September 21, 2011
Peace Now, or Never
By EHUD OLMERT
Jerusalem
AS the United Nations General Assembly opens this year, I feel uneasy. An unnecessary diplomatic clash between Israel and the Palestinians is taking shape in New York, and it will be harmful to Israel and to the future of the Middle East.
I know that things could and should have been different.
I truly believe that a two-state solution is the only way to ensure a more stable Middle East and to grant Israel the security and well-being it desires. As tensions grow, I cannot but feel that we in the region are on the verge of missing an opportunity — one that we cannot afford to miss.
The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, plans to make a unilateral bid for recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations on Friday. He has the right to do so, and the vast majority of countries in the General Assembly support his move. But this is not the wisest step Mr. Abbas can take.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has declared publicly that he believes in the two-state solution, but he is expending all of his political effort to block Mr. Abbas’s bid for statehood by rallying domestic support and appealing to other countries. This is not the wisest step Mr. Netanyahu can take.
In the worst-case scenario, chaos and violence could erupt,
Worst case scenario? Surely, you jest. This is just BAU - Battering Arabs as Usual - Business as Usual -- Basically All upended
making the possibility of an agreement even more distant
Even more distant than when? Than what? It would be political suicide for any Israeli leader to implement a peaceful solution -- not with 1/3 of the (Jewish) citizens adamantly opposed ... "NEVER FORGET" ... THIS is what the world never forgets - that the IDF have become like unto the gestapo, and that the violence wreaked and rained down upon the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is nothing more than a land grab, to try to force peoples without a country off the lands that once were their country ... you lyin' Israeli BASTARDS -- the only place REAL Jews want for a homeland is ... The U.S.A. -- this is why Israel permits citizenship to 10's of 1000's of Russian immigrants whose claims to be Jewish and not merely suspect, but lies. Nonetheless, the 10's of 1000's are needed to offset the expodus of the 10's of 1000's of Jews from Israel to places in the world where they ARE in fact safer and more secure ... like, for example, the U.S.A., Canada, etc.
, if not impossible. If that happens, peace will definitely not be the outcome.
Under what scenario whereby the status quo is maintained (with the blessings of the war monger Barack Obama, and the blessings of the British government, would peace even possibly be an outcome. NONE. MADNESS - continuing to do the same thing that didn't work before in the hopes that THIS time it'll all turn out for the better.
The parameters of a peace deal are well known and they have already been put on the table. I put them there in September 2008 when I presented a far-reaching offer to Mr. Abbas.
According to my offer, the territorial dispute would be solved by establishing a Palestinian state on territory equivalent in size to the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip with mutually agreed-upon land swaps that take into account the new realities on the ground.
But, equivalent in water resources? In arable land? NOT HARDLY you shameless shill. the LORD WILL mete out His justice upon you ... and you will not be put in the exalted place where Lazarus was honored to dwell with the Lord.
The city of Jerusalem would be shared. Reading critically, the city of Jerusalem is not presently shared (this we know, from such sources as the Jerusalem Post, etc, etc)
Its Jewish areas would be the capital of Israel and its Arab neighborhoods would become the Palestinian capital.
WEASLE WORDS ... Jewish areas would BE while Arab neighborhoods (what about an Aram living in a Jewish area? ... would BECOME ... but WHEN, damn you, WHEN?
Neither side would declare sovereignty over the city’s holy places; they would be administered jointly with the assistance of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
The Palestinian refugee problem would be addressed within the framework of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. The new Palestinian state would become the home of all the Palestinian refugees just as the state of Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people.
As stated above, AMERICAN is the homeland of the Jewish people, where they all wish to dwell, to be schooled, to work, to vacation ... especially FLORIDA!
Israel would, however, be prepared to absorb a small number of refugees on humanitarian grounds.
The humanitarian grounds being that since Israel murdered, tortured, raped, interred,jailed 850,000+, that a SMALL NUMBER of refugees can look forward to being absorbed? For what? To do the gardening? To clean the toilets?
Because ensuring Israel’s security is vital to the implementation of any agreement, the Palestinian state would be demilitarized and it would not form military alliances with other nations. Both states would cooperate to fight terrorism and violence.
Chicken shit Israeli ... take away the Palestinians guns .. THEN we will be safe .. this would be comical if not for being so tragic. GOD DAMN THE KNESSET and the IDF to HELL.
These parameters were never formally rejected by Mr. Abbas, and they should be put on the table again today. Both Mr. Abbas and Mr. Netanyahu must then make brave and difficult decisions.
We Israelis simply do not have the luxury of spending more time postponing a solution. A further delay will only help extremists on both sides who seek to sabotage any prospect of a peaceful, negotiated two-state solution.
No, you need to spend your time provoking Gazans to throw rocks at your tanks, so you can murder 13-year old boys ... what brave warriors you Israelis are! Killing children with tank fire, with bazookas, with AK-47s. Killing children, bombing hospitals, bombing schools ... oh the brave and gallant Isaraelis - the heirs of Joshua, David, etc, etc ... there done been a LOT of slaughtering for the peopls of the Hebrew tribes ... what a legacy -- only Great Britain and her bastard offspring, the United States of America, and the Romans, and the Chinese, and the Japanese, and the Nazis, and the ... oh, WTF? the list is endless
Moreover, the Arab Spring has changed the Middle East, and unpredictable developments in the region, such as the recent attack on Israel’s embassy in Cairo, could easily explode into widespread chaos. It is therefore in Israel’s strategic interest to cement existing peace agreements with its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan.
What if the Arabs were ALL to unite and put up a blockade against Israel; to prohibit Israeli jets to fly over their air spaces? The Israelis must be shitting their pants.
In addition, Israel must make every effort to defuse tensions with Turkey as soon as possible. Turkey is not an enemy of Israel.
ONLY Israel is an enemy of Israel.
I have worked closely with the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In spite of his recent statements and actions, I believe that he understands the importance of relations with Israel. Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Netanyahu must work to end this crisis immediately for the benefit of both countries and the stability of the region.
In Israel, we are sorry for the loss of life of Turkish citizens in May 2010, when Israel confronted a provocative flotilla of ships bound for Gaza. I am sure that the proper way to express these sentiments to the Turkish government and the Turkish people can be found.
Talk is cheap. You are not sorry at all. You wold do it again. You lying piece of shit.
The time for true leadership has come. Leadership is tested not by one’s capacity to survive politically but by the ability to make tough decisions in trying times.
Bombing the Palestinians, then, must be one of the easiest decisions ever. THE IDF just keeps doing it again, and again, and again, and again ....
When I addressed international forums as prime minister, the Israeli people expected me to present bold political initiatives that would bring peace — not arguments outlining why achieving peace now is not possible. Today, such an initiative is more necessary than ever to prove to the world that Israel is a peace-seeking country.
The window of opportunity is limited. Israel will not always find itself sitting across the table from Palestinian leaders like Mr. Abbas and the prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who object to terrorism and want peace. Indeed, future Palestinian leaders might abandon the idea of two states and seek a one-state solution, making reconciliation impossible.
Now is the time. There will be no better one. I hope that Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas will meet the challenge.
Time is assuredly NOT on the side of the Israelis, and they KNOW THIS.
Ehud Olmert was prime minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009.
BlackCommentator.com Columnist
The past few weeks have been filled with remembrances of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and rightly so.
Horrific events such as those, which occurred on that day, stay in the mind. This is especially true for the families of those who died on that day, affecting the lives of the next generation and the next.
And, it is difficult to forget, when both politicians and the press keep up a drumbeat of recollections and programming that present images of the day and of the following days, usually culminating with video shots of the implosion of the World Trade Center towers’ collapse to the ground with untold volumes of toxic dust.
