Category: News

In an initially pointless exercise that lasted nearly an hour, I flipped between two Palestinian television channels, Al Aqsa TV of Hamas in Gaza and Palestine TV of Fatah in the West Bank. While both purported to represent Palestine and the Palestinians, each seemed to represent some other place and some other people. It was all very disappointing.

Hamas’ world is fixated on their hate of Fatah and other factional personal business. Fatah TV is stuck between several worlds of archaic language of phony revolutions, factional rivalry and unmatched self-adoration. The two narratives are growingly alien and will unlikely ever move beyond their immediate sense of self-gratification and utter absurdity.

It is no wonder why Palestinians are still struggling to tell the world such a simple, straightforward and truthful story. Perhaps it is now out of desperation that they expect Israel’s New Historians, internationals who make occasional visits to Palestine or an unexceptionally fair western journalist to tell it.

But what about the Palestinian themselves? This is rare because factionalism in Palestine and among Palestinians in the Diaspora is also destroying the very idea of having a common narrative through which they can tell one cohesive story, untainted by the tribal political mentality which is devouring Palestinian identity the same way Israeli bulldozers are devouring whatever remains of their land.

Even if such a narrative were to finally exist, it would likely be an uphill battle, for Israel’s official narrative, albeit a forgery, is rooted in history. On May 16, 2013, Shay Hazkani, described in a detailed Haaretz article the intricate and purposeful process through which Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion rewrote history. "Catastrophic thinking: Did Ben-Gurion try to rewrite history?" was largely based on a single file (number GL-18/17028) in the State Archives that seemed to have escaped censorship. The rest of the files were whisked away after Israel’s New Historians – Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe and others – got their hands on numerous documents that violently negated Israel’s official story of its birth.

"Archived Israeli documents that reported the expulsion of Palestinians, massacres or rapes perpetrated by Israeli soldiers, along with other events considered embarrassing by the establishment, were reclassified as ‘top secret’," Hazkani wrote in the Israeli paper. But GL-18/17028 somehow survived the official onslaught on history.

Continue reading “When Falsehoods Triumph: Why a Winning Palestinian Narrative Is Hard To Find”

Last week, Matthieu Aikins at Rolling Stone shed light on evidence that U.S. forces committed war crimes against Afghans, including extra-judicial executions, torture, and disappearances of at least 17 men.

The following day, Human Rights Watch issued a statement urging an official investigation, but noted that “the U.S. has a meager record of investigating and prosecuting human rights abuses allegedly committed by its forces during its 12-year military presence in Afghanistan.”

Today, Reuters reports on the hard evidence that the U.S. has deliberately rebuffed efforts to investigate these murders:

Afghanistan’s intelligence service has abandoned its investigation into the murder of a group of civilians after being refused access to U.S. special forces soldiers suspected of involvement, according to a document obtained by Reuters.

…In the report authored by Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) intelligence agency, investigators said they had asked the United States for access to three U.S. Green Berets and four Afghan translators working with them but were rebuffed.

“Despite many requests by NDS they have not cooperated. Without their cooperation this process cannot be completed,” said the report, which was originally published on September 23.

Needless to say, it’s hard to investigate a crime committed by American forces in Afghanistan if the U.S. refuses to cooperate.

But even when investigations do occur, U.S. soldiers typically get off easy. Eight of the nine U.S. soldiers charged with the 2005 massacre of 24 Iraqi men, women, and children in Haditha, Iraq were not convicted. Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, who was charged with leading the slaughter, was convicted in a plea bargain of a single count of “dereliction of duty.” He was demoted to the rank of private and will serve no jail time.

The “Kill Team” in Afghanistan, the army unit that planned and committed executions of multiple innocent, unarmed Afghan civilians, framing the dead as having been a threat, and mutilating their corpses as trophies received light sentences as well. All but the ringleader of the Kill Team received reduced sentences and are eligible for parole in a handful of years. Even the ringleader, described as evil by one of the other defendants, was sentenced to life in prison, but could be eligible for parole in less than 10 years.

A State Department diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks revealed that U.S. forces committed a heinous war crime during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, two children, and three infants were summarily executed. Not a single American soldier was prosecuted and no investigation was initiated.

In one notable and comparable incident in February of 2010, U.S. Special Operations Forces surrounded a house in a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan. Two civilian men exited the home to ask why they had been surrounded and were shot and killed. U.S. forces then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager).

