Dead on Arrival: Israel’s Blowback Genocide

by Ellen Cantarow and Tom Engelhardt Posted onApril 17, 2024

Originally appeared at TomDispatch

When you watch the latest TV news on Israel’s war in Gaza, it feels as if its military had invaded another country. So, it’s important to remind ourselves that the tens of thousands of weapons the Biden administration has been sending to Israel since October 7th, including most recently, as the Washington Post reported, “more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs” — and keep in mind that those 2,000 pounders are “capable of leveling city blocks and leaving craters in the earth 40 feet across and larger” — are meant to be used to obliterate a 25-mile-long strip of land, smaller than some large American cities. It’s hard to remember a moment when such a relatively tiny area got quite such a pounding, day after day, week after week, month after month.

And keep in mind as well, that not many small areas of land are quite so densely populated (about 14,000 people per square mile), so the toll from those American weapons has been nothing short of devastating. In addition, a 2,000-pound bomb capable of destroying a city block won’t make any distinction between a member of Hamas and families with children. Nor, it’s now all too clear, has the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing compatriots had the faintest urge to make such a distinction. Otherwise, an estimated 10,000 Gazan children, or one of every 100 kids there, wouldn’t be dead and, in all too many cases, buried in the rubble of the buildings in which they lived.

In short, there can be little question that the present war not just in, but on, Gaza, is a crime against humanity (as, of course, was Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel). With that in mind — and worse yet, no end yet in sight for such a nightmare — let TomDispatch regular Ellen Cantarow, who long ago wrote about Israel for various American publications, offer a glimpse of hell on earth in the world of 2024. ~ Tom Engelhardt

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Dead on Arrival: Israel’s Blowback Genocide

by Ellen Cantarow

Words can’t express the horrors of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To actually feel the nightmare, you would have to be there under the bombs, fleeing with Palestinians desperately seeking a safe place that doesn’t exist; seeing building after building destroyed; treading through blood in one of the few, only partially standing hospitals; and witnessing children and other patients sprawled on hospital floors, limbs amputated without anesthesia (Israel having blocked all medical supplies).

It has taken the Jewish state’s savagery to break decades of silence about its history of crimes against humanity. U.S. military historian Robert Pape has called the onslaught against Gaza “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.” Former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour has said that we are witnessing “probably the highest kill rate of any military… since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

An Unsent Letter

Palestine is finally an international cause. Outrage surges via global demonstrations. Israel has become a pariah in the global South. In the United States, organizations including A Jewish Voice for Peace, Code Pink, and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights have been marching against the horrors now underway.

Within this charged atmosphere, the 66th reunion of my 1958 Philadelphia High School for Girls graduating class will take place in June 2024. Girls’ High was that city’s leading academic public high school of my time, together with its brother school, Central High (attended by Noam Chomsky). It was stellar not only for its academic excellence but for its integration of Black and White students at a time of deep segregation elsewhere. My mother, who graduated from Girls’ High in 1924, sent me there because of its policy of racial inclusiveness.

I recently began preparing an open letter to my classmates about the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing settler pogroms of ethnic cleansing on the West Bank — houses burned, olive trees uprooted, Palestinians made to flee. Ours is the prototypical Zionist generation and I particularly wanted to address my former classmates, some of whom still cling stubbornly to their allegiance to Israel. I was told, however, that there wouldn’t be time to read the letter at our reunion which lasts just a few afternoon hours. What follows, then, is based on the letter I was preparing to read then, had the time been available.

Zionism and The Six Day War

In the early 1950s, my best childhood friend collected money to plant trees in Israel. At one point, her synagogue, which sponsored that project, needed “straight pins.” Somehow, I heard “shraypins” instead, a mysterious Hebrew word my imagination concocted and that her friends would find funny indeed. Zionism, in other words, was simply foreign to me.

The first time I recall a thrill from it came right after Israel’s triumph in the 1967 Six Day War. I was then actively involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement on my graduate school campus and, on a trip to Paris that year, didn’t want to identify as American. I spoke French quite well and not being able to tell from my slight accent that I was an American, someone asked me where I was from.  Searching for a nationality I wouldn’t be ashamed of, I blurted out that I was an “Israelite.”

“Oh, your people!” he exclaimed. “Such a small people, but such a brave people!” For the first time, I felt deeply proud of being Jewish, not the sort of Jew who had (to my mind) cowered in a ghettoized Europe, but a strong, triumphant Jew with a powerful army. Soon after, my husband told me about Israel’s history — its 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs and its exploitation of the territories it illegally occupied after the 1967 war. Not long after that, I read Noam Chomsky’s first book about Israeli settler-colonialism, Peace in the Middle East?, and never looked back.

Settler Violence in the 1970s

My husband, Louis Kampf, taught in the humanities department of M.I.T. Chomsky was a colleague and became a good friend. It was under his influence that, in 1979, I first went to Israel and visited the occupied West Bank. I had an assignment to write about Israeli women — I was then a feminist columnist for Cambridge’s The Real Paper — and also agreed to do pieces for New York’s The Village Voice and Liberation Magazine. For the Voice I wrote about Gush Emunim — the Bloc of the Faithful, the ancestor of the Jewish settlers’ movement. For Liberation, I wrote about a Palestinian village, Halhul, two of whose teenagers were murdered by Israeli settlers from nearby Kiryat Arba.

