War crimes and atrocities in Syria - a common sense approach

According to the BBC, the UN bureaucrats are now trying to implicate Syrian President Assad in war crimes. According to UN Commissioner Navi Pillay "the scale of viciousness of the abuses being perpetrated by elements on both sides almost defies belief" and evidence indicated responsibility "at the highest level of government, including the head of state".  Notice the nuance?  Both sides have perpetrated atrocities, but the evidence only "points to the highest levels of government" and, just in case somebody had any doubts, Mrs Pillay adds "including the head of state".

One might wonder whether this accusation against Assad personally might be based on the so-called doctrine of "command responsibility" but the answer is clearly "no".  After all since Mrs. Pillay referred to "evidence" and it is unlikely that she just meant by that "evidence indicating that Assad was the President of Syria".  So what kind of "evidence" pointing "directly at the head of state" could she have?

Written orders by Assad to commit war crimes?
Radio intercepts of Assad ordering war crimes?
Witnesses testifying that Assad gave criminal orders?
Witnesses testifying that they saw Assad commit war crimes personally?

As soon as we think about that it becomes quite obvious that what Mrs Pillay has is nothing or, more accurately, all she has is the usual mix of rumors, assumptions, and the usual assortment of testimonies amounting to little more than simple hearsay.

Now, there is no doubt in my mind that unspeakable atrocities were, indeed, committed by both sides.  This is not only normal, this is inevitable.  Any civil war will inevitably result in atrocities.  Since I wrote a full article on this topic (entitled "A few basic reminders about wars, civil wars and human right") I will not repeat it all here other than saying that there is no such thing as a civil war without atrocities.  In fact, there is no such thing as war - civil or international - without atrocities.  To deny that, or say that it is possible to have wars without atrocities, is simply not to understand the very nature of war.

I fully agree with the the words of the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson, who said the the crime of aggression (to initiate a civil or international war) is the ultimate crime because "it contains within itself the accumulated evil" of all the other war crimes.  I therefore conclude the party most guilty of all the crimes committed during a war is the one starting the war because wars always produce atrocities and because absent such an initiation of war no crimes would have been committed.  In other words, I submit that it is logical to conclude that it is the side which triggered the civil war which is - by definition - most guilty for all the atrocities committed in the course of this war by all the parties, even the "other sides'" atrocities and war crimes.

The other point which I want to make here is this: historically, when orders have been given to commit atrocities there is very rarely any evidence of those orders coming form the top.  For example, in the case of Nazi Germany, the so-called "Wannsee Conference Protocol" is open to many possible interpretations and there is really no hard evidence at all that Hitler ever gave an explicit order to commit any genocide.

[Side note: This actually makes the entire Nuremberg trial a rather bizarre event.  Think about it: the Bolsheviks (especially Lenin and Trotsky) openly and officially gave orders to take hostages, execute civilians and openly defended terrorism, while the Anglos committed atrocities worldwide, invented concentration camps (Boer war), used slavery at a massive scale in the USA, "multi-genocided" an entire continent (Native Americans), used nukes on Japanese cities, deliberately firebombed German civilians, etc. and yet these powers got to judge the Nazis for their (very real) atrocities even though it was impossible to establish the personal responsibility of most Nazi dignitaries.  Still, I think that Nuremberg trials was useful because it raised many important question even if the answers it gave were dubious at best]

Similarly, the recent trials of Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic or Nikolae Ceausescu and other "ex-allies turned villain" have always resulted in cases of obvious "victor's justice" in which politically pre-judged individuals are tried by kangaroo courts.  This is not to say that the forces under the command of these men did not commit atrocities - just that there is zero real evidence that these men personally actually gave any such orders.

It is much easier to prosecute actual executioners, those who personally participated in war crimes and atrocities.  But the "big guys" - top officials or heads of state - are usually removed the the actual killers by several layers of command authority.  So at the very best, one can charge them with failure to protect and of criminal negligence (via the doctrine of "command responsibility").

Personally, I very much doubt that head of states actually often give any criminal orders to commit atrocities, at least since 1945.  This is not just a matter of protecting themselves from future prosecutions, but also because this is bad PR and because atrocities are usually counter-productive anyway.

There are, of course, the various cases of mass atrocities in Africa, ranging from the infamous Radio des Mille Collines in Rwanda to the kind of grotesque atrocities the world witnessed in Sierra Leone, where mid to high level leaders did clearly give genocidal orders.  But these are cases of basically psychopathic leaders who cannot be considered typical heads of state.

Keep in mind that the UN does not have its own intelligence service.  It cannot intercept phone-calls, letters, emails or anything else.  Of course, there are a number of powers (global and regional) which could share intelligence with the UN.  The problem is that any government or agency with the capabilities to pass on intelligence to the UN is also - by definition - perfectly capable of severely manipulating the intelligence it shares or even of completely make up non-existing facts and stories (WMD in Iraq anybody?).

So all the UN really can get is the testimony of witnesses and "open source" public information, such as newspaper articles.  Again, at the very best this can yield local anecdotes and the identities of local executioners.  Not real evidence against the the big guys running the state.

So should we dismiss the UN report and just say that both sides have committed atrocities?

No.  Why? 

Because whatever atrocities the government forces have committed they are at least not proud of them, they do not present them as justice, much less so divine justice.  Whereas the Wahabi liver-eaters are not only extremely proud of their atrocities, they also claim to commit them in the name of God, hence the endless streams of beheading and shooting videos on the Internet showing large crowds of people gathered together to witness "Islamic Justice" at the hands of local officials followed by execution against the backdrop of a hysterical mob screaming Allahu Akbar!  Talk about "command responsibility":  these executions are ordered by "Islamic" "courts" presided by "Islamic" "judges" who are all well-know, recognized state officials and not some masked death squad leaders of local commanders acting on their own initiative.