Politicians speak of America’s resilience and of its resolve and, usually, they mean that the resilience and resolve of the country are expressed in its mighty military power around the globe. They do this to garner support for more military and defense power in the national budget, which already contains more money every year than nearly all the other countries on earth, combined.
We remember the nearly 3,000 men, women, and children who were killed 10 years ago, but it is never in the context of what this nation did to other peoples, as a result of that day. In the heat of the national impulse to revenge, government officials in charge plunged the U.S. into two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, 10 years later, there have been hundreds of thousands killed (some sources calculate a million or more deaths), cities leveled, and cultures destroyed. That’s a crime of incredible magnitude that is discussed by few Americans. After defeat of the Nazis, the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1950 declared that anyone who is involved in “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties…” can be charged and tried for “crimes against peace.”
There are former U.S. government officials who are careful about where they travel, because they have been accused of war crimes and could be brought to judgment by other than American courts. The invasion of Iraq, for example, is considered by many outside the U.S. to be a war crime, because that country did not harm the U.S. It was no threat to the U.S., yet we invaded and destroyed one of the few secular nations in the Middle East. Before the invasion, a decade of sanctions softened up the country, to the extent that the United Nations estimated that 500,000 children died as a direct result of the sanctions.
What kind of society could send its young men and women into a country where they could declare the City of Fallujah in Iraq a free-fire zone, killing indiscriminately those who are left inside, even using white phosphorus weaponry?
There might be a clue to what kind of society we might be. In the 19th Century, Dostoyevsky, a Russian writer and novelist, said: “The degree of civilization can be judged by entering its prisons.”
Today, the U.S. has more than two million souls in prison, more than any other country, including China and Russia. A look inside will show that a large percentage of inmates are people of color, even though they still make up a minority among all Americans. The law isn’t working for everyone…and, it is not blind.
Forty years ago, New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller gave the order to attack the yard in Attica prison, where about 1,000 of about 2,200 inmates in the prison had been holding hostages for four days. It, too, was a free-fire zone, with troops and law enforcement, along with prison personnel, shooting into the cloud of tear-gas in the yard, where 29 inmates and 10 hostages were killed. It is doubtful that any of the shooters could see what they were shooting at.
Early press reports were that hostages had had their throats slit, but that proved to be a rumor and far off the mark. The hostages had been shot. The inmates did not have firearms. Later, it was shown through testimony that many of the hostages were protected by some of the inmates, who had rebelled because of the prison conditions and were stirred to action by the killing of George Jackson, a young Black Panther, who was shot in the back in a prison in far-off California.
Why did the governor order an assault, instead of going to the prison to determine what the inmates were demanding, as the corrections commissioner, Russell Oswald, had asked him repeatedly to do? While no one can know what was in Rockefeller’s mind at the time, it became clear later that he wanted to become president of the United States and, perhaps, he needed to show that he was just as tough a law-and-order official as any in the Republican Party.
He also was the push behind the so-called Rockefeller drug laws, which were some of the toughest in the nation. Those laws were responsible, in part, for the explosion in the population of New York’s prisons, with many (mostly African-Americans and Latinos) receiving severe sentences for mere possession of marijuana and small amounts of other drugs. Even though he showed a tough demeanor, he still was known as a liberal Republican. His actions, taken for whatever reason, left many dead and wounded at Attica and did nothing to improve prison conditions in New York or elsewhere. His drug laws helped make certain that the “prison-industrial complex” in the U.S. would flourish and grow for decades, to the present. And, of course, he did not gain the White House.
These two tragic and important events do indeed tell us what kind of society we have. The tragedy of 9/11 was cynically used by Americans in power to initiate two wars of choice that, so far, have cost more than 4,000 American dead and tens of thousands wounded. The wars have inflicted untold damage to two countries and caused the deaths and disruption of millions of lives.
The endless wars that U.S. officials have initiated and perpetuated have drained our economic, political, and societal strength. For what? For oil and simply to use our power in the world, over those whose resources we wish to claim as our own. Conditions in our prisons are little different from what they were 40 years ago, although they are contained in newer buildings…with more glass and razor wire. That we have imprisoned more human beings than any other country on earth tells us something about our laws, how we administer those laws, and of our respect for fundamental rights under the U.S. Constitution.
Those are two significant events in American history, one observed with all of the ceremony that a national government can muster and the other, an event that most Americans would wish to ignore or forget because it involves people we would like to put out of mind.
The question remains: What kind of society are we?
BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
-James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook,” The Fire Next Time
In “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” the Uncle James warns the younger James, “you can only be destroyed” if you believe “that you really are” what others tell you are.
“Trust your experience. Know whence you came.”
I remember being terrified of bullies. My arm, squeezed too tightly by another elementary classmate, or the proverbial foot on the toe, obligated me to stand still, to feel the grip and to recognize the sudden palpitations in my chest and the diminishing availability of air. I had to listen and not act - in even self-defense. These fellow children frightened me. I felt small, and I was. I felt weak, vulnerable, unprotected, and I was. The overbearing and stifling seemed inhuman, dishonest and unnatural. I thought I was in danger those moments, but I was not.
In Palmyra, Pennsylvania, the collective experience of 400 foreign student workers’ encounter with the dishonest and unnatural, and they walked off their jobs on August 17, 2011; I am sure they have never felt freer!
The Hershey factory at Palmyra “packs Hershey’s chocolates,” and according to The New York Times, the students from “China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine” thought they enlisted in a summer “cultural exchange” program where they expected “to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States.” Once the students reported to the factory, they became “underpaid” laborers.
I agree with the NYT writer Julia Preston. I think they did learn what life is like in the United States, the home of the Imperial bully!
Ordered to lift heavy boxes and pack “Reese’s candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a fast-moving production line,” the students discovered “deductions for fees associated with the program” and rent, writes Preston, barely left them enough earnings to recover the cost of obtaining visas.
As part of the preparation to teach in Ethiopia from 2002 to 2003, I attended the two-week, USAID pre-country workshops. I overheard a few younger teachers selected for this program bragged about going to Africa to “make money” and live in “awesome” pads.
In a country like Ethiopia (in 2002), one birr is roughly equivalent to eight dollars. An Ethiopian student pays roughly 150 birr for an average 15 dollar book. In a country like Ethiopia, one birr is hard to come by for millions of Ethiopians. I do not know if these young adult citizens of the U.S.A. secured those “awesome pads.” I do know that those who, along with me, worked in Ethiopia, earned $800 U.S. dollars a month, that is, 6,333 birr per month and this allowed many Americans to purchase as little as possible, except for gold jewelry, to do without hiring help, (or, if forced to, to hire an Ethiopian woman to clean house, wash clothes, and cook for minimum wages), and to give away (in terms of money) nothing! These young Americans returned to the States a little richer than when they left. (And teachers labored at teaching and the curriculum developers labored at developing curriculums).
In the U.S., some would call these young Americans ingenious, bright!
The 400 foreign students dared to question the sincerity (bless them; they learned quickly!) of the U.S-based corporation Hershey’s Chocolates.
The walkout at the Hershey plant is “the first time that foreign students have engaged in a strike to protest their employment,” but it is not the first time the State Department has received complaints from students participating in this program.
According to the New York Times report, a spokesperson for the State Department, John Fleming, is aware of the problem and is “investigating” it. Rick Anaya, Chief Executive of the Council for Educational Travel, U.S.A (State Department), claims he is not receiving “any cooperation” from the protesters.
“‘We are trying to work with these kids. All of this negativity is hurting an excellent program. We would go out of our way to help them, but it seems like someone is stirring them up out there.’”
Hmm…a second-year medical student from Istanbul, Harika Duygu Ozer, “invested $3,500” to participate in the program. Another young woman from China, Zhao Huijiao, invested “more than $6,000.” Standing for the duration of an eight-hour shift was common, but someone put them up to stirring trouble for the Hershey Company! “‘It is the worst thing for your fingers and hands and your back,’ says Ms Ozer, ‘You are standing at an angle.’”
