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Now that the explosions have stopped, we are obligated to delve into the truth behind Operation Pillar of Defense.

By Reuven Pedatzur

4 December, 2012

@ www.haaretz.com

The real story behind Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza has not yet been investigated, but now that the explosions have stopped, we are obligated to delve into the truth. The decision to kill Hamas military chief Ahmed Jabari, which was the opening shot of the operation, was made even though he was involved in negotiations on signing a long-term cease-fire agreement.

A few hours before he was assassinated, he had received a draft of an agreement for a permanent cease-fire with Israel, and he was apparently expected to reply to it affirmatively. The indirect contacts with Jabari had taken place over the course of months via Hamas’ deputy foreign minister, Ghazi Hamad, with the knowledge and consent of Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

These contacts with Hamas were conducted by Gershon Baskin, who served as an intermediary in the deal for the return of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. Baskin had reported his progress toward a draft agreement to the members of a special committee appointed by Barak back in May, a panel that also included representatives of other government ministries.

In other words, our decision makers, including the defense minister and perhaps also Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, knew about Jabari’s role in advancing a permanent cease-fire agreement. Jabari was the strongman of the Gaza Strip – Israel’s “subcontractor,” as Haaretz editor-in-chief Aluf Benn characterized him – so Hamad submitted each draft prepared with Baskin to Jabari for approval.

Also party to the negotiations on a permanent cease-fire were Egyptian intelligence officials. Some of the meetings between Baskin and Hamad took place in Cairo. These Egyptian intelligence officials were in constant contact with Barak’s envoys, so one would assume that in addition to Baskin, they too were informing Israel of their impressions of the progress in the talks on a draft agreement.

At no point in the negotiations between Baskin and Hamad was the former ever told to stop.

Moreover, about a week before Jabari’s assassination, Israeli military officials asked permission from their commanders to meet with Baskin and get a briefing. This permission was denied.

Thus the decision to kill Jabari shows that our decision makers decided a cease-fire would be undesirable for Israel at this time, and that attacking Hamas would be preferable. It seems a view had developed that Israel needed to strengthen its deterrence against Hamas rather than reach agreement with it on a period of calm. In the view of the defense establishment and the prime and defense ministers’ bureaus, a cease-fire agreement might have undermined Israel’s deterrence and weakened its image of resolve. Bolstering its deterrence, in this view, would be achieved by killing Jabari, who was liable to respond affirmatively to the offer of a long-term cease-fire.

In this way, Israel’s leaders killed three birds with one stone: They assassinated the man who had the power to make a deal with Israel; they took revenge on someone who had caused more than a few Israeli casualties; and they signaled to Hamas that communications with it will be conducted only through military force.

Quite aside from the fact that the results of Operation Pillar of Defense didn’t meet the expectations of those who launched it, the decision makers must answer one important question: If they knew it was possible to reach a cease-fire agreement (whose provisions, incidentally, were better than those of the agreement reached after the operation ) without going to war, why did they assassinate Jabari, and thereby also assassinate the chances of achieving calm without shooting? Is it possible, heaven forbid, that Barak and Netanyahu feared the opportunity to conduct a military operation at the end of their government’s term would elude them, and that’s why they ordered Jabari’s liquidation?

To keep us from suspecting their motives, the prime minister and defense minister must explain their considerations and decisions in the Jabari affair.

By Noam Chomsky, Alternet

04 December 12

@ Readersupportednews.org

An old man in Gaza held a placard that read: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.”

The old man’s message provides the proper context for the latest episode in the savage punishment of Gaza. The crimes trace back to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled from their homes in terror or were expelled to Gaza by conquering Israeli forces, who continued to truck Palestinians over the border for years after the official cease-fire.

The punishment took new forms when Israel conquered Gaza in 1967. From recent Israeli scholarship (primarily Avi Raz’s “The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War”), we learn that the government’s goal was to drive the refugees into the Sinai Peninsula – and, if feasible, the rest of the population too.

Expulsions from Gaza were carried out under the direct orders of Gen. Yeshayahu Gavish, commander of the Israel Defense Forces Southern Command. Expulsions from the West Bank were far more extreme, and Israel resorted to devious means to prevent the return of those expelled, in direct violation of U.N. Security Council orders.

The reasons were made clear in internal discussions immediately after the war. Golda Meir, later prime minister, informed her Labor Party colleagues that Israel should keep the Gaza Strip while “getting rid of its Arabs.” Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and others agreed.

Prime Minister Levi Eshkol explained that those expelled could not be allowed to return because “we cannot increase the Arab population in Israel” – referring to the newly occupied territories, already considered part of Israel.

In accord with this conception, all of Israel’s maps were changed, expunging the Green Line (the internationally recognized borders) – though publication of the maps was delayed to permit Abba Eban, an Israeli ambassador to the U.N., to attain what he called a “favorable impasse” at the General Assembly by concealing Israel’s intentions.

The goals of expulsion may remain alive today, and might be a factor in contributing to Egypt’s reluctance to open the border to free passage of people and goods barred by the U.S.-backed Israeli siege.

The current upsurge of U.S.-Israeli violence dates to January 2006, when Palestinians voted “the wrong way” in the first free election in the Arab world.

Israel and the U.S. reacted at once with harsh punishment of the miscreants, and preparation of a military coup to overthrow the elected government – the routine procedure. The punishment was radically intensified in 2007, when the coup attempt was beaten back and the elected Hamas government established full control over Gaza.

Ignoring immediate offers from Hamas for a truce after the 2006 election, Israel launched attacks that killed 660 Palestinians in 2006, most of whom were civilians (a third were minors). According to U.N. reports, 2,879 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire from April 2006 through July 2012, along with several dozen Israelis killed by fire from Gaza.

A short-lived truce in 2008 was honored by Hamas until Israel broke it in November. Ignoring further truce offers, Israel launched the murderous Cast Lead operation in December.

So matters have continued, while the U.S. and Israel also continue to reject Hamas calls for a long-term truce and a political settlement for a two-state solution in accord with the international consensus that the U.S. has blocked since 1976 when the U.S. vetoed a Security Council resolution to this effect, brought by the major Arab states.

This week, Washington devoted every effort to blocking a Palestinian initiative to upgrade its status at the U.N. but failed, in virtual international isolation as usual. The reasons were revealing: Palestine might approach the International Criminal Court about Israel’s U.S.-backed crimes.

One element of the unremitting torture of Gaza is Israel’s “buffer zone” within Gaza, from which Palestinians are barred entry to almost half of Gaza’s limited arable land.

From January 2012 to the launching of Israel’s latest killing spree on Nov. 14, Operation Pillar of Defense, one Israeli was killed by fire from Gaza while 78 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire.

The full story is naturally more complex, and uglier.

The first act of Operation Pillar of Defense was to murder Ahmed Jabari. Aluf Benn, editor of the newspaper Haaretz, describes him as Israel’s “subcontractor” and “border guard” in Gaza, who enforced relative quiet there for more than five years.

The pretext for the assassination was that during these five years Jabari had been creating a Hamas military force, with missiles from Iran. A more credible reason was provided by Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, who had been involved in direct negotiations with Jabari for years, including plans for the eventual release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Baskin reports that hours before he was assassinated, Jabari “received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the cease-fire in the case of a flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip.”

A truce was then in place, called by Hamas on Nov. 12. Israel apparently exploited the truce, Reuters reports, directing attention to the Syrian border in the hope that Hamas leaders would relax their guard and be easier to assassinate.

Throughout these years, Gaza has been kept on a level of bare survival, imprisoned by land, sea and air. On the eve of the latest attack, the U.N. reported that 40 percent of essential drugs and more than half of essential medical items were out of stock.

