Category: News

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”

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.

American journalism has entered highly dangerous terrain.

A tip-off is that the Washington Post refuses to face up to a conflict of interest involving Jeff Bezos – who’s now the sole owner of the powerful newspaper at the same time he remains Amazon’s CEO and main stakeholder.

The Post is supposed to expose CIA secrets. But Amazon is under contract to keep them. Amazon has a new $600 million "cloud" computing deal with the CIA.

The situation is unprecedented. But in an email exchange early this month, Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron told me that the newspaper doesn’t need to routinely inform readers of the CIA-Amazon-Bezos ties when reporting on the CIA. He wrote that such in-story acknowledgment would be "far outside the norm of disclosures about potential conflicts of interest at media organizations."

But there isn’t anything normal about the new situation. As I wrote to Baron, "few journalists could have anticipated ownership of the paper by a multibillionaire whose outside company would be so closely tied to the CIA."

The Washington Post’s refusal to provide readers with minimal disclosure in coverage of the CIA is important on its own. But it’s also a marker for an ominous pattern – combining denial with accommodation to raw financial and governmental power – a synergy of media leverage, corporate digital muscle and secretive agencies implementing policies of mass surveillance, covert action and ongoing warfare.

Continue reading “Why the Washington Post’s New Ties to the CIA Are So Ominous”

The bottom line when it comes to Afghanistan is that the U.S. has failed in virtually every one of its objectives. This year, 2014, is the year the Obama administration will describe as the year America’s longest war ended, even as the administration scrambles to reach an agreement with Kabul on keeping thousands of U.S. troops and Special Operations Forces there for another decade.

It’s important for Washington to frame the continued U.S. occupation of Afghanistan as the end of the war, because the alternative is to admit that America lost this war. The corrupt Kabul government cannot function or sustain itself without foreign assistance. The U.S. troops that Obama wants to keep in Afghanistan are to be tasked with training the Afghan military, an objective that has failed up to now. And the Taliban insurgency is alive and well, with many experts predicting a civil war or a break-up of the country into Taliban, tribal, and Kabul-controlled fiefdoms.

The weakness of the Kabul government and the remaining Taliban presence, however, is not an argument for continuing the war in earnest. Afghanistan’s instability may contribute to regional insecurity, but is not a direct threat to Americans. But beyond that, the U.S. could easily mitigate the problem with a change in its diplomatic posture, as opposed to military means (which have proven ineffective after 12 years at war).

First, the elephant in the room is Pakistan. Bruce Reidel, writing at The Daily Beast, argues that al-Qaeda and associated forces could make a comeback in Afghanistan after the U.S. draws down and the reason for this is Pakistan.

“Pakistan will continue to be the principal supporter and patron of the Afghan Taliban, the enemy that we have been fighting for so long,” Reidel writes. “Pakistan provides the Taliban with safe haven and sanctuary to train and recruit its fighters and protects its leaders, including Mullah Omar. The Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, helps train and fund the Taliban.”

This should ring some alarm bells. Throughout the entire U.S. war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani government has been supporting the insurgents who are fighting U.S. forces. This is more surprising when one realizes that, since 2009, the U.S. has given Pakistan about $9.4 billion in aid, with another $1.2 billion planned for 2014. Cutting off that aid might help in, you know, not directly contributing to the very insurgency we’re supposed to have crushed.

The other shift in diplomatic posture has to do with Afghanistan’s other neighbor, Iran. People forget that the U.S. cooperated with Iran in the aftermath of 9/11 to oust our mutual enemy, the Taliban, from power in Afghanistan. Such cooperation could again be realized if Washington’s mindless obsession with Iran being a regional bogeyman is put aside in favor of true detente. According to Martha Brill Olcott at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “an improved U.S.-Iranian relationship would yield many other dividends to U.S. foreign policy goals, not the least of which is that it would make the regional solution to Afghanistan’s economic recovery that Washington yearns for a much more realizable goal.”

From a purely realpolitik perspetive, there have been clear overlaps in U.S.-Iranian interests vis-a-vis Afghanistan that have been completely ignored in favor of a U.S. policy that categorizes Iran as an evil-doer out to destroy Israel and America. Meanwhile, tens of billions of U.S. dollars continued to flow to Pakistan, whose interests have been diametrically opposed to Washington’s vis-a-vis the jihadist militants.

Sigh. Lesson learned: If Washington can choose between, on the one hand, shifts diplomacy that can make its goals easier to attain, and on the other hand, endless war with no chance of success…it chooses the latter. All signs are that this will continue to be the case. Instead of cutting aid to the Taliban-supporting Pakistanis, instead of letting Iran take the lead in maintaining a Kabul government opposed to jihadists, Washington looks like it will to continue to support Pakistan, continue isolate Iran, and continue to fight an unwinnable nation-building war in Afghanistan.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon died over the weekend. Much of the U.S. and Israeli media have whitewashed Sharon’s legacy, erasing from history the fact that he was a wretched war criminal who was devoted to a Greater Israel and to massacring any civilians he perceived as obstructing that goal.

Those who have at least mentioned some of his failings make note of the 1982 massacre of at least 800 Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon. Sharon, defense minister at the time, deceptively persuaded the Israeli cabinet that an invasion of Lebanon was necessary, the goals being to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organization and to install the Maronite Christian Phalange Party into power in Beruit to serve as a client state of Israel.

The war of choice Israel waged in Lebanon killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians. Exact numbers are difficult to verify because of the “the haste with which bodies were buried in mass graves and the absence of impartial agencies.” The destruction of the war helped exacerbate a civil conflict in Lebanon that led to even more casualties. That alone is a legacy that should strip Sharon of his post-mortem label of “a man of peace.”

The Sabra and Shatila massacre took place when the Israeli-backed Lebanese Christian militia slaughtered men, women, and children in the Palestinian refugee camps, which were located in areas controlled by the Israeli military. Eye witnesses said the Lebanese militia fighters were in constant contact with the Israeli military over walkie-talkies.

Sharon was removed from office after an Israeli commission concluded that Israeli leaders were “indirectly responsible” for the massacres and that Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for failing to prevent them. But, as Human Rights Watch said on the day of Sharon’s death, “Ariel Sharon died without facing justice for his role in the massacres…[which] constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Not only was Israel responsible for the slaughter of innocents, but the U.S. was at least indirectly blameworthy. “Working with only partial knowledge of the reality on the ground,” wrote Seth Anziska in a 2012 New York Times op-ed that made use of declassified documents, “the United States feebly yielded to false arguments and stalling tactics that allowed a massacre in progress to proceed.”

Anziska’s piece is worth quoting at length:

In Washington that same day, Under Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger told the Israeli ambassador, Moshe Arens, that “Israel’s credibility has been severely damaged” and that “we appear to some to be the victim of deliberate deception by Israel.” He demanded that Israel withdraw from West Beirut immediately.

In Tel Aviv, [American envoy to the Middle East, Morris] Draper and the American ambassador, Samuel W. Lewis, met with top Israeli officials. Contrary to Prime Minister Begin’s earlier assurances, Defense Minister Sharon said the occupation of West Beirut was justified because there were “2,000 to 3,000 terrorists who remained there.” Mr. Draper disputed this claim; having coordinated the August evacuation, he knew the number was minuscule. Mr. Draper said he was horrified to hear that Mr. Sharon was considering allowing the Phalange militia into West Beirut. Even the I.D.F. chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, acknowledged to the Americans that he feared “a relentless slaughter.”

Continue reading “Ariel Sharon and the Legacy of US-Backed War Crimes”