May 2014

What happened to Iraq’s ‘human shields’?

Bandannie knows that this too is old news; but she was there at the time and just came across this article

19 March 2013 Last updated at 12:55 GMT

By Simon WattsBBC World Service

Ken O’Keefe (C) and the “human shields” en route to Baghdad

In March 2003, a group of international activists staged one of the most high-profile protests against the invasion of Iraq. With the world’s media watching, they drove in a ramshackle convoy of buses to a power station near Baghdad.

“The streets were absolutely rammed with people,” says Joe Letts, now 62, an anti-war campaigner from Dorset. “It was like a carnival atmosphere – I had never experienced anything like that before.”

Mr Letts had driven from Big Ben in London all the way to Baghdad, picking up “human shields” – peace campaigners from about 35 different countries – along the way.

They had arrived on three buses – two of them red London Routemasters owned by Mr Letts and usually hired out at West Country music festivals.

On the three-week journey from northern Europe, the activists had braved steep mountain roads and treacherous snowstorms while cooped up inside the cramped double-deckers in sleeping bags.

Saddam Hussein’s regime welcomed the human shields with open arms when they reached Baghdad on 15 February, timing their arrival to coincide with huge anti-war demonstrations around the world.

“The Iraqis had been told on TV who we were and why we were coming,” Mr Letts says, “so there were crowds of children waving. It was an extraordinary day!”

They were put up in comfortable hotel suites in the centre of the Iraqi capital.

“They fed us really well,” says Mr Letts. “There were aspects of it that were almost like being on holiday.”

The activists were planning to fan out to key sites around Baghdad, taking state-of-the-art cameras, satellite phones and computers with them.

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Nobody was in favour of Saddam – we were there to stop a repeat of the damage and suffering that followed the first Gulf War”

Joe Letts

If they had been bombed, the shields would have tried to get their footage around the word instantly, causing what Mr Letts calls a “political catastrophe” in Western capitals

But as soon as the campaigners had settled in, the Iraqis announced that they had different ideas about how the operation would work.

Many in the group were expecting to be deployed to sites such as hospitals and schools, but their Iraqi liaison officer, Abdul al-Ashhemi, said Saddam Hussein’s regime wanted them to defend six key infrastructure sites instead.

The sites included an oil refinery, a power station and a food depot, where, Mr Ashhemi announced, the shields would be given special Westernised accommodation – including proper toilets.

The meeting was fraught – some of the activists were shocked, feeling they had travelled thousands of miles to save lives, not to protect Iraqi industry.

Mr Letts admits there was “dissent in the ranks”, but he spoke in favour of the Iraqi plan and eventually carried the day.

As a former disaster relief worker who had been to Iraq in 1991, he says he could see the sense in keeping Baghdad’s power and electricity going after the bombing. And he accepted, too, that these – and not schools and hospitals – were the sites that had actually been targeted during the first Gulf War.

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My buses are all we had in the world and they were there in the middle of a war zone”

Joe Letts

“When we eventually turned up at Baghdad South power station, it had four big towers and a large picture of Saddam Hussein,” Mr Letts says.

“There was a large room that they had turned into a dormitory for us, they’d found a television from somewhere and they’d built us modern showers and loos.”

The group painted “Human Shields” in huge letters on the roof of the power station and settled in.

But in the following days there were tensions within the group – and with their hosts.

The Iraqis expelled one of the more militant activists – a former US marine called Ken O’Keefe – and several others.

Mr Letts says Mr O’Keefe had “a passionate heart” but was a “divisive leader” and too confrontational with the Iraqis.

By the start of US bombing on 20 March, others had left too – either because they were unhappy about the choice of sites or simply because they wanted to go home.

After spending a week at the electricity plant, Mr Letts also left. He felt he needed to protect his buses – they were, after all, his livelihood.

“My buses are all we had in the world and they were there in the middle of a war zone,” he says.

“I had to come back,” he says, “but I got the people there and that was my crowning achievement. I didn’t leave until we had made sure everything was working.”

Estimates of how many human shields stayed in Iraq throughout the bombing vary from 25 to just above 100. None of their sites were hit and Mr Letts thinks they did made a difference.