I stayed in Kiryat Arba, thanks to a distant cousin of my husband’s who got me there in an undercover fashion. One of my interviewees assured me that she believed in “a great chain of being,” Jews on top, all other humans below, with Arabs at the very bottom, just before animals, vegetables, and minerals. Her husband referred to the Talmudic injunction to “rise and kill first.” Another settler assured me that the Arabs could stay on the West Bank only if they would “bow their heads.”

Muhammad Milhem, Halhul’s mayor, led me to the highest hill in his village and, pointing toward Kiryat Arba, said, “This is a cancer in our midst.” I wonder if he realized how tragically prophetic his words would prove to be.

Genocide in the 2020s

Since October 8th, I’ve been riveted by the genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by the Israeli military, which had prepared for it in a retrospectively unsettling fashion by decades of dehumanizing Palestinians. Hamas clearly committed war crimes on October 7th, but international rules still govern war. A nation’s reprisal for acts against its population must still be proportional to the original crime, which Israel’s war on Gaza isn’t — not faintly! Instead, it’s been distinctly genocidal. On March 28th, Reuters reported that, according to Gaza’s health ministry, at least 32,552 Palestinians had been killed and 74,980 injured in Israel’s post-October 7th military offensive in the Gaza Strip, while more than 7,000 Gazans are missing, many likely buried under the rubble.

Israel has cut off most food and water to the region. A March 18th Oxfam press release announced that Gaza hunger figures are the “worst on record.” The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that famine, a rare and catastrophic circumstance, is imminent. Usually caused by extreme natural events, the famine in Gaza is wholly human-made. Famine leaves the body prone to all sorts of horrendous diseases. According to the WHO, “[I]llness may ultimately kill more people than Israel’s offensive. Infectious diseases are ‘soaring,’ particularly among children with 100,000 reported cases of diarrhea, 25 times higher than before Israel’s assaults.”

Were I able to show my classmates scenes from the hell that is now the Gaza Strip, where would I begin? Would it be the infant whose face was partially blown off by an Israeli strike? Would it be the 12 year old with burns over 70% of his body? Would it be the countless unarmed civilians, including children, shot in the head and upper body with murderous intent? Would it be a baby with both legs amputated, who will never learn to walk?

Dr. Yasser Khan, an ophthalmologist specializing in eyelid and facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, spent 10 days in Gaza and, in an interview with a reporter from the Intercept, described what he had seen in the European Gaza Hospital, now barely functioning, where 35,000 people were reportedly sheltering. People were cooking in the hallways of a building in which no sterile environment was possible because there was nothing with which to sterilize. The medical workers were still often performing 14 or 15 amputations on children daily. Khan saw patients like an eight-year-old girl, rescued from the rubble with a fractured leg, all of whose family — mother, father, aunts, uncles — was wiped out. And there are thousands more like her, suffering from trauma that coming generations will undoubtedly inherit. They have given rise to a new acronym: WCNSF, or Wounded Child No Surviving Family. Khan removed the eyes of patients whose faces had been damaged by shrapnel, leaving an appearance he dubbed “shrapnel face.”

Aid Workers Targeted

I would have wanted to remind my classmates that Israel has frequently targeted aid workers, killing seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) employees in early April. The Israelis claimed that it was an accident and fired the officers it held responsible. But chef Jose Andres, WCK founder, insisted the attack was purposeful, that Israel had targeted the aid convoy “car by car.”

“This was not just a bad luck situation where ‘oops’ we dropped the bomb in the wrong place,” Andres said. “This was over 1.5, 1.8 kilometers, with a very defined humanitarian convoy that had signs in the top, in the roof, a very colorful logo that we are obviously very proud of. It’s very clear who we are and what we do.”

“WCK is not just any relief organization,” wrote Jack Mirkinson in The Nation magazine. “Andrés is a global celebrity with ties to the international political establishment. WCK had been working closely with the Israeli government both in Gaza and in Israel proper. It would be difficult to think of a more mainstream, well-connected group.” It was as if Israel were showing off, Mirkinson added, “flaunting its ability to cross every known line of international humanitarian law and get away with it.”

International Court of Justice Ruling

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on January 26th that Israel’s slaughter in Gaza is a plausible case of genocide and additional testimony from Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine, “Anatomy of a Genocide,” only emphasized that point, given how little is left but rubble in so much of Gaza. The majority of its homes no longer exist, nor do its schools, universities, libraries, or music conservatories.

Violating the 49th Geneva Convention, Israel has fired on ambulances and killed more than 685 health workers, while wounding about 900 of them. It has destroyed all but a few of Gaza’s 36 formerly flourishing hospitals, claiming that Hamas fighters are hiding in tunnels under the buildings. Against the civilian population Israel has used weapons like white phosphorous, which burns to the bone and cannot be easily extinguished. In the past, the Israeli military has been known for using Gaza as a laboratory for weapons experiments and the same is true of the current round of fighting.

