Patrick O’Connor
WSWS

United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed
Al-Nahyan, left, speaks to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary R.
Clinton at the Second Contact Group Meeting on Libya, in
Rome, on Thursday, May 5, 2011. (AP/J. Martin, Pool)

Yesterday’s meeting of the “Contact Group on Libya” concluded with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announcing that Washington will soon “tap some portion” of the $30 billion in Libyan assets it has confiscated to assist the military intervention.

The brazen illegality of the Obama administration’s moves to use Libya’s national wealth to keep the so-called rebel leadership afloat again demonstrates the colonial character of the US-NATO war to oust Muammar Gaddafi.

Held in Rome, Italy, the second meeting of the Contact Group was a squalid spectacle, resembling a gathering of mafia bosses coordinating a lucrative heist. Twenty-two foreign ministers, mostly from European and Arab states, were joined by officials with the UN, Arab League, NATO, the European Union, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and the World Bank.

In a lengthy joint statement, the group declared that the so-called Interim National Council (INC) in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi is a “legitimate interlocutor for Libyans”—a status that “should entail the possibility for it to request the unfreezing of Libyan assets, which remain frozen in accounts in several states”. A “Temporary Financial Mechanism” has been established to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to the anti-Gaddafi leadership, which comprises various ex-regime figures, Islamic fundamentalists, and US intelligence assets. Kuwait has already pledged $180 million, and Qatar $400 million.

The Obama administration will move to pass legislation allowing it to spend $150 million in Libyan assets in seized in February. The Washington Post reported that “the administration will work with Congress to decide who will get the money”—underscoring the arbitrary and illegal nature of the operation. The Post further explained that the initial sum is only a small fraction of the total $30 billion in “frozen” Libyan assets because “some of that money is in American banks overseas, making it more complicated to use”.

Apparently, stealing Libyan resources is one thing, but removing them from the coffers of American banks quite another.

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Patrick O’Connor
WSWS

[The Prime Minister Julia Gillard travelled to Tarin Kowt in Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan to visit Australian soldiers based there. (AdelaideNow, October 04, 2010)]

The Australian Labor government has seized on the death of Osama bin Laden on Sunday to again emphasise its commitment to the indefinite occupation of Afghanistan.

Having previously stated her intention to keep Australian troops fighting in the neo-colonial war for the next ten years, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has now declared that the “one message we should take from all of this [i.e., bin Laden’s killing] is persistence pays.”

Like their American counterparts, senior figures in the Australian political and media establishment have rushed to glorify the US military, while voicing their enthusiasm for the killing of the Al Qaeda leader.

The Labor government’s response was marked by an open contempt for any consideration of basic precepts of international law. Gillard was interviewed on ABC Radio yesterday and casually referred to bin Laden being “executed.”

While admitting that she was not privy to the details of the US operation, the prime minister condemned bin Laden for using his wife as a “human shield”—an allegation the White House has since admitted was false. “As I understand the report, it is said someone used a woman as a human shield,” Gillard declared. “Whoever did it is, obviously, what a huge moral wrong and what a despicable act.”

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd was asked if the world was “now a safer place” and replied: “I think the core question is fulfilling our legal responsibilities, to bring to justice those who have committed acts of mass murder ... we have, therefore, together with our friends, partners and allies around the world, a legal obligation to bring such individuals to justice and his [bin Laden’s] case has taken nearly a decade.”

In reality, the Al Qaeda leader’s killing has nothing to do with “legal responsibilities” or delivering “justice” for the victims of his criminal activities. The US operation in Pakistan was a direct violation of international law—it is clear that the US special forces sent into bin Laden’s compound were on what has been described as a “kill mission.” The terrorist was not even armed when he was shot dead.

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Patrick O’Connor
WSWS

A NATO helicopter strike in the southern Afghanistan province of Helmand last Friday killed seven civilians, including three children. The atrocity is the latest in a series of recent US-led bombing operations that have inflicted mass civilian casualties.

