Chris Hedges's Blog, page 472

Were the Oslo Peace Accords Doomed From the Start?

When I first traveled to Israel-Palestine in 1994, during the heady early days of the Oslo peace process, I was expecting to see more of the joyful celebrations I’d watched on television at home. The emotional welcoming of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat back to Palestine. The massive demonstrations for peace on the streets of Tel Aviv. The spontaneous moment when Palestinians placed carnations in the gun barrels of departing Israeli soldiers. And though the early euphoria had already begun to ebb, clearly there was still hope.

It was the era of dialogue. Many Palestinians stood witness to Israeli trauma rooted in the Holocaust. Groups of Israelis began to understand the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when 750,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948. In the wake of the Oslo Declaration of Principles, signed on September 13, 1993 — a quarter of a century ago today — polls showed that large majorities of Israelis and Palestinians supported the agreement. Israelis, weary of a six-year Palestinian intifada, wanted Oslo to lead to lasting peace; Palestinians believed it would result in the creation of a free nation of their own, side by side with Israel.

“People thought this was the beginning of a new era,” says Salim Tamari, Palestinian sociologist and editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly.

“It was miraculous,” recalls Gershon Baskin, founder of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, “a high peak of optimism and hope.” Baskin, an American who emigrated to Israel nearly 40 years ago, remembers the emotional power of “these two parties who refused to recognize each other’s right to exist coming into a room and breaking through that and putting down a formula which, at the time, looked reasonable.”

Euphoria Never Lasts

Even then, however, there were disturbing signs. During that first trip, still in the glow of Oslo, I found myself in the heart of the West Bank, driving down new, smooth-as-glass “bypass roads” built for Israeli settlers and VIPs on my way from Bethlehem to Hebron. I was confused. Wasn’t this the territory-to-be of a future independent Palestinian state? Why, then, would something like this be authorized? Similarly, the next year, when Israeli forces undertook their much-heralded “withdrawal” from Ramallah, why did they only redeploy to the edge of that town, while retaining full military control of 72% of the West Bank?

Such stubborn facts on the ground stood in the way of the seemingly overwhelming optimism generated by that “peace of the brave,” symbolized by a handshake between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in front of President Clinton on the White House lawn. Was it possible we were witnessing the beginning of the end of generations of bloodshed and trauma?

Already, however, there were dissenters. Mourid Barghouti, a Palestinian poet who, like thousands of his brethren, returned from exile in the early days of Oslo, was shocked to find former PLO liberation fighters reduced to the status of petty bureaucrats lording it over ordinary citizens. Israel, he wrote in his memoir, I Saw Ramallah, had “succeeded in tearing away the sacred aspect of the Palestinian cause, turning it into what it is now — a series of ‘procedures’ and ‘schedules’ that are usually respected only by the weaker party in the conflict… The others are still masters of the place.”

Another Oslo critic, Edward Said, the Palestinian intellectual and professor of comparative literature at Columbia, refused a White House invitation to attend the signing ceremony between Arafat and Rabin. Oslo, he wrote, should be considered “an instrument of Palestinian surrender… a kingdom of illusions, with Israel firmly in command. Clearly the PLO has transformed itself from a national liberation movement into a kind of small-town government… What Israel has gotten is official Palestinian consent to continued occupation.”

At the time, many Palestinians wrote off Said as someone intent on obstructing real, if incremental, progress. Arafat himself said that, living as he did in America, the famed professor “does not feel the suffering of his people.”

Or maybe he did. In my nearly 20 trips to the Holy Land over the quarter-century since Oslo, I watched the West Bank settler population quadruple, new settlements come to ring Jerusalem, and Israel keep full military control over 60% of the West Bank (instead of the previous 72%). All those settler “bypass” roads and limited troop redeployments turned out to point not simply to obstacles on the road to the culmination of the “peace process” but to fatal flaws baked into Oslo from the beginning. Indeed, the Oslo Declaration of Principles, which mentioned security 12 times but never once independence, sovereignty, self-determination, freedom, or Palestine, simply wasn’t designed to stop such expansion. In fact, the accords only seemed to facilitate it.

“It was designed to make sure there would never be a Palestinian state,” says Diana Buttu, Palestinian analyst and former legal adviser to the PLO.  “They made it clear that they weren’t going to include the phrases ‘two-state solution,’ ‘Palestinian state,’ or ‘independence.’  It was completely designed to make sure the Palestinians wouldn’t have their freedom.”

The Failure of Oslo

The question worth asking on this 25th anniversary of those accords, which essentially drove policy in the U.S., Israel, the Palestinian occupied territories, and European capitals for a quarter of a century, is this: Were they doomed from the beginning? Billions of dollars and endless rounds of failed negotiations later, did Oslo ever really have a chance to succeed?

“I think it’s wrong to retroactively say that it was all a trick,” says Salim Tamari from the Jerusalem Quarterly’s editorial offices, once located in that holy city, now in Ramallah. The initial agreement was void of specifics, leaving the major issues — settlements, Jerusalem, control of water, refugees and their right of return — to “final status negotiations.” Israel, Tamari believes, unlike the Palestinians, achieved a major goal from the outset. “The Israelis wanted above all to have a security arrangement.”

In “Oslo II,” implemented in 1995, Israel got its cherished security cooperation, which meant that Palestinian police would control Palestinian demonstrators and so keep them from directly confronting Israeli forces. Those were, of course, the very confrontations that had helped fuel the success of the First Intifada, creating the conditions for Oslo. Today, that’s a bitter irony for Palestinians who sacrificed family members or limbs for what turned out to be such a weak agreement. But at the time, for many, it seemed worth the price.

