Selves and Others

Excerpted from "50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed to Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism" (Disinformation Books) by Mickey Z. For more info, please visit: http://www.mickeyz.net.

Celebrate Un-Thanksgiving

Until the federal penitentiary was closed in 1963, Alcatraz Island was a place most folks tried to leave. On Nov. 20, 1969, the island’s image underwent a drastic makeover. That was the day thousands of American Indians began an occupation that would last until June 11, 1971. (...)

UNITED NATIONS (IPS) - A United Nations committee is expected to block an attempt by the United States and European nations to single out six countries — Iran, North Korea, Burma, Sudan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — for condemnation on human rights abuses.

Arguing that Western nations have double standards on human rights, all six countries will be using a procedural device to thwart the adoption of the six resolutions by calling for "no action motions".

The adoption of six no-action motions — under rule 116 of the General Assembly’s rules of procedure — will prevent the resolutions being put to a vote at a meeting of the Third Committee later this week.

If the motions are approved, they will eventually go before the 191-member General Assembly, the U.N.’s highest policy-making body, for ratification next month. Traditionally, voting in the General Assembly mirrors committee voting.

With heavy canvassing for votes, the survival of the no-action motions would depend on the political clout wielded by each of the six countries.

Sudan is believed to have the best chance of survival because African countries have closed ranks in support of a member of the 53-nation African Union (AU). (...)

The devil of the occupation is also in the details. More than the actual decision to suffocate a former Jerusalem suburb and to imprison its 2,500 residents with no way out to anywhere - no car can enter, no car can leave - one is struck by the way in which Israel chose to do it. No roadblock, no fence, no orderly iron gate, not to mention any signposts, but only three huge rocks, an inverted concrete block and a pile of garbage that were placed one day at the entrance to the neighborhood, in order to imprison its residents this way, like animals in a pen. More than the imprisonment itself, the sight of the strewn rocks and the garbage tells the entire story. The contempt, the insult, the arrogant and inhumane attitude.

A pile of rocks and garbage are placed on the only exit road from the Sheikh Saad neighborhood in southeast Jerusalem. For generations, the residents of this neighborhood, well-to-do judging by the appearance of their stone houses, with a view of the Jerusalem hills from their windows, lived as Jerusalemites, with close family ties with the houses opposite, the houses of the Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabal Mukkaber. About three years ago, this arbitrary siege of rocks was placed on the neighborhood, and since then nobody can leave or enter it by car. (...)

Susan Nathan’s new book The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide recalls her recent experience of making Aliya to Israel, claiming her right to immediate citizenship according to the Israeli law of return. Growing up in a Zionist home and having had more than one or two experiences of antisemitism, Nathan is at first enchanted with Zionism and in love with the idea of the State of Israel and what she believes it represents. However, it isn’t long before that bubble bursts and she begins to see the less than ideal reality of Israel.

Nathan decides to move from her comfortable apartment in Tel-Aviv to the Arab town Tamra in the Galilee. Her unique and unusual move draws a great deal of criticism and condemnation from both her English and Israeli friends (most of whom consider themselves ’leftist’). Ultimately, this decision costs her these relationships. (...)

WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (IPS) - This summer, dozens of people converged in the high desert town of El Paso, Texas, en route to spending six months in Iraqi prisons.

They were going not as prisoners, but as their interrogators, walking a legalistic tightrope stretched across the Geneva Conventions. Just for signing up, they got a 2,000-dollar check from a company that is rapidly becoming one of the key employers in the world of intelligence: Lockheed Martin.

After a week of orientation and medical processing, they flew to Tampa, Florida, and on to their final destinations — Iraq’s infamous prisons including Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, a prison at Baghdad International Airport, and Camp Whitehorse, near Nasariyah. (...)

It’s been a devastating fall for what are conventionally regarded as the nation’s two premier newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The Times’s travails and the downfall of its erstwhile star reporter, Judy Miller, have been newsprint’s prime soap opera since late spring and now, just when we were taking a breather before the Libby trial, the Washington Post is writhing with embarrassment over the multiple conflicts of interest of its most famous staffer, Bob Woodward, best known to the world as Nixon’s nemesis in the Watergate scandal.

On Monday of this week Woodward quietly made his way to the law office of Howard Shapiro, of the firm of Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Doar, and gave a two-hour deposition to Plamegate prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, a man he had denounced on tv the night before Scooter Libby’s indictment as "a junkyard dog of a prosecutor".

Woodward’s deposition had been occasioned by a call to Fitzgerald from a White House official on November 3, a week after Libby had been indicted. The official told Fitzgerald that the prosecutor had been mistaken in claiming in his press conference that Libby had been the first to disclose the fact that Joseph Wilson’s wife [ie Valerie Plame] was in the CIA. The official informed Fitzgerald that he himself had divulged Plame’s job to Woodward in a mid-June interview, about a week before Libby told Miller the same thing. (...)