“‘The tipping point was when we found out about the rent,’” says Godwin Efobi, a 26-year-old, third-year medical student from Nigeria. Their neighbors pay less in rent, and the deductions from their paychecks leave them with “less than $200 a week.”
But someone is stirring them up! All this negativity is damaging to the image of the program! (I think this line of thinking has been overheard many times here in the U.S.A.!).
Hershey, the towering Hershey Company near Hershey, PA., “the American chocolate capital,” is looking around, pointing the finger elsewhere. Who, us? We do not “directly operate the Palmyra packing plant,” says their spokesperson, Kirk Saville. See Exel, the managers. And Exel, well, says a spokesperson, the students come through “a staffing agency” that provides “‘temporary employees…we don’t have a lot of influence over some of those issues that they’ve raised.’”
Let us see…does this response remind Americans of those once very bad bullies of the defunct Soviet Union? Or is this similar to a response from the current world bullies, according to the U.S. State Department - those Iranians or Koreans? Or maybe things like this used to happen with the hooded villains when segregation and exploitation were in change down there in the South?
Cultural exchange program! No! Get the job done, we’ll barely pay you, and “you’ll take it and you’ll like it” because, Bogart-style, we have a foot on the toe! This is America!
Bullies grow up addicted to the skillful generation of power by inducing fear among the masses. THE Bully itself stirred up the students! The empowerment of the increasingly unrestrained collective of the “corporate person” is the U.S. government’s doing. One hand feeds another! Every worker need not apply to play on the transnational corporations’ playground, but introduce a human worker to the corporate assembly line and the corporate planners guarantee a transformation into mechanical entities, cranking out everything from Tomahawk missiles, drones, and oil rigs to genetically modified, pharmaceutical drugs, and yes, chocolates. This is America! The Empire of the heartless!
But this is the good news - the students said, enough and committed themselves to action! Are the students in danger now? Yes! But they are free - a state of being human many Americans believe they are experiencing but may never really experience! This is the irony of living free in the U.S.!
Hershey ducks and runs for cover while the State Department rises to defend the roughshod operation of one of the corporations it kowtows to in the first place. But note - it does so only if this corporate-roughshod operation is in danger of being exposed to the American public.
These menacing “kids” are the problem. Uncooperative! A threat to business as usual! Negative P.R. is an issue everyone at the top recognizes, not the human beings whose labor rights’ and human rights have been violated!
Nonetheless, the foreign students at the Hershey factory recognized they had rights, labor and human rights that no bully could take from them! Instead of beginning work at 3 p.m. on July 17, 2011, the students “walked into the plant and presented a petition with several hundred signatures to a management representative.”
I am sure they could feel palpitations in their throats and even envisioned myriad unsettling responses from the Hershey Company or law enforcement as holders of J-1 visas. But they marched, as students and workers, as people, outside the plants, and any and everyone could hear their chants in English, Chinese, Nigerian, Romanian, and Ukrainian: “‘we are the mighty, mighty students!’”
We are human beings! We know whence we came!
In the land of the bullies, among the bullies, it is only honest and natural to feel frightened, as I discovered many years ago in my late teens. Pick your battles, my grandmothers used to say, because here in the U.S., to be Black is to be either defeated or proactive. Pick your battles and she meant, they will surely pick you, and you will never know your true worth, who you are, or where you come from, if you do not and never act.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.
September 20, 2011
In July-September 2011 the stock markets were again shaken at international level. The crisis has become deeper in the EU, particularly with respect to debts. The CADTM interviewed Eric Toussaint about various facets of this new stage in the crisis.
CADTM: You say that since the crisis broke out in May 2010 Greece has stopped issuing 10-year bonds. Why then do markets demand a yield of 15% or more on Greece’s 10-year bonds? [1]
Eric Toussaint: This has an influence on the sale price of older Greek debt bonds exchanged on the secondary market or on the OTC market.
There is another much more important consequence, namely that it forces Greece to make a choice between two alternatives:
a) either depend even further on the Troika (IMF, ECB, EC) to get long-term loans (10-15-30 years) and submit to their conditions;
b) or refuse the diktats of markets and of the Troika and suspend payment while starting an audit in order to repudiate the illegitimate part of its debt.
CADTM: Before we look at these alternatives, can you explain what the secondary market is?
Eric Toussaint: As it the case for used cars, there is a second-hand market for debts. Institutional investors and hedge funds buy or sell used bonds on the secondary market or on the OTC (over the counter) market. Institutional investors are by far the main actors.
The last time Greece issued ten-year bonds was on 11 March 2010, before speculative attacks started and the Troika intervened. In March 2010, to get 5 billion euros, it committed itself to an interest rate of 6.25% every year until 2020. By that date it will have to repay the borrowed capital. Since then, as we have seen, it no longer borrows for ten years because rates blew up. When we read that the ten-year interest rate is 14.86% (on 8 August 2011 when the 10-year Greek rate, which had been as high as 18%, was again below 15% after the ECB’s intervention), this indicates the price at which ten-year bonds are exchanged on the secondary or OTC markets.
Institutional investors who bought those bonds in March 2010 are trying to sell them off on the debt secondary market because they have become high risk bonds, given the possibility that Greece may not be able to refund their value when they reach maturity.
CADTM: Can you explain how the second-hand price of the ten-year bonds issued by Greece is determined?
Eric Toussaint: The following table should help us understand what is meant by saying that the Greek rate for ten years amounts to 14.86%. Let us take an example: a bank bought Greek bonds in March 2010 for EUR 500 million, with each bond representing 1,000 euros. The bank will cash EUR 62.5 each year (i.e. 6.25% of EUR1,000) for each bond. In security market lingo, a bond will yield a EUR 62.5 coupon. In 2011 those bonds are regarded as risky since it is by no means certain that by 2020 Greece will be able to repay the borrowed capital. So the banks that have many Greek bonds, such as BNP Paribas (that still had EUR 5 billion in July 2011), Dexia (3.5 billion), Commerzbank (3 billion), Generali (3 billion), Société Générale (2.7 billion), Royal Bank of Scotland, Allianz or Greek banks, now sell their bonds on the secondary market because they have junk or toxic bonds in their balance sheets. In order to reassure their shareholders (and to prevent them from selling their shares), their clients (and to prevent them from withdrawing their savings) and European authorities, they must get rid of as many Greek bonds as they can, after having gobbled them up until March 2010. What price can they sell them for? This is where the 14.86% rate plays a part. Hedge funds and other vulture funds that are ready to buy Greek bonds issued in March 2010 want a yield of 14.86%. If they buy bonds that yield EUR 62.5, this amount must represent 14.86% of the purchasing price, so the bonds are sold for only EUR 420.50.
Nominal value of a 10-year bond issued by Greece on 11 March 2010 Interest rate on 11 March 2010 Value of the coupon paid each year to the owner of a EUR1,000 bond Price of the bond on the secondary market on 8 August 2011
Actual yield on 8 August 2011 if the buyer bought a EUR 1,000 bond for EUR 420.50
Example
EUR 1,000
6,25%
EUR 62,5
EUR 420,50
14,86%
To sum up: buyers will not pay more than EUR 420.50 for a EUR 1,000 bond if they want to receive an actual interest rate of 14.86%. As you can imagine, bankers are not too willing to sell at such a loss.
CADTM: You say that institutional investors sell Greek bonds. Do you have any idea on what scale?
Eric Toussaint: As they tried to minimize the risks they took, French banks reduced their Greek exposure by 44% (from USD 27 billion to USD 15 billion) in 2010. German banks proceeded similarly: their direct exposure decreased by 60% between May 2010 and February 2011 (from EUR 16 to EUR 10 billion). In 2011 this withdrawal movement has become even more noticeable.
