THIS IS WAR !

Afghan News Sites

2009-12-20T06:05:00.002-05:00

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Afghanistan in the news

The race against Obama's deadline in Afghanistan

Washington Post

- Dec 19, 2009

- 5 hours ago

A Marine talks to youths during an operation in Helmand province in Afghanistan on Friday. (Kevin Frayer/associated Press) By David Ignatius Adm. Mike ...

clipped from Google - 12/2009

No reason for optimism about war in Afghanistan

MiamiHerald.com

- Dec 19, 2009

- 7 hours ago

By CARL HIAASEN According to the polls, President Obama's speech announcing the US troop surge in Afghanistan won over a majority of Americans. ...

clipped from Google - 12/2009

Pakistan: Supporter or spoiler?

East Oregonian

- Dec 20, 2009

- 2 hours ago

If Afghanistan is daunting for US policy makers, neighboring Pakistan is an equal, if not a more troubling dilemma. Its cooperation is required to deny ...

clipped from Google - 12/2009

In Afghan war, officer flourishes outside the box

The Associated Press

- Dec 19, 2009

- 6 hours ago

ALTIMUR, Afghanistan — You may wonder how Thomas Gukeisen made it to lieutenant colonel, and by age 39 at that. He breaks Army rules and operates by his own ...

Cost of Afghanistan War

2009-12-20T06:00:00.002-05:00

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/12/18/afghanistan_cost/index.html?source=newsletter

Editor: Mark Benjamin

Updated: Today

Topic:

Afghanistan

Friday, Dec 18, 2009 09:19 EST

A surge of dollars in Afghanistan

Total cost of the war could hit $1 trillion

By Jo Comerford

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

$57,077.60. That’s what we’re paying per minute. Keep that in mind -- just for a minute or so.

After all, the surge is already on. By the end of December, the first 1,500 U.S. troops will have landed in Afghanistan, a nation roughly the size of Texas, ranked by the United Nations as second worst in the world in terms of human development.

Women and men from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, will be among the first to head out. It takes an estimated $1 million to send each of them surging into Afghanistan for one year. So a 30,000-person surge will be at least $30 billion, which brings us to that $57,077.60. That’s how much it will cost you, the taxpayer, for one minute of that surge.

By the way, add up the yearly salary of a Marine from Camp Lejeune with four years of service, throw in his or her housing allowance, additional pay for dependents, and bonus pay for hazardous duty, imminent danger, and family separation, and you’ll still be many thousands of dollars short of that single minute’s sum.

But perhaps this isn’t a time to quibble. After all, a job is a job, especially in the United States, which has lost seven million jobs since December 2007, while reporting record-high numbers of people seeking assistance to feed themselves and/or their families. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 36 million Americans, including one out of every four children, are currently on food stamps.

On the other hand, given the woeful inadequacy of that “safety net,” we might have chosen to direct the $30 billion in surge expenditures toward raising the average individual monthly Food Stamp allotment by $70 for the next year; that's roughly an additional trip to the grocery store, every month, for 36 million people. Alternatively, we could have dedicated that $30 billion to job creation. According to a recent report issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, that sum could generate a whopping 537,810 construction jobs, 541,080 positions in healthcare, fund 742,740 teachers or employ 831,390 mass transit workers.

For purposes of comparison, $30 billion -- remember, just the Pentagon-estimated cost of a 30,000-person troop surge -- is equal to 80 percent of the total U.S. 2010 budget for international affairs, which includes monies for development and humanitarian assistance. On the domestic front, $30 billion could double the funding (at 2010 levels) for the Children's Health Insurance Program and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

Or think of the surge this way: if the United States decided to send just 29,900 extra soldiers to Afghanistan, 100 short of the present official total, it could double the amount of money -- $100 million -- it has allocated to assist refugees and returnees from Afghanistan through the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

Leaving aside the fact that the United States already accounts for 45 percent of total global military spending, the $30 billion surge cost alone would place us in the top-ten for global military spending, sandwiched between Italy and Saudi Arabia. Spent instead on “soft security” measures within Afghanistan, $30 billion could easily build, furnish and equip enough schools for the entire nation.

Continuing this nod to the absurd for just one more moment, if you received a silver dollar every second, it would take you 960 years to haul in that $30 billion. Not that anyone could hold so much money. Together, the coins would weigh nearly 120,000 tons, or more than the poundage of 21,000 Asian elephants, an aircraft carrier, or the Washington Monument. Converted to dollar bills and laid end-to-end, $30 billion would reach 2.9 million miles or 120 times around the Earth.

One more thing, that $30 billion isn’t even the real cost of Obama’s surge. It’s just a minimum, through-the-basement estimate. If you were to throw in all the bases being built, private contractors hired, extra civilians sent in, and the staggering costs of training a larger Afghan army and police force (a key goal of the surge), the figure would surely be startlingly higher. In fact, total Afghanistan War spending for 2010 is now expected to exceed $102.9 billion, doubling last year's Afghan spending. Thought of another way, it breaks down to $12 million per hour in taxpayer dollars for one year. That’s equal to total annual U.S. spending on all veteran's benefits, from hospital stays to education.

In Afghan terms, our upcoming single year of war costs represents nearly five times that country’s gross domestic product or $3,623.70 for every Afghan woman, man, and child. Given that the average annual salary for an Afghan soldier is $2,880 and many Afghans seek employment in the military purely out of economic desperation, this might be a wise investment -- especially since the Taliban is able to pay considerably more for its new recruits. In fact, recent increases in much-needed Afghan recruits appear to correlate with the promise of a pay raise.

All of this is, of course, so much fantasy, since we know just where that $30-plus billion will be going. In 2010, total Afghanistan War spending since November 2001 will exceed $325 billion, which equals the combined annual military spending of Great Britain, China, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. If we had never launched an invasion of Afghanistan or stayed on fighting all these years, those war costs, evenly distributed in this country, would have meant a $2,298.80 dividend per U.S. taxpayer.

Even as we calculate the annual cost of war, the tens of thousands of Asian elephants in the room are all pointing to $1 trillion in total war costs for Iraq and Afghanistan. The current escalation in Afghanistan coincides with that rapidly-approaching milestone. In fact, thanks to Peter Baker’s recent New York Times report on the presidential deliberations that led to the surge announcement, we know that the trillion-dollar number for both wars may be a gross underestimate. The Office of Management and Budget sent President Obama a memo, Baker tells us, suggesting that adding General McChrystal’s surge to ongoing war costs, over the next 10 years, could mean -- forget Iraq -- a trillion dollar Afghan War.

At just under one-third of the 2010 U.S. federal budget, $1 trillion essentially defies per-hour-per-soldier calculations. It dwarfs all other nations' military spending, let alone their spending on war. It makes a mockery of food stamps and schools. To make sense of this cost, we need to leave civilian life behind entirely and turn to another war. We have to reach back to the Vietnam War, which in today's dollars cost $709.9 billion -- or $300 billion less than the total cost of the two wars we're still fighting, with no end in sight, or even $300 billion less than the long war we may yet fight in Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda -Women's Role in Jihad

2009-12-18T08:05:00.008-05:00

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-qaeda-reaches-women/story?id=9364879

Al Qaeda Reaches Out to Women

Zawahiri's Wife Releases Statement, Tells Women They Can Be Suicide Bombers

By MARK SCHONE
Dec. 18, 2009

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, has been a regular presence on Islamic web sites for years , releasing statements and videos via al-Qaeda's propaganda arm that blast the West and urge Muslims to wage holy war. Now his wife may have joined the family business.

A grab taken from a video entitled "An invitation to Islam" produced by Al-Qaeda-linked media group as-Sahab and released on the Internet in September, 2006 shows Ayman al-Zawahiri, at an undisclosed date and place.

(AFP/Getty Images)

In what is thought to be her first public statement, Omaima Hassan published a statement on Islamic web sites Thursday that encouraged "Muslim sisters" to assist with jihad, but only in suitably feminine ways. She called supporting jihad "an obligation for all Muslims, men and women." ABC News could not independently confirm the authenticity of the statement.

Terrorists Beat the System in Federal Prisons

After ABC News Report of Secret CIA Prison, Head Spy Resigns

In the seven-page letter, after assuring friends and family that she and her husband are safe and well, Hassan outlines the ways in which women can assist their men with jihad. Hassan suggests that women work side by side in defending Islam with their men, but underlines that the most important role for women is to support male mujahideen by caring for their children.

"Jihad is an obligation for every man and woman," wrote Hassan, "but the way of fighting is not easy for women."

"Our main role -- that I ask God to accept from us -- is to preserve the mujahideen in their sons, and homes, and their confidentiality, and to help them raise/develop their children in the best way."

But Hassan also suggests that women can become suicide bombers, which she refers to as "martyrdom missions."

Hassan also urges women to wear hijabs, or head coverings, and to ignore Western media. Zawahiri, an Egyptian-born doctor, is a polygamist who has had at least four wives, two of them widows. Fundamentalist Islamic doctrine allows men to have up to four wives at one time.

Why Are Zawahiri and Gadahn Still Alive?

Road to Jihad: Americans Recruited for Terror

U.S. Attorney Defends Decision to Scrap Awlaki Arrest Warrant

Zawahiri's first wife, Azza, who bore him six children, was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2001. "My favorite wife's chest was crushed by a concrete ceiling," Zawahiri later wrote.

In 2008, Zawahiri sparked controversy when he said in a two-hour recorded interview posted on a web site that Al Qaeda did not have women members, and that the role of women in jihad was limited to taking care of the children of fighters and maintaining their homes.

Earlier this week, Zawahiri released his own statement, in which he blasted Egyptian and Palestinian leaders and expressed his support for Omar Abdel Rahman, Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who are all in U.S. custody.

On Thursday, Al Qaeda's propaganda arm also released a 65-page book by Zawahiri called "The Morning and the Lantern," in which he criticizes the Pakistani government. Zawahiri is believed to be in Pakistan.

Israelis, Hamas Negotiate For Prisoner Swap

2009-10-02T16:39:00.019-04:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090930/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians

Hamas, Israel deal: 20 prisoners for soldier video

News article archived and not found.

twisted propaganda

2009-09-28T00:53:00.002-04:00

Carlton Meyer, Saddam never gassed his own people

Jude Wanniski, In Defense of Saddam Hussein:

Jude Wanniski, Defending Saddam, Not President Bush

Jude Wanninski, What Happened at Halabja?

Ghali Hassan, What do Fallujah and Halabja have in Common?

Robin Miller - Media Monitors Network, Claims of Saddam's Genocide Far from Proven

Raju Thomas- Times of India, Report Suppressed: Iran Gassed Kurds, Not Iraq

Xymphora, More on Jeffrey Goldberg

Jude Wanniski, A Fair Trial for Saddam?

Gaza Strip-One family's desperation - video

2009-09-28T00:25:00.001-04:00

bush's torture policy

2009-07-24T21:34:00.004-04:00

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14447

President Carter: Many Children Were Tortured Under Bush

by Ralph Lopez

Global Research, July 20, 2009

dailykos.com

While congress says it is gearing up to investigate what is old news, that CIA and Special Ops forces are killing Al Qaeda leaders, a decision of far different gravity is being contemplated by Attorney General Eric Holder. The new insistence of Congress on its oversight role, conspicuously absent throughout 8 years of Bush, is suddenly rearing its head in the form of questioning a policy which has been in place with no controversy for years. The U.S. has been hunting and killing Al Qaeda leaders outside of official war zones since 2004, when the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had signed an order authorizing Special Forces to kill Al Qaeda where they found them.

As recently as September 2008 CBS reported that Special Forces struck Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.

The decision faced by Holder, whether or not to appoint a Special Prosecutor on torture, is of a different gravity altogether. A weight of evidence keeps building which indicates torture was employed on innocent men, that it didn't work, and that it didn't prevent any attacks. And it gets worse. Bush's own FBI Director Robert Mueller recently confirmed to the New York Times what he told Vanity Fair a year ago, that "to [his] knowledge" torture didn't prevent a single attack. Former Legendary CIA Director William Colby has said that torture is "ineffective."

Harper's Magazine's Scott Horton nows suggests there are two Eric Holders at war with each other: Holder the good soldier who knows well the preference of his boss for prosecutions to not take place, and Holder the servant of the law who is aware that what he does now may determine what is likely to happen again.

It is becoming clear that such an investigation, if it happens, will not stop with a few low-ranking scapegoats. Horton notes:

"President Obama’s assurance to CIA officials who relied on the opinions of government lawyers in implementing these programs, an assurance that Holder himself repeated, would have to be worked in. That suggests that the focus would likely be on the lawyers and policymakers who authorized use of the new techniques."

And CIA whistleblower Ray McGovern writes this week:

the buck stops - actually, in this case, it began - with President Bush. Senate Armed Services Committee leaders Carl Levin and John McCain on Dec. 11, 2008, released the executive summary of a report, approved by the full committee without dissent, concluding that Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum "opened the door to considering aggressive techniques."

What changed with Holder? Horton writes in "The Torture Prosecution Turnaround?":

Holder began his review mindful of the clear preference of President Obama’s two key political advisers—David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel—that there be no investigation. Axelrod and Emanuel are described as uninterested in either the legal or policy merits of the issue of a criminal investigation. Their concerns turn entirely on their political analysis...Holder initially appeared prepared to satisfy their wishes.

This attitude seemed to change after Obama's speech at the CIA, when Emanual and Axelrod moved out front to say there would be no prosecutions. According to Horton:

"In the days after Obama’s speech at the CIA, both Axelrod and Emanuel insisted that the White House had made the decision that there would be no prosecutions. According to reliable sources, that incensed Holder, who felt that the remarks had compromised the integrity both of the White House and Justice Department by suggesting that political advisers made the call on who would or would not be criminally investigated."

To make things worse for the Bush administration, evidence is emerging that they can no longer even rely on exhibit A and B of the Torture Works theory, Al Zabudaya and Kalid Shiek Mohammed, the latter of whom is still confessing to everything short of being the real Boston Strangler. I guess if I'd been waterboarded 82 times I'd be babbling too. The FBI Special Agent who interrogated Abu Zubayda, recently breaking a 7-year silence after reading the "torture memos," wrote in the New York Times:

"One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence...This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives."

Then there is the political risk to the Obama administration that Axelrod and Emanual have miscalculated, and that, in fact, the rest of the president's agenda is hamstrung while a growing number of Americans call for existing laws to be enforced. What is haunting Americans could be, in Washington jargon, "sucking oxygen" out of the debate, and "moving forward" is a pipe dream until pending business is dealt with. Spontaneous and planned rallies calling for a Special Prosecutor are growing, not diminishing. In addition, the worse revelations may be yet to come in the horrifying saga of what happened when, as Major General Anthony Taguba says:

[a] permissive environment [was] created by implicit and explicit authorizations by senior US officials to "take the gloves off"...

President Jimmy Carter wrote that the Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon "have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, confirmed by soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse." In "Our Endangered Values" Carter said that the Red Cross found after visiting six U.S. prisons "107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old." And reporter Hersh, (who broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal,) reported 800-900 Pakistani boys aged 13 to 15 in custody.

Journalist Seymour Hersh's (who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal) bombshell before the ACLU some years ago has been in a temporary slumber, as there is question as to whether the videotapes in possession of the Pentagon were among those claimed to be destroyed. Destroyed or not, there is still the conscience of soldiers and agents who bore witness to contend with, as the reign of political terror against whistleblowers which characterized the Bush administration subsides. Hersh said:

" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said at the time:

"The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."