Nobody in his right mind would compare the actions of  Canadian Luka Magnotta (real name:"Eric Clinton Kirk Newman")  who dismembered a student with the regular chopping off limbs and heads which regularly occurs in Saudi Arabia: in the first case we are dealing with the actions of a deranged maniac while in the second case, we are dealing with the medieval barbarity of an official law system, backed by the state and presented as ordained by God.  Likewise, we cannot compare the atrocities committed by the government forces and the insurgency because in the former case they are never upheld as normative while the the second case they are also presented as ordained by God.

But the UN, of course, puts the bulk of the blame on Assad, with no real evidence and against the principles basic common sense.

And yet my beef is not with the UN.  Having personally worked at the UN for several years I know the system and I expect nothing else of it.  The folks that really disgust me are all the academics, politicians, journalists, bloggers and self-righteous armchair strategists who first fully support a violence uprising and then express outrage when government forces commit atrocities even though supporting the former meant accepting the latter.  Likewise, I despise those doubleplusgoodthinkers who always will accuse the government forces of atrocities while systematically looking away from the atrocities committed by the putative "good guys".  These hypocrites are cowards who do not have the basic intellectual courage to accept the fact that there are no good guys in a civil war or, more accurately, that the ratio of good to bad guys very rapidly becomes pretty even in all parties involved as soon as a civil war starts.

The Saker

Did you know? Gaza

Netanyahu uses his pals Sarkozy and Miliband to bury Goldstone report

al-Manar reports:

“A joint French-British UN initiative would call on Israel and the Palestinians to hold immediate, independent investigations into war crimes allegations stemming from the war in Gaza, as part of a bid to send the Goldstone report back to Geneva and out of the hands of the Security Council or the International Criminal Court at The Hague,” Haaretz reported Tuesday.

The proposal comes before the United Nations General Assembly is scheduled Wednesday to deliberate on the Goldstone report on the Israeli war in the Gaza Strip earlier this year. A source at the Israeli Foreign Ministry in occupied Jerusalem said that French President Nicolas Sarkozy informed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the details of the initiative during a telephone conversation.

Netanyahu asked the French President to take action among European Union partners in an effort to form collective opposition to any resolution at the UN on the Goldstone report.

The initiative is a list of "red lines" which was adopted by the 27 members of the European Union. Its main points:

1. A resolution brought for the approval of the General Assembly will not include operational steps, like taking the matter to the Security Council or the International Court of Justice.

2. The resolution would call on Israel and the Palestinians to embark on an independent investigation into the events of Operation Cast Lead, and the allegations of war crimes.

3. The handling of the Goldstone report will return to the Human Rights Council, the UN body in Geneva. The parties will have to report to the council on the findings of their investigations in a few months.

According to the Foreign Ministry source, the document was delivered yesterday by the British and French permanent representatives at the UN to the Palestinian Authority delegation at the international body, as well as the representatives of Arab states, and the members of the Security Council.

Arab representatives at the UN are expected to complete Tuesday the first draft of a resolution that will be brought to the General Assembly for a vote. That report accused Israel of war crimes and was prepared by a UN fact-finding commission led by South African jurist Richard Goldstone.

The French and British has emphasized in their exchanges with the Arab representatives that if the "red lines" are not part of the resolution being prepared, the European Union will abstain, and may even vote against it - and expects that much of the international community will too.

"If you agree to go for a simple resolution which calls on Israel to carry out an investigation you will receive full support," a source familiar with the proposal said. "However, if you attempt to go further there will be at least 60 abstentions and only 120 votes in support."

Any resolution the Palestinians put forth will receive a large majority, but there is great importance to the weight of EU votes, and other countries who will vote in line with the EU.

Assessments in Israel hold that there is little chance the Palestinians will agree to the Franco-British proposal and Tel Aviv wants any resolution torpedoed.

Meanwhile, the Arab draft resolution, obtained by Reuters, says the assembly "requests the Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to transmit the report ... to the Security Council." It also urges Israel and the Palestinians to comply with the report's recommendations for launching investigations into allegations of war crimes.

The draft also tells Ban to report back to the assembly within three months on implementation of the resolution. Arab and Western diplomats told Reuters there was little doubt a majority of the General Assembly would vote in favor of the Arab draft. But negotiations were underway as Arab delegates sought to persuade Western powers to back the text.

Western diplomats said the United States would most likely vote against the resolution. Unless it is revised, they said, most European delegations would join Washington and reject it.

Resolutions of the General Assembly, unlike those of the Security Council, are nonbinding. But UN diplomats say such a resolution would intensify pressure on Israel to launch a full investigation into the actions of its army during the war. The Goldstone report lambasted both sides in the war, but was harsher toward Israel.

The Arab draft resolution does not explicitly endorse a Human Rights Council resolution from last month that censured Israel for its actions in the Gaza war without referring to any “wrongdoing” by Hamas. The United States voted against that resolution while France and Britain abstained from the vote.

But it does endorse an HRC report that included the resolution. Sudan's UN Ambassador Abdalmahmoud Abdalhaleem said it amounted to a full endorsement of the HRC resolution. "It endorses the Human Rights Council resolution, that is the point," he told Reuters. "And it exposes the double standards that some permanent Security Council members have towards the occupying power (Israel) in Palestine."

Several Western diplomats told Reuters the Arab draft was "unacceptable" because of its endorsement of the HRC actions and for requesting Security Council intervention. Abdalhaleem said the Arabs had rejected an earlier European draft that said the General Assembly would merely "take note" of the Goldstone report and pass the issue back to the HRC.

‘Prolonged diapering’ revealed as ‘enhanced interrogation technique’

By Stephen Webster for the Raw Story

A CIA inspector general report released Monday in a less-redacted version reveals that “prolonged diapering” was on the agency’s list of approved “enhanced” interrogation techniques. The revelation is in Appendix F, included in the IG’s report on page 149, as part of a set of guidelines for “medical and psychological support to detainee interrogations.” The document is dated Sept. 4, 2003.

