Palestine Center For Human Rights: Current War Statistics On Palestinian Death Toll
Two Laws Under Geneva Conventions: First All Attacks Have To Distinguish Between Military Objectives and Civilian Objectives. Second: You Can’t Just Kill Civilians Who Aren’t Participating in A War
Michael Smith: Cultural Ethnicide – Keep Expanding Until Israel Takes Over
Cultural Genocide Case: Illan Pappe – Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine
Naomi Wolf Walks Out of Synagogue When Nothing Is Said About Gaza
Michael Ratner Admonishes JFRED Jews For Racial and Economic Justice and Other GroupsTo Step Forward
Michael Ratner Pulls Apart NY Times Article: Crises Cascade and Converge, Testing Obama
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Michael Ratner Discusses 3 International Crimes That Can Be Attributed To Israel’s Actions Against Palestinians: Genocide, Apartheid and Crimes Against Humanity.
First International Crime: Genocide – There are two elements, one is the mental element, what you’re thinking, and the mental element is intent to destroy in whole or in part. Then it defines who you want to destroy. A national group which would be the Palestinians. An ethnical group, which has a common cultural heritage, racial or religious group. Second is physical, it includes killing members of the group, serious body or mental harm to members of the group. Inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
A key term when I say in whole or in part is important.
It says the perpetrators, the Israelis in this case need not intend to destroy the entire group.
Destruction of only part of a group, members living in one region is also genocide. They tried to get rid of all the educated people. They tried to get rid of the leaders. It pretty clearly fits the legal definition. So we have the crime of genocide and genocide of course can be prosecuted in the International Court of Justice.
That can be prosecuted by states who have their own universal jurisdiction.
If an Israeli general or politician travels to a country that will actually enforce its genocide laws that person can be prosecuted under the Genocide Convention and the laws that flow from it.
Second International Crime: Apartheid – It’s defined as inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.
Third International Crime:Crimes Against Humanity – It includes any of the following acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population. They include, murder, deportation or forcible transfer of population, imprisonment, enforced disappearance of persons, the crime of apartheid other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury.
Last week we interviewed Phil Weiss of Mondoweiss and talked about the media’s role in reporting facts and detailing the history around the escalating violence against Palestinians by the Israeli military. Specifically in the discussion, Phil believed that what he considered better media analysis of the Middle East situation and some other factors, might prevent a ground assault against Gaza. Michael Ratner and Michael Smith both disagreed with Phil believing that it wasn’t just about media coverage or a little better media coverage but the question of a ground assault went to a much deeper issue. 3 hours later unfortunately Michael Smith and Michael Ratner were proven correct.
I think the first thing you have to say of this issue is that the loss of human life has been overwhelmingly on one side.
I think that needs to be clear in the coverage.
What you’re getting is a coverage on the whole attempts to that treats both sides evenly as if the trauma is equally split between the two sides.
The latest figure is 161 children killed in Gaza.
And to treat the worries of Israelis as important or more important than the death of 161 kids I think is revolting.
There was a poll a while back showing that when people heard the word “occupied territories” a lot of people think that the Palestinians are occupying Israeli territory because the media so rarely explain what’s going on.
They’re not explaining what the situation is between Gaza and Israel and so you get coverage of the rockets as if they are the main problem.
It’s really a cockeyed way of viewing the situation I think.
We were talking about the headline that was changed in the New York Times after the beach massacre when Israel bombed kids playing soccer on the beach and killed 4 boys.
The original headline was “Four Young Boys Killed Playing On Gaza Beach” which I might note leaves out the active subject of that sentence it doesn’t say who killed them.
By the time it made it to print, the headline had been changed to “Boys Drawn To Gaza Beach And Into Center of Mideast Strife.”
You see the underlying bias in these examples.
Another is 13 Israeli soldiers, 70 others killed. A lot of readers are going to read that and when you say 13 soldiers and 70 others, you’re going to read that as 70 other Israelis who weren’t soldiers were killed.
