Ghosts of the Past: For Israel, War on UNESCO Is an Existential Battle

by Ramzy Baroud Posted onOctober 02, 2023

Jericho does not belong to the Palestinians alone. It belongs to the whole of humanity.

For Israel, however, the recognition by UNESCO of Jericho as a “World Heritage Site in Palestine” complicates its mission of erasing Palestine, physically and figuratively, from existence.

The decision was described by Israel’s foreign ministry as a “cynical” ploy by the Palestinians to politicize UNESCO.

This is ironic, as Israel has politicized history by removing anything that could be interpreted as part of Palestinian historical heritage, while elevating a self-centered, and largely fabricated, view of history that supposedly belongs to Israel, and Israel alone.

Though Israel has succeeded, thanks to its massive military power, in dominating the Palestinian physical landscape, it has largely failed in dominating Palestine’s history.

Apartheid walls, military checkpoints and illegal Jewish settlements are easy to construct. Constructing a historical narrative that is dotted with lies, half-truths and omissions, however, is almost impossible to sustain for long.

All of this is part of a protracted Israeli-US war on UNESCO. In 2019, the US and Israel officially withdrew from UNESCO, citing anti-Israel bias. This followed repeated threats by various US administrations, and a cut of funding by the Obama Administration in 2011.

But why such a fierce and determined war against an organization that describes itself as a promoter of “world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture”?

In fact, UNESCO is one of very few UN-linked international institutions that is the least politicized, based on the belief that the past, and whatever remains of it, is a common heritage that belongs to all of us.

As acceptable as such a claim may be for many countries around the world, for Israel UNESCO’s innocuous gestures to the Palestinians are simply heretical.

Not only Jericho – and, specifically, Tell Es-Sultan – belongs in the list of World Heritage Sites, the two should top the list. This is not grandstanding or another ‘cynical’ utilization of history but simply because Jericho is the “oldest inhabited city in the world” and Tell Es-Sultan is the “oldest town in the world” as it dates back to the 10th millennium BCE.

For example, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Era Tower, circa 8300 BCE, is believed, by recent studies, to mark the summer solstice. It was, for nearly 6,000 years, the tallest human-made structure in the world. This is just one of numerous astonishing facts about Tell Es-Sultan.

All of Palestine is rich with such history, which traces our common ancestry to ancient civilizations that have merged or fused into other cultures, giving us the fascinating tapestry that is humanity.

And, because the history of Palestine is the history of humankind, serious Palestinian historians, archeologists and intellectuals rarely display any ethnocentric ownership over that history, thus refusing to claim any ascendancy over other cultures.

“All archeological and historical evidence shows that Palestine was inhabited by many people,” wrote respected Palestinian archeologist, Dr. Hamdan Taha, in the recently-published volume Our Vision for Liberation.

Palestinian history spans a period starting from the “Homo Sapiens until the 21st century and, over this history, marked by many wars, invasions and conversions, (..) the indigenous population was never completely eliminated,” Taha writes.

A careful reading of Taha’s comments is enough to explain Israel’s fears, bordering on panic, whenever Palestine and the Palestinians are linked to a credible historical narrative.

Two points are worth a pause: one, all the “wars, invasions and conversions” did not succeed in interrupting the demographic flow and continuity of the “indigenous people” of Palestine, culminating in today’s modern Palestinians; and two, those indigenous people, though some invaders have tried in vain, were “never completely eliminated”.

Israel has done more than attempt to rewrite history and to marginalize the main actors of Palestine’s historical narrative. It has also actively and continuously tried to eliminate the natives altogether.

But it failed. The number of Palestinians living in historic Palestine today at least equals, and in some estimates is even higher than the number of Israeli Jewish immigrants from Europe and elsewhere.

Failing at the “elimination” part of history, Israel is now resorting to the two-pronged strategy of ethnic cleansing and racial separation, or apartheid. The latter practice is now increasingly recognized by international human rights groups, including Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and many others.

The ghosts of the past are another problem facing Israel. A brilliant cadre of Palestinian historians and archeologists, like Taha, joined by courageous and equally brilliant Israeli historians, like Ilan Pappé, are determined to unearth the truth on Palestine’s history and on Israel’s meddling in history.

It is because of such respected individuals, a parallel history to the one invented by Israel following the Nakba has emerged.

Another Tell – the Arabic word for “hill” – aside from Tell Es-Sultan, was recently unearthed. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said earlier this month that the excavations of Tell Qedesh is “the first-of-its-kind project” uncovering a not so distant past.

In this Palestinian village near the Lebanese border, war crimes were committed, and the hapless villagers, after doing their best to resist Zionist militias, were forced to flee.

To ensure the villagers never return, Israeli authorities bulldozed the village entirely.

“The dig is the first in Israel specifically dedicated to archaeologically exploring the legacy of what Palestinians remember as the Nakba,” Haaretz wrote.

For decades, Palestinians have been doing just that. Several generations of Palestinian archeologists have helped reanimate much of that history, ancient and modern. “The rule of archeology is to reconstruct the past in order to build the future,” according to Taha.