According to American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Jameel Jaffer, this is the first document released publicly which categorizes diapering as an enhanced interrogation technique. Another ACLU source told RAW STORY that while they are familiar with the use of diapers on clients being transported, this is “news to us.”

The document in Appendix F of the IG report reads: “Captured terrorists turned over to the CIA may be subjected to a wide range of legally sanctioned techniques, all of which are used on U.S. military personnel in SERE training programs. They are designed to psychologically ‘dislocate’ the detainee, maximizing his feelings of vulnerability and helplessness, and reduce or eliminate his will to resist our efforts to obtain critical intelligence.” The list, organized in “ascending degree of intensity,” says the following were approved standard measures “without physical or substantial psychological pressure”:

Shaving Stripping Diapering Hooding Isolation White noise or loud music (at a decibel level that will not damage hearing) Continuous light or darkness Uncomfortably cool environment Restricted diet, including reduced caloric intake (sufficient to maintain general health) Water dousing Sleep deprivation (up to 72 hours)

A second list of “enhanced” measures “with physical or psychological pressure beyond the above” reads:

Attention grasp Facial hold Insult (facial) slap Abdominal slap Prolonged diapering Sleep deprivation (over 72 hours) Stress positions –On knees, body slanted forward or backward –Leaning with forehead on wall Walling Cramped confinement Waterboard

The appearance of diapering on the list seems to contradict an Office of Legal Counsel memo (PDF link) written by former Bush administration lawyer Steven Bradbury in 2005. Bradbury claimed diapering “is not used for the purpose of humiliating the detainee, and it is not considered to be an interrogation technique.” However, in the appendix of the IG’s report, “prolonged diapering” was on the list of approved interrogation techniques (P. 150). While diapering is included on page 149 as a standard technique — along with shaving, stripping, hooding and isolation — it is also listed as one of a number of “enhanced measures,” with an intensity level below waterboarding, but above the “abdominal slap.”

The report does not define “prolonged” as it applies to diapering, nor does it confirm whether it was used on any prisoners. It is also unknown when exactly diapering was authorized as an EIT, and whether or not the order was rescinded before the 2005 Bradbury memo. Describing standard diapering, Bradbury wrote, “The detainee’s skin condition is monitored and diapers are changed as needed so that the detainee does not remain in a soiled diaper.” Bradbury is one of three former Bush administration attorneys — including John Yoo and Jay Bybee — whose legal memos are being probed by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly in the process of appointing a special prosecutor to investigate instances of CIA detainee abuse.

Spencer Ackerman, reporting for the Washington Independent, speculates that “prolonged diapering” could be the “eleventh” EIT.

“The 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on torture says clearly that in 2002, the CIA proposed to the Justice Department the use of eleven “enhanced interrogation techniques,”’ Ackerman writes. “Ten of them got the approval of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in August 2002 in the infamous Jay Bybee/John Yoo memo declassified by the Obama administration in April: the attention grasp; walling; the facial hold; the facial or insult slap; cramped confinement; insects; wall standing; stress positions; sleep deprivation; the waterboard. But what happened to the eleventh?”

Quoting the memo, he writes, “The Agency eliminated one proposed technique — [REDACTED] — after learning from DoJ that this could delay the legal review.”

“But an appendix to the report written by former CIA Director George Tenet gives an indication as to what that eleventh technique was — and says that it’s permissible,” Ackerman continues. “Take a look at Appendix E, Tenet’s January 28, 2003 memorandum on guidelines for both ’standard’ and ‘enhanced’ interrogations. Tenet’s list of ‘enhanced’ techniques, you’ll notice, number eleven:

These techniques are, [sic] the attention grasp, walling, the facial hold, the facial slap (insult slap), the abdominal slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours, the use of diapers for prolonged periods, the use of harmless insects, the water board, and such techniques as may be specifically approved pursuant to paragraph 4 below.

Ackerman adds, “All the others on Tenet’s list were approved by the Office of Legal Counsel in August of 2002. But that diapering technique was never approved by the Justice Department. Tenet considered ‘the use of diapers for limited periods (generally not to exceed 72 hours)’ to be a ’standard’ technique, as I blogged earlier. But it’s at least conceivable that the Justice Department would have thought reviewing prolonged diapering would have delayed the 2002 review, since the humiliation and health issues of forcing someone to remain in their own filth for over three days raise serious legal issues.”

Ron Brynaert contributed to this report.

ICC evaluates Israeli war crimes case

Press TV reports: The Palestinian Authority has recognized the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court to investigate Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

Acting Palestinian Justice Minister Ali Khashan sent a brief letter to the court on Jan. 21, in which he recognized the authority of the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal. The court made the letter public Tuesday, APTN reported.

On Monday, the office of the International Criminal Court, ICC, said that the ICC has begun a "preliminary analysis" of alleged crimes committed by Israelis during the recent offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo told a small group of foreign correspondents in a meeting at the court that he has received 150 separate communications calling for war crimes investigations over the Gaza conflict.

"Ali Khashan gave the letter to my office," said the prosecutor.

"My work now is to analyze if this is in accordance with the law," he said, adding that he would not hastily decide on the issue.

Moreno-Ocampo needs to now determine whether "the Palestinian Authority has the power under international law to recognize the court" -- whether the Palestinians should be considered by the court as having sovereign status.

The use of controversial chemical white phosphorous shells, indiscriminate firing during the offensive in the densely-populated coastal sliver, the shelling of a UN school turned refugee camp, as well as the question as to whether other Israeli military tactics were in breach of humanitarian laws are among the issues Tel Aviv has been charged with.

Human Rights Watch has called for an international investigation into allegations of war crimes by Israel.

The Arab League (AL) also made an appeal to the UN General Assembly last week to "form an international committee to investigate Israeli crimes in the Gaza Strip and to set up a criminal court to try Israeli war criminals."

More than 1330 people, a large number of them civilians, were killed and 5450 others were injured in the Israeli war on Gaza.

Israeli warplanes continue air strikes in southern Gaza Strip despite announcing a ceasefire and allegedly ending the 23-day war.

