War Crimes on The Huffington Post

Shahid Buttar: The Failure of the Federalist, No. 10

2009-12-02T15:16:00Z

Despite our Founders' vision of independent powers exercising checks & balances to prevent a "tyranny of the majority," every branch of the federal government acted last month to cast its lot with torturers. But even though President Obama, Congress and the Court have united to hide evidence of high-level crime, Americans of conscience continue to resist, arguing that sweeping human rights abuses under the rug is a greater threat to national security than dealing with them openly and bringing the perpetrators to justice.

This Monday, the Supreme Court ruled in Department of Defense v. ACLU that the Defense Department could maintain secrecy over photos documenting pervasive torture. While disappointing, the decision was more or less inevitable in the wake of the Obama administration's latest reversal.

After deciding to release evidence of torture in wake of court orders requiring disclosure, the administration later caved to pressure from the intelligence community, and even went so far as to force out the official whose decision antagonized the CIA leadership. Lobbying Congress to secure an amendment to FOIA, the administration bent over backward to protect torturers and keep them from facing justice.

Executive secrecy is appalling enough in the abstract, and even worse in the context of a cover up hiding evidence of apparent war crimes and torture. Authorized by an act of a complacent Congress bowing to a disingenuous administration, the Defense Department acted last week to withhold evidence of its own misconduct, based on an illusory justification citing the safety of U.S. troops abroad. And, as it must under Justice Jackson's analysis in the seminal Steel Seizure cases, the Supreme Court acquiesced.

Every branch of the U.S. government--the Executive, the Congress, and now the Supreme Court--has shockingly acted to sweep evidence of war crimes under the rug. Their collusion is a profound betrayal of our nation's historical legacy, a setback for international human rights, and a devastating defeat for democratic transparency in the face of official misconduct.

But in a democracy, even collusion among every branch of our federal government does not end the story. Last week, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee released a forceful coalition letter I wrote on behalf of nearly 30 interfaith, civil rights, and peace and justice organizations around the country to "explain why transparency and robust accountability are a strategic national security imperative, and to expose the self-interest of voices counseling against accountability."

The letter criticized the "self-serving and internally inconsistent diatribe" of the CIA leadership, reiterating that "any incident of torture or kidnapping violated international law," and also that "detainee abuse...undermined several important national security interests."

First, by forcing detainees to make unreliable statements, coercive interrogation proved to be a poor vehicle for intelligence gathering. Second, torture played into the hands of our nation's enemies by facilitating their recruitment efforts. Finally, torture sapped the morale of junior intelligence agents, as well as the experienced interrogators who complained about torture policies. (citations omitted)

Our coalition went on to examine the impact of torture with impunity on several important groups of stakeholders: (a) the men & women of our armed forces and intelligence services, whose morale has been sapped by the protection of criminals among them; (b) our nation's international allies, "many of which have voiced concerns about detainee mistreatment"; (c) civil society voices supportive of U.S. military deployments in areas where our legitimacy is contested; (d) and the "millions of Americans from all walks of life, demographics, professions, backgrounds, and communities who are appropriately appalled by the CIA's abuses."

Beyond noting the interests of these groups, our letter also reframed a number of misconceptions pervading the issue of accountability for torture, which grows only more pressing with the revelation over the weekend of continuing torture under the Obama administration despite the repudiation of enhanced interrogation techniques.

First, responding to "the self-serving ruse that releasing the photos would undermine the safety of U.S. troops deployed abroad," our coalition argues that "any potential harm to our troops inheres in the criminal conduct depicted in the photos, not their potential disclosure." Moreover, "[t]he extent to which that conduct has undermined our broader national security only reinforces the imperative of prosecution."

Second, the letter reframes the procedural posture, noting that "failing to investigate those who conceived, planned, and orchestrated violations of international law does not reflect political neutrality. In fact, the current investigation, limited to some junior agents, reflects pre-judgment in favor of alleged torturers." (emphasis in original)

Ultimately, "the Department of Defense retains--and we request[ed] that [the President] exercise--the authority to declassify and release the photos." As we argued last week, "Our safety as a nation, as well as the legitimacy of our system of justice, the integrity of our intelligence services, and the strength of our international alliances all depend on [President Obama's] willingness to restore the rule of law by ensuring its equal application to all."

This is the latest among many tests - most of which he has, so far, unfortunately failed - that will demonstrate who the President is in fact. Will he serve as the beacon of hope in government that he pretended to be throughout last year's campaign, or like other politicians, did he merely pander to the public in order to pursue his personal ambitions?

John Demjanjuk Trial Day Canceled Due To Illness

2009-12-02T10:41:09Z

MUNICH — The trial of John Demjanjuk on charges of accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews as a death camp guard was called off for the day Wednesday after a doctor determined he was too ill to come to court.