Unlike Israel, however, Taha’s vision aims to “incorporate the voices of all peoples, groups, cultures and religions that have lived on the land of Palestine.”

This inclusive vision is at direct odds with Israel’s exclusivist, selective, and often fabricated “vision”, predicated on military domination and cultural erasure.

In its Extended 45th Session of the World Heritage Committee in Riyadh on September 17, UNESCO has just confirmed the validity of the Palestinian vision. Naturally, Israel is angry because invaders hate the truth.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. His other books include My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

 

Israel Continues Its “Shoot-to-Cripple” Policy Targeting Youngsters with Impunity

Still no sign of sanctions from the self-righteous international community

by Stuart Littlewood / October 7th, 2023

The Guardian reports an increase in the number of young Palestinian demonstrators in hospital with gunshot wounds.

Their protests are in response to the Jewish invasions of the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in East Jerusalem and raids by the Israeli occupation forces into Gaza, as well as the continuing misery and hopelessness caused by Israel’s illegal and brutal blockade of Gaza since 2006.

Several have been admitted to hospital with bullet wounds to the ankle which is a notoriously difficult part of the leg to treat successfully, especially when Palestinian doctors lack the microscopic equipment to carry out such intricate operations. One young man had been shot through both ankles with the same bullet and it is not clear if he will ever walk again.

The latest violence, says the Guardian, echoes the “Great March of Return” protests that began in 2018 and lasted nearly two years, in which 227 Palestinians were killed during weekly demonstrations at the separation fences. The protests were triggered by Donald Trump’s decision to recognise the “disputed” city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

But Israel’s “shoot-to-cripple” policy isn’t new. Back in 2018, I told how retired trauma surgeon David Halpin, who had often worked as a volunteer in Gaza hospitals, drew attention to it in January 2011: “The deliberate injury of the limbs of 23 boys by high velocity weapons has been logged and described by Defence for Children International Palestine Branch (DCI-P) since March 2010.”

Extreme poverty among Gazans had forced men and boys to scavenge for broken concrete (gravel) among the rubble of the evacuated Eli Sinai settlement and the industrial zone by the Erez border control post where factories had been demolished by Israeli shelling. This material could be used to make blocks and poured concrete with cement imported mostly through the tunnels. They did this reclamation work – with donkey and cart, picks and shovels – for precious shekels in the shadow of Israel’s manned watch towers and under the drones constantly above.

The leg was the target in most cases, said Halpin. And where it wasn’t, the sniper would likely “aim up” so the flank, elbow etc was hit instead. “No weapons were carried by the gravel workers, so they posed no threat to Israeli occupation force personnel. Instead, they were bending their backs to their menial work within their internment camp.” In many cases those hit would be disabled for life. And that, it seems, continues to be the Israeli regime’s sickening aim to this day.

“Exit wounds the size of a fist”

In 2018 Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which operates in Gaza, reported

devastating gunshot wounds among hundreds of people injured during the protests… The huge majority of patients – mainly young men, but also some women and children – have unusually severe wounds to the lower extremities. MSF medical teams note the injuries include an extreme level of destruction to bones and soft tissue, and large exit wounds that can be the size of a fist.

Half of the more than 500 patients we have admitted in our clinics have injuries where the bullet has literally destroyed tissue after having pulverised the bone. These patients will need to have very complex surgical operations and most of them will have disabilities for life.

Such high energy compound tibial fractures from Israeli live fire may require between five and seven surgical procedures, each operation taking three to six hours. The wounds appeared to be caused by ammunition with an expanding “butterfly” effect. “Mass lifelong disability is now the prospect for young Gazans who merely gathered in unarmed protest.”

Meanwhile, the snivelling international community does nothing to stop these horrendous crimes by the self-styled “most moral army in the world”.

About 60 per cent of the thousands of injured were hit in the legs by sniper fire, according to the local health ministry – admissions that overwhelmed an already crumbling medical sector. Since then, amputees using crutches have become a common sight on Gaza’s streets. In response, MSF has funded a new prosthetics clinic for Gaza residents, and a limb reconstruction centre at al-Awda hospital.

“It is sad to say we have become experts in this work. We have much better facilities and equipment now than we did in 2018 and we can do most orthopaedic and plastic procedures,” said Rami Abu-Jasser, one of the centre’s supervisors. “But we still cannot treat more than a handful of people a day.”

As I mentioned at that time, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva adopted a resolution to set up an independent, international Commission of Inquiry to investigate all violations of humanitarian and international human rights law in the occupied Palestinian territory, with a particular focus on recent events in Gaza.

The resolution passed with only two states opposing (the USA and another of Israel’s poodles, Australia), 29 in favour, and 14 abstentions. The UK was one of those abstaining, along with Croatia, Germany, Hungary and Slovakia.

