This is an amazing resource. Pass it on!
-mr
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Georgetown's 2009 Symposium on Palestine
Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies has made its 2009 Symposium "Palestine & the Palestinians Today" available online.
This is an amazing resource. Pass it on!
This is an amazing resource. Pass it on!
What kind of statehood? "Netanyahu and the 'Palestinian state' card"
Israel's former failed prime minister and current defense minister, Ehud Barak, is now saying that PM Netanyahu
will present the U.S. administration a diplomatic plan in line with the principle of "two states for two nations" during his upcoming visit to Washington.
Until now, Netanyahu has refused to commit himself to agreeing with the Obama administration that statehood for the Palestinians is the way forward for peace. So now, Barak is indicating Netanyahu may be a bit "flexible" on the statehood issue. (Foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, however, remains strongly opposed. Oops.)But here's the thing. It is not the word "state" that's important, regarding the outcome. South Africa's Bantustans were also called "states", remember.
It is the content of the sovereignty and decision-making powers, the independence of the decision-making process, and the territorial and economic foundations that support this independence that are important.
So people should not get hung up on the word "state"-- and certainly, they shouldn't suddenly rush to crown Netanyahu with a peacemaker's laurels if he should deign to say the Palestinians might be able to have one.
Look at the content of any proposal made, not just its name.
A couple other things to bear in mind:
1. Past PM Olmert also said he believed in a Palestinian "state." His concept of it was very restrictive, including of course territorially. The fact that he accepted the notion of a Palestinian state did not mean his proposals regarding the final settlement were in any way acceptable.
2. Ten years ago, Barak won a strong victory in the polls against Netanyahu, and replaced him as PM. On that occasion, Barak won by promising Israelis that he was the man who could conclude a final peace with the Palestinians "within six to nine months." Eighteen months later his premiership collapsed into chaos with that pledge still unfulfilled.
Worse than that, the peremptory and bullying way he conducted his peace "diplomacy" with the Palestinians ensured that the Camp David II summit was a disaster. Barak then loudly blamed PA leader Yasser Arafat for the failure and said Israel "had no partner for peace." (Clinton, quite shamefully, completely backed him up on that.)
Leaders and activists in the real Israeli peace movement say that Barak's behavior at that time was a stab in the heart for their movement, from which it has still, nine years later, not recovered.
This time, Barak is "promising" that the Netanyahu government will have peace with the Palestinians "within three years." He has no credibility.
-mr
Monday, April 27, 2009
Protesting American Imperialism in Kut
As submerged sectarian tensions re-surface in Iraq, US occupation forces defy the Status of Forces Agreement, killing several innocents in the process:
Al-Maliki Denounces US Raid as Violating SOFA;
Larijani dissatisfied with US
AP reports that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has denounced a US raid in Kut as a violation of the security agreement between Washington and Baghdad.
WaPo goes further and says that al-Maliki is actually calling for the troops involved to be prosecuted in Iraqi courts.
The US said its troops were targeting a major funder of militias, whom they accused of receiving monies and material from Iran. I.e. this was about the so-called 'special cells' or pro-Iranian groups inside the Shiite militias. Kut has a lot of Sadrists, who follow Muqtada al-Sadr and there are still Mahdi Army units active there. The raid left an innocent female bystander dead. Six captured alleged militiamen were released by the US military after al-Maliki's protest.
In Kut, hundreds gathered in an anti-US demonstration.
The US maintains that the raid was coordinated with the Iraqi government. But it appears that the officials the US dealt with were local and that they neglected to pass news of the plan up to their superiors.
Under the Status of Forces Agreement, the US must notify the Iraqi government before it takes military action.
Al-Maliki is touchy about such an operation in Kut and probably wants personal approval in such matters. Kut is in the Shiite south, where al-Maliki has been attempting to spread the influence of his Islamic Mission Party (Da'wa). It has a significant Sadrist constituency, and al-Maliki is trying to put together coalition provincial governments with the Sadrists. So the US raid made al-Maliki look weak and puppet-like and made him unpopular in a key area where he wants support.
Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Iraqi government officials are expecting further bombings this week, as the country prepares for a conference on investing in Iraq later this week. The officials say that the guerrillas are attempting to dissuade foreign investors and to give them the impression that Iraq is unstable and a poor place to invest. The guerrillas hope to keep the government of Nuri al-Maliki weak so as to be able to overthrow it.
