Category: News

For decades, Israel has claimed that Palestinian school books teach pupils to hate Israel and Jews. This sent a strong signal to pro-Israel voices in Washington to tell lies, like when Newt Gingrich falsely claimed in a Republican presidential debate in December 2011 that Palestinian schoolbooks “teach terrorism.” He gave an erroneous example that Palestinians “have text books that say, ‘If there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?’”

Ultimately, the charges about extremist and anti-Semitic Palestinian education became a way to condemn Palestinians in general and to serve as proof that Palestinians could not be reasoned with in peace talks. It was part of the ideological vilification of the other side that justified a harder line in Israel by depicting the threat Palestinians pose as metastasized and multi-generational.

Today’s New York Times, Academic Study Weakens Israeli Claim That Palestinian School Texts Teach Hate: “An academic study of the contents of Israeli and Palestinian Authority textbooks, to be published Monday, finds 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 study, according to the New York Times, was “unusually comprehensive” and actually found that both Israel and Palestinian schoolbooks are biased against the other side, but that “extreme examples of dehumanization and demonization were ‘very rare’ on both sides.”

Sigal Samuel at the Daily Beast’s Open Zion:

While the study shows that all three schoolbook systems present a unilateral national narrative depicting the other community as the enemy, it also shows that these negative features are less pronounced in the Israeli state books: only 49 percent of relevant texts in Israeli state books describe the other in negative or very negative ways, as opposed to 73 percent in Israeli ultra-Orthodox and 84 percent in Palestinian books. The Israeli state books also include more self-critical passages and provide additional information about Palestinian religion, culture, and everyday life.

The US continues to militarize much of Latin America, spending enormous amounts of cash in order to prop up obedient regimes, train armies and militias, build new military bases, deploy more troops, and keep the military industrial complex fat and happy.

“In the most expensive initiative in Latin America since the Cold War,” reports the Associated Press, “the US has militarized the battle against the traffickers, spending more than $20 billion in the past decade.”

“US Army troops, Air Force pilots and Navy ships outfitted with Coast Guard counternarcotics teams are routinely deployed to chase, track and capture drug smugglers,” while Washington is simultaneously “training not only law enforcement agents in Latin American nations, but their militaries as well, building a network of expensive hardware, radar, airplanes, ships, runways and refueling stations,” and justifying it all under the drug war.

The US is building new military bases in Guatemala, Panama, Belize, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Peru, and elsewhere.

Hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars go to militarizing the region for the benefit of Washington and its corporate collaborators, but it ends up in some very nasty places. John Lindsay-Poland at FOR details some of the human rights abusers Washington is currently supporting:

The US Southern Command (SouthCom), responsible for US military activities in Central and South America and the Caribbean, is assisting the Panamanian border police, known as SENAFRONT, by upgrading a building in the SENAFRONT compound. The force was implicated in killings of indigenous protesters (PDF) in Bocas del Toro in 2011, and fired indiscriminately with live ammunition (PDF) on Afro-Caribbean protesters last October.

And even though there is legislation that bans “most State Department-channeled military aid to the army” in Guatemala, the ban curiously “does not apply to Defense Department assistance,” and US military aid to Guatemala has increased more than seven times since 2009.

The contracts included new assistance to the Guatemalan special forces, known as Kaibiles, former members of which have been implicated in giving training to the Zetas drug cartel, as well as the worst atrocities during the genocide period of the 1980s. Two contracts, funded by SouthCom and signed in September, were for a “shoot house” and “improvements” at the Kaibiles training base in Poptun, Petén.

“In addition,” Lindsay-Poland writes, “the US military spent another $8.1 million on fuel in Guatemala last year, probably for ‘Beyond the Horizon’ military exercises held there and in Honduras from April to July, and perhaps to support the deployment of 200 Marines to Guatemala in August.”

The US has recently expanded its mission in Honduras, referred to as Operation Anvil. It is run with six State Department attack helicopters and a special team of commando-style Drug Enforcement Administration agents who have now been implicated along with Honduran security forces in the killing of innocent Hondurans on several occasions.

In June, a group of academics from around Latin America plus the US wrote a letter to the State Department protesting against the US military presence in Honduras and demanding that aid to the country’s abusive law enforcement apparatus be halted. They exposed the drug war as the farce it is, charging “we are the ones providing all the corpses in your war” and arguing that “combatting drug trafficking is not a legitimate justification for the US to fund and train security forces that usurp democratic governments and violently repress our people.”

And when Washington isn’t giving its support and training to human rights abusers, its military spending in the region exclusively helps the corporate entities in the military industrial complex. Lindsay-Poland:

Many countries that host US military activities hope to receive economic benefits and jobs as a result. But more than five of every six Pentagon dollars contracted for services and goods in the region went to US-based companies. Only nine percent of the $574.4 million in Pentagon contracts signed in 2012 (including fuel contracts) were with firms in the country where the work was to be carried out. In the Caribbean, there were virtually no local companies that benefitted from the $245 million in Defense Department contracts.

The US has a lengthy record of savage military interventionism and support for mass murderers in Central and South America. The Obama administration has dramatically increased this long historical trend. One is tempted to point out how ineffective it has been under the stated drug war justifications, given that such approaches have only bolstered the black market drug trade. But the truth is, this approach is incredibly effective in keeping obedient regimes in place, maintaining geo-political/economic/military dominance in the region, and deepening the pockets of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and countless other corporate welfare queens.

Among the many statements Chuck Hagel meekly recanted during his confirmation hearings last week was his comment that there is “no justification for Israel to keep the Palestinians caged up like animals.” Republican Senator Mike Lee asked Hagel if he stood by that language, to which Hagel replied, “No, if I had an opportunity to edit that, like many things I’ve said, I would – I would like to go back and change the words and the meaning.”

