Stephen Lendman

Despite a credible start, the fix is in. Expect justice again to be denied. After the Gaza War (Operation Cast Lead), the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) appointed Justice Richard Goldstone to lead an independent four-person fact-finding Commission to investigate human rights and humanitarian law violations committed on both sides, Israel doing everything possible to obstruct him in vain.

The Commission conducted 188 interviews, got over 300 reports, submissions and other documents, comprising more than 10,000 pages, 30 videos, and 1,200 photographs, much of it gathered first-hand. Secondary sources added corroboration, in total providing clear evidence of Israel crimes.

On September 15, 2009, the Commission concluded that:

"there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity."

"While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right of self-defense, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole."

Rocket attacks were a pretext for well-planned naked aggression. The Commission's findings were conclusively damning despite Israeli war criminals not punished, justice still denied but not forever.

Daily, Israel commits crimes against humanity through targeted assassinations, street violence, mass arrests, torture, regular incursions, land theft, dispossessions, and other law violations, including suffocating Gazans under siege, then attacking humanitarian missions breaking it, most recently on May 31 against Freedom Flotilla participants, murdering targeted activists in cold-blood in international waters, claiming self-defense, a clear bald-faced lie, the evidence overwhelming, conclusive, and damning.

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Lawrence Davidson

Deliver Us from Ignorance: Freedom’s Higher Meaning

The cases of Omar Khadr and Bradley Manning

Lawrence Davidson shows how popular apathy and parochialism, combined with control of the information flow by the US government and its allied mass media, has led to a situation whereby the American public views injustice and illegality with complete indifference.

At present there are two men sitting in prison who have never met but are nonetheless intimately connected. One is 23 year old Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was with a group of Afghan resistance fighters attacked by US troops in 2002 (when he was 15). The second is Private First Class Bradley Manning, the man who blew the whistle on the barbaric tactics used by the US in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It is their different forms of resistance to a war sold to the US public as "necessary" and defensive that binds their fate.

Omar Khadr – child prisoner

Omar Khadr was taken prisoner in 2002. The United States claimed he was a member of Al-Qaeda and said he met Osama bin Laden when he was 10. This made him an "intelligence treasure trove". Al-Qaeda obliged the US by describing Omar as a "lion cub" defender of the faith. In truth, neither claim is real evidence of any definite organizational connection. The number of distinct resistance groups in Afghanistan runs into the dozens and Al-Qaeda will breezily claim every one of them. According to General James Jones, who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, the number of actual Al-Qaeda operatives at any one time in Afghanistan is under 100 individuals. The assertion that 15-year-old Omar was one them is problematic. But it was enough for the American government that he was with the resistance. Having complete power over both him and his media image, he could be made into anything the American government wanted. For instance, he is accused of throwing a grenade at American troops despite the fact that the reports of the 2002 action are confused and contradictory. There is no eyewitness evidence of Khadir’s actions during the fighting. Nonetheless, one American soldier died at the time and Omar Khadr has been charged with his "murder".

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Maximilian C. Forte

US military video from an Apache helicopter. Two journalists
from Reuters can be seen in this frame, "Namir" and "Saed",
just before the US attack. Wikileaks.

Unhinged at the US State Department and Pentagon

In the interest of full disclosure, I am one of Wikileaks’ many financial donors. I have downloaded their entire Afghan War Diary, and numerous other documents in the past, and I have shared them. I am also one of the critics of some aspects of the Wikileaks review process. Some might rush to conclude that this puts individuals such as myself in a difficult position. Not from our standpoint. Instead the difficult positions are owned by the U.S. State Department and Pentagon, whose emissions have been chock full of absurd assertions, twisted logic, while appealing to us with as much charm as that of a delinquent about to commit date rape: first the appeal to our good side (ethics), then the threat of destruction (prosecution).

The past week has seen a mounting cascade of legal threats against Wikileaks, launched first via the mainstream media, which along with its patron state is clearly smarting from the lash of uncontrolled information access. A Pentagon official reportedly exclaimed, with obvious joy: “It’s amazing how [Wikileaks’ Julian] Assange has overplayed his hand. Now, he’s alienating the sort of people who you’d normally think would be his biggest supporters.” In one step, three fallacies: one, that this story is all about Julian Assange, thus reducing the complex to the personal; two, that supporters of Wikileaks have become antagonistic toward what is an amorphous transnational movement without clear boundaries of membership or location; and three, the implication that support has shifted toward the Pentagon, as if it now has some sort of green light of legitimacy to commit any acts against Wikileaks that it wishes. It’s only at these big historical moments, with so much at stake, with everything seemingly up in the air, that one finds so many people who are so wrong about so much. Let’s review the strategy of intended intimidation.

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Chris Hedges

A sister taking farewell with her baby brother,
murdered by Israeli officials. (The WE!)

Those who send tanks and fighter jets to bomb the concrete hovels in Gaza with families crouching, helpless, inside -- they are the terrorists.

When I lived in Jerusalem I had a friend who confided in me that as a college student in the United States she attended events like these, wrote up reports and submitted them to the Israel consulate for money. It would be naive to assume this Israeli practice has ended. So, I want first tonight to address that person, or those persons, who may have come to this event for the purpose of reporting on it to the Israeli government.

I would like to remind them that it is they who hide in darkness. It is we who stand in the light. It is they who deceive. It is we who openly proclaim our compassion and demand justice for those who suffer in Gaza. We are not afraid to name our names. We are not afraid to name our beliefs. And we know something you perhaps sense with a kind of dread. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, and that arc is descending with a righteous fury that is thundering down upon the Israeli government.

You may have the bulldozers, planes and helicopters that smash houses to rubble, the commandos who descend from ropes on ships and kill unarmed civilians on the high seas as well as in Gaza, the vast power of the state behind you. We have only our hands and our hearts and our voices. But note this. Note this well. It is you who are afraid of us. We are not afraid of you. We will keep working and praying, keep protesting and denouncing, keep pushing up against your navy and your army, with nothing but our bodies, until we prove that the force of morality and justice is greater than hate and violence. And then, when there is freedom in Gaza, we will forgive ... you. We will ask you to break bread with us. We will bless your children even if you did not find it in your heart to bless the children of those you occupied. And maybe it is this forgiveness, maybe it is the final, insurmountable power of love, which unsettles you the most.

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