Anna Baltzer

Last night marked one week since Israel's attack in international waters on the Mavi Marmara Turkish humanitarian ship bound for Gaza, killing nine. One by one, the hundreds of witnesses aboard the vessels have been returning home to tell their stories after being stripped of any and all footage. By confiscating all non-military evidence of the incident, Israel has been able to successfully dominate the narrative, at least in the US where news of the attack had begun to dwindle by the time witnesses were released. One wonders, if Israel is conveying the whole story of what happened that night, why eliminate every single other piece of documentation? What does Israel have to hide?

According to hundreds of eyewitnesses, the Navy shot at the boat and threw tear gas and sound bombs before boarding the ship, and then hit the ground shooting. The videos released by Israel show those aboard the ship attacking soldiers with sticks. Israel claims that the deaths were an accident, that the soldiers were startled by the sticks and thus forced to shoot people to defend themselves.

Now let's put things into perspective. In 2005, the Israeli Army removed 8,000 ideological settlers from Gaza, many of them kicking and screaming with sticks and rocks in hand. The Army managed not to kill or even shoot a single one of them. Do sticks from Turks hurt more, or is it not about the sticks at all?

As Dr. Norman Finkelstein pointed out, Israeli officials met for an entire week prior to the flotilla to plan precisely what they intended to do. The Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren himself stated that the Mavi Marmara was simply "too large to stop with nonviolent means." It's hard to believe that this was an accident.

While the world focuses on the flotilla and Gaza, Israel's restrictions on Palestinian rights in the rest of Palestine continue to tighten. On Friday, soldiers surrounded the Old City in Jerusalem to prevent Muslim men from praying at Al-Aqsa mosque. Only those younger than 15 or older than 40 were allowed through. Hundreds of men gathered outside the metal bars installed by the Army around the city gates. Frustrated, many men sat down to wait to pray on the sidewalk, but soldiers on horseback pushed through the crowd, forcing the men to scatter.

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Ellen Brown

While individuals, businesses and governments suffer from a credit crisis created on Wall Street, the banks responsible for the crisis are tapping into nearly-interest-free credit lines and using the money to speculate or to make commercial loans at much higher rates. By forming their own banks, states too can tap into very low interest rates, and can buffer themselves from another Lehman-style credit collapse.

Keeping interest rates low is considered the first line of defense for central banks bent on easing the credit crisis and getting banks to lend again. The Federal Reserve’s target for the federal funds rate -- the overnight interest rate that banks charge each other – has been kept at a rock-bottom 0% to 0.25% ever since December 2008. A growing number of economists now think it could stay there well into 2011 or even 2012, prompted by fears that a spreading debt crisis in Europe could hurt a budding U.S. recovery.

Dirk van Dijk, writing for the investor website Zacks.com, explains what a good deal this is for the banks:

“Keeping short-term rates low . . . is particularly helpful to the big banks like Bank of America (BAC) and JPMorgan (JPM). Their raw material is short-term money, which is effectively free right now. They can borrow at 0.25% or less, and then turn around and invest those funds in, say, a 5-year T-note at 2.50%, locking in an almost risk-free profit of 2.25%. On big enough sums of money, this can be very profitable, and will help to recapitalize the banking system (provided they don’t drain capital by paying it out in dividends or frittering it away in outrageous bonuses to their top executives).”

This can be very profitable indeed for the big Wall Street banks, but the purpose of the near-zero interest rates was supposed to be to get the banks to lend again. Instead, they are investing this virtually interest-free money in risk-free government bonds, on which we the taxpayers are paying 2.5% interest; or are using the money to engage in the same sort of unregulated speculation that nearly brought down the economy in 2008, or to buy up smaller local banks, or to pay “outrageous bonuses to their top executives.” Even when banks do deign to use their nearly-interest-free funds to support loans, they do not pass these very low rates on to borrowers. The fed funds rate was lowered by 5% between August 2007 and December 2008; yet the 30 year fixed mortgage rate dropped less than 1%, from 6.75% to only about 6%.

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David Lindorff

Shot in the back and the back of
the head by Israeli commandos:
American youth Furkan Dogan

You want to know why we need independent journalism, and why those of you who are reading this article need to support the publication in which it is appearing? Because if you rely for your news on the US corporate media, whether ad-supported or underwriter-supported, you won’t learn that Furkan Dogan, the 19-year-old American citizen slain by Israeli commandos in the raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla May 31, was shot in the back and in the back of the head, as well as multiple times in the face.

This is the conclusion of the autopsy conducted by the Turkish Council of Forensic Medicine, which also did autopsies on the eight other Turkish citizens killed in the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara ferry and five other smaller boats in the so-called Freedom Flotilla. Of the other eight dead, the medical examiners found that five had been shot in the back, or in the back of the head.

This critically important information has not appeared in US news reports. Some American news organizations have left out the autopsy information entirely from their reports as of Saturday. CNN, in its report [1] on Friday, did note that five of the nine were shot in the head, and at close range, but the all-important fact that most of the victims were shot from behind was left out. (By Sunday, CNN wasn't even mentioning that one of the nine victims was an American citizen). ABC had the same information on Thursday, again without mentioning the shots from behind. In its article on Friday, the NY Times had yet to even name Dogan, the American victim, much less mention the bullets that hit him or how he was shot. On Sunday and Monday, the Times was still silent.

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The New England Committee to Defend Palestine

Collective statement from the New England Committee to Defend Palestine regarding the heroes of the Mavi Marmara

***Please circulate widely***

From all credible reports of what happened during the early morning raid on the Free Gaza Flotilla, it seems clear that Israeli commandos attacked the lead ship-the Mavi Marmara-shooting before boarding it in international waters, and expected to rapidly subdue the noncompliant captain and passengers by a show of brutal, armed force. This follows a well-worn pattern of armed zionist attacks on unarmed activists, from the crushing of Rachel Corrie to the point blank shooting of Basem Abu Rahme.

But it’s also clear that things didn’t quite follow the script this time. The passengers of the Mavi Marmara resisted. They decided that they were not willing to allow their ship to be illegally boarded and commandeered in international waters. They chose not to be shot, beaten, electroshocked, kidnapped and tortured without a fight. The Israeli military has justified the killing of activists on the flotilla on the grounds that they did not respond “non-violently” to the armed invasion of their ship. Within the terms dictated by colonialism, the self-defense of the oppressed makes the murderous violence of the oppressor legitimate.

The commandos invaded the ship shooting. No one knows how many they would have executed had they met no resistance on the deck; it’s possible that they would have pursued their murderous rampage throughout the ship. As it was, images broadcast later on Turkish TV show the soldiers clustered together, cowering on one side of the deck with their guns drawn. Trained mostly in beating and killing nine year olds for throwing rocks, they look terrified facing adults with nothing but sticks and pipes.

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Stephen M. Walt

Powerful states often do bad things. When they do, government officials and sympathizers inevitably try to defend their conduct, even when those actions are clearly wrong or obviously counterproductive. This is called being an "apologist," although people who do this rarely apologize for much of anything.

Some readers out there may aspire to careers in foreign policy, and you may be called upon to perform these duties as part of your professional obligations. Moreover, all of us need to be able to spot the rhetorical ploys that governments use to justify their own misconduct. To help students prepare for future acts of diplomatic casuistry, and to raise public consciousness about these tactics, I offer as a public service this handy 21-step guide: "How to Defend the Indefensible and Get Away With It." The connection to recent events is obvious, but such practices are commonplace in many countries and widely practiced by non-state actors as well.

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