts-Shura-Council-greenlights-presidents-emerge.aspx

[6] ahramonline, Jan 29, 2013, “US still backing Morsi as army remains quiescent”,

http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/63559/Egypt/Politics-/US-still-backing-Morsi-as-army-remains-quiescent.aspx

[7] ahramonline, Monday 28 Jan 2013

“Islamist parties welcome Morsi’s state-of-emergency decision”, http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/0/63479/Egypt/0/Islamist-parties-welcome-Morsis-stateofemergency-d.aspx

By Robert Reich,

29 January 13

@ Robert Reich’s Blog

As President Obama said in his inaugural address last week, America “cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.”

Yet that continues to be the direction we’re heading in.

A newly-released analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the super-rich have done well in the economic recovery while almost everyone else has done badly. The top 1 percent of earners’ real wages grew 8.2 percent from 2009 to 2011, yet the real annual wages of Americans in the bottom 90 percent have continued to decline in the recovery, eroding by 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2011.

In other words, we’re back to the widening inequality we had before the debt bubble burst in 2008 and the economy crashed.

But the President is exactly right. Not even the very wealthy can continue to succeed without a broader-based prosperity. That’s because 70 percent of economic activity in America is consumer spending. If the bottom 90 percent of Americans are becoming poorer, they’re less able to spend. Without their spending, the economy can’t get out of first gear.

That’s a big reason why the recovery continues to be anemic, and why the International Monetary Fund just lowered its estimate for U.S. growth in 2013 to just 2 percent.

Almost a quarter of all jobs in America now pay wages below the poverty line for a family of four. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 7 out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage — like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains.

At this rate, who’s going to buy all the goods and services America is capable of producing? We can’t return to the kind of debt-financed consumption that caused the bubble in the first place.

Get it? It’s not a zero-sum game. Wealthy Americans would do better with smaller shares of a rapidly-growing economy than with the large shares they now possess of an economy that’s barely moving.

If they were rational, the wealthy would support public investments in education and job-training, a world-class infrastructure (transportation, water and sewage, energy, internet), and basic research – all of which would make the American workforce more productive.

If they were rational they’d even support labor unions – which have proven the best means of giving working people a fair share in the nation’s prosperity.

But labor unions are almost extinct.

The decline of labor unions in America tracks exactly the decline in the bottom 90 percent’s share of total earnings, and shrinkage of the middle class.

In the 1950s, when the U.S. economy was growing faster than 3 percent a year, more than a third of all working people belonged to a union. That gave them enough bargaining clout to get wages that allowed them to buy what the economy was capable of producing.

Since the late 1970s, unions have eroded – as has the purchasing power of most Americans, and not coincidentally, the average annual growth of the economy.

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that as of 2012 only 6.6 percent of workers in the private sector were unionized. (That’s down from 6.9 percent in 2011.) That’s the lowest rate of unionization in almost a century.

What’s to blame? Partly globalization and technological change. Globalization sent many unionized manufacturing plants abroad.

Manufacturing is starting to return to America but it’s returning without many jobs. The old assembly line has been replaced by robotics and numerically-controlled machine tools.

Technologies have also replaced many formerly unionized workers in telecommunications (remember telephone operators?) and clerical jobs.

But wait. Other nations subject to the same forces have far higher levels of unionization than America. 28 percent of Canada’s workforce is unionized, as is more than 25 percent of Britain’s, and almost 20 percent of Germany’s.

Unions are almost extinct in America because we’ve chosen to make them extinct.

Unlike other rich nations, our labor laws allow employers to replace striking workers. We’ve also made it exceedingly difficult for workers to organize, and we barely penalized companies that violate labor laws. (A worker who’s illegally fired for trying to organize a union may, if lucky, get the job back along with back pay – after years of legal haggling.)

Republicans, in particular, have set out to kill off unions. Union membership dropped 13 percent last year in Wisconsin, which in 2011 curbed the collective bargaining rights of many public employees. And it fell 18 percent last year in Indiana, which last February enacted a right-to-work law (allowing employees at unionized workplaces to get all the benefits of unionization without paying for them). Last month Michigan enacted a similar law.

Don’t blame globalization and technological change for why employees at Walmart , America’s largest employer, still don’t have a union. They’re not in global competition and their jobs aren’t directly threatened by technology.

The average pay of a Walmart worker is $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.

Walmart is a microcosm of the American economy. It has brazenly fought off unions. But it could easily afford to pay its workers more. It earned $16 billion last year. Much of that sum went to Walmart’s shareholders, including the family of its founder, Sam Walton.

The wealth of the Walton family now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

But how can Walmart expect to continue to show fat profits when most of its customers are on a downward economic escalator?

Walmart should be unionized. So should McDonalds. So should every major big-box retailer and fast-food outlet in the nation. So should every hospital in America.

That way, more Americans would have enough money in their pockets to get the economy moving. And everyone – even the very rich – would benefit.

As Obama said, America cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

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 Countercurrents.org

29 January, 2013

Countercurrents.org

External armed intervention and conflict is ruining agriculture sector in Syria.

A UN mission has found: cereal, fruit and vegetable production dropped by half and there is massive destruction of irrigation and other infrastructure*.