The speaker of the Iranian House has warned Iraqi insurgents that Tehran would track them down and punish them for the attacks this past week on Iranian pilgrims to holy shrines in Iraq. He also took up the theme that the US might be behind attacks on Iranian targets.
(source: Prof. Juan Cole's, Informed Comment)
-mr
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Headlines:
- Maliki: US Raid ‘Crime’ That Violated Pact
- Clinton Pledges to Keep Troops in Iraq if Violence Escalates
- CIA ignored warnings from US soldiers that torture and extreme stress would not work
- 2008 'deadliest' year for Palestinians: rights group
- Destroying Afghan opium crop: But does it help?
- Iraqi forces dismantle two booby-trapped cars, 20 bombs in Baghdad
- Injured soldier gets new face _ and anonymity
- UK campaigners score victory towards arms embargo
- Another muted scream: Basem Ibrahim Abu Rahme
Prof. Cole on Pakistani Taliban hype:
Pakistan Crisis and Social Statistics
Readers have written me asking what I think of the rash of almost apocalyptic pronouncements on the security situation in Pakistan issuing from the New York Times, The Telegraph, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent days.
And Stephen Walt also is asking why there are such varying assessments of Pakistan's security prospects. He suggests that one problem is the difficulty of predicting a revolutionary situation. But Pakistan just had a revolution against the military dictatorship! The polling, the behavior in the voting booth, the history of political geography, aren't these data relevant to the issue? Why does no one instance them?
As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can't see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People's Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system.
Another major province is Sindh, with nearly 50 mn. of Pakistan's 165 mn. population. It is divided between Urdu-speakers and the largely rural Sindhis who are religious traditionalists, many of the anti-Taliban Barelvi school. They voted overwhelmingly for the centrist, mostly secular Pakistan People's Party in the recent parliamentary elections. Then there are the Urdu-speakers originally from India who mostly live in Karachi and a few other cities. In the past couple of decades the Urdu-speakers have tended to vote for the secular MQM party.
Residents of Sindh and Punjab constitute some 85% of Pakistan's population, and while these provinces have some Muslim extremists, they are a small fringe there.
Pakistan has a professional bureaucracy. It has doubled its literacy rate in the past three decades. Rural electrification has increased enormously. The urban middle class has doubled since 2000. The country has many, many problems, but it is hardly the Somalia some observers seem to imagine.
Opinion polling shows that even before the rounds of violence of the past two years, most Pakistanis rejected Muslim radicalism and violence. The stock of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda plummeted after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.
The Pakistani Taliban are largely a phenomenon of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas west of the North-West Frontier Province, and of a few districts within the NWFP itself. These are largely Pushtun ethnically. The NYT's breathless observation that there are Taliban a hundred miles from Islamabad doesn't actually tell us very much, since Islamabad is geographically close to the Pushtun regions without that implying that Pushtuns dominate or could dominate it. It is like saying that Lynchburg, Va., is close to Washington DC and thereby implying that Jerry Falwell's movement is about to take over the latter.
The Pakistani Taliban amount to a few thousand fighters who lack tanks, armored vehicles, and an air force.
The Pakistani military is the world's sixth largest, with 550,000 active duty troops and is well equipped and well-trained. It in the past has acquitted itself well against India, a country ten times Pakistan's size population-wise. It is the backbone of the country, and has excellent command and control, never having suffered an internal mutiny of any significance.
So what is being alleged? That some rural Pushtun tribesmen turned Taliban are about to sweep into Islamabad and overthrow the government of Pakistan? Frankly ridiculous. Wouldn't the government bring some tank formations up from the Indian border and stop them?
Or is it being alleged that the Pakistani army won't fight the Taliban? But then explain the long and destructive Bajaur campaign.
Or is the fear that some junior officers in the army are more or less Taliban and that they might make a coup? But the Pakistani military has typically sought a US alliance after every coup it has made. Who would support Talibanized officers? Not China, not the US, the major patrons of Islamabad.
If that is the fear, in any case, then the US should strengthen the civilian, elected government, which was installed against US wishes by a popular movement during the past two years. The officers should be strictly instructed that they are to stay in their barracks.
