Category: News

There are few who deny that there is an acceptable range of opinion in official Washington on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and another range of opinion which lies outside of it. The latter range refers mostly to any direct criticism of Israel or legitimizing any Palestinian perspective on the conflict.

Some voices manage to argue positions outside the “acceptable range” without being called an anti-Semite or a terrorist. In this case, six former U.S. officials (emphasis on the former) have written a piece in Politico that is a must-read.

Former national security adviser Zbigneiw Brzezinski, former U.S. secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Lee Hamilton, former U.S. trade representative Carla A. Hills, former under secretary of state for political affairs Thomas Pickering, and president of the U.S./Middle East Project Henry Siegman make several recommendations to John Kerry in the current negotiations. They call Israel’s policies of occupation and settlement in Palestinian territory “confiscation” and they describe Netanyahu’s demands as “politically and morally unacceptable.”

Here are the first two issues they cover:

Settlements: U.S. disapproval of continued settlement enlargement in the Occupied Territories by Israel’s government as “illegitimate” and “unhelpful” does not begin to define the destructiveness of this activity. Nor does it dispel the impression that we have come to accept it despite our rhetorical objections. Halting the diplomatic process on a date certain until Israel complies with international law and previous agreements would help to stop this activity and clearly place the onus for the interruption where it belongs.

Palestinian incitement: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s charge that various Palestinian claims to all of historic Palestine constitute incitement that stands in the way of Israel’s acceptance of Palestinian statehood reflects a double standard. The Likud and many of Israel’s other political parties and their leaders make similar declarations about the legitimacy of Israel’s claims to all of Palestine, designating the West Bank “disputed” rather than occupied territory. Moreover, Israeli governments have acted on those claims by establishing Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank. Surely the “incitement” of Palestinian rhetoric hardly compares to the incitement of Israel’s actual confiscations of Palestinian territory. If the United States is not prepared to say so openly, there is little hope for the success of these talks, which depends far more on the strength of America’s political leverage and its determination to use it than on the good will of the parties.

The second two issues they tackle relate to Israel’s absurd security demands which would essentially continue the occupation in perpetuity and Israel’s call for the Palestinian side to recognize Israel as “the national homeland of the Jewish people.” On the latter issue, the Palestinians already recognized the legitimacy of the state of Israel in 1988 and again in 1993. This fulfilled Israel’s demands at the time, but once the Palestinians agreed to it, Israeli policy then shifted to something they were sure Palestinians wouldn’t cave on. Like with Israel’s demands to continue to occupy the Jordan Valley, their negotiating tactics are designed to provoke Palestinian rejection and thus a breakdown in talks.

I emphasized that these were former U.S. officials because that seems to be the only time people in government dare utter a perspective contrary to Israel’s right-wing; that is, when domestic politics is no longer a factor. This makes John Kerry’s concurrence unlikely in the extreme.

Miriam Carey is dead and will never be able to tell us what happened on that fateful Oct. 3 day when she led police on a high speed chase through the busy downtown streets of Capitol Hill and was killed shortly after, before she could even exit her car, her 1-year-old daughter in the back seat, a silent witness to it all.

But an autopsy ordered by her grieving family may lend some detail to the sad story.

According to reports on Tuesday morning, the results of the autopsy have revealed that Carey was shot five times “from behind,” including one shot to the back of her head.

As we have covered here before, Carey, 34, may have been under some mental duress, and no one quite knows why she drove all the way down to Washington, D.C. from Connecticut with her young daughter that day. The entire incident is still under police investigation so officials did not return calls for comment by local reporters. The autopsy also revealed that she was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs when the incident happened.