The mission, from January 18 to 22, has also found: Twenty-two months of conflict have left Syria’s agricultural sector in tatters

The mission has found:

1. Wheat and barley production dropped to less than 2 million tonnes last year from 4 to 4.5 million tonnes in normal years.

2. Vegetable, fruit and olive production declined significantly in both Homs and Dara’a Governorates, including a 60 percent drop in vegetable production in Homs and a 40 percent drop in olive oil production in Dara’a.

3. Only 45 percent of the farmers were able to fully harvest their cereal crops while 14 percent reported they could not harvest due to insecurity and lack of fuel.

4. There is a lack of access to agricultural inputs including quality seeds and fertilizers.

5. There is a lack of irrigation due to damage to main irrigation canals especially in Homs and lack of fuel for irrigation pumps.

6. Movement of livestock to grazing areas has not been possible and their survival is compromised by the lack of animal feed and veterinary drugs, the importation of which is hampered by sanctions.

7. The production of poultry, a traditional source of cheap animal protein has also been severely hit with major farms destroyed in Homs, Hama and Idleb.

The mission was coordinated with both the government and the opposition and visited several affected areas in Damascus as well as in the governorates of Homs and Dara’a. The mission team was composed of emergency directors from seven UN humanitarian agencies and led by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The mission was struck by the plight of the Syrian people whose capacity to cope is dramatically eroded by 22 months of crisis,” said Dominique Burgeon, Director of FAO’s Emergency and Rehabilitation Division, who participated in the mission.

“Destruction of infrastructure in all sectors is massive and it is clear that the longer the conflict will last, the longer it will take to rehabilitate it,” he said.

Of the 10 million Syrians who live in rural areas – about 46 percent of the population – 80 percent derive their livelihoods from agriculture.

Burgeon said: The people need urgent agricultural support in terms of seeds, fertilizers, animal feed, veterinary drugs, poultry and rehabilitation of irrigation infrastructure.

* 23-01-2013, “Syrian agricultural production drops massively as conflict continues”, http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/168676/icode/

By Alex Lantier

29 January, 2013

@ WSWS.org

The imperialist powers are escalating the war in Mali. Britain has pledged to deploy troops, and the US is planning a base for drone aircraft in the region, as French troops marched into the rebellious north of its former colony.

British authorities said they would deploy hundreds of troops, concentrating on training French-backed Malian government forces and providing “force protection” for the trainers. British Special Forces are already reportedly in Mali, working with the French. Britain has also sent C-17 transport aircraft to help France deploy troops to Mali.

The announcement came after talks Sunday between British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President François Hollande. A Downing Street spokesman said, “The prime minister made clear that we fully support the French government’s actions …. The prime minister went on to explain that we are keen to provide further assistance where we can, depending on what French requirements there may be.”

The United States is also extending military assistance to France, offering on Saturday to refuel French warplanes with US tanker airplanes after talks between US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. Many French fighter-bombers operate from bases in France, flying to Mali through Algerian air space and bombing targets in Mali. This places them on the outer edge of their operating radius, requiring refueling.

At the same time, Washington is in discussions with Niger and other neighboring countries of Mali to find a possible base for US drones. The US already deploys small manned surveillance planes from a base in the military side of the Ouagadougou airport in Burkina Faso. This is one of a series of informal bases tied to the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), whose only official base in Africa is a joint Franco-American base in the East African coastal city-state of Djibouti.

US officials said that drones flying from Niger or Burkina Faso would monitor the flow of supplies and weapons from Libya across the Sahara to northern Mali.

They could also attack ground targets, extending the US war of remote-controlled assassination—currently waged in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of the Arab Peninsula and East Africa—to the Sahel. The New York Times reported that Washington has “not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens.”

AFRICOM commander General Carter Ham declined to comment on the US basing of forces in Niger, claiming the subject was “too operational for me to confirm or deny.” However, Niger’s president, Mahamadou Issoufou, has stressed that he is willing to establish a “long-term strategic relationship with the US.”

French Special Forces also recently deployed to Niger to protect French nuclear energy firm Areva’s huge uranium mines there. (See: “France sends troops to secure Niger uranium mines”)

The escalation of drone and commando warfare across West Africa highlights the sordid corporate and strategic interests driving the war in Mali, and the responsibility of the imperialist powers in creating the conditions that provoked the war in the first place.

NATO’s promotion of Islamist forces in the 2011 Libya war to destroy the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi stoked ethnic and sectarian warfare in the Sahara. Now, Islamist forces, traffickers tied both to Al Qaeda and to the French-backed Malian regime in Bamako, and local ethnic-nationalist groups are re-supplying themselves with arms stolen from Libyan weapons dumps and trafficked across the Sahara. The response from Washington, Paris, and London is to further deploy forces and escalate violence across West Africa.

France is invading northern Mali, which broke away from the corrupt junta of Captain Amadou Sanogo in the capital, Bamako, to re-impose Bamako’s authority. Yesterday and over the weekend, French troops occupied key northern Malian towns, after a bombing campaign last week targeting the towns of Lere, Timbuktu, Kidal, and Gao.