Israel’s “war” against Gaza did not, of course, start on October 7th. In 2006, after Gazans elected Hamas to govern them, Israel imposed a siege on the Strip. As lawyer Dov Weisglass, then an aide to the prime minister, said at the time, he wanted to keep Gazans just below starvation level — not enough to kill them, but not enough to fill them either. The present siege has turned Gaza into what’s been called the largest open-air prison on earth, a virtual concentration camp. A U.N. commentator described this as “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.” Such conditions helped produce the October attack.

Occupying the West Bank since 1967, Israel has distinctly contravened international law. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention stipulates that “the Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” It also prohibits “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory.” Israel, however, has settled about 700,000 Israeli Jews in the West Bank. Once upon a time, there was indeed room for a separate Palestinian state. No more.

Arabs to the Gas Chambers

When I visited the West Bank city of Hebron in the 1980s, I saw graffiti on walls that proclaimed: “ARABS TO THE GAS CHAMBERS.” Back then, the renowned Israeli public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that Israel was turning its soldiers into Judeonazis. Recent YouTube videos of soldiers mocking their victims bear out his prophecy. Fascism is now pervasive in Israel. There are courageous exceptions like journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy who write for the newspaper Haaretz and the group Combatants for Peace. But all too many Israelis have supported their country’s assault on Gaza, or even wanted something worse. I wish I could have told my classmates that, should they care about Israel, it’s their responsibility to speak out now.

The genocide in Gaza has been enabled, of course, by President Biden, who continues to send billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry, including devastating 2,000-pound bombs, to Israel. Without those arms, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t be acting as it is. While it purports to be searching for and killing Hamas perpetrators of the October 7th atrocities, it’s actually gone to war against the entire population of Gaza. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe sees it as “a massive operation of killing, of ethnic cleansing of depopulation.”

When Jews were being slaughtered by the Nazis, the world turned away. Now, the world has awakened to Israel’s crimes. Many American Jews, like those in A Jewish Voice for Peace (whose demonstrations I’ve attended) are indeed speaking out.

It’s often asked how a people who suffered so much could cause such suffering. In fact, almost all the survivors of the Holocaust are dead. Obviously, none of the perpetrators of the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank were in European concentration camps. In a 1979 interview, renowned Israeli dissident, Hebrew University chemistry professor Israel Shahak pointed out that no Holocaust survivor had ever been a member of the Israeli government. Israel frequently uses the Holocaust to justify its actions in the Palestinian territories. This is a sacrilege, while one of history’s great crimes is being committed, and this member of the class of 1958 knows it.

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.

Ellen Cantarow has written about Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people since 1979 for publications that include TomDispatch, The Village Voice, Mother Jones, and Grand Street.

Copyright 2024 Ellen Cantarow

 

A Brief History of Kill Lists, from Langley to Lavender

by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies Posted onApril 17, 2024

The Israeli online magazine +972 has published a detailed report on Israel’s use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. When Israel attacked Gaza after October 7, the Lavender system had a database of 37,000 Palestinian men with suspected links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Lavender assigns a numerical score, from one to a hundred, to every man in Gaza, based mainly on cellphone and social media data, and automatically adds those with high scores to its kill list of suspected militants. Israel uses another automated system, known as “Where’s Daddy?”, to call in airstrikes to kill these men and their families in their homes.

The report is based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have worked with these systems. As one of the officers explained to +972, by adding a name from a Lavender-generated list to the Where’s Daddy home tracking system, he can place the man’s home under constant drone surveillance, and an airstrike will be launched once he comes home.

The officers said the “collateral” killing of the men’s extended families was of little consequence to Israel. “Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” the officer said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”

The officers explained that the decision to target thousands of these men in their homes is just a question of expediency. It is simply easier to wait for them to come home to the address on file in the system, and then bomb that house or apartment building, than to search for them in the chaos of the war-torn Gaza Strip.

The officers who spoke to 972+ explained that in previous Israeli massacres in Gaza, they could not generate targets quickly enough to satisfy their political and military bosses, and so these AI systems were designed to solve that problem for them. The speed with which Lavender can generate new targets only gives its human minders an average of 20 seconds to review and rubber-stamp each name, even though they know from tests of the Lavender system that at least 10% of the men chosen for assassination and familicide have only an insignificant or a mistaken connection with Hamas or PIJ.

The Lavender AI system is a new weapon, developed by Israel. But the kind of kill lists that it generates have a long pedigree in U.S. wars, occupations and CIA regime change operations. Since the birth of the CIA after the Second World War, the technology used to create kill lists has evolved from the CIA’s earliest coups in Iran and Guatemala, to Indonesia and the Phoenix program in Vietnam in the 1960s, to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and to the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just as U.S. weapons development aims to be at the cutting edge, or the killing edge, of new technology, the CIA and U.S. military intelligence have always tried to use the latest data processing technology to identify and kill their enemies.

The CIA learned some of these methods from German intelligence officers captured at the end of the Second World War. Many of the names on Nazi kill lists were generated by an intelligence unit called Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Germany’s spy chief on the eastern front(see David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 268).

Gehlen and the FHO had no computers, but they did have access to four million Soviet POWs from all over the USSR, and no compunction about torturing them to learn the names of Jews and communist officials in their hometowns to compile kill lists for the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen.