U.S. troops lied and tampered with the evidence at the scene. Investigations eventually forced the Pentagon to issue an apology, but none of the soldiers were charged with a crime.

Most of these incidents were revealed to the public because of intrepid journalism and they almost certainly represent a tiny minority of the U.S. crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan with impunity.

Via Ma’an News, Israel is close to carrying out plans to forcibly displace tens of thousands of Bedouin Palestinians in southern Israel, demolishing their villages, and erecting new Jewish settlements in their place.

Israel’s Prawer Plan calls for the relocation of 40,000-70,000 Bedouin, the demolition of about 40 villages, and the confiscation of nearly 200,000 acres of land in the Negev Desert.

…According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the plan will destroy the communal and social fabric of tens of thousands of Bedouins, condemning them to a future of poverty and unemployment.

For those who don’t know, the Negev Bedouin are a group of Arab tribes that have lived in Palestine for centuries. Many of them were displaced in the 1948 war, but large numbers still remain in southern Israel. The Israeli state has long subjected them to abuse and denied them access to “basic services and infrastructure, such as electricity and running water.”

I am absolutely baffled as to how anyone can look at the Prawer Plan and not acknowledge Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing.

The Washington Post‘s Bart Gellman, one of the journalists in possession of the full cache of Edward Snowden’s leaked NSA documents, debated former NSA/CIA chief Michael Hayden yesterday. Lengthy, but worth watching.

The British and the Canadians call today Remembrance Day, or Armistice Day. In the United States, it’s been known as Veterans Day since the end of the Korean War. Americans are much more divorced from WWI than people in Europe or Canada. Understandable, since the conflict  never touched our soil, and it killed “only” 125,000 men in less than two years.

Today Veterans Day is an excuse to salute living veterans of various wars, and to thank them all. But never mind what the calendar says, we should keep calling it Armistice Day. Because that’s what happened on November 11 — World War One endd.

It’s not as if when the U.S. called it Armistice Day, it was a peacenik’s holiday. No holiday officially mandated by President Woodrow Wilson could ever be that. But all the same, the switch — signed by President Dwight Eisenhower, after a WWII veteran rallied for it — to a day for all veterans suggests a diminishing amount of critical thought about the meaning of the holiday. Or, at least an end to more peaceful platitudes and a drift towards more dangerous ones.

World War I was a terrible thing. Its existence assured the world of a second, much worse conflict. The Treaty of Versailles’s draconian terms hit Germany with blame for everything. Hyperinflation, depression, and resentment paved a road to Hitler. But on November 11, 1918, the war stopped. A war ending — one particular war that included particular, real men is something worth celebrating and considering. Because what is being celebrated on Veterans Day is an abstraction. Nobody is thanking of the individuals who may have been well-intentioned, and then changed their minds. Not the ones who were aching to play warrior, or the ones who had limited economic opportunities. Definitely not the ones who came back with PTSD-addled brains, or antiwar ideas.

Today is not the day to remember how the armed forces aren’t dealing with what they’ve made. Individuals in society may want soldiers to have medical care, and they definitely want to salute them in parades. They will happily change their Facebook statuses to “thank you” today.  But nobody really wants to deal with what happens after wars — with skyrocketing suicide rates or traumatic brain injuries in Americans. The other side of our wars won’t even get a mention today, and the numbers of dead are a hell of a lot higher there.

One exception to the fever of banal kindness is Justin Doolittle’s Salon essay headlined “Stop thanking the troops for me.” At one point in the piece, he notes that sporting events often involve explicitly pro-military raw-raw rabble-rousing. Even sports advertising is closely tied with heart-warming military ads. One example is the Bank of America ad that played incessantly during baseball season.  

“Bank of America and the Hughes family” tells us about Caroline Hughes, William Hughes, John Hughes Jr, John Anderson Hughes, and Robert Hughes who have served in Haiti, Vietnam, World War II (specifically Normandy), World War I (cavalry), and the Spanish-American war. A long line of folks all in the U.S. military, with the artifacts and the photographs to prove it.

This is a very tidy version of a popular idea, mainly among the more conservative, that all soldiers should be praised. But it doesn’t even gel with professed conservative ideals.

Conservatives hate false “equality.” Capitalism rewards ingenuity and drive. The clunky hand of the state just hands out cash. Liberals want everyone to have a participation trophy, and nobody to get unfair benefits. Conservatives want hard work, winners and losers, and pulling yourself up by your boot straps. So why so they constantly reaffirm this notion that to serve your country is noble, regardless of the conflict or its effects on the rest of the world? Why is war — the biggest state endevour there is — the time to turn your politics into a bumper sticker and a ribbon?