On MSNBC there was a contributor, a Palestinian American, Rula Jebreal, who was discussing this case and the coverage in general of MSNBC, and was critical of the amount of air time given to Israeli officials versus the amount of time given to Palestinians to discuss the conflict.
After making these criticisms, within hours, she had her contract canceled by MSNBC.
She was actually brought back on not as an MSNBC contributor but as a Palestinian journalist to talk to Chris Hayes, and Chris Hayes defended her firing.
In this particular conflict 100 U.S. Senators voted to declare their support for Israel with no mention of the Palestinians who are dying.
Michael Smith: 100 to zero. What does that say about democracy?
I think its safe to say there’s more dissent in U.S. media than in U.S. government about the attack on Gaza.
I think that the rise of social media has effected the coverage.
When you’re doing a story about people treating war as a spectator sport and don’t mention that people are dying in the war, you are really treating war as a spectator sport.
We’re writing about this daily on our blog FAIR.org. You can also hear us talking about these issues on Counterspin.
Guest – Jim Naurekas, Extra! Magazine Editor Since 1990, Jim Naureckas has been the editor of Extra!, FAIR’s monthly journal of media criticism. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ’90s. He is also the co-manager of FAIR’s website. He has worked as an investigative reporter for the newspaper In These Times, where he covered the Iran-Contra scandal, and was managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere, a newsletter on Latin America. Jim was born in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1964, and graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR’s program director.
Naomi Wolf – Guantanamo Bay: The Inside Story
Has President Obama begun to honor his promise to close Guantanamo detention camp and undo secretive detention and interrogation policies within the year? Author and political consultant Naomi had to find out for herself. She is back from Cuba and wrote a highly descriptive narrative-style article of the trip titled Guantanamo Bay: An Inside Story. Naomi takes the reader into a surreal world where detainee handlers and lawyers flatly contradict each other and prisoners are viewed from a safari-tour distance.
Naomi Wolf:
In order to close down an open society, you need secret prisons where torture takes place to create a police state.
I’ve admired the work at CCR, and I thought since we have a new president I should go down to Guantanamo and see for myself if anything has changed.
Getting off the plane in Cuba: It was like the Soviet Union in 1948, I was immediately separated from Pardiss Kebriaei. (CCR Attorney)
Journalists are shadowed, literally every they’re there. Not only do they keep lawyers from doing their jobs, they keep journalists from doing their jobs.
They literally treat detainees like animals in a cage. Any action that would humanize the detainees is categorically forbidden. They showed us camp x-ray first – the dog kennel-like cages.
Running around these cages are rats the size of bulldogs.
I went into another room and there was a huge pile of chairs. I looked closely at the legs and arms of chairs, there were duct tape marks as if someone were taped to the chair for interrogation.
It was clear that the Obama Team wanted to communicate there was a kinder, gentler Guantanamo.
Mohammad Al Anashi – alleged suicide. Banality of Evil
Their bodies are crimes scenes but they can’t talk about what happened to them because it’s classified.
The Obama Administration proposed a new strategy last week for continuing the detention of Mohammed Jawad, he’s an Afghani being held for allegedly wounding two US soldiers with a grenade in 2002. Jawad may have been as young as 12 when he was picked up in 2002. Last month, the Obama administration conceded defeat when US District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle told Justice Department lawyers that the case for holding Jawad was quote riddled with holes. Now, the Obama administration under pressure to release Jawad to Afghanistan, is asking to hold Jawad and try the case in a US District Court. A military judge has already ruled that his confession to Afghanistan authorities had been coerced by torture because they threatened to arrest and kill his family.
Jonathan Hafetz:
Mohammed Jawad, arrested in Afghanistan in 2002 for allegedly throwing a grenade in a crowded market place that injured 2 US service members and their Afghan interpreter.
Following his arrest, he was beaten and tortured by corrupt Afghan police who also threatened to kill him and his family if didn’t confess to throwing grenade.