 

In November one of the first in a series of hideous photos sent from Gaza showed a doctor holding the charred corpse of a murdered child. That one had a personal resonance. The doctor is the director and head of surgery at Khan Yunis hospital, which I had visited a few weeks earlier.

In writing about the trip I reported his passionate appeal for desperately needed medicine and surgical equipment. These are among the crimes of the U.S.-Israeli siege, and of Egyptian complicity.

The casualty rates from the November episode were about average: more than 160 Palestinian dead, including many children, and six Israelis.

Among the dead were three journalists. The official Israeli justification was that “The targets are people who have relevance to terror activity.” Reporting the “execution” in The New York Times, the reporter David Carr observed that “it has come to this: Killing members of the news media can be justified by a phrase as amorphous as ‘relevance to terror activity.’ ”

The massive destruction was all in Gaza. Israel used advanced U.S. military equipment and relied on U.S. diplomatic support, including the usual U.S. intervention efforts to block a Security Council call for a cease-fire.

With each such exploit, Israel’s global image erodes. The photos and videos of terror and devastation, and the character of the conflict, leave few remaining shreds of credibility to the self-declared “most moral army in the world,” at least among people whose eyes are open.

The pretexts for the assault were also the usual ones. We can put aside the predictable declarations of the perpetrators in Israel and Washington. But even decent people ask what Israel should do when attacked by a barrage of missiles. It’s a fair question, and there are straightforward answers.

One response would be to observe international law, which allows the use of force without Security Council authorization in exactly one case: in self-defense after informing the Security Council of an armed attack, until the Council acts, in accord with the U.N. Charter, Article 51.

Israel is well familiar with that Charter provision, which it invoked at the outbreak of the June 1967 war. But, of course, Israel’s appeal went nowhere when it was quickly ascertained that Israel had launched the attack. Israel did not follow this course in November, knowing what would be revealed in a Security Council debate.

Another narrow response would be to agree to a truce, as appeared quite possible before the operation was launched on Nov. 14.

There are more far-reaching responses. By coincidence, one is discussed in the current issue of the journal National Interest. Asia scholars Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen describe China’s reaction after rioting in western Xinjiang province, “in which mobs of Uighurs marched around the city beating hapless Han (Chinese) to death.”

Chinese president Hu Jintao quickly flew to the province to take charge; senior leaders in the security establishment were fired; and a wide range of development projects were undertaken to address underlying causes of the unrest.

In Gaza, too, a civilized reaction is possible. The U.S. and Israel could end the merciless, unremitting assault, open the borders and provide for reconstruction – and if it were imaginable, reparations for decades of violence and repression.

The cease-fire agreement stated that the measures to implement the end of the siege and the targeting of residents in border areas “shall be dealt with after 24 hours from the start of the cease-fire.”

There is no sign of steps in this direction. Nor is there any indication of a U.S.-Israeli willingness to rescind their separation of Gaza from the West Bank in violation of the Oslo Accords, to end the illegal settlement and development programs in the West Bank that are designed to undermine a political settlement, or in any other way to abandon the rejectionism of the past decades.

Someday, and it must be soon, the world will respond to the plea issued by the distinguished Gazan human-rights lawyer Raji Sourani while the bombs were once again raining down on defenseless civilians in Gaza: “We demand justice and accountability. We dream of a normal life, in freedom and dignity.”

By Bill Van Auken

04 December, 2012

@ WSWS.org

The Obama administration and the corporate media have cited unspecified “intelligence” about the movement of chemical weapons to issue new threats of direct intervention in Syria, where Washington and its allies have been backing so-called “rebels” in a bid to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both made public statements Monday alleging a danger of Syria using chemical weapons and threatening US retaliation.

Appearing before a military audience at the National Defense University in Fort McNair, Obama declared, “I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad and anyone who is under his command… If you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons there will be consequences and you will be held accountable.”

“This is a red line for the United States,” Clinton said earlier in the day after a meeting in Prague with Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg.

“I’m not going to telegraph in any specifics what we would do in the event of credible evidence that the Assad regime has resorted to using chemical weapons against their own people, but suffice it to say that we’re certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur,” Clinton warned.

Schwarzenberg told the media that Czech troops specializing in chemical weapons had been sent to Jordan and were “training” with forces there.

Citing unnamed senior officials who claim to have seen unspecified intelligence on Syrian chemical weapons, the New York Times, CNN and other media have joined forces with the Obama administration in promoting the chemical weapons justification for another US war of aggression.

What becomes clear in examining these reports, as well as the statements from the administration, is that the alleged threat from Syrian “weapons of mass destruction” is entirely concocted. Not a single piece of hard evidence is cited by any government official or any media source.

In a breathless report on Monday, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr quoted an unnamed “senior US official” as describing “worrying signs” of supposed activity around chemical weapons sites in Syria in “the last few days.”

“The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitiveness of the information discussed, declined to specify the exact intelligence that the United States has gathered in the past few days,” Starr said.

The CNN report quotes one US official as saying that “this puts us into the contingency of potential US action.”

The chemical weapons story was initially broken on Sunday by the New York Times in a front-page article co-authored by David Sanger, the Times’ chief Washington correspondent, and Eric Schmitt, its national security correspondent. Writing that “what exactly the Syrian forces intend to do with the weapons remains murky,” the Times correspondents cited as their source unnamed “officials who have seen the intelligence from Syria.”

Syria’s Foreign Ministry categorically denied that the country’s military is preparing to use chemical weapons. A statement released in Damascus said that Syria “would not use chemical weapons—if there are any—against its own people under any circumstances.”

What is particularly significant in the statements of Obama and other US officials is the absence of any expression of concern over the Syrian military’s chemical weapons stockpile falling into the hands of the so-called rebels whom Washington is supporting.

It has become impossible to conceal the fact that the main fighting force challenging the Assad regime is dominated by Islamist militias, including forces tied to Al Qaeda, who would be prepared to use such weapons against civilian populations in Western Europe or the United States. That this is a matter of official indifference only underscores the glaring contradiction between the official expressions of concern and the real motives underlying the US intervention.

The leaks about chemical weapons were made on the eve of a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday. The meeting will decide on Turkey’s request for the deployment of Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries on the country’s 560-mile border with Syria.

The Turkish government has claimed that the missiles are necessary to counter an alleged threat of missiles with chemical warheads being fired towards its territory by the Syrian armed forces.

Turkey has been among the most important state sponsors of the Syrian insurgency, funneling arms and supplies and reportedly providing Turkish military officers as “advisers.” It has allowed the anti-Assad forces to use its territory as a base and hosted a CIA station, where US operatives have coordinated the provision of arms, money and intelligence to the “rebels.”

The deployment of the Patriot missiles, which both US and NATO officials have indicated will be approved at this week’s meeting, will mark a major turning point in the imperialist intervention in Syria. It will place US and NATO forces in direct confrontation with the Syrian military and pave the way for a far more open intervention.

While the missile batteries are supposedly aimed against a threat of surface-to-surface missiles from Syria, a far more likely use is to deny Syrian military aircraft the ability to operate in northern Syria, effectively carving out a “no-fly zone” in which the US-NATO-backed “rebels” can operate with relative impunity. As in last year’s US-NATO intervention in Libya, such a development would likely prove the first step in a direct war for regime-change.

The claims of threats from Syrian chemical weapons also serve as a pretext for a direct ground invasion. As the New York Times article notes, the US and its allies “have long been developing contingency plans in case they decided to intervene in an effort to neutralize the chemical weapons, a task that the Pentagon estimates would require upward of 75,000 troops.”