After the war, like the 1,600 German scientists spirited out of Germany in Operation Paperclip, the United States flew Gehlen and his senior staff to Fort Hunt in Virginia. They were welcomed by Allen Dulles, soon to be the first and still the longest-serving director of the CIA. Dulles sent them back to Pullach in occupied Germany to resume their anti-Soviet operations as CIA agents. The Gehlen Organization formed the nucleus of what became the BND, the new West German intelligence service, with Reinhard Gehlen as its director until he retired in 1968.

After a CIA coup removed Iran’s popular, democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, a CIA team led by U.S. Major General Norman Schwarzkopf trained a new intelligence service, known as SAVAK, in the use of kill lists and torture. SAVAK used these skills to purge Iran’s government and military of suspected communists and later to hunt down anyone who dared to oppose the Shah.

By 1975, Amnesty International estimated that Iran was holding between 25,000 and 100,000 political prisoners, and had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture that is beyond belief.”

In Guatemala, a CIA coup in 1954 replaced the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman with a brutal dictatorship. As resistance grew in the 1960s, U.S. special forces joined the Guatemalan army in a scorched earth campaign in Zacapa, which killed 15,000 people to defeat a few hundred armed rebels. Meanwhile, CIA-trained urban death squads abducted, tortured and killed PGT (Guatemalan Labor Party) members in Guatemala City, notably 28 prominent labor leaders who were abducted and disappeared in March 1966.

Once this first wave of resistance was suppressed, the CIA set up a new telecommunications center and intelligence agency, based in the presidential palace. It compiled a database of “subversives” across the country that included leaders of farming co-ops and labor, student and indigenous activists, to provide ever-growing lists for the death squads. The resulting civil war became a genocide against indigenous people in Ixil and the western highlands that killed or disappeared at least 200,000 people.

This pattern was repeated across the world, wherever popular, progressive leaders offered hope to their people in ways that challenged U.S. interests. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in 1988, “The irony of U.S. policy in the Third World is that, while it has always justified its larger objectives and efforts in the name of anticommunism, its own goals have made it unable to tolerate change from any quarter that impinged significantly on its own interests.”

When General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965, the U.S. Embassy compiled a list of 5,000 communists for his death squads to hunt down and kill. The CIA estimated that they eventually killed 250,000 people, while other estimates run as high as a million.

Twenty-five years later, journalist Kathy Kadane investigated the U.S. role in the massacre in Indonesia, and spoke to Robert Martens, the political officer who led the State-CIA team that compiled the kill list. “It really was a big help to the army,” Martens told Kadane. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that’s not all bad – there’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”

Kathy Kadane also spoke to former CIA director William Colby, who was the head of the CIA’s Far East division in the 1960s. Colby compared the U.S. role in Indonesia to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which was launched two years later, claiming that they were both successful programs to identify and eliminate the organizational structure of America’s communist enemies.

The Phoenix program was designed to uncover and dismantle the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) shadow government across South Vietnam. Phoenix’s Combined Intelligence Center in Saigon fed thousands of names into an IBM 1401 computer, along with their locations and their alleged roles in the NLF. The CIA credited the Phoenix program with killing 26,369 NLF officials, while another 55,000 were imprisoned or persuaded to defect. Seymour Hersh reviewed South Vietnamese government documents that put the death toll at 41,000.

How many of the dead were correctly identified as NLF officials may be impossible to know, but Americans who took part in Phoenix operations reported killing the wrong people in many cases. Navy SEAL Elton Manzione told author Douglas Valentine (The Phoenix Program) how he killed two young girls in a night raid on a village, and then sat down on a stack of ammunition crates with a hand grenade and an M-16, threatening to blow himself up, until he got a ticket home.

“The whole aura of the Vietnam War was influenced by what went on in the “hunter-killer” teams of Phoenix, Delta, etc,” Manzione told Valentine. “That was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending freedom – that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it becoming America’s most unpopular war.”

Even as the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the “war fatigue” in the United States led to a more peaceful next decade, the CIA continued to engineer and support coups around the world, and to provide post-coup governments with increasingly computerized kill lists to consolidate their rule.

After supporting General Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the CIA played a central role in Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, to hunt down tens of thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing and disappearing at least 60,000 people.

The CIA’s role in Operation Condor is still shrouded in secrecy, but Patrice McSherry, a political scientist at Long Island University, has investigated the U.S. role and concluded, “Operation Condor also had the covert support of the US government. Washington provided Condor with military intelligence and training, financial assistance, advanced computers, sophisticated tracking technology, and access to the continental telecommunications system housed in the Panama Canal Zone.”

McSherry’s research revealed how the CIA supported the intelligence services of the Condor states with computerized links, a telex system, and purpose-built encoding and decoding machines made by the CIA Logistics Department. As she wrote in her book, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America:

“The Condor system’s secure communications system, Condortel… allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor…”

Operation Condor ultimately failed, but the U.S. provided similar support and training to right-wing governments in Colombia and Central America throughout the 1980s in what senior military officers have called a “quiet, disguised, media-free approach” to repression and kill lists.