For Palestinians, Oslo remained a kind of tabula rasa of hopes and dreams based on the formula of getting an agreement first and working out the details later. “Arafat thought that if he was able to get into the Palestinian territories, he would manage his relations with the Israelis,” says Ghassan Khatib, former minister of labor and planning for the Palestinian Authority (PA) as well as a prominent analyst and pollster. “And he did not pay attention to the details in the written documents.”

More important to Arafat was simply to return from exile in Tunisia and then convince Israel to end its settlement policies, give Palestinians East Jerusalem, share the region’s water supplies, and come to an equitable agreement on the right of return for Palestinian refugees dispossessed in 1948. Yet Arafat and his cadre of fellow PLO officials from the diaspora, Khatib argues, “had no real understanding of or expertise in the Israeli way of doing things, the Israeli mentality, etcetera, etcetera.”

Just as bad, says Omar Shaban of the Gaza think tank Pal-Think, was the ineptitude of Palestinian institutions in convincing Israelis that they could govern competently. “We didn’t do a very good job… We did not build good institutions. We did not build real democracy. And we did not speak enough to the Israeli public… [to] convince them that we are here to work together, to build together,” and that “peace is good for the Israeli people.”

For Gershon Baskin, however, the failure of Oslo had far less to do with any cultural misunderstandings or bureaucratic mismanagement and far more to do with an act of political violence: the assassination of Rabin by an Israeli right-wing extremist in 1995. His death was “the major event that changed the course of Oslo.”

As Baskin, who served as an adviser to Rabin’s intelligence team for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, recalls, “I know what kind of direction Rabin was moving in when he agreed to Oslo.” In the early Oslo years, the prime minister’s deputies were at work on secret negotiations with the Palestinians — the Geneva Accords and the Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement — that would have made major territorial concessions and called for East Jerusalem to be the future Palestinian capital. Some Palestinians were not impressed; they noted that by approving of the Oslo accords, they had already agreed to cede 78% of historic Palestine, settling for the 22% that remained: the West Bank and Gaza. And they pointed out that some settlements remained in both of these unofficial agreements and that neither included any kind of Palestinian right of return — considered by Israelis as a potential death blow to their state and by countless Palestinians uprooted in 1948 as a non-negotiable issue.

“There’s so much revisionist history,” Diana Buttu says.  She points out that when American settler Baruch Goldstein assassinated 29 Palestinians praying in a mosque in Hebron in 1994, Rabin could have seized the moment to end the settlements.  Instead, she points out, he “entrenched the army, entrenched the settlements.  It’s very cute for them to say it all related to the assassination of Rabin.  But it really relates to what he intended to do in the first place.”

The Soldiers Take Control

Yet Baskin believes that when Rabin, having just addressed 100,000 Israelis at a peace rally in Tel Aviv, was gunned down, Israeli priorities changed strikingly. “It was a peace process taken over by the military and the security people who had a very different understanding of how to do it.” This “change of mentality,” he adds, went “from cooperation and bridge building to walls and fence building — creating a system of separation, of permits, of restriction of movement.” The division of the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, or ostensiblyfull Palestinian control (18%), joint control (22%), and full Israeli military control (60%), was supposed to be temporary, but it has remained the status quo for a quarter of a century.

Whatever the motives and intentions of the Israeli architects of Oslo, they were soon superseded by Israelis who saw the claim of Eretz Israel — all the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River — as a prime territorial goal. As a result, the endless expansion of settlements (and the creation of new ones), as well as seizures of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and even of individual Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem neighborhoods, has become the endgame for successive Israeli governments, abetted by their American counterparts. “The basic fact is that Israel has their cake and they’re eating it,” says Tamari. “They have the territories. They’re not withdrawing. They’re happy with the security of A, B, and C. There’s no pressure on them from the Americans. On the contrary.”

In the Oslo era, American presidents and secretaries of state, at most, issued mild diplomatic rebukes for settlement building, never threatening to suspend U.S. aid if Israel didn’t stop undermining the “peace process.” The last time that happened was when Secretary of State James Baker threatened to suspend $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel during the presidency of George H.W. Bush in 1992.

And so, steadily, with every new visit to the Holy Land, I would witness the latest evidence of an expanding occupation — new or larger settlements and military bases, more patrols by jeeps and armored vehicles, new surveillance towers, additional earthen barriers,giant red and white warning signs, and most of all, hundreds of military checkpoints, ever more ubiquitous, on virtually every mile of the West Bank. Less visible were the night raids on Palestinian refugee camps and the nearly 40%of Palestinian adult males who have spent time in Israeli prisons, where the military court conviction rate for them is 99.74%. Also on the increase was the Palestinian Authority’s expanding “security cooperation” with Israel. That, in turn, often pitted Palestinians against each other, embittering villagers and city dwellers alike against the governing PA.

As the system of control grew, draconian restrictions on movement only increased. Adults and children alike were forced to wait hours to return home from school or work or a visit to a hospital or relatives in Jordan. Meanwhile, occupied Palestine was slowly being converted into an archipelago of Israeli military control. Clearly, the “peace process” had made things far worse for Palestinians.

“I remember the nice days where there was peace without agreement,” says Shaban of Pal-Think, his tongue only partly in cheek. “Now we have agreement without peace.”

When “Peace” Is a Dirty Word

And so, in the post-Oslo decades, even “peace” became a dirty word to many Palestinians. “They thought that this agreement would lead into an independent Palestinian state,” says Ghassan Khatib, whose initial tracking poll, shortly after the iconic handshake on the White House lawn, showed 70% Palestinian support for Oslo. But when, he adds, “the public realized that this agreement was not good enough to stop the expansion of settlements, they realized it’s good for nothing. Because the peace process for the Palestinians is about ending the occupation. And settlement expansion is actually the essence of occupation.” Twenty-five years later, his polling finds that support for the “peace process” among Palestinians is now at about 24%.