“Systematic failure by Israel to carry out genuine investigations”

The preamble to the UNHRC resolution stated the reasons for action brilliantly and is worth repeating here:

Convinced that the lack of accountability for violations of international law reinforces a culture of impunity, leading to a recurrence of violations and seriously endangering international peace,

Noting the systematic failure by Israel to carry out genuine investigations in an impartial, independent, prompt and effective way, as required by international law, into the violence and offences against Palestinians by the occupying forces, and to establish judicial accountability for its actions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,

Emphasising the obligations of Israel as the occupying power to ensure the safety, well-being and protection of the Palestinian civilian population under its occupation in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,

Emphasising also that the intentional targeting of civilians and other protected persons in situations of armed conflict, including foreign occupation, constitutes a grave breach of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, and poses a threat to international peace and security,

Recognising the importance of the right to life and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association to the full enjoyment of all human rights…

The wording evidently stung Israel’s avid admirers Theresa May, barmy Boris Johnson and the gutless spivs populating the Foreign Office to such a degree that they couldn’t bring themselves to support the resolution.

“Gazans did all the dying and the Israeli soldiers did all the killing”

In a pathetic attempt to explain why they abstained, the UK mission in Geneva called the resolution “partial and unhelpfully unbalanced” for not “explicitly call[ing] for an investigation into the action of non-state actors such as Hamas.” The UK government then issued a statement saying it called on Israel to carry out a transparent inquiry into its occupation force’s conduct at the border fence and to demonstrate how this would achieve a sufficient level of independence. The investigation should include international members.

The death toll alone warranted such a comprehensive inquiry, they said. “We urge that the findings of such an investigation be made public, and if wrongdoing is found, that those responsible be held to account.”

Of course, that was never going to happen. And the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem called the internal Israeli military probe “part of the whitewashing toolkit.”

The British government was sharply criticised in Parliament for its limp-wrested performance and reminded of Israel’s self-exoneration over the killing of four boys playing on a beach during the 2014 military offensive on Gaza. Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, former Chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, asked: “Given that Gazans did all the dying and the Israeli soldiers did all the killing, how does the minister expect an internal Israeli inquiry… to be less partial and less unhelpfully unbalanced than the inquiry mandated by the UN Human Rights Council?”

Stuart Littlewood’s book Radio Free Palestine, with Foreword by Jeff Halper, can be read on the internet by visiting radiofreepalestine.org.uk. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.

The Last Prisoners at Guantanamo?

by Karen Greenberg and Tom Engelhardt Posted onOctober 06, 2023

Originally posted at TomDispatch.

In September 2007, Karen Greenberg ominously titled her third report for TomDispatch “Guantanamo Forever.” Give her credit. So many years ago, she grasped all too clearly the nightmarish nature of that bastion of injustice. Sixteen years and three presidencies later, 21 years after that offshore prison from hell was founded by President George W. Bush and crew, it’s hard (as you’ll see with today’s piece) not to simply use that title again.

As I wrote in my introduction to her piece then,

“As the presidential election season heats up, Republican candidates have opted for ‘Guantanamo-forever’ policy positions. Retiring Republican Senator Chuck Hagel recently complained that the notorious detention facility — once the proud public face of the President’s attempt to move incarceration and mistreatment offshore and beyond the reach of American courts — has bizarrely enough become ‘a Republican litmus test.’ At the same time, at Guantanamo itself, anger and factionalism are on the rise, not among prisoners but warders, while the attempt to set up what Wall Street Journal reporter Jess Bravin calls ‘a free-standing court system to try alleged foreign terrorists’ founders for the nine hundredth time. More than five years after being inaugurated, the prison complex has so far adjudicated exactly one case to the point of conviction — a simple plea bargain (essentially negotiated between President Bush and Australian Prime Minister John Howard) that transferred small-fry Taliban follower David Hicks back to Australia where he is to be freed at the end of this year.”

It’s true, as Greenberg notes, that those offshore military commission trials of leftover Gitmo prisoners are finally proceeding in their forever fashion and perhaps someday that prison will indeed be no more. But when it comes to the fallout from this country’s endless war on terror, which turned into an endless war of terror, some things never seem to end. After all, only now is Congress even considering the possibility of taking back from the president the power to make war globally, thanks to that Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, it passed three days after the 9/11 attacks (with but a single negative vote, that of the remarkable Barbara Lee), and the one it passed in 2002 before the invasion of Iraq and never rescinded. And don’t count on that happening either!

The question of whether those forever wars and the forever prison that went with them will ever be truly ended still remains up for grabs, but let TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg explain so many years (and articles) later. ~ Tom Engelhardt

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Closing Guantánamo?  Yes, a Snail’s Pace… but a Pace

by Karen Greenberg

For 18 years, I’ve been writing articles for TomDispatch on the never-ending story of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility. And here’s my ultimate takeaway (for the moment): 21 years after that grim offshore prison of injustice was set up in Cuba in response to the 9/11 attacks and the capture of figures supposedly linked to them, and despite the expressed desire of three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — to close it, the endgame remains devastatingly elusive.

At times due to a failure of will, at times due to a failure of the system itself or the sheer complexity of the logistics involved, and at times due to acts of Congress or the courts, efforts to shut that prison have been eternally stymied. Despite endless acknowledgements that what’s gone on there has defied domestic, international, and military law — not to mention longstanding norms of morality and justice — that prison persists.

