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Israel Accused of War Crimes
(BBC News, 23 August 2006)
Amnesty International has accused Israel of committing war crimes by deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in Lebanon. . . . The human rights group says attacks on homes, bridges, roads and water and fuel plants were an "integral part" of Israel's strategy in the recent war. . . . The group also calls for a UN investigation into whether both Israel and Hezbollah broke humanitarian law. . . . In a report released on Wednesday, Amnesty International bases its accusations on an examination of Israeli attacks and comments made by Israeli officials during the 34-day conflict with the militant group Hezbollah. . . . "The pattern, scope and scale of the attacks makes Israel's claim that this was 'collateral damage', simply not credible," said Kate Gilmore, Executive Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International. . . . The document details what it describes as "massive destruction by Israeli forces of whole civilian neighbourhoods and villages", together with attacks on bridges "in areas of no apparent strategic importance", on its list of supporting evidence. . . . It also says Israel targeted supermarkets, water pumping stations and water treatment plants, which may have broken a prohibition in humanitarian law against targeting objects crucial to civilian survival. . . . The report lists Israeli statements - such as comments made by Israeli Chief of Staff Lt Gen Dan Halutz that "nothing is safe [in Lebanon], as simple as that" - to support its claims. . . . Ms Gilmore said Israel's claims that attacks on infrastructure were lawful was "manifestly wrong". . . . "Many of the violations identified in our report are war crimes, including indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks," said Ms Gilmore. . . . The human rights organisation said it would look into Hezbollah's attacks on Israel separately. . . . About 1,000 Lebanese - most civilians - died in the conflict, while 161 Israelis, mainly soldiers, were killed.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 4:44 AM

 

The UK Terror plot: what's really going on?
(Craig Murray, August 14, 2006)
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time. . . . In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms. . . . What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. . . . Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests. . . . Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth. . . . We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled. . . . There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby. . . . We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA. . . . In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered. . . . Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 2:20 PM

 

Bush Administration Helped Plan War on Lebanon>
(Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, August 14, 2006)
The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground. . . . According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials well before the July 12th kidnappings. . . . The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. . . . "The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully," the former senior intelligence official said. "Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo - it's Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, 'Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.' " The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said. . . . The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits," a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We'll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran." . . . "If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Forces - can't pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million," Armitage said. "The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis [and the Americans, who furnished them the bombs]." . . . Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, "to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear." The consultant added, "Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council." After that, "persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board," the consultant said. . . . The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon's infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. . . . The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was "the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran." . . . Cheney's office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser . . . The surprising strength of Hezbollah's resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, "is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back." . . . Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. "There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this," he said. "When the smoke clears, they'll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran." . . . There is this almost comical thinking that you can do it all from the air, even when you're up against an irregular enemy with a dug-in capability. You're not going to be successful unless you have a ground presence, but the political leadership never considers the worst case. These guys only want to hear the best case. . . . Even those who continue to support Israel's war against Hezbollah agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals—to rally the Lebanese against Hezbollah. "Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it," John Arquilla. . . . "The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result."

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 2:45 PM

 

