US Intelligence Enables Israeli Attacks

This interview is from couple years back when Gaza was under attack by Israel. But, since, nothing has changed in conditions of Gaza, Israel or other stakeholders (US, Middle East countries etc.), this interview is still very much relevant today. This interview is interesting due to its discussion of 3 main topics which give Israel the legitimacy to build an open air prison (Gaza is essentially an open air prison) & then use it as its weapons testing facility (which Israel actually does, as discussed in another blog post earlier in 2017):

1. US sharing intelligence with Israel is nothing new. Israel is considered an staunch ally in the Middle East by US, & hence, it bends over backwards to accommodate any reasonable or unreasonable Israeli requests. US would even throw its own citizens under the bus, proverbially speaking, to furnish Israel's requests. US may not have enough money to help solve its own problems (homelessness, education, crime, unemployment etc.) but it has to give billions in financial aid to Israel every year, besides, military & intelligence sharing.

2. Arab dictators legitimizing Israel's occupation of Palestinian land is the worst form of crime against Muslims. Muslims fully expect to be railroaded by non-Muslims, but what can be said & felt when your own Muslim leaders, esp. those leaders who are called the "custodian of the 2 holy mosques" of Islam, make friends with Israel. Why? Because they operate per the idea that enemy of my enemy is my friend. Since. Iran is considered an enemy by both Israel & Saudi Arabia; that enmity of Iran made friends & allies of Israel with Saudi Arabia.

On top of that, since, Saudi Arabia is the leader of Sunni Arab world, other Middle Eastern / prominent members of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) are also following the lead of Saudi Arabia; countries like Kuwait, UAE, Qatar etc.

So, Palestinians not only have Israeli, European, & North American Zionists & Evangelical Christians to deal with, they also have Muslim leaders from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, & Kuwait etc. working against them & Iran.

Further to that, another tangential, but related, point, is that this alliance of Israel, US, & Saudi Arabia & its followers, show the American hypocrisy. The slogan of democracy is all well & good in theory, but in reality, as long as, American political & energy interests are secure, it doesn't matter to US & Western governments, what happens to human rights in Middle Eastern countries. As Glenn Greenwald says in the interview that the Western governments "... actually give the Saudis training and technology that bolster their surveillance, one of the most repressive regimes in the world, at the very same time that we pretend to be campaigning for democracy."

3. The role of media in US has become more of propagating what the government is saying. So, although, the Western governments talk about freedom of the press, the mainstream press has lost its way, & become the mouthpiece of their respective governments. The public has realized that & hence, a large majority disregard the media, & that's exactly, what Trump seized on, but he & his followers took the problem to the other extreme & label anything spewing out of Trump as facts & everything else as lies.

Western governments & press disregard media of countries they think are their enemies, for instance, North Korea, Russia, China etc. & bill the national media outlets of these countries as mere mouthpieces of their respective governments. But aren't the media of the Western governments doing the exact same thing for their own governments? For example, American news outlets like CNN, ABC, Fox, MSNBC etc. played a crucial role in drumming up the war rhetoric for Gulf War I, Gulf War II, Afghanistan, Iraq & Libya.

We can all blame the actions of the media losing its integrity due to their never-ending chase of the TV ratings & advertisement dollars but what's more troubling is the hypocrisy; bringing the perfect proverb to my mind that "kettle is calling the pot black."

The new administration of Mr. Trump is predictably doing what several other past administrations have tried to do, previously; broker a peace deal between Israel & Palestine, & finally bring the peace in the Middle East. However, the peace deal is like a corporate vision, which will never actually be attained & always remain an elusive dream, because the peace deals are not being negotiated with honesty. Hypocrisy & double agendas rule the day. Israel needs Gaza & West Bank to always show the world that they are in threat & is the victim (in addition to being those places as live testing places for Israel's billion-dollar arms industry). America needs Israel & repressive Middle Eastern regimes to control its own interests in Middle East. American media has also become the pawn of the government & the public is being fed the lies about Muslims, Islam, Israel, Palestine, & Arab countries to help manufacture domestic support for whatever American government actually wants to do in the Middle East.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMuxNOtNL9Q

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So what do we know about this targeting? If I understand it correctly, the documents that Snowden released aren't about this particular attack or this specific attack on Gaza, but in the past there's evidence not only of intelligence sharing, but the word that leaked off the page to me when I was reading your piece was targeting. What do we know about that?

