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Israeli Attack May Have a Silver Lining
June 2, 2010
Ivan Eland

Details of Israel’s attack on the flotilla to Gaza containing humanitarian aid are still leaking out from the Israeli attempt to stifle them. But even if Israel’s spin about its attack on the flotilla is accepted, the situation is still fairly damning for Israel.

Israel maintains that it ordered the flotilla to divert to the Israeli port of Ashdod from the blockaded Gaza coast. When the ship did not do so, Israel launched a commando raid that killed at least nine passengers and wounded dozens more. At least seven Israeli soldiers were wounded in the attack. The Israelis maintain that their soldiers, boarding the ships by repelling from helicopters, were attacked by the passengers with metal rods, knives, slingshots, and two pistols commandeered from the soldiers themselves. The Israelis released a video from early in the operation showing passengers attacking the military men, who claimed to carry only paintball guns and pistols that they didn’t expect to use. The Israelis claimed they killed the aggressive passengers only in self-defense. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, at a press conference, claimed, “The entire flotilla is a political and media provocation by anti-Israeli activists. They have absolutely nothing to do with humanitarian aid.”

The passengers have a different story. One al-Jazeera reporter maintained that the Israelis shot at the ships before boarding. The organizers of the flotilla maintain that the commandos began shooting from the time they landed on the ship at 4 a.m. and released videos to support that position.

Yet even if we disregard flotilla organizers’ rendition of events and charitably accept Israel’s story as what happened, Israel is still culpable. The Israeli military attacked unarmed ships in international waters about 41 miles from the Israeli coastline—well beyond the 12-mile limit of Israeli territorial waters—to enforce an illegal and inhumane blockade of Gaza. The blockade is a violation of international law and an act of war. Thus, the passengers of any ship being illegally attacked have a right to defend themselves with any armaments they can scrounge up, including pistols captured from incompetent commandos.

The Israelis claiming self-defense while in attack mode is similar to what their former patron, George W. Bush, claimed as he invaded the sovereign state of Iraq. As with Bush, the Israelis have always believed that “the best defense is a good offense.”

Not only were the Israelis in attack mode, they used what French President Nicolas Sarkozy aptly called “the disproportionate use of force” against the flotilla. After all, the flotilla contained aid supplies for the Gazan people, not weapons going to Hamas. Einat Wilf, a member of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, admitted, “This had nothing to with security. The armaments for Hamas were not coming from this flotilla.” Before the attack, she had cautioned the Israeli government that this was a public relations issue, not a military one.

The Israelis have repeatedly justified the total blockade of Gaza on the basis of preventing such weapons from reaching Hamas and have also maintained that no humanitarian crisis in Gaza exists because of the quarantine. But the United Nations and non-governmental organizations have debunked the latter notion. And even though the Obama administration supports the Israeli blockade, Obama’s aides say that he has privately criticized the poor humanitarian conditions in Gaza. It is clear that the Israelis only let enough supplies through the blockade to prevent an immediate humanitarian disaster and politically manipulate the strictures by saying nothing will change until an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas has been returned.

Terrorism is usually defined as harming a population by collective punishment to pressure its leadership to make political changes. Normally we think of small groups terrorizing a population with bombs, but governments purposefully killing civilians with bombs (such as the allies did to Japan and Germany in World War II) or inducing starvation and illness with a more slow-motion blockade should also be considered terrorism. It is appalling that civilized nations, such as Israel and its U.S. patron, are committing or endorsing, respectively, this illegal and immoral quarantine.

The one silver lining to Israel’s unconscionable attack on a humanitarian flotilla is that its reprehensible collective punishment of Gazans through blockade likely will be made politically “unsustainable.”

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Postcard from Hebron
June 2, 2010
Alvaro Vargas Llosa

HEBRON, West Bank—The Hebron city center used to be the commercial hub of the southern West Bank, a serpentine network of lively Palestinian bazaars and thoroughfares. It is now a parade of abandoned buildings whose silence makes the ubiquitous graffiti against their former inhabitants all the more eerie.