Recently, however, for those of us perpetually looking for a ray or even a glimmer of hope, there have finally been a few developments that seem to signal steps, however tiny, toward closure.

There are still 30 detainees at Guantánamo. Sixteen of them have been deemed no longer threats to the United States and cleared for release, but arrangements have yet to be made to transfer them to another country. Three others are considered too dangerous for release. And eleven have been charged in the military commissions system that was set up in 2006 and revised under President Obama in 2009. One, Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman al-Bahlul, has been convicted. Another, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, recently pleaded guilty. Now, nine detainees face trials in three separate cases. All of them were tortured at CIA “black sites” for different periods of time between 2003 and 2006.

Progress in the Biden years has been occurring, even if at a snail’s pace. His administration has said that it intends to close Guantánamo by the end of his term.  And in the last two and a half years, it has indeed reduced the population from 40 to 30, the most recent transfer of a freed prisoner to another country occurring this April. In addition, the Biden administration increased the total number of remaining detainees eligible for release from six to its current 16.

Arranging such transfers has proven painstaking work, requiring complex negotiations with foreign countries, as well as assurances to American officials — and ultimately Congress — that the release will pose no future threat to the United States and that the prisoner will be treated justly in the receiving country. Those releases have been complicated because, after Obama announced at the outset of his presidency that Guantánamo would close within a year, Congress banned any Gitmo detainee from ever being transferred to the United States for any purpose whatsoever, a ban that’s been re-authorized every year since then.

While those detainees cleared for release await transfer to other countries, developments over the past few months have put the military commissions in the forefront of activities aimed at closure.

Until now, the commissions have indeed been a dismal failure. A mere nine convictions have been secured since the passage of the first Military Commissions Act in 2006, all but two through plea deals, and four of the nine have been overturned on appeal. Two remain on appeal. Generally, however, the fact that all of the individuals currently charged and facing trial were initially held at CIA black sites around the world where they were grievously tortured has proven an impassable barrier to trial. Consequently, as New York Times reporters Carol Rosenberg and Charlie Savage have reminded us, “No former C.I.A. detainee has been convicted at trial before a military commission.”

The reasons are many. Obama delayed the trials for three years and the pandemic delayed them further. But by far the biggest obstacle remains the fact that the detainees were horrifically tortured at those black sites. Defense attorneys have persistently insisted that evidence derived under torture should be inadmissible in the proceedings in accordance with the law. While the prosecutors have claimed otherwise, even so many years later, the tortured defendants continue to suffer from the devastating fashion in which they were treated, impeding their defense and causing further delay. In fact, their torture-induced severe psychological instability and often physical incapacity, not to mention instances of distrust of their lawyers, have made it difficult to hold hearings of any sort. As a result, after so many years, the cases remain in the throes of pre-trial hearings and jury selection is still far off.

President Biden has indeed set himself a lower bar than Obama, who issued an early executive order calling for the closure of the prison within a year only to encounter immediate blowback and failure. Still, Biden has made some modest headway in closing Gitmo. Since he took office, most of those who remained in “forever prisoner” limbo have at least been cleared for release. In addition, he’s appointed Tina Kaidanow, former State Department ambassador at large for counterterrorism, to oversee their transfers and has secured the release of 10 prisoners since he took office.

But the recent signs, however incremental, of further movement pertain not to the three remaining “forever prisoners” or to the 16 who have been cleared for release but to those being dealt with by the military commissions established by Congress.

The Military Commissions Cases

The military commissions still face the almost insurmountable hurdle that has haunted them from the start: the legacy of CIA torture. Nevertheless, there has been some recent modest progress, despite the irrevocable damage it caused both individual detainees and our system of justice.

The first signs of movement came in the initial days of the Biden presidency when the Pentagon referred charges against three men to the military commissions. The two Indonesians and one Malaysian captured in Thailand in 2003 had been accused in connection with bombings that targeted two nightclubs in Bali in 2002 and a Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 people, including Americans. A trial date has now been proposed for 2025. (This would, of course, be after Joe Biden’s first term in office.)

Then, there have been signs of progress on potential plea deals. In the summer of 2021, pretrial hearings in the case of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, an Iraqi captured in 2006 and accused of being a senior member of al-Qaeda, began. The al-Iraqi case reached a resolution in June 2022, when he pleaded guilty to war-crime charges for acts committed in Afghanistan. The terms of his plea deal are still unknown. His sentencing is set for 2024.

In addition, starting in the spring of 2022, prosecutors reached out to defendants in the 9/11 case, who have been facing the death penalty, to begin potential plea-deal discussions in which a maximum life sentence would replace the threat of death. But the path towards resolution remains fraught. In September, perhaps in response to pressure from some of the 9/11 families intent on keeping the death penalty in place, President Biden reportedly refused to approve certain details of those proposed deals. As with so much else at Guantánamo, for every step forward, there seem to be two steps back. Still, negotiations are presumably continuing.