On Monday, One Palestinian civilian was killed and four others were injured in an Israeli air strike in southern Gaza Strip. On Tuesday, Israeli warplanes attacked the northern Gazan town of Jabaliya.

Black Flag

by Uri Avnery

A SPANISH JUDGE has instituted a judicial inquiry against seven Israeli political and military personalities on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The case: the 2002 dropping of a one ton bomb on the home of Hamas leader Salah Shehade. Apart from the intended victim, 14 people, most of them children, were killed.

For those who have forgotten: the then commander of the Israeli Air Force, Dan Halutz, was asked at the time what he feels when he drops a bomb on a residential building. His unforgettable answer: “A slight bump to the wing.” When we in Gush Shalom accused him of a war crime, he demanded that we be put on trial for high treason. He was joined by the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who accused us of wanting to “turn over Israeli army officers to the enemy”. The Attorney General notified us officially that he did not intend to open an investigation against those responsible for the bombing.

I should be happy, therefore, that at long last somebody is ready to put that action to a judicial test (even if he seems to have been thwarted by political pressure.) But I am sorry that this has happened in Spain, not in Israel.

ISRAELI TV VIEWERS have lately been exposed to a bizarre sight: army officers appearing with their faces hidden, as usual for criminals when the court prohibits their identification. Pedophiles, for example, or attackers of old women.

On the orders of the military censors, this applies to all officers, from battalion commanders down, who have been involved in the Gaza war. Since the faces of brigade commanders and above are generally known, the order does not apply to them.

Immediately after the cease-fire, the Minister of Defense, Ehud Barak, promoted a special law that would give unlimited backing by the state to all officers and soldiers who took part in the Gaza war and who might be accused abroad of war crimes. This seems to confirm the Hebrew adage: “On the head of the thief, the hat is burning”.

I DO NOT object to trials abroad. The main thing is that war criminals, like pirates, should be brought to justice. It is not so important where they are caught. (This rule was applied by the State of Israel when it abducted Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and hanged him in Israel for heinous crimes committed outside the territory of Israel and, indeed, before the state even existed.)

But as an Israeli patriot, I would prefer suspected Israeli war criminals to be put on trial in Israel. That is necessary for the country, for all decent officers and soldiers of the Israeli army, for the education of future generations of citizens and soldiers.

There is no need to rely on international law alone. There are Israeli laws against war crimes. Enough to mention the immortal phrase coined by Justice Binyamin Halevy, serving as a military judge, in the trial of the border policemen who were responsible for the 1956 massacre in Kafr Kassem, when dozens of children, women and men were mown down for violating a curfew which they did not even know about.

The judge announced that even in wartime, there are orders over which flies “the black flag of illegality”. These are orders which are “manifestly” illegal – that is to say, orders which every normal person can tell are illegal, without having to consult a lawyer.

War criminals dishonor the army whose uniform they wear – whether they are generals or common soldiers. As a combat soldier on the day the Israeli Defense Army was officially created, I am ashamed of them and demand that they be cast out and be put on trial in Israel.

My list of suspects includes politicians, soldiers, rabbis and lawyers.

THERE IS not the slightest doubt that in the Gaza war, crimes were committed. The question is to what extent and by whom.

Example: the soldiers call on the residents of a house to leave it. A woman and her four children come out, waving white handkerchiefs. It is absolutely clear that they are not armed fighters. A soldier in a near-by tank stands up, points his rifle and shoots them dead at short range. According to testimonies that seem to be beyond doubt, this happened more than once.

Another example: the shelling of the United Nations school full of refugees, from which there was no shooting – as admitted by the army, after the original pretexts were disproved.

These are ”simple” cases. But the spectrum of cases is far wider. A serious judicial investigation has to start right from the top: the politicians and senior officers who decided on the war and confirmed its plans must be investigated about their decisions. In Nuremberg it was laid down that the starting of a war of aggression is a crime.

An objective investigation has to find out whether the decision to start the war was justified, or if there existed another way of stopping the launching of rockets against Israeli territory. Without doubt, no country can or should tolerate the bombing of its towns and villages from beyond the border. But could this be prevented by talking with the Gaza authorities? Was our government’s decision to boycott Hamas, the winner of the democratic Palestinian elections, the real cause of this war? Did the imposition of the blockade on a million and a half Gaza Strip inhabitants contribute to the launching of the Qassams? In brief: were the alternatives considered before it was decided to start a deadly war?

The war plan included a massive attack on the civilian population of the Strip. The real aims of a war can be understood less from the official declarations of its initiators, than from their actions. If in this war some 1300 men, women and children were killed, the great majority of whom were not fighters; if about 5000 people were injured, most of them children; if some 2500 homes were partly or wholly destroyed; if the infrastructure of life was totally demolished – all this clearly could not have happened accidentally. It must have been a part of the war plan.

The things said during the war by politicians and officers make it clear that the plan had at least two aims, which might be considered war crimes: (1) To cause widespread killing and destruction, in order to “fix a price tag”. “to burn into their consciousness”, “to reinforce deterrence”, and most of all – to get the population to rise up against Hamas and overthrow their government. Clearly this affects mainly the civilian population. (2) To avoid casualties to our army at (literally) any price by destroying any building and killing any human being in the area into which our troops were about to move, including destroying homes over the heads of their inhabitants, preventing medical teams from reaching the victims, killing people indiscriminately. In certain cases, inhabitants were warned that they must flee, but this was mainly an alibi-action: there was nowhere to flee to, and often fire was opened on people trying to escape.

An independent court will have to decide whether such a war-plan is in accordance with national and international law, or whether it was ab initio a crime against humanity and a war-crime.

This was a war of a regular army with huge capabilities against a guerrilla force. In such a war, too, not everything is permissible. Arguments like “The Hamas terrorists were hiding within the civilian population” and “They used the population as human shields” may be effective as propaganda but are irrelevant: that is true for every guerrilla war. It must be taken into account when a decision to start such a war is being considered.

