markfromireland

‘How can we stand by and allow this to go on?’
Published: 31 July 2006

They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. ” Mehdi Hashem, aged seven ­ Qana,” was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy’s body lay. “Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 ­ Qana”, “Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one ­ Qana.'’ And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas’s little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father’s shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.

You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity ­ yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the ” pinpoint accuracy'’ it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana ­ as if that justified this massacre. Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about “Muslim terror” threatening ” western civilisation” ­ as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.

And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing ­ a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana ­ whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine ­ has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.

And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: “For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B”. No doubt the manufacturers can call it “combat-proven” because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died.
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The attacks on Israeli troops by Hamas and Hizbollah are very unlikely to have been co-ordinated but the effect, a multiplier effect, is as though they were. Both operations, were carried out from territory Israel had evacuated, both resulted in the capture of Israeli soldiers and both have been used as the “cassus belli” for a war of punishment by Israel that targets civilians in the hope of fomenting civil war.

• Israel’s reaction to the two events essentially has been the same:
• Rejection of any negotiation or prisoner swap – which both Hamas and Hizbollah have forward as their core demand.
• A “shock and awe” campaign in Gaza and Lebanon targetting civilians in the hope of pressurising the fighters on them to release the captives.

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الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية: جنودٌ يتحدثون عن الإساءة إلى محتجزين في العراق
السلطات تسمح باستخدام الوسائل المسيئة وتتجاهل شكاوى الجنود

هذه الروايات تدحض ادعاءات الحكومة الأمريكية بأن التعذيب والإساءات في العراق لم
تكن بإيعازٍ من السلطات بل هي حالاتٌ استثنائية. فعلى العكس من ذلك، كانت تلك
الممارسات موضع تغاضٍ، وتستخدم على نطاق واسع.

جون سيفتون، الباحثٌ الرئيسي لقسم الإرهاب ومكافحة الإرهاب

نسخة للطباعة

“He wouldn’t say anything, and they kept screaming at him and screaming at him. And they picked him up and threw him against the wall—and it’s a concrete wall. They threw him up against the wall, they punched him in the neck, punched him in the stomach—you know, gut shot—they threw him down. [At one point,] they actually threw him outside—they had two guys [other detainees] outside watching—threw him outside the building, just threw him outside like that. And then they picked him up, dragged him back, pulling him by the hair and stuff. . . . They hold his arms like this [out behind his back] and then beat him down—enough so they could break it, to give you a little bit of the pain. Same with the kneecaps: kicked him in the kneecaps, you know, really hard, with those boots—combat boots.

They were [usually] very conscious of trying not to leave marks [on the body] most of the time, but with that guy—they really didn’t [i.e., they made no effort to avoid leaving bruises and cuts]. . . . [Later,] they took some of the sani-wipes from the MRE pack [Meals Ready to Eat], you know, clean his face off and stuff like that, but the next day, he was pretty bruised. “

[snip]

The detainee was beaten and interrogated for about two hours, Nick said. “He was there for a long time, a long time.” Later on, Nick said, the interrogators told guards and other soldiers that the detainee had inflicted the damage on himself: “They blamed it on him—a ‘falling-down-the-stairs’ deal or whatever.”

As it turned out, the detainee who was beaten was Iranian: Nick said he was a middle aged man, probably in his late 40s, and said he was probably a small-time businessman or smuggler who brought electronics to and from Syria and through Kurdish areas in Iran and Iraq. The fact that the man didn’t speak Arabic apparently made the interrogators beat him more severely

The guy didn’t speak Arabic at all; he spoke Farsi. And there was nobody who spoke Farsi on the post and he just kept getting the crap beat out of him because they thought that he was being silent when he only spoke Farsi.

Nick said that one of the Special Forces soldiers on the base—who was not trained as an interrogator or part of a military intelligence unit—was responsible:

The guy who was doing most of the roughing up in that case, I’m pretty sure that he was one of the SF [Special Forces] guys that just rotated through, and was just helping out in the interrogation. But they really thought this guy had a bunch of information, and he never opened his mouth except to scream incoherently, when he was getting hit.