He was then turned over to Americans who continued to torture and terrify him. They then obtained a different false confession.
He was taken to Bagram Prison at the peak of torture and abuse in December 2002.
He was then rendered from his home country and taken to Guantanamo in February 2003.
Mohammad Jawad suffered psychological stress, was observed to be in a trance state, then psychologists saw this as an opportunity to completely break him.
He was sleep deprived, moved 110 times during a 2 week period.
Fall of 2008, a military judge threw out false confessions that Jawad made to Afghan and US officials.
By the end of 2008, the military commissions case was literally on life support, meanwhile Jawad enter’s his seventh year of detention.
The case now under US District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle; had granted Habeas petition, ordered Jawad to be released.
New law: Before transferring a detainee from GTMO to another country, the president must provide notice to Congress. The power to decide release of Guantanamo prisoners still in Executive Branch of US Government.
Guest – Jonathan Hafetz, attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project and one of Jawad’s lawyers. Jonathan Hafetz blasted the Obama administration for its “pathetic attempt to prolong an outrageous case and to manipulate the court system.”
The First 100 Days: Dismantling the Police State in a New Presidency – Part 1
This is the first of a three part special. Law and Disorder hosts bring a series of interviews with key attorneys, authors and activists from the front lines such as the Center For Constitutional Rights, Universities of Law and the National Lawyers Guild. Some of the police state policies are beginning to be reversed such as closing down secret CIA sites, a timeline to shut down Guantanamo, and mandating everyone CIA included follow US Army Field Manual Interrogation tactics.
We define the current laws in place that now constitute a police state. Then we look at the steps the Obama Administration must take to turn back the major breaches in civil liberties such as the Patriot Act One and Two, the Military Commissions Act, FBI Guidelines and legal provisions that allow for torture. As you’ll hear, some attorneys believe much of the dismantling can be done by executive order.
We begin with a description of what we have seen since September 11, 2001 and precursors such as the Effective Death Penalty Act, the earlier renditions under Clinton’s administration. Then, right after 9/11 came the overreaching of executive power in the form of signing statements that misuse the war powers resolution to detain, torture and try so_called enemy combatants. This includes racial profiling against Muslims here and abroad, massive surveillance capacities and warrant_less wiretapping.
The dismantling of police state blocks in the new presidency will take attention to detail to ensure a full restoration of democracy that will ultimately allow for social progress. In the next hour we look at some remedies and solutions to reverse laws that have created domestic enemy combatants, Guantanamo Bay prison, Renditions, Secret CIA sites, Torture, Kangaroo Courts: Special Trials, FISA, domestic surveillance, private military contractors.
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Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Vince Warren discusses the abuse of preventive detention, torture, rendition and states secrets. Hosts cite recent examples of deep surveillance on peaceful protesters and the unprecedented collusion between federal, state and local law enforcement. Warren points out the importance of rolling back the police state measures put in place by the Bush administration, in that No president has ever given back the power a previous president has given him.
Vincent Warren:
Torture/rendition/states secrets / right to dissent / the abuse of preventive detention.
Torture top of list, the export of torture and CIA black sites.
torture crimes at this time are unprosecutable adn its up to the president to
Close Guantanamo prison – send prisoners back to countries they came from, repatriate.
CCR and civil proceedings – hold accountable, the Bush administration to declare what they’ve done unconstitutional, damages to clients CCR represents and injunctive relief, future deterrents
Universal jurisdiction stems from the Nuremberg principles that say a crime that is committed against a person anywhere is prosecutable anywhere.
Countries such as Germany Spain and France have statutes for human rights abuse survivors to bring cases for prosecution.
States secrets privilege, the privilige that the government has routinely invoked in a range of CCR cases, whenever the government says states secrets, the courts, including the supreme courts usually kick the case. The remedy?
Congress can create a statute that limits the use of a states secrets power in order to make it consistent for truth telling and accountability.