History is just beginning to sort out the Bush era, with stubborn facts showing a resilience that Fox News talking points cannot, and more emerging. Today, even among Republicans, it is difficult to find those who will embrace Richard Nixon, though for a while he was every bit the perceived victim of "left-wing hate" that Bush and Cheney are now. Incredibly, to compare Nixon to Bush-Cheney is to do a deeply flawed man a disservice. Nixon inherited Vietnam. He did not orchestrate from whole cloth a campaign to link Saddam with 9/11, and strenuously push to war despite the objections of his countrymen and the world. Nixon spied on political enemies. He did not use a tragedy to illegally spy on millions, the true numbers of which we still do not know because congress has never investigated.

It's almost possible to feel sorry for the shifty, friendless Nixon. It is less possible to feel so for the smirking Bush, who thought nothing of telling soldier's families that war critics were saying that their loved ones "had died in vain."

A compilation in November 2008 of other evidence of alleged incidents involving children at the time recounts:

-- Iraqi lawyer Sahar Yasiri, representing the Federation of Prisoners and Political Prisoners, said in a published interview there are more than 400,000 detainees in Iraq being held in 36 prisons and camps and that 95 percent of the 10,000 women among them have been raped. Children, he said, "suffer from torture, rape, (and) starvation" and do not know why they have been arrested. He added the children have been victims of "random" arrests "not based on any legal text."

-- Former prisoner Thaar Salman Dawod in a witness statement said, "[I saw] two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and [a U.S. soldier] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners."

-- Iraqi TV reporter, Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, arrested while making a documentary and thrown into Abu Ghraib for 74 days, told Mackay he saw "hundreds" of children there. Al-Baz said he heard one 12-year-old girl crying, "They have undressed me. They have poured water over me." He said he heard her whimpering daily.

-- Al-Baz also told of a 15-year-old boy "who was soaked repeatedly with hoses until he collapsed." Amnesty International said ex-detainees reported boys as young as 10 are held at Abu Ghraib.

-- German TV reporter Thomas Reutter of "Report Mainz" quoted U.S. Army Sgt. Samuel Provance that interrogation specialists "poured water" over one 16-year-old Iraqi boy, drove him throughout a cold night, "smeared him with mud" and then showed him to his father, who was also in custody. Apparently, one tactic employed by the Bush regime is to elicit confessions from adults by dragging their abused children in front of them.

-- Jonathan Steele, wrote in the British "The Guardian" that "Hundreds of children, some as young as nine, are being held in appalling conditions in Baghdad’s prisons...Sixteen-year-old Omar Ali told the "Guardian" he spent more than three years at Karkh juvenile prison sleeping with 75 boys to a cell that is just five by 10 meters, some of them on the floor. Omar told the paper guards often take boys to a separate room in the prison and rape them.

-- Raad Jamal, age 17, was taken from his Doura home by U.S. troops and turned over to the Iraqi Army’s Second regiment where Jamal said he was hung from the ceiling by ropes and beaten with electric cables.

-- Human Rights Watch (HRW) last June put the number of juveniles detained at 513. In all, HRW estimates, since 2003, the U.S. has detained 2,400 children in Iraq, some as young as ten.

-- IRIN, the humanitarian news service, last year quoted Khalid Rabia of the Iraqi NGO Prisoners’ Association for Justice(PAJ), stating that five boys between 13 and 17 accused of supporting insurgents and detained by the Iraqi army "showed signs of torture all over their bodies," such as "cigarette burns over their legs," she said.

-- One boy of 13 arrested in Afghanistan in 2002 was held in solitary for more than a year at Bagram and Guantanamo and made to stand in stress position and deprived of sleep, according to the "Catholic Worker."

Attorney General Holder is a man of conscience who now serves both President Obama and the law. A Newsweek piece last week says he has no illusions that:

Such a decision [to appoint a Special Prosecutor] would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision."

There can be redemption for a nation which faces its past. One that does not can only become more monstrous.

Global Research Articles by Ralph Lopez

Israeli Soldiers Speak out

2009-07-24T20:43:00.004-04:00

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14514

July 24, 2009

"Breaking the Silence:" Testimonies of Israeli Soldiers by Stephen Lendman

"Breaking the Silence is an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers that collects anonymous testimonies of soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories during the Second Intifada." They recount experiences that deeply affected them, including abusing Palestinians, looting, destroying property, and other practices "excused as military necessities, or explained as extreme and unique cases."

They believe otherwise in describing "the depth of corruption which is spreading in the Israeli military" to which Israeli society and most Western observers turn a blind eye. "Breaking the Silence" was established to force an uncomfortable reality into the open to "demand accountability regarding Israel's military actions in the Occupied Territories perpetrated by us in our name."

Its new booklet features 54 damning testimonies from 30 Israeli soldiers on their experiences in Operation Cast Lead. They recount what official media and government sources suppressed with comments like:

"You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them."

Another referred to "not much said about the issue of innocent civilians." Anyone and anything were fair game, and laws of war went out the window.

They explained wanton destruction, crops uprooted, human slaughter, women and children killed in cold blood, illegal weapons used, free-fire orders to shoot to kill anywhere at anything that moved, and using civilians as human shields.

Israeli commanders refuted their accounts as groundless, but B'Tselem reported that the military "refused to open serious, impartial investigations," even when provided with detailed information, including victims' names, exact dates, and precise locations of incidents.

On its own, B'Tselem collected testimonies from Gaza residents in which 70 Palestinian civilians were killed, over half of them children. Israeli military sources were unresponsive, except to acknowledge receipt of some information, nothing more or that a serious investigation would be conducted. It never was.

Anonymous Testimonies to Protect Soldiers from Recriminations - First From Earlier Operations

A Nachal unit first sergeant recounted Israeli tanks entering a West Bank village and crushing a car beneath the treads. "Yes, I saw it from the APC we were in. I peeped out. Suddenly we heard a car being crushed....I can't understand why a tank should run over a car when the road's open." It wasn't an isolated incident. It happens often, wanton destruction for its own sake.

He also said that "When we got back from that operation, we had loot so to speak. There were IDs confiscated, uniforms, Kalachnikovs. For army intelligence."

A Nachal elite unit first sergeant said missions were explicitly intended to harass people. Homes were entered, arrests made. "At various points while closing in on a house there are varying open-fire instructions. When the whole house is surrounded, crews placed all around it, the guy who runs out of the house is considered an 'escaper' and must be stopped. If he exits running in a suspect manner (he) must be shot (and) kill(ed). Shot to be stopped: in other words, shoot to kill."

When entering villages, armed Palestinian policemen "at certain points in time....were considered enemy troops (so) we had to shoot to kill if we saw any." Orders were to shoot when in doubt. In describing the atmosphere and command orders, they were "Kill, kill, kill, kill. We want to see bodies."

He explained his anti-terrorism training saying: "Terrorist in sight, that's what it's called, when you run into them. It's some sort of code. It used to be 'hostages.' So you reach the terrorist, you confirm the kill. You don't confirm the kill, you confirm the guy has been 'neutralized,' no chance of his getting back to you because he's been shot in the head. That's confirming he's neutralized."

A 401 Armor unit staff sergeant described the freedom he had to fire a lot - "automatic fire, directed at the whole city, at houses and at doors, was something that everybody did, not just me. I do not know why I did it. I (had) a gun. I did not think. In the army I never thought. I did what I was told to do. And besides, everybody did it. That was the custom - officers and such, everybody knew."

A Battalion 55 Artillery corp first sergeant said when his unit "return(ed) from operations we would throw stun and smoke grenades into the bakeries that opened between 4:00 and 5:00 am because people in the village threw stones....Once I fired over 1500 rounds from a machine gun at the houses in the city." Nobody cared, it was just at Palestinians.

An Armoured Corps first sergeant recounted earlier Gaza and West Bank operations for the "main purpose (of) either demolish(ing) terrorists' houses or places where they manufacture mortars, and other such stuff, or...You would come in and ruin everything you see." At times, "open-fire orders (were to kill) every person you see on the street....kill him....shoot to kill. Don't mind whether he has or has no gun on him."

Operation Cast Lead Testimonies

One soldier said:

"....In training you learn that white phosphorus is not used, and you're taught that it's not humane. You watch films and see what it does to people who are hit, and you say, 'There, we're doing it too.' That's not what I expected to see. Until that moment I had thought that I belonged to the most humane army in the world."

Other testimonies describe white phosphorous used in densely populated neighborhoods, wanton killing and destruction "unrelated to any direct threat to Israeli forces, and permissive rules of engagement that led to the killing of innocents."

More comments reflected the "moral deterioration" of the army and Israeli society, even affecting the rabbinate that blessed mass slaughter and destruction prior to engagements.

Soldier testimonies bear witness to disturbing Israeli values "on a systemic level." Operation Cast Lead's rein of terror was "a direct result of IDF policy, and especially (its) rules of engagement (that sanction) shoot (first) and (don't) ask questions."

Breaking the Silence participants offered their testimonies as "an urgent call to Israeli society and its leaders to sober up and investigate anew the results of our actions....(a disturbing) slide together down the moral slippery slope" that affects them and all Jews globally.

Testimony 1 - Human Shield

People are called "Johnnie. They're Palestinian civilians" in Gaza neighborhoods. In checking out houses, "we send the neighbor in, the 'Johnnie,' and if there are armed men inside, we (use) 'pressure cooker' procedures....to get them out alive....to catch the armed men." When necessary, combat helicopters are called in to fire anti-tank missiles at civilian homes. Then send a "Johnnie" in to check for dead and wounded.

In one home, two were dead and another alive, so supersized Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers start "demolishing the house over him until the neighbor went in" and got him out.

Human shields were also used to check for booby-traps and perform other services. "Sometimes the force would enter while placing rifle barrels on a civilian's shoulder, advancing into the house and using him as a human shield. Commanders said these were the instructions and we had to do it."

Testimony 2 - House Demolitions

Residential buildings at strategic points were taken over by force. Neighborhoods were described with "lots of destroyed houses....ruins....more and more ruins, and even the houses still standing, most of them kept getting shelled...." Other houses were blasted....blown "up in the air" with explosives.

"Operational necessity" sometimes meant a whole neighborhood was destroyed so as "not to jeopardize Israeli soldiers (and with) the day after" in mind, meaning to disrupt Gaza life to the maximum and leave it that way after forces pulled out.

Testimony 3 - Rules of Engagement

Descriptions included "enter(ing) a yard and out of sheer fear the family was waiting in an exposed spot - a father, grandfather, young mother and babies. As we were coming in, the commander was firing a volley, and mistakenly killed an innocent. We got to the house....he goes in with live fire....the family was hiding from the bombings....he happened to kill an elderly guy....it really seems insane....if I look at it from the (other) side, there are people who deserve to go to jail."

Testimony 4 - Rules of Engagement & Home Occupation

Tactics taught are "dry" and "wet" entries. In Gaza, there was "no such thing as a dry entry. All entries were wet," meaning free-firing with missiles, tank shells, machine guns, grenades, everything. On the ground, wet entry orders were to "shoot as we enter a (house or) room (so) no one there could fire at us."

Testimony 5 - Atmosphere

What "bothered me? Many things....all that destruction. All that fire at innocents. This shock of realizing with whom I'm in this together....the hatred, and the joy of killing....I killed a terrorist....blew his head off....There's nothing to hold you back." They're just Arabs.

Testimony 6 - Bombardment

The new 120mm Mortar was used in Gaza with "95 - 100%" accuracy. When it hits, it scatters shrapnel all around. It was used against neighborhoods. Innocents were hit, and "our artillery fire there was insane...."

"Most of the time firing was for softening resistance I think....We simply received orders. If we hit terrorists, then I guess that was the purpose."

Testimony 7 - Rules of Engagement

The commander stressed using "fire power" from the air and on the ground. "You see something and you're not quite sure? You shoot....Fire power was insane. We went in and the booms were just mad. The minute we got to our starting line, we simply began to fire at suspect places....a house, a window....In urban warfare, anyone is your enemy. No innocents." Houses were taken over with soldiers positioned inside "according to plan."

Testimony 8 - Rules of Engagement & Use of White Phosphorous

Some of the younger soldiers "think it's cool to wield such power with no one wanting to rein them in. They (were given) permission to open fire" even at most people who "definitely (are) not terrorists." Free fire used all weapons against "everything (including) houses," whether or not they looked suspect. "I know (that some) crews....even fired white phosphorous. Our battalion mortars (and tanks) were also using phosphorous."

Sometimes an order was given: "Permitted, phosphorous in the air." At times, it was used "because it's fun. Cool. I don't understand what it's used for."

Testimony 9 - Rules of Engagement & House Demolitions

"From the onset....the brigade commander and other officers made it very clear to us that any movement must entail gunfire" with or without being shot at. Alerts were given about a suicide bomber or sniper in the area, but "none of (these) materialized as far as our company was concerned."

"Houses were demolished everywhere." They were fired at "with tremendous power. We didn't see a single house that remained intact....The entire infrastructure, tracks, fields, roads (were) in total ruin." D-9 bulldozers demolished everything "in our designated area. It looked awful, like in those World War II films where nothing remained. A totally destroyed city."

Testimony 10 - Briefings

Formal briefings covered "going off to war (and in war) no consideration of civilians was to be taken. Shoot anyone you see....this pretty much disgusted me. There was a clear feeling, and this was repeated whenever others spoke to us, that no humanitarian consideration played any role in the army at present."

Language used in one briefing was something like: "Don't let morality become an issue. That will come up later. Leave the nightmares and horrors that will come up for later, now just shoot."

Testimony 11 - Use of White Phosphorous & Rules of Engagement

"We walked (with another battalion) and saw all the white phosphorous bombs....we saw glazing on the sand (resulting) from white phosphorous (use), and it was upsetting." Houses were targeted and many around them were destroyed with people inside them.

Testimony 12 - Rules of Engagement

Moving into an area, orders were to "hold the junction, control it." Vehicle movement wasn't allowed and those advancing were fired on. Whole areas were abandoned. In entering houses, strict procedure is followed, including "setting red lines. It means that whoever crosses this line is shot, no questions asked." Orders always were shoot to kill, including women and children.

Testimonies 13 and 14 - Rules of Engagement

Houses were entered with gunfire and taken over. Some civilians were killed. Anyone out at night was called a terrorist even if it was clear he had no weapons.

Testimonies 15 and 16 - Rabbinate Unit

Promoting "Jewish Awareness," rabbis talked with soldiers and gave out materials, the Book of Psalms and some brochures. War got a religious tone against "four enemies:" Hamas, Iran, the Palestinian Authority even though it doesn't control Gaza, and Arab citizens of Israel. Rabbinate briefings said "they (all) undermine us."

Also that Israel was fighting a "war of choice, (a) holy war (with) differing rules." The message "aimed at inspiring the men with courage, cruelty, aggressiveness (and feeling) no pity, God protects you, everything you do is sanctified....Palestinians are the enemy....everyone."

Soldiers were told to be "crusaders," to have a "proper fighting spirit," and show no mercy. Distributed pamphlets said: "Palestinians are like the Philistines of old, newcomers who do not belong in the land, aliens planted on our soil which should clearly return to us."

One man introduced as Rabbi Chen presented his talk in points, also covered in pamphlets. First was "the sanctity of the People of Israel. He put it this way: he said while going in there, we should know there is no accounting for sins in this case." In other words, "whatever we do is fine."

Another point referred to the "sons of light" waging war against the "sons of darkness" to turn the IDF into a messianic force in a battle of good versus evil.