Nine children collecting firewood were killed on March 1 in an airstrike in northeastern Kunar province. This prompted desperate apologies from President Barack Obama and General David Petraeus, aimed at placating enormous anger among ordinary Afghans. On March 14 another two children, 10- and 15-year-old brothers, were killed in Kunar. One government official said the boys were carrying shovels on their shoulders that may have been mistaken for weapons. On March 23, a NATO airstrike in eastern Khost province reportedly killed three civilians, including one child. These incidents followed last month’s war crime in the Ghaziabad district of Kunar province, where helicopter strikes killed 65 civilians, including 22 women, and 40 children under the age of 13, according to an Afghan government investigation.

Details of the latest incident remain scant. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) ordered an air strike on two vehicles travelling through Helmand’s Now Zad district. According to ISAF, the vehicles were believed to be occupied by a “Taliban leader and his associates”. A statement acknowledged, without providing details, “Afghan civilians were accidentally killed and wounded in Now Zad district, Helmand province”. ISAF added that an investigation was underway.

Two men, two women, and three children were killed, according to Afghan officials in Helmand. Another three children and two adults were reportedly wounded. According to the Associated Press, provincial authorities said the civilians killed and injured had been in a car near the targeted vehicles. ISAF spokesman Major Tim James said he could not confirm that the Taliban leader had been present.

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Patrick O’Connor
WSWS

An injured Afghan child at the hospital in Farah province.
Photo: Abdul Malek/AP [From an earlier US massacre]

In the worst of several US air strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan in recent days, up to 51 civilians were killed last Thursday in Afghanistan’s north-eastern Kunar province. General David Petraeus, the commander of the US forces in Afghanistan, expressed the colonial-style hostility of the occupation force’s senior command toward the Afghan population, reportedly accusing local residents of burning their children to fake evidence of civilian casualties.

In a five-hour operation on the night of February 17, US Apache helicopters strafed a group of alleged Afghan insurgents with gunfire, rockets and Hellfire missiles. Surveillance drones guided the helicopter assault in the mountainous district of Ghaziabad, near the Pakistan border, and according to the Washington Post, bombs were dropped by at least one of the unmanned Predator aircraft. The attack was one of a number of recent US operations in the district, ordered as part of President Barack Obama’s broader escalation of the Af-Pak war.

Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, senior military spokesman in Kabul, stated that three dozen people were killed in the incident. He maintained they were all “suspected insurgents who had gathered to attack US and Afghan troops”. However, the remarks of one unnamed military official, cited by the Washington Post on Monday, made clear that American authorities had no knowledge of the identities of those killed. The official admitted that those targeted had been wearing civilian clothes.

Kunar Governor Said Fazlullah Wahidi contradicted Smith’s claims. He said: “According to our information 64 people were killed: 13 armed opposition, 22 women, 26 boys and 3 old men.” The governor sent a three-man “fact-finding team” to the area on Saturday, which returned with seven injured people suffering burns and shrapnel wounds, including a young man and woman and five boys and girls.

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Patrick O’Connor
WSWS

The latest batch of the several hundred leaked US diplomatic cables concerning Australia, provided by WikiLeaks to the Fairfax company’s Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age, provide further extraordinary evidence of Washington’s direct involvement in the anti-democratic coup against former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last June.

Key coup plotters in the Labor Party and trade unions—including senators Mark Arbib and David Feeney, and Australian Workers Union chief Paul Howes—secretly provided the US embassy with regular updates on internal government discussions and divisions within the leadership. As early as June 2008, the American ambassador identified Julia Gillard as the “front-runner” to replace Rudd. In October 2009, i.e., eight months before Gillard was installed in unprecedented circumstances, Mark Arbib informed American officials of emerging leadership tensions. The Australian people, on the other hand, were kept entirely in the dark about any differences between the prime minister and his colleagues until after Rudd was ousted.