In a democratic state, the military takes its orders from the political establishment. Good. But that does not include “manifestly” illegal orders, over which the black flag of illegality is waving. Since the Nuremberg trials, there is no more room for the excuse that “I was only obeying orders”.

Therefore, the personal responsibility of all involved - from the Chief of Staff, the Front Commander and the Division Commander right down to the last soldier - must be examined. From the statements of soldiers one must deduce that many believed that their job was “to kill as many Arabs as possible”. Meaning: no distinction between fighters and non-fighters. That is a completely illegal order, whether given explicitly or by a wink and a nudge. The soldiers understood this to be “the spirit of the commander”.

AMONG THOSE suspected of war crimes, the rabbis have a place of honor.

Those who incite to war crimes and call upon soldiers, directly or indirectly, to commit war crimes may be guilty of a war crime themselves.

When one speaks of “rabbis”, one thinks of old men with long white beards and big hats, who give tongue to venerable wisdom. But the rabbis who accompanied the troops are a very different species.

In the last decades, the state-financed religious educational system has churned out “rabbis” who are more like medieval Christian priests than the Jewish sages of Poland or Morocco. This system indoctrinates its pupils with a violent tribal cult, totally ethnocentric, which sees in the whole of world history nothing but an endless story of Jewish victimhood. This is a religion of a Chosen People, indifferent to others, a religion without compassion for anyone who is not Jewish, which glorifies the God-decreed genocide described in the Biblical book of Joshua.

The products of this education are now the “rabbis” who instruct the religious youths. With their encouragement, a systematic effort has been made to take over the Israeli army from within. Kippa-wearing officers have replaced the Kibbutzniks, who not so long ago were dominant in the army. Many of the lower and middle-ranking officers now belong to this group.

The most outstanding example is the “Chief Army Rabbi”, Colonel Avichai Ronsky, who has declared that his job is to reinforce the “fighting spirit” of the soldiers. He is a man of the extreme right, not far from the spirit of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party was outlawed in Israel for its fascist ideology. Under the auspices of the army rabbinate, religious-fascist brochures of the ultra-right “rabbis” were distributed to the soldiers.

This material includes political incitement, such as the statement that the Jewish religion prohibits “giving up even one millimeter of Eretz Israel”, that the Palestinians, like the Biblical Philistines (from whom the name Palestine derives), are a foreign people who invaded the country, and that any compromise (such as indicated in the official government program) is a mortal sin. The distribution of political propaganda violates, of course, army law.

The rabbis openly called upon the soldiers to be cruel and merciless towards the Arabs. To treat them mercifully, they stated, is a “terrible, awful immorality”. When such material is distributed to religious soldiers going into war, it is easy to see why things happened the way they did.

THE PLANNERS of this war knew that the shadow of war crimes was hovering over the planned operation. Witness: the Attorney General (whose official title is “Legal Advisor to the Government”) was a partner to the planning. This week the Chief Army Attorney, Colonel Avichai Mandelblut, disclosed that his officers were attached throughout the war to all the commanders, from the Chief of Staff down to the Division Commander.

All this together leads to the inescapable conclusion that the legal advisors bear direct responsibility for the decisions taken and implemented, from the massacre of the civilian police recruits at their graduating ceremony to the shelling of the UN installations. Every attorney who was a partner to the deliberations before an order was given is responsible for its consequences, unless he can prove that he objected to it.

The Chief Army Attorney, who is supposed to give the army professional and objective advice, speaks about “the monstrous enemy” and tries to justify the actions of the army by saying that it was fighting against “an unbridled enemy, who declared that he ‘loves death’ and finds shelter behind the backs of women and children”. Such language is, perhaps, pardonable in a pep-talk of a war-drunk combat commander, like the battalion chief who ordered his soldiers to commit suicide rather than be captured, but totally unacceptable when it comes from the chief legal officer of the army.

WE MUST pursue all the legal processes in Israel and call for an independent investigation and the indictment of suspected perpetrators. We must demand this even if the chances of it happening are slim indeed.

If these efforts fail, nobody will be able to object to trials abroad, either in an international court or in the courts of those nations that respect human rights and international law.

Until then, the black flag will still be waving.

Israel officials face war crimes investigation in Spain

Ha'aretz reports: A Spanish judge has opened a probe of seven current or former Israeli officials over a 2002 bombing in Gaza that killed a Hamas militant and 14 other people, including nine children.

Judge Fernando Andreu said the attack by Israel, which targeted militant Salah Shehadeh in a densely populated civilian area, might constitute a crime against humanity.

The judge is acting under a doctrine that allows prosecution in Spain of such an offense or crimes like terrorism or genocide even if they are alleged to have been committed in another country.

Andreu announced the probe in a writ issued Thursday. The people named in the suit include Dan Halutz, former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff and Israel Air Force commander at the time, as well as Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, then defense minister and now the minister of infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Israel is preparing for a wave of lawsuits by pro-Palestinian organizations overseas against Israelis involved in the latest Gaza fighting, claiming they were responsible for war crimes due to the harsh results stemming from the IDF's actions against Palestinian civilians and their property.

Senior Israeli ministers have expressed serious fears during following the war about the possibility that Israel will be pressed to agree to an international investigation of the losses among non-combatants during Operation Cast Lead; or alternately, that Israelis will be faced with personal suits, such as happened to Israeli officers who were accused of war crimes in Britain for their actions during the second intifada.

Israel braces for war crime charges

Press TV reports: Israel prepares to respond to possible war crimes charges after its soldiers admitted to having used chemical weapons against Gazans.

Israeli government sources revealed on Friday that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had tasked an inter-ministerial team to clear Tel Aviv of possible war crimes charges relating to its three-week-long assault on Gaza.

Israeli Justice Minister Daniel Friedman will spearhead the efforts to coordinate a legal defense for civilians and the military amid world condemnation of Tel Aviv's war on Gaza.