On the ground, what now exists is not two states, but essentially a single state that leaves Israel in de facto control of land, water, borders, and freedom of movement. What connections existed between the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem have been splintered, with little prospect of any kind of reunification any time soon.

Today, when you travel to the West Bank and drive through what was to be the landscape of a free and independent Palestine, you find yourself surrounded by a militarized colonial settler regime. The word “apartheid” inevitably comes to mind, despite its unpopularity among the pro-Israel lobby and their charges in Congress. Sometimes, I wonder whether “Jim Crow” doesn’t best describe the new Palestinian reality.

For me, each successive trip has revealed a political situation grimmer and less hopeful than the time before. Israel’s pursuit of land over peace and the complicity of the American government essentially killed “the two-state solution.”

The final blow came this May when the Trump administration moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In the process, it became clear that U.S. Mideast policy is now largely directed not only by the pro-settler triumvirate of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and Middle East adviser Jason Greenblatt, but also by the Armageddon lobby. Those evangelical Christians are spearheaded by John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, which has surpassed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as the largest pro-Israel group in the U.S. They believe that Israel must remain in control of the Holy Land so that Jesus can return and mete out justice to sinners, after which believers will rise to heaven in the rapture. Hagee, who has described such a moment in detail from his pulpit, is a major contributor to the Israeli settlement of Ariel (population 20,000). It was no happenstance that he was the minister who gave the benediction at the U.S. embassy dedication ceremony in Jerusalem in May, as Israeli forces were gunning down unarmed protesters in Gaza.

Now, in an effort to end the long-standing right of return of Palestinian refugees, the Trump administration is canceling funding to UNRWA, the U.N. refugee agency that has provided food, shelter, education, and housing in the Palestinian refugee camps for nearly seven decades. The move, spearheaded by Kushner, is part of a broader “deal of the century” to pressure Palestiniansinto a peace agreement on American and Israeli terms. Clearly a bad deal for Palestinians, it is sure to sharply increase poverty and hunger in the camps, especially in Gaza. Strategically, it appears to be an attempt to force Gazans to give up their long-standing national rights, while increasing their dependence on humanitarian aid.

There is another solution, says Buttu.  Instead of approaching this as primarily a humanitarian problem, the international community could “put pressure on Israel to end the [economic] siege, and allow us to live in freedom. If we were able to have a seaport, an airport,” to import, export, and travel freely, “we wouldn’t need handouts.” Yet most of the world, she says, is “too terrified to confront Israel.”

Failed peace, dashed hopes, hunger, apartheid, Armageddon. Not much to celebrate, is there? And there may not be for quite a while. “The dream is still there,” insists Tamari, but he adds that, for the foreseeable future, “I think we’re going to continue to have the status quo. State of repression, colonization for many, many years to come. Until the global scene changes.” Say, a major decline in U.S. influence (something not so hard to imagine right now) or some other less predictable set of events. “Or until the Palestinians undertake a massive civil insurrection. That may tip the balance.”

An Ode to Joy

Many Palestinians see the recent Gaza March of Return and the nonviolent boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which advocates cultural and economic boycotts of Israel, as examples of such civil insurrections. BDS supporters recently celebrated a genuine victory, with the announcements by Lana del Rey and 15 other artists that they were bowing out of the Meteor concert festival in Israel. Yet taken together, BDS and the March of Return don’t come close to the First Intifada, a six-year uprising involving virtually every sector of Palestinian society, which brought Israel to the negotiating table — ironically, for the failed Oslo Agreement.

Still, few are the Palestinians likely to tell you that the national dream is dead. In late July, for instance, I spoke with Laila Salah, a 21-year-old Palestinian cellist, then rehearsing to play Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in Jerusalem in an orchestra led by Palestinian violist Ramzi Aburedwan, the founder of the Al Kamandjati music school. Many of Laila’s fellow Palestinian musicians, risking arrest, snuck into the holy city, in part to play Beethoven but also to assert their right to be in their beloved Jerusalem, which they still dream of as their capital. When I asked Laila if she thought Palestine would have its own state one day, she compared her people’s freedom to the fourth movement, or Ode to Joy, in the 9th Symphony. “The fourth movement embodies our freedom,” she told me. “Or at least, being able to go freely around Palestine. It’s a wish to come true. I don’t know when. We might not be alive to see our fourth movement.”

With the endless march of settlements, Israel’s continued impunity, a fractured Palestine divided between the West Bank and Gaza, and a Trump administration empowering people who believe Armageddon is near, a solution to the Israel-Palestine nightmare may seem impossible.  But maybe, Laila, a just peace is coming sooner than you think.

After all, who predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall or the end of apartheid in South Africa?

Our Planet Is Angry

“Storm of a lifetime” is how the National Weather Service in Wilmington, N.C., described Hurricane Florence as it came lumbering across the Atlantic to hurl its ferocious winds and rain onto that coastal state. Pointing to the storm’s unusual path, one meteorologist said, “There’s virtually no precedent for a hurricane moving southwest for some time along the Carolina coast.” Florence is expected to slow down as it hits the coast, dumping a catastrophic amount of water over a small area instead of spreading rain far and wide. What that means for North Carolina’s numerous hog farms, coal ash pits and nuclear reactors is anyone’s guess, but there is a high likelihood of an environmental disaster unfolding.

We aren’t necessarily seeing more large storms. We’re seeing the usual storm activity jumping into overdrive, as The Washington Post’s Chris Mooney described how “[i]n little more than a day, Hurricane Florence exploded in strength, jumping from a Category 1 to a Category 4 behemoth with 140 mph winds.”

