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News :: Arts |
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IDF Shoots Their Own Men. |
Current rating: 6 |
by xhracoo AKA DAN Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
13 Mar 2003
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The killing of two Israeli security guards near a Hebron-area West Bank settlement Thursday afternoon was the result of a mistake by IDF troops who were scouting for terrorists, the IDF senior commander in the area said. |
GOC Central Command, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky said the incident was "an operational failure by the troops observing the area" from a nearby hill.
The soldiers observing the area erroneously believed that the two were terrorists who were in fact located on a different hilltop, Kaplinsky said.
The two victims have been named as Yoav Doron, aged 22, from Jerusalem, and Yehuda Ben-Yosef, 22, from Ma'aleh Adumim.
Doron was laid to rest at 11:30 P.M. at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, Israel Radio reported.
The IDF said it had received warnings of a possible terror attack in the area and that the two Israelis had not heeded soldiers' calls to stop.
The IDF Spokesman expressed regret and announced an investigation into the incident, which took place at 1 P.M. on a hilltop road east of the Pnei Hever settlement, close to the Zif Highway junction.
"This was a tragic mistake, as in other incidents in which innocent people are killed on either side," said Major Sharon Feingold, from the IDF Spokesman's office.
"The unit ordered the car to stop, and after identifying the occupant as armed, shot and killed him," an IDF statement said. "After hearing the gunfire, a second armed man ran off [from the hill]. He was shot dead by a helicopter gunship."
The second man had called security forces in the area and told them that he was under fire from terrorists, unaware that IDF soldiers were the source of the fire, Channel Two reported. The two had recently completed their mandatory service in the army in a unit that served in the area, the report added.
The army said its troops had been on alert for a "terrorist attack" by Palestinian gunmen, who have carried out a spate of shootings in the area over recent days, including the killing of two Israelis and a soldier.
At the time of the shooting, one of the victims - who were in charge of guarding an antenna used for research and development on a hilltop in the area - had pulled over to the side of the road to make some coffee, and the other one began driving away.
Soldiers had been searching for Palestinians whom IDF intelligence had reported were planning to attack an Israeli vehicle on the road leading to Pnei Hever. The elite lookout force noticed the armed security guard in the car and called for help from the ground.
The soldiers said they called on the guard to stop. According to several reports, he stopped and got out of the car, after which he was shot dead. According to other reports, he was shot as soon as he began driving.
All reports said, however, that the second security guard heard the shots and began running to his aid when an Air Force helicopter fired a rocket and killed him.
It was intially believed that the shooting was an ambush attack in which Palestinians disguised as soldiers had opened fire on an Israeli car.
The army has beefed up forces and has been on special alert in and around Hebron in recent days, after a series of Palestinian attacks on settlers and soldiers in the city.
"We've said for a long time that the firing orders are too lax," said Lior Yavne, a spokesman for rights group B'Tselem, which monitors human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
"The soldiers see suspicious figures, fire first and ask questions later," he said.
Yavne said dozens of unarmed Palestinians have been killed by IDF fire in the past 29 months of fighting, including those driving or walking near military checkpoints.
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HORRIFIC MASSACRES IN WEST BANK BEYOND BELIEF: THE ENTIRE PLANET MUST SEE THIS!!!! |
by vomwqux AKA DAN Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 6
13 Mar 2003
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http://www.gooff.com/NM/templates/Breaking_News.asp?articleid=355&zoneid=2
We fear that the gravest abuses against the Palestinian population are taking place behind closed doors as humanitarian agencies and the media are being barred access to most of the Occupied Territories,” Amnesty International
THE MASSACRE
IS HORRIFIC BEYOND MEASURE
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Halliburton "RADIATION" Ups Terror Fears |
by Nquo Ucrhothos AKA DAN Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
14 Mar 2003
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A report by the Wall Street Journal Thursday said officials were concerned that the device's radioactive material could be used to create a "dirty bomb," an explosive device designed to scatter radioactivity in a densely populated area.
Funny, they've really been pushing the dirty bomb meme.
US expects to award Halliburton massive contract to rebuild Iraq
Firm linked to Cheney wins oil-field contract
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Gore Speech Revealed Saddam Was A Bush Sr. Made Man |
by Lm Yorabch AKA DAN Disinfo
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
15 Mar 2003
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In September 1992 Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Al Gore addressed the Center for International Policy and articulated a comprehensive dissertation on the inconsistencies, fabrications and collaboration between the Reagan/Bush I administrations and Saddam Hussein.