As we walked up Shuhada Street, several young Israeli children taunted the former Israeli soldier who was leading us: “Yehuda, you criminal, you will not win.” A veteran of the toughest unit in Hebron and the son of ultra-Orthodox parents, Yehuda simply smiled. He is accustomed to invective since he denounced the expulsion of thousands of Palestinians from this area now controlled by Israeli settlers.

We walked until we reached a checkpoint that the two Israelis in our party were not allowed cross. Beyond it lies the part of Hebron under the Palestinian Authority. The rest of us crossed it, entering another world—a Palestinian town boiling with commercial and social life.

You would be mistaken to think the separation in Hebron was an abuse of power by Israel. In fact, it resulted because just 500 Jewish settlers prevailed, despite opposition from most Israelis, thanks to two factors: an electoral system producing Israeli minority governments dependent on extremist parties that represent 10 percent of society, and, more importantly, the gradual indifference of Israelis focused on other priorities.

Because of the endless political stalemate and their economic prosperity, the minds of many Israelis have drifted away to the future. And the future is a high-tech revolution churning out innovations in medicine and communications. According to the most recent statistics, seed capital investment per person in Israel is 2.5 times greater than in the United States and 30 times greater than in Europe. One young entrepreneur told us how he has patented a method for turning garbage into plastic while an older businessman shared with us his new method for renovating asphalt.

Gush Emunim, the settler movement that began in the 1960s, numbers no more than 400,000 people. To the outside world, their motivation for expanding into the West Bank—including the Hebron settlements and the ones I visited around Yatta where the traditional lives of shepherds and farmers have been ruined by settlers who have sealed off of their wells—is primarily religious.

But for most settlers, the motivation is nationalist or economic. Even the ultra-Orthodox Haredis are more interested in a confessional state than in restoring “Eretz Israel.” The ultra-Orthodox Israelis’ limited participation in the settlements has to do with cheap land, something they desperately need, given their relatively low productivity and the burden imposed on their finances by customs such as buying their children houses when they marry.

Amos Oz, one of Israel’s foremost intellectuals, told me that no more than 100,000 settlers are truly committed. “A decision by the government to remove the settlements, which have doubled since the (1993) Oslo accords, would be met with resistance by a small percentage, something manageable, as former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proved in Gaza.” What is lacking, thinks A.B. Yehoshua, another renowned public intellectual, “is simply the political will.” The pressure from Israeli society, preoccupied with other priorities, is not there.

On paper, conditions are propitious for peace. Israel’s economy is booming and the Palestinian territories are experiencing a free-market bonanza thanks to Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, whose policies have attracted investment. The few barriers Israeli authorities have removed have created lucrative and collegial cross-border exchanges between Israelis and Palestinians.

In 1925, Lord Balfour, the former British foreign minister, spoke at Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus. He invoked a Jewish homeland in which “not only men of Jewish birth but others sharing the common civilization of the world will have reason to congratulate themselves.” What is sad is not how distant reality is from that but how easy it is to imagine it.

The Palestinian boy who led us out of a dangerous backstreet in the Jerusalem casbah; the settler who asked us to mediate between him and Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Yosef Alalu, a critic; the economic elan of the Palestinian territories, and Israel’s mesmerizing entrepreneurship all demonstrated to us the wonders these two societies could achieve together.

“I am very optimistic,” Israeli President Simon Peres told us during a visit to his office. “Abu Mazen,” he mused, calling Mahmoud Abbas by the name Israelis prefer, “only needs to understand that great things don’t happen because you are great; you become great by doing them.”

This apt phrase actually applies to leaders on both sides.