The article also points to the Pentagon’s having “quietly sent a task force of more than 150 planners and other specialists to Jordan to help the armed forces there to, among other things, prepare for the possibility that Syria would lose control of its chemical weapons.” The phrase “among other things” serves to mask the essential mission of this force of US special operations troops, which is to aid the “rebel” operations inside Syria and serve as an advance guard for a more direct US-NATO intervention.

Debka.com, a web site with close ties to Israeli intelligence, reported that last week the “rebels” had carried out an attack that destroyed a Russian-built electronic warning radar station in southern Syria, effectively blinding the regime in the face of any attacks prepared by the Israeli military. According to a report in the Atlantic Monday, Israel has approached the Jordanian government with plans for air strikes on Syrian chemical weapons sites. Debka described the deployment of the Patriot missiles and the attacks on Syrian radar as representing “a coordinated military effort.”

Within just weeks of the US election, concerted preparations are underway for yet another war of aggression in the Middle East. The warnings about supposed threats from “weapons of mass destruction” are an unmistakable echo of the lies used to justify the catastrophic US war against Iraq a decade ago. The New York Times, the “newspaper of record” and voice of official liberalism, served as the indispensable conduit for government disinformation about non-existent Iraqi WMD, lending credibility to the propaganda used to justify the unprovoked US invasion. Clearly, the same modus operandi is being employed in Syria.

In the offing is a war with potentially far more devastating consequences than the eight-year US intervention in Iraq or the more than decade-long war in Afghanistan. In attacking Syria, US imperialism is aiming to pave the way for an assault on Iran in a bid to reorganize the entire region in its own interests.

By Don Hazen, AlterNet

03 December 12

@ readersupportednews.org

“The public would not be accepting of drones, if they knew how kill decisions are made, and how many innocents are killed in the process.”– Robert Greenwald, Brave New Films

Robert Greenwald, head of the progressive internet video and documentary film company, Brave New Films, recently traveled to Pakistan, supported financially by hundreds of BNF donors, to witness first hand the stories of families who have had innocent loved ones killed by U.S. drone attacks. Greenwald is challenging both the morality and the factual effectiveness of the U.S drone program as we learn more about the failures and questionable policies. The U.S. claims that drone missiles are aimed at potential terrorists but because the ground rules of who can be targeted is both vague and has been loosened, the number of innocents being killed has risen sharply. Furthermore, the information that is used to target people, appears to be the result of a system of bribery at the local level, which is of questionable reliability.

It wasn’t until April 2012 that John Brennan, White House counter-terrorism adviser admitted for the first time publicly, that our government has been using drones in Pakistan, and later Yemen, to attempt to kill those they consider as potential terrorists. This was the first public acknowledgment, despite the fact that the program had been going for at least several years. Still far more information was withheld in Brennan’s announcement about the the program, than was revealed.

As The Washington Post reports: “Brennan’s speech was also noteworthy, however, for what he withheld. He did not disclose how many people have been killed, list all the locations where armed drones are being flown or mention the administration’s increasing reliance on ‘signature’ strikes, which allow the CIA to fire missiles even when it doesn’t know the identities of those who could be killed.”

The CIA runs the drone program and it is shrouded in secrecy, which enables people like Brennan to characterize the program in glowing terms, which go mainly unchallenged by the media, and contribute to the public assumption that drones are accurate, safe, and taking out the bad guys. Thus Brennan is able to get away with saying, as reported in the Post : Drones’ capability to linger over targets for days enables unprecedented “surgical precision,” Brennan said, “the ability, with laser-like focus, to eliminate the cancerous tumor called an al-Qaeda terrorist while limiting damage to the tissue around it — that makes this counter-terrorism tool so essential.” This despite little evidence that active or powerful elements of Al-Qaeda are operating in the Swat area of Pakistan which has been targeted by drones.

Nevertheless, increasingly another story is emerging which raises fundamental questions about the wisdom and the morality of our policy vis a vis Pakistan, and Brennan’s effort to pretend that the drone program isn’t destructive, and hugely alienating to Pakistan. According to Greenwald, speaking to his staff in a briefing upon his return from Pakistan, people with whom he spoke ” said the Drone attacks were a great recruiting tool for the Taliban, because powerless people want to fight back for the losses they have suffered, as their communities and families are attacked. Many businesses have been destroyed in the Swat area, and schools are empty because everyone is afraid of drone attacks.

Greenwald explains: Let’s assume for a moment the drones can be technically accurate, although that is questionable. What information are they using to establish their targets? Basically it is a form of bribery, where the CIA gives former Pakistani military large sums of money to pass out to sources on the ground in Swat, where the Taliban are most active. Sometimes, — and it is impossible to tell how much — these bribes lead to the settling of old and local scores .”

So there is another painful and tragic side to the drone story — not the one of killing so called “militant targets” but rather the slaughter of innocent civilians, as stories of drone victims have emerged in the Fata area of Swat where the drones are targeted.

Greenwald recounted one situation, as told to him from people from area of the bombing that there was a group of elders were meeting in a Jirga — a kind town meeting of elders — to resolve a community conflict , this one a dispute about mining. But the meeting was interpreted by drone intelligence as a group of men with guns — obviously not unusual for the region — and it became a “signature strike” — and a missile killed between 20 and 40 of the elders.

Like with their intense efforts to work to end the war in Afghanistan, Greenwald and Brave New Films started their quest to change U.S. drone policy with heavy odds (and check out his latest efforts at WarCosts.com). But just as the public attitude toward the Afghan war shifted over time, with heavy dosages of strong factual information contrary to the administration’s line, Greenwald is confident that thee attitude toward drones will shift.

AlterNet spoke with Greenwald in his Culver City California offices on November 26th, just after his return from Pakistan.

Don Hazen: Tell us a little bit about what it was like in Pakistan, and what surprised you, and made you think you were doing the right thing by going there and pursuing the drone story.

Robert Greenwald: The first-hand experience immediately was that the people couldn’t have been more gracious, and that was surprising, given how hated the drones are — by virtue of all measure of statistics — in the great majority of the country.

Don Hazen: What was their message to you? Did they understand you to be a messenger to the public here in the US?

Robert Greenwald: Many of the people asked me to talk to the president of the United States, and to explain to him who they were — that they were not terrorists; they were farmers, they were peasants, they were poor people, they were working people, they were religious people. I heard that over and over again — to please explain this to the President how much damage this was doing. And some of them had the belief that just his understanding who they really were would force him to change his mind about the drone attacks.

Don Hazen: What is your sense of the Obama policy’s effect in Pakistan? What’s your thinking about why we have moved to the use of drones as a major policy shift, and is it working?

Robert Greenwald: After a trip to the region, is very hard to understand or justify why we’re doing it. I feel, like when I went to Afghanistan — there two minutes after walking around on the streets, and you knew this was a country that invading and occupying was not going to be a security solution. After a short period of time in Pakistan, it’s clear that drones are not a security solution either.. If you believe in drones, the original idea was to go after so-called high-value targets, which according to the NYU-Stanford study 2% of the people killed by drones are high-value targets — now, who are all the rest of the people? Well, it’s a secret program, so therefore the CIA doesn’t have to tell us anything, yet they claim that with each attack they’re getting militants. Now we have people coming forward, saying, actually, no we’re not terrorists. One man, he had a picture of a 65 year old woman with grey hair — his mother. She’s not a militant terrorist. So the notion that we’re killing terrorists exclusively is fundamentally inaccurate. It has been estimated by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that as many as 178 children have been killed in drone attacks (Read the full report on child casualties from the drone war on WarCosts.com and watch Greenwald’s related video at the bottom of this interview).