Republicons.org has acquired a transcript of the speech (pdf) delivered by Gore and it exhaustively details, in classic Gore fashion, a twelve year history of politically expedience, appeasement and clandestine cooperation with Iraq. Regardless of what one feels about Al Gore politically and personally, his one unimpeachable quality is his being the preeminent policy wonk; he is at the zenith of contemporary political scholarship.
Below are extended relevant excerpts from his speech and the entire speech, in PDF format, may be downloaded from the link at the end of this article. In today’s Bush II administration, in which Saddam is vilified as Hitler reincarnate, it is telling to remember that the cast of characters is largely unchanged from the period reviewed by Gore and the contradictions in word and deed are even more poignant.
A few important notes; when Gore refers to President Bush he is, of course referring to George H.W. Bush not George W Bush (although in many places they could be interchanged). Second, the downloadable speech is in Adobe PDF format
http://www.republicons.org/gore91992.pdf
should you require the free Acrobat PDF reader please visit
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.
Excerpts from Gore’s speech of September 29, 1992:
President Bush, in his handling of our policy toward Iraq has shown poor judgment, moral blindness and bungling policies led directly to a war that should never have taken place. U.S. taxpayers are now stuck with paying the bill for $1.9 billion President Bush gave to Saddam Hussein even though top administration officials were repeatedly told Saddam was using our dollars to buy weapons technology. Bush, of course, believes that the war with Iraq was his finest hour as the organizer and leader of a vast coalition of armed forces, united for the purpose of frustrating the designs of an evil dictator.
But the war with Iraq had deep roots, and if George Bush's prosecution of the war is part of his record, so too is his involvement in the diplomacy which led to it, both in the Reagan/Bush era, and far more so, during his presidency when he accelerated foreign aid and the sale of weapons technology to Iraq -- right up until the invasion of Kuwait -- in spite of repeated warnings that anyone with common sense would have had no difficulty understanding.
Nineteen months ago January 1991 – the onset of the Iraq war, President Bush called Saddam Hussein a new Hitler who had to be stopped at all costs. Yet today, that same tyrant remains firmly in power, resisting by every means the will of the international community. No wonder so many Americans ask themselves whether our victory over Saddam will ultimately prove an illusion.
George Bush wants the American people to see him as the hero who put out a raging fire. But new evidence now shows that he is the one who set the fire. He not only struck the match, he poured gasoline on the flames. So give him credit for calling in the fire department, but understand who started the blaze.
In September of 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. Iraq was the odds-on favorite to win the war in short order. However, by May 1982, Iraq was clearly in trouble. It had lost a major battle with Iran. Our policy-makers began to imagine Iran under a radical Islamic government emerging as the dominant regional power: a nightmare. I believe that is why, in February 1982, President Reagan took Iraq off the list of states that sponsored terrorism.
By taking Iraq's name off the list, President Reagan opened the way for Iraq to receive US credits through subsidized agricultural loan guarantees and Export-Import Bank credits.
In other words, for strategic reasons, the Reagan/Bush Administration would overlook virtually any unpleasant reality in Iraq, and apparently subvert US laws in order to prop up Saddam Hussein's brutal regime.
George Bush cannot even try to claim ignorance where policy toward Iraq was concerned. Not only was he directly in the loop, he was a principal architect of the policy from its earliest days. For example, in April of 1984, Bush personally lobbied the Ex-Im Bank's chairman--a friend from college days--to disregard the views of his own economists, and extend credits to Iraq. Doubts about Iraq's credit-worthiness were very well-founded. But the overriding issue was whether Iraq could continue to hold on in the war with Iran. That's all that seemed to matter.
In pursuit of that objective, the Reagan/Bush Administration would overlook the fact that it was an Iraq-based group that masterminded the assassination attempt against Israel's ambassador to the UK, which occurred in June 1982. The Reagan/Bush Administration was also prepared to overlook the fact that the terrorist who masterminded the attack on the Achille Lauro and the savage murder of American Leon Klinghoffer fled with Iraqi assistance. Nor did it matter that the team of terrorists who set out to blow up the Rome airport came from Baghdad with suitcase bombs.