Testimony 17 - House Demolitions & Rules of Engagement

"Pressure cooker" tactics were used. D-9 bulldozers "worked nonstop to raze orchards and take down houses suspected of containing tunnels" or stopping sniper fire. "The feeling is it's all sand dunes, all the streets were destroyed and there were shell pits from the bombings before the ground offensive." After a week, "our officer decided he'd hold a grenade-launching practice....So we went into a house next door, took an inner room, and each person came along and threw a grenade inside. The house was totally devastated."

Testimony 18 - Briefings & Rules of Engagement

Before the operation began, the battalion commander "said we were going to exercise insane fire power with artillery and air force....There were no clear red lines. In urban areas it's very much at the commanders' own discretion....we were told to enter every house (using) live fire....a grenade or two, shooting, and only then we enter."

Testimony 19 - Bombardment

It was designed "to gain control of the area....The whole cover thing starts, massive fire, auxiliary fire, and then my company goes it....In the first phase, we open fire in every zone." Every house in a designated area is entered....At the end of the day the platoons are set up in the houses. Each house becomes a small army outpost with positions...." Then other houses are occupied and searched. Families inside were assembled in one room, then told to leave and walk into the city. In some houses, the men were gathered together and shackled.

Testimony 20 - Rules of Engagement

"Our objective was to split the Gaza Strip, fragment it," take total control.

Testimony 21 - Briefings & Rules of Engagement

The commander said don't "feel bad about destruction because it is all done for the safety of our own soldiers." If someone is suspect, "we should not give him the benefit of the doubt. Eventually this could be an enemy, even if it's some old woman approaching the house. It could be an old woman carrying an explosive charge."

We had constant reports about suspect women or pairs, stuff like that, but never ran into any.

"There are two phases: there's the primary phase of taking objectives....whatever is suspect is targeted for fire." Youngsters in the ranks "are out for action and most of them have pretty racist views....some of them say (they) don't want wars, but what can (they) do, this is how things are and we'll never have peace with the Arabs." Those with more moderate views are in the minority. For most soldiers, "there are two possibilities: either you're terribly scared or terribly gung-ho. Better gung-ho than frightened, for this way you can do a better job of it."

Testimony 22 - Bombardment

One home "was known as a Hamas activist's house. This automatically gets acted upon...the house was bombed while these guys were inside. A woman came out, holding a child, and escaped southward." Reports were that people inside were unarmed. "But that's not the point. The point is that four men standing outside the house conferring look suspect."

Testimony 23 - Rules of Engagement & Home Searches

"In routine work there are outposts, windows, observation posts and stairs....you go out, take the house, spend (enough time) inside, then go back to the same house or to another one....You're also told to wreck floor tiles to check for tunnels. Television sets, closets (everything). Many explosive charges were found, they also blew up, no one was hurt."

Before going in you shoot....we didn't really need to shoot after the tank had wrecked the house....Physically the houses were ruined." In some, drawings were made on walls, even with lipstick, and "the closets were all trashed. It sounded retarded....you go into a house and turn it all inside out."

Testimony 24 - Briefings & House Demolitions

Initial briefings by commanders never mentioned "the lives of civilians (or) showing consideration to civilians." Here it wasn't mentioned. "Just the brutality, go in there brutally....In case of any doubt, take down houses. You don't need confirmation for anything...."

D-9 operators "cannot show consideration. If he's ordered to demolish a house, he" does it...."houses and agricultural areas as well, orchards and hothouses." At the end of the operation, the commander said "We demolished 900 houses....a really huge number. We demolished a lot."

Testimony 25 - Briefings & Rules of Engagement

"The battalion commander said there would be lots and lots of terrorists and we should really watch out but don't worry, everyone will have taken plenty of people down (because) insane fire power (gives us an) advantage over them."

Testimony 26 - Briefings & Rules of Engagement

Before going in, "the battalion commander....defined the operation goals: 2000 dead terrorists, not just stopping the missiles launched at (Israeli) communities around the Gaza Strip. He claimed this would bring Hamas down to its knees....No one said 'kill innocents.' " But orders were for the army to kill everyone thought to be suspect.

"The issue of civilians became irrelevant as soon as you'd enter combat - the rules change. You shoot. It's war. In war no questions are asked."

Testimony 27 - House Demolitions

Suspect houses were targeted with white phosphorous shells "to serve as an igniter, simply make it all go up in flames," and in the process destroy weapons and tunnels.

Testimony 28 - Rules of Engagement

Neighborhoods were cleaned out, areas "where infantry had not yet entered." After going in, "terrorists" were identified and killed. "We kept working with snipers, infantry 'straw widows,' where they identify targets for you and you fire shells....You shoot even if (targets not) identified."

Testimony 29 - House Demolitions & Bombardment

In controlled areas, orders were "to raze as much as possible....Such razing is a euphemism for intentional, systematic destruction, enabling total visibility....so no one could hide anything from us" and operational objectives could be accomplished - destroying suspected booby-trapped houses and tunnels. Also leaving behind minimal infrastructure after the operation was concluded.

The destruction in Gaza "was on a totally different scale (than anything) I had previously known....the ground was....constantly shaking. I mean, there were blasts all the time. Explosions were heard all day long, the night was filled with flashes, an intensity we had never experienced before. Several D-9 bulldozers were operating around the clock, constantly busy....What is a suspect spot? It means you decided it was suspect and could take out all your rage at it."

Testimony 30 - House Demolitions & Bombardment

Most "mosques were demolished. (Our) brigade commander (said) we should not hesitate to target mosques. Nothing is immune, nothing and no area. He explicitly mentioned mosques....If you see sand bags, you shoot without the shadow of a doubt....You run into a curve in the road and know there's an angle from which you cannot monitor a certain area, first you shoot, see if anything happens, then you proceed....If you don't know what's in a building, you fire at it. Such were the general instructions...."

Testimony 31 - Rules of Engagement

"We weren't told outright to shoot anything we saw moving but that was the implication. I asked, 'What if I see a girl outside?' She has no business being outside. 'So what do I do?' Check if she's armed - then shoot her." For anyone engaged at short range, it's "understood from (our) briefing that it's better to shoot first and ask questions later."

Testimony 32 - Briefings

"There was less talk of values, more of professionalism, not a moral issue." The atmosphere placed little value on Palestinian lives. Jewish ones were another matter.

Testimony 33 - Rules of Engagement

"We fired rounds at houses in front of us (in) which we didn't see movement....But these were houses that we identified as looking out over us. We fired into windows, before the ceasefire....everyone started shooting. I heard this happened in other areas as well."

Testimony 34 - Rules of Engagement

Even though Israeli forces faced no resistance on entering Gaza, orders were that everyone is suspect. "There is no such thing as suspect arrest procedure. If I detect a (possible threatening) suspect - I shoot (to kill)."

Commander briefings stressed "aggressive action," protecting soldier lives, and having no regard for civilians. They're all suspects.

Testimony 35 - Vandalism

Soldiers "took out notebooks and text books and ripped them. One guy smashed cupboards for kicks, out of boredom....The deputy company commander's staff wrote 'Death to Arabs' on their walls." Lip service only was paid to looting. Don't ask, don't tell was how it was.

Testimony 36 - Rabbinate Unit

They gave pep talks and handed out booklets about "the importance of serving the People of Israel who have been persecuted all these years and (are) now back in (their) homeland and need to fight for it." The usual hot button issues were mentioned - the Holocaust, defending God, and the rights of Israeli Jews. Arab ones don't matter.

Testimony 37 - House Demolitions & Vandalism

Houses were entered with live gunfire, grenades, and other destructive force. Extensive damage was done. Soldiers inside did much more. They had no regard for "even the simplest most basic sanitary stuff like going to the toilet, basic hygiene. I mean you could see they had defecated anywhere and left the stuff lying around." No one cared.

Testimony 38 - Rules of Engagement & House Demolitions

"The amount of destruction was incredible....Not one stone left standing over another. You see plenty of fields, hothouses, orchards, everything devastated. Totally ruined. It's terrible. It's surreal....in my own company there were plenty of people who fired just for the hell of it, at houses, water tanks. They love targeting water tanks." D-9 operators also...."love to demolish, and when the commander sends them off, 'Go take down that house,' they're happy."

Testimony 39 - Vandalism

Doors inside houses were blasted open. Contents were smashed, television and computer screens. Things of value were looted. "The guys would simply break stuff. Some were out to destroy and trash the whole time. They drew a disgusting drawing on the wall. They threw out sofas. They took down (pictures) just to shatter (them)." They did what they wanted. Who'd stop them? The assumption was "everyone is a terrorist (so) it's legitimate to do just anything we please."

Testimony 40 - Bombardment

Targeted houses were bombed, destroying others nearby. Indiscriminate bombing was commonplace.

Testimony 41 - Bombardment

Helicopters and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) were directed against suspect houses. "I'm not certain what is considered suspect and what proper rules of engagement are. We responded to anything that seemed suspect to us." In one area, all houses were fired on. "There was massive fire."

Testimony 42 - Home Demolitions & Use of White Phosphorous

Shells were fired at a house suspected of being booby-trapped. "Then some order arrived to ignite it. The way to do that was to actually fire phosphorous shells from above. (It) ignites the whole house."

Testimony 43 - Rules of Engagement

"One guy said he just couldn't finish this operation without killing someone. So he killed someone...." It was war.

Testimony 44 - Vandalism

Houses were cleared with live fire and people inside taken away. There was no control. Soldiers did what they wanted. At times, they "went crazy." They did "unnecessary damage to property, smashing stuff, looting. Commanders didn't care.

Testimony 45 - House Demolitions & Vandalism

More demolitions. Another neighborhood ruined. "Some of the houses had been demolished because they sheltered armed combatants, other(s) suspected of having tunnels underneath, yet others blocked our line of vision....they were taken down, whole orchards were razed."

Testimony 46 - Vandalism

"In primary searches for weapons, we go in and then suddenly a guy opens a cupboard, sees china and begins to throw it all on the floor (to) show it to the Arabs." Stuff was thrown out windows and walls written on also.

Testimony 47 - House Demolitions

"It was amazing." So many were destroyed that "At first you go in and see lots of houses. A week later, after the razing, you see the horizon further away, almost to the sea. They simply took down all the houses around so the terrorists would have nowhere else to hide." All around you see rubble.

Testimony 48 - Briefings

Briefing stressed "going in there and getting things back in order," that, of course, meant terrorizing Gazans into submission. "An army that does these things, that takes apart houses because there was sporadic shooting nearby, is an unprofessional army."

Testimony 49 - Bombardment

Soldiers were forbidden to go up on rooftops because helicopters, planes, and UAVs fired on persons detected there. "Whoever climbed to the roof was doomed."

Testimony 50 - Rules of Engagement

All Palestinians were suspects, so even ones waving white flags were shot. "The soldiers were made to understand that their lives (mattered), and that there was no way (they'd risk being killed) for the sake of leaving civilians the benefit of the doubt. We were allowed to fire in order to spare our lives." Orders were to shoot at everyone, "even an old woman - take them down."

Testimony 51 - Human Shields

Some soldiers were worried about moral issues like using people as human shields. "Personally I'm unhappy about it....I certainly don't intend to serve in the Occupied Territories any longer....I'm not feeling good....having been there and taken part in (operations making him) very uneasy....You always have another option."

Testimony 52 - House Demolitions

"....most of the destruction that went on....was not necessary....the battalion commander said that as far as we were concerned this was war."

Testimony 53 - Rules of Engagement

...."at a certain time soldiers (use) a machine gun, rifle and grenade launcher (to) take a house....and target it for a blast of deterrent fire. The idea is to sow confusion, keep shifting the direction of warfare."

Testimony 54 - Atmosphere

"Going in, the atmosphere was 'gung-ho' and the whole country was behind us. While inside, all of that disappeared....Listen, coming out of there I did not feel any heroic elation or sacrifice, just that it was sickening and unglamorous and boring and stupid. People suffered....human beings become nothing....It is impossible to conceive of such an extent of suffering as that which we inflicted on Gaza....that is what I take with me in particular, how people can be indifferent to suffering or see it as trivial."

Final Comments

Defense minister Ehud Barak claims Israel has "the most moral army in the world." The above testimonies say otherwise. They show:

-- deep moral degradation;

-- insensitivity to human lives and suffering;

-- clear evidence of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction for its own sake;

-- civilians targeted like combatants;

-- women and children treated no differently than men;

-- the elderly, the very young, it didn't matter;

-- being Palestinian makes them terrorists;

-- rules of engagement were "shoot first and ask questions later" if at all.

For over six decades, Israel defiled international law by committing the most egregious crimes of war and against humanity against Palestinian civilians and neighboring Arab states. The world community hardly blinks.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on Republic Broadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening.

Stephen Lendman is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Stephen Lendman

Index - Uruknet Publications

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"Neoconned" and "Neoconned Again", two new collections of essays

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Israeli Torture of Palestinian Detainees (and others)

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:: ONU - XX Assemblea Generale (1965):

La XX Assemblea Generale dell’ONU (1965) dichiara "la legittimità della lotta da parte dei popoli sotto oppressione coloniale, per esercitare il loro diritto all' autodeter-
minazione e all'indipendenza".
Inoltre, l'Assemblea invita "tutti gli Stati a fornire assistenza morale e materiale ai movimenti di liberazione nazionale nei territori coloniali".

:: ONU - Risoluzione 1514

"L'Assemblea Generale dichiara che: la soggezione dei popoli a dominio straniero, conquista e asservimento costituisce una negazione dei diritti umani fondamentali, è contraria alla Carta delle Nazioni Unite ed è un impedimento alla promozione della pace e della cooperazione mondiali.
Tutti i popoli hanno diritto all' autodeter-
minazione; in virtù di tale diritto essi devono liberamente determinare il loro status politico e liberamente perseguire il loro sviluppo economico, sociale e culturale".

:: Convenzione di Ginevra, Protocollo Addizionale I (1977):

La lotta armata può essere usata, come ultima risorsa, come mezzo per esercitare il diritto all' autodeter-
minazione.

:: Tribunale penale internazionale

In base allo Statuto del Tribunale penale internazionale, sono definiti “crimini di guerra”:
(1) attacchi lanciati intenzionalmente contro popolazione civili in quanto tali o contro civili che non prendano direttamente parte alle ostilità;
(4) attacchi lanciati intenzionalmente nella consapevolezza che gli stessi avranno come conseguenza la perdita di vite umane tra la popolazione civile, e lesioni a civili o danni a proprietà civili ovvero danni diffusi duraturi e gravi all’ambiente naturale che siano manifestamente eccessivi rispetto all’insieme dei concreti e diretti i vantaggi militari previsti.

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Torturing Palestinian Detainees

Stephen Lendman

November 14, 2007

B'Tselem is the conservative Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories with a well-deserved reputation for accuracy. A group of prominent academics, attorneys, journalists and Knesset members founded the organization in 1989 to "document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel" to convince government officials to respect human rights and comply with international law.

Its work covers a wide range of human rights issues that include detentions and torture. In May, 2007, it prepared a detailed 100 page report titled "Absolute Prohibition: The Torture and Ill-treatment of Palestinian Detainees" that's now available in print for those who request it. This article summarizes its findings that represent a joint effort by B'Tselem and HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual that was founded in 1988 to support Palestinian rights during the first intifada in the late 1980s.

Since the early 1990s, B'Tselem published more than ten reports on Israelis' use of torture and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees. This is the latest one in an effort to raise public awareness and help abolish these abhorrent practices. The findings are based on testimonies solicited from a small "unrepresentative" sample of 73 Palestinian West Bank residents who were arrested between July, 2005 and January, 2006, agreed to tell their stories, and who met predetermined criteria for the study.