Don Hazen: Why is the CIA in charge of this? What would they say to argue with you? And Why do they think the drone policy is working?

Robert Greenwald: The CIA is in charge, because remember, we’re officially not at war with Pakistan. Tell that to the population and in Pakistan, who see this as an extreme violation of their sovereignty. The Pakistan Parliament voted three times unanimously against the use of drones. One of the original justifications by the CIA was that there was this “imminent threat” of terrorism. Well, I defy anyone to prove that the individuals attacked by drones in Pakistan pose an imminent security threat to the security of the United States. I think the CIA would say, and they have said that it’s the least-bad solution, but I have concluded it’s far from the least bad solution. Basically the CIA has decided that they can unilaterally pick who should be assassinated — No proof, no evidence, no court of law. A small group of people are deciding who should be assassinated and which countries its OK to do this in, and they are often very very wrong.

Don Hazen: And how do we fight that? As more people are mobilized to be against drones, what would be the strategy and tactics to try to change the policy; It seems like there’s no access to changing this policy in a democracy, since much of it is secret, and a “matter of national security.” Nobody is voting on it. The Congress isn’t saying — Yes , on drones; or No on drones.

Robert Greenwald: It’s somewhat analogous to Afghanistan — Congress had to have a series of votes over the years to fund that war, keep it going. I think the first step is to have investigations — It looks like they’re going to have an investigation in the UK, and also now that the United Nations is going to be conducting its own. We need to first know: what exactly is the policy, how is it being decided, and to push for transparency. There’s absolutely no reason — with the exception of avoiding outside scrutiny — for the CIA to keep this hidden. Everyone knows drones are being deployed outside the US for assassinations. Let’s say you even believe in drones. Shouldn’t we have a system that would “justify” their use? i.e. we did this attack, because these bad guys were there, and here’s what we did. We don’t even have that. So that’s where we start. We are asking for people to contact Pelosi/Boehner and push for the House Resolution that Dennis Kucinich introduced that calls for an investigation.

Don Hazen: Do you have a sense of where this is coming from beyond the CIA? Is Obama and his national security staff all pro-drone?

Robert Greenwald: Based on limited information, it appears to be primarily driven by the CIA and especially John Brennan, chief counter-terrorism advisor to Obama. But now we hear that Brennan is trying to rein the program .

Don Hazen: Moral issues aside, what do you say to the people who a. believe drones will save American lives, b. cost a lot less than the traditional model of bombers? For example there was a huge issue in Afghanistan of bombing weddings, where part of the celebration involves firing machine guns into the sky — the proponents of drones say, look we’re avoiding a lot more casualties with this approach.

Robert Greenwald: Well, the accuracy argument — whether it’s a wedding in Afghanistan or a funeral in Pakistan, it comes down to who was on the ground giving you the information telling you who the attendants were. And we know that the people who give that kind of information are being bribed. So their intelligence is going to be faulty. It’s an approach that creates doubts from the outset.

Don Hazen: All this is going on in Swat, a semi autonomous area of Pakistan right? How much of a threat are the Taliban there?

Robert Greenwald: Yes, the Swat area is part of the nation state of Pakistan, but it follows its own set of rules and regulations. It’s semi-autonomous. Highly uneducated, extreme levels of poverty as we understand the word poverty, and highly mountainous. That area is where almost all of the attacks on Pakistan have been unleashed.

As far as the he Taliban goes, it is not one unified organization Some of them are brutal to the population, some are less aggressive. But the key is that none of them pose an immediate threat to the U.S. So what’s central here, is that it’s the drone attacks that are creating the threat, as angry people may try to seek revenge against us, as has already been the case.

 

By Noel Sharkey, Guardian UK

03 December 12

The rational approach to the inhumanity of automating death by machines beyond the control of human handlers is to prohibit it

Are we losing our humanity by automating death? Human Rights Watch (HRW) thinks so. In a new report, co-published with Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, they argue the “case against killer robots”. This is not the stuff of science fiction. The killer robots they refer to are not Terminator-style cyborgs hellbent on destroying the human race. There is not even a whiff of Skynet.

These are the mindless robots I first warned Guardian readers about in 2007 – robots programmed to independently select targets and kill them. Five years on from that call for legislation, there is still no international discussion among state actors, and the proliferation of precursor technologies continues unchecked.

Now HRW has stepped up to recommend that all states: prohibit the development, production and use of fully autonomous weapons through an international legally binding instrument; and adopt national laws and policies to prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons.

At the same time the Nobel peace prize winner Jody Williams has stressed the need for a pre-emptive civil society campaign to prevent these inhumane new weapons from creating unjustifiable harm to civilian populations.

By coincidence, three days after the HRW report was published, the US department of defence issued a directive on “autonomy in weapons systems” that “once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator”. It “establishes … policy and assigns responsibilities for the development and use of autonomous and semi-autonomous functions in weapon systems”. But this offers no comfort.

The US forces and policymakers have been discussing the development of autonomous weapon systems in their roadmaps since 2004, and the directive gives developers the green light. It boils down to saying that the defence department will test everything thoroughly from development to employment, train their operators, make sure that all applicable laws are followed; and have human computer interfaces to abort missions. It also repeatedly stresses the establishment of guidelines to minimise the probability of failures that could lead to unintended engagements or loss of control.

The reason for the repeated stress on failure becomes alarmingly clear in the definitions section, where we are told that failures “can result from a number of causes, including, but not limited to, human error, human-machine interaction failures, malfunctions, communications degradation, software coding errors, enemy cyber attacks or infiltration into the industrial supply chain, jamming, spoofing, decoys, other enemy countermeasures or actions, or unanticipated situations on the battlefield”.

These possible failures show the weakness of the whole enterprise, because they are mostly outside the control of the developers. Guidance about human operators being able to terminate engagements is meaningless if communication is lost, not to mention that the types of supersonic and hypersonic robot craft the US are developing are far beyond human response times.

There are other technical naiveties. Testing, verification and validation are stressed without acknowledging the virtual impossibility of validating that mobile autonomous weapons will “function as anticipated in realistic operational environments against adaptive adversaries”. How can a system be fully tested against adaptive unpredictable enemies?

The directive presents a blinkered US-centric outlook. It lacks understanding that proliferation of the technology means US robots are likely to encounter equal technology from other sophisticated powers. As anyone with a computing background knows, if two or more machines with unknown programs encounter one another, the outcome is unpredictable and could create the unforeseeable harm to civilians that HRW is talking about.

The directive tells us nothing about how these devices will lower the bar against initiating wars, taking actions short of war or violating human rights by sending killing machines abroad, where no US personnel can be injured or killed, to terrify local populations with uncertainty. Autonomous killers can hover for days waiting to execute someone.

It is clear that the rational approach to the inhumanity of automating death by machine is to prohibit it. We are on the brink of a revolution in military affairs that should and must be stopped.

By Eva Bartlett

01 December, 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Deaths also happened naturally during the recent Israeli attacks, as did illnesses. For the ill, most over-crowded hospitals, functioning in emergency mode, had no room for mundane everyday illnesses (however serious they would normally be considered). One of Emad’s uncle’s passed away by natural causes during the attacks. Holding the three days of mourning most families abide by becomes difficult under the bombs, particularly when the Zionist army is noted for bombing mourning tents (including in the week prior to the officially-declared Zionist attacks (Israel bombs mourning tent, Nov 10)

Walking on a Gaza backstreet parallel to the main east-west street, Omar Mukthar, I see over a low wall splatters of mud across the side of tall building. It takes me a minute to understand how the mud got sprayed there. Stepping through a space in the wall, I see the crater whose dirt was spewed onto the wall when a presumably F-16 bomb was dropped.