Israel moved close to being prosecuted for war crimes after Norwegian found traces of depleted uranium in Gaza victims, suggesting that Israel used the illegal weapons in its war on the densely-populated territory.

The UN nuclear watchdog said on Wednesday that it would open an investigation into Israel's alleged use of depleted uranium weapons, which are listed as 'illegal weapons of mass destruction' in the Geneva Convention.

The case for Israeli war crimes became stronger on Thursday when the Israeli military admitted that it pounded the Palestinian coast with at least twenty phosphorus bombs during the offensive.

White phosphorus, classified as a 'chemical weapon' by the US intelligence, is a highly-incendiary substance that bursts into all-consuming flames that cannot be extinguished with water, burning flesh to the bone and often leading to death.

Under the Geneva Treaty of 1980, the use of white phosphorous as a weapon is prohibited.

Human rights group Amnesty International has also touched on the issue, saying that Tel Aviv used white phosphorus munitions "indiscriminately and illegally" in overcrowded areas of Gaza.

"The repeated use [of White Phosphorus] in this manner, despite evidence of its indiscriminate effects and its toll on civilians, is a war crime," said Donatella Rovera of the Amnesty International.

Eight Israeli human rights groups have also called for an investigation into the offensive -- which has left some 1,340 people dead and thousands of others hospitalized.

UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk, meanwhile, said Thursday that there is more than enough evidence that Israel committed war crimes in the strip.

According to Falk, the crimes committed in Gaza are clearly reminiscent of "the worst kind of international memories of the Warsaw Ghetto", which included the starvation and murder of Polish Jews by Nazi Germany in World War II.

Israel launched its Operation Cast Lead on December 27 to allegedly defend its territories from Hamas rockets, which were fired in retaliation for Israel's defiance of a ceasefire that had previously been in place.

The UN Charter and international law, however, does not give Israel the legal foundation for claiming self-defense in the case of the Gazans.

IDF censor bans naming officers involved in Gaza op

Ha'aretz reports: The Military Censor is applying strict restrictions preventing the media from identifying officers who participated in the Gaza Strip fighting and information about them that may be used in legal proceedings against them abroad. There is growing concern at the Defense Ministry and the Ministry of Justice that Israeli officers will be singled out in a massive wave of suits for alleged human rights violations.

The new instructions from the military censor to the media were prepared in consultation with Attorney General Menachem Mazuz and his military counterpart, Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit. Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi was also involved in the decisions on this matter.

In recent days the censor has forbidden publishing the full names and photographs of officers from the level of battalion commander down. It is assumed that the identity of brigade commanders has already been made known. The censor also forbids any reports tying a particular officer of such battlefield command rank (lieutenant to lieutenant colonel) to destruction inflicted in a particular area.

There is particular concern at the Defense Ministry that interviews in the press by officers describing the destruction of homes or harm to civilians in areas where they commanded forces could become "self-incriminating" evidence, used by human rights groups and political groups seeking to bring suits against IDF officers.

The new regulations were finalized earlier this week, tightening censorship rules that had allowed more detailed reporting, as well as revealing the identities of officers. Two days ago, an unofficial report was received on a suit allegedly brought in the Netherlands against the commander of one of the brigades, following the release of his identity to the media. Israel's ambassador to the Netherlands has been unable to confirm that such a suit had been filed.

Moreover, it is known that a number of organizations have begun preparing a "target list" of officers - names of officers involved in the fighting and where they fought, in an effort to establish evidence that will allow legal proceedings to begin.

The commander of the Gaza Division, Brigadier Eyal Eisenberg, when asked Thursday whether he was concerned that legal steps would be taken against him and his officers abroad, said that "the state is supposed to provide security to its citizens. The operation [in Gaza] came after eight years of suffering thousands of Qassam rockets in the Negev. I think we embarked on a just war and I stand behind the troops."

A very interesting idea: sue the bastards!

There is an interesting idea being floated around by the Iranian government and other circles. The idea is to sue Israel and/or Israeli leader for war crimes, crimes against humanity and even genocide. Sounds silly? Think again.

It all began when the government of Iran asked the ICC to issue warrants for the arrest of Israeli leaders. Soon thereafter a US professor, Francis Anthony Boyle, has offered the Iranian President a plan according to which he would open a legal case against Israel. Boyle has interesting views on this topic (see his article about the legal basis for prosecution) and his offer could do something very useful: internationalize the effort to sue the Israelis.

I find this very interesting. First, it shows that Iran is willing to actually do something to help the Palestinians (proving the Iran bashers wrong, yet again). Second, while the actual probability of seeing Olmert or Livni sitting next to Karadzic in the Hague is remote, there is a huge potential for all sorts of legal headaches for the Israeli leaders in their travels. Think about it, literally any judge in any country might issue an arrest warrant for any Israeli leader (even without an ICC warrant, by the way). Of course, the vast majority governments of the world will immediately bail out any Isareli official in trouble (after all, who would dare alienate the USraelian Empire?), but still - imagine the embarrasment. Thirdly, with the USraelien Empire in decline there just might be a country where such an arrest would "stick" and where the charge would actually go to a court (remember Pinochet).

Lastly, this example shows that there are things a government can do to help the Palestinians short of declaring a war on Israel. The fact that *all* the Arab governments are simply "sitting on their hands" is not due the a lack of options but to a shameful lack of will and care.

Hamas announces end to truce with Israel

Press TV reports:

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, has announced the cessation of the six-month-old ceasefire with Israel in the Gaza Strip.

"The calm, which was reached with Egyptian sponsorship on June 19 and expires on December 19, is finished because the enemy did not abide by its obligations. The calm is over," Hamas official, Ayman Taha, said on Thursday.

The announcement raises the prospect of an escalation in cross-border fighting.

Hamas had earlier ruled out renewal of truce in and around Gaza and insisted that authorities in the Palestinian territory have a duty to respond to any attack by Israel.

"There is no possibility of renewing the truce which ends on December 19 (Friday). The Zionist enemy destroyed it. We at Hamas have the right to respond to any Zionist aggression against the Palestinian people. It's a national duty," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said on Thursday.