On the other side of the planet an even stronger storm, with wind speeds greater than Florence, Super Typhoon Mangkhut, is heading right toward the Philippines and China. Geographically, between Florence and Mangkhut lie the islands of Hawaii that got battered by Hurricane Olivia just weeks after being hit by Hurricane Lane. And only weeks ago, large swaths of the planet were struck by debilitating and record-breaking heat waves, fueling out-of-control wildfires up and down California’s coast. We have barely recovered from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and Hurricane Harvey in Houston last year, and before we know it, worse climate-related disasters will be upon us.

The earth is trying to tell us something: We are a species in deep, deep trouble. No matter how much our politicians dismiss the reality of global warming, minimize its impact or offer false solutions, the rapidly intensifying storms and their unpredictable paths are screaming out that our climate is changing. Heat waves are cooking the ground we walk on. No longer is a melting glacier in a far-off location the worst sign of our changing climate—the signs are happening here and now.

A warmer planet cares little for an invasive species called “Homo sapiens” that has colonized its surface and poisoned it. We may as well think of global warming as a planetary fever intended to cast us off as one would a pesky and persistent virus. It’s just physics, after all—something that ought to be grasped by anyone who understands why the inside of their enclosed car gets scorching hot after even a few minutes of sitting in the sun.

At a time when we should be heeding the earth’s angry response to our greenhouse gas emissions, Donald Trump’s administration is steadily unraveling our modest protections from climate change. On Monday, news emerged that the Environmental Protection Agency would make it easier for energy companies to dump methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. According to The New York Times, the proposal would be the “third major step this year to roll back federal efforts to fight climate change.” Just when we should be rapidly and dramatically scaling back all fossil fuel extraction and consumption, we are literally going backward.

Even in California, which has led the charge against Trump’s ill-fated decision to ignore climate change, and where Gov. Jerry Brown just signed an ambitious clean energy bill into law, we are not doing nearly enough. Gov. Brown and the California state legislature have led the way on climate actions, but the federal bar is so low that California is able to preserve and even expand its oil and gas extraction industries and still claim to be leading the way on climate change.

The earth is doing its best to purge us, yet those in power are not listening. But the rest of us are. We’re listening and acting, as 30,000 people did in San Francisco last Saturday, joining hundreds of thousands of others all over the world as part of the Rise for Climate Jobs and Justice marches, and as activists are doing right now in confronting Gov. Brown at his Global Climate Summit. We are marching and rallying, screaming our throats hoarse, blocking traffic, getting arrested, chaining ourselves to equipment, and being attacked by dogs, pepper spray, tear gas and more.

Not only are we acting, we the people are the primary victims of a changing climate and the extreme weather events that are its hallmark. Trump, who boasted of the federal government’s response to Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico by calling it an “unsung success,” has effectively told us that he considers 3,000 deaths a measure of success. On Thursday he went even further, denying that there were that many deaths in Puerto Rico and claiming it was all a Democrat-led conspiracy to smear him. He has decided that 20,000 pallets of bottled water that were found rotting in the sun for a year instead of being distributed to needy survivors is what constitutes an adequate response by the government. What, then, are we to expect from the response to Hurricane Florence, and to all the hurricanes, wildfires and heat waves that will follow, thick and fast?

Eventually governments will run out of money, resources and first responders to tackle the extreme weather events on our roasting planet. Ordinary people will be left on their own as elites go laughing all the way the bank, enriched by the wealth of our fossil fuel economy.

The French Revolution of the 1780s and ’90s is one of many revolutions in history that demonstrated how people who are pushed too far can and will use violence to reorganize society. Obviously, in our current age we cannot consider killing off those politicians and corporate executives who are dooming us to climate-related suffering and death as they satiate their greed. But we can foment an alternative to bloody revolutions by stripping elites of their power by any nonviolent means necessary, such as elections, political actions and all other forms of people power. The fate of our species hangs in the balance. We are many and they are few. That is all that we can do now in the face of our climate apocalypse.

Neighborhoods Evacuate as Gas Blasts Destroy Homes in Massachusetts

LAWRENCE, Mass. — A series of gas explosions caused fires at more than 20 homes across three communities north of Boston on Thursday, forcing entire neighborhoods to evacuate as crews scramble to douse the flames and shut off gas and electric lines in an attempt to prevent further damage.

Massachusetts State Police say troopers have been dispatched to Lawrence, Andover and North Andover to secure scenes and help traffic that has snarled roads as panicked residents attempt to flee their neighborhoods amid the afternoon rush hour.

Joseph Solomon, the police chief in nearby Methuen, said 20 to 25 homes were on fire in Lawrence. Solomon, who responded to Lawrence to help, said there are so many fires “you can’t even see the sky.”

The cause wasn’t immediately clear. The Columbia Gas company had announced earlier Thursday that it would be upgrading gas lines in neighborhoods across the state, including the area where the explosions happened. It was not clear whether work was happening there Thursday, and a spokeswoman did not immediately comment.

Town officials in Andover are advising all residents and businesses to evacuate and to shut off their gas, if they know how to safely. The town of 35,000 residents is about 26 miles (40 kilometers) north of Boston near the New Hampshire border.

In neighboring North Andover, town Selectman Phil Decologero said that his entire neighborhood had gathered in the street, afraid to enter homes. He warned anyone with concerns to leave their houses and head to North Andover High School, which is being set up as a gathering point.

“It’s definitely a scary situation at the moment,” he said. “It’s pretty severe.”

Entire neighborhoods were being evacuated in Lawrence. City Councilor Marc Laplante said authorities were shutting off electric power and urging residents in the Colonial Heights neighborhood to head to Parthum elementary and middle schools.

“People need to get out of this area safely, and it’s really difficult because the traffic right now is horrendous,” he said.

The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency said staff members were heading to Lawrence, Andover and North Andover, along with state fire investigators.