GLENN GREENWALD, AWARD-WINNING JOURNALIST, THE INTERCEPT: It's no secret that the U.S. is the key party enabling Israeli militarism and aggression. In general, it provides, obviously, huge amounts of cash to the Israelis, even in an ongoing attack, such as the one currently taking place in Gaza. The U.S. just in the last week has furnished arms and munitions and grenades to the Israelis that they're using in the attack.

So our piece focused on the role that the NSA and the intelligence apparatus that the United States has built plays in enabling the Israeli attack. And we revealed some documents showing that the relationship has grown substantially over the last decade between the NSA on the one hand and the Israeli counterpart, the SIGINT National Unit, on the other, in which the NSA provides the Israelis with all kinds of surveillance technology, training, but also lots of data that they collect in the course of doing surveillance that the Israelis then use to target people in Gaza, in the West Bank, and throughout the region, first for surveillance, but then, obviously, also for targeting with violence. And so the U.S. really is at the center of every form of Israeli aggression that takes place in that region.

JAY: Now, we're led to believe that the American satellites have the capability of actually seeing faces on streets. I mean, one, do we know whether that's true? And two, if that level of technology is being transferred, that would mean active, real-time involvement of the U.S. intelligence or U.S. army in Israeli warfare.

GREENWALD: The Americans share the vast bulk of their surveillance technology and surveillance activities in the region with the Israelis. It's a very close cooperative sharing arrangement.

I don't think there's any question that the Israelis are being reckless and more or less indiscriminate in the violence they're wreaking on Gaza. I mean, there are Israeli generals who have inadvertently acknowledged, essentially, that they are attacking heavily civilian areas and with their knowledge that lots of civilians are going to be killed. They have targeted UN schools that they knew and that coordinates for which had been provided to them many, many times. And so I don't think there's a lot of efforts being undertaken by the Israelis to be very precise or careful in the kinds of people that they're killing.
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... I think they're interested in knowing the whereabouts of people who are of greatest interest to them. And certainly the sharing arrangement with the U.S. helps them to know where people are, and it helps them to geo-locate them. ... .

... I think the important point is this is not a careful and precise operation, where they're targeting people very carefully and then killing only them. They're engaged in the destruction of entire blocks, blowing up huge apartment buildings and homes. And that's why the death toll of innocent people has been so high.

JAY: Is there any limits on what type of technology the United States gives to Israel that you're aware of? Are they getting the same kind of technology that the American Armed Forces has itself?

GREENWALD: A lot of it, yeah. ... there was an agreement whereby the NSA agreed to provide raw communication, even of U.S. citizens, to the Israelis without first even minimizing--meaning safeguarding the identity of the American citizens to whom that communication pertained. ... it isn't that the NSA just wholesale hands over everything to Israel. But in some cases the NSA cooperates more aggressively with the Israelis than they do even with their closest surveillance partners in the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. ... it's just reflective of this overall policy that the U.S. government has to be incredibly loyal to the Israelis when it comes to providing pretty much anything the Israelis want.
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JAY: ... the political side of the American administration's essentially driven by domestic politics. But ... this is more about big money than it is about Jewish voters.

GREENWALD: ... what's interesting is there's this sort of taboo on how you're supposed to talk about the role that domestic politics plays in our policy toward Israel, because it touches on longstanding anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish money controlling foreign policy for the benefit of Israel and at the expense of the United States or other countries. But if you look at what political consultants and the like say when they're speaking candidly, ... that's more or less what they say. Hank Sheinkopf is one of the most sort of savvy and experienced political operatives. He was a high-level aid to the Clintons. He helped run Hillary Clinton's Senate campaigns in New York. And there's this fascinating New York Sun article from 2007 that talks about how all of the Democratic presidential candidates, like John Edwards and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the like, are parading before AIPAC and speaking very, very aggressively and militaristically about Iran. And they asked Hank Sheinkopf why that is. And he said, well, it's very simple to understand: it's because Jewish voters are essentially the ATM of American politics--in New York.