Iraq not only stayed off the terrorist list no matter what, but in November 1984, full diplomatic relations were established with the country. The US government continued to exert every effort to channel assistance to Saddam Hussein--even with evidence that he was not only promoting terrorism, but was also pursuing a nuclear weapons program. As early as May of 1985, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle warned about the suspected diversion of US exports of dual-use technology to the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. But Bush ensured that the flow of technology continued.
In March 1987, Bush again took a prominent role: when Iraq's ambassador complained that our Defense Department was taking too long and being too cautious about export licenses for high tech items, Bush apparently agreed with him that the Defense Department was being capricious and had to get with the program.
There might have been a moment's pause for reflection when Iraqi aircraft intentionally attacked the USS Stark in May 1987, killing 37 sailors -- but the Administration smoothed it over very fast. This was the spring when the Ex-Im Bank staff resisted another $200 million loan for Iraq, but again the loan was granted after Bush again personally intervened to stress its political importance. The loan went through in May, just two days before the attack on the Stark.
Within days of the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein--seeing that he had gotten away with using poison gas against the Kurds previously--launched additional major gas attacks on them. The war was over, and he was determined to settle accounts. Saddam's attacks created, in addition to the wave of deaths, a flight of about a half million Kurdish refugees.
The outrage and disgust sparked action and ignited an intensification of efforts to pull the plug on US assistance to Saddam Hussein. I myself went to the Senate floor twice demanding tough action. But these efforts were resisted to the bitter end by the Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle Administrations. For example, they pulled out all the stops to defeat the Prevention of Genocide Act, after the US Senate had passed it unanimously in September of 1988.
Most significant of all, in April 1989, the CIA reported to Secretary of State James Baker and other top Bush administration officials that Iraq was clandestinely procuring nuclear weapons technology through a global network of front companies.
Now, in the midst of this flood of highly alarming information, on October 2, 1989, President Bush signed a document known as NSD-26, which established policy toward Iraq under his Administration.
NSD-26 mandated the pursuit of improved economic and political ties with Iraq on the assumption that Iraqi behavior could be modified by means of new favors to be granted. Perhaps so, if this were a state not under the complete control of a single man whose ruthlessness was already totally apparent. The text of NSD-26 blindly ignores the evidence already at the Administration's disposal of Iraqi behavior in the past regarding human rights, terrorism, the use of chemical weapons, and the pursuit of advanced weapons of mass destruction.
It leaps from the page, that George Bush, both as Vice President and President, had done his utmost to make sure that no such sanctions would ever apply to Saddam Hussein. Consequently, the question is unavoidable: why should Saddam Hussein be concerned about a threat of action in the future from the same man who had resolutely blocked any such action in the past? To the contrary Saddam had every reason to assume that Bush would look the other way -- no matter what he did.
In October of 1989, representatives of the Departments of State and Agriculture met to discuss Iraq's diversion of US agricultural credits into the acquisition of US technology for its nuclear weapons program. Later that same month, however, on October 26th, Assistant Secretary of State Kelly sent Secretary Baker a memo jointly written with the State Department's legal counsel, Abe Sofaer, urging that Baker push an additional $1 billion in agricultural loan guarantees for Iraq.
In January of 1990, President Bush issued a determination that exempted Iraq from section 512 of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act of November 1989 prohibiting further loans to Iraq on grounds of "national security".
In February 1990, Saddam Hussein called for the removal of US military forces from the Persian Gulf. And yet, the same month, the Administration actually apologized to Saddam for the content of a Voice of America broadcast criticizing Iraq's human rights record.
On April 12th, at the personal request of Bush, Senators Bob Dole and Alan Simpson -- the number one and number two Republican leaders in the Senate -- travelled to Baghdad and told Saddam Hussein that President Bush was still ready to veto any sanctions bill that Congress might pass.
In July, as Iraqi tanks and soldiers massed on the Kuwaiti border, the Senate tried to pass another sanctions bill against Iraq...and the Administration opposed it. Not only that, but on the eve of the invasion, the Bush/Quayle Administration kept selling Saddam dual- use technology such as sophisticated computers, flight simulators, and equipment to manufacture gun barrels.
President Bush has explicitly denied that his policies enhanced Saddam Hussein's nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities. He denied this, not only in an official report to Congress in the fall of 1991, but as recently as June 13th and July 1st of this year, when Bush said: "We did not enhance Saddam Hussein's nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons capability." But as I have just mentioned, his own Secretary of State knew differently at least as of July 1990.