CADTM: What does the ECB do in this respect?
Eric Toussaint: The ECB is entirely devoted to serving the bankers’ interests.
CADTM: But how?
Eric Toussaint: Through buying Greek bonds itself on the secondary market. The ECB buys from the private banks that wish to get rid of securities backed on the Greek debt with a valuation haircut of about 20%. It pays approximately EUR 800 for a bond whose value was EUR 1,000€ when issued. Now, as appears from the table above, these bonds are valued at much less on the secondary market or on the OTC market. You can easily imagine why the banks appreciate being paid EUR 800 by the ECB rather the market price. This being said, it is another example of the huge gap between the actual practices of private bankers and European leaders on the one hand and their discourse on the need to allow market forces to determine prices on the other.
Éric Toussaint, doctor in political sciences (University of Liège and University of Paris 8), president of CADTM Belgium, member of the president’s commission for auditing the debt in Ecuador (CAIC), member of the scientific council of ATTAC France, coauthor of “La Dette ou la Vie”, Aden-CADTM, 2011, contributor to ATTAC’s book “Le piège de la dette publique. Comment s’en sortir”, published by Les liens qui libèrent, Paris, 2011.
Translated by Christine Pagnoulle and Vicki Briault in collaboration with Judith Harris
Notes.
[1] On 25 August 2011 the Greek rate for 10 years reached 18.55%, on the day before, 17.9%. The rate for 2 years was a staggering 45.9%. http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2011/08/25/les-taux-des-obligations-grecques-a-dix-ans-atteignent-un-nouveau-record_1563605_3214.html (accessed 26 August 2011)
September 20, 2011
Israel which lost its “strategic asset” -as some of its leaders accurately described ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak- has been watching the Egyptian revolution since its onset with a mix of apprehension and concern, but its been watching closely nonetheless. Yet for some reason its military decided on 18 and 19 August to test the revolution -or otherwise provoke it- when its air force violated the Egyptian northeastern border in its hunt for Palestinian militants and launched air strikes that subsequently killed six Egyptian police guards.
Despite public outrage in Egypt, Israel’s leaders expressed only “regret” but would not offer an apology. Nor had it done so in the past under Egypt’s Mubarak when it “accidentally” killed several dozen borders guards and civilians without consequences over the years. It got away with it then and might have thought it can reassert its impunity with the new Egypt now.
But what is surprising here is Tel Aviv’s apparent misreading of the new reality across its southern border- its failure to assess the size and depth of public hostility towards Israel, despite the 32-year-old “peace” agreement with Cairo.
Israel’s decision makers and even mainstream media appeared only to see official Egypt which refused to respond to the public demand of recalling Egypt’s ambassador from Tel Aviv in retaliation. Yes, alarm bells were sounded all over Israeli editorials when protests relocated from Tahrir square on 19 August to the Israeli embassy in Giza and when a young building constructer scaled the 23 storey building, to remove the Israeli flag amidst a state of national jubilation. But instead of bowing to the storm, Israel’s military leaders declared to the Israeli daily Haaretz (22 August) that the 1979 peace agreement should be amended to allow for an upgrade in Egyptian military presence in Sinai’s demilitarized buffer zone to man Israel’s southern borders. In other words the Egyptian army should be allowed to deploy over Egyptian soil in their new job description as Israel’s police guards.
Meanwhile Tel Aviv continued to defy its once powerful ally Ankara by refusing to apologize for killing nine of its nationals on the Mavi Marmara Gaza bound aid ship while in international waters in May 2010. Israel left Turkey with no choice but to expel its ambassador in Ankara and suspend six military joint agreements on 2 September.
Naturally, this resonated instantly with the Egyptians who demanded no less from their military rulers but were let down. So on 9 September where a million man demonstration was called for in Tahrir square, very young and angry protestors vented their rage in two locations: the Interior ministry that remains repressive despite the revolution and the Israeli embassy for defying their national pride and dignity. This time not one, but two men removed the Israeli flag after thousands destroyed a provocative 3 meter high wall recently erected by the authorities to discourage demonstrations. This developed into the unexpected and unprecedented storming of the embassy.
Four Egyptians were killed that day and over 1,000 suffered injuries in clashes with armies of police. Both the Mubarak-appointed Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) and the Essam Saraf government condemned the events in harsh wording, vowing to severely punish those held accountable.
While Israel found comfort in the above sacrifices offered by Egypt’s unelected rulers, and the reaction of apologists here who described the embassy events as “uncivilized” and “derailment from the revolution’s goals” it continued, once again, to overlook the real player in the revolutionary Egypt: the people themselves.
In the same vein, many Israeli editorials decided to draw a separation between the civilized “revolutionaries” of Tahrir Square from the unruly “mobs” who stormed the embassy, concluding that the latter do not represent the revolution.
But if this is indeed the situation in Egypt, why the anxiety over the warm reception of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan’s two day visit to Cairo last week? Isn’t Egypt’s revolution solely limited to domestic issues? Aren’t Egyptians, as the Israeli narrative goes, only concerned with democracy and improving living conditions and have no interest in national independence, dignity, pride or stability at their borders, clearly volatile because of the Israeli occupation?
Today Tel Aviv has to decide whether it wants to read the revolution’s graffiti on the wall and understand that it’s the people, not a confused government or a military council that lacks imagination beyond Mubarak’s mindset, who hold the cards to Egypt’s future. Any democratically elected government will not revive the defeatist -if not subservient- foreign policy that Mubarak and his successor Anwar El-Sadat engineered.
Their legacy was buried in Tahrir square by a people’s revolution and a struggle that was born ten years ago out of the nation-wide solidarity movement with the second Palestinian Intifada. It evolved – against all odds and – into the anti-Mubarak dissent movement that eventually toppled him on 11 February.
Amira Howeidy is an Egyptian journalist based in Cairo. She’s written extensively about Egypt’s dissent movement and the Palestinian question.
September 20, 2011
“Now we can see [success in Vietnam] clearly, like the light at the end of a tunnel”
–Gen. Henri Navarre, commander French forces in Vietnam, May 20, 1953
“A new phase is starting…we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view…there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”
–Gen. William Westmoreland, commander U.S. forces in Vietnam, November 1967
“Yesterday’s attack [in Kabul] was a fleeting event; it came and it went. The insurgents are on the defensive.” The performance of Afghan security forces should tell Afghans “they can sleep well at night.”
–Gen. John Allen, North Atlantic Treaty Commander in Afghanistan, Sept. 14, 2011
Dear Lord, what is about generals that seem to make them so particularly immune to history’s lessons?
Gen. Navarre had a sure-fire plan to draw the Vietnamese insurgents into a great battle that would end the war. Worked like a charm. On May 7, 1954 the French army surrendered at Dien Bien Phu.
In November 1967, Gen. Westmoreland was making the rounds in Washington, talking up “body counts” and “pacification,” and how the U.S would have this little matter in Vietnam wrapped up pretty quickly. Ten weeks later, on Jan.31, 1968, the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive that put the U.S. Embassy in Saigon under siege, seized the city of Hue, and shattered the myth that the U.S. was winning the war in Vietnam.
And now Gen. Allen says the attack on Kabul indicates the Taliban are on their last legs.
For NATO this year has been the deadliest in the decade-old war, and the Kabul assault suggests that the Taliban are hardly on the ropes. As Matthew Green of the Financial Times put it, “The attack was among the most sophisticated insurgents have launched on the capital and exposed the inability of Afghan forces to guarantee security even in the most heavily defended districts.”