But I think it's not just Jewish voters. I think it's really important to understand that one of the biggest factions supporting Israel, probably in a more aggressive way than a lot of Jewish voters, are evangelicals, who for religious reasons believe that it's really crucial that Israel occupy not only Israel but sort of what they view as greater Israel, which includes the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, because they believe God wanted Israel to possess that land and that a unified Israel, as they see it, is necessary for the return of Jesus and for the rapture. And so you have not just Jewish voters, but evangelical Christians who are very fervent in their demands that the U.S. government support Israel, even at the expense of American interest. And that definitely is a big part of the domestic pressures.

JAY: ... the other issue is do you not think that much of the foreign-policy elite, professional and political, share this vision of Israel as this necessary outpost for America in a sea of oil with angry Arabs that don't like Americans very much, so it's not just about the potential money in American elections, it's also a convergence of interest and seeing that Israel, for better or worse, is absolutely essential to American hegemony in the Middle East?

GREENWALD: Yeah, I think it's an important point. First of all, ... I don't think that the issue with Israel is different in terms of domestic politics than pretty much every other issue, which is that money dominates, and there's much more money on the side of pro-Israel or support for Israel than there is, say, support for the Palestinians, which is why it's so lopsided. ... .

But the point you make is an important one, which is sometimes it gets depicted that Israel is this kind of domineering force that kind of commandeers American politics for its own interest at the expense of the United States. I think you're right, though-- it's much more of a two-way street than that. The Americans definitely look at Israel as an important weapon that they use to advance their interests in the Middle East, just like they look at support for the dictatorial regimes that are their allies as well, in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain. You know, these are just ways that the United States kind of dominates that region in order to secure their energy and oil interests. And Israel is an important weapon in the eyes of a lot of American policymakers. It's not just that they're forced to do so because of domestic political constraints.

JAY: And this relationship with the Saudis is kind of an interesting piece of this puzzle, because ... the Saudis are also in on this intelligence sharing. So you have both Israel and Saudi Arabia within the American intelligence confidence circle. Supposedly, the Saudis are so in support of the Palestinians. But sort of at a deeper level, you almost have a kind of quasi-alliance between the Saudis and the Israelis to help manage the region under this American intelligence and military umbrella.

GREENWALD: Oh, there's definitely a de facto alliance, or at least a coalition, between the U.S., the Saudis, and Israel. Especially since the Saudis began viewing Iran as their great rival in the region, they viewed working cooperatively with the Israelis as something that was very much in their interest. And, of course, they made kind of meaningless pronouncements in support of the Palestinians because they need to do so for political consumption. I mean, even the Saudi tyrants care a little bit about the public not viewing them as partners of the Israelis.

But that is one of the most undercovered and underexamined issues in U.S. foreign policy is the unbelievably close relationship between the U.S. and the Saudis, and now increasingly the Israelis. I mean, we did do an article a week ago publishing the documents showing very close intelligence sharing between the Saudis and the Americans. We actually give the Saudis training and technology that bolster their surveillance, one of the most repressive regimes in the world, at the very same time that we pretend to be campaigning for democracy.

But the thing that's even more amazing about that is we've had this 12 year period of running around trying to pin the blame of 9/11 on all sorts of parties, from Saddam Hussein to Iran to whoever the sort of enemy du jour is, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and yet the country that probably bears most of the blame, if anyone does, is Saudi Arabia. 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. You have people in the Saudi government who at the very least were close to some of the people who were helping to plan the 9/11 attack, probably financing the people who were responsible. And yet they become our closest allies. It's just one of those ironies that underscores how propagandistic the war on terror has become.

JAY: ... how much is mainstream media paying attention to the some of the kind of stuff you're breaking?

GREENWALD: I mean, I think they're paying attention in several different respects. I mean, the stories that we've broken, the Snowden revelations in general, have made a big impact on the media landscape. I think part of that is just the drama of it all, the sort of spycraft, the drama about where Snowden can go or where he would get asylum, all of that.
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... I think that the stories themselves get some media attention. But I do think that some get more attention than others based upon not what's actually newsworthy, but based upon the kinds of things the American media likes to systematically ignore.
...

And I think some of the revelations that we published about spying with Saudi Arabia, about spying with Israel, have been more or less ignored by the American media for the same reason, that it's just so contrary to the narrative that we like to sustain about what the role of the U.S. government in the world is, and any kind of attention to that sort of stuff would require a whole lot of digging and further investigation that American media outlets in general like to avoid because of how uncomfortable it makes people.
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... They like to propagate that narrative and avoid things that call any of it into question. And I think that's actually one of the reasons why people have lost faith in established media outlets is because it doesn't really seem to serve any real purpose if all they're doing is bolstering and propagating what the government is saying instead of questioning and investigating it.