In another instance of inching forward, the commissions have recently addressed the case of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the 9/11 defendants. He has displayed severe signs of mental instability, including delusions and hallucinations, owing to his brutal treatment in CIA custody. He’s convinced, for instance, that CIA agents are still pumping unnerving noises and vibrations into his cell, causing sleep deprivation. His inability to talk about much else has stymied the attempts of his lawyers to prepare him for future hearings. Last June 6th, in fact, a panel of psychiatrists and forensic experts declared him unfit to stand trial, given his post-traumatic stress syndrome and his psychotic delusions. Based on their report, Commissions Judge Matthew McCall agreed and, on September 21, 2023, severed him from the trial.

Excluding Tortured Evidence

While there are, in other words, signs of progress via plea deals and severance, the most promising development may be in the longest running military commission case of all, that of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. He’s accused of masterminding the bombing of the USS Cole, a destroyer off the coast of Yemen, in 2000 killing 17 American servicemen.

Al-Nashiri, a Saudi, was held in CIA black sites from 2002 to 2006, while being tortured using techniques like waterboarding, stress positions, forced sodomy, and mock executions. He was finally indicted in 2011, but his case has faced innumerable pretrial hurdles since then, largely involving debates over evidence derived from torture and the possible inadmissibility of it at trial.

Lawyers considered that his case had taken a step forward when the government reversed its position on torture-derived evidence. A Biden Department of Justice brief filed on January 31, 2022, said, “The government recognizes that torture is abhorrent and unlawful, and unequivocally adheres to humane treatment standards for all detainees… [T]he government will not seek admission, at any stage of the proceedings, of any of petitioner’s statements while he was in CIA custody.” That reversed a prior policy allowing such statements to be used in pretrial hearings, if not at trial itself.

Then, in August, the judge in the case made torture the grounds for taking yet another step forward. Like other detainees, al-Nashiri had been interviewed in later years by FBI “clean teams” of agents who attempted to solicit the same confessions without torture and were often successful. The prosecution wanted to use those confessions, but defense attorneys argued that the impact of torture didn’t dissipate with the clean teams, that the detainees feared their torturers were waiting in the wings to punish them if they gave different answers. They insisted that the defendant’s torture trauma and the perpetual fear of more of it remained an ongoing obstacle to statements of truth.

Al-Nashiri’s lawyers filed papers seeking to exclude his clean-team testimony.  Judge Lanny Acosta then took a long-overdue step forward, ruling against the admission of such later confessions. He noted that the clean-team agents “acted professionally and in no way coerced the accused,” even offering “tea and pastries” and reassuring the defendant that he was no longer in CIA custody. Nonetheless, Acosta ruled the statements inadmissible in pre-trial proceedings as well as at trial, since prolonged torture had undoubtedly affected al-Nashiri’s later testimony.

In his 50-page opinion, the judge offered a detailed chronology of the kinds of torture Nashiri had suffered and noted as well the continued use of force against him during his time at Guantánamo, treatment and conditions that could indeed evoke memories of his period in CIA custody. As the judge wrote,

“[H]e was in no position to know whether Drs. Mitchell and/or Jessen [the architects of the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program] were watching…. prepared to intervene with more abusive treatment… He had no reason to doubt that he might, without notice, suddenly be shipped back to a dungeon like the ones he had experienced before… [or if someone] lurked nearby with a pistol, a drill, or a broomstick, ready to intervene in the event he chose to remain silent or to offer versions of events that differed from what he told his prior investigators.”

As the Judge concluded, “Even if the 2007 statements were not obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, they were derived from it.” Michel Paradis, a senior attorney in the Department of Defense’s Office of the Chief Defense Counsel and counsel for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, has summed up the situation aptly, telling me, “What the refusal to admit the so-called ‘clean team’ statement shows is what anyone who looks at it up close sees. There is nothing clean about torture and there is no way to sanitize it.”

The judge’s decision also marks a potential threshold for the remaining Gitmo cases. If evidence from torture is disallowed, including in pre-trial proceedings, that may lead to future plea deals and even some leniency. Either way, in the wake of Judge Acosta’s decision, the interminably slow Guantánamo cases might just begin to proceed more rapidly.

Add to all this the effect of the passage of time, given among other things the aging not just of Gitmo’s prisoners, but of those working to bring their cases to trial over all these years, many of whom have retired. Judge Acosta gave notice of his retirement from the Army as September ended, while Matthew McCall, the fourth judge to preside over the 9/11 case, has similarly indicated that he’ll be leaving next April, also before it comes to trial. Several of the attorneys for the detainees have retired as well, after so many years representing their clients.

The belated but increasingly accepted notion that torture renders trials impossible, now seemingly shared by the court as well as the defense teams, has become more than mere rhetoric. As Paradis commented to me, “No justice system worth the name permits even the whiff of evidence tainted by torture. We have revolted at the idea for more than a century in this country and even persuaded the world that it should do the same, such as when Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture.”

Ironically, the acknowledgement of this reality may finally bring these cases to their conclusion. But so many years later, despite being determined to grasp every ray of hope, I suspect that, when it comes to the closing of Guantánamo, the sorrowful record of the past may overshadow the dreams of a better tomorrow.

Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law. Her most recent book is Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, now out in paperback. Claudia Bennett and Ava Gagliardi contributed research for this article.