What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan's nuclear capacity.
All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.
My guess is that the alarmism is also being promoted from within Pakistan by Pervez Musharraf, who wants to make another military coup; and by civilian politicians in Islamabad, who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are secretly also bribing to attack Afghanistan.
Advice to Obama: Pakistan is being configured for you in ways that benefit some narrow sectional interests. Caveat emptor.
-mr
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Massive blasts roil illusions of peace in Iraq:
REUTERS
Reuters North American News Service
Apr 23, 2009 10:22 EST
* At least 75 killed in two suicide bomb attacks
* Many Iranian pilgrims among the dead
* Local insurgent leader reported captured
By Aseel Kami
BAGHDAD, April 23 (Reuters) - Two suicide bombers wearing vests stuffed with explosives blew themselves up in separate attacks in Iraq on Thursday, killing 75 people, including many Iranian pilgrims, in the bloodiest day for more than a year.
The blasts occurred as apprehension grows in Iraq ahead of a pullout by U.S. troops from city centres in June, and after warnings from officials that insurgent groups may try to take advantage of that to launch attacks.
A national election due at the end of the year also threatens to stir a resurgence in violence just as the bloodshed of the past six years appeared to be receding.
Shortly after the two attacks, the authorities in Baghdad said they had arrested the purported leader of an al Qaeda-affiliated insurgent group, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. His arrest, which has been reported before, could not be confirmed. One of the attacks occurred near Muqdadiya, 80 km (50 miles) northeast of Baghdad, in the volatile province of Diyala. The suicide bomber appeared to have targeted a group of Iranian pilgrims in a crowded roadside restaurant at lunchtime.
All but two of the 47 dead were Iranians visiting Shi'ite Muslim religious sites in Iraq, police said. Sixty-seven people were wounded.
It was the single deadliest attack since 50 people were killed by a suicide bomber in a restaurant near the northern city of Kirkuk on December 11 last year.
The blast in central Baghdad took place as a group of Iraqi national police were distributing relief supplies to families driven from their homes during the sectarian slaughter and insurgency unleashed by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Twenty-eight people died, and 50 were wounded, police said. At least five children were among the dead, they added.
Red Crescent food parcels and shattered packets of chocolate biscuits were strewn in the blood pooled on the pavement after the attack, while a woman dressed in a black abaya robe wailed and beat her thighs in anguish.
"It is a suicide bomber. Obviously that has the fingerprints of al Qaeda," said Baghdad security spokesman Major-General Qassim Moussawi.
BAGHDADI ARREST
Violence across Iraq has fallen sharply over the past year, but insurgents such as Sunni Islamist al Qaeda still carry out attacks. Suicide bombings are often associated with al Qaeda.
A suicide bomber on Wednesday killed at least five people and wounded 15 inside a mosque in central Iraq, and on Monday, a suicide bomber in a police uniform killed four policemen in Diyala. Eight U.S. soldiers were wounded.
While the bombings remain routine, it has been a while since so many people were killed on a single day in Iraq.
On June 17 last year, a truck bomb in Baghdad killed 63, two bombs on March 6, 2008, killed 68 people, also in Baghdad, and female suicide bombers targeting a pet market killed 99 in the capital on Feb. 1, 2008.
Shortly after Thursday's bombings, Moussawi's office in Baghdad reported on its website that Baghdadi, had been arrested in the east of the city.
Baghdadi is said to be the head of the Islamic State of Iraq, one of several groups thought to be behind suicide bombings in the northern city of Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq.
Security experts have speculated that Baghdadi was a character invented by some extremists rather than a real person.
Some Iraqis expect violence to increase in Iraq as rival political and armed groups position themselves ahead of a national election due to take place at the end of the year.
Iraqi officials say al Qaeda and others are also likely to try to test Iraqi security forces as U.S. troops prepare to pull out of cities ahead of a full withdrawal by the end of 2011. (Writing by Michael Christie; Editing by Louise Ireland)
Source: Reuters North American News Service
-mr
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
'Just World News' with Helena Cobban:
Veteran reporter and writer Helena Cobban on Israel's self-disclosed military doctrine of slow-motion ethnic cleansing, imperiled East Jerusalem Palestinians, and Israeli spooks . . .