He returned to Baghdad later in 2003 and visited the electricity plant, where the manager told him the shields had protected the site until a wave of looting broke out immediately after the US-led invasion.

At that stage, the power station was still working and Mr Letts understands that there was a “broadly similar experience” at the other five installations.

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The human shields did not even come close to stopping the war in Iraq, but Mr Letts says it was a “massive achievement” to help keep enough of the infrastructure going for Baghdad to be “survivable”.

Mr Letts says members of the RAF and other sources have told him the human shields were very much a talking point in the high command.

“The Brits and Americans were very much worried about wiping out large numbers of them,” he says.

The human shields were widely criticised in the West for being pawns of the Iraqi regime. Mr Letts says they discussed all their key decisions at length with Iraqi officials and then took a democratic vote among themselves.

“Nobody was in favour of Saddam”, he says. “We were there to stop a repeat of the damage and suffering that followed the first Gulf War.”

And for the Dorset bus driver, the trip to Iraq turned out to be as much of a personal odyssey as a political one.

He had been struggling for years to share the Christian faith of his wife, Thea, and on the way to Iraq he was inspired by seeing the biblical sites visited by Saint Paul.

“It was the most incredible journey,” Mr Letts says. “I’m a different person because of it… and I think I’m a better one.”

Simon Watts interviewed Joe Letts for the BBC World Service programme Witness. Listen back via BBC iPlayer or browse the Outlook podcast archive.

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Human shields face 12 years’ jail for visiting Iraq

May 30, 2014 0

TRNN Replay: Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan

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CAMILO MEJIA, CHAIR, IVAW: My name is Camilo Mejia. I’m an Iraq War veteran and resister, and I chair the board of directors at Iraq Veterans Against the War. And I want to take this opportunity to say to the members that it’s been a true honor to be here with you and to meet many of you for the first time. Thank you all for coming. Thanks everyone for being here. This has been an immense success. We could not be happier than we are. I would like to start my remarks by saying that if you are a Vietnam veteran, a member of VVAW, and especially if you attended the first Winter Soldier investigation, please stand. Thank you. There’s a long history of resistance in our military, but it is because of your leadership and your strength and your resistance that we stand here today. Without your example, we would be pushing forward through darkness. It is with the torch that you passed on to us that we lead the way against an endless, illegitimate occupation that’s tearing apart our military and our country. Today is the last day of Winter Soldier Iraq and Afghanistan, but today also marks the birth of a new generation of Winter Soldiers. George Orwell once wrote, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes an act of rebellion.” We live today in times of universal deceit. But throughout the past four days, we have witnessed firsthand accounts that challenge that universal deceit. Iraq Veterans Against the War has become a source of stress to the military brass and to the government. We have members who have been interrogated by the FBI. We have members sitting in this room who have been incarcerated for being conscientious objectors. We have been incarcerated for standing up to and saying no to command rape and sexual discrimination. We have members in Iraq Veterans Against the War who have been prosecuted for being publicly critical of our government’s failed war policies. We have become a dangerous group of people not because of our military training, but because we have dared to challenge the official story, because of members of the military, we have dared to share our experiences, because we have dared to think for ourselves, because we have dared to analyze and be critical, because we have dared to follow our conscience, because we have dared to go beyond patriotism to embrace humanity. The servicemembers and veterans who have shared our experiences with you and with the entire world are committing an act of resistance by being here. We resist the notion of free speech and democracy when the voices of those who have been the most affected by the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are being silenced by the government and by the corporate media. We refuse the notion of nation building in Iraq when our levies are breaking at home and our people are drowning, and when our own bridges are falling down. We resist and reject the official government rhetoric of “support our troops” when we have a whole new military generation returning home to no care for posttraumatic stress disorder, to homelessness, to disturbingly high levels of suicide, homicide, and domestic violence. We have heard heartbreaking testimony. We who have been there have seen the horror in the eyes of children whose doors we kicked down at three in the morning. We have learned that to treat other people with humanity, we have to treat our own people with humanity. We cannot win the hearts and minds of any country until we win the hearts and minds of our own people, until we eradicate homophobia within our ranks, until we treat our own people as equals regardless of their gender or the color of their skin. You have heard our three points of unity: immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all occupying forces, full benefits to all military personnel, and reparations to the people of Iraq so they can rebuild their country on their own terms. We at IVAW are not going to rest until we achieve these three goals. As IVAW’s longtime friend and adviser Stan Goff once said, we are still soldiers, which is not their soldiers anymore. We are your new Winter Soldiers. Thank you.