The space seems to be uncultivated land, save the palm and olive trees here and there. The “mini” crater whose dirt decorates the wall is roughly 8 m diameter and as deep. Across the plot, a larger crater roughly 15 m by 15 m draws passersby from Omar Mukthar street.

At least three Palestinian journalists were killed in the Nov 2012 Israeli attacks on Gaza, and at least 12 reported injured. Visiting two of the main media buildings targeted by Israeli attacks during the last Israeli assault on Gaza, the level of damage highlights the clear intent of the Israeli army in targeting media offices, antennae, and journalists. The Sharook building suffered damage on its upper floors from a number of bombings including drone and possibly Apache helicopter missiles. The building housing Aqsa TV and various other media offices likewise suffered major damage on its upper floors.

One young media worker tells me of his near-death experience: after the first couple of bombs rained down on the building, a third one struck the roof just metres from where he stood, praying out loud in the face of the missile. Somehow, it didn’t explode.

The highlight of the day is seeing Saleh again. During the 2008-2009 Israeli assault on Gaza, Saleh kept media workers (Palestinian and international alike) fed, coffeed, tead, and just generally kept everyone’s spirits up in the hardest of times. Employed by Ramattan News to work in the kitchen, Saleh lost his work when Ramattan closed down later in 2009. I am very happy to see him employed again, in a Strip where unemployment is so high.

From the roof of the Sharook building, I saw the flattened Abu Khadara ministry complex, the re-flattened Saraya complex, and the bombed stadium. Since the stadium was within walking distance, I went to see. A few months earlier, I’d met some of the paraolympians and would-be olympians who use the stadium, one of very few resources in Gaza for atheletes in general, para-athletes in particular. Perhaps the Israeli war-machine didn’t like the relative success of two of Gaza’s paralympians? Or perhaps the bombing of a place of entertainment for Gaza youths and adults alike was just another Zionist act of spite.

A trip to Beit Hanoun to join a demo on international day of solidarity with Palestine results in unintended explorations. The intended demo, against the continued Israeli policy of shooting Palestinians on their land anywhere near border, despite the “cease-fire”, is called off the government, possibly because of the UN bid for Palestine today, possibly out of worry of more injured and killed following the spate of Israeli army shootings of Palestinians.

I go instead to the Beit Hanoun hospital, meet the director, learn about Israeli shelling of hospital during last attacks, which include two tank shells fired at the hospital, also not exploding. The damage, he says, would have been severe had the shells gone off.

Since two recent border shootings occurred in Beit Hanoun, I go inside the hospital to visit a young man shot in abdomen yesterday, just shy of his heart. Thankfully “only” a flesh wound, he will recover and live. But this is beside the point: he was on Palestinian land, visibly no threat to the well-equipped Israeli army with all of their war toys, when the Israeli soldier in his concrete military occupation tower began shooting without warning, without shooting in air. Shot directly at farmers.

On the ride back to Gaza, a lively conversation ensues as Beit Hanounites discuss the upcoming bid at the UN for recognition of a Palestinian state. Some are for, some are against. Even those for it realize it will mean nothing in the end, as Palestine is still suffering under occupation, whether recognized as a state or not. A woman sitting in front of the 5 seat car dominates the conversation with her own political views. All in all, as loud and energized as the conversation is, it is light-hearted, the rapid dialect of Beit Hanoun Palestinians, along with the unending grins and joking, typical Palestinian humour in the face of… occupation.

Eva Bartlett, a 33-year-old ISM volunteer who entered Gaza on a siege-breaker boat in November 2008 — just one month before Israel launched its horrific, 22-day invasion. she is still there. Her blog is http://ingaza.wordpress.com

By Franklin Lamb

01 December, 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Beirut: The United Nations General Assembly vote of 11/29/12, which some in Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian refugee camps are calling a “birth certificate for our country” is the latest of more than 400 UN resolutions on the Question of Palestine and a rare major victory for Palestinians after 65 years of resisting occupation.

The UN action, which was backed by an overwhelm majority of UN members with a lopsided vote of 138 to 9, may well force the Zionist regime to seriously consider a just peaceful resolution of the conflict.

With due respect to the nearly 50 percent of the UN members who voted against the historic Palestine Resolution on 11/29/12 at the General Assembly, which is to say the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru ( the world’s smallest republic covering just 8.1 square miles with a population of 9, 378)), and Palau, with its approximately 20,000 inhabitants, all former U.S. Trust Territories and currently “freely associated states” of the United States, with U.S. zip/postal and telephone codes much more closely resembling American states (51st, 52nd, 53rd and 54th) than sovereign countries, the World spoke clearly in favor of Palestinian self-determination. Indeed, the only reason these dissenting four “countries” are UN Members at all is due to cold war era efforts of Washington to stack the General Assembly in its favor by running up the numbers of its safe votes.

Over the past fortnight, as the US and Israel piled layers of threats onto their mantra of derision regarding yesterday’s historic UN vote on Palestine, both countries desperately tried to dissuade the Palestinians from scrapping their application for non-member observer state membership status with the United Nations.

Way too much did Israeli officials and their US lobby protest, thus drawing more international attention and curiosity as they kept dissing the “purely symbolic empty gesture and meaningless act.”

Naftali Bennett, leader of the extremist right-wing national religious Zionist party in Israel, Habayit Hayehudi (“The Jewish Home”) warned the day before the vote that “the PA bid for non-member status at the UN has very real implications on Israel, and that we must take harsh measures in response. I don’t accept the claim that this is a symbolic move,” Bennet told Israel Radio. “This is not symbolic at all. This has very practical implications. “He added: “We must tell the Arabs, if you pursue a unilateral strategy at the UN, We will pursue a unilateral strategy in annexing settlements in the West Bank.”

There is some important symbolism in the UN admitting Palestine as a non-member observer on the 65th anniversary of the November 29, 1947, adoption by the UN General Assembly of the resolution on the partition of Palestine (resolution 181 (II)). On December 2, 1977, it was recorded that the assembly called for the annual observance of November 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (A/RES/32/40 B).

Last minute appeals by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton plus a late night pre-vote visit by US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Middle East envoy David Hale to the hotel room of the Palestinian Authority hold-over President Mahmoud Abbas failed to convince him to withdraw the resolution and to include the demanded eviscerating codicils.

Secretary of State Clinton could not have been more mistaken as she insisted at her news conference on 11/28/12 that “the only path towards a Palestinian state was through direct negotiations. As I have said many times the only path to a two-state solution that fulfills the aspirations of the Palestinian people is through Jerusalem and Ramallah, not New York.” Few in the state department, according to congressional staff members who liaise with Clinton’s staff, believe that direct negotiations would ever lead to Israel voluntarily rejecting its current apartheid system or that the interminable “peace process” has ever been taken seriously by the Zionist regime and in fact constitute a hoax. In contradistinction, the growing reality in the Middle East and all five continents is the belief that only Resistance, with its scores of forms, will liberate Palestine from Zionist occupation.

Low balling the UN vote…..

Following the 138 to 9 vote, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, intimated, as did the usual Amen chorus of anti-Arab & anti-Islam zealots, from the US Israeli lobby, including the likes of ADL’s Abe Foxman, that” just as predicted, anti-Semitism was lurking behind the lopsided vote” and that it all amounted, in the words of Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev, “to nothing but cheap political theater that should not come as a surprise to anyone.”