No president has ever given back the power a previous president has given him.
The abuse of preventive detention, fusion centers – intelligence gathering and data mining – the concern is that no one can monitor and again its done in secrecy. no oversight, more preemptive law enforcement
The irony here is that government usually acts as if one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing, unless they’re coming down on our constitutional rights, then they’re all on the same page.
We’re joined by author and activist Naomi Wolf. She is the author of seven books, and the groundbreaking book The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot. In the book, Naomi addresses ten steps that societies, dictators, and sometimes democracies use to close an open society to move it toward facsism. We want to re-visit those ten steps.
A small group of people used the law to subvert the law. Reichstag Fire, then disembowel their own Constitution.
Initial thinking inspired from my friend who is the daughter of holocaust survivors, she said the Bush strategies echo early 1930s Germany.
Enabling Acts in Germany gave the power to the state to read a person’s mail, listen to their phone calls and read their telegrams. This, in the alleged interest of national security and the fight against terrorism.
Nazis used to unload the coffins of the war dead at night.
A would-be dictator sought to close an open society or crush a democracy movement. Mussolini in 1920, the great evil pioneer. Hitler studied Mussolini, Stalin studied Hitler.
I looked at Russia, studied Czechoslovakia in the 60’s, Pinochet’s coup in 1973, the Chinese crackdown on democracy in the 80s.
What I saw was there was a blueprint. The blueprint has 10 steps. The 10 steps have been codified, they teach them at the School of the Americas.
To help would be Latin-American dictators to overthrow their own governments. What terrified me is that those ten steps are being put in place by the Bush Administration.
Law and Disorder hosts welcome back Naomi Wolf to the studio. Naomi is the author of seven books, and the groundbreaking book The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot, which was also turned into a feature documentary now playing in theaters. In the book, Naomi addresses ten steps that societies, dictators, and sometimes democracies use to close an open society to move it toward facsism. Her new book is titled Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries which is a call to action for every person, activist or not. When you ask that question “What Can I Do?” The answers are outlined in Give Me Liberty.
A small group of people used the law to subvert the law. Reichstag Fire, then disembowel their own Constitution.
Initial thinking inspired from my friend who is the daughter of holocaust survivors, she said the Bush strategies echo early 1930s Germany.
Enabling Acts in Germany gave the power to the state to read a person’s mail, listen to their phone calls and read their telegrams. This, in the alleged interest of national security and the fight against terrorism.
Nazis used to unload the coffins of the war dead at night.
A would-be dictator sought to close an open society or crush a democracy movement. Mussolini in 1920, the great evil pioneer. Hitler studied Mussolini, Stalin studied Hitler.
I looked at Russia, studied Czechoslovakia in the 60’s, Pinochet’s coup in 1973, the Chinese crackdown on democracy in the 80s.
What I saw was there was a blueprint. The blueprint has 10 steps. The 10 steps have been codified, they teach them at the School of the Americas.
To help would be Latin-American dictators to overthrow their own governments. What terrified me is that those ten steps are being put in place by the Bush Administration.
I like most Americans felt frustrated, helpless and powerless, I saw that they felt depressed and as if they had no authority. More depressed than in baby democracies like Sierra Leone
I went back, just as I studied closing societies, I looked at how people dismantled tyranny and win back a republic.
I drew on some remarkable historians who have established that this idea of liberty were brought forth by ordinary people. They meant to bequeath us with these core American values.
What I’ve learned is that we’ve (U.S) been brainwashed for the last 30 years, as part of a systematic effort from a vested interested to get us to forget our leadership role as citizens.
We’re really expected to lead the nation and have a whole arsenal of tools at our disposal.
There’s a section called fake patriotism, where I talk about the false ideology that leads you away from core texts such as the Bill of Rights that tells you how to overthrow the government to dismantle tyranny.
The message I categorically got from the founders was . . we were expected to totally take over the power and not leave it to the pundits to have the debates, not leave it to constitutional scholars, or politicians.