They were chosen from the names of 4460 Palestinian detainees whose relatives contacted HaMoked for help to locate their whereabouts. HaMoked provides this service because Israel violates international law and its own military regulations by denying family members any information about who was detained or where they're being held. From its many years investigating Israeli torture, B'Tselem believes the information in this report accurately reflects the types and extent of Israeli abusive practices.

Torture, abuse or degrading treatment are abhorrent in any form for any reason, and long-standing international law forbids these practices under all circumstances. The four 1949 Geneva Conventions banned any form of "physical or mental coercion" and affirmed sick, wounded, war prisoners and civilians must be treated humanely. All four conventions have a common thread called Common Article Three that requires all non-combatants to be treated humanely at all times. There are no exceptions for any reasons, and violations are grave breaches of Geneva and other international law that constitute crimes of war and against humanity.

Nonetheless, the 1987 Landau Commission (headed by retired Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Moshe Landau) cited the "necessary defense" provision in the Penal Law to recommend using "psychological and moderate physical pressure," to obtain evidence for convictions in criminal proceedings. Its justification was that coercive interrogation tactics were necessary against "hostile terrorist activity" it defined to include not just threats or acts of violence but all activities related to Palestinian nationalism.

Later in September, 1999, Israel's High Court of Justice (HCJ) responded to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel's petition (PCATI) and issued a landmark decision (reversing Landau recommendations) and barred the use of torture against detainees. It was, however, a hollow gesture as at the same time it ruled pressure and a measure of discomfort were legitimate interrogation side-effects but should not be used to break a detainee's spirit. It then added a giant loophole allowing interrogators to use physical force and avoid prosecutions in "ticking time bomb" cases even though international law allows no exceptions, and Israeli authorities could claim that excuse for anyone in custody.

Since its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (the OPT) in 1967, Israel imprisoned over 650,000 Palestinians according to the Palestinian peace and justice group MIFTA. That's equivalent to about one-sixth of the OPT's population today. The security services currently hold around ten to twelve thousand Palestinian men, women and children in its prisons under deplorable conditions with many under administrative detention without charge. Based on earlier assessments by Hamoked, B'Tselem estimates as many as 85% of them are subjected to torture and mistreatment in custody even though most of them aren't accused of terrorism. These practices are routinely and systematically used against political activists, students accused of being pro-Islam, sheikhs and religious leaders, people in Islamic charitable organizations, relatives of wanted individuals or any man, woman or child Israel targets for any reason.

B'Tselem's May, 2007 report states that the Israeli Security Agency (ISA - formerly called the General Security Service or GSS) admits to using "exceptional" methods that include "physical pressure" of interrogation in "ticking bomb" cases that can be used as an excuse to abuse anyone. In addition, law enforcement officials openly admit harsh measures are approved retroactively so that Palestinian detainee rights can be freely violated without fear of recrimination. In other words, ISA interrogators know the rules - don't ask permission, use any methods you wish, and don't worry about the consequences after the fact. There won't be any, and it shows in what detainees told B'Tselem.

They reported being "softened up" for interrogation from the moment of their arrest to when ISA agents took over. Abuses at the outset included beatings, painful binding, swearing, humiliation and denial of basic needs. The ISA procedure then included seven key forms of abuse that violated the detainees' dignity and bodily integrity. They were inflicted to break their spirit, but international law calls it torture when it includes verified intent, severe pain or suffering, improper motive, and involvement of the state. All those conditions apply to Israeli abusive practices that included:

-- isolation that prohibited detainees from contact with family, an attorney or ICRC representatives; this exacerbated detainees' sense of powerlessness by creating a situation in which they're completely at the mercy of interrogators; it's also known to cause them serious psychological harm when continued for extended periods;

-- psychological pressure from solitary confinement in "putrid, stifling cells three to six square meters in size" with no windows or access to daylight and fresh air; a fixed overhead light on 24 hours a day; walls made of rough plaster making them uncomfortable or impossible to lean against; a water faucet on one wall and some cells with sinks; a usually dirty and damp mattress and "filthy putrid" blankets on the floor; nothing else in cells; reading and writing materials not allowed; in many cells, toilets were holes in the floor; detainees denied all human contact except for guards and interrogators.

-- physical conditions in solitary confinement cells are regulated in Criminal Procedure Regulations issued by Israel's Minister of Internal Security with the approval of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee; they don't apply to "security detainees," however, so cells have no bed, chairs and most often no sink; nothing else provided including use of a telephone and right to have visitors provide items; cells were too small to walk around in, and no daily outside exercise was allowed;

-- detainees weakened from lack of physical activity, sleep deprivation and inadequate food; they're denied basic needs like food and liquids, medicines or the right to relieve themselves; throughout long hours of interrogation, they're shackled to a chair unable to move hands or legs even minimally; they had nutritional deficiencies and food received was inadequate, cold, improperly cooked, flavorless and often repulsive in appearance; many detainees resisted eating as long as possible;

-- shackling in the "shabah" position that's the prolonged and painful binding of detainees' hands and feet to a standard-sized unupholstered, metal frame, rigid plastic chair fixed to the floor with no armrests; hands tightly bound behind the back in adjustable plastic handcuffs and connected to a ring at the back of the seat to stretch them uncomfortably below the backrest; legs bound to the chair's front legs; detainees were unable to get up throughout interrogation that on average lasted eight consecutive hours without a break and on the first day ran 12 hours; later in the interrogation period, sessions shortened to four or five hours;

-- interrogations only for a small portion of this time; for most if it, interrogators were out of the room; at those times air conditioning turned up to uncomfortably cold levels; most often only one meal served during a day's interrogation; very sparing toilet privileges allowed; nearly all detainees complained of severe back, neck, shoulder, arms and wrist pain during interrogation; numbness or loss of sensation in limbs also reported; the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) ruled in 1999 that all "shabah" shackling procedures are unlawful since they violate rules for "reasonable and fair interrogation" and injure detainees' dignity and well-being; ISA interrogators ignore the ruling with impunity;

-- cursing and humiliating strip searches of detainees as well as shouting, spitting in the face and other related abusive practices; detainees forced to strip naked and submit to body searches while being yelled at and mocked;

-- intimidations made to include threats of physical torture (called "military interrogation"), arrest of family members and destruction of homes;

-- using informants ("asafirs") to get information that's not abusive as such but is a very questionable method following preparatory "softening up."

B'Tselem then discussed "special" interrogation methods that mostly involve physical violence:

-- sleep deprivation for 30 to 40 hours during which detainees left painfully shackled in interrogation rooms; guards frequently awakened detainees between midnight and 5AM; various type oppressive noises used at night to interfere with sleep;

-- use of "dry" beatings that included punching, kicking all parts of the body, striking with rifle butts and face slapping; detainees hit with clubs, helmets and other objects; heads slammed against a wall, floor or hard surface; beatings inflicted when detainees' hands were bound behind their back, and they were blindfolded; additional beatings during physical inspections with their hands cuffed;

-- painful binding with handcuffs or other devices tight enough to cut off blood flow circulation and cause swelling;

-- sharp twisting of the head forcefully and suddenly sideways or backwards;

-- forced "frog" crouching on tiptoes with cuffed hands behind the back accompanied by shoving or beating until detainees lost their balance and fell forward or backward; this method inflicts pain by increasing pressure on leg muscles and also hurts wrists after falling;

-- use of forced "banana" position that involves bending the back in a painful arch while the body is extended horizontally to the floor on a backless chair with arms and feet bound beneath it.

Prison killings also occur like the October 22 one at the notorious Ketziot Detention Center in the Negev desert where 2300 Palestinians are held under very harsh conditions. It happened at 2AM when prison guards began searching tents and strip-searching inmates in a deliberate middle of the night provocation. Prisoners resisted and about 550 members of the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) Metsada riot dispersal unit responded with excessive force by beating them with plastic clubs and rifle butts as well as firing rubber-coated bullets, live ammunition, tear gas and stun grenades that set tents ablaze and caused as many as 250 inmate injuries and at least nine serious ones. During the assault, Mohammed Al Ashqar was killed after being shot in the head.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) maintains that prisoner abuse, repressive tactics and killing Palestinians is official Israeli policy that's become even worse under current IPS director, Beni Kaniak. PCHR reports he instituted these punitive measures:

-- reductions in food and cleaning materials rations;

-- additional items prisoners forbidden to have;

-- confiscated prisoners' money and prevented none sent from families to reach them;

-- widespread use of solitary confinement;

-- periodic movement of prisoners to new facilities to prevent any sense of stability;

-- repeated unannounced harsh late night raids like the October 22 one at Ketziot.

These tactics and Palestinian detainee torture and abuse are condoned "under the auspices of the Israeli law enforcement system." B'Tselem reported since 2001, Israel's State Attorney's Office got over 500 complaints of these practices but investigated none of them. Overall, instances of detainee mistreatment are rarely looked into and even fewer ever result in indictments. Further, despite its 1999 ruling, Israel's High Court of Justice (HCJ) aids ISA interrogations by refusing to accept even one of hundreds of petitions brought before it for redress. HCJ also lets ISA conceal information from detainees that abusive orders were issued against them or that legal petitions were filed on their behalf. It further allows evidence obtained under torture to be used in criminal proceedings.

B'Tselem and HaMoked are committed to ending Israel's use of torture against Palestinian detainees. They cite the example of the US Army's September, 2006 Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations as a proper guide to conducting interrogations even though authorized physical and psychological brutality became official administration policy under George Bush post-9/11. Nonetheless, this manual covers 18 interrogation methods experience showed work under varying situations and conditions. They range from establishing trust between interrogator and detainee to the use of ruses and psychological manipulation. In all cases, they don't involve torture or other unlawful practices.

It's one thing to have rules and laws and another to abide by them. The US under George Bush condones and practices "the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency" according to once secret Department of Justice (DOJ) legal opinions. It's no different in Israel where the ISA systematically and routinely uses banned interrogation measures with impunity. B'Tselem and HaMoked want these practices ended and urge the Israeli government to halt them by enacting enforceable laws "strictly prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" in accordance with international law.

They further recommend every complaint of abuse and torture be investigated by an independent body, persons found to have broken the law to be prosecuted, and that "every detainee receives minimum humane conditions."

Israel claims to be a civilized state. It's about time it acted like one.

Stephen Lendman is Research Associate of the Centre for research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at www.sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on www.TheMIcroEffect.com Mondays at noon US central time.

:: Article nr. 38209 sent on 14-nov-2007 19:11 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=38209

:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

Israel-Hamas Negotiate Truce Deal

2009-03-22T06:26:00.022-04:00

Jan. 17: An Israeli army mobile artillery piece fires towards targets in the Gaza Strip, from the Israel side of the border with Gaza.

Jan. 16: Palestinian drives his car through burning tires left by Palestinian stone-throwers during clashes with Israeli troops.

Jan. 14: An explosion from an Israeli airstrike is seen on the outskirts of Gaza City.
Jan. 16: A controlled explosion of a Palestinian house is seen as Israeli tanks move inside the Gaza Strip.
Jan. 15: Israeli armored vehicles drive near Atatra inside the Gaza Strip.
Jan. 15: Smoke rises following an explosion caused by Israeli military operations is seen through a window.

Ceasefire in Gaza

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,480367,00.html

Israel Security Cabinet Approves Cease-Fire in Gaza as Olmert Says Objectives Achieved

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced Saturday, folllwing a Security Cabinent vote in favor of a cease-fire, said that the goals of Israel's offensive in Gaza had been achieved.

Israel has no immediate plans to withdraw troops from Gaza, but the cease-fire likely will entail the end of Israeli attacks on Hamas now that the militant Palestinian group appears to have been disabled to the point that there is less of a threat of rocket attacks on southern Israel.

Olmert said in a televised address that Israel's "goals have been achieved, and even more." Fighting stopped at 2 a.m. local time (7 p.m. EST) but Israel will keep troops on the ground for the time being, Olmert said.

But Hamas leaders have repeated that it will not respect any cease-fire as long as Israel remains inside Gaza.

More than 1,100 Palestinians have been killed in the three weeks of violence, according to Palestinian and U.N. officials. Thirteen Israelis have also died.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Saturday that a unilateral cease-fire should be accompanied by a timetable for withdrawal, and a Hamas spokesman said the group would not stop fighting until Israel is out of Gaza.

As the world waited Saturday for the cease-fire vote in the Israeli Security Cabinent, Israeli forces kept up the country's punishing three-week-long campaign by pounding dozens of Hamas targets as the army kept up pressure on the Islamic militant group.

The military said it struck some 50 Hamas targets. But one shelling attack struck a U.N. school packed with refugees fleeing the fighting, killing two Palestinians and drawing a sharp condemnation from the United Nations. Israel had no comment on the incident, the latest in a string of attacks to hit a U.N. installation.

Click here for photos of the conflict.

Israel was pressing ahead with its offensive hours before a vote by its leaders late Saturday on whether to accept an Egyptian-brokered truce.

A senior Israeli official said Saturday that Israel plans to halt its three-week-old Gaza offensive because it has achieved its goals, Reuters reported.

Video

Photo Essays

Links

Rice Presses Mideast Leaders for 'Durable' Solution in Gaza

"The goal is to announce, subject to the approval of the cabinet, a suspension of military activities because we believe our goals have been attained," the official, who asked not to be named, said.

The vote follows Friday's signing of a "memorandum of understanding" in Washington between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni that calls for expanded intelligence cooperation to prevent Hamas from rearming. Livni called the deal, reached on the final working day of the Bush administration, "a vital complement for a cessation of hostility."

Israel's 12-member Security Cabinet was expected to approve the Egyptian proposal, under which fighting would stop immediately for 10 days. Israeli forces would remain in Gaza and the territory's border crossings with Israel and Egypt would remain closed until security arrangements are made to prevent Hamas arms smuggling.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev saying he was hopeful that Israel is "entering the endgame" on its Gaza offensive.

A "sustained and durable" stop to Hamas rocket fire on southern Israel was near, Regev said. If approved, a truce summit would follow in Cairo with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Under the deal, Egypt would shut down weapons smuggling routes with international help and discussions on opening Gaza's blockaded border crossings — Hamas' key demand — would take place at a later date. It remains unclear whether Hamas supports the proposal.

The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a non-binding resolution demanding an "immediate and durable and fully respected cease fire" in Gaza on Friday night, the Jerusalem Post reported.

The U.S., Israel, Nauru and Venezuela voting against the resolution, because they hoped for a stronger statement.

Israel launched the offensive on Dec. 27 to try to halt near-daily Hamas rocket attacks against southern Israel. Palestinian medics say the fighting has killed at least 1,140 Palestinians — roughly half of them civilians — and Israel's bombing campaign caused massive destruction in the Gaza Strip. Thirteen Israelis have been killed, four by rocket fire and nine in ground battles in Gaza, according to the government.

In the meantime, there was no slowdown in the offensive. A total of 11 Palestinians were killed in battles throughout Gaza Saturday, Palestinian medics said.

Israeli warplanes dropped bombs throughout the night on suspected smuggling tunnels in the southern border town of Rafah. The bombs could be heard whistling through the air, shook the ground upon impact and left a dusty haze in the air.

In the northern town of Beit Lahiya, an Israeli shell struck a U.N. school where 1,600 people had sought shelter to flee the fighting, said Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.

He said several shells struck the school compound, including a direct hit on the top floor of the building. The shell killed two boys, and turned a room on the building's into a blackened mess of charred concrete and twisted metal bed frames. Near Gaza City, Palestinian officials said three more civilians were killed by a naval shell, while a militant was killed in an airstrike.