And incredibly, immediately following the war, President Bush reverted to form. At President Bush's encouragement, an armed resistance to Saddam Hussein sprang up in Iraq. But at the critical moment, it was George Bush's decision to betray that resistance by tolerating Saddam Hussein's use of attack helicopters to put down the rebellions. That was a clear violation of the terms of the ceasefire, and it was a violation we had more than enough power to suppress.
A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making
This history is known to many in the Middle East and Europe, though few Americans are acquainted with it, much less understand it. Yet these interventions help explain why United States policy is viewed with some cynicism abroad. George W. Bush is not the first American president to seek regime change in Iraq. Mr. Bush and his advisers are following a familiar pattern.
On the brink of war, both supporters and critics of United States policy on Iraq agree on the origins, at least, of the haunted relations that have brought us to this pass: America's dealings with Saddam Hussein, justifiable or not, began some two decades ago with its shadowy, expedient support of his regime in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980's.
Both sides are mistaken. Washington's policy traces an even longer, more shrouded and fateful history. Forty years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency, under President John F. Kennedy, conducted its own regime change in Baghdad, carried out in collaboration with Saddam Hussein.
The Iraqi leader seen as a grave threat in 1963 was Abdel Karim Kassem, a general who five years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. Washington's role in the coup went unreported at the time and has been little noted since. America's anti-Kassem intrigue has been widely substantiated, however, in disclosures by the Senate Committee on Intelligence and in the work of journalists and historians like David Wise, an authority on the C.I.A.
From 1958 to 1960, despite Kassem's harsh repression, the Eisenhower administration abided him as a counter to Washington's Arab nemesis of the era, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt — much as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush would aid Saddam Hussein in the 1980's against the common foe of Iran. By 1961, the Kassem regime had grown more assertive. Seeking new arms rivaling Israel's arsenal, threatening Western oil interests, resuming his country's old quarrel with Kuwait, talking openly of challenging the dominance of America in the Middle East — all steps Saddam Hussein was to repeat in some form — Kassem was regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed.
In 1963 Britain and Israel backed American intervention in Iraq, while other United States allies — chiefly France and Germany — resisted. But without significant opposition within the government, Kennedy, like President Bush today, pressed on. In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshaled opponents of the Iraqi regime. Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents. The C.I.A.'s "Health Alteration Committee," as it was tactfully called, sent Kassem a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief, though the potentially lethal gift either failed to work or never reached its victim.
Then, on Feb. 8, 1963, the conspirators staged a coup in Baghdad. For a time the government held out, but eventually Kassem gave up, and after a swift trial was shot; his body was later shown on Baghdad television. Washington immediately befriended the successor regime. "Almost certainly a gain for our side," Robert Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to Kennedy the day of the takeover.
As its instrument the C.I.A. had chosen the authoritarian and anti-Communist Baath Party, in 1963 still a relatively small political faction influential in the Iraqi Army. According to the former Baathist leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with the C.I.A. in 1962 and 1963 was Saddam Hussein, then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after taking part in a failed assassination of Kassem in 1958.
According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite — killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.
The United States also sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the United States had backed against Kassem and then abandoned. Soon, Western corporations like Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum were doing business with Baghdad — for American firms, their first major involvement in Iraq.
But it wasn't long before there was infighting among Iraq's new rulers. In 1968, after yet another coup, the Baathist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr seized control, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. Again, this coup, amid more factional violence, came with C.I.A. backing. Serving on the staff of the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960's, I often heard C.I.A. officers — including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking C.I.A. official for the Near East and Africa at the time — speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists.
This history is known to many in the Middle East and Europe, though few Americans are acquainted with it, much less understand it. Yet these interventions help explain why United States policy is viewed with some cynicism abroad. George W. Bush is not the first American president to seek regime change in Iraq. Mr. Bush and his advisers are following a familiar pattern.
The Kassem episode raises questions about the war at hand. In the last half century, regime change in Iraq has been accompanied by bloody reprisals. How fierce, then, may be the resistance of hundreds of officers, scientists and others identified with Saddam Hussein's long rule? Why should they believe America and its latest Iraqi clients will act more wisely, or less vengefully, now than in the past?
If a new war in Iraq seems fraught with danger and uncertainty, just wait for the peace.
Roger Morris, author of "Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician," is completing a book about United States covert policy in Central and South Asia.
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