New from Alvaro Vargas Llosa! LESSONS FROM THE POOR: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit Half the people in the world live on two dollars or less per day and roughly 600 million live on no more than one dollar per day. With thousands of international relief organizations, strategic government programs, and billions of dollars in foreign aid, why do so many underdeveloped countries remain unable to grow their economies beyond mere survival? Learn More »»

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Why is a Yemeni Student in Guantánamo,

Cleared on Three Occasions, Still Imprisoned?

by Andy Worthington, June 1, 2010

Originally published by the Future of Freedom Foundation

On the evening of March 28, 2002, Mohammed Hassen, an 18-year-old Yemeni student at Salafia University in Faisalabad, Pakistan, made a decision that was to change his life forever. He had been visiting fellow students in another house connected with the university, had stayed for dinner, and had decided to stay the night rather than traveling back to his own accommodation. Within hours, however, Hassen, along with 15 other people living in the house, was seized in a raid by Pakistani police, transferred to U.S. custody, and sent to Guantánamo, where he remains to this day.

In all, 15 men were seized in this house — victims of a mistaken belief on the part of Pakistani and U.S. intelligence that there was a meaningful connection between the house and the supposed “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah. Seized on the same night in another house in Faisalabad, Abu Zubaydah then became the first official victim of a torture program approved for use by the CIA and initiated at the highest levels of the Bush administration, even though it has been revealed in the years since that he was not even a member of al-Qaeda, and was, instead, a mentally damaged gatekeeper for a training camp that was closed down by the Taliban because its leader, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi (another victim of CIA-directed torture), refused to cooperate with al-Qaeda.

Publicly, neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration has conceded that those staying at the house were seized by mistake and that Mohammed Hassen was particularly unfortunate. The lowest point was reached in June 2006, after one of the men seized in the house, Ali al-Salami, died in Guantánamo. Al-Salami was one of three men who allegedly committed suicide on June 9, 2006, and although this narrative was challenged in January this year by Scott Horton in an extraordinary article in Harper’s Magazine, in which it emerged that the men may have been killed, either deliberately, or as part of a torture session, the Pentagon’s response to his death was to wheel out unsubstantiated allegations, based on the untrustworthy interrogations of other prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah, that he was “a mid- to high-level al-Qaeda operative who had key ties to principal facilitators and senior members of the group.”

Despite these deeply disturbing incidents, the truth about the house and its inhabitants has gradually come to light in the last few years, partly as the story of Abu Zubaydah has unraveled, but primarily through statements made by the prisoners’ lawyers, through decisions to release some of the men seized in the house, made by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, and through rulings made in the District Court in Washington, D.C., where judges have granted the habeas corpus petitions of three of the men and have concluded that the government failed to establish, by a preponderance of the evidence, that they were connected to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban.

Objectively, the most significant development in dismissing the government’s claims came last May, when Judge Gladys Kessler granted the habeas corpus petition of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, one of the 15 prisoners seized in the house. Ali Ahmed was the first of the three prisoners to win their habeas petitions, and in a savage denunciation of the government’s supposed evidence, Judge Kessler dismissed statements made by four other prisoners, concluding that they were all unreliable, and also dismissed the government’s attempts to implicate Ali Ahmed in wrongdoing through a “mosaic” of information drawn from a variety of intelligence reports. Stating, bluntly, that the “mosaic” is “only as persuasive as the tiles which compose it and the glue which binds them together,” she then proceeded, as I explained at the time, “to highlight a catalog of deficiencies in the tiles and the glue.”

Even more significantly, Judge Kessler made a point of casting her net wider than the specific case of Ali Ahmed, noting, “It is likely, based on evidence in the record, that at least a majority of the [redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was located close to a university.”

Ali Ahmed was finally released last September, and in the meantime another student in the house, Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, a Saudi, was released last June, following the deliberations of the Task Force. In addition, two other Yemeni students, Mohammed Tahir and Fayad Yahya Ahmed, were released in December.

As a result, in January this year, on the eighth anniversary of Guantánamo’s opening, ten of the 15 men seized in the house were still at Guantánamo, despite Judge Kessler’s assertions about the majority of these men, and, moreover, despite the fact that it was almost certain that the Task Force had reached the same conclusion.