As described earlier, Nick and MPs he worked with were under orders to keep newly arrived detainees awake and standing in the metal container. But Nick ordered the enlisted soldiers working under him not to hit detainees:

[I told them:] this is what I expect, this is how I do things. I don’t care what the other guys do, the rules are “don’t bring a camera,” so don’t bring a camera, you don’t hit the guys. I try to tell them to treat them the way you wanna be treated and stuff like that. . . Geneva Conventions, that’s what I do—I remind them of Geneva Conventions—this is what we do, this is what we don’t do to prisoners.

Nick said that neither he nor any of his troops had training in detention operations, or Geneva Conventions standards on treatment of detainees:

Geneva Conventions—I mean, a lot of people’s knowledge—99 percent of people’s knowledge extends to “hey, there’s a Geneva Conventions Category one in the back of my ID card,” [referring to the classification written on soldiers identification cards]. Or: “Geneva’s a town in Switzerland.” For a lot of people, you know, that’s what it extends to. I knew a little bit more, you know, as far as that goes: Those are rules governing warfare and stuff like that. But I didn’t know a lot of specific information or anything like that. I looked up specific information based on the treatment of POWs, detainees, etc. etc. That’s what I was looking for. And right now, I couldn’t quote you much. . . .

That’s pretty much how it went. That’s the prevailing thought [process] and it was mentioned that, “Oh, that’s an antiquated set of rules.”

“You can’t get information out of people these days without breaking them”—that kind of thing. That was the prevalent attitude. That was voiced by the E6. That was the quote: “You cannot get information out of them without breaking that stuff.”

From Nick’s perspective, the interrogators did not appear professional. He believed that much of the abuse stemmed from racist attitudes toward detainees. Many of the guards and interrogators called Iraqi’s “Hajis,” and would often mock or taunt them. Nick also said he didn’t believe that abusive interrogation tactics worked:

“No Blood, No Foul” Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq - Human Rights Watch [WEB]

“No Blood, No Foul” Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq - Human Rights Watch [PDF]

The assault on Lebanon continues. It’s been in the works for quite a few years now. For situational updates here’s a few resources you mightn’t be aware of. All of these links will open in a window or tab depending on which browser you use:

• Naharnet - local news site posts regular updates. Highly recommended.
• The Beiruter - Naharnet’s blog aggregator.
• Lebanese Bloggers Forum - Just what it says, check the side bar for links.
• Lebanese Political Journal - Worth a read.
• Daily Star (Beirut) - Voice of the Lebanese establishment.

I don’t have time to comment on Gaza so I just suggest you read this remarkable woman’s writings:

• “From Gaza with love”

Not counting the various Iraqi resistance groups. There are five major political groups in the Middle East:

1. Hamas,
2. Hizbollah,
3. Syria,
4. Iran,
5. The Muslim Brotherhood.

With whom the western governments in particular the U.S. government won’t talk. The Israelis won’t talk to any of them either and are currently trying to militarily overthrow the elected Hamas administration. There isn’t a hope in hell of ending any of the current conflicts when the only party the west will talk to is Israel and when western governments, in particular the U.S. government, gives them money and weaponry like they were sweets. Mealy mouthed platitudes about “restraint” are recognised in Tel Aviv as what they are - mealy mouthed platitudes.

Here’s a quick take on Lebanon. Six years ago Hizbollah successfully threw the Israelis out of South Lebanon. They did it by killing the invaders and by being prepared to be killed. That’s how you get rid of invaders you accept that you yourself are going to take unbearable pain and you make it too unbearably painful for the invaders to continue to occupy your country by killing a lot of them. The Israeli retreat destroyed the myth of Israeli military invincibility but did not however end the war. The Israelis have been looking to recreate the myth ever since. The excuse used by the Israelis for what they’re currently doing is manifestly a ridiculous lie. The storyline goes something like this:

“Terrorists crossed into Israel from Lebanon and kidnapped two of our soldiers. They did this in coordination with and at the behest of either the Syrians or the Iranians or both. We are going to punish Lebanon for not controlling the Hizb.”

The facts are very different. Hizbollah arose from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Lebanese civil war. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was characterised by savage brutality and caused a civil war in which everyone slaughtered everyone else and brought Hizbollah to prominence in the South. Hizbollah defeated three Israeli armies in a row Lebanon was effectively crippled and divided and that suited the Israelis, the Syrians, the French, the Saudis, and everyone else.