The IDF's 'Dahiyah Doctrine', applied in Gaza
Kudos to Inter-Press Service's Daan Bouwens for this piece of reporting in which he reminded readers that Israel's strategic decisionmakers had integrated a policy of major, intentional destruction of civilian targets into their war-planning for certain contingencies considerably before they launched the assault on Gaza, December 27.
Bouwens quotes Valentina Azarov, a legal expert with the Israeli human-rights group HaMoked as arguing that the IDF's operations in Gaza, "were part of the military strategy called the 'Dahiyah policy', being that of indiscriminate killing and the use of excessive, disproportionate force."
Azarov and Bouwens were at pains to point out that this was Azarov's own personal assessment. However, she had adduced considerable evidence to back it up.
'Dahiyah' is, in this context, a reference to the the heavily populated southern suburb (dahiyeh) of Beirut, in which Hizbullah maintained its headquarters for many years prior to the Israeli assault of summer 2006-- and which it has substantially rebuilt since 2006.
But during Israel's 33-day war against Lebanon that year, it just about leveled the entire Dahiyeh, which was a neighborhood of densely packed eight- to ten-story buildings, most of them residential, but including numerous schools, mosques, shops, and so on, along with more than a few offices for Hizbullah's extensive social-service bodies, political bodies, and yes, also their military bodies.
The best online resource about the Dahiyah Doctrine is this contribution that Ben White made to the Guardian's 'Comment is free' section last October. This Wikipedia page on the 'Dahiya Strategy' is also helpful.
The White piece has good hyperlinks, including to the then-recent interview in which the GOC of the IDF's 'Northern Command', Gadi Eisenkot, talked openly about the Dayiha Doctrine in these terms:
"What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on," said Gadi Eisenkot, head of the army's northern division.
In terms of "deterrence theory", this is a pretty standard threat of "massive retaliation." (Added to, I guess, a specifically Israeli version of Henry Kissinger's "Madman theory of deterrence", as indirectly alluded to here.)
"We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases," Eisenkot told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.
"This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved," Eisenkot added.But the results-- whether in the Dahiyah or in Gaza-- have been devastating.
Back in October-November of last year, when Eisenkot was making his pronouncements about the doctrine and Israelis were commenting on it-- sometimes with great approval-- just about all the discussion seemed still to be solely about Lebanon and Hizbullah, and future prospects in that theater.
But as we know, Israel's military planners were meanwhile already working hard to plan an upcoming operation against Gaza-- one of the key goals of which was to "restore the credibility of Israel's deterrence" and to wipe away the stale traces of defeat, flat-out operational ineptitude, and flawed leadership decisionmaking that had marked Israel's previous war of choice, in 2006.
Only a few of the commentaries in Israel-- e.g., this one from Gabriel Siboni-- noted the applicability of the Dahiyah Doctrine to Gaza.
Siboni wrote:
With an outbreak of hostilities, the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy's actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. The strike must be carried out as quickly as possible, and must prioritize damaging assets over seeking out each and every launcher. Punishment must be aimed at decision makers and the power elite.
It was left to one of Siboni's colleagues at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National security Studies, Zaki Shalom, to raise some significant questions about the new doctrine.... This approach is applicable to the Gaza Strip as well. There, the IDF will be required to strike hard at Hamas and to refrain from the cat and mouse games of searching for Qassam rocket launchers. The IDF should not be expected to stop the rocket and missile fire against the Israeli home front through attacks on the launchers themselves, but by means of imposing a ceasefire on the enemy...
The last of his questions had particular significance to the situation in Gaza:
Finally, how will the plan be applied if it becomes evident that village inhabitants are shunning a mass exodus? Would the IDF activate massive fire that results in hundreds or possibly thousands of civilians killed?
Okay, forget about "village". (Israelis tend to just assume that all Palestinians live in "villages". The Dahiyah is not a village, and most of the residents of Gaza don't live in villages, either.)But what, more germanely, happens to the plan if there is no place for the civilian residents of the area targeted to safely flee to-- as was certainly the case in Gaza?