May 30, 2014 1

Inside the Mind of Edward Snowden (NBC News Exclusive Intervieuw

May 29, 2014 0

Exclusive Photos: Syria’s Oldest Synagogue, Destroyed by Assad

The Jobar Synagogue was one of the holiest Jewish sites in Syria and contained priceless historical artifacts. Now it’s destroyed—and the opposition says Assad is to blame.

Syrian Arab Army forces flattened the Eliyahu Hanabi Synagogue in the Jobar neighborhood of Damascus over the weekend. The attack not only wrecked a site that’s at least 400 years old. It may have destroyed thousands of irreplaceable Jewish artifacts contained inside the synagogue, according to opposition leaders and photos obtained at the site.

The area where the synagogue once stood has been under bombardment by the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for months. The Syrian regime is laying siege to the town, one of the few rebel strongholds in the area. It’s all part of what the opposition calls Assad’s “scorched earth” policy, which includes random and violent attacks on civilian populations.

“I am deeply saddened to learn of the destruction of Jobar Synagogue, which was a treasure of Jewish and Syrian cultural heritage,” said Shlomo Bolts, an official at the Syrian American Council, an American charity connected to the Syrian opposition.

Bolts, a Jew of Syrian ancestry, said that the Syrian Jewish community is only the latest victim of Assad’s strategy to target religious and cultural institutions.

“Yet this is hardly the only place of worship to be destroyed by the Assad regime. The Umm al-Zinar Church [a house of worship in Homs that locals say dates back to the first centuries of Christianity], the [1,400 year-old] Khalid Ibn Walid Mosque, and countless other irreplaceable cultural sites are now lost to history due to a dictator’s manic desire to keep power at all costs,” he said.

The Syrian American Council is part of the Coalition for a Democratic Syria, an umbrella organization that says it represents over 100,000 Syrian-Americans. The group’s contacts inside Syria shot photos of the rubble where the Jobar Synagogue stood until days ago. Those photos were provided to The Daily Beast.

This week’s attack, though the final blow, was not the first time the Syrian regime had bombarded the Jobar Synagogue. An Israeli news report from April 2013 noted that the synagogue had been “looted and destroyed,” although later photos proved that the synagogue had taken only moderate damage from a mortar shell.

Activists estimate that at least 33 churches and hundreds of mosques have been destroyed by the Assad regime since the start of the Syrian civil war. Six UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Syria have been destroyed in Syria since the fighting began.

Last December, photos emerged in another Israeli news report showing that many of the synagogue’s most precious artifacts were intact. The report stated that the bulk of the synagogue’s artifact collection was being held safely in the hands of local leaders.

Before the conflict, the synagogue held thousands of religious and cultural treasures, including hundreds-years-old Torah scrolls, historical texts, precious dining ware, and ancient Judaica of all sorts. Some of the items were reportedly looted in the early days of the war. Some were reportedly placed in safekeeping. Many remained in the building until its destruction.

Opposition sources told The Daily Beast that the damage assessment following this week’s devastating attack on the Jobar synagogue was ongoing but all of the Jewish heritage items that remained inside the synagogue are feared lost.

The Eliyahu Hanabi Synagogue, built to honor the prophet Elijah, had existed at least since medieval times. The site has been a destination for Jewish pilgrimage for centuries. It was said to have been built atop the cave where Elijah hid from his persecutors. The Prophet Elisha, who allegedly built the synagogue, was said to have anointed King Hazael on its steps, now gone.

The town of Jobar was home to a significant Jewish population throughout the medieval period, although the community was eventually driven out of Syria and the synagogue was taken over in the 19th century by local Arab leaders. Following the establishment of the State of Israel, the synagogue was used as a school for displaced Palestinians.