The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as it does on any issue involving Palestine and Israel issued Talking Points for members of Congress and other Zionist organizations to be used when communicating with constituents and giving media interviews. AIPAC keeps close track of how many interviews each member gives and how closely they tow the Zionist line so as to help determine how much cash the particular member will receive for re-election as well as other perks.

For this crucial UN vote, the US Zionist lobby used U.S. Senators Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Susan Collins (R-ME) drafted a letter from these AIPAC stalwarts to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas opposing any unilateral attempts by the Palestinian Government to pursue non-member state status at the United Nations General Assembly.

In their letter, the Senators asserted that “Palestinian statehood can only be realized as a result of a broader peace agreement negotiated with the Israelis, not through unilateral measures at the United Nations. Should you decide, however, to bypass direct negotiations and unilaterally seek upgraded status at the UN, we want to again remind you of the potential for significant consequences. As S. Res. 185 notes, any such efforts may cause consequences in regards to U.S. policy and foreign aid.”

AIPAC instructed Congress to make the following points which was included in an “urgent advisory” to every member and many staffers.

1. This UN action won’t lead to peace.

Peace will only occur through direct talks. By refusing to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and seeking recognition of a state at the United Nations, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is damaging U.S. peace efforts. (nothing in this point is accurate)

2. Recognizing a Palestinian state gives legitimacy to Hamas.

The Iranian-backed terrorist group has fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilians and is sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state. By granting recognition of a state, the international community will reward Hamas for its terrorist actions, rather than condemn them

3. The United States has rejected the Palestinian approach.

President Obama has said that “no vote at the United Nations will ever create an independent Palestinian state” and called the Palestinian efforts at the U.N. a “mistake.”

Other talking points AIPAC told Congress to use include: while Israel Takes Steps for Peace, Palestinians run to UN , Israel Wants Talks; Palestinians Still Refuse, Palestinians Glorify Terrorists by praising the Hamas victory.

What the Zionist leaders of Israel, as they franticly try to intimidate the region by stockpiling American weapons, while grabbing more Palestinian land, fear is that the 11/19/12 UN resolution may be a game changer.

In this they are correct.

The UN action allows the Palestinians to participate in General Assembly debates and de facto grants recognition of Palestinian statehood on the pre-1967 ceasefire lines while re-enforcing the wide international consensus that the pre-1967 lines should form the basis of a permanent peace settlement.

It also opens up the 17 Specialized Agencies of the UN including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), International Labor Organization (ILO), International Maritime Organization (IMO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), International Telecommunication Union (ITU), United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), Universal Postal Union (UPU), the World Bank Group, World Health Organization, World Trade Organization (WTO), International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) as well as related and comparable organizations.

As noted this week by Al-Haq, the Palestinian human rights organization “ Under such a strengthened position within the international legal system, the State of Palestine will be allowed to formally accede to international human rights instruments and other technical United Nations bodies, thus improving protection of Palestinian rights at the domestic and international level”.

It is also to be expected that Palestinian citizens under brutal Zionist occupation will demand to use their new status to join the International Criminal Court and might press for investigations of Zionist international crimes, crimes against humanity, attempted genocide, and a host of other practices in the occupied territories. Investigating such international crimes and bringing punishment to those convicted is why the ICC was established.

Professor Francis Boyle reminds us that Palestine can also now sue Israel at the International Court of Justice and end the illegal siege of Gaza, and join the Law of the Sea Convention and secure its fair share of the gas fields lying off the Gaza coast with enormous economic benefits. Palestine can also now join the International Civil Aviation Organization and gain sovereignty over its own airspace; join the International Telecommunications Union and gain sovereign legal control over its own airwaves, phone lines and band-widths.

These are just some of the many reason the Obama administration, slavishly joined the Zionist leadership of occupied Palestine to defeat the UN application.

The actions of the Obama Administration and its vehement opposition to the UN vote continues to diminish the relevance of the US in the Middle East as it slides further down the wrong side of history with its client state in tow. Attempting to justify its shameful opposition to the Palestinian diplomatic undertaking in the UN, the Obama administration could only offer a weak brief from the State Department legal department accusing the PLO of acting unilaterally, in breach of signed agreements are simply parroting AIPAC talking points noted above.

Deepening Palestine’s international legal personality within the United Nations system is a legitimate presence on the world stage from which to assert rights guaranteed by fundamental principles of International Law. With more access to the United Nations system, Palestinians have gained a major political and legal framework from which to work and to encourage the international community to comply with its obligation to end Israeli crimes against them and bring Israel’s serious breaches of international law to an end.

Franklin P. Lamb is Director, Americans Concerned for Middle East Peace, Wash.DC-Beirut and Board Member, The Sabra Shatila Foundation and the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, Beirut-Washington DC Email: fplamb@gmail.com

By James Hansen, Guardian UK

01 December 12

@ readersupportednews.org

The extreme weather events of 2012 are what we have been warning of for 25 years, but the answer is plain to see

Will our short attention span be the end of us? Just a month after the second “storm of a century” in two years, the media moves on to the latest scandal with barely a retrospective glance at the implications of the extreme climate anomalies we have seen.

Hurricane Sandy was not just a storm. It was a stark illustration of the power that climate change can deliver – today – to our doorsteps.

Ask the homeowners along the New Jersey and New York shores still homeless. Ask the local governments struggling weeks later to turn on power to their cold, darkened towns and cities. Ask the entire north-east coast, reeling from a catastrophe whose cost is estimated at $50bn and rising. (I am not brave enough to ask those who’ve lost husbands or wives, children or grandparents).

I bring up these facts sadly, as one who has urged us to heed the scientific evidence on climate change for the past 25 years. The science is clear: climate change is here, now.

Superstorm Sandy is not the first storm, and certainly won’t be the last. Still, it is hard for us as individual human beings to connect the dots. That’s where observation, data and scientific analysis help us see.

No credible scientist disputes that we have warmed our climate by almost 1.5C over land areas in the past century, most of that in the past 30 years.

As my colleagues and I demonstrated in a peer-reviewed study published this summer, climate extremes are already occurring much more frequently in the world we have warmed through our reliance on fossil fuels.

Our analysis showed that extreme summer heat anomalies used to be infrequent: covering only 0.1-0.2% of the globe in any given summer during the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. During the past decade, as the average global temperature rose, such extremes have covered 10% of the land.

Extreme temperatures deliver more than heat.

The water cycle is especially sensitive to rising temperatures. Increased heat speeds up evaporation, causing more extreme droughts, like the $5bn (and counting) drought in Texas and Oklahoma. It is linked to an expanding wildfire season and an increase by several fold in the frequency of large fires in the American west.

The heat also leads to more extreme sea surface temperatures – a key culprit behind Sandy’s devastating force. The latent heat in atmospheric water vapour is the fuel that powers tornadoes, thunderstorms, and hurricanes. Stepping up evaporation with warmer temperatures is like stepping on the gas: More energy-rich vapour condenses into water drops, releasing more latent heat as it does so, causing more powerful storms, increased rainfall and more extreme flooding. This is not a matter of belief. This is high-school science class.

The chances of getting a late October hurricane in New York without the help of global warming are extremely small. In that sense, you can blame Sandy on global warming. Sandy was the strongest recorded storm, measured by barometric pressure, to make landfall north of Cape Hatteras, eclipsing the hurricane of 1938.

But this fixation on determining the blame for a particular storm, or disputing the causal link between climate change and this or that storm, is misguided.

