Day: September 19, 2009

Israel Escalates Anti-UN Campaign; Its Most Important Diplomatic Battle in Years By Batoul Wehbe

Leave a comment

17 September, 2009 — Al Manar TV

A day after the release of the critical Goldstone Commission report over Israeli crimes in Gaza, Israel continued its Anti-UN campaign.

“The Goldstone committee is a committee that was set up to find Israel guilty of crimes that were determined in advanced, and the committee’s members did not let the facts confuse them,” said Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Thursday, in his first comments in response to the harsh UN report investigation into the Israeli aggression on the Gaza strip.

According to the report: “Some of the actions of the Government of Israel might justify a competent court finding that crimes against humanity have been committed,” and “…the Mission finds that there have been a number of violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law.”

Lieberman said the committee’s conclusions were “predetermined”, and he accused its members of serving the purposes of utilitarian countries. “The whole purpose of the report, from the moment the decision was made to write it, was to destroy Israel’s image, in service of countries where the terms ‘human rights’ and ‘combat ethics’ do not even appear in their dictionaries,” the foreign minister alleged.

Lieberman went on to say, “I can say wholeheartedly, as can any man that examines the matter in an objective manner, that the IDF is the most moral army in the world, and it is forced to deal with the most vile terrorists, who set for themselves the goal of killing women and children, and hide behind women and children.” He said, “The Goldstone Report has no legal, factual or ethical value, and more than a testament to the State of Israel, it is a testament to the writers of the report and those that sent them.”

Continue reading →

U.S. Missile Shield Plans: Retreat Or Advance? By Rick Rozoff

Leave a comment

18 September, 2009 — Global Research – Stop NATO

On September 17 the White House and the Pentagon, Barack Obama and Robert Gates, announced that after a sixty-day review of the project, the U.S. is going to abandon plans to station ten ground-based interceptor missiles in Poland and a forward-based X-band missile radar installation in the Czech Republic.

The deployments were negotiated with both prospective host countries by the preceding George W. Bush administration under the guise of protecting the United States from alleged long-range missile attacks by what were described as rogue states: Iran and North Korea.

Interceptor missiles in Poland would only be of use in protecting the U.S. if Iran possessed intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of being fired over the Arctic Ocean. No serious person has ever suggested Iran has such a capability or ever will.

But Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin remarked last November that U.S. missiles in Poland could hit his nation’s capital of Moscow in four minutes, as NATO warplanes that have patrolled the skies over the Baltic Sea since 2004 could reach Russia’s second largest city, St. Petersburg, in five minutes.

Leading Russian officials, political and military, have unanimously accused Washington of targeting their own nation and its strategic forces rather than Iran with its third position missile shield plans.

Surveys have consistently demonstrated that a majority of Poles oppose the stationing of American missiles and the troops that would accompany them in their nation. Polls in the Czech Republic show over two-thirds opposition to the basing of interceptor missile radar in that country.

Continue reading →

A Criminal State that MUST be Isolated. Reading the Goldstone Report By Khalid Amayreh

Leave a comment

19 September, 2009 — Palestine Think Tank

whitewash.jpg

(art by Carlos Latuff)

Israel is unusually furious over the publication this week of the Goldstone commission report which accuses the apartheid regime of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip during the bloody blitz against the coastal Palestinian territory nearly nine months ago.

Israeli officials and hasbara doctors have been railing against Goldstone, who is both Jewish and Zionist, to the extent of accusing him of “anti-Semitism,” an increasingly stale and ineffective weapon which Israel resorts to when all other propaganda tools don’t work.

Benyamin Netanyahu, the extremist Prime Minister of the Zionist regime has even asked US Special Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell to assist Israel, especially at the American arena, in order to curb the fallout from the report.

Meanwhile, Israel is embarking on a frantic propaganda campaign to discredit the report. In the past, Israel succeeded in endearing itself to western public opinion by enlisting the often Jewish-controlled media which effectively helped disseminate the Zionist narrative. In so doing, that media often turned the black into white, and the big lie into a “virtual truth” glorified by millions of gullible westerners who wouldn’t overburden themselves with the task of finding out the “real truth.”

Now, Israel is facing an uphill task doing the same job successfully.

Continue reading →

US Special Ops operates psywar websites targeted at UK By Lewis Page

Leave a comment

16 September, 2009 — The Register

The secretive US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) has awarded arms globocorp General Dynamics a $10m contract to set up a network of psychological-warfare “influence websites” supporting the Global War On Terror. France and Britain are specifically included as “targeted regions”.

SOCOM is principally famous for its large contingents of elite, secret operatives from all four US armed services (Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Delta Force, Team-6/DevGru, “the Activity” etc etc). What’s less well-known about the organisation is that it also includes the US forces’ active psychological-warfare apparatus. According (pdf) to the 4th Airborne Psychological Operations Group – the only full-time psywar unit in the US Army, and part of SOCOM:

PSYOP is the dissemination of truthful information to foreign audiences in support of US policy… these activities are not forms of force, but are force multipliers that use nonviolent means in often violent environments… they rely on logic, fear, desire or other mental factors… The ultimate objective of US military psychological operations is to convince enemy, neutral, and friendly nations and forces to take action favorable to the United States…

Their purpose can range from gaining support for US operations to preparing the battlefield for combat.

Continue reading →

Afghanistan: Where Empires Go to Die By Dahr Jamail

Leave a comment

17 September, 2009 — t r u t h o u t

On September 7 the Swedish aid agency Swedish Committee for Afghanistan reported that the previous week US soldiers raided one of its hospitals. According to the director of the aid agency, Anders Fange, troops stormed through both the men’s and women’s wards, where they frantically searched for wounded Taliban fighters.

Soldiers demanded that hospital administrators inform the military of any incoming patients who might be insurgents, after which the military would then decide if said patients would be admitted or not. Fange called the incident “not only a clear violation of globally recognized humanitarian principles about the sanctity of health facilities and staff in areas of conflict, but also a clear breach of the civil-military agreement” between nongovernmental organizations and international forces.

Fange said that US troops broke down doors and tied up visitors and hospital staff.

Impeding operations at medical facilities in Afghanistan directly violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which strictly forbids attacks on emergency vehicles and the obstruction of medical operations during wartime.

Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, a public affairs officer for the US Navy, confirmed the raid, and told the Associated Press, “Complaints like this are rare.”

Despite Sidenstricker’s claim that “complaints like this” are rare in Afghanistan, they are, in fact, common. Just as they are in Iraq, the other occupation. A desperate conventional military, when losing a guerilla war, tends to toss international law out the window. Yet even more so when the entire occupation itself is a violation of international law.

Continue reading →