The U.S. School of the Americas (SOA) trained thousands of Latin American officers in the use of torture and death squads, as Major Joseph Blair, the SOA’s former chief of instruction described to John Pilger for his film, The War You Don’t See:

“The doctrine that was taught was that, if you want information, you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get the person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them – and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”

When the same methods were transferred to the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq after 2003, Newsweek headlined it “The Salvador Option.” A U.S. officer explained to Newsweek that U.S. and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

The United States sent two veterans of its dirty wars in Latin America to Iraq to play key roles in that campaign. Colonel James Steele led the U.S. Military Advisor Group in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986, training and supervising Salvadoran forces who killed tens of thousands of civilians. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly escaping a prison sentence for his role supervising shipments from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to the U.S.-backed Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua.

In Iraq, Steele oversaw the training of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos – rebranded as “National” and later “Federal” Police after the discovery of their al-Jadiriyah torture center and other atrocities.

Bayan al-Jabr, a commander in the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militia, was appointed Interior Minister in 2005, and Badr militiamen were integrated into the Wolf Brigade death squad and other Special Police units. Jabr’s chief adviser was Steven Casteel, the former intelligence chief for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Latin America.

The Interior Ministry death squads waged a dirty war in Baghdad and other cities, filling the Baghdad morgue with up to 1,800 corpses per month, while Casteel fed the western media absurd cover stories, such as that the death squads were all “insurgents” in stolen police uniforms.

Meanwhile U.S. special operations forces conducted “kill-or-capture” night raids in search of Resistance leaders. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003-2008, oversaw the development of a database system, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, that compiled cellphone numbers mined from captured cellphones to generate an ever-expanding target list for night raids and air strikes.

The targeting of cellphones instead of actual people enabled the automation of the targeting system, and explicitly excluded using human intelligence to confirm identities. Two senior U.S. commanders told the Washington Post that only half the night raids attacked the right house or person.

In Afghanistan, President Obama put McChrystal in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in 2009, and his cellphone-based “social network analysis” enabled an exponential increase in night raids, from 20 raids per month in May 2009 to up to 40 per night by April 2011.

As with the Lavender system in Gaza, this huge increase in targets was achieved by taking a system originally designed to identify and track a small number of senior enemy commanders and applying it to anyone suspected of having links with the Taliban, based on their cellphone data.

This led to the capture of an endless flood of innocent civilians, so that most civilian detainees had to be quickly released to make room for new ones. The increased killing of innocent civilians in night raids and airstrikes fueled already fierce resistance to the U.S. and NATO occupation and ultimately led to its defeat.

President Obama’s drone campaign to kill suspected enemies in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia was just as indiscriminate, with reports suggesting that 90% of the people it killed in Pakistan were innocent civilians.

And yet Obama and his national security team kept meeting in the White House every “Terror Tuesday” to select who the drones would target that week, using an Orwellian, computerized “disposition matrix” to provide technological cover for their life and death decisions.

Looking at this evolution of ever-more automated systems for killing and capturing enemies, we can see how, as the information technology used has advanced from telexes to cellphones and from early IBM computers to artificial intelligence, the human intelligence and sensibility that could spot mistakes, prioritize human life and prevent the killing of innocent civilians has been progressively marginalized and excluded, making these operations more brutal and horrifying than ever.

Nicolas has at least two good friends who survived the dirty wars in Latin America because someone who worked in the police or military got word to them that their names were on a death list, one in Argentina, the other in Guatemala. If their fates had been decided by an AI machine like Lavender, they would both be long dead.

As with supposed advances in other types of weapons technology, like drones and “precision” bombs and missiles, innovations that claim to make targeting more precise and eliminate human error have instead led to the automated mass murder of innocent people, especially women and children, bringing us full circle from one holocaust to the next.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

 

Trilateral Militarization: From Missiles to Nukes

The trilateral militarization of the US, Japan and the Philippines has officially started. From missiles to nuclearization, it could cast a dark shadow over the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

by Dan Steinbock Posted onApril 18, 2024

In the Philippines, the proponents of the trilateral alliance frame it as a response to the “threat of assertive China.” In reality, the unwarranted trilateral alliance seems to be the result of a longstanding US maritime counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign, resting on the work of the US Navy Department and other US interests.

The purpose of the campaign has been to escalate the South China Sea friction in international media to justify trilateral militarization.

In the Philippines, the concern for escalation is fairly widespread. On Friday former president Duterte warned in Chinese media that “the US is trying to provoke a war between China and the Philippines,” expressing his hope that the Philippines can change course to “resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation.”

The trilateral alliance seems to be a prelude to a massive rearmament drive that has potential to undermine and possibly collapse the expected Asian Century of peace and development.  

Nuclearization via QUAD and AUKUS              

In March 2023, US President Joe Biden held a press conference on the AUKUS partnership with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego, California. A glimpse of the Asian future was provided by the nuclear-powered USS Missouri submarine, which was visibly in the background. It was meant to be a signal to China.

Ironically, the net effect is rising nuclearization in the South China Sea by countries that are not located in the ASEAN territories. The US-led multilateral security framework targeting China rests on the QUAD (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) between the US, Japan, Australia and India. AUKUS is more actionable. It seeks to hem in China’s moves with a nested military network, including sharing advanced military technologies like nuclear-powered submarines. The first subs will be built in the UK by late 2030s and in Australia after 2040.