A better path forward means listening to the growing chorus – Sandy, extreme droughts and wildfires, intense rainstorms, record-breaking melting of Arctic sea ice – and taking action. Think of it like taking out an insurance policy for the planet.

We can fix this. The answer is a price on carbon. We must make the price of fossil fuels honest, reflecting their cost to society including the economic devastation wrought by storms like Sandy, the toll on farmland and ecosystems, as well as priceless human lives.

Whether that price takes the shape of a carbon tax, as some in Washington are now willing to discuss, or a carbon fee, as I have advocated, a price on carbon lets the market find the most effective ways to phase out our reliance on fossil fuels. It also moves us to a sustainable energy future where energy choices are made by individuals and communities, not by Washington mandates and lobbyists.

A carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, will increase consumer costs. So the money that is collected should be distributed to the public. As people try to minimise their energy costs to keep money for other things, their actions will stimulate the economy, drive innovations and transition us away from fossil fuels.

If we make our demand for action clear enough, I am optimistic that our leaders in Washington can look beyond the short-term challenges of today to see the looming, long-term threats ahead, and the answer that is right in front of them. We can’t simply allow the next news cycle to distract us from the real task ahead.

Back in the 1980s, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to make clear the difference between natural variability and climate-change driven extremes. As I predicted, the climate dice in the 21st century are now “loaded”. It’s not just bad luck Sandy pummelled America’s coasts, extreme drought devastated its midlands and wildfires scorched its mountains.

We loaded the dice. We changed our climate.

By Amy Goodman

30 October, 2012

@ Democracy Now!

Forecasters say Hurricane Sandy is a rare hybrid superstorm created by an Arctic jet stream from the north wrapping itself around a tropical storm from the south. Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground, warns that such a “Frankenstorm,” as it is called, is an outgrowth of the extreme weather changes caused by global warming. “When you do heat the oceans up more, you extend the length of hurricane season,” Masters says. “There’s been ample evidence over the last decade or so that hurricane season is getting longer — starts earlier, ends later. You’re more likely to get these sort of late October storms now, and you’re more likely to have this sort of situation where a late October storm meets up with a regular winter low-pressure system and gives us this ridiculous combination of a nor’easter and a hurricane that comes ashore, bringing all kinds of destructive effects.” We’re also joined by climate scientist Greg Jones from Southern Oregon University.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road in Medford, Oregon, at Southern Oregon Public Television, but the story today is on the East Coast, as we continue our coverage of Hurricane Sandy, a massive storm that could impact up to 50 million people from the Carolinas to Boston. New York and other cities have shut down schools and transit systems. Hundreds of thousands of people have already been evacuated. Millions could lose power over the next day.

We are continuing here in Ashland, Oregon, with Greg Jones, climate scientist, professor of environmental studies at Southern Oregon University in Ashland. And joining us by Democracy Now! video stream is Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground, which was just bought by Weather Channel.

Jeff Masters, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk—explain what is happening right now on the East Coast.

JEFF MASTERS: We’ve got a Caribbean hurricane that formed last week, moved northwards through the Bahamas. It’s now offshore the coast of Virginia. It’s maintained its hurricane strength. It’s got 85-mile-per-hour winds, and it’s starting to accelerate towards the coast now, as a wintertime low-pressure system starts to suck it in. The scale of this storm is just remarkable. The U.S. has never seen this sort of a large storm where you’ve got winds that are tropical-storm force, about 900 miles in diameter, and the radius of 12-foot seas surrounding the storm is more than 500 miles. So, over a 1,100-mile-diameter area of 12-foot-high waves—just a massive storm. It really deserves the label “superstorm.”

AMY GOODMAN: What is the death toll so far?

JEFF MASTERS: Last I saw was about 65. Eleven of those were in Cuba, which is very good about their disaster preparedness. That’s an unusually high death toll for them. And then, the majority of the deaths were in Haiti, where they don’t have as good a public sort of response system because of all the deforestation that’s gone on there and the poverty and, of course, the earthquake of two years ago.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think of the preparations for this storm?

JEFF MASTERS: In the U.S., I think people are getting the message. Whether they act on it or not, I don’t know. This part of the world where it’s getting hit doesn’t have a lot of storm experience. We did have Hurricane Irene last year, but that fizzled out a little bit right before landfall, and we didn’t get as high a storm surge as we were expecting. Storm surge is the most dangerous part of a hurricane, typically, and it’s going ashore in an area that doesn’t have much experience with this sort of event. And this will be a one-in-200- or one-in-100-year sort of event for them. There’s already record storm surge flooding occurring along the shore of New Jersey, and it’s going to get much worse tonight when the high tide comes in.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you compare this hurricane to Sandy—Sandy to Irene?

JEFF MASTERS: Sure. Hurricane Irene brought about a 9.5-foot storm tide to New York City; Sandy is expected to bring a foot or two higher than that, which potentially will flood the subway system in New York City, so a higher storm surge.

As far as the rains go, Irene had higher rains. This storm is going to have about 30 percent less rainfall, and you’re not going to see the kind of catastrophic rainfall flooding damage that we saw with Irene, which amounted to something like $16 billion. And in part that’s because the soils are drier and rivers are lower right now; we’ve been in a little bit of a drought condition in the Northeast. So the rains aren’t going to be that big of an issue.

The winds, however, are going to be a huge issue, because they’re going to affect a massive amount of coastline. Again, over a 500-mile stretch of coast is going to see winds in excess of probably 50 miles per hour. With the trees still with their leaves on them, you’re going to see a lot of tree damage, a lot of power failures. I expect over 10 million people will suffer power failures during this storm.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about climate change and whether it makes this storm more destructive?

JEFF MASTERS: Whenever you add more heat to the oceans, you’ve got more energy for destruction. And hurricanes are heat engines. They pull heat out of the ocean, convert it to the kinetic energy of their winds. So, the approximately one-degree-Fahrenheit warming of the oceans we’ve experienced over the past century does directly increase the winds of hurricanes. And that’s of concern because just if you’ve got a 5 percent increase in hurricane winds, that doesn’t translate to a 5 percent increase in damage. The damage of the wind goes by some power, like a second or third power. So a 5 percent increase in the winds causes a much higher degree of wind damage. So that’s the main thing, as far as heat in the oceans goes, about the effect on hurricanes.

The other thing to think about is, when you do heat the oceans up more, you extend the length of hurricane season. And there’s been ample evidence over the last decade or so that hurricane season is getting longer—starts earlier, ends later. You’re more likely to get these sort of late October storms now, and you’re more likely to have this sort of situation where a late October storm meets up with a regular winter low-pressure system and gives us this ridiculous combination of a nor’easter and a hurricane that comes ashore, bringing all kinds of destructive effects.

AMY GOODMAN: Were you disappointed, Jeff Masters, that in the three presidential debates, that tens of millions of people were watching, the issue of climate change did not arise?

JEFF MASTERS: Yeah, absolutely. Climate change has become the new Voldemort of our times, that which cannot be named. And it’s ridiculous that we can’t talk about a subject that’s directly influencing our lives now and will continue to do so even more strongly in the future. I see superstorm Sandy here as kind of a wake-up call coming the week before the election. “Hey, America, hey, politicians, pay attention to this.” We’re experiencing an unusual number of very rare meteorological events, and they’re probably not all due to just random variations in the weather. We do expect extreme events of this nature to increase in the future, and we should be paying attention to the fact that we’ve had a very large number of these billion-dollar sorts of disasters in recent years.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m wondering, Greg Jones, as a climate scientist here at the Southern Oregon University in Ashland, if you find the same kind of silence around the issue of climate change?