Reports suggest that opposition fighters—including both ethnic-Tuareg and Islamist forces from various militias—are abandoning the towns after token or no resistance. They are either fleeing towards Kidal, a remote town 300 miles northeast of Gao and the last to remain under opposition control, or to the countryside, to prepare guerrilla resistance.

On Sunday Gao—the largest of the towns, with roughly 85,000 inhabitants—fell to French and Malian government troops, who had first seized its airstrip. French military sources said they had killed 25 Islamist fighters in Gao.

Yesterday the Tuareg-nationalist National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) signaled that it wanted to organize a truce in Kidal with invading French forces.

Yesterday French forces also took control of Timbuktu, a historic center of region’s medieval African empires.

Before French troops entered the town, Islamist militias reportedly burned two libraries in Timbuktu, containing thousands of priceless historic manuscripts dating back to the 13th century. Like other deeply reactionary acts of vandalism by US-backed Islamists who later fell out with the West—such as the destruction of Kabul’s cultural heritage by Afghan anti-Soviet mujahedin in 1992, or the Taliban destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha sculptures in 2001—such crimes point to the terrible implications of imperialism’s manipulation and promotion of Islamism.

Attempts to use the crimes of the West’s former Islamist proxies in Africa to justify France’s war in Mali are profoundly hypocritical. Paris routinely ignores such crimes when they are committed by forces it is supporting. This includes the Islamist Syrian insurgency, which attacked historic sites such as the souk of Aleppo. It is also a cynical cover for the reactionary character of the war.

With France blocking journalists from covering the war zones, reports of ethnic killings are being largely ignored in the mass media. On Saturday, however, Amnesty International (AI) released a statement accusing French-backed Malian forces of “violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including the extrajudicial executions of Tuareg civilians, indiscriminate shelling of a Tuareg nomadic camp, and killing livestock on which the nomadic population rely for survival.”

The Bamako regime, whose authority France is intervening to restore, is thoroughly corrupt. Having worked closely with the International Monetary Fund and French capital to privatize and eliminate northern Mali’s limited social infrastructure since the 1980s, it turned northern Mali into a region where a small elite amassed fortunes based largely on criminal activities. These prominently include drug and kidnapping rackets, from which Malian officials derive considerable profits.

According to the British Guardian, the most expensive area of Gao is called “Cocainebougou,” or “Cocaine-town,” due to the fortunes realized from shipping Latin American cocaine through the South Atlantic and West Africa on towards Europe. The paper commented that their source, a police officer, “admitted there was collusion between smugglers and state officials.”

By William A. Cook

28 January, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

“ We are outraged and shocked at these offensive comments (made by MP David Ward last week) about Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the suggestion that Jews should have learned a lesson from the experience ” (Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1/25/2013).

I must apologize for not responding to the lashing given to Lib Dem MP David Ward a week ago as my wife’s Mother, 88 years of age, was moved into Hospice care readying her for leaving this vale of tears. Her life, as is true of my own, suffered the horrors of WWII and the Nazi devastation of prisoners including, from 1933, Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah Witnesses,   homosexuals , (and) persons accused of “asocial” or socially deviant behavior, and Jews, between 1938 and 1945 (Holocaust Encyclopedia). Our lives are bookended between depressions and wars. So what have we learned, as David Ward so tellingly asks to the chagrin of many including Mr. Benjamin quoted above. Curiously I found Mr. Ward’s comment incomplete. This is what he said:

    Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.

If truth be told, it did not take “a few years” for the Jews to inflict “unbelievable levels of persecution” on the indigenous people of Mandate Palestine; the persecution began in earnest in 1939 against the British, the British Mandate Government established in 1922 by the League of Nations to maintain order and peace in Palestine. The Zionists undertook “a war against the British Mandate Government, its Police and Soldiers” while it lobbied and subverted the MP’s in Westminster with propaganda and money. Here are the words Weizmann and Ben-Gurion promised the Mandate Government:

•  “if further action was taken against them (by the British Mandate Government) to destroy Zionism, then there would be a blood bath. Nothing could prevent it. Nobody would be safe in Palestine  (July 12, 1946, Rhodes Archive Documents). If need be, we shall take the country by force. If Palestine proves too small, her frontiers will have to be extended” (Ben Gurion, Appendix LVc).

This war set the British Government against its own soldiers and police, yea against the nations of the world that had authorized Britain to manage Palestine, and its own Balfour Declaration wording, to appease the Zionists that made this period one of the most destructive and humiliating experienced by the British people through their elected representatives. When in 1948, May of 1948, the Mandate soldiers and police returned home they were virtually shunned by the MPs as Robert Fisk notes in his piece, “The Forgotten Holocaust.”

Let’s move beyond the “outrage and shock” experienced by Mr. Benjamin, dig through the defecation if you will, to understand why he avoids telling the truth. Should he care to find it, he need only travel a few miles to Oxford , specifically seek in the Rhodes House Archives the “Top Secret” files of Sir Richard C. Catling lodged in a long card board box tied with a shoestring. Catling was Assistant Head Deputy of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Mandate Police. His file contains almost 500 pages of evidence detailing the subterfuge of the Jewish Agency that ostensibly cooperated with the British Government as Jewish immigrants came to Palestine . The documents were seized by the Mandate authorities from the Jewish Agency and its affiliated terror groups, the Haganah, Stern and Irgun “gangs.”