Copyright 2023 Karen J. Greenberg

 

Twenty Years Later, an Update From Iraq: ‘There Is No Future Here for My Children.’

Corruption, pollution, poverty, water shortages, and a climate of fear. Is this what democracy looks like?

by Jon Reynolds Posted onOctober 06, 2023

Twenty years after George W. Bush and his neocon cabinet moved forward with plans to invade Iraq, and more than a decade after Barack Obama promised to end the war, the US still maintains hundreds of troops in the country with no plans to leave.

Unsurprisingly, Iraqis aren’t exactly eager for the US to stay.

In 2019, a poll found seven out of ten Iraqis wanting Americans to withdraw from the country, with VOA News reporting 78 percent of Iraqis feeling the US military presence in their country “is provoking more conflict” than it is preventing.

The following year, Iraq’s parliament passed a resolution calling for the US to withdraw, prompting war-hungry American news networks such as CNN to condescendingly cover the move with headlines such as, “Iraq has voted to expel US troops. Whether they’ll actually be kicked out is far from clear”.

Despite the rhetoric we heard during the initial invasion in March of 2003 about bringing “democracy” to Iraq, twenty years later, the will of the Iraqi people and their government is being actively ignored in favor of US interests.

“There is no future here for my children,” Raghed Jasim, an Iraqi citizen, told the Associated Press back in March. “Of course I blame the corrupt Iraqi government. But I blame the Americans too. They replaced our leaders with thieves.”

Jasim is one of many Iraqis recently diagnosed with cancer, something he attributes to living near an oil production plant. For other Iraqis — such as those in the city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by an onslaught of depleted uranium during the US invasion — spikes in cancer and birth defects have exceeded those reported following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“After 2003, more and more oil was exported, and we expected to benefit from this,” Bashir Jabir, an Iraqi from a small village told AP. “Instead, it hurt us.”

In late September, Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shiaa al-Sudani met with representatives from dozens of US energy companies in New York to pitch potential investments. “My government is serious about investment in gas and to be an active and powerful player in the gas market,” he told Bloomberg.

Unfortunately, any wealth generated from these investments is unlikely to be enjoyed by Iraqi civilians, who continue to deal with cancerous pollution, crippling poverty, and widespread water and electricity shortages.

Meanwhile, voter turnout has reached historic lows and many Iraqis are afraid to speak out against their government.

In 2018, Iraqi protests were met with “swift crackdowns” by security forces, and “assassinations by armed groups” have created a climate of fear, reports AP. “The killings silenced many activists,” said Basra activist Ammar Sarhan, yet “business continues as usual.”

And so alas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions in taxpayer dollars, America’s warped brand of “democracy” has been fully exported to Iraq. To the surprise of few, it isn’t looking very democratic at all.

Jon Reynolds is a freelance journalist covering a wide range of topics with a primary focus on the labor movement and collapsing US empire. He writes at The Screeching Kettle at Substack. Reprinted with permission.

 

Artificial Intelligence Goes to War

by William D. Hartung and Tom Engelhardt Posted onOctober 04, 2023

Uh… gulp… you thought it was bad when that experienced pilot ejected from one of the Air Force’s hottest “new” planes, the F-35 combat fighter, near — no, not China or somewhere in the Middle East — but Charleston, South Carolina. The plane then flew on its own for another 60 miles before crashing into an empty field. And that was without an enemy in sight.

Perhaps we should just be happy that an F-35 ever even made it into the air, given its endless problems in these years. After all, as Dan Grazier of the Center for Defense Information wrote, it’s now “the largest and most expensive weapons program in history.” Yet when it comes to something as significant as “mission availability,” according to the Congressional Budget Office, only about 26% of all F-35s, each of which now costs an estimated $80 million to produce and $44,000 an hour to fly, are available at any moment. Not exactly thrilling, all in all.

As TomDispatch regular and Pentagon expert William Hartung makes clear today, if that’s what happens with the Air Force’s least intelligent fighter plane, what should we expect of its just arriving artificial-intelligence-driven fleet of drones or “robot wingmen” that could be deployed, as he suggests, in a future war with China? Given the history of the U.S. military’s three-decade-old drone warfare program, which caused such havoc among civilian populations during this country’s Global War on Terror, what could the future hold in store? After all, non-AI drones were “roughly thirty times more likely to result in a civilian fatality than an airstrike by a manned aircraft.” And remember, that fleet of aircraft was still, at least officially, run by human intelligence, not the artificial variety. Who knows what may occur when such drones, freed from the human brain, are let loose on this planet? While you’re considering that possibility, let Hartung take you on a quick flight to the Pentagon and then to China.  ~ Tom Engelhardt

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Will the Pentagon’s Techno-Fantasies Pave the Way for War with China?

by William D. Hartung

On August 28th, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks chose the occasion of a three-day conference organized by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), the arms industry’s biggest trade group, to announce the “Replicator Initiative.” Among other things, it would involve producing “swarms of drones” that could hit thousands of targets in China on short notice. Call it the full-scale launching of techno-war.