Gunness condemned the school attack, noting the U.N. has given Israel the coordinates of all its operations in Gaza to avoid such violence. "There have to be investigations to see if war crimes have been committed," he said.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment, saying the matter was still under investigation. But in similar instances, including an attack that heavily damaged the U.N. headquarters in Gaza earlier this week, Israel has accused Hamas militants of staging attacks from U.N. and other civilian buildings.

The military said its planes struck 50 Hamas locations overnight, including rocket-launching sites, smuggling tunnels, weapons storehouses, bunkers and minefields. Some five rockets were fired into Israel, causing minor damage but no injuries, the army said.

Israeli troops entered a small central Gaza town and nearby housing project, taking over houses and positioning on rooftops. Hamas militants fired assault rifles, mortars and rockets at the Israeli forces in tanks and military vehicles, the sound of clashes audible from Gaza City. Warplanes fired missiles at buildings and nearby farms, witnesses said.

"A shell landed in my bedroom and we are now sitting in the kitchen. We are 17 people here," said Jihan Sarsawi, a resident of the housing project. Speaking by telephone, she said residents were trapped in their homes.

The violence followed Israeli envoy Amos Gilad's journey to Cairo on Friday. He returned to report "substantial progress" in truce talks with Egyptian mediators, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office announced. The Israeli vote comes ahead of President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday, and Israeli elections next month.

Hamas has given mixed signals about whether it would accept the cease-fire proposal. In Turkey, a spokesman for the movement, Sami Abu Zuhri, said militants would keep fighting. Hamas "will not bow to invading forces, will not raise the white flag," he said.

A Hamas official said Saturday the group will continue fighting against Israel if none of its demands for a cease-fire are met.

Apparently reacting to reports that Israel could call off its offensive and declare a unilateral cease-fire without considering Hamas demands, Beirut-based Osama Hamdan said fighting would continue.

"Today, the movement's delegation arrives in Cairo. To be clear, we have nothing new to offer. We are not going to go back to the first point in the discussions and dialogue. Either we hear what we want or the result will be continuing the confrontation on the ground," said Hamdan, who is close to movement leader Khaled Mashaal.

He added that for Israel to call a unilateral ceasefire while negotiations are underway in Cairo undermines the mediators, a reference to Egypt that has been promoting its own initiative to end the fighting and resolve the long-running crisis.

A Hamas delegation was set to arrive in Cairo Saturday amid the frenzied international diplomacy to end 22 days of fighting.

But after weeks of heavy losses, leaders inside Gaza have signaled they are ready for a deal. A Hamas delegation was headed to Cairo on Saturday for more negotiations.

"Our movement is a main player and it cannot be ignored," said Ghazi Hamad, a Gaza-based Hamas official.

Hamas, which overtook the Gaza Strip in a violent coup in June 2007, has demanded an immediate Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the opening of blockaded border crossings.

In an interview with the Israeli YNet news Web site, Livni indicated that Israel would renew its offensive if Hamas militants continued to fire rockets at Israel even after a truce agreement was reached.

"This campaign is not a one-time event," she said. "The test will be the day after. That is the test of deterrence."

Speaking in Washington, she said the deal with the U.S. was meant "to complement Egyptian actions and to end of the flow of weapons to Gaza."

The agreement outlines a framework under which the United States commits detection and surveillance equipment, as well as logistical help and training to Israel, Egypt and other nations to be used in monitoring Gaza's land and sea borders.

Earlier, Rice said she hoped European countries would work out similar bilateral agreements with Israel.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

.........................................................................

Negotiator: Israel Asks to Annex 6.8 Percent of West Bank for Peace Deal

[ Israel goes for more land grab of Palestinian lands]

Negotiator: Israel Asks to Annex 6.8 Percent of West Bank for Peace Deal

Friday, December 12, 2008

Dec. 5: Palestinian children look at a car owned by Palestinians that was set on fire overnight by Jewish settlers in the West Bank town of Hebron.

JERUSALEM — Israel proposed to annex 6.8 percent of the West Bank and to take in a few thousand refugees under a peace deal, but it has not revealed its position on the most contentious issue — the future of Jerusalem, the chief Palestinian negotiators said Friday night.

Ahmed Qureia said the Palestinian side did not consider the ideas presented on annexation and the return of some Palestinians to be acceptable.

Speaking for the first time in detail about yearlong U.S.-backed talks that failed to produce an agreement, Qureia's comments appeared aimed, in part, at providing a record of the Israeli position ahead of leadership changes in Israel and the United States.

Click here for photos.

Barack Obama assumes the U.S. presidency Jan. 20. Israel holds elections Feb. 10, and polls suggest hard-line opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu could become the next prime minister.

Netanyahu opposes large-scale territorial concessions to the Palestinians and has said he would not continue the negotiations in their current format. He says he would try to focus on improving the Palestinian economy instead.

The office of outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declined to address Qureia's comments. However, aides noted recent speeches in which Olmert said Israel would have to withdraw from much of the land it captured in the 1967 Mideast War, including the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem.

Qureia told Palestinian reporters that Israel wants to keep four blocs of Jewish settlements in the West Bank — Ariel, Maaleh Adumim, Givat Zeev and Efrat-Gush Etzion. He said Israel initially proposed to annex 7.3 percent of the territory, then reduced that to 6.8 percent.

Israel offered to give some of its own territory as compensation, but not an equal trade in size and quality, Qureia said. He added that some of the areas Israel wants to annex would be crucial to a viable Palestinian state envisioned as the goal of the peace negotiations.

Israeli officials have talked publicly about keeping some settlements in exchange for other land, but have not given any specifics. Qureia has said in the past the Palestinians are willing to consider a land swap, but on a much smaller scale than he outlined Friday.

Photo Essays

West Bank Clash

Turning to Jerusalem, Qureia said the Palestinians repeatedly raised their demand for a division of the city but were never given Israel's view.

Olmert, who will step down after the elections, has said Israel will have to give up some Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. However, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, a member of Olmert's governing coalition, has threatened to quit if Jerusalem is discussed in the talks.

Qureia said Olmert's offer during talks to take in 5,000 Palestinian refugees over five years was rejected. But he added that the Palestinians do not seek the return of all refugees and their descendants, a group that numbers several million.

"To say that not a single refugee would be allowed back or that all the refugees should be allowed back is not a solution," he said. "We should reach a mutual position on this issue."

Israeli leaders have adamantly refused to accept large numbers of Palestinians, saying mass repatriation would destroy the Jewish character of Israel.

The negotiations were launched a year ago, at a U.S.-hosted Mideast conference in Annapolis, Md. Since then, Qureia and Livni have met repeatedly, in parallel to talks between Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Qureia said he hopes the new American president will make solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a priority. "We hope that we will not have to wait" for intensive U.S. involvement, he said

Gaza Ops Rage, Death Toll Mounts

Civilians Caught In Urban Combat - Gaza Debate

2009-03-22T06:05:00.004-04:00

March 19, 2009, 7:45 pm

Civilians Caught in Urban Combat

By The Editors

(Photo: Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images) Palestinian civilians ran for cover during an Israeli air strike in the Jabalia refugee camp, in the northern Gaza Strip, on Dec. 29, 2008.

Since Israel ended its assault on Gaza, Palestinians and international rights groups have accused it of using excessive force that resulted in a high number of civilian casualties. The Israeli military has denied these charges, but now testimony is emerging from soldiers, indicating that some of these claims have merit.

Although rules of engaging potential enemy combatants exist, in the heat of battle they often become murky. Fighting in an urban environment where the enemy is not in uniform or carrying arms but slipping between houses and among civilians presents an especially difficult situation for soldiers.

Are there rules of engagement that can minimize civilian casualties?

Andrew Exum, Center for a New American Security
Sarah Holewinski, Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict
Micah Zenko, Council on Foreign Relations
Michael E. O’Hanlon, Brookings Institution

Interpret the Situation

Andrew Exum is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security. He is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and blogs at Abu Muqawama.

The recent Israeli campaign to end rocket fire originating from Gaza left 1,300 Palestinians dead and many wondering about the morality of such seemingly “disproportionate” operations. Questions of morality in warfare, though, are notoriously difficult to referee and inspire more emotion than sober thought.

A related question to ask — and one more accessible to traditional tools of measurement — would be one concerning effectiveness. In pursuing military options that carry with them such a high human cost, did the Israel Defense Force achieve operational successes at the expense of Israel’s long-term strategic interests?

In modern conflict against violent nonstate actors, rules of engagement may need to be refined for operational effectiveness.

In modern conflict against violent nonstate actors like Hamas, Hezbollah or guerrilla groups in Iraq and Afghanistan, it may be in the best interests of the dominant military actor to adhere to rules of engagement that go beyond the laws of land warfare and international conventions. As the United States military has discovered in both Iraq and Afghanistan, civilian casualties have a direct effect on the effectiveness of operations in the strategic sense.

Traditionally, Israel — much like the United States — has subscribed to a Jominian concept of warfare that privileges the destruction of the enemy’s fighting forces above other considerations. In the Clausewitzian model, though, the supreme question of war has to do with whether or not military force served its purpose in advancing national political aims.

The time may arrive when Israel decides that highly kinetic, enemy-centric military operations do not necessarily serve Israel’s longer-term strategic aims. Instead, Israel may want to adopt lessons learned from the United States experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and place a higher emphasis on the prevention of civilian casualties at the expense of lethality and force protection.

Weighing the Cost of War

Sarah Holewinski is the executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, an organization that works with warring parties to help civilians they have been harmed in combat.

Rules of Engagement will never completely prevent civilian casualties unless the first rule is “don’t discharge your weapon.” But in the real world, these rules about when and how to approach a potential enemy combatant can significantly limit civilian harm if planned properly and followed.

The lesson the U.S. learned in Iraq in 2007 was: know the mission, review the rules, make smart changes, save lives.

Just look at the example that Gen. Peter Chiarelli set in Iraq in 2007. He saw that checkpoints, while necessary to stop the speedy flow of traffic near bases or combat operations, were harming too many locals. The ordinary Iraqi didn’t know when to stop, how to stop and was too frequently being killed in his car in the resulting confusion. With General Chiarelli’s new requirements about giving better warnings, civilian casualties dropped. The lesson learned was: know the mission, review the rules, make smart changes, save lives.

The Laws of Armed Conflict tell warring parties that hitting military targets has to be proportionate to, or worth, the potential cost to civilian lives. Certain weapons cannot be used because they’re too deadly to a broad population. If the mission is to take out a weapons installation located in a densely populated area, that objective must be weighed against the cost of obliterating homes, destroying families and causing humanitarian suffering. You need to think about what weapons and tactics might best shield civilians from greatest harm.

Unfortunately the laws of war don’t tell soldiers how to weigh those factors, but a good commander knows the whole point of rules of engagement is to burrow down into where and when and how to fight. Getting that wrong is far too costly.

To Protect Noncombatants, Seek a Ceasefire

Micah Zenko is a fellow in the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The recent revelations from Israeli combat pilots and ground troops that their commanders granted permissive rules of engagement during incursions into the Gaza Strip comes as no surprise given the chaotic nature of offensive combat operations and the tactics employed by Hamas that often do not respect the laws of war.

Even the most carefully crafted rules, however, are useless if they are not utilized in split-second, life-or-death situations.

The Pentagon defines the rules as “directives issued by competent military authority that delineate the circumstances and limitations under which United States forces will initiate and/or continue combat engagement with other forces encountered.” These directives provide guidance to commanders in answering four questions about using military force: when, where, against whom and how.

In an era where international perceptions of whether a state is morally and legally right to use force, and whether the scope and intensity of that force is commensurate with achieving the intended political and military objectives, the proper rules of engagement are as essential for success as highly advanced weapons systems. Even the most carefully crafted rules, however, are useless if they are not utilized by pilots and soldiers in split-second, life-or-death situations, and consistently enforced by their commanding officers.

In the future, the surest way to prevent incidences alleged by the Israeli soldiers from ever happening is to exhaust all avenues short of war to reach a ceasefire with Hamas. If Israel believes it is necessary to reignite the conflict, then according to some of its own combat veterans it will need to revisit its rules of engagement and make certain they are followed.

The Problem Lay in the Strategy

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Whatever the rules of engagement, Israel’s soldiers did not perform notably worse than we Americans did in the early years of the Iraq war or the Afghanistan mission. In fact, in all three cases, the soldiers have been extremely careful by historical standards.

That said, there have been differences across and within these cases. In Iraq, commanders emphasized care and restraint in the use of force more as time went on than they did from 2003 to 2005. In Afghanistan, we have used air strikes somewhat indiscriminately, and that continued even through much of 2008.

Israel’s overall strategy was more problematic than the specific performance of troops or the rules of engagement.

In Gaza, my view is that Israel’s overall strategy was more problematic than the specific performance of troops or the rules of engagement. Israel did not, in my view, have any realistic chance of killing most Hamas leaders or disarming Hamas in its operation (notably, in a somewhat similar operation in Lebanon in 2006, Israel did only temporary damage to Hezbollah, as its own leaders now publicly admit). Rather, Israel wished to convey its willingness to use force to defend its people and territory — to “reestablish deterrence” as its leaders like to say.

Its hope was that Hamas would be convinced not to attack in the future even if it had weapons to do so. Israel also wanted to send a message to the region that, in effect, no land-for-peace deal is possible if it leaves Tel Aviv vulnerable to similar kinds of attacks coming out of the West Bank. Once these decisions were made, and once Israel decided that it needed several weeks of combat including a ground incursion to drive the points home, the level of Palestinian fatalities that resulted became more or less inevitable.

I think Israel could have accomplished the same goal after perhaps a week to 10 days of fighting — and that issue, rather than debates about the rules of engagement for its troops, is the crux of the matter. At least, Israel did not feel it needed to fight for 2 or 3 months to reestablish deterrence. The situation could have been better, but it also certainly could have been worse.

Debate: Comments on Israelis vs Civilian Non-Combatants

2009-03-22T05:58:00.005-04:00

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/civilians-caught-in-urban-combat/

Comments to post above:

From 1 to 25 of 106 Comments

1 2 3 ... 5 Next »

1. March 19, 2009 8:22 pm Link

The IDF’s targeting of civilians in Gaza is not opinion but fact. Not one, but two UN schools were fairly precisely shelled with white phosphorous rounds. At the very least hundreds, but most likely thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Most likely the vast majority of those are civilians in the purest sense of the word - women and children. Thousands have been wounded. Entire families have been buried alive under collapsing buildings, thousands upon thousands have been cut off from medical services, many have lost what little they owned.
Israel makes war on a captive civilian population with no access or control of its own borders, a population that has no real means of defense. The weapons that Israel uses in this campaign should never be used in a densely populated civilian area. It would be as if the New York Police Department leveled several public housing complexes with artillery to root out drug dealers.
Let’s discard the fiction that the IDF ever intended to minimize civilian casualties - what we have witnessed in Gaza is a fairly pure expression of collective punishment - no other strategic objectives have been met except terror. The burden of proof is on Israel - it must somehow show the civilized world that it did not, in fact, intend to kill Palestinians indiscriminately. At this point, that would be difficult indeed to prove.
At Sabra and Shatila, the IDF was content to have others pull the trigger, but now Israelis are warming to this kind of work.
— Philip Nicholas
2. March 19, 2009 8:55 pm Link

“Civilians Caught in Urban Combat” is what you dumb it down to when it’s a case of deliberate murder by the supposedly moral Israeli Defense Forces that prompted this discussion? The stories in Haaretz are not about militants “hiding” among civilians as the usual American excuse - often lies - for Israel goes. But this is about Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed women and children (as they often do and goes unreported in America) without provocation as vividly described by an Israeli witness.

But even in this instance where there is a clear distinction between good and bad orders and decisions, the vehemently pro-Israeli editors of this paper clouds the issue by reducing serious Israeli crimes to simple circumstance. Of course Israel’s opponents never get that luxury of doubt.