In the interest of time, the US plans to forward-deploy Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines, coupled with the UK’s similar Astute-class subs, to a naval base near Perth in Western Australia, already by 2027. AUKUS is also likely to expand in 2024 or early 2025. Japan and Canada are in line to join the so-called pillar 2 section of the AUKUS agreement, while US is courting South Korea and New Zealand.

From the Chinese viewpoint, the US is expanding the AUKUS military alliance by “forming a mini-NATO in Asia, which poses unprecedented threats and challenges to the region’s prosperity and stability.” The track-record – from Iraq and Afghanistan to Ukraine and Gaza – is not assuring.

But nuclearization takes time. Hence, the missiles.

Missiles and militarization             

As veteran political analyst Francisco Tatad writes, “Marcos sees China as the source of the danger, but he does not say why our two countries should be going to war with each other over some pieces of stone in the vast disputed sea.” Tatad asks, “Whose war must we prepare for?”

The question about “whose war” remains blurry, unlike the question “how” that war could begin. Due to the 2019 expiration of the previously banned Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the U.S. is planning to deploy ground-based intermediate-range missiles in the Indo-Pacific already in 2024, thus establishing its first arsenal in the region since the end of the Cold War.

Missiles over South China Sea?

The Arleigh-Burke class guided-missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones (DDG 53) launches a Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) during a live-fire test of the ship’s aegis weapons system (Pacific Ocean, June 19, 2014). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Originally developed by the huge US defense contractor Raytheon, which has played a key role in Ukraine’s devastation, these missiles feature land-based versions of the Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) and the Tomahawk cruise missile, with ranges between 500 and 2,700 kilometers (photo right). Tomahawks in particular have been used from the Gulf War to Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Reportedly, the U.S. Army will send the intermediate-range missile units primarily to the U.S. territory of Guam, looking for more forward deployment to Asian allies in a contingency. These allies, like Philippines, are likely expected to be open to “rotational deployments in crises.”

Responding to a crisis in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea will require missiles that can reach targets in those critical waterways or the Chinese mainland. This means an extended deployment near the “first island chain,” which stretches from Japan’s Okinawa islands to Taiwan and, yes, the Philippines.

A decade of steps toward militarization

The US Naval Department’s involvement seems to have intensified since the mid-2010s, when the late foreign secretary Albert F. del Rosario had a key role in the creation of the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which opened the country to U.S. military, ships, and planes; for the first time since 1991. A year later, Rosario met Obama’s then-deputy secretary of state Antony Blinken in Manila, aiming at bigger bilateral commitments.

Toward deeper military alignments

(Left) Foreign Affairs Secretary del Rosario and then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Manila in Nov. 2015. (Center) Foreign Affairs Secretary Locsin, Jr. and INDOPACOM Commander Adm. John C. Aquilino in Aug, 2021. (Right) Gen. Romeo Brawner, Jr., Chief of Staff and Adm. Aquilino in Mar. 2024.  Source: DFA, DFA-OPCD.

President Duterte’s electoral triumph in 2016 caused a six-year breather in the ambitious plans. Militarization began to move ahead in 2021, when Admiral John C. Aquilino, Commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), met foreign secretary Locsin, Jr. Adm. Aquilino welcomed bilateral progress as “a huge leap forward” and US press release described the ties as an “alliance.”

Aquilino’s calls matter. The INDOPACOM is the largest of six geographic combatant commands of the US Armed Forces. It is responsible for all U.S. military activities in the Indo-Pacific region.

But nothing was set in stone, yet. President Marcos Jr had pledged building on Duterte legacy and nurturing strong ties with both the US and China, like most ASEAN nations. But these pledges had to go. They were misaligned with the Big Defense’s plans for Manila.

In October 2022, Senator Imee Marcos, chair of Philippine foreign relations committee, still pled in Washington: “Do not make us choose between the United States and China.” But prior to the address, her younger brother, President Marcos had met President Biden and discussed “the full breadth of issues in the alliance.” Subsequently, major electoral pledges turned upside down and trilateral mobilization became an inflated response to a deflated problem.

Rightly, columnist Rigoberto Tiglao wondered why the Philippines should go to war with China, its biggest trading partner, over a dispute that “is solely over Ayungin Shoal, a permanently submerged, useless small area.”

Militarization benefited the Pentagon and the Big Defense. But what exactly did Manila get in return, except for risks?

More bases, more targets: 9, 15, or 20 sites?

In spring early 2023, President Marcos Jr. granted U.S. forces access to four new bases, in addition to five existing bases included under the expanded Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA). The decision was opposed vehemently by several provinces and municipalities in the target areas. But these concerns were quickly suppressed as “unnecessary.” Even the Congress proved oddly numb about the seismic foreign policy shift, despite its huge economic and geopolitical implications.

And yet, in September, Adm. Aquilino returned to the Philippines to discuss “opportunities for increased multilateral cooperation, maritime security initiatives, and the upcoming exercise Balikatan.” The U.S. had added 63 projects for the EDCA sites on top of the previously-approved 32. These projects included multipurpose storage facilities, road networks and fuel storage, “among others.” Although the U.S. officially has only “rotational access” to the Philippines bases, it had allocated over $109 million towards infrastructure improvements at some seven EDCA locations.