A discussion as to how, when, why, and where the United States of America, as a democratic rebublic, has essentially been put to death.

Regardless of what so many have come to believe, death is more than the simple fact of someone having died, the realization that a living breathing entity has ceased to function, that a lifeless form has become that of “just another cadaver,” the stark realization that a human being’s time on earth has finally come to an end. Even though one’s body has been “laid to rest,” something of much greater significance has occurred. Much more to the point is the death of one’s soul, the departure of the spirit from an individual’s body; an acknowledgement that an imponderable, a vital living force having once empowered an individual through each and every step of life has vanished from the scene...... a shared understanding that something very special has been swept away. Indeed, the knowledge that something absolutely essential to the life of every related human being has been lost to the world. For this the world is less than it once was.

But what about the corporal and spiritual qualities of a more communal, national entity such as that of our own nation, the United States of America? (...)

The U.S. government has now admitted its troops used white phosphorous as an incendiary weapon against Iraqis during the assault on Fallujah a year ago. Chemical weapons experts say such attacks are in violation of international law banning the use of chemical weapons. We speak with columnist George Monbiot and the news director of RAI TV, the Italian TV network that produced the film "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre."

The U.S. government has now admitted its troops used white phosphorous

as an incendiary weapon against Iraqis during the assault on Fallujah a

year ago.

Chemical weapons experts say such attacks are in violation of international law banning the use of chemical weapons.

Peter Kaiser, of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical

Weapons, said, "Chemicals used against humans or animals that cause

harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are

considered chemical weapons."

White phosphorous is often compared to napalm because it combusts

spontaneously when exposed to oxygen and can burn right through skin to

the bone.

The Pentagon"s admission comes after a week of denials that it used

white phosphorous as a weapon in Fallujah. While reporters have noted

the use of white phosphorous since the war began, it only became a

major story last Tuesday when Italian state broadcaster RAI TV aired

the documentary "Fallujuah: The Hidden Massacre."

On that same day Democracy Now aired an excerpt of the documentary and

interviewed Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, the director of the Pentagon’s

Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad. During our show Boylan

denied the claims made in the documentary that white phosphorous was

used as a weapon to target Iraqis.

• Lt. Col. Steve Boylan interviewed on Democracy Now, Nov. 8, 2005..

But the Pentagon was caught in a lie after it was

revealed that an official Army publication called Field Artillery

magazine had disclosed that the Army had in fact used white phosphorous

as a weapon.

The magazine, in its March-April issue,

reported "[White Phosphorous] proved to be an effective and versatile

munition... [and] as a potent psychological weapon against the

insurgents in trench lines and spider holes."

The magazine went on to report "We fired "shake and bake" missions at

the insurgents, using WP [White Phosphorous] to flush them out and HE

[high explosives] to take them out."

On Tuesday, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, another Pentagon spokesperson,

admitted on the BBC that white phosphorous was used as an offensive

weapon to target insurgents.

• Lt. Col. Barry Venable interviewed on BBC.

The Pentagon has defended its use of white phosphorous

by claiming it is a not chemical weapon and that it was only used

against Iraqi insurgents, not civilians. However even this would have

been illegall according to the Army’s own rules of combat. In 1999 the

Army published a handbook that read, "It is against the law of land

warfare to employ WP against personnel targets."

An Iraqi human rights team has reportedly gone into Fallujah to

investigate the use of white phosphorus as a weapon by U.S.

forces.

The BBC News website, in a special page “Q&A: White phosphorus” and under the title “The BBC News website looks at the facts behind the row.” reads:

What are the international conventions?

Washington is not a signatory to any treaty restricting the use of white phosphorus against civilians.

White phosphorus is covered by Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons, which prohibits its use as an incendiary weapon against civilian populations or in air attacks against enemy forces in civilian areas.

The US, unlike 80 other countries including the UK, is not a signatory to Protocol III.

The same BBC News website, in the article “Iraq probes US phosphorus weapons” reads:

“Washington is not a signatory to an international treaty restricting the use of the substance against civilians.”

I asked Karen Parker, Chief Counsel of the Association of Humanitarian Lawyers based in San Francisco to comment on what the BBC reports

(...)

The Iraqi government is to investigate the United States military’s use of white phosphorus shells during the battle of Fallujah - an inquiry that could reveal whether American forces breached a fundamental international weapons treaty.

Iraq’s acting Human Rights minister, Narmin Othman, said last night that a team would be dispatched to Fallujah to try to ascertain conclusively whether civilians had been killed or injured by the incendiary weapon. The use of white phosphorus (WP) and other incendiary weapons such as napalm against civilians is prohibited.

The announcement came as John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, faced mounting calls for an inquiry into the use of WP by British forces as well as what Britain knew about its deployment by American troops. Mr Reid said that he would look into the matter. (...)