Are Trump’s Advisers Trying to Bait Him Into War in the Middle East?

The New York Times, on September 11, 2013, accommodated Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s desire “to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders” about “recent events surrounding Syria.”

Putin’s op-ed in the Times appeared under the title: “A Plea for Caution From Russia.” In it, he warned that a military “strike by the United States against Syria will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders … and unleash a new wave of terrorism. … It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.”

Three weeks before Putin’s piece, on August 21, there had been a chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was immediately blamed. There soon emerged, however, ample evidence that the incident was a provocation to bring direct U.S. military involvement against Assad, lest Syrian government forces retain their momentum and defeat the jihadist rebels.

In a Memorandum for President Barack Obama five days before Putin’s article, on September 6, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) had warned President Barack Obama of the likelihood that the incident in Ghouta was a false-flag attack.

Despite his concern of a U.S. attack, Putin’s main message in his op-ed was positive, talking of a growing mutual trust:

“A new opportunity to avoid military action has emerged in the past few days. The United States, Russia and all members of the international community must take advantage of the Syrian government’s willingness to place its chemical arsenal under international control for subsequent destruction. Judging by the statements of President Obama, the United States sees this as an alternative to military action. [Syria’s chemical weapons were in fact destroyed under UN supervision the following year.]

“I welcome the president’s interest in continuing the dialogue with Russia on Syria. We must work together to keep this hope alive … and steer the discussion back toward negotiations. If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust … and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues.”

Obama Refuses to Strike

In a lengthy interview with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg published in The Atlantic much later, in March 2016, Obama showed considerable pride in having refused to act according to what he called the “Washington playbook.”

He added a telling vignette that escaped appropriate attention in Establishment media. Obama confided to Goldberg that, during the crucial last week of August 2013, National Intelligence Director James Clapper paid the President an unannounced visit to caution him that the allegation that Assad was responsible for the chemical attack in Ghouta was “not a slam dunk.”

Clapper’s reference was to the very words used by former CIA Director George Tenet when he characterized, falsely, the nature of the evidence on WMD in Iraq while briefing President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in December 2002. Additional evidence that Ghouta was a false flag came in December 2016 parliamentary testimony in Turkey.

In early September 2013, around the time of Putin’s op-ed, Obama resisted the pressure of virtually all his advisers to launch cruise missiles on Syria and accepted the Russian-brokered deal for Syria to give up its chemical weapons. Obama followed public opinion but had to endure public outrage from those lusting for the U.S. to get involved militarily. From neoconservatives, in particular, there was hell to pay.

Atop the CNN building in Washington, DC, on the evening of September 9, two days before Putin’s piece, I had a fortuitous up-close-and-personal opportunity to watch the bitterness and disdain with which Paul Wolfowitz and Joe Lieberman heaped abuse on Obama for being too “cowardly” to attack.

Five Years Later

In his appeal for cooperation with the U.S., Putin had written these words reportedly by himself:

“My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is ‘what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.’ It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

In recent days, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, has left no doubt that he is the mascot of American exceptionalism. Its corollary is Washington’s “right” to send its forces, uninvited, into countries like Syria.

“We’ve tried to convey the message in recent days that if there’s a third use of chemical weapons, the response will be much stronger,” Bolton said on Monday. “I can say we’ve been in consultations with the British and the French who have joined us in the second strike and they also agree that another use of chemical weapons will result in a much stronger response.”

As was the case in September 2013, Syrian government forces, with Russian support, have the rebels on the defensive, this time in Idlib province where most of the remaining jihadists have been driven. On Sunday began what could be the final showdown of the five-year war. Bolton’s warning of a chemical attack by Assad makes little sense as Damascus is clearly winning and the last thing Assad would do is invite U.S. retaliation.

U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, with remarkable prescience, has already blamed Damascus for whatever chemical attack might take place. The warnings of direct U.S. military involvement, greater than Trump’s two previous pin-prick attacks, is an invitation for the cornered jihadists to launch another false-flag attack to exactly bring that about.

Sadly, not only has the growing trust recorded by Putin five years ago evaporated, but the likelihood of a U.S.-Russian military clash in the region is as perilously high as ever.

Seven days before Putin’s piece appeared, citizen Donald Trump had tweeted: “Many Syrian ‘rebels’ are radical Jihadis. Not our friends & supporting them doesn’t serve our national interest. Stay out of Syria!”

In September 2015 Trump accused his Republican primary opponents of wanting to “start World War III over Syria. Give me a break. You know, Russia wants to get ISIS, right? We want to get ISIS. Russia is in Syria — maybe we should let them do it? Let them do it.”

Last week Trump warned Russia and Syria not to attack Idlib. Trump faces perhaps his biggest test as president: whether he can resist his neocon advisers and not massively attack Syria, as Obama chose not to, or risk the wider war he accused his Republican opponents of fomenting.

Senate Democrats Refer Secret Kavanaugh Document to FBI

Less than a day after The Intercept reported that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) received a letter that purportedly details an “incident” involving Trump Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh and “a woman while they were in high school,” Feinstein announced in a statement on Thursday that she has referred the secret document to the FBI.

“I have received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” Feinstein said. “That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.”

“This matter has been referred to the FBI for investigation,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Il.) told BuzzFeed when asked about the letter.

News that a letter about a judge who is up for a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court has been sent to the FBI “seems like a pretty big deal,” political analyst Matt McDermott noted in response to Feinstein’s statement.

This, uh, seems like a pretty big deal. https://t.co/ZdUwXDGGOw

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) September 13, 2018

With a final vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination set for next week, rumors regarding the contents of the letter have reportedly been swirling around Capitol Hill in recent days. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have requested to view the document, but Feinstein has refused to give her colleagues access.