Two reports are included, one from High Commissioner Hugh MacMichael written in 1941 and sent to the British Secretary of State’s office and the second Catling’s report from 1947. The contents of these documents and the commentary of the reports were published by myself as Editor of The Plight of the Palestinians: a Long History of Destruction. That volume was published in 2010 by Macmillan Company with offices in London and New York . More than 20 renowned writers from around the world contributed to this work that describes the original intent of the Zionists as they terrorized the British authorities and the Palestinians from 1939 to May 14, 1948 and never stopped to this day. It is a book about genocide in Palestine .

How do you say that kindly? How do you make people, Jews and gentiles alike, feel comfortable talking about such behavior? How do you atone for the massacres of innocents as the Jewish armies raped, pillaged, slaughtered or drove out the residents of 418 towns and villages in Palestine while the British forces there had to stand by and watch because their fellow British politicians in Westminster called the shots?

Seven to eight hundred thousand Palestinians were driven from their homes and lands, into exile in foreign countries or into Gaza . They are a people without a homeland, contrary to the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. No passports, no recognized rights to employment or medical care or support of any kind—in Beirut and other cities in Lebanon , in Syria , in Jordan . To this day they live in refugee camps, thousands imprisoned with no place to go, no right of return, yet any Jew living anywhere in the world, who never stepped foot in Palestine, who has no Semitic blood in his/her veins, has a “right of return.” How can this be? Where is the justice?

Where is the cry of lamentation by the British MPs for allowing these conditions to persist? Why a cry of “Outrage and Shock”? What hypocritical nonsense from the “Good” people of Britain who walk around in pin striped suits and glittering pearls asking for “decency” and “respect” and “kindness” toward those who suffered the holocaust because they would be appalled at such “words” as David Ward uttered. I’m sorry, I don’t believe the Jews of the concentration camps would be “shocked and outraged” by such words; I think they would be “shocked and outraged” if the MPs and the Deputies of British Jews did not speak against the horrors the Zionist government of Israel has perpetrated on the Jews in the name of Judaism. Perhaps they can speak through me:

THE GHOSTS OF TEREZIN

I saw the pictures children drew at Terezin

As they clustered in the attic’s closing darkness, —

Pictures of the sun beyond the rain,

Of Mothers muffled in scarves and solemn dress,

Of Fathers proud beneath their yarmulkas, —

All waiting patiently the promised day

When they would board the silver train

And flee to the Holy City.

And I wept at their plight,

The silent, unknown, gnawing fright

That burned within their Ghetto of sin,

This Terezin.

And then before my eyes there came

Another scene, so strange, as if incarnate in the first

That burst untimely before my weeping heart;

A scene more ravaged than Terezin,

Of streets and alleys swamped in sewage and despair

Where children breathed the fetid air of hate

That smoldered like steaming ashes there.

Suddenly appeared above the graves, the ghosts of Terezin,

Arising like mist around the crematorium;

Fathers and Mothers, in their promised land at last,

Grasping children to their breasts.

Silent as sentinels they stood,

And there they wept as they watched in vain

The wardens wander through the camps

Like Gestapo agents of old,

Stark, cold, indifferent to the pain

Of those who huddled beneath the tin roofs,

Encased like the dead in cement boxes

As the acrid stench of lingering sewage

Flowed through the alleys and the homes.

They saw the tanks rattle through the streets

With ranks of soldiers scurrying behind,

Seeking the vermin that infested this place, –

Homeless, nameless, without a face, —

Sneaking through this ghetto in the dark of night

To drive the children from this transport town,

This resurrected refugee camp, this new Terezin,

Where the new Jew wanders the world

Like the Jews of Terezin,

Joined in their loneliness and despair

As they watch their children there

Become the walls of Terezin!

The “despatch” sent by MacMichael to the Secretary of State resulted from an investigation into the funding practices and use of those funds by various Jewish organizations.

The memorandum illustrates … the fact that the Mandatory is faced potentially with as grave a danger in Palestine from Jewish violence as it has ever faced from Arab violence, a danger infinitely less easy to meet by the methods of repression which have been employed against Arabs. In the first place, the Jews … have the moral and political support … of considerable sections of public opinion both in the United Kingdom and the United States of America . … all the influence and political ability of the Zionists would be brought to bear to show that the Jews in Palestine were the victims of aggression, and that a substantial body of opinion abroad would be persuaded of the truth of the contention. (i)

Quite obviously, MacMichael understands that the Mandatory has little power at home over the zealous actions of the Zionists as they manipulate public and political opinion even as they expand their terrorism against the British Mandate government in Palestine . This is an untenable position to be in, responsible for government control and security of those under its authority, i.e. Palestinians as well as Jews, knowing that the Jews are set on driving the British out of Palestine, and knowing that the home government can offer little help.

To bolster his points, MacMichael offers the following:

… the Jews in Palestine are by no means untrained in the use of arms … large numbers have received training in the Palestine Police… or in His Majesty’s Forces. At the present time, in addition to approximately 10,000 Jews in His Majesty’s Forces, there are 5,800 in various units of the police force and 15,400 special policemen (31,000) … When to those men … are added the illicit ‘defence’ organizations of the Jews (Haganah alone had an estimated 60-70,000 men by 1945, see Mss, Med. S20 Appendix XXI), it will be evident that the Jewish people in arms would numerically and in calibre be a very formidable adversary. (ii)

This is in 1941before the full deployment of Jewish terrorism against the legitimate Palestine government got under way.