Of course the chorus on one side is that police were just doing their jobs, trying to prevent a potential “terror” attack at the Nation’s Capital, which since 9/11 has been functioning in varying degrees of emergency security lock-down. Others say that very post-9/11 mindset has made police hostile and trigger happy and remote as ever from the people to whom they owe their livelihoods and salaries. Instead, everyone is a potential terrorist, until proven otherwise. The reaction from the members of congress and their staffs, many who hailed the police as heroes, in essence, for killing Miriam Carey that day, is a clear indication of how that mindset has set in here Inside the Beltway

Carey may have taken wrong turn and panicked, or, her intent may have been more diabolical. But to her family, this was a senseless loss of life and a stain on law enforcement, and they are suing the Capitol Police, which had the lead in this incident, for $75 million. Stay tuned.

by Medea Benjamin and Kate Chandley

Illegal US drone strikes continue (the Long War Journal says there have been 8 drones strikes in Yemen so far this year), but efforts to curb the use of killer drones have made remarkable headway this year.

While the faith-based community has taken far too long to address the moral issues posed by remote-controlled killing, on February 13, the World Council of Churches – the largest coalition of Christian churches – came out in opposition to the use of armed drones. The Council said that the use of armed drones poses a "serious threat to humanity" and condemned, in particular, US drone strikes in Pakistan. This is a breakthrough in the religious community, and should make it easier for individual denominations to make similar pronouncements, as the Church of the Brethren has.

There have also been major developments in the secular world. In February, the European Union, with an overwhelming vote of 534-49, passed a resolution calling on EU Member States to "oppose and ban the practice of extrajudicial targeted killings" and demanding that EU member states "do not perpetrate unlawful targeted killings or facilitate such killings by other states." This resolution will pressure individual European nations to stop their own production and/or use of killer drones (especially the UK, Germany, Italy and France), and to stop their collaboration with the US drone program.

People on the receiving end of US drone strikes have also stepped up their opposition. On April 1, a group of friends and family of drone strike victims in Yemen came together to form the National Organization for Drone Victims. This is the first time anywhere that drone strike victims have created their own entity to support one another and seek redress. The organization plans to conduct its own investigations, focusing on the civilian impact of drone attacks. At the official launch, which was packed with press, the group said any government official supporting the US drones should be tried in a criminal court. "Today, we launch this new organization which will be the starting point for us to get justice and to take legal measures on a national and international scale against anyone who is aiding these crimes," said the organization’s president Mohammad Ali al-Qawli, whose brother was killed in a drone strike.

Continue reading “Killer Drones in a Downward Spiral?”

Antiwar.com is linking to Seymour Hersh’s latest report indicating the potential role of the Turkish government in unleashing the chemical agent sarin in Syria last year and the possibility that it was done intentionally in order to instigate a U.S. military action against the Assad regime. Hersh spoke about the piece on Democracy Now:

This should be rather obvious, but a recent study shows that the less informed you are, the worse your policy recommendations are likely to be. Specifically, you are much more likely to advocate U.S. military intervention in Ukraine if you’re also someone who can’t find Ukraine on a map.

Washington Post:

On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S.  to intervene with military force.

Only about 16 percent of Americans can locate Ukraine on a map. Some respondents placed Ukraine “in Brazil or in the Indian Ocean.” Yeesh.

Anyone surprised by this should really pick up Bryan Caplan’s book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. “In theory, democracy is a bulwark against socially harmful policies,” Caplan writes. “In practice, however, democracies frequently adopt and maintain policies that are damaging.”

One thing I would add is that there is a reason uninformed opinions swing in the pro-war direction, rather than the non-intervention direction. It’s not as if a blank slate just magically tends toward greater U.S. military intervention. The uninformed get bits and pieces of information from a press corps that largely serves to amplify the hawkish rhetoric of politicians in Washington and from cable news anchors (who, I believe, are often as uninformed as their viewers). If you’re not going to start a university-level research project on some pressing issue of either foreign or domestic policy, you defer to these filtered sources. The fact that we end up with still very uninformed people whose lack of knowledge is highly correlated with a pro-war position should tell us something about the nature of the press and of cable news.

Business Insider:

In military slang, Predator drone operators often refer to kills as ‘bug splats’, since viewing the body through a grainy video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.

To challenge this insensitivity as well as raise awareness of civilian casualties, an artist collective installed a massive portrait facing up in the heavily bombed Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, where drone attacks regularly occur. Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face.