Israelis Rain Down Deadly DU On Lebanese Civilians
(Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com, July 29, 2006)
Esteemed depleted uranium expert Dr. Doug Rokke is pointing the finger at Israel for using deadly and illegal depleted uranium munitions against the Lebanese people which were sold to them by the U.S. government - and calls for an immediate halt to the practice. . . . Dr. Doug Rokke's military career spanned four decades before he was appointed as the head of the US Army's investigative team into the assessment and teaching of the dangers of depleted uranium. . . . Depleted uranium is a radioactive toxic poison - according to Wikipedia, . . . "Depleted uranium is a byproduct of the enriching of natural uranium for use in nuclear reactors. When most of the fissile radioactive isotopes of uranium are removed from natural uranium, the residue is called depleted uranium." . . . Depleted uranium is indiscriminate in who it targets. During an appearance on the Alex Jones Show, Dr. Rokke described some of the effects of depleted uranium - a battlefield weapon that once used can never be cleaned up and remains in the atmosphere for eternity. . . . "What we know from first hand experience and what happened to those of us in Gulf War I and when we did our research for the US Army - the first thing that hits you is respiratory problems, then you have the rashes, then you start having permanent lung damage within a few months because of radiation and chemical toxicity, then you have neurological problems, then you have gastrointestinal problems." . . . "You have decalcification of the bones and the teeth - then you have all the eye problems due to the alpha and beta damage to the eyes - and then the cancers, the leukemia and everything else," said Rokke. . . . "It's catastrophic, the US Army briefing the Pentagon leaders prior to Gulf War II in 2002 flat out acknowledged all of the problems yet they disregard them and say that they don't exist in public." . . . Rokke said the Israelis first used depleted uranium munitions against the Egyptians during the Arab-Israeli war in 1973-74. . . . He outlined the path to the Israeli use of depleted uranium munitions, the 'civilized world's' dirty bombs, in Lebanon over the last two weeks. . . . "So now we have photographic confirmation - and I want to repeat - photographic confirmation of Israeli tankers loading uranium rounds into Israeli tanks and using them in Lebanon," Rokke told Jones. . . . "What we have now is deliberate use of radioactive munitions, depleted uranium munitions, which are illegal according to the United Nations." . . . "We've got all the Lebanese being effected, all the women and children being affected, all the Israelis being effected, and the areas over there are so small you're going to have the whole region effected and contaminated." . . . "We knew about the GBU 28 delivery, we knew that was a given thing - now we were looking at the damage that's being done to Lebanon and all the damage indicates DU but until we actually got the full photograph of the DU round being loaded by an Israeli tank gunner we didn't have that and that came in yesterday," said Rokke. . . . The photographs of Israeli soldiers loading DU munitions were strangely deleted from numerous different news websites shortly after they were published but we were able to retrieve these smaller versions from the Getty archive which are captioned below.

LEBANESE BORDER, ISRAEL - JULY 14: An Israeli army soldier carries armor-piercing ammunition as he loads his tank ahead of possible action against Hezbollah militants July 14, 2006 on Israel's northern border with Lebanon. Israel has stepped up its action against Hezbollah targets in an effort to drive the Islamic militants from the border and to force the return of two soldiers captured by the group in a cross-border attack two days ago on July 12. (Photo by David Silverman/Getty Images)

LEBANESE BORDER, ISRAEL - JULY 14: Israeli army tank crew load their Merkeva tanks with armor-piercing ammunition as they prepare for possible action against Hezbollah militants July 14, 2006 on Israel's northern border with Lebanon. Israel has stepped up its action against Hezbollah targets in an effort to drive the Islamic militants from the border and to force the return of two soldiers captured by the group in a cross-border attack two days ago on July 12.
. . . Rokke expands on Israeli use of depleted uranium mission in an article in which he states that, "the use of uranium weapons is absolutely unacceptable, and a crime against humanity. Consequently the citizens of the world and all governments must force cessation of uranium weapons use. I must demand that Israel now provide medical care to all DU casualties in Lebanon and clean up all DU contamination." . . . On Tuesday we carried a video of Lebanese doctors describing injuries to children as showing all the hallmarks of phosphorous - a chemical weapon also highly contentious in battlefield use. . . . In a related development, former NSA official Wayne Madsen was told by his sources that the Israelis deliberately targeted and killed four UN observers because they had obtained knowledge of Israeli atrocities being perpetrated against the Lebanese population.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 7:21 PM

 

Robert Fisk Details Israeli Atrocities
(Robert Fisk, The Independent, 6 August 2006)
Qana again. AGAIN! I write in my notebook. Ten years ago, I was in the little hill village in southern Lebanon when the Israeli army fired artillery shells into the UN compound and killed 106 Lebanese, more than half of them children. Most died of amputation wounds - the shells exploded in the air - and now today I am heading south again to look at the latest Qana massacre. . . . Fifty-nine dead? Thirty-seven? Twenty-eight? An air strike this time, and the usual lies follow. Ten years ago, Hizbollah were "hiding" in the UN compound. Untrue. Now, we are supposed to believe that the dead of Qana - today's slaughter - were living in a house which was a storage base for Hizbollah missiles. Another lie - because the dead were all killed in the basement, where they would never be if rockets were piled floor-to-ceiling. Even Israel later abandons this nonsense. I watch Lebanese soldiers stuffing the children's corpses into plastic bags - then I see them pushing the little bodies into carpets because the bags have run out. . . . But the roads, my God, the roads of southern Lebanon. . . . Windows open, listen for the howl of jets. I am astonished that only one journalist - a young Lebanese woman - has died so far. I watch the little silver fish as they filter through the sky.