MacMichael and Catling found themselves missing one of Catling’s primary supports for the waging of “irregular warfare” drawn from his image of the 3-legged stool that required the support of the people, the commander and his army and the government, an image, no doubt, from his childhood in Suffolk where his family were butchers and farmers. But the situation only got worse as the end of WWII loomed. The Haganah carried out anti-British military operations, including the kidnapping, killing and booby trapping of soldiers’ bodies, conducted against the Mandate Government while the home government remained silent under the pall of Israeli Zionist propaganda. (iii)

But recording the acts of terrorism does not do justice to the conditions the Mandate government faced. MacMichael describes the reality of the forces aligned against the police in Palestine .

    A second matter which deeply impressed me is the almost Nazi control exercised by the official Jewish organizations over the Jewish community, willy nilly, through the administration of funds from abroad, the issue of labor certificates in connection with the immigration quota…. The Royal Commission were, in my view, fundamentally at error in describing the Jewish community in Palestine as “intensely democratic”. … The Zionist organization, the whole social structure which it has created in Palestine , has the trappings but none of the essentials of democracy. The community is under the closed oligarchy of the Jewish official organizations which control Zionist policy and circumscribe the lives of the Jewish community in all directions…. The reality of power is in the Agency, with the Haganah, the illegal military organization, always in the background. (iv)

And so the authorities in Palestine , the legal authorities, have no power to enforce measures that would curtail terrorism against their own police. “The use of force cannot be contemplated at present as any such action would have to be on a very large scale.” MacMichael understands that he can get no help from the Jewish community, even from those who find themselves at odds with the Agency’s methods or morality. The consequences to the individual Jew for disobedience is horrendous as the second document seized from the Zionists in 1947 attests.

But we’ll stop here; David Ward’s comment was nothing to condemn. He didn’t know of the years before the end of WWII when the Zionists were destroying Mandate Palestine and the indigenous people there. Yet he knew enough to ask a discerning question. Did the Jewish people learn anything from their experience under Hitler’s rule? The Zionists did quite obviously and they used it and continue to use it to decimate and destroy the Palestinian people, to disarm truth with distortion, to steal land and subjugate the innocent, and to verbally defecate with deafening verbal, righteous indignation, to avoid the reality and truth that could be discovered if their actions were brought before the International Courts.

Should anyone care to extend their interest in this deception you might read “Deception as Truth: the Myth of Mid-East Peace,” “The Birth Date of Fratricide: May 14, 1948 ,” “A Miscarriage of Birth: a Miscarriage of Justice,” and the Introduction to the book, The Plight of the Palestinians .

(i) MacMichael, Harold. (1947). “Memorandum on the Participation of the Jewish National Institutions in Palestine in Acts of Lawlessness and Violence” The Palestine Police, Jerusalem , 7-31-1947 in Catling file.

(ii) MacMichael. “dispatch.” 1.

(iii) Ibid., “Despatch.” 2.

(iv) Ibid., “Despatch.” 2.

William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. He writes frequently for Internet publications including The Palestine Chronicle, MWC News, Atlantic Free Press, Pacific Free Press, Countercurrents, Counterpunch, World Prout Assembly, Dissident Voice, and Information Clearing House among others. His books include Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria, a novella, and the forthcoming The Plight of the Palestinians. He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu or www.drwilliamacook.com

 

 

By Dirk Adriaensens

28 January, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

The inhuman prison system in Iraq , a legacy of the US occupation

Azzaman reported on 25 January : The question “How many times did you blow yourself up?” is part of a joke doing rounds in Iraq . It refers to a prisoner who under duress and in order to prevent his interrogators from torturing him any further admitted that he had blown himself up several times. For his tormentors the response was ‘good’ enough to brand him ‘terrorist’ and keep him behind bards without proper trial for many years. Many Iraqi prisoners, some of them still languishing in their prison cells and other released, speak of their torture and imprisonment in Iraqi jails in these terms.

Hurling empty and ridiculous accusations is part of the skills that U.S. troops and their jailers have bequeathed Iraqi security forces. The shortest way for an Iraqi in custody today is to quickly confess to the accusation hurled at him to escape humiliation and torture.

The issue of tens of thousands of jailed Iraqis is at the top of demands of Iraqi demonstrators and protesters. Stories of families being destroyed following the arrest of their breadwinners without charges and proper trial are common in Iraq . Some of the prisoners started their terms at the age of 19 or even younger and have been in jail for many years without trial.

Would the government have the guts to ponder the future of a young generation in prison for so long and of children whose father has been jailed simply on ungrounded suspicions and for so long? What kind of future awaits them? The government should listen carefully to the demands of the hundreds of thousands of protesters who have taken to the streets of major cities in central Iraq .

Freeing prisoners and putting an end to jailing people without proper trial is only a first step. Maliki’s government should be dissolved and put on trial. Reparations should be paid to all the victims who have been unjustly and illegally detained for so many years, including the detainees in American administered prisons.