A “fleeting event”? I suppose that depends on how one defines “fleeting.” Seven Taliban pinned down NATO and Afghan security forces for 20 hours, scattering Embassy officials, and pretty much paralyzing a major part of the capital. It was the 26th major attack on Kabul since 2008, assaults that have killed 225 people.
What generals don’t get (it tends to be above their pay grade) is that wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan— wars of occupation—are political, not military affairs. The U.S. military continues to claim that the Tet offensive was a huge military victory because it killed lots of insurgents, and the U.S. took back all the cities it lost. But Tet was less a military offensive than a political undertaking aimed at derailing the myth that the U.S. was “winning” the war in Vietnam. And that is exactly what Tet did. Regardless of what the generals thought, the American people concluded that they had been lied to, and that the war could not be won.
During the Paris peace talks to end the war in Southeast Asia, an American colonel confronted his North Vietnamese counterpart and told him that the U.S. had won every battle in the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese officer nodded, “Yes, that is true, but also irrelevant.” I doubt the American officer got the point.
General Allen’s line about “the insurgents are on the defensive” can now join former Vice-President Dick Cheney’s dismissal of the growing Iraqi insurgency as nothing but Saddam Hussein “dead-enders.”
As for Kabul residents being able to “sleep well at night” because of the performance of the Afghan security forces:
“The nature and scale of today’s attacks clearly proves that the terrorists received assistance and guidance from some security officials within the government who are their sympathizers,” Naim Hamidzai, chair of the Afghan parliament’s Internal Security Committee, told the New York Times. “Otherwise it would be impossible for the planners and masterminds of the attack to stage such a sophisticated and complex attack, in this extremely well guarded location without the complicity of insiders.”
The Afghan Army saw its desertion rate more than double in the first six months of this year. Between January and June, some 24,590 soldiers deserted, compared with 11,423 who left in the same period in 2010. The Afghan army is supposed to reach 195,000 by October 2012.
The Afghan army has also been unable to recruit Pashtuns from southern Afghanistan, the heart of the insurgency. According to a recent study by the New York Times, Pashtuns from Kandahar, Helmand, Oruzgan, Zabul, Paktika, and Ghazni make up 17 percent of the population but only 1.5 percent of the army. In short, the Afghan Army in the south is essentially a northern army of occupation, which explains why no one in the southern provinces will join the army, and virtually no Taliban have switched allegiances to the government.
To shore up security, the U.S. has been recruiting and arming militias that, according to a recent Human Rights study, have killed, raped and stolen from local villagers. U.S. Special Forces recruit the militia members, who then shift their loyalties to local warlords. This should hardly come as a surprise. The Soviets tried exactly this tactic during their occupation, which ended up fueling the growth of the warlords and led to the devastating 1992-96 civil war.
Of course General Allen might have had something else in mind when he talked about getting a good night’s sleep.
According to the United Nations, this year will be a bumper crop for opium. Prices for dry opium increased 306 percent this year, from $69 a kilo to $281 a kilo. As Jean-Luc Lemahieu, an official of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, told the New York Times, “This is not business as usual. There is no crop that can compete with those prices.”
Smoke enough opium you can sleep through anything.
For the last 10 years we have bombed, shot, incarcerated, and water-boarded a lot of people in Afghanistan. We have allowed opium to become the country’s major source of income, and we are currently bringing back the warlords and their armies. Afghanistan is a far more dangerous place today than it was a decade ago, and the only tunnels are the ones in which the Taliban store their weapons and supplies.
It seems time to resuscitate a line from another decade and another war: “Out now!”
Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com
September 20, 2011
US President Barack Obama’s decision to use the US’ veto prerogative if the United Nations votes to recognise a Palestinian state will constitute a blow to those seeking peace in the Middle East.
His administration’s claim that peace can only be achieved through dialogue and consent rather than through unilateral moves ignores the complex power relations that constitute peace-making between Israelis and Palestinians. History teaches that peace is achieved only when the conflicting sides believe that they have too much to lose by sustaining the conflict. And, at this point in history, the price Israel is paying for continuing the occupation is extremely small.
But if, for the sake of argument, one were to accept the view expressed by President Obama – that unilateralism is a flawed political approach – then one should survey the history of unilateral moves within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and examine the US response towards them.
A logical place to begin is 1991, when Israelis and Palestinians met for the first time in Madrid to negotiate a peace agreement. United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for Israel’s withdrawal from the land it occupied during the 1967 War in exchange for peace, served as the basis for the Madrid Conference.
Ever since that conference, Israel has carried out numerous unilateral moves that have undermined efforts to reach a peace agreement based on land for peace. These include the confiscation of Palestinian land, the construction of settlements and the transfer of Jewish citizenry to occupied territories, actions that every US administration regarded as an obstruction to the peace process.
Settlement expansion
Consider, for example, the Jewish settler population. At the end of 1991, there were 132,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and 89,800 settlers in the West Bank. Two decades later, the numbers of settlers in East Jerusalem has increased by about 40 per cent, while the settlers in the West Bank, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, have increased by over 300 per cent. Currently, there are about half a million Jewish settlers.
If Israel had arrested its unilateral transfer of Jewish citizens to Palestinian land in 1991 once it had embarked upon a peace process based on the return of occupied territory, the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank would have been less than 50 per cent of what it is today.
Indeed, estimations based on the natural growth rate of the West Bank settler population suggest that this population would have been less than 150,000 people in 2011, while today it is actually over 300,000.
An analysis of settler movement to the West Bank also reveals that settler population growth has not been substantially different when left-of-centre parties have been in power. During periods in which the Labour Party formed the governing coalition, the numbers have been just as high, if not higher, than periods during which Likud or Kadima have been in power. This, in turn, underscores the fact that all Israeli governments have unilaterally populated the contested West Bank with more Jewish settlers while simultaneously carrying out negotiations based on land for peace.
Seeing that the settlers are undermining any future two-state solution, the Palestinians have decided not to wait any longer and are asking the United Nations to recognise a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. This, they intimate, is their last attempt to salvage the two-state route before abandoning it to the dustbin of history.
Their argument is straightforward: If the idea behind a two-state solution is dividing land among the two peoples, how can Israel unilaterally continue to settle the contested land while carrying out negotiations? Israeli unilateralism, in other words, has driven the Palestinians to choose the unilateral path. The only difference is that the latter’s unilateralism is aimed at advancing a peace agreement, while the former’s is aimed at destroying it.
One-sided US veto
The US has never considered using its veto power to stop Israel from carrying out unilateral moves aimed at undermining peace.
Instead, the US has frequently used its veto to prevent the condemnation of Israeli policies that breach international law. Now the Obama Administration wants to use the veto again, with the moral justification that unilateralism is misguided. But the real question is: Why is unilateralism bad when it attempts to advance a solution, yet warrants no response when unilateralism threatens to undermine a solution?
President Obama should keep in mind that the Palestinian appeal to the international community might very well be the last chance for salvaging the two-state solution.
If the Palestinian demand for recognition falls through due to a US veto, then the necessary conditions for a paradigm shift will be in place: The two-state solution will be even less feasible, and the one-state formula will emerge as the only alternative.
Neve Gordon is an Israeli activist and the author of and author ofIsrael’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008). He can be contacted through his website www.israelsoccupation.info
Yinon Cohen is Yerushalmi Professor of Israel and Jewish Studies, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, New York.
First published in Al Jazeera.
September 20, 2011
The notion of international trade in health care may seem strange. The issue may also seem far removed from the current policy preoccupations in Washington. However, we believe it is finally time trade played a central role in the current debt debate.
One of the basic facts that the congressional super committee must confront is that the debt problem is not excessive current deficits, but rather a problem with the longer-term budget. And the main reason for the large projected deficits well into the future is the growth in health care costs. Public sector programs like Medicare and Medicaid will be increasingly unaffordable. The health care system must be reformed — no easy task.