Gillard was described, some two years before the coup, by US diplomatic officials as the “rising star” within the Labor government. They made various enquiries into Gillard’s foreign policy sympathies, receiving assurances from government sources that her origins in the party’s “left” faction had no policy significance whatsoever. Arbib told the embassy that Gillard was “one of the most pragmatic politicians in the ALP”; Victorian senator David Feeney added that “there is no longer any intellectual integrity in the factions” and that “there is no major policy issue on which he, a Right factional leader, differs from Gillard”. When embassy officials checked on Gillard with Paul Howes, Australian Workers Union boss and subsequent anti-Rudd coup plotter, observing that “ALP politicians from the Left, no matter how capable, do not become party leader,” he responded immediately: “but she votes with the Right’.”

The Sydney Morning Herald and Age have published parts of the latest material in excerpted form, ahead of their full public release expected in coming weeks. They focus today on Mark Arbib’s role as a “secret US source”. One of the key apparatchiks in Labor’s powerful New South Wales right-wing faction, Arbib reportedly made several requests to US officials that his identity as a “protected” informant be guarded.

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Patrick O’Connor
WSWS

The latest round of US diplomatic cables distributed by WikiLeaks has cast fresh light on the circumstances surrounding the anti-democratic Labor Party coup on June 23-24 that ousted Kevin Rudd as Australian prime minister. In 2008 and 2009, the US embassy issued an extraordinary series of scathing assessments of Rudd’s performance, centring on his attitude to China. While the full story is yet to come out, the WSWS noted in the aftermath of the coup that “Washington’s increasingly aggressive stance towards Beijing was undoubtedly a major factor in the recent political upheavals in Canberra.”

The cables also shed light on the role being played by Prime Minister Julia Gillard. The prime beneficiary of the coup against Rudd, Gillard is functioning as nothing but a mouthpiece for the Obama administration. Lining up with right-wing forces in the US that have vilified WikiLeaks’ editor Julian Assange, and called for his “assassination”, the Australian prime minister has joined the fray by declaring “illegal”, without a shred of evidence, the publication of the documents and by supporting US threats to prosecute Assange.

Excerpts from the latest cables have been published today by the Sydney Morning Herald and Age newspapers. They cover a two-year period in which the US was becoming increasingly preoccupied with countering the rise of China as a rival world power. Not yet published are cables from 2010, in the period immediately leading up to Rudd’s ousting. But what has so far been revealed makes clear that as far as Washington was concerned, the Australian government’s primary responsibility was to function as an obedient junior partner in the anti-China containment strategy, providing military and diplomatic support as demanded. Much of the US embassy’s anger with Rudd derived from his various foreign policy initiatives that were not first devised in Washington, or at least vetted by American officials.

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Patrick O’Connor

May 10, 2010: Gillard rules out replacing Rudd. Treasurer
Wayne Swan and the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, in
federal parliament. Photo: Glen McCurtayne

[The meaning of 'spruik'] Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard appeared at the National Press Club yesterday to deliver what the government had billed as a major address on the economy and its “reform” credentials. The event was entirely overshadowed, however, by new reports of Gillard’s personal role in the coup against her predecessor, Kevin Rudd. Despite the prime minister’s, and her colleagues’, best efforts to “move forward” and prevent any scrutiny of the unprecedented manoeuvres of June 23-24, the still unclear story as to how Rudd was brought down, and by whom, continues to dog the Labor government.

During question time, Laurie Oakes, veteran Canberra journalist with Channel 9, asked Gillard about her meeting with Rudd the night before she was installed as prime minister: “Is it true that Mr Rudd told you that night that he was working towards an October election because he knew issues like climate change needed to be sorted out? Is it true that Mr Rudd indicated to you that if closer to the election, polling showed he was an impediment to the re-election of the government, and if leading Labor figures such as [former defence minister] John Faulkner agreed he was an impediment, that he would then voluntarily stand aside and hand over the leadership to you before the election? Is it also true that you agreed this offer was sensible and responsible? Is it true that there was then a brief break during which Mr Rudd went outside and briefed a couple of colleagues on what he thought was a deal, while you contacted your backers, and that when the meeting resumed you said you’d changed your mind? You’d been informed he didn’t have the numbers in caucus and you were going to challenge anyway?”