Shameful American media protection of aggressive, murderous Zionists continues to know no bounds while the rest of the world watches in disdain and disgust at Washington’s hypocrisy and impotence. Also, it must be very nice and easy for an American editor to write “finger pointing aside” when no American finger has EVER pointed at Israel in a serious, consequential manner. You people have no conscience.
— AH
3. March 19, 2009 9:18 pm Link

It is assumed in the introduction and in the subsequent analyzes that civilian casualties in Gaza were the inadvertent result of combat with an elusive enemy: “Indeed, fighting in an urban environment where the enemy is not in uniform or carrying arms but slipping between houses and among civilians presents an especially difficult situation for soldiers. ”

Yet, reports from NGO’s, human right organizations, and UN officials on the ground paint a very different picture. One in which civilians and civilian infrastructure were deliberately targeted, or where IDF fire was so reckless that it was clear no effort to spare civilians was considered at all.

Furthermore, Gaza yet remains occupied and Israel remains the occupying power. The rules that apply are those that fall under the 4th Geneva Accords, not those of Clauswitz or the Baron de Jomini. According to International Law then, Israel should be in the dock accused of war crimes, not being portrayed as the hapless victim of Hamas as this piece does in the large part.
— Grif
4. March 19, 2009 9:58 pm Link

The number of civilian deaths and casualities is just part of the crime. The bombing of UN sites, hospitals, schools, and no coverage allowed in by reporters speaks volumes.
— julie
5. March 19, 2009 10:05 pm Link

The sad part is, there are no rules of war. There are theories, and there are schools, but there are no rules. Each command must craft its own strategy based on the playing field, and each combatant must make split-second decisions.

Certainly some actions are less desirable from a third-person observer standpoint; deliberately targeting civilians, as Hamas openly does. And some are less effective in the long term image battle, as the Israeli Army’s tactics seem to be in this case.

But it seems empty to pass moral judgment. This is war, and the only winner is he or she who returns home alive.
— Kent
6. March 19, 2009 10:05 pm Link

I am a firm believer that once at war, combat must be the application of overwhelming and maximum force. The only goal of combat is the absolute destruction of the enemy and anything else that stands in the way.

That said, there are (and can never be) rules of engagement that would protect civilians.

Protecting civilians must be ensured at the strategic levels. Political leaders must pursue strategies that minimize civilian deaths. This, most obviously, includes strategies that involve no combat at all.

The sad truth is, once at war military leaders have an obligation to follow tactics that both destroy the enemy and minimize friendly casualties. Inevitably this leads to the use of massive force, which frequently causes civilian casualties. I don’t blame military leaders or the troops for this. I blame political leaders for putting the military in this difficult position in the first place.
— mjl
7. March 19, 2009 10:20 pm Link

These four comments seem thoughtful and well-argued, yet they also share an underlying assumption that is not be accurate. They start from the assumption that Israeli forces do not want to kill civilians or destroy civilian infrastructure, and go on to address how the IDF can tweak its rules of engagement or adjust its strategy to minimize such mistakes.

Yet a reading of the testimony that emerged from the soldiers at the discussion group, as published in Haaretz, will show that much of this killing and damage was intentional. The NYT story describes a soldier ‘mistakenly’ shooting a woman and her children. The original Israeli version states clearly that the soldier knew exactly who he was shooting.

Did the soldiers in the Haaretz testimony mistakenly smash and spit on Palestinians’ family photos, mistakenly defecate in their childrens’ beds, or mistakenly smash and dismember computers, fridges and televisions?

No, they heard loud and clear the message from their superiors and from Israeli society as a whole: Your job is to teach the Palestinian people a lesson. Punish them until they lose their will to resist. The hatred and contempt behind those petty cruelties also drove the relentless killing and destruction of homes.

Teaching that lesson, breaking that will to resist, has been the mission of the IDF in the occupied territories for 42 years, and it will continue to get progressively more brutal and savage, without ever acheiving that goal, until the rest of the world finally tells Israel ‘enough’ and puts an end to this occupation.

Meanwhile, let’s not overlook our role in aiding and abetting these atrocities, with the arms, money, and diplomatic cover we provide Israel. Many of our own citizens and politicians are also egging these soldiers on. This blood is on us too.

History will judge America harshly for its ignorant blind cruelty to the Palestinian people. The rest of the world already has.
— tom scanlon
8. March 19, 2009 10:35 pm Link

The two new axis of evil in the world today, are now the IDF, and the AIPAC..
Shame, on all the Zionists and their unquestioned violence by Israel.
A plague on your house……….Israel
The AIPAC (Wolfowitz, Perle,etc.) are the promoters of this Iraq war for the benefit of Israel.
Is Iran next???
— Mannie
9. March 19, 2009 11:30 pm Link

Interesting — Israel is just realizing what the rest of the world (with the exception of the US media and politicians) knew all along: That IDF committed war crimes in Gaza. The Gaza massacre has turned me (someone who, as recently as last fall, was hoping to one day visit Israel as a tourist) into an activist against the Israeli occupation. In fact, it’s turned me into a believer in the end of Israel as it exists today. I believe that the state solution is dead and that Israel needs to cease to exist as a Jewish state and that it should grant full citizenship rights to all Palestinians currently living in the occupied territories. No more Apartheid, no more occupation, just good old democracy where one person equals one vote and everyone has equal rights.

Until that happens, I will boycott Israel, I will boycott companies with strong ties to Israel (including those owned by prominent Zionists), I will keep spreading the word about Israeli crimes far and wide (as I’ve been doing for the past three months), and do whatever else I can to ensure the end of Israel.

For the past three months, every night before going to bed, I’ve doing something that keeps me going: I apologize to Amal Abed Rabbo, who was only two when she was murdered by IDF, on January 7 of this year, for having contributed to her death with my tax dollars:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/23/gaza-children-killed-israel

I owe it to Amal to make sure I do everything in my power to end the suffering of the Palestinian children.
— Z.G.
10. March 19, 2009 11:52 pm Link

W.r.t tom scanlon’s comment above:

You’re exactly right. All one needs is to listen to Moshe Yaalon, the ex-chief of staff of Israeli Defense Forces, who in 2002 said: ‘The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.’

That’s what the IDF soldiers were doing in Gaza: helping the Palestinians understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people!
— Z.G.

Abuse Allegations in Israeli War on Gaza

2009-03-22T05:41:00.007-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/world/middleeast/21gaza.html?ref=weekinreview

More Allegations Surface in Israeli Accounts of Gaza War

Published: March 20, 2009
ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — An Israeli newspaper gave a fuller account on Friday of testimonies by soldiers alleging loose rules of engagement in Israel’s war in Gaza, which they said led to civilian deaths and wanton property destruction. One soldier asserted that extremist rabbis had told troops they were fighting a holy war.

Skip to next paragraph

In war, are there rules of engagement that can minimize civilian causalities?

A Religious War in Israel’s Army (March 22, 2009)[See post Below]

The soldier was quoted as saying that the rabbis had “brought in a lot of booklets and articles,” adding, “their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle. God brought us back to this land, and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land.”

He said that as a commander, he had tried to explain to his men that “not everyone who is in Gaza is Hamas,” and that “this war was not a war for the sanctification of the holy name, but rather one to stop the Qassam rockets.”

The account, in the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, expanded on shorter excerpts printed Thursday in Haaretz and Maariv, a center-right newspaper, and came from a taped conversation among Gaza war veterans at an institute that prepares soldiers before their service. After the materials were published, the military advocate general began an investigation into the allegations.

The director of the institute where the discussion occurred, Dany Zamir, published the accounts in his newsletter and leaked them to the newspapers to draw attention to what he considered to be troubling revelations. Mr. Zamir is known to be on the left of Israel’s political spectrum.

He is quoted in the excerpts as saying to the soldiers who spoke: “I think it would be important for parents to sit here and hear this discussion. I think it would be an instructive discussion, and also very dismaying and depressing. You are describing an army with very low norms of value, that’s the truth.”

Earlier excerpts included an account of the killing of an elderly woman by a sharpshooter and the killing of a woman and two children by another sniper.

The testimonies published Friday also spoke of the ease with which some houses were damaged.

Another soldier said: “We got an order one day — all of the equipment, all of the furniture, just clean out the whole house. We threw everything, everything out of the windows to make room. The entire contents of the house went flying out the windows.”

The soldier also alleged that when entering buildings, “we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified, we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself, where is the logic in this?”

“From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn’t fled. I didn’t really understand. On one hand they don’t really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they’re telling us they hadn’t fled so it’s their fault.”

Religious War in Israel's Army

2009-03-22T05:23:00.008-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/weekinreview/22BRONNER.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

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A Religious War in Israel’s Army

Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

AT ODDS Some secular liberals say religious nationalists set a tone that encouraged abuses during recent fighting in Gaza.

Published: March 21, 2009
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — The publication late last week of eyewitness accounts by Israeli soldiers alleging acute mistreatment of Palestinian civilians in the recent Gaza fighting highlights a debate here about the rules of war. But it also exposes something else: the clash between secular liberals and religious nationalists for control over the army and society.

Skip to next paragraph

More Allegations Surface in Israeli Accounts of Gaza War (March 21, 2009)

Times Topics: Israel

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Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

AFTERMATH A sign of the intense violence: A donkey’s carcass lies where it was shot.

Several of the testimonies, published by an institute that runs a premilitary course and is affiliated with the left-leaning secular kibbutz movement, showed a distinct impatience with religious soldiers, portraying them as self-appointed holy warriors.

A soldier, identified by the pseudonym Ram, is quoted as saying that in Gaza, “the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”

Dany Zamir, the director of the one-year premilitary course who solicited the testimonies and then leaked them, leading to a promise by the military to investigate, is quoted in the transcripts as expressing anguish over the growing religious nationalist elements of the military.

“If clerics are anointing us with oil and sticking holy books in our hands, and if the soldiers in these units aren’t representative of the whole spectrum of the Jewish people, but rather of certain segments of the population, what can we expect?” he said. “To whom do we complain?”

For the first four decades of Israel’s existence, the army — like many of the country’s institutions — was dominated by kibbutz members who saw themselves as secular, Western and educated. In the past decade or two, religious nationalists, including many from the settler movement in the West Bank, have moved into more and more positions of military responsibility. (In Israeli society, they are a growing force, distinct from, and more modern than, the black-garbed ultra-Orthodox, who are excused from military service.)

In many cases, the religious nationalists have ascended to command positions from precisely the kind of premilitary college course that Mr. Zamir runs — but theirs are run by the religious movements rather than his secular one, meaning that the competition between him and them is both ideological and careerist.

“The officer corps of the elite Golani Brigade is now heavily populated by religious right-wing graduates of the preparatory academies,” noted Moshe Halbertal, a Jewish philosophy professor who co-wrote the military code of ethics and who is himself religiously observant but politically liberal. “The religious right is trying to have an impact on Israeli society through the army.”

For Mr. Halbertal, like for the vast majority of Israelis, the army is an especially sensitive institution because it has always functioned as a social cauldron, throwing together people from all walks of life and scores of ethnic and national backgrounds, and helping form them into a cohesive society with social networks that carry on throughout their lives.

Those who oppose the religious right have been especially concerned about the influence of the military’s chief rabbi, Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki, who is himself a West Bank settler and who was very active during the war, spending most of it in the company of the troops in the field.

He took a quotation from a classical Hebrew text and turned it into a slogan during the war: “He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.”

A controversy then arose when a booklet handed out to soldiers was found to contain a rabbinical edict against showing the enemy mercy. The Defense Ministry reprimanded the rabbi.

At the time, in January, Avshalom Vilan, then a leftist member of Parliament, accused the rabbi of having “turned the Israeli military’s activity from fighting out of necessity into a holy war.”

Immediately after Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 and then from several West Bank settlements, there was a call to disband certain religious programs in the army because some soldiers in them said they would refuse to obey future orders to disband settlements. After the rise of Hamas in Gaza and the increase in rocket attacks on Israel, that discussion died down.

But Yaron Ezrahi, a leftist political scientist at Hebrew University who has been lecturing to military commanders, said that the call to close those programs should now be revived because what was evident in Gaza was that the humanistic tradition from which a code of ethics is derived was not being sufficiently observed there.

The dispute over control of the army is not only ideological. It is also personal, as all politics is in this small, intimate country. Those who disagree with the chief rabbi have vilified him. Those who are unhappy with what Mr. Zamir did by leaking the transcript of the Gaza soldiers’ testimonies last week have spread word that he is a leftist ideologue out to harm Israel.

In 1990, Mr. Zamir, then a parachute company commander in the reserves, was sentenced to prison for refusing to guard a ceremony involving religious Jews visiting the West Bank city of Nablus. For some, that refusal is a badge of honor; for others it is an act of insubordination and treason. A quiet campaign began on Thursday regarding Mr. Zamir’s leftist sympathies, to discredit the transcript he publicized.

At the same time, Rabbi Rontzki’s numerous sayings and writings have been making the rounds among leftist intellectuals. He has written, for example, that what others call “humanistic values” are simply subjective feelings that should be subordinate to following the law of the Torah.

He has also said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath, when work is prohibited but treating the sick and injured is expected, is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.

Mr. Halbertal, the Jewish philosopher who opposes the attitude of Rabbi Rontzki, said the divide that is growing in Israel is not only between religious and secular Jews but among the religious themselves. The debate is over three issues — the sanctity of land versus life; the relationship between messianism and Zionism; and the place of non-Jews in a sovereign Jewish state.

The religious left argues that the right has made a fetish of the land of Israel instead of letting life take precedence, he said. The religious left also rejects the messianic nature of the right’s Zionist discourse, and it argues that Jewish tradition values all life, not primarily Jewish life.

“The right tends to make an equation between authenticity and brutality, as if the idea of humanism were a Western and alien implant to Judaism,” he said. “They seem not to know that nationalism and fascism are also Western ideas and that hypernationalism is not Jewish at all.”

Museum of Sadam's Horrors - video

2009-03-17T17:36:00.006-04:00

http://shock.military.com/Shock/videos.do?displayContent=184587&ESRC=dod.nl

Museum of Saddam's Horrors

In Iraq a museum is being built to display the instruments of torture and the documents proving guilt of Saddam Hussein, his sick son Uday, and his loyal henchmen.

Submitted By: Video Blogger

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2009-03-17T02:01:00.004-04:00

video-israeli attack on gaza civilians

....................................

UNRWA SCHOOL IN BEIT LAHIA, GAZA, PALESTINE

2009-02-16T23:06:00.005-05:00

****

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Stop the War

2009-02-16T21:37:00.003-05:00

Pakistan Valley Falls to Taliban

2008-12-29T16:49:00.008-05:00

Taliban burning and beheading its way through Pakistani valley

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081229/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan_valley_of_fear

Scenic Pakistani valley falls to Taliban militants

By NAHAL TOOSI, Associated Press Writer Nahal Toosi, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 34 mins ago

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Taliban militants are beheading and burning their way through Pakistan's picturesque Swat Valley, and residents say the insurgents now control most of the mountainous region far from the lawless tribal areas where jihadists thrive.

The deteriorating situation in the former tourist haven comes despite an army offensive that began in 2007 and an attempted peace deal. It is especially worrisome to Pakistani officials because the valley lies outside the areas where al-Qaida and Taliban militants have traditionally operated and where the military is staging a separate offensive.

"You can't imagine how bad it is," said Muzaffar ul-Mulk, a federal lawmaker whose home in Swat was attacked by bomb-toting assailants in mid-December, weeks after he left. "It's worse day by day."