Presumably, the Philippines is to serve as a logistical platform, to tie China in the South China Sea (SCS) before a potential Taiwan crisis. But more is needed. Or as Radio Free Asia reported: “The US is seeking access to more bases in the Philippines on top of nine sites already included under an expanded pact.”

Just weeks later, in a Senate hearing, Senator Robinhood Padilla addressed the presence of a US Navy Poseidon aircraft circling overhead during a resupply mission, suggesting that the US naval presence unnecessarily caused an escalation between China and the Philippines. Instead of welcoming Padilla’s comments as an opening for a democratic debate on the pros and cons of the foreign policy U-turn, the questions were hush-hushed away.

Eclipse of Southeast Asian economic engines

Until recently, Japan and the Philippines were reluctant to host new American capabilities, to avoid becoming an immediate target of the Chinese military in a crisis. As economic challenges are amounting in both countries, things are changing.

But us trilateral mobilization the only option?

While affirming the strong US-Philippines bilateral alliance in the 2022 CSIS event, senator Imee Marcos affirmed the broad US-Philippines address, but it was not exclusive with “engagement with China, including joint development, confidence-building measures, and a code of conduct in the South China Sea.” In a multipolar world, there is room for multiple power centers.

Against widespread criticism and skepticism in the ASEAN, the proponents of the trilateral militarization portray it as a pillar of “peace and stability” in the region. They live in a parallel universe. As several ASEAN leaders have warned, trilateral mobilization has potential to split Southeast Asia and bury the Asian Century. 

Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net.

 A version of the commentary was published by China-US Focus on April 12, 2024. 

 

Take That, Joe Manchin

by Ted Glick and Jane Califf / April 15th, 2024

“We are a married couple of 45 years. We are taking action together as elders deeply concerned about the future facing our 3-year-old grandson, all children, and all life on earth. That is why we have joined with many others to stop the destructive and abusive Mountain Valley Pipeline, as well as any new fossil fuel infrastructure. Three years ago, the International Energy Agency said that was needed even then, because of the seriousness of the climate emergency

“We need solar and wind right now, not destructive fossil fuels and a trillion dollar a year war economy.

“We are outraged that billions of our tax dollars are being used for military aid to Israel in its genocidal war on Gaza. War kills people and the environment.”

This is the statement that we wrote explaining why on April 10 we locked ourselves into a “trojan possum” wooden structure blocking the only access road to a major MVP construction site on Poor Mountain in Virginia. For seven hours, with the support of others, we were able to prevent work being done at this site. After extraction and arrest, we were each charged with three misdemeanors in Roanoke County, Va.

Many other people have taken actions like this going back to 2018. Indeed, an historic and heroic tree sit of 932 straight days between 2018 and 2021 in Elliston, Virginia, along the planned route of the pipeline, was a major reason why, six years later, the MVP has not been finished and is not yet operational.

Joe Manchin can’t be very happy about this situation. He and Republicans tried to squash resistance and fast track MVP construction last summer via an amendment to must-pass federal debt legislation. The amendment which was included required federal agencies to provide all needed permits within 30 days and for the federal courts to be stifled in their oversight role.

Some of those active in the movement to defeat the MVP were understandably deflated by this development, but others responded with outrage. Within a couple months of this Congressional action, young people connected to Appalachians Against Pipelines had begun engaging in nonviolent direct action to slow pipeline construction work. Hundreds of people in the last six months have risked arrest in these actions. Climate activist Jerome Wagner was released just last week after spending two months in a West Virginia prison for locking himself to an MVP drill.

The two of us have been active in movements for positive social change going back to the Black Freedom and Anti-Vietnam War movements 60 years ago. One of us is 83 and the other is 74. We are active in our town, in our state and nationally in a number of climate justice and progressive groups. We do so because we were raised by loving parents to live by the ethic that our role on this earth, for as long as we are alive and capable of doing so, is to do all we can to make the earth a better place for those coming after us.

We feel this responsibility even more so now because of the deepening climate emergency and the growing neo-fascist threat posed by Trump and the MAGA movement. We also feel it because, as of January, 2021, we are grandparents of a wonderful three-year old boy. Without question, a major reason we took this action was for him and all children.

We are heartened by many things we see within our progressive movement for positive social change. One of them is the emergence of new groups like Third Act and Radical Elders and the connections developing between them and youth organizations like the Sunrise Movement and Fridays for Future. We are also heartened to see growing numbers of elders stepping forward to take part in the direct action that young people have been taking for years in organized efforts like the fight to stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Can we defeat Manchin and his MVP corporate cronies? Can we defeat Trump and MAGA? Can we overcome the criminal fossil fuel industry and create truly justice-based and nature-connected human societies? We don’t know, but we do know based on our decades of experience that taking part in the struggle for all of these things, despite all of the hardships and ups and downs, is without question a better way to liveFacebooTwitter

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Ted Glick and Jane Califf have been married for 45 years. Jane is a retired teacher and author of the book, How to Teach Without Screaming. Ted is a volunteer organizer with Beyond Extreme Energy and author of the books Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution. More information can be found at https://tedglick.com. Read other articles by Ted Glick and Jane Califf.