President Obama and Congress sought to do it last year. But it remains to be seen how much the Affordable Care Act will accomplish, if Congress even allows it to take effect. With the future uncertain, anything that we can do to contain costs significantly in other ways must be exploited. We have a partial solution: medical trade, or allowing Americans to take advantage of different forms of international transactions in medical services. The fact that medical care of comparable quality is available at much lower prices elsewhere in the world can be used to rein in costs in the United States.
The idea holds remarkable promise. Here’s how it could work:
Patients go overseas for major medical procedures: Modern medical facilities in Thailand, India and other countries would allow patients to have procedures such as heart bypass surgery for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars less than in U.S. facilities.
Medicare and Medicaid could allow patients to use such facilities. The savings to these programs could be split between the patient and the government. This might mean tens of thousands of dollars for both, even after covering travel costs.
Buy into other countries’ health care systems: Many retirees have family or emotional ties to other countries. They can be given the option to use their Medicare to buy into the health care systems of Canada, Germany or whatever country they choose.
In effect, the money that the U.S. government would have spent on the beneficiary’s Medicare would instead be paid to another country’s government so that it would provide medical care. The difference in the cost of care, which could run into tens of thousands of dollars a year, would be split between the U.S. government and the beneficiary.
Import doctors: The United States could benefit by making it easier for foreign physicians to practice in the United States. This could be done with greater standardization and transparency in testing procedures. Foreign doctors would still have to meet U.S. standards, but they could train and test for a license in their home countries. A greater supply of doctors would reduce physicians’ compensation in the United States — and bring it closer to the levels in other wealthy countries.
This would also ease the other problem with last year’s health reform law: While it brings almost all people into insurance coverage, it doesn’t do enough to ensure that those people will find medical personnel who will treat them!
Medical trade where we “export” patients and “import” doctors — just two ways of exploiting medical trade — may seem a strange way to fix the U.S. health care system. But it is clearly an important avenue that has so far not been taken seriously.
We are used to the notion that competition generated by trade helps consumers and disciplines producers. For example, Japanese competition led to lower car prices and better quality; although people can differ on how they view its impact in lowering wages for domestic auto workers. International competition can have the same effect on the health care industry. It offers a route around the political power of the health care industry that may succeed in making health care in the United States affordable.
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy . He also has a blog, ” Beat the Press ,” where he discusses the media’s coverage of economic issues.
Jagdish Bhagwati is University Professor of Economics and Law at Columbia University.
A version of this article was published by The Guardian.
September 20, 2011
The notion of international trade in health care may seem strange. The issue may also seem far removed from the current policy preoccupations in Washington. However, we believe it is finally time trade played a central role in the current debt debate.
One of the basic facts that the congressional super committee must confront is that the debt problem is not excessive current deficits, but rather a problem with the longer-term budget. And the main reason for the large projected deficits well into the future is the growth in health care costs. Public sector programs like Medicare and Medicaid will be increasingly unaffordable. The health care system must be reformed — no easy task.
President Obama and Congress sought to do it last year. But it remains to be seen how much the Affordable Care Act will accomplish, if Congress even allows it to take effect. With the future uncertain, anything that we can do to contain costs significantly in other ways must be exploited. We have a partial solution: medical trade, or allowing Americans to take advantage of different forms of international transactions in medical services. The fact that medical care of comparable quality is available at much lower prices elsewhere in the world can be used to rein in costs in the United States.
The idea holds remarkable promise. Here’s how it could work:
Patients go overseas for major medical procedures: Modern medical facilities in Thailand, India and other countries would allow patients to have procedures such as heart bypass surgery for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars less than in U.S. facilities.
Medicare and Medicaid could allow patients to use such facilities. The savings to these programs could be split between the patient and the government. This might mean tens of thousands of dollars for both, even after covering travel costs.
Buy into other countries’ health care systems: Many retirees have family or emotional ties to other countries. They can be given the option to use their Medicare to buy into the health care systems of Canada, Germany or whatever country they choose.
In effect, the money that the U.S. government would have spent on the beneficiary’s Medicare would instead be paid to another country’s government so that it would provide medical care. The difference in the cost of care, which could run into tens of thousands of dollars a year, would be split between the U.S. government and the beneficiary.
Import doctors: The United States could benefit by making it easier for foreign physicians to practice in the United States. This could be done with greater standardization and transparency in testing procedures. Foreign doctors would still have to meet U.S. standards, but they could train and test for a license in their home countries. A greater supply of doctors would reduce physicians’ compensation in the United States — and bring it closer to the levels in other wealthy countries.
This would also ease the other problem with last year’s health reform law: While it brings almost all people into insurance coverage, it doesn’t do enough to ensure that those people will find medical personnel who will treat them!
Medical trade where we “export” patients and “import” doctors — just two ways of exploiting medical trade — may seem a strange way to fix the U.S. health care system. But it is clearly an important avenue that has so far not been taken seriously.
We are used to the notion that competition generated by trade helps consumers and disciplines producers. For example, Japanese competition led to lower car prices and better quality; although people can differ on how they view its impact in lowering wages for domestic auto workers. International competition can have the same effect on the health care industry. It offers a route around the political power of the health care industry that may succeed in making health care in the United States affordable.
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy . He also has a blog, ” Beat the Press ,” where he discusses the media’s coverage of economic issues.
Jagdish Bhagwati is University Professor of Economics and Law at Columbia University.
A version of this article was published by The Guardian.
September 20, 2011
Former Army Intelligence officer Adrienne Kinne has a very valuable open secret which, if told under oath, could lead to the first ever conviction of U.S. soldiers on war crimes charges. But since she told her story publicly in an interview with journalist Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow! over three years ago, she has been reluctant to put it to use in the ongoing prosecution in the Spanish High Court of three U.S. soldiers for the murder of Spanish cameraman José Couso.
On May 13, 2008, Kinne went public for the first time with her experiences in military intelligence during the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war. Prior to the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad that preceded the U.S.-led coalition’s ground invasion, Kinne was tasked with filtering through thousands of recorded satellite phone conversations emanating from the Iraqi capital.
An Arabic translation specialist, Kinne grew concerned as she found herself listening not to terrorists and Iraqi militants but to English-speaking international journalists and NGO-workers. After spying on American civilians, she worried she was breaking the law. Her concerns multiplied on receiving an email listing potential targets of the invaders that included various assets of the Baathist regime, as well as the Hotel Palestine. During the previous weeks and days she had been listening in as international journalists based at this hotel spoke to their worried friends and loved ones abroad, reassuring them that they were safe along with 300 media colleagues from several countries, including the United States.
Thus was Kinne moved to address her superior officer, John Berry, regarding the presence of hundreds of journalists who considered themselves safe inside a potential U.S. target. She was told “it was not [her] job to analyze[, but] to collect and pass on information…someone somewhere higher up the chain knew what they were doing.”
Soon after the invasion, the hotel was indeed attacked, killing Couso as well as Ukranian Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk. Kinne didn’t know if the soldiers responsible for the attack knew the hotel was a media hub. But after five years of learning more and more about the consistent U.S. disregard for international law in the conduct of the war and after joining Iraq Veterans Against the War, Kinne decided to make her case known “because [she] really hope[d…] that other people who know a lot more […would] choose to do the same thing for the right reasons. And if by speaking out you can encourage other people to…follow suit, I think that’s…what [it]’s all about.”
Since her interview with Amy Goodman, Kinne has not testified before the Spanish court on behalf of Couso’s family. According to José’s brother, Javier Couso, she has stated that she will only testify before a U.S. court, that she believes the true guilty parties lie further up the chain of command. As a former soldier herself, she has expressed reluctance to prosecute fellow soldiers for carrying out orders, a reluctance perhaps encouraged by the U.S. government’s strong stance against whistleblowers. Nevertheless, the Couso case will go to oral arguments sometime this fall, raising the case’s profile and perhaps pressuring Adrienne Kinne to come forward.