Gillard refused to answer the questions, insisting that she would never, “for the rest of my life”, reveal what was said in the meeting she had with Rudd. She absurdly attempted to present this stonewalling as a principled gesture of respect for a private discussion with the former prime minister, but it in fact amounted to a contemptuous dismissal of the right of the Australian people to know the means through which she became head of government.

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Alison Weir

The New York Times, whose regional bureau chief has a son in the Israeli military, reports that Israel has just appointed a panel charged with investigating its attack on an aid flotilla that killed nine aid volunteers, including a 19-year-old American.

Isabel Kershner, who is an Israeli citizen and has refused to answer questions about her possible family ties to the Israeli military, writes the report.

Kershner reports that the White House hailed the announcement of the panel as an “important step forward,” stating that “the structure and terms of reference of Israel’s proposed independent public commission can meet the standard of a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation.”

In her story, Kershner reports that the panel will include eminent Irish Nobel Peace Laureate Lord David Trimble as an observer, but omits the fact that Trimble is a leader of the newly formed pro-Israel organization “Friends of Israel” and is close to Netanyahu associate Dore Gold.

Irish journalist Patrick Roberts writes, “This is a little like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.”

Kershner reports that the other foreign observer is Brig. Gen. Ken Watkins, former judge advocate general of Canadian Forces, but fails to mention that Watkins is known for stonewalling a 2009 House of Commons investigation into Afghan prisoner abuse.

One House of Commons member commented at the time about Watkins’ lack of cooperation with the investigation: "Obviously the cover-up continues."

Kershner informs readers that the panel will be led by a retired Israeli Supreme Court Justice, but fails to mention reports that he does not believe in such a panel and opposed foreign participation.

Kershner reports in the bottom half of her story that Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper calls the proposed panel a “farce,” but does not mention that this is a longstanding pattern for Israeli governmental investigations (and lack thereof) into military human rights abuses.

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Patrick O’Connor
WSWS

One of Israel's tribalist killers incapacitated and receiving medical
care from the humanitarian aid activists.

The Israeli government’s announcement yesterday of a so-called Independent Public Commission into last month’s bloody Israeli commando raid on a Gaza aid flotilla underscores the Zionist state’s contempt for international law and world opinion. Rejecting calls for an independent and international inquiry into the incident, which saw nine Turkish activists killed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has instead created a mechanism to exonerate the Israeli military and blame the victims of the illegal attack on the MV Mavi Marmara on May 31.

Senior government and military figures have made little pretence that the inquiry will be anything other than a whitewash of the Israeli massacre. According to the Israeli Ynetnews website, Netanyahu told his cabinet yesterday:

“Two principles guided us [in forming the inquiry]: first, maintaining the freedom of IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] soldiers to act and the credibility of the IDF investigation, and second, giving a credible and convincing response [for] the responsible states in the international community.”

Netanyahu’s communications minister Moshe Kahlon added:

“The [inquiry] decision will create a balance between the international demand for a committee and the Israeli government’s obligation to protect the IDF.”

The prime minister and his colleagues could not have put the matter more clearly—the inquiry is to counter demands for a proper investigation, also ensuring the Israeli military retains its free hand in maintaining the illegal blockade on the 1.5 million Palestinian residents of Gaza. An Israeli inquiry was never going to be anything but a cynical farce. The Netanyahu government is comprised of senior figures who ought to be facing war crimes charges for their various roles in previous Israeli military assaults on Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The Zionist state is now internationally notorious for its brazen provocations, military attacks, cover-ups and disinformation campaigns.

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