He noted that the movement would act according to the situation on the ground.

The Egypt-mediated ceasefire between Israel and Gaza came into effect on June 19, under which Israel promised to stop attacks on Gaza and ease the blockade in exchange for an end to retaliatory homemade rocket attacks.

Israel, however, has carried out several military incursions into the Gaza Strip and has kept all Gaza's border crossings closed since November 4.

In response to a stepped-up blockade of the costal strip and the killing of an Islamic Jihad Movement member, Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip on Wednesday fired 10 Qassam rockets at the southern Israeli town of Sderot during which three people suffered slight wounds.

Gaza Strip is experiencing a humanitarian crisis which has left more than 1.5 million residents in the region without basic supplies, including food. Patients are dying due to a shortage of vital medical supplies.

Iran holds Egypt liable for Israeli crimes

Press TV reports:

A senior Iranian official says Egyptian support for Israel makes Cairo accountable for any crime committed in the Gaza Strip.

"Egypt has closed the Rafah crossing and tightened the siege (of Gaza)," said Ayatollah Seyyed Ahmad Khatami, a member of the Iranian Assembly of Experts, at Tehran's Friday prayers.

Tel Aviv placed the Gaza Strip under a blockade after the democratically-elected Palestinian government of Hamas took control of the coastal area in mid-June 2007.

The UN Human Rights Council declared on Tuesday that Israeli policies against the Palestinians and the blockade of the Gaza Strip as "crime(s) against humanity."

In response to the UN report, Israeli ambassador in Geneva Aharon Leshno Yaar said Tel Aviv "remains committed to reinforcing areas in which we are succeeding and bettering those areas that need improvement."

According to UN human rights rapporteur Richard Falk, however, Tel Aviv was responding to what he described as low-level criticism by "normally cautious UN officials". Falk suggested Israeli crimes to be worthy of an International Criminal Court investigation.

Despite its objection, Israel was forced to permit deliveries of humanitarian aid and gas to Gaza on Tuesday after days of full closure of all Gaza crossings.

On Friday, Ayatollah Khatami said "certain Arab leaders" should also be investigated by international courts for aiding and abetting Tel Aviv in its crimes.

"Certain Arab leaders should be tried as 'betrayers' for all Israeli crimes in the occupied lands and the Gaza Strip," the Iranian cleric continued.

Records show that since the imposition of the blockade, 260 patients have died, 75 percent of Palestinian kids are suffering from malnutrition, and 40 percent of ambulances have stopped working due to the lack of gas, Khatami added.

The Hamas movement has urged the international community to force Israel to lift the siege after the release of the UN Human Rights report.

"If the UN says that the tight siege on the Gaza Strip is a war crime, we wonder why Arab leaders do not demand the reopening of the Rafah crossing," said Barhoum.

The Rafah crossing connects Egypt to the Gaza Strip inhabited by some 1.5 million Palestinians.

We, the Salt of the Earth, Take Precedence

By Paul Craig Roberts for Information Clearinghouse

Which country is the rogue nation? Iraq? Iran? Or the United States? Syndicated columnist Charley Reese asks this question in a recently published article.

Reese notes that it is the US that routinely commits “acts of aggression around the globe.” The US government has no qualms about dropping bombs on civilians whether they be in Serbia, the Middle East, or Africa. It is all in a good cause--our cause.

This slaughtering of foreigners doesn’t seem to bother the American public. Americans take it for granted that Americans are superior and that American purposes, whatever they be, take precedence over the rights of other people to life and to a political existence independent of American hegemony.

The Bush regime has come up with a preemption doctrine that justifies attacking a country in order to prevent the country from possibly becoming a future threat to the US. “Threat” is broadly defined. It appears to mean the ability to withstand the imposition of US hegemony. This insane doctrine justifies attacking China and Russia, a direction in which the Republican presidential candidate John McCain seems to lean.

The callousness of Americans toward the lives of other peoples is stunning. How many Christian churches ask God’s forgiveness for having been rushed into an error that has killed, maimed, and displaced a quarter of the Iraqi population?

How many Christian churches ask God to give better guidance to our government so that it does not repeat the error and crime by attacking Iran?

The indifference of Americans to others flows from “American exceptionalism,” the belief that Americans are graced with a special mission to impose their virtue on the rest of the world. Like the French revolutionaries, Americans don’t seem to care how many people they kill in the process of spreading their exceptionalism.

American exceptionalism has swelled Americans’ heads, filling them with hubris and self-righteousness and making Americans believe that they are the salt of the earth.

Three recent books are good antidotes for this unjustified self-esteem. One is Patrick J. Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. Another is After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh, and a third is John Pilger’s Freedom Next Time.

Buchanan’s latest book is by far his best. It is spell-binding from his opening sentence: “All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away.” As the pages turn, the comfortable myths, produced by history written by the victors, are swept aside. The veil is lifted to reveal the true faces of British and American exceptionalism: stupidity and deceit.

Buchanan’s strength is that he lets the story be told by Britain’s greatest 20th century historians and the memoirs of the participants in the events that destroyed the West’s dominance and moral character. Buchanan’s contribution is to assemble the collective judgment of a hundred historians.

As I read the tale, it is a story of hubris destroying judgment and substituting in its place blunder and miscalculation. Both world wars began when England, for no sound or sensible reason, declared war on Germany. Winston Churchill was a prime instigator of both wars. He seems to have been a person who needed a war stage in order to be a “great man.”

The American President Woodrow Wilson shares responsibility with Britain and France for the Versailles Treaty, which dismembered Germany, stripping her of territory and putting millions of Germans under foreign rule, and imposed reparations that Britain’s greatest economist, John Maynard Keynes, correctly predicted to be unrealistic. All of this was done in violation of assurances given to Germany that there would be no reparations or boundary changes. Once Germany surrendered, the assurances were withdrawn, and a starvation blockade forced German submission to the new harsh terms.