Activists estimate that at least 33 churches and hundreds of mosques have been destroyed by the Assad regime since the start of the Syrian civil war. Six UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Syria have been destroyed in Syria since the fighting began.

As early as March 2012, UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova was publicly warning about damage to precious sites and calling on both sides to protect Syria’s cultural legacy.

“Damage to the heritage of the country is damage to the soul of its people and its identity,” she said.

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May 29, 2014 0

Fearing divestment from Israel, Jewish orgs oppose divestment to halt global warming

Philip Weiss on May 24, 2014 11

This is priceless, and reads like parody. “Jewish Groups Push Back in Fight for Divestment From Fossil Fuel Companies; Fear Tactic Could Be Used in Israel Debate.” Great reporting by Hody Nemes and Nathan Guttman at the Forward.

Global warming? Chopped liver. Iran’s more of a problem.

[I]n interviews with the Forward, Jewish institutional leaders saw the issue as secondary to other global and social issues.

“We should be thinking of divestment only in terms of very extreme threats of the kind that Iran poses,” said Richard Foltin, director of national and legislative affairs at the American Jewish Committee. Foltin was referring to mainstream Jewish communal support for divestment from companies doing business with Iran, whose development of its nuclear capabilities is viewed as a cover for developing nuclear weapons that would pose an existential threat to Israel.

Reality check from the youth:

Kara Kaufman, a 2012 graduate of Brown University and committed climate activist, sees this perspective as one bound to alienate younger Jews…

What’s the big fear? That divestment would be legitimized as a tool, and would be turned on Israel. BDS really is marching.

Jews urging such a move [divesting from fossil fuel companies] on national organizations face a formidable hurdle: the fear of legitimizing divestment as a tactic, considering its use by pro-Palestinian groups against Israel.

In 2003, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an important mainstream Jewish umbrella group, adopted guidelines for judging boycott or divestment initiatives that urged avoiding them in most cases. The guidelines, which are still viewed as the communal standard for judging these initiatives, recommend avoiding boycotts, divestment and economic sanctions because such measures could “deny the Jewish community the higher moral ground in opposing boycotts against Israel or Jewish interests.”…

Nemes and Guttman notice the hypocrisy:

In the past, however, the Jewish community did not hesitate to use these very same investments as a tool to advance communal goals. Groups stood behind legislation imposing trade restrictions on the Soviet Union until Jews were allowed to leave the country; some supported counter-boycotts against companies that adhered to the Arab boycott against Israel and, more recently, Jewish groups led calls to divest from Sudan because of genocide the Khartoum government was accused of committing in the country’s Darfur region. Most noticeable today, however, is the campaign supported by a wall-to-wall coalition of Jewish groups to divest American funds from Iran.

The difference this time?

Some groups argue that fossil fuel is not a clear-cut case compared to previous campaigns and that chances of it succeeding in bringing down carbon-emitting fuel companies are, at best, slim. But the concern about legitimizing the use of divestment, one of the three pillars of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement targeted at Israel in recent years, is ever-present.

That association got some traction recently during a debate over fossil fuel divestment at Swarthmore College. “Last year, there was a lot of agitation for companies to support Palestine and stop investing in companies having to do with Israel,” Swarthmore board chairman Giles Kemp told The New York Times, explaining one factor in his school’s rejection of the tactic. “Those students were as fervent in their cause as these students are in theirs.”

So the planet can go down the tube. Again we see how corrupting Zionism is, destroying Jewish activism on a central issue for the human species:

JCPA [Jewish Council for Public Affairs] also operates the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, but the council has yet to adopt a policy on fossil fuel divestment.

Jared Feldman, the council’s Washington director, expressed skepticism on the tactic’s efficacy. “Instead of talking about divestment, we should see how we can support development of alternative energy sources,” Feldman said.

I don’t know what to say. But this wasn’t in the Onion.