The Taliban activity in northwest Pakistan also comes as the country shifts forces east to the Indian border because of tensions over last month's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, potentially giving insurgents more space to maneuver along the Afghan frontier.

Militants began preying on Swat's lush mountain ranges about two years ago, and it is now too dangerous for foreign and Pakistani journalists to visit. Interviews with residents, lawmakers and officials who have fled the region paint a dire picture.

A suicide blast killed 40 people Sunday at a polling station in Buner, an area bordering Swat that had been relatively peaceful. The attack underscored fears that even so-called "settled" regions presumptively under government control are increasingly unsafe.

The 3,500-square-mile Swat Valley lies less than 100 miles from the capital, Islamabad.

A senior government official said he feared there could be a spillover effect if the government lost control of Swat and allowed the insurgency to infect other areas. Like nearly everyone interviewed, the official requested anonymity for fear of reprisal by militants.

Officials estimate that up to a third of Swat's 1.5 million people have left the area. Salah-ud-Din, who oversees relief efforts in Swat for the International Committee of the Red Cross, estimated that 80 percent of the valley is now under Taliban control.

Swat's militants are led by Maulana Fazlullah, a cleric who rose to prominence through radio broadcasts demanding the imposition of a harsh brand of Islamic law. His appeal tapped into widespread frustration with the area's inefficient judicial system.

Most of the insurgents are easy to spot with long hair, beards, rifles, camouflage vests and running shoes. They number at most 2,000, according to people who were interviewed.

In some places, just a handful of insurgents can control a village. They rule by fear: beheading government sympathizers, blowing up bridges and demanding women wear all-encompassing burqas.

They have also set up a parallel administration with courts, taxes, patrols and checkpoints, according to lawmakers and officials. And they are suspected of burning scores of girls' schools.

In mid-December, Taliban fighters killed a young member of a Sufi-influenced Muslim group who had tried to raise a militia against them. The militants later dug up Pir Samiullah's corpse and hung it for two days in a village square — partly to prove to his followers that he was not a superhuman saint, a security official said on condition of anonymity.

A lawmaker and the senior Swat government official said business and landowners had been told to give two-thirds of their income to the militants. Some local media reported last week that the militants have pronounced a ban on female education effective in mid-January.

Several people interviewed said the regional government made a mistake in May when it struck a peace deal with the militants. The agreement fell apart within two months but let the insurgents regroup.

The Swat insurgency also includes Afghan and other fighters from outside the valley, security officials said.

Any movement of Pakistani troops from the Swat Valley and tribal areas to the Indian border will concern the United States and other Western countries, which want Pakistan to focus on the al-Qaida threat near Afghanistan.

On Friday, Pakistani intelligence officials said thousands of troops were being shifted toward the border with India, which blames Pakistani militants for terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month that killed 164 people. But there has been no sign yet of a major buildup near India.

"The terrorists' aim in Mumbai was precisely this — to get the Pakistani army to withdraw from the western border and mount operations on the east," said Ahmed Rashid, a journalist and author who has written extensively about militancy in the region.

"The terrorists are not going to be sitting still. They are not going to be adhering to any sort of cease-fire while the army takes on the Indian threat. They are going to occupy the vacuum the army will create."

Residents and officials from the Swat Valley were critical of the army offensive there, saying troops appeared to be confined to their posts and often killed civilians when firing artillery at suspected militant targets.

The military has deployed some 100,000 troops through the northwest.

A government official familiar with security issues estimated that some 10,000 paramilitary and army troops had killed 300 to 400 militants in Swat since 2007, while about 130 troops were killed. Authorities have not released details of civilian casualties, and it was unclear if they were even being tallied.

The official, who insisted on anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, disputed assertions that militants had overrun the valley, but said a spotty supply line was hampering operations. He said the army had to man some Swat police stations because the police force there had been decimated by desertions and militant killings.

A Swat militant boasted that "we are doing our activities wherever we want, and the army is confined to their living places."

"They cannot move independently like us," said the man, who was reached over the phone and gave his name as Muzaffarul Haq. He claimed the Swat militants had no al-Qaida or foreign connections, but that they supported all groups that shared the goal of imposing Islamic law.

"With the grace of Allah, there is no dearth of funds, weapons or rations," he said. "Our women are providing cooked food for those who are struggling in Allah's path. Our children are getting prepared for jihad."

___

Associated Press writers Zarar Khan in Islamabad and Riaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.

FRONTLINE/World Pakistan: State of Emergency Synopsis and Video | PBS
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Lost Children - Congo Conflict

2008-11-28T18:24:00.009-05:00

The Lost Children of the Congo Conflict
http://abcnews.go.com/International/popup?id=6127725

Refugees Flee From Congo Violence

Children lost or without their parents rest at the Don Bosco Ngangi center in Goma, eastern Congo, Nov. 13, 2008. Fighting in Congo intensified in August and has since displaced at least 250,000 people despite the presence of the largest U.N. peacekeeping force in the world. U.N. officials say both the rebels and government troops have committed crimes against civilians.
(Jerome Delay/AP Photo)

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THE LOST CHILDREN OF THE CONGO CONFLICT. Refugees Flee From Congo Violence. Children lost or without their parents rest at the Don Bosco Ngangi center in ...
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The Frame: The children lost in the Congo conflict
The children lost in the Congo conflict. The conflict in eastern Congo continues. ... and lost children rest at the Don Bosco Ngangi center in Goma, eastern Congo on ...
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Somalia - The US Secret War

2008-11-26T22:11:00.006-05:00

http://www.military.com/news/article/somalia-a-us-war-nobody-is-watching.html?col=1186032325324

Somalia, a US War 'Nobody is Watching'

November 25, 2008

Chicago Tribune

To glimpse America's secret war in Africa, you must bang with a rock on the iron gate of the prison in this remote port in northern Somalia. A sleepy guard will yank open a rusty deadbolt. Then, you ask to speak to an inmate named Mohamed Ali Isse.

Isse, 36, is a convicted murderer and jihadist. He is known among his fellow prisoners, with grudging awe, as "The Man with the American Thing in His Leg."

That "thing" is a stainless steel surgical pin screwed into his bullet-shattered femur, courtesy, he says, of the U.S. Navy. How it got there -- or more to the point, how Isse ended up in this crumbling, stone-walled hellhole at the uttermost end of the Earth -- is a story that the U.S. government probably would prefer to remain untold.

That's because Isse and his fancy surgery scars offer what little tangible evidence exists of a bare-knuckled war that has been waged silently, over the past five years, with the sole aim of preventing anarchic Somalia from becoming the world's next Afghanistan.

It is a standoff war in which the Pentagon lobs million-dollar cruise missiles into a famine-haunted African wasteland the size of Texas, hoping to kill lone terror suspects who might be dozing in candlelit huts. (The raids' success or failure is almost impossible to verify.)

It is a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants and -- according to Isse and civil rights activists -- secretly imprison them offshore, aboard U.S. warships.

Mostly, though, it is a policy time bomb that will be inherited by the incoming Obama administration: a little-known front in the global war on terrorism that Washington appears to be losing, if it hasn't already been lost.

"Somalia is one of the great unrecognized U.S. policy failures since 9/11," said Ken Menkhaus, a leading Somalia scholar at Davidson College in North Carolina. "By any rational metric, what we've ended up with there today is the opposite of what we wanted."

What the Bush administration wanted, when it tacitly backed Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in late 2006, was clear enough: to help a close African ally in the war on terror crush the Islamic Courts Union, or ICU. The Taliban-like movement emerged from the ashes of more than 15 years of anarchy and lawlessness in Africa's most infamous failed state, Somalia.

At first, the invasion seemed an easy victory. By early 2007, the ICU had been routed, a pro-Western transitional government installed, and hundreds of Islamic militants in Somalia either captured or killed.

But over the last 18 months, Somalia's Islamists -- now more radical than ever -- have regrouped and roared back.

On a single day last month, they flexed their muscles by killing nearly 30 people in a spate of bloody car-bomb attacks that recalled the darkest days of Iraq. And their brutal militia, the Shabab or "Youth," today controls much of the destitute nation, a shattered but strategic country that overlooks the vital oil-shipping lanes of the Gulf of Aden.

Even worse, in recent days Shabab's fighters have moved to within miles of the Somalian capital of Mogadishu, threatening to topple the weak interim government supported by the U.S. and Ethiopia.

At the same time, according to the UN, the explosion of violence is inflaming what probably is the worst humanitarian tragedy in the world.

In the midst of a killing drought, more than 700,000 city dwellers have been driven out of bullet-scarred Mogadishu by the recent clashes between the Islamist rebels and the interim government.

The U.S. role in Somalia's current agonies has not always been clear. But back in the Berbera prison, Isse, who is both a villain and a victim in this immense panorama of suffering, offered a keyhole view that extended all the way back to Washington.

Wrapped in a faded sarong, scowling in the blistering-hot prison yard, the jihadist at first refused to meet foreign visitors -- a loathed American in particular. But after some cajoling, he agreed to tell his story through a fellow inmate: a surreal but credible tale of illicit abduction by the CIA, secret helicopter rides and a journey through an African gulag that lifts the curtain, albeit only briefly, on an American invisible war.

"Your government gets away with a lot here," said the warden, Hassan Mohamed Ibrahim, striding about his antique facility with a pistol tucked in the back of his pants. "In Iraq, the world is watching. In Afghanistan, the world is watching. In Somalia, nobody is watching."

From ashes of 'Black Hawk Down'

In truth, merely watching in Mogadishu these days is apt to get you killed.

Somalia's hapless capital has long been considered the Dodge City of Africa -- a seaside metropolis sundered by clan fighting ever since the nation's central government collapsed in 1991. That feral reputation was cemented in 1993, when chanting mobs dragged the bodies of U.S. Army Rangers through the streets in a disastrous UN peacekeeping mission chronicled in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down."

Yet if Mogadishu was once merely a perilous destination for outsiders, visiting today is suicidal.

For the first time in local memory, the airport -- the city's frail lifeline to the world -- is regularly closed by insurgent mortar attacks despite a small and jittery contingent of African Union peacekeepers.

Foreign workers who once toiled quietly for years in Somalia have been evacuated. A U.S. missile strike in May killed the Shabab commander, Aden Hashi Ayro, enraging Islamist militants who have since vowed to kidnap and kill any outsider found in the country.

The upshot: Most of Somalia today is closed to the world.

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way when Washington provided intelligence to the invading Ethiopians two years ago.

The homegrown Islamic radicals who controlled most of central and southern Somalia in mid-2006 certainly were no angels. They shuttered Mogadishu's cinemas, demanded that Somali men grow beards and, according to the U.S. State Department, provided refuge to some 30 local and international jihadists associated with Al Qaeda.

But the Islamic Courts Union's turbaned militiamen had actually defeated Somalia's hated warlords. And their enforcement of Islamic religious laws, while unpopular among many Somalis, made Mogadishu safe to walk in for the first time in a generation.

"It's not just that people miss those days," said a Somali humanitarian worker who, for safety reasons, asked to be identified only as Hassan. "They resent the Ethiopians and Americans tearing it all up, using Somalia as their battlefield against global terrorism. It's like the Cold War all over again. Somalis aren't in control."

When the Islamic movement again strengthened, Isse, the terrorist jailed in Berbera, was a pharmacy owner from the isolated town of Buro in Somaliland, a parched northern enclave that declared independence from Somalia in the early 1990s.

Radicalized by U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is serving a life sentence for organizing the killings of four foreign aid workers in late 2003 and early 2004. Two of his victims were elderly British teachers.

A dour, bearded man with bullet scars puckering his neck and leg, Isse still maintains his innocence. Much of Isse's account of his capture and imprisonment was independently corroborated by Western intelligence analysts, Somali security officials and court records in Somaliland, where the wounded jihadist was tried and jailed for murdering the aid workers. Those sources say Isse was snatched by the U.S. after fleeing to the safe house of a notorious Islamist militant in Mogadishu.

How that operation unfolded on a hot June night in 2004 reveals the extent of American clandestine involvement in Somalia's chaotic affairs -- and how such anti-terrorism efforts appear to have backfired.

Interrogation aboard ship

"I captured Isse for the Americans," said Mohamed Afrah Qanyare. "The Americans contracted us to do certain things, and we did them. Isse put up resistance so we shot him. But he survived."

A scar-faced warlord in a business suit, Qanyare is a member of Somalia's weak transitional government. Today he divides his days between lawless Mogadishu and luxury hotels in Nairobi.

But four years ago, his militia helped form the kernel of a CIA-created mercenary force called the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism in Somalia. The unit cobbled together some of the world's most violent, wily and unreliable clan militias -- including gangs that had attacked U.S. forces in the early 1990s -- to confront a rising tide of Islamic militancy in Somalia's anarchic capital.

The Somalis on the CIA payroll engaged in a grim tit-for-tat exchange of kidnappings and assassinations with extremists. And Isse was one of their catches.

He was wounded in a CIA-ordered raid on his Mogadishu safe house in June 2004, according to Qanyare and Matt Bryden, one of the world's leading scholars of the Somali insurgency who has access to intelligence regarding it. They say Isse was then loaded aboard a U.S. military helicopter summoned by satellite phone and was flown, bleeding, to an offshore U.S. vessel.

"He saw white people in uniforms working on his body," said Isse's Somali defense lawyer, Bashir Hussein Abdi, describing how Isse was rushed into a ship-board operating room. "He felt the ship moving. He thought he was dreaming."

Navy doctors spliced a steel rod into Isse's bullet-shattered leg, according to Abdi. Every day for about a month afterward, Isse's court depositions assert, plainclothes U.S. agents grilled the bedridden Somali at sea about Al Qaeda's presence.

The CIA never has publicly acknowledged its operations in Somalia. Agency spokesman George Little declined to comment on Isse's case.

For years, human-rights organizations attempted to expose the rumored detention and interrogation of terror suspects aboard U.S. warships to avoid media and legal scrutiny. In June, the British civil rights group Reprieve contended that as many as 17 U.S. warships may have doubled as "floating prisons" since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Calling such claims "misleading," the Pentagon has insisted that U.S. ships have served only as transit stops for terror suspects being shuttled to permanent detention camps such as the one in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But Tribune reporting on Isse indicates strongly that a U.S. warship was used for interrogation at least once off the lawless coast of Somalia.

The U.S. Navy conceded Isse had stayed aboard one of its vessels. In a terse statement, Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesman for the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet that patrols the Gulf of Aden, said only that the Navy was "not able to confirm dates" of Isse's imprisonment.

For reasons that remain unclear, he was later flown to Camp Lemonier, a U.S. military base in the African state of Djibouti, Somali intelligence sources say, and from there to a clandestine prison in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Isse and his lawyer allege he was detained there for six weeks and tortured by Ethiopian military intelligence with electric shocks.

Ethiopia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and office of prime minister did not respond to queries about Isse's allegations.

However, security officials in neighboring Somaliland did confirm that they collected Isse from the Ethiopian police at a dusty border crossing in late 2004. "The Man with the American Thing in His Leg" was interrogated again. After a local trial, he was locked in the ancient Berbera prison.

"It doesn't matter if he is guilty or innocent," said Abdi, the defense lawyer. "Countries like Ethiopia and America use terrorism to justify this treatment. This is not justice. It is a crime in itself."

Tales of CIA "snatch and grab" operations against terror suspects abroad aren't new, of course. President George W. Bush finally confirmed two years ago the existence of an international program that "renditioned" terrorism suspects to a network of "black site" prisons in Eastern Europe, Iraq and Afghanistan.