Is Independent War Reporting a Crime?
In Spain, the name José Couso is well known in all sectors of society. He was a video-journalist with major TV network Tele5 who was killed in his hotel room by a U.S. tank during the first days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Spanish media outlets –even those that supported the invasion – expressed outrage in the wake of his assassination.
In the United States, however, the media has stayed relatively silent on the Couso case despite its enormous implications for international justice, and American diplomatic interference therein. More than eight years after José’s untimely death, his family and friends continue to seek justice for what they see as a blatant case of premeditated murder by U.S. war planners to send a message to journalists: Tell the official version of the war’s narrative or else. The unofficial version goes like this.
On April 8, 2003, about two weeks into the aerial devastation of the Iraqi capital and just days after invading forces entered Baghdad, TV news stations were broadcasting a spectacular demonstration of military power to millions of viewers around the world. Mainstream coverage of the war tended to repeat the crusader narrative of the war’s authors, in which the Coalition of the Willing sought to liberate Iraqis from a WMD-possessing, 9/11-linked Saddam Hussein. But many journalists covering the war were not convinced of the invaders’ good intentions. Arriving in Baghdad, they encountered a bustling metropolis inhabited by normal people – people not interested in spreading tyranny, but in living their lives. As flames engulfed miles upon miles of the urban center and surrounding areas, international journalists were aware that the great majority of the people whose lives and homes were being incinerated were not agents of evil, but human beings.
These independent reporters viewed the war differently than embedded journalists who were given body armor and protection by a cavalcade of armed men. The embedded journalist sees targets as just that – targets. Hearing an officer order fire on a building deemed to harbor the enemy, the embedded journalist has no choice but to believe the officer and hope that the enemy is – in the euphemistic language of war – neutralized.
With scores of embedded journalists serving as military stenographers of the invading, and later the occupying armies, independent journalists were cast as unwilling participants in the other war being fought in Baghdad in 2003 – the war that claimed the life of José Couso among others: the war against witness. It was that war that George W. Bush was waging when he ominously warned all un-embedded journalists to leave Baghdad and follow the war from Central Command Headquarters in Qatar. The war against witness has been fought with ever-higher stakes for decades if not centuries, and it goes on to this day as much in the courtrooms of Spain as in the streets of Gaza.
Killing the Witness
Weeks before the bombing of Baghdad began, Western journalists set up headquarters at the Hotel Palestine on the East bank of the Tigris River after having left their previous base at the Al-Rashid Hotel on the other side of the river. When CNN pulled its personnel from the Al-Rashid, other journalists knew that the Pentagon had identified it as a potential target. As the CNN team was under U.S. protection, the residents of the Al-Rashid followed them to the Palestine, forwarded their coordinates to the Pentagon, and believed themselves safe.
On the morning of April 8, several journalists in the Palestine concentrated themselves on the balconies of the 20-story hotel. There they filmed the activities of the A Company (nicknamed “assassins”) of the 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, U.S. Army. Its tanks spent the morning on the al-Jumuriya bridge over the Tigris shelling various government buildings of the old regime as well as remaining Iraqi military positions. Just 1.7 kilometers from the hotel, camera crews could capture every shot fired by the tanks.
Also visible from the balconies of the Palestine was a pair of less likely military targets: the headquarters of the two Arab media outlets that had set up in Baghdad to cover the war via satellite – Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV.
Like all journalistic enterprises in Baghdad at the time of the invasion, Al-Jazeera had reported its exact location to the Pentagon months in advance and had clearly marked the outside of its headquarters to avoid any confusion. The network heads did not want to take any chances after U.S. forces bombed their Kabul headquarters early in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. But the provision of the exact coordinates of its Iraq offices didn’t stop the United States from targeting Al Jazeera in Basra on April 2. In Baghdad on April 8, meanwhile, , an A-10 Warthog fighter plane from the same 3rd Infantry Division swooped over Hotel Palestine and launched a missile into Al Jazeera’s electrical generator, killing Palestinian-Jordanian journalist Tareq Ayyoub and injuring his Iraqi cameraman.
Some hours later, amid relative calm, the crews at the Palestine had turned their cameras back on the tank division. The heaviest fighting of the day was over, the tanks positioned over the water on the bridge. Without provocation, at 11:45 AM, the tank turned its guns on the headquarters of Abu-Dhabi TV, where a camera had been recording the tanks’ activities all morning from the building’s rooftop.
Footage recovered from José Couso’s camera shows the tank’s machine-gun fire aiming unequivocally at that camera, ultimately destroying it. The personnel of Abu Dhabi TV, who like those of Al Jazeera had reported their exact coordinates to the Pentagon before the invasion and marked their headquarters in giant press tags, were lucky to have escaped the attack alive.
By then, many journalists had left the hotel after a tense morning to cover other areas of the city. But Couso kept filming, and Taras Protsyuk’s camera continued feeding live images to Reuters. Fifteen minutes after attacking Abu Dhabi TV, the tank on the bridge took aim at the Hotel Palestine, lifted its crosshairs to the 15th floor and fired a single anti-personnel shell. Taras, on the 15th-floor balcony, was killed instantly. José, one floor below, was rushed to the hospital, his leg crushed, his stomach gored. Despite a successful leg amputation and several hours of surgery by more than a dozen Iraqi doctors, he died from blood loss. The whole episode was captured on film.
The three media targets attacked that day were the only non-embedded journalistic crews broadcasting unfiltered images of the war live via satellite. Al-Jazeera had long been a target of Bush administration derision, as top-level officials accused the network of outright collusion with bin Laden and Saddam for broadcasting unsavory images of civilian casualties and American hostages. Indeed, the United States continued bombing Al Jazeera installations during the war, seeking to ban it from broadcasting. And if the message the United States was trying to send to independent journalists wasn’t clear enough, the U.S.-led coalition later launched its own Arab-language satellite channel Al-Hurrah, “The free one.”
The Official Stories
The first official story, told just an hour after the attack, claimed that snipers were operating out of the hotel. Forty minutes later, the commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, General Buford Blount, said the tank “was receiving small arms and RPG fire from the hotel and engaged the target with one round. After that, there was no more shooting.” Two-and-a-half hours after that, Pentagon spokesman Brian Whitman admitted the Pentagon’s prior knowledge of the hotel’s journalistic presence but maintained that the tank had received rocket-fire from the hotel.
Contradicting Whitman, CENTCOM spokesman General Brooks said in a press conference the following day that the military “[did]n’t know every place a journalist [was] operating on the battlefield. We [knew] only those journalists that [were] operating with us.” In other words, un-imbedded journalists were fair game.
As news of the U.S. response filtered down to the eyewitnesses of the attack – the journalists who were at the hotel – the official story came under scrutiny: not a single shot was fired from anywhere within earshot of the Palestine, let alone from the very spot where dozens of journalists were watching the action below.
So the next day, Captain Philip Wolford, the tank commander who ordered the shelling of the hotel, told a reporter that he thought an Iraqi spotter was on the roof of the hotel, informing enemy combatants of the tank’s position. This story was repeated by the man who fired the shot, Lt. Shawn Gibson, who said he saw a man with binoculars through the tank’s scope. He emphasized that the “spotter” did not have a TV camera and also noted that he waited ten minutes to receive final clearance to fire the shot. During that time, Wolford’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Philip DeCamp, was apparently never brought into the discussion on whether or not to fire on the hotel.