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May 25, 2014 0

Robert Greenwald’s “Koch Brothers Exposed” (Full)

Koch Brothers Exposed is a hard-hitting investigation of the 1% at its very worst. This full-length documentary film on Charles and David Koch—two of the world’s richest and most powerful men—is the latest from acclaimed director Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price, Outfoxed, Rethink Afghanistan). The billionaire brothers bankroll a vast network of organizations that work to undermine the interests of the 99% on issues ranging from Social Security to the environment to civil rights. This film uncovers the Kochs’ corruption—and points the way to how Americans can reclaim their democracy.

What can you do to fight back? Get the film. Host a screening. Tell your friends. Get the Koch brothers out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

10 Shocking Facts on the Kochs

1. Koch Industries, which the brothers own, is one of the top ten polluters in the United States — which perhaps explains why the Kochs have given $60 million to climate denial groups between 1997 and 2010.

2. The Kochs are the oil and gas industry’s biggest donors to the congressional committee with oversight of the hazardous Keystone XL oil pipeline. They and their employees gave more than $300,000 to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2010 alone.

3. From 1998-2008, Koch-controlled foundations gave more than $196 million to organizations that favor polices that would financially enrich the two brothers. In addition, Koch Industries spent $50 million on lobbying and some $8 million in PAC contributions.

4. The Koch fortune has its origins in engineering contracts with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.

5. The Kochs are suing to take over the Cato Institute, which has accused the Kochs of attempting to destroy the group’s identity as an independent, libertarian think and align it more closely with a partisan agenda.

6. A Huffington Post source who was at a three-day retreat of conservative billionaires said the Koch brothers pledged to donate $60 million to defeat President Obama in 2012 and produce pledges of $40 million more from others at the retreat.

7. Since 2000, the Kochs have collected almost $100 million in government contracts, mostly from the Department of Defense.

8. Koch Industries has an annual production capacity of 2.2 billion pounds of the carcinogen formaldehyde. The company has worked to keep it from being classified as a carcinogen even though David Koch is a prostate cancer survivor.

9. The Koch brothers’ combined fortune of roughly $50 billion is exceeded only by that of Bill Gates in the United States.

10. The Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs accused Koch Oil of scheming to steal $31 million of crude oil from Native Americans. Although the company claimed it was accidental, a former executive in this operation said Charles Koch had known about it and had responded to the overages by saying, “I want my fair share, and that’s all of it.”

May 24, 2014 0

Beitunia killings and the media’s incredibly high bar for Palestinian stories

Faced with the most striking evidence, the Israeli media continues to treat the Palestinian version of the killings as a fabrication, demanding more and more evidence of wrongdoing; that is how the public is taught, day by day, that the reality of occupation isn’t worthy of its attention.

Ever since I left working on the sports pages and began dealing with current affairs, I remember myself trying to initiate stories on the Palestinian issue. Writing about the West Bank and Gaza seemed to me the most crucial contribution an Israeli paper can make. Besides, there were always great stories, of all kinds, in the occupied territories.

Israelis walk around feeling they know everything about the occupation and the conflict, but my impression has always been that this more of a defense mechanism than a fact of life. I often meet internationals who have traveled on the ground and know their way around better than most of the Jewish public. The more I deal with the occupation, the more I understand how much more I have to learn.

But the real problem in the media organizations I worked for was never a shortage of knowledge or good stories, but rather, self-censorship. In the most grotesque moments, the orders came straight from the top. I specifically remember an op-ed by our publisher at Maariv, Ofer Nimrodi, published during Cast Lead. In it Nimrodi apologized to his readers and to the army’s soldiers and generals, for a text by one of our regular columnists that criticized the IDF’s conduct.

Another time, the late editor of Maariv, Amnon Dankner, stood on the newsroom floor screaming at the editor of the the weekend magazine: “Israelis don’t want a picture of an Arab terrorist with rotting teeth on the front page of their holiday paper!” The thing that made him jump was an exclusive interview one reporter got with Laila Khaled in Amman.

Things got worse after Cast Lead. After the operation ended, we sat – the magazine’s editor and myself – with the heads of human rights organization B’Tselem. They presented us with the findings of their investigations, documenting numerous cases of civilian casualties, which could have been avoided, or at times – even seemed intentional. The attempt to turn this into a feature story was buried under excuses from the paper’s editors: it was a non-item, not interesting enough, not new, and so on. We all began to seriously deal with some of those cases – and the IDF even ended up putting soldiers on trials – only following the Goldstone Report and some publications in the international media.