As for the CIA's anti-terror mercenaries in Mogadishu, they may have kidnapped a dozen or more wanted Islamists for the Americans, intelligence experts say. But their excesses ended up swelling the ranks of their enemy, the Islamic Courts Union militias.

"It was a stupid idea," said Bryden, the security analyst who has written extensively on Somalia's Islamist insurgency. "It actually strengthened the hand of the Islamists and helped trigger the crisis we're in today."

In the sweltering Berbera prison, Exhibit A in Washington's phantom war in Somalia had finished his afternoon prayers. He clapped his sandals together, then limped off to his cell without a word.

A sinking nation

The future of Somalia and its 8 million people is totally unscripted. This unbearable lack of certainty, of a way forward, accommodates little hope.

Ethiopian and U.S. actions have eroded Somalis' hidebound allegiance to their clans, once a firewall against Al Qaeda's global ideology, says Bryden. Somalia's 2 million-strong diaspora is of greatest concern. Angry young men, foreign passports in hand, could be lured back to the reopened Shabab training camps, where instructors occasionally use photocopied portraits of Bush as rifle targets.

Some envision no Somalia at all.

With about $8 billion in humanitarian aid fire-hosed into the smoking ruins of Somalia since the early 1990s -- the U.S. will donate roughly $200 million this year alone -- a growing chorus of policymakers is advocating that the failed state be allowed to fail, to break up into autonomous zones or fiefdoms, such as Isse's home of Somaliland.

But there is another possible future for Somalia. To see it, you must go to Bosaso, a port 300 miles east of Isse's cell.

Bosaso is an escape hatch from Somalia. Thousands of people swarm through the town's scruffy waterfront every year, seeking passage across the Gulf of Aden to the Middle East. Dressed in rags, they sleep by the hundreds in dirt alleys and empty lots. Stranded women and girls are forced into prostitution.

"You can see why we still need America's help," said Abdinur Jama, the coast guard commander for Puntland, the semiautonomous state encompassing Bosaso. "We need training and equipment to stop this."

Dapper in camouflage and a Yankees cap, Jama was a rarity in Somalia, an optimist. While Bosaso's teenagers shook their fists at high-flying U.S. jets on routine patrols -- "Go to hell!" they chanted -- Jama still spoke well of international engagement in Somalia.

On a morning when he offered to take visitors on a coast patrol, it did not seem kind to tell him what a U.S. military think tank at West Point had concluded about Somalia last year: that, in some respects, failed states were admirable places to combat Al Qaeda, because the absence of local sovereignty permitted "relatively unrestricted Western counterterrorism efforts."

After all, Jama's decrepit patrol boat was sinking.

A crew member scrambled to stanch a yard-high geyser of seawater that spurted through the cracked hull. Jama screwed his cap on tighter and peered professionally at land that, despite Washington's best-laid plans, has turned far more desperate than Afghanistan.

"Can you swim?" Jama asked. But it hardly seemed to matter. Back on dry land, in Somalia, an entire country was drowning.

Al Qaida Leaving Iraq; Going to Afghanistan

2008-07-23T22:05:00.003-04:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080724/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/al_qaida_afghanistan_4;_ylt=Ai4VFaLxMc8X4Y.H9pukeuyWwvIE

Ambassador: Al-Qaida leaving Iraq for Afghanistan

By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer 56 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Al-Qaida's foreign fighters who have for years bedeviled Iraq are increasingly going to Afghanistan to fight instead, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States said Wednesday.

More Troops for Afghanistan

2008-07-23T21:49:00.005-04:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080723/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_afghanistan

Pentagon to recommend more troops for Afghanistan

By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 57 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Top Pentagon leaders are expected to recommend soon that Defense Secretary Robert Gates order hundreds of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the next month or so, according to a senior military official.

The units are likely to be small and could include engineers, ordnance disposal troops and other support forces needed to shore up fighting needs and the training of Afghan forces. Officials have not ruled out identifying a larger, brigade-sized unit before the end of the year that could either be shifted to Afghanistan from a planned deployment to Iraq or moved from some other location.

U.S. commanders in Afghanistan have been asking for three combat brigades, or roughly 10,000 more troops, to help quash rising violence there.

The senior official, who requested anonymity because the proposals are not public, said the recommendations have not yet been approved by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or delivered to Gates. The Joint Chiefs and military commanders are reviewing a number of options.

Last week Gates said he is hoping to address some of those requirements sooner rather than later.

On Wednesday, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said that any sizable increase in troop levels in Afghanistan may not come until the new administration takes over next year.

Any decision to shift large units such as combat brigades into Afghanistan after they've been preparing to go to Iraq later this year would take additional training and time, Morrell said.

"You can't snap your fingers and make this happen, unfortunately," he said. He added later that the Pentagon is not kicking any decisions down the road to the next White House. Rather, he said, decisions made now may require months to execute.

While he stressed that no decisions have been made yet, the issue was likely among those discussed when President Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Wednesday in a classified briefing at the Pentagon.

Bush has made the Iraq war, now in its sixth year, the Defense Department's top priority, and defense officials have been candid about the fact that the focus on Iraq has meant fewer troops and other military assets available for the campaign in Afghanistan.

"That is the war which we have focused on," Morrell said of Iraq, asserting, "That is the war we are now winning."

Officials have said that if improved security conditions in Iraq hold, they hope to be able to devote more troops to Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent following its ouster by a U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.

Iraq's ambassador to the U.S. said Wednesday that al-Qaida's foreign fighters who have for years bedeviled Iraq are increasingly going to Afghanistan to fight instead.

Al-Qaida had training camps and a headquarters in Afghanistan, under the protection of the then-ruling Taliban, until the U.S. invasion after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. With al-Qaida forced out of Afghanistan, the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 quickly drew outside fighters there.

___

Associated Press writers Pauline Jelinek and Pamela Hess contributed to this report.

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2008-03-22T06:40:00.006-04:00

http://www.leadingtowar.com/

A website chronicling how Bush Administration led the American people into war.

Grisly "Proof" of Life for Captives of Insurgents

2008-03-21T22:07:00.003-04:00

Families of Iraq Captives Cling to a Grisly Find

Severed fingers delivered to the United States authorities in Iraq had been shown by DNA analysis to be those belonging to some of the missing.

Families of Iraq Captives Cling to a Grisly Find

By KIRK JOHNSON

Published: March 22, 2008

For the families of five American contractors kidnapped in Iraq more than a year ago, the months of waiting with no news of their fate have made for a battle of hope against dread.

This month has come news, of a sort: that severed fingers delivered to the United States authorities in Iraq had been shown by DNA analysis to be those of four of the missing Americans, and of an Austrian colleague of three of them.

That finally broke the silence and, though grisly, offered some hope — “proof of life,” as the father of one of these four put it.

Three of the four were employees of the same company, the Crescent Security Group, based in Kuwait, who were taken captive together, along with the Austrian and yet another American, in an ambush on Nov. 16, 2006. Crescent Security was under contract to Italy, and the men had been escorting an Italian convoy withdrawing from the country when they were seized near the southern city of Safwan by insurgents reportedly wearing Iraqi police uniforms.

The fourth contractor linked to one of the fingers was a computer specialist for an information technology company, who was abducted in early 2007 near Basra.

Some relatives of the security contractors saw a videotape of them that was issued by their captors in late 2006. And then nothing, only the yawning gulf of the wait, until now.

“You seem to normalize your life, and then, all of a sudden, they come up with proof of life, and bang — you can’t sleep,” said Francis L. Cote, a Marine Corps veteran who lives in Getzville, N.Y., a Buffalo suburb.

Mr. Cote’s son, Jonathon, 25 — a military man like the father, discharged in 2004 after four years in the Army — had arrived in Iraq to work for Crescent only a month before his disappearance.

Patrick Reuben, a police officer in Minneapolis, said he had only recently resigned himself to the idea that his twin brother, Paul, 41, another of the Crescent contractors, was dead. Now, Mr. Reuben said, the DNA report has given him hope too, though in an interview he could not help slipping back and forth between the present and past tenses — his brother is, his brother was.

In rural Roaring Springs, Tex., near Lubbock, Barbara Alexander said she had been thinking a lot about the days raising her son, Ronald J. Withrow, who was working in Iraq for the information technology company, JPI Worldwide, when he disappeared in January 2007.

Living on only her modest salary as a beautician, Ms. Alexander said, she and her son had sometimes had nothing more than fried tortillas and hot sauce for dinner, seeing who could eat the most sauce before burning out. Then, as adults, their relationship became strained — a stupid fight, she said, between stubborn people — and now she has been writing letters to Mr. Withrow, 40, with pages piling up and nowhere to send them.

For Mark Munns, a fishing pole and a tackle box seems to capture the sense of a life suspended. Mr. Munns and his son, Josh, 25, to whom DNA links the remaining finger, often fished together along a winding stretch of the Sacramento River in Anderson, Calif., near their home. The river teems with steelhead and other trout, but the fishing gear is stored away.

“There are too many memories there right now,” said Mr. Munns, a retired UPS worker.

But memory is just about all the families have to embrace for now.

Mr. Munns recalled one of the last conversations with Josh, a former marine who had said he was going back to Iraq to earn some quick cash for a down payment on a house. He had his life planned out. He would become a police officer and be married.

“ ‘Dad, I’m good at what I do,’ ” Mr. Munns recalled his son saying. “And I took him at his word.”

That the fingers had been delivered to the American authorities and then linked by DNA samples to these four captives and their Austrian colleague, identified as Bert Nussbaumer, was first reported by The Washington Post, on March 13. An American official in Iraq subsequently confirmed as much.

Mr. Cote, the father clinging to the development as proof of life, said he had watched the captors’ video of his son over and over.

“I’m being treated well,” Jonathon Cote said on the tape. “I can’t be released until the prisoners from the American jails and the British jails are released.”

Paul Reuben’s cousin, Carolyn Reuben, also sees the recovery of a severed finger as a hopeful sign. But it also means some terribly haunting questions.

“Did this happen recently?” Ms. Reuben said. “Was he conscious when they did it? Did they make him watch? Did they give him a choice: ‘Do you want a finger or a toe?’ ”

Ms. Alexander talked a lot about the fight with her son. It seems petty now, she said: a squabble over a car and a blown engine. But it led to a separation and silence lasting three years — time lost and now compounded by the months since Mr. Withrow’s disappearance.

“I know that we can’t change what has been done, but we can always pick up whenever we see each other again, and not look back,” she said. “I want him to go ahead and come home. I want him to come home and stay with us. He’s welcome here any time of the day, no matter the hardship.”

Reporting was contributed by Christina Capecchi in Minneapolis; Scott Jason in Anderson, Calif.; Gretel C. Kovach in Dallas; David Staba in Getzville, N.Y.; and Erica Goode in Iraq.

The Flip Side of the Coin

2008-03-07T01:04:00.003-05:00

See next 4 posts.

Gaza conditions 'at 40-year low'

2008-03-06T22:58:00.004-05:00

** Gaza conditions 'at 40-year low' **
Gaza's humanitarian situation is at its worst since Israel occupied the territory in 1967, say human rights groups.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/7280026.stm >

Last Updated: Thursday, 6 March 2008, 09:15 GMT

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Gaza conditions 'at 40-year low'

The groups say a battered, starved Gaza cannot be a peace partner

Conditions in Gaza

Gaza's humanitarian situation is at its worst since Israel occupied the territory in 1967, say UK-based human rights and development groups.

They include Amnesty International, Save the Children, Cafod, Care International and Christian Aid.

They criticise Israel's blockade on Gaza as illegal collective punishment which fails to deliver security.

Israel says its military action and other measures are lawful and needed to stop rocket attacks from Gaza.

Israel pulled its troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, but retains control over Gaza's airspace and coastline, and over its own border with the territory.

Click here to for an enlarged map of the Gaza Strip

It tightened its blockade in January amid a surge in rocket attacks by Palestinian militants in Gaza.

Israel's Defence Ministry rejected the criticism in the report, blaming the Hamas militant group which controls Gaza.

"The main responsibility for events in Gaza is the Hamas organisation, to which all complaints should be addressed," a statement read.

'Disaster'

The groups' report, Gaza Strip: A Humanitarian Implosion, says the blockade has dramatically worsened levels of poverty and unemployment, and has led to deterioration in education and health services.

GAZA REPORT

More than 80% of population rely on humanitarian aid

Unemployment about 40%

No running water for 25-30% of Gazans

Gaza report: Key points

More than 1.1 million Gazans are dependent on food aid and of 110,000 workers previously employed in the private sector, 75,000 have now lost their jobs, the report says.

"Unless the blockade ends now, it will be impossible to pull Gaza back from the brink of this disaster and any hopes for peace in the region will be dashed," said Geoffrey Dennis, of Care International UK.

Last week Israeli forces launched a bloody and destructive raid in northern Gaza, in which more than 120 Palestinians - including many civilians - were killed.

Israel says the measures are designed to stamp out frequent rocket fire by Palestinian militants.

Recent rocket attacks have hit deeper into southern Israel, reaching Ashkelon, the closest large Israeli city to the Gaza Strip.

Occupying power

The UK-based groups agree that Israel has the right and obligation to protect its citizens, urging both sides to cease unlawful attacks on civilians.

Gaza's humanitarian crisis

Profile: Gaza Strip

But they call upon Israel to comply with its obligations, as the occupying power in Gaza, to ensure its inhabitants have access to food, clean water, electricity and medical care, which have been in short supply in the strip.

"Punishing the entire Gazan population by denying them these basic human rights is utterly indefensible," said Amnesty UK Director Kate Allen.

"The current situation is man-made and must be reversed."

Other recommendations from the groups include international engagement with the Hamas movement, which rejects Israel's legitimacy and has been shunned by Israel's allies, and the Fatah party of Palestinian West Bank leader Mahmoud Abbas.

"Gaza cannot become a partner for peace unless Israel, Fatah and the Quartet [the US and UN, Europe and Russia] engage with Hamas and give the people of Gaza a future," said Daleep Mukarji of Christian Aid.

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Israel Security Cabinet Approves Cease-Fire in Gaza as Olmert Says Objectives Achieved

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Negotiator: Israel Asks to Annex 6.8 Percent of West Bank for Peace Deal

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Civilians Caught In Urban Combat - Gaza Debate

Civilians Caught in Urban Combat

Interpret the Situation

Weighing the Cost of War

To Protect Noncombatants, Seek a Ceasefire

The Problem Lay in the Strategy

Debate: Comments on Israelis vs Civilian Non-Combatants

From 1 to 25 of 106 Comments

Abuse Allegations in Israeli War on Gaza

More Allegations Surface in Israeli Accounts of Gaza War

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A Religious War in Israel’s Army (March 22, 2009)[See post Below]

Religious War in Israel's Army

A Religious War in Israel’s Army

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More Allegations Surface in Israeli Accounts of Gaza War (March 21, 2009)

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Museum of Sadam's Horrors - video

Museum of Saddam's Horrors

Stop the War

Pakistan Valley Falls to Taliban

Scenic Pakistani valley falls to Taliban militants

Lost Children - Congo Conflict

THE LOST CHILDREN OF THE CONGO CONFLICT

Refugees Flee From Congo Violence

Somalia - The US Secret War

Somalia, a US War 'Nobody is Watching'

Al Qaida Leaving Iraq; Going to Afghanistan

Ambassador: Al-Qaida leaving Iraq for Afghanistan

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More Troops for Afghanistan

Pentagon to recommend more troops for Afghanistan

Afghanistan

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Leading to War

Grisly "Proof" of Life for Captives of Insurgents

Families of Iraq Captives Cling to a Grisly Find

The Flip Side of the Coin

Gaza conditions 'at 40-year low'