“Supporting the military, though, and expressing gratitude for what the military is actually doing around the world, are nothing if not explicitly political sentiments,”writes Doolitttle. It’s true. What are you thanking each soldier for if not for what they do, and what they are a part of? Are we supposed to ignore blowback, and the disastrous state of Iraq, and the continued occupation of Afghanistan when we thank soldiers? Are we supposed to forget the insanity of Vietnam, and the civilian bombings during WWII?

Even World War I shouldn’t be seen as 1000 years ago, with all of its idiotic, wasteful carnage now just restful poems about poppies. World War I was a disaster, too. Maybe more than most wars. Why are we trying to forget that it ended today? Why has thanking replaced remembering?

This is a sincere question for conservatives and Republicans and anyone who would frame wars the way the silly Bank of America ad does — if every war is equally noble, which one is the good war? If beating Hitler is losing in Vietnam, is 600,000 dead at the Somme is remembering the Maine, why should we ever believe anyone swearing that this time it’s really Munich in 1938, and we can’t afford to stand down from [Insert International Threat Here]? The warmongerers cry wolf every time. A good way to prove that is to pretend that every war and every soldier is the same, so every war must be the one we just have to fight.

War is life and death. Even one — or two — days a year, we cannot afford to treat it like an apolitical platitude. Don’t blame individual soldiers, but don’t thank them either.

Instead, think about November 11 and think about the end of a war.

The Washington Post reported last week that hundreds of Afghan detainees held at Bagram airbase were transferred to Kabul’s control, as per earlier agreements, and hundreds were simply released. At Lawfare, Robert Chesney was none too happy about this, arguing they should have continued their detention without due process.

Chesney’s Lawfare colleague John Bellinger saw that as a good opportunity to remind people of what President Obama did with regard to detention policy in Afghanistan. What he did was create “his own Guantanamo in Afghanistan that was more than ten times the size of the Guantanamo he inherited…”

When the Administration came into office, there were roughly 600 detainees at Bagram (and roughly 240 at Guantanamo). By the fall of 2012, when the initial agreement to transfer control of Bagram to the Afghan Government was reached, the number of detainees had quintupled, to more than 3000, including approximately 50 non-Afghan detainees. The Administration has held all of these detainees under the laws of war, but not as POWs under the Third Geneva Convention or Protected Persons under the Fourth Convention; the Administration instead has called them ”unprivileged enemy belligerents” (to be distinguished from the Bush Administration’s much maligned label of “unlawful enemy combatants”).   Moreover, unlike the detainees at Guantanamo, none of the detainees at Bagram have enjoyed the right of habeas corpus to challenge their detention in US courts. Despite the opprobrium they heaped on the Bush Administration, European governments and the press have been strangely silent about the Bagram detention facility; Human Rights First did release a report in 2011 entitled “Detained and Denied in Afghanistan,” but it received little attention.

In his NDU speech earlier this year, President Obama asserted that Guantanamo is a “facility that should never have been opened.” When his speechwriters wrote these lines, however, they may not have realized that President Obama has presided over the creation of his own Guantanamo in Afghanistan that was more than ten times the size of the Guantanamo he inherited and where detainees have had substantially fewer legal rights to challenge their detention.

It’s old news that Obama didn’t close Gitmo, and old news that the Bush administration’s concept of indefinite detention was therefore embraced. That Obama expanded Bagram to 3,000 detainees and held them under the same logic as Bush did Gitmo detainees is also  old news, except that it’s old news that almost nobody knows (I’ve been writing about it since Obama began his surge).

It’s worth thinking about how the Bagram population grew so large and the likelihood that thousands of them are guilty of nothing that would stand up in court (if court were a privilege they were afforded). At  the height of Obama’s surge in Afghanistan, according to a 2011 report by the Open Society Institute, “An estimated 12 to 20 night raids [occurred] per night, resulting in thousands of detentions per year, many of whom are non-combatants.” This at a time when senior commanders in the Joint Special Operations Command were telling the Washington Post that night raids get the wrong guy about 50 percent of the time.

Even with his “unprivileged enemy belligerents” doctrine, Obama has managed to wiggle out of the public backlash Bush received for his “unlawful enemy combatants” doctrine. Somehow.