Israel, World Capital of Homeland Security Industries - Shir Hever on RAI

Some great insights into how Israeli defence industry are flourishing by exporting high-tech military equipment to developing countries. Israeli economy is becoming increasingly dependent on its defence industry. Since, defence industry is so important for Israeli economy, the elusive peace process between Israel & Palestine will always remain elusive. As Shir Hever says in the end that why would you want peace in the Middle East, when the occupation & war is bringing in cold, hard cash in the country.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0dyHMVMh0s

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: ... a lot of your work has been about the Israeli security state. I guess one of the things that doesn't get talked about enough ... is how much money gets made out of the security needs of Israel or the perceived security needs of Israel. Talk about how important all that is to the Israeli economy, particularly the Israeli elite.

SHIR HEVER, ECONOMIST, ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER: There was a sort of wave shape in the amount of dependency of Israel on the security economy and the military economy. During the Cold War years, especially in the '80s, there was a peak in massive investment in security and exports, and the Israeli industrial force was over 20% working for the military industry one way or another. Then that collapsed, especially during the '90s. There's a big shift to different sectors. Many of these big companies underwent a very severe crisis.

JAY: Why?

HEVER: Because the end of the Cold War meant lower demands. There was no investment in high-tech industry. There was also a deep social change in Israel with immigrants coming from the former Soviet Union which started to integrate into different sectors of the Israeli economy, mainly the high-tech sector, which was growing very fast. And so that meant that Israel was demilitarizing in many ways. And there was also this kind of hope that because of the Oslo negotiations there would be an end of the occupation. So international corporations started to invest in the Israeli economy in the belief or in the hope that it will become less militarized and the consumer economy would flourish.

All that was actually proven to be false, and starting from the year 2000, with the Second Intifada of Palestinians against the Israeli occupation, and even more after September 11, 2001, in the United States, there was a surge of the Israeli military industry again. And it's not the majority of the Israeli economy. It's not the biggest sector in Israel. But, nevertheless, there is no country in the world in which security plays such an important role as it is in Israel.

JAY: Now, before we get into the domestic situation, let's talk about how important security is as an Israeli export, and also the politics, 'cause it's interesting who they export to.

HEVER: Yeah, this is something that--Israel always played a very interesting role in the global arms trade, because there were some attempts by the Israeli military companies to compete with the U.S. military companies, which were crushed in the bud very quickly. And that shows exactly the moment in which U.S. support for Israel stops. Whenever an Israeli military company tries to sell something to China which has some U.S. technology in it or tries to compete with a U.S. company over producing a fighter plane, for example, that's the end of U.S.-Israeli alliance right there.

So Israeli companies evolved into targeting themselves as a sort of complementary to the U.S. military industry. The U.S. is the biggest arms exporter in the world by far, but Israel is the highest per capita arms exporter in the world. And while the U.S. specializes in big combat platforms (fighter planes, bombers, warships, helicopters, and so on, tanks), Israel is selling a lot of components that go with these platforms. So if you already got the F-16 from the U.S., you can buy special missiles, navigation systems, communications systems from Israeli companies that go with your F-16.

JAY: And if you go back historically, sometimes Israel would sell and could sell things to regimes even the Americans couldn't openly sell arms to.

HEVER: Yeah. And whenever you make a sort of comparison of which are the biggest arms exporter in the world, Israel is not very high--well, it's high compared to its size, but it's never in the top five. But when you ask which countries are selling to developing economies or to those tertiary markets, then Israel is quite high on the list.

JAY: And it included the South African apartheid regime, Columbia, Honduras, and it goes on and on.

HEVER: Yeah. So if we're talking about the '60s, '70s, '80s, Israel sold weapons to Rhodesia, which also had an apartheid regime; to South Africa, breaking the embargo very blatantly; to Guatemala during the civil wars; to Chile under Pinochet. Those countries which found it very difficult to convince the more mainstream weapon companies to sell them arms could always go to Israel.

JAY: And why--I mean, Israel's always trying to present itself as a democratic country. They're very interested in making sure that American--American Jews, particularly--support, send money to Israel. They never seem concerned. I mean, most American Jews are left-of-center, progressive in one way or the other, some of which except when it comes to Israel, but certainly when it came to South Africa and Chile and things like that. But they never seem to care about that, the Israeli governments.