The threshold for Palestinian stories has been on the rise ever since. To get a story published that actually dealt with Palestinians, it needed to be increasingly unique. Most of the time, there wasn’t even a real need to censor anything. Everybody in the paper understood.

Readers hated such stories, too. At a time when newspapers are collapsing, this is no small thing. Israelis often ask why their own human rights organizations turn to the international community with their stories and findings, but they should actually be wondering why neither the public nor the Hebrew-language media are interested in this material.

For a story to break into the mainstream conversation, it had to really have rare qualities: say, a blonde Danish guy who is rammed with a rifle by an army colonel during a bicycle protest in the Jordan Valley. Plus, there was a need for awesome media, preferably video. Testimonies by real people – which has always comprised the heart of journalistic writing – account to nothing when it comes to Palestinians. Photos are only slightly better.

If one thought that video cameras or mobile devices would solve this issue, as far as the Israeli media is concerned, not much has changed. A new myth emerged – that most Palestinian material is fabricated, or “manipulatively edited,” or any other nonsense that is meant to cast doubt on the entire event, and not less important – to deprive it of any context, as if the protest is not taking place under occupation, as if there is no reason for this “riot,” and so on.

There is always the chance that a video is manipulated or fabricated, including the current clips from the protest outside Ofer Prison – the one showing the killing of two Palestinian minors. Yet such fabrications are the rare exception, not the norm a journalist encounters. Most videos are real, most witnesses are reliable.

Specifically, there are 21 gigabytes of videos from the Beitunia shooting, taken from four security cameras; there are hours of tape from that day. There are the real bodies of two dead Palestinians. There are the reports from the hospital they were taken to. Even Israel doesn’t doubt the basic facts – that a couple of teens were killed in that protest.

And yet, when it comes to the Israeli media, the common response was rather skeptical. On Channel 10, Yaron London – not a raving right-winger – actually concluded that this was a fabrication. Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon and the headline in Israel’s most widely read paper, Yisrael Hayom, said pretty much the same thing. The other important daily, Yedioth, spoke of “a controversy.” The military correspondent in the widely watched Channel 2 News, Roni Daniel, sounded doubtful. They all chose to be blind, and to hell with their responsibility to the public.

This is why the Israeli mainstream seems to be divided between those who doubt the Palestinian version and those who think that shooting at unarmed protesters is not such a bad idea. This is why political decisions are taken in a public atmosphere that is as mean as it is ignorant. The results are as catastrophic as one could expect.

Two more notes: (a) because of the sensational character of the West Bank coverage in the Israeli media, directly resulting from the rise of the emotional and journalistic threshold to absurd levels, the “coverage” becomes an aggregation of bizarre, unrelated incidents, most of them not that severe. Someone is hit, another guy is threatened with a loaded gun – the sort of stuff you see in every city. Palestinians are killed almost every week in the territories, homes are demolished on a regular basis; people are arrested, beaten and humiliated every day. But if you ask the average Israeli, he thinks that what takes place in the West Bank is not that different from the pushing and shoving at the entrance to a rock concert anywhere else. That’s what they see.

(b) As far as the media’s dealings with the security forces goes, it’s the exact opposite: the bar is constantly lowered. The most heavily edited, most manipulative clips shown on Israeli television in recent years were from the Mavi Marmara. The IDF confiscated all the media from the numerous journalists on board, but released only several clips of few seconds each, edited, marked with arrows and other graphics, put in slow-motion at times. Did any of the journalists, local and international, who aired these clips bother to demand the release of the raw footage? Did anyone ask “what happened prior to those images?” as they do now?

At times, those clips only served the political needs of senior generals. On the day the army’s chief of staff testified before the committee investigating the raid on the Mavi Marmara, and “by pure coincidence,” the IDF Spokesperson released a (heavily edited) clip showing MK Hanin Zoabi confronting soldiers on board the ship. You could guess what the center of the media’s attention was that day.

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May 23, 2014 0