... Anyway, it seems clear that my longtime acquaintances Richard Falk and Richard Goldstone, both of whom are charged by the UN with investigating Israel's conduct during the war on Gaza, have an ample paper trail to look to-- and hopefully, also to follow up further on-- regarding the specific intent of Israel's political and military leaders to engage from the get-go in avowedly disproportionate operations inside Gaza, including against specifically civilian targets.
Goldstone had a generally good track record in the waning days of his country's apartheid system, in investigating some of the grosser excesses of the "securocrats", including the high level securocrats, who ruled the country in those days. Let's hope he brings that same sensibility, that same doggedness, and that same refusal to be rolled by all the securocrats' many excuses, special pleadings, and specious arguments, to his current task regarding Israel.
Threats to East Jerusalem Palestinians, Youtubed
Clayton Swisher has two super short pieces on Al-Jazeera English about the threats to the Palestinian communities in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. In the first of those, he finds a US diplomat who's been sent to "fact-find" with one of the threatened Sheikh Jarrah families.
Yes, "fact-finding" is fine. But really, how much more of it needs to be done? The numerous expropriations, home demolitions, and other gross rights abuses the Palestinians of occupied East Jerusalem have faced throughout 42 years of occupation have all been excellently documented.
The US government position still in fact tracks with the international law position that holds that East Jerusalem is indeed occupied territory. (Though for the past 16-plus years, US government officials have always tried to squirm their way out of admitting as much in public.
The fact that this portion of the city is occupied territory means that the implantation of Israeli settlers into colonies/settlements in and around it has been quite illegal under international law, as have all other steps taken to change the status of the this portion of the occupied West Bank. (Yes, of course including its annexation/Anschluss to Israel.)
The 270,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the built environment they hold so dear (and sacred) are under acute threat these days. EJ Palestinians pay high Israeli-style taxes but receive nothing like he kinds of municipal or other kinds of government services that the city's Jewish-Israeli population receives. They are prohibited from holding any kinds of public political gatherings. Though they live in a city Israelis claim has been "unified", they are subject to all the sanctions available to the military occupation authorities in the rest of the West Bank, including endlessly renewable terms of detention without trial. (As applied, also, to the legislators they elected back in January 2006.)
In addition, thousands of EJ Palestinians have hanging over their heads either the threat of confiscation of the special blue ID cards ("pass books") that allow them to continue living in the city of their birth, or the threat of demolition of their family home. Hundreds of demolition orders-- maybe more than a thousand?-- are outstanding. The East Jerusalemites never know where the municipal demolition crews will be sent to next month, or next week, in their endless forays around the city.
Many East Jerusalemites feel quite abandoned by the Lords of Ramallah, judging that the situation of their city took a marked turn for the worse after Oslo.
So let's hope Sen. Mitchell and the rest of the "international community" finally do something this time to buttress and restore the protections that international law accords to the East Jerusalemites, as to the Gazans and all other populations under military occupation.
We need only recall that the special protections that the Fourth Geneva Convention accords to residents of territories under military occupation were adopted by the world's nations in 1949 in the specific light of the gross violations that the vulnerable populations (including of course Jewish and Roma populations) of Eastern Europe had been subjected to during the foreign military occupation they had then so recently suffered.More on Jane Harman, high-ranking pro-Israel mole?
Just how deeply have the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and its longtime backers and contacts in the Israeli securocracy wormed their way into the heart of US national decisionmaking? Considerable new evidence on this is provided in this important piece of reporting by Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein yesterday. (HT: The Arabist.)
Stein's important scoop is about a series of moves that the high-ranking and strongly pro-Israeli California Congresswoman Jane Harman made in response to a telephonic appeal from an un-named "suspected Israeli agent" that she intervene politically to get the Justice department to reduce the charges against the two accused AIPAC spies, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.
Stein writes,
Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.
Ah, but what she didn't know was that the call was being wiretapped and recorded under the NSA's wiretap program... And now, someone has leaked the transcript of that call to Stein.In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.
Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to... Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”
Jane Harman is no ordinary member of congress. She was at the time, as the Stein piece notes, poised to become the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and thus privy to many kinds of intelligence that are not shared with ordinary members of congress-- far less the citizenry.
It also meant she had powerful working relationships with members of the US securocracy and growing input into their decisions.
After the NSA overheard her saying she would intervene to try to save Rosen and Weissman's skins, they and CIA head Porter Goss opened an investigation into her actions (the previous wiretap having been only into the conversations engaged in by her interlocutor.)