 

The Death of Paris ‘15

by Robert Hunziker / April 15th, 2024

The Paris climate agreement of 2015 set the standards for how nation/states must approach the net zero target year 2050 by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in stages, starting with major reductions by 2030.

Paris ’15 is dead.

According to a new report by Global Energy Monitor of San Francisco, at least 20B barrels of oil equivalent has been discovered since the International Energy Agency statement of fact in 2021 that no new oil, gas, or coal development should proceed if the world is to reach net zero by 2050.

Nevertheless, as of today, fossil fuel producers worldwide plan on quadrupling output from newly approved projects by 2030, diametrically opposite what was agreed upon at Paris ’15. Effectively, the much-heralded savior Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 is torn to shreds.

Disregard for the agreement is even worse than first blush would indicate, to wit:

Last year, at least 20 oil and gas fields were readied and approved for extraction following discovery, sanctioning the removal of 8bn barrels of oil equivalent. By the end of this decade, the report found, the fossil-fuel industry aims to sanction nearly four times this amount – 31bn barrels of oil equivalent – across 64 additional new oil and gas fields.

— “Surge of New US-Led Oil and Gas Activity Threatens to Wreck Paris Climate Goals”, The Guardian, March 2024.

Fossil fuel exploration and production is on a roll, on a high, indomitably conquering every warning by climate scientists of past decades. The big oil companies, in concert with the major developed nations, are flipping the bird at Paris ’15. It’s a worthless scrap of paper. They’re drilling and increasing production 4-fold, period!

The United States leads the way. It has produced more crude oil than any country has in history for the past six years running. Nobody is outproducing America. Making matters even more poignantly difficult to swallow and pouring salt into the wound, the leader of Saudi Aramco at a recent conference in Texas said the world should “abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”

Meanwhile, it was recently reported that the senior producers are “way off track” on emissions goals that, from the start, were faux commitments with a wink and a grin. According to Carbon Tracker, production plans for the 25 largest oil and gas companies do not come close to aligning with the central goal of Paris ’15, which is now lifeless.

Carbon Tracker’s Paris Alignment Scorecard reads like a lunatic gang of young druggies flunking out of high school. Letter grades run from A to H with each oil company failing. The highest ranking was a lowly D. And every company plans on expansion of oil and gas production, near term. Making matters even worse, according to Carbon Tracker, oil and gas companies are reneging on prior climate commitments. No big surprise there.

All of this is now coming out into the open in the aftermath of COP28 (UN climate change conference) held in Dubai last year, an event designed and led by fossil fuel interests. How could the UN and associated scientists be so fooled, publicly ridiculed, allowing the fossil fuel industry to hijack their most important UN climate change conference?

Now that the oil and gas industry has hijacked UN climate change conferences, it should come as no surprise that COP29 in 2024 will be held in the Azerbaijani capital city Baku. Azerbaijan has been an oil producer for over 100 years as one of the world’s top producers with fossil fuels responsible for over 90% of the country’s exports, providing two-thirds of its state budget.

According to analysts at Rystad Energy, sourced by Global Witness, Azerbaijan plans to increase fossil fuel production by one-third over the next 10 years. (The Guardian) Meanwhile, in somewhat of a mixed message, the country claims to be an alternative energy leader in the world and plans on going to 30% renewables by 2030, which is standard PR by oil companies nowadays.

One wonders what this means for activists and climate scientists and UN climate conferences. Will the fossil fuel industry continue to dominate UN climate conferences? But, even more significantly, what does this mean for planetary global warming?

A recent article in Space.com deals with the issue: “How The Runaway Greenhouse Gas Effect Can Destroy a Planet’s Habitability — Including Earth’s”, Space, com, December 19, 2023.

Here’s the storyline:

Using advanced computer simulations, scientists have shown how easily a runaway greenhouse effect can rapidly transform a habitable planet into a hellish world inhospitable to life.

Here’s the hard part:

The team of astronomers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and CNRS laboratories of Paris and Bordeaux saw that after initial stages of a planet’s climate transformation, the planet’s atmosphere, structure, and cloud coverage get significantly altered, such that a difficult-to-halt runaway effect starts to commence. Alarmingly, this process could be initiated here on Earth with just a slight change in solar luminosity or by a global average temperature rise of just a few tens of degrees. Even those minor changes could lead to our planet becoming totally inhospitable.

The brutal result is what’s called “a hellscape.” But no timeline is mentioned. It is just one of those things that might happen sometime in the future, hopefully, nobody lives to see it, or conversely, nobody lives.

One thing is probably clear, by continuing to pump fossil fuels, enriching the atmosphere with one of the most powerful greenhouse gases, CO2 constituting 76% of all greenhouse gases, the odds and timing of the runaway greenhouse gas effect get closer by the day, and now, thanks to a new “let’s drill the hell out of it” attitude, faster than anybody realizes.FacebookTwitter

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Robert Hunziker (MA, economic history, DePaul University) is a freelance writer and environmental journalist whose articles have been translated into foreign languages and appeared in over 50 journals, magazines, and sites worldwide. He can be contacted at: rlhunziker@gmail.com. Read other articles by Robert.