HEVER: Well, sometimes it's because they do that in coordination with the U.S. government. Like, for example, in the Iran-Iraq War, where there was weapons being sold to both sides of the same time, then Israel was selling to Iran and the U.S. selling to Iraq, and it was coordinated. So in that case they're working with the U.S.

But also there was a sort of debate within Israel about how the arms industry is a strategic asset and who should they export to. And the question is: can the Israeli military grow stronger by this revenue that comes from exporting those kind of systems that are being developed for the Israeli army? Maybe those systems that are becoming a bit obsolete and outdated, we can sell them, use the money to develop something new.

And there was a worry in Israel after the occupation of 1967, because France, which was the biggest supplier of arms to Israel at the time, said they're going to embargo weapons sales to Israel unless Israel withdraws from the occupied territory.

JAY: What year was that?

HEVER: 1967. And the Israeli government was worried there's going to be an embargo. And at that point they said, we have to develop everything ourselves; we have to have a very strong military industry so that we can make our own tanks, our own cannons, and so on. They didn't know that they were actually going to be rewarded for the occupation and that France, which sold some weapons to Israel, is going to be replaced by a much bigger supplier in 1973, six years after the occupation, the United States. So they already made that strategic decision: they're going to reach out to new markets to try to sell Israeli weapon technology wherever they can.

But I think what we see in the last decade or so, especially after September 11, is that Israel has kind of shifted their target audience. It's not that they're looking for those countries that are under embargo to sell them the Israeli submachine guns. The famous submachine gun the uzi is no longer produced in Israel, actually. It's now made in China. But actually they were going to sell to those areas in which there is extreme inequality, extreme social resentment, to the governments, in order to repress that kind of uprising.

So, actually, Israel is now the world capital of homeland security industries. They're selling security cameras, surveillance equipments, drones, riot gear. That is the sort of technology that governments need in order to control their citizens. And it comes not just with the actual technology; it comes also with an ideology. It comes with the ideology that, look what Israel is doing, how Israel is controlling Palestinians and every aspect of their lives, and decides who can pass and who gets a permit and so on, and uses this technology to leave Palestinians no option to resist, and why don't we sell that to other governments around the world. For example, Brazil bought a lot of that technology in order to repress the favelas in preparation for the World Cup. We see that in India, not just in the area of Kashmir, but mainly there along the border with Pakistan, and in East Europe. And we also see that with extreme-right governments, like Berlusconi in Italy that was worried about asylum-seekers coming from Africa, and using Israeli drones and Israeli technology to try to block that, but also not just buying the technology, but also buying the legitimacy, saying Israel is a wonderful country. Berlusconi was a big pro-Israeli spokesman. And if Israel is allowed to do it, we can do it too.

JAY: And part of what the Israeli model for their sales, I guess, says to these regimes is you don't have to be worried about an uprising someday; you can repress people for decades and decades. Just look at us.

HEVER: Yeah. It's a very cynical worldview. It brings to mind 1984, that you can just use brute force to repress resistance.

I think there is a limit to how much it can work. And there's also a limit to understanding of how you can use it and where. Now that we're watching what's happening in the Ukraine, it brings to mind what happened in Georgia in 2008, in which a failed Israeli general, Gal Hirsch, who actually did terribly in the war against Lebanon of 2006, formed his own security company, went to Georgia, and talked to the government about selling them Israeli equipment. And the Georgian government believed, because of this prestige of the Israeli army, their equipment would be able to stop the Russian army. Now, we know what happened in the end in 2008. They were immediately defeated. So it actually goes to show that the Israeli army has completely lost its preparation and its technologies that were designed to fight other armies. The Israeli army hasn't engaged in a conventional war for 40 years. They're now completely concentrated on fighting civilians and repressing them.

JAY: And at the cutting edge. You mentioned drones and surveillance equipment. I saw ... Netanyahu was in California and made a deal with Jerry Brown to make deals with Silicon Valley, and cyber security is one of the things they want to work on. There's a lot of integration or interpenetration between American capital and American security, intelligence, and Silicon Valley with Israel's intellectual capacity, money, and security industry. And they have their political representatives, too.