GREG JONES: Sure. You know, right now it’s really sad to see all of our political entities not approaching this in some way, shape or form. It’s not an electable issue, not until the public sees it to be important enough to demand something more from both parties. It’s really unfortunate. I see it in my students, as well. There’s some apathy relative to both the weather and climate. Until the types of damage that a hurricane like this system can bring, you know, I don’t think that people wake up enough and see those kind of issues as being directly tied to what we do in the fossil fuel industry and in terms of changing the climate, changing the surface of the earth and the oceans. Those are all very problematic issues, and the parties just aren’t there with it.

AMY GOODMAN: You look at effect of climate change on wineries here on the West Coast?

GREG JONES: Well, I’m a—I’ve been studying climate and how it affects agricultural crops for years. My main area of study is—is looking at how climate influences growing grapes and making wine. Now, it’s a very important issue, but it’s very frivolous compared to the—you know, the hurricane that’s bearing down on the East Coast right now. But the issue is, is that all crops have very fine climate niches relative to their surroundings, and small changes in climate can completely change coffee, pineapples, chocolate, wine, any of these types of very specialized crops that we grow. Plus, it also has an issue for broad-based crops. Whether or not those broad-based crops like corn and soybeans and wheat can produce consistently in a changing climate is a big question for the future.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s a very serious issue when you’re talking about a term that a lot of people don’t hear about in the United States, “climate refugees” —

GREG JONES: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: —when food becomes scarce because of climate change.

GREG JONES: Sure, and we have some serious issues with dealing with this. I mean, many of our crops—you take rice grown in Southeast Asia, has been feeding the largest population on earth. Small changes in monsoon rainfalls can bring about a, you know, disaster. And so, just—just small changes, I think, is really very important as we look at these crop systems. Humans, in general, as we talk about what we do daily and weekly and seasonally, you know, small changes in climate don’t mean very much to us. But when they impact our food systems and how they’re produced, that’s where we have real problems.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Jeff Masters, about geoengineering, also, as well, Greg Jones. Naomi Klein had a fascinating piece in the New York Times yesterday called “Geoengineering: Testing the Waters,” where she talked about being on British Columbia’s shoreline, the Sunshine Coast, and seeing orcas in the water, killer whales, and being shocked by this extremely rare visit. And she said, “The possibility [that] the sighting may have resulted from something less serendipitous did not occur to me until two weeks ago, when I read reports of a bizarre ocean experiment off the islands of Haida Gwaii, several hundred miles from where we spotted the orcas swimming.

“There, an American entrepreneur named Russ George dumped 120 tons of iron dust off the hull of a rented fishing boat; the plan [was] to create an algae bloom that would sequester carbon and thereby combat climate change.”

And she goes on to say, “Mr. George is one of a growing number of would-be geoengineers who advocate high-risk, large-scale technical interventions that would fundamentally change the oceans and skies in order to reduce the effects of global warming. In addition to Mr. George’s scheme to fertilize the ocean with iron, other geoengineering strategies under consideration include pumping sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to imitate the cooling effects of a major volcanic eruption and ‘brightening’ clouds so they reflect more of the sun’s rays back to space.”

And she goes on to say that “The risks are huge. Ocean fertilization could trigger dead zones and toxic tides. [And] multiple simulations have predicted that mimicking the effects of a volcano would interfere with monsoons in Asia and Africa, potentially threatening water and food security for billions of people.”

Jeff Masters, your response? And then Greg Jones.

JEFF MASTERS: It’s a high-risk sort of thing, and it’s quite controversial. We don’t know how we’re affecting the climate now, so you add another element of risk by deliberately modifying it. And we should definitely do a lot more study before we do any sort of real implementation of a geoengineering scheme. I do think we should study it. And we may get desperate enough that we’ll have to do it. I call geoengineering a bad idea whose time may come. When you’re down two touchdowns late in the fourth quarter, sometimes you’ve got to throw deep. I mean, it’s a terrible gamble, and it will cause unexpected effects, including drought, shift of rainfall patterns. But if civilization itself is potentially going to collapse because of what we’re doing to the climate, maybe we need to consider these sorts of things—not in the near future, but down the road a few decades.

AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein asks, “What are the real solutions to climate change?” She says, “Wouldn’t it be better to change our behavior—to reduce our use of fossil fuels—before we begin fiddling with the planet’s basic life-support systems?” Greg Jones?

GREG JONES: Well, I mean, Jeff is correct here. I think these are measures that we’re looking at because we haven’t approached it maybe in the best possible way of just dealing with our usage of fuel. But geoengineering, there is a tremendous number of different potentials there. The problem, typically, is scaling it up to something that is going to be effective at the global scale, that doesn’t cause any other ramifications into whatever system it is, whether it’s the oceans or the atmosphere or the surface of the earth. We need to do the studies, I think, to find out what is going to be the most effective strategies in geoengineering. But it’s a real challenge to [inaudible] these types of research projects when we—when we know that the outcomes probably aren’t scalable to the global scale.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break, and when we come back, we’re going to go to Haiti. I want to thank you, Greg Jones, for being with us, climate scientist at Southern Oregon University. Also, I want to thank Jeff Masters for being with us from Michigan, from Ann Arbor. Jeff Masters runs Weather Underground, which was just bought by Weather Channel. We’ll continue to follow what is taking place on the East Coast and deal with the issue of climate change.

 

By Gilad Atzmon

30 November, 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

The Guardian newspaper reported on 27 November that Britain is prepared to back a key vote recognizing Palestinian statehood at the United nations but only if the Palestinian Authority chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, pledges not to pursue Israel for war crimes and to resume peace talks.

According to the newspaper,

On Monday night [26 November], the government signalled it would change track and vote yes if the Palestinians modified their application…

Whitehall officials said the Palestinians were now being asked to refrain from applying for membership of the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice, which could both be used to pursue war crimes charges or other legal claims against Israel.

Abbas is also being asked to commit to an immediate resumption of peace talks “without preconditions” with Israel.

The third condition is that the General Assembly’s resolution does not require the UN security council to follow suit.

In other words, in return for Britain supporting the Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN, the Palestinians would have to overlook Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity, and refrain from insisting that Israel stop the ongoing theft of Palestinian lands in the occupied territories by building new Jewish settlements and expanding existing ones, practices that are illegal under international law.

I wonder why the British government is so keen to protect Israeli war criminals? Could it be because 80 per cent of Conservative Party MPs belong to the pro-Israel lobby group, Conservative Friends of Israel?

I’d also like to know what is it that has led the British government to change its position on the Palestinian bid for statehood. Is it because our Tory politicians are trying to squeeze more money from their paymasters? After all, if Whitehall’s decision is driven by ethical and humanist concerns, why then are they trying to save Israeli mass murderers from being schlepped to the International Court of Justice where they belong?

Another possible explanation for the British turnaround is that Israel and its lobby may actually want the world to support the Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN. Such a bid could be the first step towards accomplishing the Zionist aim of removing once and for all the demographic threat to the Jews-only state posed by millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

A “sovereign Palestine” on a fraction of the Palestinian homeland would “liberate” Israel from the burdens of an occupier state.

It is possible that, following the recent Israeli defeat in Gaza, someone in Whitehall cottoned on to the fact that the Jewish state belongs to the past and doesn’t have much of a future. It is possible that they’ve realized that Britain had better seek some new allies in the Arab world.

Still, putting all their money on Abbas might be just one more poorly calculated British political decision.

Gilad Atzmon is a musician-composer. He is particularly well-known both for his fiction and his political analysis which is widely published. Gilad – New Book: The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics Gilad.co.uk