According to The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim, “Different sources provided different accounts of the contents of the letter, and some of the sources said they themselves had heard different versions, but the one consistent theme was that it describes an incident involving Kavanaugh and a woman while they were in high school.”

“The letter took a circuitous route to Feinstein,” noted Grim, who reported that the document was “relayed to someone affiliated with Stanford University, who authored the letter and sent it to Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat who represents the area.”

Wind and Rain From Florence’s Leading Edge Lash Carolinas

WILMINGTON, N.C.—The outer bands of wind and rain from a weakened but still lethal Hurricane Florence began lashing North Carolina on Thursday as the monster storm moved in for a prolonged and potentially catastrophic drenching along the Southeast coast.

Florence’s winds had dropped from a peak of 140 mph (225 kph) to 105 mph (165 kph) by midmorning, reducing the hurricane from a terrifying Category 4 to a 2. But forecasters warned that the widening storm — and its likelihood of lingering around the coast day after day — will bring seawater surging onto land and torrential downpours.

“It truly is really about the whole size of this storm,” National Hurricane Center Director Ken Graham said. “The larger and the slower the storm is, the greater the threat and the impact — and we have that.”

As of 11 a.m. EDT, Florence was centered about 145 miles (230 kilometers) southeast of Wilmington, its forward movement slowed to 10 mph (17 kph). Hurricane-force winds extended 80 miles (130 kilometers) from its center, and tropical-storm-force winds up to 195 miles (315 kilometers).

Forecasters said Florence’s eye could come ashore early Friday around the North Carolina-South Carolina line. Then it is likely to hover along the coast Saturday, pushing up to 13 feet (nearly 4 meters) of storm surge and unloading water on both states.

By midday, Spanish moss blew sideways in the trees as the winds increased in Wilmington. On North Carolina’s Outer Banks, water flowed through streets and between beachfront homes, and some of the few people still left in Nags Head took photos of angry waves topped with white froth.

The forecast calls for as much as 40 inches (102 centimeters) of rain over seven days along the coast, with the deluge continuing even as the center of the storm pushes its way over the Appalachian Mountains.

The result could be what the Houston area saw during Hurricane Harvey just over a year ago: catastrophic inland flooding that could swamp homes, businesses, farms and industrial sites.

The police chief of a barrier island in Florence’s bulls’-eye said he was asking for next-of-kin contact information from the few residents who refused to leave.

“I’m not going to put our personnel in harm’s way, especially for people that we’ve already told to evacuate,” Wrightsville Beach Police Chief Dan House said.

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper urged residents to remain alert despite changing forecasts.

“Don’t relax, don’t get complacent. Stay on guard. This is a powerful storm that can kill. Today the threat becomes a reality,” he said.

About 5.25 million people live in areas under hurricane warnings or watches, and 4.9 million in places covered by tropical storm warnings or watches, the National Weather Service said.

Weather Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters said Florence eventually could strike as a Category 1 with winds less than 100 mph (160 kph), but that’s still enough to cause at least $1 billion in damage. Water kills more people in hurricanes than wind does.

Scientists said it is too soon to say what role, if any, global warming played in the storm. But previous research has shown that the strongest hurricanes are getting wetter, more intense and intensifying faster because of human-caused climate change.

It’s unclear exactly how many people fled ahead of the storm, but more than 1.7 million people in the Carolinas and Virginia were warned to clear out.

Airlines canceled about 1,200 flights and counting, and some airports in the Carolinas virtually shut down. Home Depot and Lowe’s activated emergency response centers and sent in around 1,100 trucks to get generators, trash bags and bottled water to stores before and after the storm.

Duke Energy, the nation’s No. 2 power company, said Florence could knock out electricity to three-quarters of its 4 million customers in the Carolinas, and outages could last for weeks. Workers are being brought in from the Midwest and Florida to help in the storm’s aftermath, it said.

Florence’s weakening as it neared the coast created tension between some who left home and authorities who worried that the storm could still be deadly.

Frustrated after evacuating his beach home for a storm that has since been downgraded, retired nurse Frederick Fisher grumbled in the lobby of a hotel in Wilmington several miles inland.

“Against my better judgment, due to emotionalism, I evacuated,” he said. “I’ve got four cats inside the house. If I can’t get back in a week, after awhile they might turn on each other or trash the place.”

___

Jeffrey Collins reported from Myrtle Beach, S.C. Associated Press writers Seth Borenstein in Washington; Jennifer Kay in Miami; Gary Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina; Sarah Rankin and Denise Lavoie in Richmond, Virginia; Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina; Skip Foreman in Charlotte, North Carolina; Jeff Martin in Hampton, Georgia; David Koeing in Dallas; Gerry Broome at Nags Head, North Carolina; and Jay Reeves in Atlanta contributed to this report.

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For the latest on Hurricane Florence, visit https://www.apnews.com/tag/Hurricanes

The Trump Administration Is Detaining a Record Number of Immigrant Children

Currently, 12,800 migrant minors are in custody at federally contracted shelters. It’s the highest number ever recorded, according to a New York Times report. That’s five times more children than in May 2017, when there were 2,400 in custody.

The numbers have continued to increase, the Times reports, despite a July federal court order that required shelters to release hundreds of children separated from their families. The rise, the Times continues, is “due not to an influx of children entering the country, but a reduction in the number being released to live with families and other sponsors, the data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services suggests.”

Members of Congress shared the data with the Times. Most of the migrants involved crossed the border without their families, and a large number, now spread out among 100 shelters, are teens from Central America:

… [D]espite the Trump administration’s efforts to discourage Central American migrants, roughly the same number of children are crossing the border as in years past. The big difference, said those familiar with the shelter system, is that red tape and fear brought on by stricter immigration enforcement have discouraged relatives and family friends from coming forward to sponsor children.