Her speech to the assembled arms makers was yet another sign that the military-industrial complex (MIC) President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about more than 60 years ago is still alive, all too well, and taking a new turn. Call it the MIC for the digital age.

Hicks described the goal of the Replicator Initiative this way:

“To stay ahead [of China], we’re going to create a new state of the art… leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains which are less expensive, put fewer people at risk, and can be changed, upgraded, or improved with substantially shorter lead times… We’ll counter the PLA’s [People’s Liberation Army’s] with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat.”

Think of it as artificial intelligence (AI) goes to war — and oh, that word “attritable,” a term that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue or mean much of anything to the average taxpayer, is pure Pentagonese for the ready and rapid replaceability of systems lost in combat. Let’s explore later whether the Pentagon and the arms industry are even capable of producing the kinds of cheap, effective, easily replicable techno-war systems Hicks touted in her speech. First, though, let me focus on the goal of such an effort: confronting China.

Target: China

However one gauges China’s appetite for military conflict — as opposed to relying more heavily on its increasingly powerful political and economic tools of influence — the Pentagon is clearly proposing a military-industrial fix for the challenge posed by Beijing. As Hicks’s speech to those arms makers suggests, that new strategy is going to be grounded in a crucial premise: that any future technological arms race will rely heavily on the dream of building ever cheaper, ever more capable weapons systems based on the rapid development of near-instant communications, artificial intelligence, and the ability to deploy such systems on short notice.

The vision Hicks put forward to the NDIA is, you might already have noticed, untethered from the slightest urge to respond diplomatically or politically to the challenge of Beijing as a rising great power. It matters little that those would undoubtedly be the most effective ways to head off a future conflict with China.

Such a non-military approach would be grounded in a clearly articulated return to this country’s longstanding “One China” policy. Under it, the U.S. would forgo any hint of the formal political recognition of the island of Taiwan as a separate state, while Beijing would commit itself to limiting to peaceful means its efforts to absorb that island.

There are numerous other issues where collaboration between the two nations could move the U.S. and China from a policy of confrontation to one of cooperation, as noted in a new paper by my colleague Jake Werner of the Quincy Institute: “1) development in the Global South; 2) addressing climate change; 3) renegotiating global trade and economic rules; and 4) reforming international institutions to create a more open and inclusive world order.” Achieving such goals on this planet now might seem like a tall order, but the alternative — bellicose rhetoric and aggressive forms of competition that increase the risk of war — should be considered both dangerous and unacceptable.

On the other side of the equation, proponents of increasing Pentagon spending to address the purported dangers of the rise of China are masters of threat inflation. They find it easy and satisfying to exaggerate both Beijing’s military capabilities and its global intentions in order to justify keeping the military-industrial complex amply funded into the distant future.

As Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight noted in a December 2022 report, while China has made significant strides militarily in the past few decades, its strategy is “inherently defensive” and poses no direct threat to the United States. At present, in fact, Beijing lags behind Washington strikingly when it comes to both military spending and key capabilities, including having a far smaller (though still undoubtedly devastating) nuclear arsenal, a less capable Navy, and fewer major combat aircraft. None of this would, however, be faintly obvious if you only listened to the doomsayers on Capitol Hill and in the halls of the Pentagon.

But as Grazier points out, this should surprise no one since “threat inflation has been the go-to tool for defense spending hawks for decades.” That was, for instance, notably the case at the end of the Cold War of the last century, after the Soviet Union had disintegrated, when then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell so classically said: “Think hard about it. I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to [Cuba’s Fidel] Castro and Kim Il-sung [the late North Korean dictator].”

Needless to say, that posed a grave threat to the Pentagon’s financial fortunes and Congress did indeed insist then on significant reductions in the size of the armed forces, offering less funds to spend on new weaponry in the first few post-Cold War years. But the Pentagon was quick to highlight a new set of supposed threats to American power to justify putting military spending back on the upswing. With no great power in sight, it began focusing instead on the supposed dangers of regional powers like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It also greatly overstated their military strength in its drive to be funded to win not one but two major regional conflicts at the same time. This process of switching to new alleged threats to justify a larger military establishment was captured strikingly in Michael Klare’s 1995 book Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws.

After the 9/11 attacks, that “rogue states” rationale was, for a time, superseded by the disastrous “Global War on Terror,” a distinctly misguided response to those terrorist acts. It would spawn trillions of dollars of spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a global counter-terror presence that included U.S. operations in 85 — yes, 85! — countries, as strikingly documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

All of that blood and treasure, including hundreds of thousands of direct civilian deaths (and many more indirect ones), as well as thousands of American deaths and painful numbers of devastating physical and psychological injuries to U.S. military personnel, resulted in the installation of unstable or repressive regimes whose conduct — in the case of Iraq — helped set the stage for the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) terror organization. As it turned out, those interventions proved to be anything but either the “cakewalk” or the flowering of democracy predicted by the advocates of America’s post-9/11 wars. Give them full credit, though! They proved to be a remarkably efficient money machine for the denizens of the military-industrial complex.