Just calling your congressperson isn’t enough, you conform yourself into democracy commando teams of 20 to 30 people.
Strategically intervene into the election cycle so you have more power, than lobbyists and special interests.
You can stop complaining about the media and become the media, write your own op eds.
Tools and information are deliberately kept out of people’s hands.
People think there’s a brick wall whenever they pick up these tools, but its a Potemkin village.
They don’t want us to engage.
A Constitutional amendment that would drive a national referendum to bypass corrupt Congress to make law such as capping Campaign Finance
Direct Action Activism. It always works to have thousands of people in the streets.
But the kind of protest that always works is illegal. The thing that broke up the Soviet Union, we’re not allowed to do in the United States.
Political Marches Today: I went from point A to point B but I feel like I didn’t do anything. You didn’t. The only protest that’s effective is protest that stops traffic. By definition, you can’t get a permit for stopping traffic.
These horrible laws in the ten steps are still on the books and its going to take a mass movement to reverse them because Obama is not powerful enough to dismantle them.
We need to legislate on the city council level and on the federal level, that our police can’t accept Homeland Security money, tasers, microwave technology and rubber bullets.
All the cold war weapons manufacturers have shifted into building surveillance and security technologies. Their lobbyists sit down with Homeland Security and write the laws. That pressure is not going away.
Barack Obama does not have the power to stop Boeing, Raytheon and AT&T. The population is the back bone for what the next president can do.
Guest – Naomi Wolf, American author, political consultant and intellectual. She is the author of The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot. It’s an impassioned call to return to the beliefs of the Founding Fathers. In the book, Wolf shows how events in the last six years echo those taken throughout history to build some of the worst dictatorships. A documentary film titled End of America was released this fall along with her follow up book Give Me Liberty: A Handbook For American Revolutionaries.
Naomi Wolf is the co-founder of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership.
Law and Disorder hosts were live in the studio with Naomi Wolf. Naomi Wolf is a feminist, social critic and political activist. The New York Times called her book, The Beauty Myth, one of the most important books of the 20th century. Wolf is the co-founder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, teaching young women to become leaders and agents of change. Naomi Wolf blog in the Huffington Post
Her latest book The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot is a call to return to the beliefs of our founding fathers. Wolf’s new book illustrates ten steps historically taken by leaders who are attempting to dismantle a democracy. Wolf jokingly called it the The Greatest Hits of Facism.
In The End of America, Wolf gives voice to the cause of every American patriot: the preservation of the Constitution and the liberties it embodies and protects.
“Recent history has profound lessons for us in the U.S. today about how fascist, totalitarian, and other repressive leaders seize and maintain power, especially in what were once democracies. The secret is that these leaders all tend to take very similar, parallel steps. The Founders of this nation were so deeply familiar with tyranny and the habits and practices of tyrants that they set up our checks and balances precisely out of fear of what is unfolding today. We are seeing these same kinds of tactics now closing down freedoms in America, turning our nation into something that in the near future could be quite other than the open society in which we grew up and learned to love liberty,†stated Wolf.
“Freedom and democracy†are two words we’ve been hearing from the right wing in this country for 25 years. In their quest to shore up support for the politics of wealth and privilege, the Right has organized patiently and consistently by focusing on a core ideology to amass a formidable base. The Right’s commentary on world affairs, morality, the state, and the economy, though, has had an overarching focus, namely to eliminate social equality as a legitimate public policy goal. Its success has resulted in one of the most dramatic, undemocratic, and insidious transfers of wealth and power in recent American history.
Guest – John Ehrenberg, author of the book “Servants of Wealth: The Right’s Assault on Economic Justice.†A professor of political science at Long Island University, in this, his third book, critically analyzes the rise of an ideologically coherent Right. He dissects their themes of military weakness, moral decay, racial anxiety, and hostility to social welfare to reveal their central organizing objective of protecting wealth and assaulting equality.