HEVER: Yeah. But I think it's falling apart, because the Israeli high-tech industry has grown, like I said, in the '90s very rapidly. But it grew where many of these companies, their dream was to be bought by a U.S. company and then they can leave. A lot of the very talented Israeli high-tech entrepreneurs found themselves very happily moving to other countries. And then, between 2000 and 2008, there were eight years--so, after the crash of the NASDAQ of 2000 and until 2008, the next economic crisis, the average increase in value of Israeli high-tech companies was zero percent over eight years. During that time--that's because a lot of those companies collapsed and lost everything. And those who survived were mainly tied to the security apparatus, and their biggest customer is the Israeli army.
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JAY: ...if this is an increasingly big sector of the Israeli economy, ... the interests of this sector certainly are not to have a peace agreement. How much does that influence politics?

HEVER: Well, it's not easy to show how that influences directly. You don't really see how that lobby works. But you can see that Israel's former prime minister and former minister of defense, Ehud Barak, he has done many political mistakes in the last couple of years, and it seemed that he is not going to be able to get into the government again. So he said, I'm now going to do what I actually like to do best: I am going to the private sector. And then it becomes apparent that he has many friends who own these security companies, and he can open doors for them, and he can get a lot of money from them. So, obviously, these security companies' business model is built on the occupation. These are companies that their motto when they go to arms trade shows and show their equipment, they say, this has already been tested by the Israeli army on actual people. You can only have that because of the occupation. So every new weapon is first sold to the Israeli army, shot at Palestinians. Then you can sell it.

JAY: Yeah, and they probably have nice little sales videos showing how this all works.

HEVER: Of course. Yeah. After this invasion of Gaza that we were talking about, there was a trade show that the Israeli army did where they showed how each and every of these new inventions were used in the attack on Gaza, completely shamelessly.

JAY: So the attacks become demos.

HEVER: The attacks become demos, and these companies make a profit out of it, and then these companies are hiring senior Israeli officials. I don't think that means that they want to end the peace process or sabotage the peace process; it means they want to continue it forever, because as long as it continues, they can continue these periodic attacks and they can continue the occupation.

JAY: Yeah, 'cause the peace process is a process of never come to an agreement about peace.

Ex-CIA executive director admits waterboarding is ‘torture’

Since, there's so much written about torture / "enhanced interrogation" techniques at Guantanamo Bay, there's nothing much left to comment on it. However, I would like to point out one thing this article mentions about these "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

As the article mentions that some of these torture techniques have been borrowed from the "torture book" of Nazi Germany.

So, it's all good & ok to vilify Nazis and describe Adolf Hitler as the most despicable human who ever lived, but it's all good and ok to copy the torture tactics from Nazis & apply them extensively on people who are still waiting for the lawful punishments for their alleged crimes.

Think of it like this; you hate that coworker at your workplace who bullies everyone & everyone is afraid of him/her. Would you, a nice person, copy & act like that bully & still think that you are not only a nice person, but people are respecting you because you are still being a considered a nice person by others?

Or what if your husband or boyfriend start copying tactics & methods of a rapist? Would you still think that he is a nice person with whom you are or willing to have a family?

Furthermore, perhaps, Nazis were using these "enhanced interrogation" techniques to extract info from Jews. They wanted to eliminate all Jews from lands they had occupied. Perhaps, they labelled "Jews" as "terrorists" & considered themselves & their nations / occupied lands to be threatened by Jews, & hence, wanted to extract info from captured Jews in any way they can, so they can exterminate all of them. Now, what if, we replace "Nazis" with "American military" & "Jews" with "Muslims". Lo and behold, we got Gitmo !!!

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https://www.rt.com/usa/311532-cia-torture-gitmo-interrogation/

The most senior CIA officer on record yet has said he’s “comfortable with saying” that waterboarding & related interrogation methods were “torture.” He was commenting on the post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation” tactics used by the Bush Administration.

The remarks by former executive director of the CIA, Alvin ‘Buzzy’ Krongard (2001-2004), were made to BBC’s Panorama. The third most senior former official at the agency was asked if he thought waterboarding & related tools amounted to torture.

“Well, let's put it this way, it is meant to make him (the suspect) as uncomfortable as possible. So I assume, without getting into semantics, that's torture. I'm comfortable with saying that."