With bullish insensitivity, the Task Force — comprising representatives of key government departments and the intelligence agencies — announced the results of its year-long review of the prisoners’ cases on the anniversary, dismaying those who believed that Guantánamo would close within a year (as President Obama promised) and that indefinite detention without charge or trial would be thoroughly repudiated. Announcing the results of its investigations, the Task Force declared that 35 prisoners had been designated to face trials, that 48 had been designated for ongoing indefinite detention without charge or trial, and that the rest (97 at the time of writing) had been cleared for transfer or release.

This latter category included 66 of the remaining 97 Yemenis, and it is clear from an analysis of the Task Force’s report, released by the Washington Post on Saturday (PDF), that the 31 Yemenis designated for trials or for ongoing detention without charge or trial include five men regarded as particularly significant (including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the alleged 9/11 plotters), and 26 others (regarded as facilitators for al-Qaeda, bodyguards for Osama bin Laden, or “well-trained operatives who were being groomed by al-Qaeda leaders for future terrorist operations”), and do not, therefore, include the men seized in the guest house in Faisalabad.

Despite this, the remaining ten men seized in the house in Faisalabad — eight Yemenis, including Mohammed Hassen, a Palestinian and a Russian — have continued to languish in Guantánamo, awaiting an opportunity to follow the example of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed and have their habeas petitions granted in the District Court.

Two weeks ago, the Russian, Ravil Mingazov, won his habeas petition, and last Wednesday, Mohammed Hassen also secured a victory. The judge in both cases was Henry H. Kennedy Jr., and although his unclassified opinions have not yet been released, it is obvious that, in both cases, he reached a similar conclusion to Judge Kessler in the case of Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed.

Distressingly, however, the ruling means little to either man. In Ravil Mingazov’s case, a third country must be found that is prepared to offer him a new home, as he is at risk of torture if he is repatriated, and in Mohammed Hassen’s case, he is the victim of politically inspired inertia on the part of the Obama administration.

Although seven Yemenis were released last year (including Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed and two others seized in the guest house), President Obama capitulated to pressure from critics in Congress in January, following the failed Christmas Day plane bombing by a Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had apparently received training in Yemen, and declared what the Task Force referred to as a “moratorium on the transfer of detainees to Yemen.”

In the Task Force’s words, “The involvement of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — the branch of al-Qaeda based in Yemen — in the recent attempted bombing of an airplane headed to Detroit underscored the continued need for a deliberate approach to any further effort to repatriate Yemeni detainees.” Missing from this analysis was any mention of the fact that the Yemenis cleared for release had been cleared precisely because they had not demonstrated any commitment to terrorist activities, and that the moratorium had largely been declared because President Obama found himself unable to tell critics that a small number of former prisoners from Saudi Arabia, who were reportedly involved with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, had been freed by President Bush, in spite of the recommendations of the intelligence services, as part of a diplomatic deal with the Saudi government.

As a result, Mohammed Hassen finds himself still held despite being cleared for release from Guantánamo on three occasions, the first of which took place nearly four years ago. As one of his lawyers, Marc Falkoff, explained in October 2007, Hassen was first recommended for release in June 2005, although his transfer was not approved by a military review board until the spring of 2006. On June 26, 2006, Gordon England, the deputy secretary of defense, signed off on his transfer, but like dozens of other prisoners approved for transfer under the Bush administration, the decision did not lead to his release.

With the near-certainty that the Task Force also proved his transfer, and with Judge Kennedy’s ruling last week, the full horror of his plight becomes clear. Almost four years after he was first approved for transfer, Mohammed Hassen appears to have no way of being released from Guantánamo.

Concerned readers may wish to use his example to reflect on the continuing injustice of Guantánamo, and to tilt against the prevailing hysteria regarding the prison — manufactured largely by opportunistic lawmakers and media pundits — to ask the administration to find its moral compass and to lift the moratorium on transferring prisoners to Yemen so that Mohammed Hassen can begin to recover from his eight lost years in Guantánamo, and so that others — the remaining men seized with him, two other Yemenis who recently won their habeas petitions, and the dozens of other Yemenis who pose no threat to the United States — can also be freed.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

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Intelligence Reform Is a Failure
May 26, 2010
Ivan Eland

The sacking of Dennis Blair, the third director of national intelligence in the position’s short five-year history, is one important indicator that the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act of 2004 has failed. That act was effective neither in achieving real reform of the sprawling intelligence bureaucracies nor in preventing terrorist attacks.