Many Human Rights Organisations, including The B Russell s Tribunal, have frequently alarmed the world community about the horrible conditions in Iraq prisons, where torture, rape, sodomy and outright murder are endemic.

34 Detainees tortured to death in 3 months

Journalists obtained a list of 34 names of detainees who died in prison after being tortured, within three months in 2012. The list is a formal document from the Ministry of Justice, requested by the Human Rights Committee in the Iraqi Parliament. Most of these prisoners had no autopsy reports from the Forensic Medical Department.

When the spokesman of Ministry of Justice, Haidar al-Saadi, was asked about this , he denied the validity of this information, and accused external parties conspiring secretly and promoting lies. When the reporter gave him the official documents in which the Ministry of Justice confessed of the death of the detainees he became speechless and did not know the answer but he promised the reporter to prepare the answer the next day. Unfortunately, when the BBC called him the next day he closed his phone!!!

Women imprisoned for many years instead of their husbands and sons

The Iraqi News Network reported on 16 January that Hussein Al-Shahristani, the Deputy Prime Minister of Energy and Chairman of the Ministerial Committee that was formed to study the demands of the demonstrators visited one of the women prisons in Baghdad . Al-Shahristani found out that there was a female inmate who was there for six years and her case was never submitted to court. She was arrested because her son was suspected to be involved in terroristic activities. A few days ago, Noori Al-Maliki assured that the government would never allow arresting the mother, the wife, the son, or the sister instead of the wanted husband or father, and that everyone is responsible for his / her own crime. That is a lie, one more to be added to Nouri’s credentials.

When the woman was asked about the reason behind her arrest, she said that her son entered his house one day carrying a black sack containing items she didn’t know about. The security forces came to their house the next day and arrested her because she didn’t report her son to the authorities about that sack. The woman used to live in one of the eastern areas and remained in prison for the last six years without any judicial procedure. Wesaal Al-Jaf, the Member of the Human Rights Parliamentary Committee confirmed that there are a huge number of detainees whose cases have not enough evidence to back the accusations. Al-Jaf demanded to form a united investigation group to review the cases of the detainees. It is known now that every institution, whether civil or military, has its own detention centers or secret prisons. Al-Jaf added that releasing the prisoners is the first step towards a just judicial system.

Torture and murder in Al Rasafah secret prison

Many Iraqi families have testified that their sons are in a secret prison in Al-Rasafah Prisons Compound , named Quarries 13, run by the Iraqi Correction Office, under the authority of the Ministry of Justice. Al-Rasafah Prisons Compound includes many public prisons, like Al-Rasafah 1 st ,2 nd ,3 rd ,4 th , and the 5 th Prisons, in addition to the uncovered secret prison, in which the prisoners face torture every day. When the families went to visit their sons, entrance was prohibited. The Prison Management didn’t confirm or deny whether their sons were imprisoned there or not, but the Management assured the visitors that there are more than 50 prisoners in that building, and they cannot call their families or consult a lawyer. The families said their sons were in that prison for 3 to 5 years, and they knew nothing about this until the released prisoners told them.

One of the released prisoners said that he was in that secret prison. The Prison consists of metal caravans divided into small cells 2 meters long and 1 meter wide. The ground and walls are all of rusty iron, the toilet is inside this cell too, and is sometimes blocked so the dirty water floods out. In the winter, the rain pours inside and fills the cells. Many prisoners have serious diseases, like scabies, as a result of this terrible condition. The prisoners are enduring continuous torture and many of them died after the harsh torture.

New information about the torture of the security guards of Al-Hashimi & Al-Isawi

IraqiRabita reported recently that they have received new information about the methods of torture used against the security guards of Al-Hashimi and Al-Isawi. The investigators have been torturing those guards continuously for 14 days, using electricity, beating, cutting their tongues with sharp razors and then filling their mouths with salt.

A committee from the Ministry of Interior came to see one of those prisoners, then a judge sent by Al-Maliki met him, the prisoner told the judge that he couldn’t walk, so they wrapped him with a blanket and carried him. The judge told the prisoner that this was a “political issue” and that he couldn’t do anything for him. One of the imprisoned guards told the investigator who was beating him to stop hurting him if he had some honour left. The investigator replied that the guard and his family have no honour, and that he will slaughter all the Sunni Iraqis and throw them in the Tigris River .

These are the names of some of the investigators who tortured the guards on a sectarian basis:

•  Major Ali Hasan Al-Bahadli: an ex convict, accused of murder and rape. Maliki released him to torture people especially for this case.

•  Lt.Colonel Nema Al-Gharbawi.

•  Saad Al-Lami – the judge who supports all of this.

Another prisoner said that they brought a laptop into the prison facility with files of crimes, and that the prisoners had to memorize those crimes, to confess those crimes in front of the media or the judges, then they checked if the prisoners had “memorized” those crimes well. In case there’s a proven crime, but the prisoner is Shiite, the prison management blackmails that prisoner and asks a lot of money. In return, they “transfer” his accusations to a Sunni prisoner from the arrested guards and release the Shiite.

Ahmad, One the brothers of Al-Hashimi’s guard Muhammad Shawqir, visited the prison and asked about his brother. Instead they arrested him on false grounds. Then he was brought before a judge and when the judge said he was innocent, they brought him back to his cell and accused him of another crime, and so forth.