The fear is leading to overcrowding. “The closer they get to 100 percent [capacity], the less ability they will have to address anything unforeseen,” says Mark Greenberg, who in the Obama administration oversaw the care of migrant children at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Instead of releasing more children, the Trump administration is addressing the capacity problem by tripling the size of a temporary tent city in Tornillo, Texas, so it can house 3,800 children through the end of 2018. According to Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., these facilities are more expensive than traditional shelters, costing “about $750 per child per day, or three times the amount of a typical shelter.” DeLauro told the Times, “[These conditions] are flying in the face of child welfare, and we’re doing it by design. … You drive up the cost and you prolong the trauma on these children.”

The Trump administration explained its actions by saying it was overwhelmed with requests for asylum. Evelyn Stauffer, press secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement, “The number of unaccompanied alien children apprehended are a symptom of the larger issue of a broken immigration system. … That is why HHS joins the president in calling on Congress to address this broken system and the pull factors that have led to increasing numbers at the U.S. border.”

There was no mention of a longer-term plan for housing these children, or for finding them homes outside federal shelters.

Read the entire Times report here.

D.C.-Based Pro-Israel Group Used Facebook Ads to Target Pro-Palestinian Activist

In 2016, as Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi performed at college campuses around the United States, his appearances seemed to spark student protests.

Before his visit to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, a page called “John Jay Students Against Hate” appeared on Facebook with Kanazi’s face next to a uniformed cop, painting Kanazi as anti-police. When Kanazi crossed the country a few days later to visit San Jose State, a nearly-identical Facebook page popped up, this one called “SJSU Students Against Hate,” with Kanazi’s face superimposed over an image of military graves. Paid Facebook campaigns promoted both pages.

Despite their names, the Facebook campaigns were run by professional Washington D.C. political operatives who work for a group called the Israel on Campus Coalition, according to promotional materials obtained by ProPublica and the Forward.

In the materials, which the Israel on Campus Coalition distributed to its donors, the group describes each of the Facebook pages as an “anonymous digital campaign.” The group says it paid to promote the campaign, which reached tens of thousands of people.

The social media campaigns provide another example of how well-funded advocacy organizations are using deceptive strategies to promote their cause online. The Israel on Campus Coalition launched these campaigns during the 2016 election season, at the same time that entities linked to the Russian government bought misleading Facebook ads on a range of political issues.

The Israel on Campus Coalition didn’t respond to requests for comment. The group had a budget of $9 million in its fiscal year ending in June 2017, according to federal tax filings. Its funders include the foundations of billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer and philanthropist Lynn Schusterman.

Asked about the Israel on Campus Coalition pages, a Facebook spokesman said they “violate our policies against misrepresentation and they have been removed.”

In response to criticism of Russia-linked ads, Facebook recently created new rules requiring disclosure of who is paying for political ads on the site. How the company defines what is political remains murky.

Anonymous digital campaigns appear to be a central part of the Israel on Campus Coalition’s efforts to combat pro-Palestinian activism on U.S. campuses. This past spring, the ICC appears to have set up at least one anonymous website to oppose a George Washington University student government resolution that called on the school to divest its endowment from certain companies that students said were profiting from Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, the Forward reported.

The Israel on Campus Coalition’s leaders discussed their covert social media tactics in an unaired Al Jazeera documentary featuring hidden camera footage of Washington, D.C. pro-Israel advocacy officials.

“With the anti-Israel people, what’s most effective, what we found at least in the last year, is you do the opposition research, put up some anonymous website, and then put up targeted Facebook ads,” said the Israel on Campus Coalition’s executive director, Jacob Baime, in the Al Jazeera documentary, which was filmed in 2016. The film was viewed by ProPublica and the Forward.

Baime also said in the documentary that his organization’s work is based on a doctrine used to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban. “It’s modeled on General Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy,” Baime said. “We’ve copied a lot from that strategy that has been working really well for us, actually.”

McChrystal, who led the U.S. military’s special forces and the NATO war effort in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010, emphasized so-called “offensive information operations” to embarrass and discredit violent insurgents.

The Al Jazeera documentary, in which a journalist went undercover as an intern for a pro-Israel advocacy group in Washington, has been the subject of months of international intrigue and has never been aired by the network. Decrying the undercover tactics, pro-Israel groups and members of Congress have pushed back against the documentary series and Qatar, which funds Al Jazeera. The network, which has faced public criticism from its own journalists for not airing the documentary, said in April it did not buckle under pressure from a pro-Israel group in deciding not to broadcast the program. A spokesman didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Footage in the documentary also shows Israel on Campus Coalition officials describing their working relationship with the Israeli government.

Baime says in the documentary that Israel on Campus Coalition officials “coordinate” or “communicate” with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, an Israeli government department that has become the hub of the Israeli government’s overt and covert efforts against the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement in the U.S. and around the world. A spokesman for the agency didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In the same hidden camera footage, Ian Hersh, the Israel on Campus Coalition’s director of operations, said that the Ministry of Strategic Affairs participates in the group’s “Operations and Intelligence Brief,” a regular strategy meeting.

In recent days, some aspects of the Al Jazeera documentary as well as a short clip have been on the website Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian news site whose executive director, Ali Abunimah, appears as an interviewee in the film.

Baime and Hersh didn’t respond to requests for comment about the footage of them in the documentary.

The Israel on Campus Coalition’s online efforts against Kanazi, the Palestinian-American poet, began in November 2016 while he was touring college campuses to promote his book, “Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up From Brooklyn to Palestine.”

According to the Israel on Campus Coalition’s donor materials, the group identified and worked with a non-Jewish military veteran and San Jose State University student to write a blog post critical of Kanazi. The precise nature of the group’s work with the student is unclear from the donor materials, and the student did not respond to requests for comment.