The torture debate has never let up. President Barack Obama famously put an end to torture in 2009, but failed to prosecute senior Bush-era officials for running such programs.

In the past, the position of all Bush-era officials was overwhelmingly that the euphemistically-called “enhanced interrogation” is not torture, as it was approved by the White House at the time. Those techniques included, aside from waterboarding, sleep deprivation, forcing detainees into uncomfortable physical positions, slamming them into flexible walls, as well as cramming them into small spaces, beating them physically & subjecting them to ice-cold baths.

Guantanamo Bay, which Obama has several times promised to shut down, is still operating. Panorama writes how one detainee, Abu Zubayadh, accused of being a key Al-Qaeda recruiter, has been in detention there since 2002. During these 14 years, he has regularly been stuffed into a box barely larger than a square meter, sometimes for 29 hours at a time. The person is forced to sit in a crouched position, with no room to breathe or do anything else.

Another, upright, coffin-shaped box was also used. Abu spent more than 11 days confined in that.

All the methods were taken from the CIA’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance & Escape) handbook on resisting interrogation. Some of the torture methods date back to Nazi Germany.

SERE military instructor Malcolm Nance talked to Panorama, explaining how “these close confinement boxes were used by the SS… They would stuff these British and American agents into them and drive them mad.”

The practice was banned by the Geneva Conventions, but this ban didn’t prevent its use on Guantanamo Bay inmates.

A host of other methods thought to have been banned were uncovered in last December’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, which dealt with the interrogation of terror suspects in secret CIA prison facilities.

According to Krongard, any intelligence extracted that the Brits found interesting & “particularly represented a threat” was shared with them by the Americans. "I can't think of two intelligence services working in a more harmonious or closer [way] and that I think, had a lot to do with the relationship at the top," he added.

When asked if he thought the British knew or approved of the interrogation methods, Krongard said: “It’s hard for me to think that they didn’t, they’re professional intelligence people, I mean obviously.”

However, when the BBC approached the Foreign Office to ask whether accepting information gathered through torture was fine, it received an adamant reply: “We do not condone it, nor do we ask others to do it on our behalf."

The results of the Senate Intelligence Committee probe were published last December. Though much of the report was redacted, it contained shocking findings about what was euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including the admission that they were ultimately ineffective.

Canada's support of Israel is dangerous

A great post from Robert Fisk.

This order of "you cannot criticize Israel", which the current government of Canada intends to enact, is nothing short of a dictatorial rule. Where's that freedom of speech & democracy, which Canadian governments, past & present, so much shout about all over the world?

Even if the government doesn't enact this law, it has already expanded the meaning of hate crime in Canada. So any vague reference towards criticism of a Canadian ally will definitely irk the government & the activist(s) can face jail time.

What happened to that peaceful, non-violent way of protesting against something wrong? When Mandela was imprisoned for decades by South African apartheid government, the Western governments were up in arms. Mandela was celebrated around the world for standing up against the South African apartheid regime until it gave in to his demands of granting freedom to South Africa. Western political & business leaders love to quote Gandhi that how he got India free from British colonialists without the use of violence. But nobody in the Western hemisphere says anything when Canadian government comes up with such a dictatorial law to love Israel.

Mr. Fisk ended the piece with a great advice for the Canadian, & in general, Western government leaders, that "boycotting a state for its crimes is a non-violent but potentially powerful way to express moral outrage at a time when political statements ... fail to represent the anger of voters or have any effect on a state that ignores international law. If you take that away, then the Boston bomber, now facing the execution chamber, can say that his was the only way." Criticizing a government is a peaceful way to express outrage. The other option for an activist is violence.

As I always say in my blog posts that democracy in the West, & all over the world, is a smoke-&-mirror game. It doesn't actually exist. Governments are run by career politicians who earn millions & give the ignorant public the illusion of "choosing" their leaders, even though, it has already been decided, long before the first ballot has cast, who will be the reigning king of the kingdom.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/robert-fisk-canadas-support-of-israel-is-dangerous-10256597.html

I’ve never been keen on boycotts. The one against Italy for invading Abyssinia didn’t work. Nor did the arms blockade on Spain. I’m still not sure that boycotting South Africa really brought down apartheid. I rather suspect that the old racists simply realised they were hopelessly outnumbered by the blacks of South Africa & that the game was up.