On my way back to Beirut, I find the traffic snarled up by a bomb-smashed bridge, where the Lebanese army is trying to tow a vegetable-laden truck out of a river. I go down to them and slosh through the water to tell the army sergeant that he is out of his mind. He's got almost 50 civilian cars backed up in a queue, just waiting for another Israeli air attack. Leave the lorry till later, I tell him.

Other soldiers arrive, and there is a 10-minute debate about the wisdom of my advice, while I am watching the skies and pointing out a diving Israeli F-16. Then the sergeant decides that Fisk is not as stupid as he looks, cuts the tow-rope and lets the traffic through. I am caked in dust, and Katya Jahjoura, a Lebanese photographer colleague, catches sight of me and bursts into uncontrollable laughter. "You look as if you have been living in rubble!" she cries, and I shoot her a desperate look. Better get out of this place, in case we get turned into rubble, I reply.

Monday, 31 July

Benjamin Netanyahu tries another lie, an old one reheated from 1982, when Menachem Begin used to claim that the civilian casualties of Israel's air raids were no different from the civilians killed in Denmark in an RAF raid in the Second World War. Ho hum, nice try, Benjamin, but not good enough.

First, the story. RAF aircraft staged an air raid on the Nazi Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, but massacred more than 80 children when their bombs went astray. The Israelis are slaughtering the innocent of southern Lebanon from high altitude - high enough to avoid Hizbollah missiles. The reason the RAF killed 83 children, 20 nuns and three firemen on 21 March 1945 was that their Mosquitoes were flying so low to avoid civilian casualties that one of the British aircraft clipped its wing on a railroad tower outside Copenhagen central station, and crashed into the school. The other aircraft assumed the smoke from its high-octane fuel was the target.

Interesting, though, the way Israel's leaders are ready to manipulate the history of the Second World War. No Israeli aircraft has been lost over Lebanon in this war and the civilians of Lebanon are dying by the score, repeatedly and bombed from a great height.

Tuesday, 1 August

Electricity off, my fridge flooded over the floor again, my landlord Mustafa at the front door with a plastic plate of figs from the tree in his front garden. The papers are getting thinner. However, Paul's restaurant has reopened in East Beirut where I lunch with Marwan Iskander, one of murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri's senior financial advisers.

Marwan and his wife Mona are a source of joy, full of jokes and outrageous (and accurate) comments about the politicians of the Middle East. I pay for the meal, and Marwan produces - as I knew he would - a huge Cuban cigar for me. I gave up smoking years ago. But I think the war allows me to smoke again, just a little.

Wednesday, 2 August

Huge explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut shake the walls of my home. A cauldron of fire ascends into the sky. What is there left to destroy in the slums which scribes still call a "Hizbollah stronghold"?

The Israelis are now bombing all roads leading to Syria, especially at the border crossing at Masna (very clever, as if the Hizbollah is bringing its missiles into Lebanon in convoys on the international highway). Then the guerrilla army, which started this whole bloody fiasco, fires off dozens more rockets into Israel.

I put my nose into the suburbs and get a call from a colleague in south Lebanon who describes the village of Srifa as "like Dresden". World War Two again. But the suburbs do look like a scene from that conflict. My grocer laments that he has no milk, no yoghurt, which - as a milkoholic myself - I lament.

Thursday, 3 August

More friends wanting to know if it's safe to return to Lebanon. An old acquaintance tells me that when she insisted on coming back to Beirut, a relative threw a shoe and a book at her. What was the book, I asked? A volume of poetry, it seems.