Hitler’s program was to put Germany back together. He was succeeding without war until Churchill provoked Chamberlain into an insane act. Danzig was 95 percent German. It had been given to Poland by the Versailles Treaty. Hitler was negotiating its return and offered in exchange a guarantee of Poland’s frontiers. The Polish colonels, assessing the relative strengths of Poland and Germany, understood that a deal was better than a war. But suddenly, the British Prime Minister issued Poland a guarantee of its existing territory, including Danzig, whose inhabitants wished to return to Germany.

Buchanan produces one historian after another to testify that British miscalculations and blunders, culminating in Chamberlain’s worthless and provocative “guarantee” to Poland, brought the West into a war that Hitler did not want, a war that destroyed the British Empire and left Britain a dependency of America, a war that delivered Poland, a chunk of Germany, all of Eastern Europe, and the Baltic states to Joseph Stalin, a war that left the Western allies with a 45-year cold war against the nuclear-armed Soviet Union.

People resist the shattering of their illusions, and many are angry with Buchanan for assembling the facts of the case that distinguished historians have provided.

Churchill admirers are outraged that their hero is revealed as the first war criminal of World War II. It was Churchill who initiated the policy of terror bombing civilians in non-combatant areas. Buchanan quotes B.H. Liddell Hart: “When Mr. Churchill came into power, one of the first decisions of his government was to extend bombing to the non-combatant area.”

In holding Churchill to account, Buchanan makes no apologies for Hitler, but the ease with which Churchill set aside moral considerations is discomforting.

Buchanan documents that Churchill’s plan was to destroy 50% of German homes. Churchill also had plans for using chemical and biological warfare against German civilians. In 2001 the Glasgow Sunday Herald reported Churchill’s plan to drop five million anthrax cakes onto German pastures in order to poison the cattle and through them the people. Churchill instructed the RAF to consider drenching “the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany” with poison gas “in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention.”

“It is absurd to consider morality on this topic,” the great man declared.

Paul Johnson, a favorite historian of conservatives, notes that Churchill’s policy of terror bombing civilians was “approved in cabinet, endorsed by parliament and, so far as can be judged, enthusiastically backed by the bulk of the British people.” Thus, the terror bombing of civilians, which “marked a critical stage in the moral declension of humanity in our times,” fulfilled “all the conditions of the process of consent in a democracy under law.”

British historian F.J.P. Veale concluded that Churchill’s policy of indiscriminate bombing of civilians caused an unprecedented “reversion to primary and total warfare” associated with “Sennacherib, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane.”

The Americans were quick to follow Churchill’s lead. General Curtis LeMay boasted of his raid on Tokyo: “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”

MacDonogh’s book, After the Reich, dispels the comfortable myth of generous allied treatment of defeated Germany. Having discarded all moral scruples, the allies fell upon the vanquished country with brutal occupation. Hundreds of thousands of women raped; hundreds of thousands of Germans died in deportations; a million German prisoners of war died in captivity.

MacDonogh calculates that 2.5 million Germans died between the liberation of Vienna and the Berlin airlift.

Nigel Jones writes in the conservative London Sunday Telegraph: “MacDonogh has told a very inconvenient truth,” a story long “cloaked in silence since telling it suited no one.”

The hypocrisy of the Nuremberg trials is that the victors were also guilty of crimes for which the vanquished were punished. The purpose of the trials was to demonize the defeated in order to divert attention from the allies’ own war crimes. The trials had little to do with justice.

In Freedom Next Time, Pilger shows the complete self-absorption of American, British and Israeli governments whose policies are unimpeded by any moral principle.

Pilger documents the demise of the inhabitants of Diego Garcia. The Americans wanted Diego Garcia for an air base, so the British packed up the 2,000 residents, people with British passports under British protection, and deported them to Mauritius, one thousand miles away.

To cover up its crime against humanity, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office created the fiction that the inhabitants, which had been living in the archipelago for two or three centuries, were “a floating population.” This fiction, wrote a legal adviser, bolsters “our arguments that the territory has no indigenous or settled population.”

Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart conspired to mislead the UN about the deported islanders by, in Stewart’s words, “ presenting any move as a change of employment for contract workers--rather than as a population resettlement.”

Pilger interviewed some of the displaced persons, but emotional blocs will shield patriotic Americans and British from the uncomfortable facts. Rational skeptics can find a second documented account of the Anglo-American rape of Diego Garcia online at http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=diego_garcia. An entire people were swept away.

Two thousand people were in the way of an American purpose--an air base--so we had our British dependency deport them.

Several million Palestinians are in Israel’s way. Pilger’s documented account of Israel’s crushing of the Palestinians shows that our “democratic ally” in the Middle East is capable of any evil and has no remorse or mercy. Israel is an apt student of the British and American empires’ attitudes toward lesser beings. They simply don’t count.

Those who are the salt of the earth take precedence over everything.
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Note: though I have not read McDonough's book (yet), here are the facts from the book according to a reviewer on Amazon:

* 2.3 million German civilians died violent deaths following the official cessation of hostilities on VE-Day, and 1.4 million German POWs died in captivity.
* Some of the same concentration camps formerly utilized by the Germans to imprison the Jews and work them to death were co-opted into Allied concentration camps to hold millions of Germans. The same grizzly results ensued: emasculated bodies from those who nearly starved to death and were plagued by pestilence and disease. Nearly all of the famous concentration camps utilized by the Germans--Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Dachau--were utilized again by the Allies replicating the same hellish conditions perpetrated by the Nazis. German prisoners died in throngs.
* The Americans utilized torture to extract confessions in their prison at Schwabisch Hall. Men had their testicles emasculated in the interrogations.
* There were 600 POW camps in the UK, and over a million POWs died in the USSR.
* On April 17-18, 1945, French soldiers raped as many as 600 women in Freudenstadt, before making passage to Stuggart where they raped 3,000 more.
* The Russians may have raped over 20,000 women alone in Berlin.