And I’m still unconvinced that boycotting Israel, even though it frightens the right-wing crazies in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, will achieve a two-state solution, human rights for Palestinians, etc. I’m free to refuse to buy products from Jewish colonies in occupied Arab land (I do not buy them), but, when I visit Israel, I stay at the King David Hotel in west Jerusalem, visit the Tel Aviv gallery of art & buy Israeli-published books. Some Israeli academics support a boycott of their own country. They may be right in doing so.

But in Canada – & I had to literally rub my eyes when I read this – the totally pro-Israeli Conservative government of Stephen Harper intends to list the boycotting of Israel as a “hate crime”. This is not only ludicrous, stupid, pointless & racist because it assumes that anyone opposed to Israel’s vicious & iniquitous policies of land-grabbing in the West Bank is an anti-Semite, but it is also anti-democratic. Those who believe in non-violence have always espoused boycott movements on the grounds that economic pressure rather than bombs is a moral way of putting pressure on a country that violates international law.

Yet Harper, who would surely be elected to the Knesset if he were an Israeli, went so far as to suggest on a recent visit to Jerusalem that merely to criticise Israel can be a form of anti-Semitism. The newly retired Canadian Foreign minister John Baird ... has described Canada’s Boycott Israel movement as “the new face of anti-Semitism”. In January, he actually signed an official agreement with Israel to fight the Boycott Israel organisation, known locally as the BDS (Boycott, Divest & Sanction) group. Steven Blaney, who rejoices in the title of Canada’s “Minister of Public Safety”, says that boycotts of Israel cannot be separated from anti-Semitic hate speech & the recent attacks against Jews in France.

This is preposterous. If I decline to buy Israeli-produced oranges at a British supermarket, this doesn’t make me a Nazi murderer. To criticise Israel doesn’t turn Canadians into Jew-haters. A number of liberal Jewish groups have protested against Harper’s proposed extension of existing ‘hate laws’ – far too many Jewish organisations have praised it – on the grounds that it assumes that all Jews support Israel or approve of its actions. And since Jews are also members of boycott-Israel groups, Harper’s expanded definition of the law would have to put Jews on trial in Canada for anti-Semitism.

Cloaked as usual in the kind of Blairite (& Cameronite) clichés that all law-&-order politicians adopt, Canadians are told that their government will show “zero tolerance” towards groups advocating a boycott of Israel. Of course, we show “zero tolerance” on the streets towards theft, mugging & gangland thuggery. But “zero tolerance” against those who wish to boycott a nation whose army slaughtered more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza last year, more than half of them civilians? Really? It was significant, I thought, that, after the killing of a Canadian soldier outside the Ottawa parliament by a Muslim last year & a murderous attack on Canadian servicemen, Harper publicised the message of condolence he had received from Netanyahu, as if the commiserations of a man who ordered the bombardment of Gaza were something to be proud of.

The dark little catch in all this is that last year Canada changed its definition of hate speech to include statements made against “national origin”, not just race & religion. Thus statements or speeches critical of Israel – like a number of public lectures I have given in Canada – may now be classed as statements against Jews (even though Jews are often among the organisers of my own speaking engagements in America). And, in due course, editorials in papers such as the Toronto Star can be deemed anti-Semitic & thus worthy of being denounced as a “hate-crime”.

This extended definition of 'hate crime' will put a lot of civil society groups under the cosh. The United Church of Canada & Canadian Quakers could find themselves in court & judges, however much they personally recoiled from Israel’s abuse of Palestinians, would have to abide by this outrageous piece of legislation & exercise “zero tolerance” against the free speech of those who condemn war crimes by Israel in the Middle East.

It is worth remembering that tens of thousands of Jews throughout the world, & especially in America & Poland, called for a boycott of Nazi Germany in 1933 for the very anti-Semitic acts that led directly to the Holocaust. American diplomats were critical, lest it provoked Hitler to even crueller deeds. But they didn’t threaten the protesters with “zero tolerance” of “hate crimes” because of the “national origin” of the Germans they proposed to boycott.

In the end, of course, it’s quite simple. Boycotting a state for its crimes is a non-violent but potentially powerful way to express moral outrage at a time when political statements – or cowardly governments like that of Stephen Harper – fail to represent the anger of voters or have any effect on a state that ignores international law. If you take that away, then the Boston bomber, now facing the execution chamber, can say that his was the only way.