The Israel on Campus Coalition then created and paid to promote the “SJSU Students Against Hate” page, which linked to the blog post.

“Kanazi preaches hate on the campuses he visits,” the student wrote in the post, which appeared on the website Medium and has since been deleted.

Kanazi said that he does not recall being aware of the anonymous Facebook pages at the time. “These insidious tactics are part of a larger campaign to smear students, professors, and anyone who dares speak up for Palestinian human rights at universities,” he said in an email.

 

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Why John Bolton Should Be Tried at International Criminal Court

National Security Adviser John Bolton appears to be spiraling down into the same miasma of madness that possesses other members of the Trump administration – perhaps caused by a microbe carried in Trump’s sniffle. This week he threatened justices of the International Criminal Court in the Hague with physical abduction were they to dare indict an American for war crimes committed in Afghanistan.

The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Statute, which went into effect in 2002 has been ratified by 123 nations of the world. Most of Europe and all of Latin America and half of African states have signed. Virtually the only deadbeats are countries whose officials are afraid of being indicted by the court for serious human rights crimes, such as Syria, China, India, Sudan, Israel, Russia and . . . the United States of America (actually the latter four signed but they pulled out when they realized that they had exposed their state officials to prosecution, what with the war crimes they are constantly committing).

The ICC undertook to try dictator Moammar Gaddafi, but he was killed before he could be brought before it; it still has an outstanding case against the dictator’s son Seif. For Bolton to menace it in this way makes clear that he is in the Gaddafi category, which is why he fears the institution.

Bolton has no particular expertise in anything at all, he is just an angry shyster lawyer picked up by the more insane elements of the Republican Party as their pit bull. He once denied that the United Nations exists, then George W. Bush tried to make him US ambassador to the United Nations (he wasn’t confirmed, but served briefly on a sneaky Bush recess appointment).

So here are the crimes that I allege Bolton has committed, for which he by all rights should face justice at the Hague, at the hands of the same ICC judges that he just brutishly threatened:

1. Bolton played a key role in hoodwinking the American public into the 2003 US war of aggression on Iraq, for which there was no legitimate casus belli or legal basis for war. The UN Charter forbids the initiation of a war except where a country is attacked and responds in self-defense or where the UN Security Council designates a government as a threat to world order (as it did Gaddafi’s Libya). These attempts to outlaw wars of aggression were a reaction against the Nazi invasion of Poland, etc. People like Bolton, who don’t want any constraints on his power from the international rule of law, are just trying out for the role of people like Nazi generals Günther von Kluge and Gerd von Rundstedt, who led the assault on Poland. (Like Bolton in regard to Iraq, they maintained that they were only defending themselves from a menacing Poland, but nobody believed this lie).

Bolton is manifestly guilty of the crime of aggression under the Rome Statute and its 2010 enabling statutes adopted at Kampala: Article 8 bis, para 1, says: For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations.

As Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security under Bush, Bolton was clearly a high executive officer of a government guilty of the crime of aggression.

2. As National Security Adviser, Bolton has supported the Apartheid policies of the far-right extremist government of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu toward the Occupied Palestinians.

Apartheid is a crime under the Rome Statute:

‘The crime of apartheid’ means inhumane acts . . . committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

He also supports the transfer of Israeli citizens into the Occupied West Bank as squatters on Palestinian land.

8.2.b.viii stipulates as a war crime

“The transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory.”

Bolton strongly supports and enables a whole range of war crimes of the Likud regime in Tel Aviv against the Palestinian people, above all keeping them in a condition of abject statelessness and continually stealing their property.

Under war crimes comes “Extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”

It could be argued that Israel could not engage in these illegal violations of Palestinian rights save for the American veto, so that high US officials who conspire to enable crimes like Apartheid and usurpation of Occupied Territories are even more guilty than Israeli officials.

3. Bolton is in the back pocket of, has spoken for, and may have received significant monies from the People’s Jihadis (Mojahedin-e Khalq), a group that has been on the US State Department terrorist watch list and which has killed civilians with bombings and attacks in Iran. They even had a base given them for these purposes by Saddam Hussein, in whose company Bolton has fallen, given their alliance with this same Iranian cult.

The MEK is guilty of “a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack,” and under this heading, of murder. In fact, it has killed Americans. Bolton gets red in the face about threats to the US except that he pals around with people who have the blood of Americans on their hands.

How delightful it would be to see Bolton at the Hague, before the very judges he threatened to kidnap.

 

Gunman Kills 5, Self in Southern California Rampage

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A gunman killed five people, including his wife, before turning the gun on himself as a Kern County sheriff’s deputy closed in Wednesday, authorities said.

There was no immediate word on what sparked the shootings that took place at a home and a business in Bakersfield, which is some 90 miles (145 kilometers) north of Los Angeles.

“Obviously, these are not random shootings,” Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood told KERO-TV. Six people died in a short amount of time, he added.

The man first showed up at a trucking business with his wife shortly before 5:30 p.m. where he confronted another man.

“The suspect, the husband, shot the person at the trucking company and then turned and shot his wife,” then chased and shot another man who showed up, Youngblood said.

The gunman then went to a home where he shot two people, the sheriff said.

He then carjacked a woman who was driving her child. The woman and child escaped and the man drove to a highway where a sheriff’s deputy saw him, Youngblood said.

The gunman saw the deputy and pulled into a lot. When the deputy confronted him at gunpoint the man shot himself in the chest, the sheriff said.

His identity was not immediately released.

Except for the gunman’s wife, there was no immediate word on how the victims might have been related.

About 30 people saw the shootings and were being interviewed by deputies, Youngblood said.