Stein writes:
And they were prepared to open a case on her, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court, the secret panel established by the 1979 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to hear government wiretap requests.
(The irony there was that Harman intervened strongly to defend the very wiretapping program that-- whether she knew it at the time or not-- had started to establish a pretty strong record of her own misdeeds.)First, however, they needed the certification of top intelligence officials that Harman’s wiretapped conversations justified a national security investigation.
Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss reviewed the Harman transcript and signed off on the Justice Department’s FISA application. He also decided that, under a protocol involving the separation of powers, it was time to notify then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Minority Leader Pelosi, of the FBI’s impending national security investigation of a member of Congress — to wit, Harman.
Goss, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, deemed the matter particularly urgent because of Harman’s rank as the panel’s top Democrat.
But that’s when, according to knowledgeable officials, Attorney General Gonzales intervened.
According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he “needed Jane” to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.
Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program.
He was right.
On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, “I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.”
Pelosi and Hastert never did get the briefing.
A year later, in November 2006, the Dems won control of the House-- and Jane Harman, by then the Minority (Democratic) Leader on the Intelligence Committee was on the point of becoming its Chair. However, something evidently happened at that point that persuaded the powerful Pelosi that this would be a bad idea. Stein does not say what that something was. Rep. Sylvestre Reyes (Texas) became Chair instead.
Today, indeed, Harman is no longer even on the House Intelligence Committee.
This indicates to me that the extreme permeability to Israeli influence of many of the US's leading national-security decisionmaking bodies that we saw during the early years of the Bush administration (and before that, during much of the Clinton administration) has slowly started to be rolled back in the past 2-3 years.
That early-Bush-era permeability-- as manifested in the extremely strong influence of hawkish pro-Israelis in the Rumsfeld Defense Department, in Cheney's office, and also, certainly in Congress-- helped to feed completely skewed disinformation into the pre-2003 decisionmaking process over Iraq, and thus played a huge role in jerking our government into launching that mega-lethal and extremely ill-considered military aggression.
Now, today's big "question" is whether the US will either launch a military attack against Iran or give Israel the permission it certainly needs if it is to use US assets and support to do launch one in its own name.
Might US decisionmaking once again be so permeable to Israeli disinformation and manipulation that Washington could get jerked into launching or allowing another ill-considered war-- one that, this time, would draw our already overstretched military directly into a shooting war with a non-trivial and extremely sensitively located regional power?
This clearly is something that all US citizens have a strong interest in preventing. So the more we know about previous attempts by the Israeli securocrats to distort our country's security-affairs decisionmaking, the better.
Huge kudos to CQ for publishing this story. I hope we see a lot more reportorial resources devoted to follow-up stories about all aspects of it.
But one last big question: Why, once again, do we see the WaPo and the NYT completely ignoring this important story, which CQ broke yesterday and should therefore have been in today's editions of both papers?
-mr
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Israeli Soldier Slaughters Another Peaceful Protester
From Informed Comment:
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Do You want more Gas?
First the Israeli government built a separation wall right through a Palestinian village, Bilin, on the West Bank inside the Palestine Authority (i.e. beyond the Israeli border).
Then young people assembled regularly to protest that their village was cut in two, with villagers on each side now unable easily to visit, and with the villagers having had land stolen from them without compensation.
On Friday, Israeli troops replied to the unarmed protesters by firing tear gas at them. But the tear gas canisters are intended to be shot from a fair distance. An Israeli soldier appears to have aimed a canister at close distance right at Basim Abu Rahmah, killing him on the spot. In mid-March Tristan Anderson of Oakland, California, was shot in the head with a canister and badly wounded while protesting the Apartheid Wall Israel has built; he is still in a coma.
Philip Weiss provides video demonstrating that that protesters were not violent. Basim was trying to reason with the Israeli soldiers just before he was killed. Weiss says that with the young man lying dead on the ground, one Israeli soldier asks a protester, "Do you want more gas?" (I have to say, I found the question chilling).
Aljazeera English also did a report:
Aljazeera English reports on the aftermath of the Gaza War, finding that "At least 83 children lost both parents and 2,200 lost at least one during Israel's recent war on Gaza."
Video:
-mr
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