Electricity back, and I torture myself by watching CNN, which is reporting this slaughterhouse as if it is a football match. Score so far: a few dozen Israelis, hundreds of Lebanese, thousands of missiles, and even more thousands of Israeli bombs. The missiles come from Iran - as CNN reminds us. The Israeli bombs come from the United States - as CNN does not remind us.

Friday, 4 August

The day of the bridges. Abed and I are up the highway north of Beirut with Ed Cody of The Washington Post (he who reads Verlaine) and we manage to drive on side roads through the Christian Metn district, which has inexplicably been attacked (since the Christian Maronites of Lebanon are supposed to be Israel's best friends here). "You cannot believe how angry we are," a woman says to me, surveying her smashed car and smashed home and shattered windows and the rubble all over the road. A viaduct has fallen into a valley, all 200 metres of it, though another side road is left completely undamaged, and we cruise along it to the next destroyed bridge. So what was the point of bombing the bridges?

We drive back to Beirut on empty roads, windows open and the whisper of jets still in the sky. I go to the Associated Press office, where my old mate Samir Ghattas is the bureau chief. "So how were the bridges?" he asks. "I guess you were driving fast." He can say that again.

I do an interview with CBC in Toronto and talk openly of Israeli war crimes, and no one in the Canadian studio feels this is impolitic or frightening or any of the other usual fears of television producers, who think they will be faced with the usual slurs about "anti-Semitic" reporters who dare to criticise Israel.

I turn on the television, and there is Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's boss, threatening Israel with deeper missile penetrations if Israel bombs Beirut. I listen to Israel's Prime Minister, saying much the same thing in reverse.

I call these people the "roarers", but I leaf through my tatty copy of King Lear to see what they remind me of. Bingo. "I shall do such things I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth." Shakespeare should be reporting this war.

Saturday, 5 August

Lots of stories about a massive Israeli ground offensive, which turn out to be untrue. The UN in southern Lebanon suspects that Israel is manufacturing non-existent raids to pacify public opinion as Hizbollah missiles continue to fly across the frontier. But a friend calls to tell me that Hizbollah might be running out of rockets. Possibly true, I reflect, and think of all the bridges which haven't yet been blown to pieces.

More gruesome photographs of the dead in the Lebanese papers. We in the pure "West" spare our readers these terrible pictures - we "respect" the dead too much to print them, though we didn't respect them very much when they were alive - and we forget the ferocious anger which Arabs feel when these images are placed in front of them. What are we storing up for ourselves? I wrote about another 9/11 in the paper this morning. And I fear I'm right.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 5:19 PM

 

Israel Begins the Next Holocaust...in Lebanon
(Nasser Nasser and Sam F. Ghattas, Associated Press, 2 August 2006)
Villagers outside this Hezbollah stronghold used the bucket of a front-end loader to carry away the dead Wednesday, after a night of Israeli airstrikes and a commando raid killed 16. . . . It was Israel's deepest assault on the ground into Lebanon in 12 years. . . . Sixteen civilians, including a family of seven, died in the heavy clashes and air raids. A Hezbollah leader rumored to have been the target of the operation spoke by phone to the guerrilla organization's television station later to prove he was not captured. . . . Bodies of the dead were hastily shrouded in white cloth and carried for burial to the al-Jamaliyeh village graveyard in the end-loader bucket. Both the village and the Dar al-Hikma Hospital were about half a mile from the center of Baalbek. . . . The village mayor, Hussein Jamaleddin, lost his son, brother and five other relatives. He broke down, cried hysterically and pulled at a limb of his dead son hanging out of the giant shovel. . . . "This is the leg of my son. He was a sportsman, he did tae kwon do," Jamaleddin wailed. . . . By launching a commando raid so far from its borders, at least 55 miles from its nearest territory, Israel also showed it could strike at will and anywhere inside Lebanon despite tough Hezbollah resistance along the border area with Israel. . . . Over the decades, Baalbek was famous for its Roman ruins and the international festival under the towering columns that attracted the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 1:15 PM