Constructing “the China Threat”

As for China, its status as the threat du jour gained momentum during the Trump years. In fact, for the first time since the twentieth century, the Pentagon’s 2018 defense strategy document targeted “great power competition” as the wave of the future.

One particularly influential document from that period was the report of the congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy Commission. That body critiqued the Pentagon’s strategy of the moment, boldly claiming (without significant backup information) that the Defense Department was not planning to spend enough to address the military challenge posed by great power rivals, with a primary focus on China.

The commission proposed increasing the Pentagon’s budget by 3% to 5% above inflation for years to come — a move that would have pushed it to an unprecedented $1 trillion or more within a few years. Its report would then be extensively cited by Pentagon spending boosters in Congress, most notably former Senate Armed Services Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-OK), who used to literally wave it at witnesses in hearings and ask them to pledge allegiance to its dubious findings.

That 3% to 5% real growth figure caught on with prominent hawks in Congress and, until the recent chaos in the House of Representatives, spending did indeed fit just that pattern. What has not been much discussed is research by the Project on Government Oversight showing that the commission that penned the report and fueled those spending increases was heavily weighted toward individuals with ties to the arms industry. Its co-chair, for instance, served on the board of the giant weapons maker Northrop Grumman, and most of the other members had been or were advisers or consultants to the industry, or worked in think tanks heavily funded by just such corporations. So, we were never talking about a faintly objective assessment of U.S. “defense” needs.

Beware of Pentagon “Techno-Enthusiasm”

Just so no one would miss the point in her NDIA speech, Kathleen Hicks reiterated that the proposed transformation of weapons development with future techno-war in mind was squarely aimed at Beijing. “We must,” she said, “ensure the PRC leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, ‘today is not the day’ — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond… Innovation is how we do that.”

The notion that advanced military technology could be the magic solution to complex security challenges runs directly against the actual record of the Pentagon and the arms industry over the past five decades. In those years, supposedly “revolutionary” new systems like the F-35 combat aircraft, the Army’s Future Combat System (FCS), and the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship have been notoriously plagued by cost overruns, schedule delays, performance problems, and maintenance challenges that have, at best, severely limited their combat capabilities. In fact, the Navy is already planning to retire a number of those Littoral Combat Ships early, while the whole FCS program was canceled outright.

In short, the Pentagon is now betting on a complete transformation of how it and the industry do business in the age of AI — a long shot, to put it mildly.

But you can count on one thing: the new approach is likely to be a gold mine for weapons contractors, even if the resulting weaponry doesn’t faintly perform as advertised. This quest will not be without political challenges, most notably finding the many billions of dollars needed to pursue the goals of the Replicator Initiative, while staving off lobbying by producers of existing big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, bombers, and fighter jets.

Members of Congress will defend such current-generation systems fiercely to keep weapons spending flowing to major corporate contractors and so into key congressional districts. One solution to the potential conflict between funding the new systems touted by Hicks and the costly existing programs that now feed the titans of the arms industry: jack up the Pentagon’s already massive budget and head for that trillion-dollar peak, which would be the highest level of such spending since World War II.

The Pentagon has long built its strategy around supposed technological marvels like the “electronic battlefield” in the Vietnam era; the “revolution in military affairs,” first touted in the early 1990s; and the precision-guided munitions praised since at least the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It matters little that such wonder weapons have never performed as advertised. For example, a detailed Government Accountability Office report on the bombing campaign in the Gulf War found that “the claim by DOD [Department of Defense] and contractors of a one-target, one-bomb capability for laser-guided munitions was not demonstrated in the air campaign where, on average, 11 tons of guided and 44 tons of unguided munitions were delivered on each successfully destroyed target.”

When such advanced weapons systems can be made to work, at enormous cost in time and money, they almost invariably prove of limited value, even against relatively poorly armed adversaries (as in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century). China, a great power rival with a modern industrial base and a growing arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, is another matter. The quest for decisive military superiority over Beijing and the ability to win a war against a nuclear-armed power should be (but isn’t) considered a fool’s errand, more likely to spur a war than deter it, with potentially disastrous consequences for all concerned.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, a drive for the full-scale production of AI-based weaponry will only increase the likelihood that future wars could be fought all too disastrously without human intervention. As Michael Klare pointed out in a report for the Arms Control Association, relying on such systems will also magnify the chances of technical failures, as well as misguided AI-driven targeting decisions that could spur unintended slaughter and decision-making without human intervention. The potentially disastrous malfunctioning of such autonomous systems might, in turn, only increase the possibility of nuclear conflict.

It would still be possible to rein in the Pentagon’s techno-enthusiasm by slowing the development of the kinds of systems highlighted in Hicks’s speech, while creating international rules of the road regarding their future development and deployment. But the time to start pushing back against yet another misguided “techno-revolution” is now, before automated warfare increases the risk of a global catastrophe. Emphasizing new weaponry over creative diplomacy and smart political decisions is a recipe for disaster in the decades to come. There has to be a better way.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of “More Money, Less Security: Pentagon Spending and Strategy in the Biden Administration.”

Copyright 2023 William D. Hartung