Sen Feinstein: Iran Sanctions Bill ‘Is A March To War’

Senator Diane Feinstein took to the floor of the Senate to argue against the bill that would impose new sanctions on Iran in the interim period between the 6-month agreement and a final deal down the road. She said this attempt to foil negotiations is really “a march to war,” that would signal to the Iranians that the real interest of the United States in not in diplomacy, but in regime change.

I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day…

The NYT’s Unbalanced Reporting On Military Training, Education in Gaza

This piece from the New York Times reports on Hamas boot camps in Gaza where teenagers receive military training and repeats oft-cited claims about Hamas textbooks that don’t recognize Israel. It is a one-sided depiction of an ugly reality that exists, of course, on both sides.

Having seen two major Israeli military operations in Gaza in their short lives, many of the teenagers came to this boot camp, which is run by Hamas, the Islamic militant group that has led Gaza since 2007, to prepare for what they see as the inevitable next round.

…The Futuwwa program, which was supported by the Hamas Education Ministry, followed other recent efforts by Hamas to inculcate Gaza’s youths with its militant ideology. Last year, for a required “national education” course in government schools, Hamas introduced its own textbooks that do not recognize modern Israel or mention the Oslo peace accords, which Israel signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s.

First of all, why should Hamas’s military training of Gaza youths be any more troubling to us than Israel’s mandatory military conscription of all Israeli citizens starting at age 18? We’re supposed to believe there is a qualitative difference because Hamas is a “terrorist organization” whereas Israel is a state. Obviously, this is a distinction without a difference, given that “terrorism” can come in lots of forms, including state terrorism, which Israel perpetrates all the time.

On the issue of biased Hamas textbooks which don’t recognize modern Israel, the New York Times is being negligent in its journalism. Any balanced article would have mentioned the academic study conducted last year that was, according to the Times‘s own reporting on it at the time, “unusually comprehensive,” and which found that 95 percent of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox schoolbooks don’t recognize Palestine’s borders either. They show “no borders in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, implying that the Palestinian areas are part of the State of Israel,” observed Sigal Samuel at the Daily Beast’s Open Zion.

The academic study found “that each side generally presents the other as the enemy, but it undermines recent assertions by the Israeli government that Palestinian children are educated ‘to hate,'” the report explained.

The Hypocritical US Position on Cyber-Warfare

The New York Times is out with a story about how the NSA has the capacity to surreptitiously install software on specific computers that allow the agency to mount cyber attacks and carry out surveillance, even when the targeted computers are not connected to the internet. The Times reports that the NSA has done this to some 100,000 computers around the world.

This again brings up the issue of the NSA engaging in cyber-warfare, an activity that the U.S. is a veritable pioneer in, but which Washington relentlessly condemns other nations for engaging in.

The “tracking malware” discussed for the first time in the New York Times piece, “is a pursuit played most aggressively with the Chinese,” the report says. The U.S. has targeted Chinese Army units and “has set up two data centers in China — perhaps through front companies — from which it can insert malware into computers.”

Granted, the Chinese engage in cyber-warfare against the U.S. as well, but to frame U.S. cyber operations against China as purely a response to Chinese cyber threats is disingenuous. There is documentation of U.S. cyber-warfare going back decades – and the U.S. has always been, needless to say, way ahead of China on this front, technologically speaking.

“U.S. intelligence services carried out 231 offensive cyber-operations in 2011, the leading edge of a clandestine campaign that embraces the Internet as a theater of spying, sabotage and war,” The Washington Post reported in August, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The key word there is “offensive.”

The hypocrisy of the official U.S. position on cyber-warfare is made clear in two recent Washington Post articles…

The Post reported in September 2012: “Cyberattacks can amount to armed attacks triggering the right of self-defense and are subject to international laws of war, the State Department’s top lawyer said Tuesday.”

And in August 2013: “The CIA and the NSA have begun aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as ‘offensive cyber operations.'”

Either Washington’s logic is airtight and they admit that China, Iran, and other countries targeted by our cyber-warfare now have the right to respond militarily in self-defense…or, the real logic is that the U.S. considers offensive cyber-warfare to be illegal for everyone except Uncle Sam. Which is it?

The Whitewashing of Ariel Sharon

The death of former Israeli leader Ariel Sharon enlivened US media’s interest in the legacy of a man considered by many a war criminal, and by some a hero. In fact, the supposed heroism of Sharon was at the heart of CNN coverage of his death on January 11.

Sharon spent his last eight years in a coma, but apparently not long enough for US corporate media to wake up from its own moral coma. CNN online’s coverage presented Sharon as a man of heroic stature, who was forced to make tough choices for the sake of his own people. “Throughout, he was called "The Bulldozer," a fearless leader who got things done,” wrote Alan Duke.

In his article, “Ariel Sharon, former Israeli Prime Minister, dead at 85”, Duke appeared to be confronting Sharon’s past head on. In reality, he cleverly whitewashed the man’s horrendous crimes, while finding every opportunity to recount his fictional virtue. “Many in the Arab world called Sharon ‘the Butcher of Beirut’ after he oversaw Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon while serving as defense minister,” Duke wrote.

Nevertheless, Sharon was not called the “The Bulldozer” for being “a fearless leader” nor do Arabs call him “the Butcher of Beirut” for simply “overseeing” the invasion of Lebanon. Duke is either ignorant or oblivious to the facts, but the blame is not his alone, since references to Sharon’s heroism was a staple in CNN’s coverage.

Sharon’s demise however, and the flood of robust eulogies will neither change the facts of his blood-socked history, nor erase the “facts on the ground” – as in the many illegal colonies that Sharon so dedicatedly erected on occupied Palestinian land.

Continue reading “The Whitewashing of Ariel Sharon”

World Bank Firm Backs Honduran Corporation Associated With Forced Evictions, Multiple Killings

According to Human Rights Watch, the World Bank’s private investment firm, International Finance Corporation (IFC), lent $15 million to Corporacion Dinant, a Honduran food company, despite indications that it was forcing people off their own land and controlled security forces that engaged in multiple killings.

“The IFC loaned millions of dollars to a project, even though it was known that its operations were already enmeshed in killings and other violence,” said Jessica Evans, senior international financial institutions researcher and advocate at Human Rights Watch. “As President Kim urges World Bank staff to take on riskier investments, the Dinant case should serve as a warning about the pitfalls of investing without proper oversight.”

The CAO found that IFC staff had underestimated risks related to security and land conflicts, and that they did not undertake adequate due diligence even though the situation around the project and the risks had been raised publicly. Nor did IFC project staff inform other IFC specialists on such environmental and social risks about the problems that they knew were occurring.

The investigation stemmed from allegations that Dinant conducted, facilitated, or supported forced evictions of farmers in Bajo Aguán, Honduras, and that violence against farmers on and around Dinant plantations in the Bajo Aguán, including multiple killings, occurred because of inappropriate use of private and public security forces under Dinant’s control or influence.

The CAO found that the IFC did not, as its policy requires, adequately oversee Dinant’s obligations to investigate credible allegations of abusive acts committed by the company’s security personnel or to sanction the use of force that goes beyond “preventative and defensive purposes in proportion to the nature and extent of the threat.”

Read the whole report here. See here, here, and here to read about detrimental U.S. policies towards Honduras that contribute to the kind of atmosphere in which government-allied corporations abuse the people and security forces engage in killings with impunity.