In fact, Blair’s firing came just days after the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a biting report on the multiple snafus of the intelligence agencies in failing to prevent the attempted Christmas Day terrorist attack by the BVD bomber. But although Blair didn’t get along well with Leon Panetta, the CIA’s director, or John Brennan, the White House’s de facto intelligence chief, a primary reason for such friction was that he had to fight turf wars in an attempt to give his young office some relevance in the new intelligence structure.

The DNI was borne out of massive intelligence failures leading up to 9/11 and concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The problem was that the plethora of secretive and mutually suspicious intelligence agencies weren’t coordinating very well with each other. At the time, the director of central intelligence (DCI), then the same person as the CIA director, was nominally in charge of coordinating the collection, analysis, and dissemination of intelligence among the multitude of agencies. The DCI ran into the problem of not having enough authority over the personnel, budgets, and operations of the other agencies to do the job. The DNI, which replaced the now defunct DCI, has the same problem, except that he is in worse shape because he’s not really even the head of a substantial intelligence agency, as the DCI/CIA director was.

In short, the coordinating role was passed from one of the participating agencies—CIA—to a new layer of bureaucracy above the now 16 intelligence agencies. Blair, without even a home agency to manage, repeatedly lost turf wars, which undermined the authority of DNI’s coordination role. For example, Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, beat out Blair to win the right to choose the top U.S. intelligence official in each foreign country. In doing so, Panetta sent a memo telling CIA personnel to ignore a Blair directive. Also, the CIA worked to cut the size and power of the DNI’s staff, and Blair failed to rein in CIA covert operations adored by the White House. But although Blair’s connections in and relations with the White House were lousy, his two Republican predecessors also loft turf battles with the intelligence agencies and failed to achieve reform.

Yet, at the time the intelligence reorganization was enacted, it was entirely predictable that it would fail. About 85 percent of the intelligence community’s budget is controlled by the behemoth Department of Defense. Simply creating a new “neutral” agency and shifting the intelligence coordination role from the CIA to it does nothing to alter this fact. More important, smooth coordination among agencies, the original shortfall, was not helped by creating a new DNI and accompanying bureaucracy.

The intelligence community structure evolved during the Cold War to counter another nation-state—the Soviet Union—that had a bigger bureaucracy than the United States. Yet now the primary enemy is small, agile terrorist groups that don’t have to fill out bureaucratic forms before launching an attack. Yet after intelligence failures leading up to 9/11 and in Iraq, the Bush administration and Congress, pretending to do something about lagging intelligence cooperation, proposed to fight such enemy agility by adding another layer of officialdom and making the potential for coordination problems worse. The snafus surrounding the failure to foil even the ham-handed BVD or Times Square bombers are illustrative of the enhanced incompetence. In the “war on terror,” the Bush administration and Congress also took a similar approach by squishing together unrelated domestic security agencies and creating more bureaucracy—the Department of Homeland Security—to sit on top of them. Predictably, many analysts now regard that “reform” as an abject failure.

In the age of more nimble opponents, the U.S. government needs to move in the opposite direction. Instead of adding bureaucracies, Congress, to improve coordination, needs to eliminate some intelligence and homeland security agencies and consolidate the remaining intelligence and homeland security functions. Only with a streamlined bureaucracy can the U.S. government hope to be most effective against groups such as al-Qaeda.

New from Ivan Eland! THE EMPIRE HAS NO CLOTHES: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed (Updated Edition) Most Americans don’t think of their government as an empire, but in fact the United States has been steadily expanding its control of overseas territories since the turn of the twentieth century. In The Empire Has No Clothes, Ivan Eland, a leading expert on U.S. defense policy and national security, examines American military interventions around the world from the Spanish-American War to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Learn More »»

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