One of Al-Hashimi’s security guards who is now in jail told IraqiRabita :

On 31 December 2012 , we had a very long session of beating and torture. There were 12 security guards of Al-Isawi with us. The torture session was to prepare them to sign some confessions, this time against the Al-Anbar heads of tribes, Ali Hatam Al-Sulaiman and Abu Risha.

The oddest thing was that the investigators told the prisoners that they had to confess against Masoud Barazani, that he was “leading and funding death squads in Mosul to kill the academics and the Imams in the mosques”.

In the morning, they brought cameras from Al-Iraqia TV to record those confessions on TV. So, the prisoners started to accuse Ali Hatam that he bombed many areas in Al-Anbar, Ramadi and Ana, and that Abu Risha killed many of his opponents in Ramadi and Heet, and was cooperating with Al-Qaeda to raid checkpoints. They recorded those confessions to be used by Maliki when needed.

One of Al-Hashimi security guards who is now in jail called me, telling me the following:

In December,31st,2012 , we had a very long session of beating, swearing and torture, there are 12 security guards of Al-Eesawi with us, the torture was to prepare them to sign on some confessions ,this time was on Al-Anbar heads of tribes,one of them is ( Ali Hatam Al-Sulaiman) and ( Abu Reesha).

What was also odd is that the investigators told the prisoners that they have to confess on Masoud Barazani, and that the latter is leading and funding death squads in Mosul to kill the academics and the Imams in the mosques.

In the morning, they brought cameras from Al-Iraqia TV to make those confessions on TV .So, the prisoners started to accuse Ali Hatam that he bombed many areas in Al-Anbar, Ramadi and Ana, and that Abu Risha killed many of his opponents in Ramadi and Heet, and was cooperating with Al-Qaeda to raid checkpoints. They recorded those accusations to be used when needed.

If the accusations are false, who are the real criminals?

Here are some clues. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Al-Maliki himself has dropped all charges against mass murderer Ismael Hafid Al-Lami .

This well-known criminal nicknamed Abu Diri was summoned to Al-Rasafah Criminal Court, after a direct decision by Nouri Al-Maliki to drop all charges against that man. Ismael Al-Lami was accused of many sectarian killings, kidnapping, torturing and burying the victims alive. Nouri Al-Maliki headed the Asaib Ahlul Haq Militia and they formed a Special Operations Cell. This Cell is connected directly with Al-Maliki’s Office and is run by Abu Diri himself. Its main duty is to assassinate everyone opposing Al-Maliki policy. Abu Diri is a well-known killer of Iraqis, carried out many crimes in 2006 and 2007 on behalf of the Al-Mahdi Militia, Al-Jaafari and Iran . He used terrible ways to torture and killed many Iraqis, whether they were Sunni or Shiite. Later, he escaped to Iran and joined the Iranian Basij, but he went back to Iraq after an invitation from Al-Maliki himself.

Jawad Al-Bolani, the former Minister of Interior escaped to Beirut after a scandal of being involved in terroristic activities . Hamid Al-Mutlag, the Iraqi League Representative said that the former Minister of Interior Jawad Al-Bolani escaped to Beirut , after it was discovered he was involved in terrorist activities. Al-Mutlag demanded the government to take legal actions against the officials who have corruption cases in order not to allow them to escape the country, assuring that when those corrupted people escape, and no one punishes them, the Iraqi people would never trust the government again.

Al-Mutlag said in a statement that such an escape by Al-Bolani increased the suspicions of corruption. Al-Mutlag added that Al-Bolani had connections with terrorist activities from the first day of his job as Minister of Interior. The Parliament Defense and Security Committee have ample evidence about terrorist operations supervised by Al-Bolani and his brother. Al-Mutlag added that it’s the duty of the government to arrest such criminals to submit them to the Iraqi judiciary.

Al-Zamili: from serial killer as Deputy Minister of Health to Parliament Member in a committee to provide security for the iraqis!

To make things even worse, and to fully understand the anger of the Iraqi people and the demands of the Iraqi protest movement, here is the incredible case of Hakim Al-Zamili .

Hakim Al-Zamili was well known when Ibrahim Al-Jaafari was the Prime Minister in Iraq . The Iraqis used to call him the Butcher of the Ministry of Health (MOH), because he was leading militias that kidnapped employees from the MOH, or patients from the hospitals and health centres, to kill them and throw them on the garbage dump. He also formed a militia to watch the families who visited the morgues to look for their sons who were killed. A member of this militia would address one of the family members and if the victim was a Sunni, he would contact the militia to kidnap that family member and kill him. Hospitals became a source of horror for every Sunni in Iraq , because as soon as they would enter a hospital, they would be kidnapped and brutally killed.

When he held that position, the MOH distributed medicines that caused miscarriages to pregnant women. So, Al-Elwiyah Hospital registered the miscarriages of 25 infants daily.

The most famous crimes Al-Zamili was that when his militia kidnapped Dr.Al-Al-Mahdawi who was nominated to be the Deputy Minister of Health, they met with Al-Mahdawi in the MOH building, and there he and his security guards were kidnapped, and until now they are still missing.