But of course, Israel does keep the Palestinians caged up like animals.

Mondoweiss (via Scott McConnell) posts a short clip from the 2003 documentary “Checkpoint” in which Israeli soldiers can be seen describing this fact explicitly. “Animals. Like the Discovery Channel. All of Ramallah is a jungle,” says one.

You can find similar talk throughout Israel’s occupation. As Israeli military leader and politician Moshhe Dayan said following the 1967 Six Day War: “We don’t have a solution, and you will continue living like dogs, and whoever wants will go, and will see how this procedure will work out.”

Sen. Menendez of New Jersey, the chairman of the Sen. Foreign Relations Committee, is under investigation for his trips to the Dominican Republic. There are allegations that he was diddling very young hookers there – which could be a crime under a U.S. law which prohibits foreign travel to boink underage prostitutes.

Will Menendez invoke the “Greaseman’s Daddy Defense” – “Hard to believe a girl that big could be only 14?? [[The Greaseman was the most popular comic DJ in the DC area in the 1980s & 1990s, and told plenty of stories about his father’s legal troubles.]]

Politico reports:

Fifty-three percent of Americans believe the government is a threat, and 43 percent do not, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Three-in-ten Americans believe government constitutes a major threat. In a poll conducted October 2003, only 45 percent saw government as a threat to their freedoms. Fifty-four percent do not.

I’m not necessarily one to take public opinion as sacred (majorities of Americans support all kinds of horrible things), but it’s hard to blame the 53% of Americans who think the government is a threat to their liberties. The sectors of the economy in which the government is most involved are also the most dysfunctional (e.g., healthcare, banking, etc.). We live in an age where there is a bipartisan consensus that the government can secretly spy on Americans communications without a warrant from a traditional court; political activists are infiltrated with government agents; the President can wage secret wars with robots and can even kill US citizens without a shred of due process; American citizens may be subject to indefinite detention on the say-so of the Executive branch alone; and so on.

Granted, 70% of those who think the government jeopardizes liberties are Republicans, so many respondents are thinking about Obama taking away their gun rights and their Christianity. But 45% are not gun owners and 55% of independents are in the camp that believe the government is a threat to their liberties. And with the level of encroachment into people’s lives and liberties these days, it shouldn’t be surprising.

Micah Zenko is betting that the latest UN investigation into drone killings by the United States “is unlikely to compel increased transparency from the Obama administration.” Essentially, this is because similar investigations have been going on for about ten years and the Bush and Obama administrations have had the same response to them: “Screw off.”

After the first targeted assassination by drone killed six al-Qaeda suspects in November 2002 in Yemen, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, Asma Jahangir, demanded some answers and indicated this probably violated international law. Jahangir wrote:

The Special Rapporteur is extremely concerned that should the information received be accurate, an alarming precedent might have been set for extrajudicial execution by consent of Government. The Special Rapporteur acknowledges that Governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens against the excesses of non-State actors or other authorities, but these actions must be taken in accordance with international human rights and humanitarian law. In the opinion of the Special Rapporteur, the attack in Yemen constitutes a clear case of extrajudicial killing.

The Bush administration’s response, as Zenko documents, was to have “no comment” on the validity of the reports and to say that humanitarian laws wouldn’t apply to “enemy combatants.” This was of course characteristic of the post-9/11 view that the entire world was a limitless battlefield where the US was unrestrained in what it could do because it was all in self-defense against imminent terrorist attacks. Right.

And when UN special rapporteurs made similar inquiries into Obama’s drone attacks, they were similarly stiff armed. And the Obama administration made the same argument as Bush: these attacks were in self-defense of imminent terrorist attacks and it doesn’t matter that they occurred outside of an official battlefield because the world is our battlefield.

Two things are important to point out here. First of all, the notion that every one of Obama’s 400-plus drone strikes was in self-defense of an imminent terrorist attack is asinine. We know from reporting about the administration’s use of “signature strikes,” that bombs are dropped on people that the US cannot even identify, but who have supposedly demonstrated a “pattern of behavior” that suggests they might be a member of a terrorist organization. The very use of signature strikes appears to obliterate the argument that the drones are disrupting “imminent” attacks.

Obama has twisted the meaning of “imminence” in order to claim the drone war fits within international law. As Secrecy News explained while describing a legal memo scrutinizing the rationale in support of drone strikes:

For example, [Congressional Research Service] says the Administration appears to have redefined the meaning of “imminence,” one of the required elements for justifying the use of force in self-defense on the territory of another country.  The standard definition of imminence refers to an overwhelming threat that allows “no moment for deliberation.”  But the Administration uses imminence idiosyncratically “to refer to the window of opportunity for striking rather than the perceived immediacy of the threat of an armed attack.”  This novel usage “may pose some challenge to the international law regarding the use of force,” CRS said.

The use of force in the drone war is patently illegal without the the justification of self-defense from imminent attacks. Redefining the word is a sly way of being a criminal without admitting it.

The second thing that is important when considering the Obama administration’s defense of its drone war is the issue of secrecy. If the administration is so confident that the drone war is being carried out legally, why continue to “neither confirm nor deny” the existence of specific strikes? Why has Obama kept the official legal rationale for the drone war secret, not just from the American people or the UN, but from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to provide oversight of such policies?

If one thing has been clear throughout history and certainly in Obama’s first term as President, it’s that people in government keep things secret to protect themselves from public and legal scrutiny, not for their stated reasons of “protecting national security.”

So while the ramped up investigation at the UN is a good sign, all indications are that the Obama administration will, once again, thwart any attempt to impose legal scrutiny, transparency, and accountability to his drone war.