The idea that the Lebanese army could take over from Hizbollah even if Hizbollah were willing is ridiculous, the Lebanese army is good at looking pretty in a snappy uniform. That’s all they’re good at. The Hariri assassination discussed in the comments to a posting on this blog here created a situation in which for the first time all of the Lebanese parties got serious, well as serious as they get, about actually strengthening Lebanon. I did a short posting on this giving a quick summary back in March. What hasn’t changed is that Israel and Hizbollah are at war. Hizbollah arose in reaction to the brutality of the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon. To dismiss them as just a terrorist organisation is very foolish. Like Hamas and the Ikhwanis they’re a social and religious movement incorporating well organised and functional:

• Nationalist.
• Religious,
• Political,
• Social,
• Economic and,
• Military departments.

Granted their military wing often uses terrorist tactics but the fact that they have integrated all of the aspects of their struggle makes them far more formidable than any mere “terrorist group” such as ETA, the UVF, the IRA, or the various groups collectively referred to as “al-Qaeda.” In social terms they’re what has kept Southern Lebanon together, in military terms they’re what defeated three Israeli armies in a row, and every Lebanese knows it. They may have been becoming somewhat less politically popular as they moved toward “using the ballot box more than the AK47″ but that hasn’t stopped them from being a formidable military force. They and they Israelis have been watching and attacking each other on the border ever since Hizbollah was formed neither side has ever stopped.

So what happened and why? The immediate cause was that a bad decision by a junior Israeli officer meant that an Israeli unit was left vulnerable to attack and capture. A panicked attempt to get them back using a tank crossing the border and being destroyed. Or to put it another way - a local Hizbollah commander saw an opportunity that was too good to pass up. An Israeli commander faced with an equivalent opportunity would have done the same thing.

Israel wants to defeat Hizbollah and doesn’t care what it does to achieve this goal. I doubt that that their often stated goal of destroying it is achievable my guess is that for the moment all they want Hizbollah visibly defeated and forced to withdraw a long way from the border. I don’t believe that’s achievable either. Israel’s massive attack against all of Lebanon especially infrastructure and civilians has over the last 48 hours rallied the Lebanese against Israel. Even if this Israeli operation were to succeed and even if their wildest dream was to come true and Hizbollah’s defeat was such that it was effectively destroyed the impact on Israel’s own security is likely to be disastrous. The 1982 invasion produced Hizbollah; this latest aggression against all of Lebanon will either strengthen their support which was beginning to weaken or produce another adversary, more tightly organised, more radical, more militant, more ruthless, and determined to revenge themselves both on those who attacked Lebanon and upon those who facilitated and justified the attack.

markfromireland

• Saudi Arabia pledges 50 million dollars in immediate aid to Lebanon
• Israel faces “unimaginable losses” if it attacks Syria, the Iranian foreign ministry said Sunday
• Israeli PM Ehud Olmert warns of ‘long-term consequences’ after Hizbullah attack on Haifa
• Hizbullah launches a new salvo of Raad 2 and Raad 3 rockets at Haifa, killing 9 and injuring 20
• Al-Manar TV building has been completely destroyed by an Israeli strike
• Israeli special forces are operating on the ground in Lebanon, in conjunction with air and sea forces, General Gadi Eisenkraut, operations chief at central command, confirmed Sunday
• Chirac says that forces “who jeopardize the security, stability and sovereignty of Lebanon must be stopped,” ahead of talks with Bush
• Bush says that Israel had ‘every right to defend itself’ but should be ‘mindful of the consequences’
• Hizbullah denied an Israeli television report that its leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, had been injured in an Israeli raid
• Israeli aircraft presses on early Sunday with intensive bombing raids on Beirut’s southern suburbs
• Hizbullah claims Sunday to have repelled the first attempted Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon since hostilities began
• Saniora calls for an immediate ceasefire to end Israel’s “collective punishment” of the Lebanese people
• Morning Roundup: Israel Steps Up Assault on Beirut’s Southern Suburbs
  
  Waves of warplanes thundering through the darkness bombed Beirut’s southern suburbs for hours early Sunday, a day after Israel stepped up its air strikes and tightened a noose around this reeling nation…
• Source: Naharnet.com

I suggest you either bookmark them or use their feed.

markfromireland