He was accused of kidnapping Ammar Al-Saffar, the second nominated Deputy Minister of Health, although Al-Saffar was from the Dawa Party. No one found his corpse or found out anything related to his kidnapping, until the Dawa Party closed the case for unknown reasons.

After many complaints, and after his crimes exceeded all limits, when even Al-Maliki couldn’t stop this murderous creature, the American Forces arrested him and submitted him to the Iraqi Judiciary, accused of kidnapping tens of innocent people. After he was arrested, he directly confessed things about the Minister of Health, he also mentioned to the Americans the names of 61 members of death squads in Baghdad , Najaf and Samawah. He confessed that he used the ambulances to transport weapons and wanted members of the Mahdi Militia, and to transport the kidnapped victims to the Kalf-al-Sadda Area to kill them there. After those confessions and details the Americans formed a committee headed by Colonel Mark Martins, this committee transferred Al-Zamili and Hameed Al-Shammari, the Head Security Guard in the MOH, into an open court, saying that this trial would be more important than the trials of Saddam’s regime officials .

But, since the Iraqi judiciary is terribly corrupted, and the Mahdi Militia controls the courts, the judiciary and the police stations, all the accusations against Al-Zamili were dropped, and he was finally released after the witnesses failed to testify against his crimes. That’s how Al-Zamili was released after less than a year, although the Americans claimed that his trial would be the trial of the decade! Later it was discovered that his militia threatened the judges and witnesses, kidnapped their family members and threatened to rape and kill them, even when the Coalition Forces assured their safety !

The MOH under Al-Jaafari’s rule was controlled by the Sadr bloc. Dr.Ali Al-Shammari, the ex- Minister of Health was nominated by the Sadrists. But, after Dr. Al-Shammari found out about the crimes the Mahdi Militia against the Sunnis in the MOH, after he noticed that he was actually leading a Ministry of kidnapping and torture and a slaughter house, not a Ministry, he was threatened by the Sadrists when he dismissed many criminals who used to work in the MOH, as Ismael Haqqi, the Red Crescent President declared. Dr.Al-Shammari decided to seek help from the Americans, had loads of evidences and files that proved corruption and crimes committed by the Sadrists and the Mahdi Militia in the MOH. He also decided to leave his job because of those crimes. The accusations incriminated Al-Mahdi Militia and Muqtada Al-Sadr personally, crimes committed in every department related to the MOH. Unfortunately, the Americans also decided to ignore those evidences and closed the case. Were they themselves involved? Were these militias used as local stooges to carry out their counterinsurgency program? All the available evidence points in that direction.

Having a person like Al-Zamili in the Iraqi Parliament despite his terrible crime record, tells us that Iraq is run by a group of criminals, supervised by a parliament that is more criminal than the government itself. He is a Parliament member now, and there’s no need to be astonished if we find him one day as the Minister of Justice. Hadi Al-Ameri has no diploma, but he’s the Minister of Transportation, Ali Al-Adeeb has no doctorate certificate, but he’s the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, so, contemporary Iraq has the dubious reputation to give important positions to criminals.

After all these and other cruelties and human rights abuses inflicted upon the Iraqi people, does it come as a surprise that millions of people are currently demonstrating against this corrupted government? The Iraqi people want to live in peace and dignity, and they want security for their families. They are fed up with this country that looks more like a huge open air concentration camp than as a “blossoming democracy”.

Translation of Iraqi reports: Lubna Al Rudaini

Dirk Adriaensens is coordinator of SOS Iraq and member of the executive committee of the BRussells Tribunal. Between 1992 and 2003 he led several delegations to Iraq to observe the devastating effects of UN imposed sanctions. He was a member of the International Organizing Committee of the World Tribunal on Iraq (2003-2005). He is also co-coordinator of the Global Campaign Against the Assassination of Iraqi Academics. He is co-author of Rendez-Vous in Baghdad , EPO (1994), Cultural Cleansing in Iraq , Pluto Press, London (2010), Beyond Educide, Academia Press, Ghent (2012), and is a frequent contributor to GlobalResearch, Truthout, The International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies and other media.

 

 

By Alistair Dawber

Sunday 27 January 2013

@ The Independent

Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.

The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically.

One of the Ethiopian women who was interviewed is quoted as saying: “They [medical staff] told us they are inoculations. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.” It is alleged that some of the women were forced or coerced to take the drug while in transit camps in Ethiopia.

The drug in question is thought to be Depo-Provera, which is injected every three months and is considered to be a highly effective, long-lasting contraceptive.

Nearly 100,000 Ethiopian Jews have moved to Israel under the Law of Return since the 1980s, but their Jewishness has been questioned by some rabbis. Last year, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who also holds the health portfolio, warned that illegal immigrants from Africa “threaten our existence as a Jewish and democratic state”.

Haaretz published an extract from a letter sent by the Ministry of Health to units administering the drug. Doctors were told “not to renew prescriptions for Depo Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment”.

Sharona Eliahu Chai, a lawyer for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), said: “Findings from investigations into the use of Depo Provera are extremely worrisome, raising concerns of harmful health policies with racist implications in violation of medical ethics. The Ministry of Health’s director-general was right to act quickly and put forth new guidelines.”