All of these official explanations can be traced through the 2004 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) report entitled “Two Murders and a Lie.” According to the Couso family, that report, which concludes that there “was not…a deliberate attack on journalists or the media,” is illegitimate for a number of reasons. First, it relies heavily on the statement of imbedded journalist Chris Tomlinson, a longtime Army Intelligence officer. Second, when the family requested that the report not be submitted as evidence in the case (it does not, after all, mention the attacks on Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV), RSF head Robert Ménard insisted on its inclusion. And finally, a U.S. embassy cable from February 2008 quotes a representative of RSF insulting judge Pedraz’s efforts to keep the case open.
Notwithstanding the report’s conclusions, the soldiers’ explanations suffer from three major problems: the shell was fired five floors below the hotel’s rooftop; second, it doesn’t take a spotter 1.7 kilometers away in a tall building to see a tank in the middle of a bridge; and Protsyuk, who was struck directly by the shell, did have a TV camera, and it happened to be the only TV camera in the entire hotel that was transmitting via satellite in real time.
Moreover, optical experts sent by both the Couso family’s legal team and the judge handling the case agree that a person looking through the tank’s scope, equipped to see details at up to four kilometers, would be able to distinguish the eye colors of those on the balcony from the bridge so there could be no mistaking a Ukrainian cameraman for a fedayeen with binoculars. The soldiers got caught in a lie.
U.S. authorities in Washington ignored the details. Erstwhile Secretary of State Colin Powell sent a letter to the Spanish foreign minister saying that the shot that killed Couso and Protsyuk was fired in proportionate response to “hostile fire” emanating from the journalistic hub. Dick Cheney told reporters “you’d have to be an idiot to believe that [U.S. troops deliberately fired on journalists].” And Commander in Chief Bush responded in his usual laconic fashion: “war is a dangerous place.”
But the colleagues of Couso and Protsyuk, who had been waving to the U.S. soldiers from their hotel balconies the day before the shelling and knew that not a single shot was fired from the hotel, refused to let the United States get away with killing two of their own. Journalists protested in the Spanish parliament demanding a diplomatic course of action to seek justice for a Spanish citizen killed without reason. Massive demonstrations in front of the U.S. embassy in Madrid brought thousands into the streets. And a shattered family with its own history of military service turned its grief into a righteous indignation fierce enough to fuel the fight for justice against all odds.
A Case of Judiciary Independence
After Spanish authorities denied the Couso family’s initial requests to demand an independent investigation into the events of April 8 – instead giving the benefit of the doubt to the U.S. military’s internal investigation – the family decided in consultation with human rights attorney Pilar Hermoso to present a legal case to the Spanish High Court against the three soldiers immediately responsible for José Couso’s death: Wolford, Gibson, and DeCamp.
Ever since Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón ordered the arrest of U.S.-backed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet on murder charges citing the doctrine of “universal jurisdiction,” the Iberian nation has earned notoriety for its fiercely independent and tenacious judicial system. But as soon as the Bush administration got word that a Spanish judge was seeking to impose jurisdiction over three U.S. soldiers, its diplomats began pressuring the Spanish government to keep the judiciary in check. Then ruled by the right-wing Popular Party (PP) under President José-María Aznar, the Spanish government was eager to cooperate with the United States in the so-called war on terror, sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq despite massive public opposition. Indeed, Aznar participated in the planning of the Iraq War on Portugal’s Azores islands with Bush and Tony Blair in an open rejection of UN protocol. Thus, months after the case was presented, the prosecutor’s office (staffed by political appointees of the ruling party) had it shelved for procedural faults.
Nevertheless, with the backing of a major social movement and the support of judge Santiago Pedraz (part of the independent judiciary), the family’s legal team spent the final months of 2003 collecting eyewitness testimony in support of the case. And they grew even more hopeful when the Socialist Party (PSOE), whose candidates had expressed their support for the Couso case during the campaign season, took control of the government in 2004.
What happened to the case over the subsequent years – which we know thanks to a number of U.S. embassy cables released by Wikileaks – reveals the alarming degree to which U.S. officials sought to undermine Spanish sovereignty, and the even more alarming degree to which Spanish officials bowed to their demands.
According to WikiLeaks
A cable dated October 21, 2005 details the rush of high-level (PSOE) Spanish officials – Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido, Justice Minister Juan Fernando López Aguilar, Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos, and Vice President María Teresa Fernández de la Vega – to the U.S. embassy after Judge Pedraz issued arrest and extradition warrants for the three soldiers on October 19. They assured the ambassador that despite their public expressions of respect for the judicial process, they would do all they could to kill the case.
In March 2006, the attorney general’s office was able to shelf the case once again, this time claiming lack of jurisdiction. A cable from March 22 written by Ambassador Eduardo Aguirre stresses the responsiveness to Bush-administration demands by the socialist vice president de la Vega, stating that “we are well served by strengthening our level of communication with her.” But the judiciary refused to fold under political maneuvering. In December 2006, the Supreme Court determined that Pedraz did indeed have jurisdiction in the case and effectively reopened it.
This ruling didn’t deter the U.S. embassy or its friends in the Spanish government. After strategizing with Embassy personnel, the chief prosecutor of the National Court, Javier Zaragoza, ordered the government to drop the charges once again. Two years later in 2009 the case was reopened for a brief 2-month period after new supporting evidence surfaced, including Adrienne Kinne’s interview on DemocracyNow!. Rather than seeking to confirm Kinne’s testimony and call her to the witness stand, the government prosecutors refused to even acknowledge that Kinne existed.
Nevertheless, for all the control they exerted over the politicized justice ministry, the U.S. embassy couldn’t tame the Supreme Court, which reopened the case again in July 2010. After submitting a provisional conclusion to the court and issuing another international arrest warrant for the accused soldiers, Judge Pedraz received authorization from the government to travel to Baghdad with a court-appointed team of experts in order to corroborate the evidence submitted by the Cousos. In a last ditch effort to obstruct justice, the government refused to guarantee their security. That didn’t seem to bother the judge too much, nor was he deterred by the harassment of armed U.S.-Iraqi military units who sought to prevent him from accessing various points of interest.
On return, the judge submitted the investigative report based on the trip’s conclusions to the justice ministry and the prosecutor’s office at the beginning of 2011. As that evidence is processed, the Couso family is left waiting for the court to advance the case into oral argument sometime this fall. Meanwhile, their struggle to secure Adrienne Kinne’s testimony continues. If she refuses, the family plans to fly Amy Goodman to Spain in order to confirm before the court that the interview with Kinne of 2008 did indeed transpire.
Whistleblowers under the Gun
Kinne’s reluctance to testify is by no means misguided. On the one hand, she currently works as a military psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs where she interacts daily with soldiers responsible for innocent civilian deaths. On the other hand, she has every reason to fear government retribution for her would-be bravery.
Since taking office, the Obama administration has turned its back on government whistleblowers, whom the president praised during his campaign for their “acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives[… that] should be encouraged rather than stifled.” His administration has thus far indicted five former government employees under the Espionage Act of 1917, more than any previous president, and he openly defended the harsh conditions of accused whistleblower Bradley Manning at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia.
The citizen movement in support of Manning that has moved thousands of people into the streets – several of them risking arrest – must not wait for potential whistleblowers to fall victim to government repression before coming to their defense. Despite the violent rhetoric of right-wing pundits and politicians, the brave men and women willing to speak the truth about the exercise of U.S. power may be the greatest hope for advocates of international justice.
Leaked documents give a broad outline of the often-illegal foreign policy of the United States, but only detailed human testimony can fill in the blanks to give the whole truth. International courts demand the whole truth, and so should those who seek global justice. A victory in the Couso case would set an important precedent in the effort to subject the military to the rule of law, and solidarity with whistleblowers may help secure that victory.
V. Noah Gimbel is a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus, writing from Spain. He can be reached at noah.gimbel@gmail.com