Presiding Judge Ralph Alt said the doctor examined Demjanjuk, 89, in a prison hospital two hours before the session due to begin, and determined that he had a fever caused by an unidentified infection. The fever continued to rise despite medication, and the doctor decided it was not safe to transport him to court, Alt said.

John Demjanjuk Trial Begins In Germany

2009-11-30T11:12:13Z

MUNICH — John Demjanjuk sat in a wheelchair wrapped in a light blue blanket, his eyes closed and his face pale as his trial opened Monday on charges he helped kill 27,900 Jews as a Nazi death camp guard.

Lawyers for the retired Ohio autoworker portrayed him as a victim – of the Nazis and misguided German justice. But three German doctors testified the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was fit to stand trial.

Kaing Guek Eav, Khmer Rouge Prison Chief, Could Get 40 Years

2009-11-25T10:29:53Z

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — The prison chief being tried for running a Khmer Rouge torture center apologized but said he was only following orders and couldn't stop the abuse and the thousands of killings there, as prosecutors sought a 40-year prison sentence.

Defense attorneys in Cambodia's first genocide tribunal continued their closing arguments Thursday. Kaing Guek Eav, 67, is charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, murder and torture, which carry a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

Jon Temin: Why Sudan Matters

2009-11-24T18:04:55Z

Foreign policy realists sometimes ask how much seemingly marginal states such as Sudan really matter. The answer is that Sudan matters for many reasons, none more important than the millions dead and displaced due to decades of unnecessary internal violence. Sudan matters now more than ever because two seminal events are quickly approaching -- elections in 2010 and a referendum on the unity of the country in 2011 -- and the international community is increasingly concerned that they will lead to new and renewed violence and displacement. With the recent release of its long-awaited Sudan policy, Sudan matters to the Obama Administration and its efforts to transform the president's popularity abroad into tangible achievements.

But Sudan also matters because what is happening right now in Sudan, and what will happen in the next two years, has important implications for Africa and efforts to address state fragility globally for at least three reasons.

First, Sudan may test the inviolability of Africa's borders. Many of Africa's current borders were drawn almost blindly by European rulers at a conference in Berlin in 1885. They tend to be arbitrary and often awkward, splitting kin groups across different countries while placing adversarial groups within the same borders. But with few exceptions (the carving of Eritrea out of Ethiopia being the most notable), Africa's borders have remained static. Until now, African leaders and citizens have accepted the geographic hand they were dealt.

But in 2011, southern Sudanese are scheduled to vote in a referendum on whether to remain part of Sudan or secede. The referendum is the culmination of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between Sudan's north and south that ended decades of civil war which cost roughly two million lives. Every indication is that southerners will vote for secession - the president of the Government of Southern Sudan recently predicted that remaining in a united Sudan would render southerners "second-class citizens." Secession would mean the division of Africa's physically largest country, with the south comprising approximately a quarter of Sudan's land. This could be deeply traumatic for Sudan, but may not affect Sudan alone.

If Africa's largest country can be divided through referendum, what does this imply for an unwieldy, arguably ungovernable country like the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Or Nigeria, which, not unlike Sudan, is deeply divided along ethnic and religious lines? How many of Africa's borders may be up for debate? Southern Sudan's right to self-determination should be unassailable, but the precedent set by secession would be felt well beyond Sudan -- something surely on the minds of leaders and disgruntled populations elsewhere.

Second, Sudan presents a stern test of the "African solutions to African problems" mantra. There are few durable African solutions to boast of, especially with Zimbabwe and Kenya backsliding. Particularly concerning Sudan's Darfur crisis, Africa is on the hook: the Darfur peacekeeping mission is a joint enterprise between the African Union and United Nations, includes troops only from Africa, and, until their recent departures, was led by a diplomat from Congo-Brazzaville and a general from Nigeria. The lead mediator for Darfur is from Burkina Faso. The African Union Panel on Darfur, which investigated issues of peace, justice and reconciliation, recently released its findings and was led by former South Africa President Thabo Mbeki. African Union gatherings have debated Darfur and passed resolutions -- including one condemning the International Criminal Court's indictment of Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir.

Despite this depth of African engagement, there are few results to show. The scale of the killing has diminished, but millions remain displaced. UNAMID is intensely unpopular among many of the displaced and remains significantly short of its mandated capacity of 26,000 troops. There is no political solution in sight, with factionalized rebel groups struggling to unite and the most influential rebel leader, Abdel Wahid al-Nur, refusing to engage in negotiations. An African solution to this problem does not seem imminent. This is by no means solely Africa's fault, as the United States, China and others bring substantially greater leverage to the situation than any African state. But it does raise the question: if so much African engagement does not bring progress, can there be African solutions to Africa's most intractable problems?

Third, following in the footsteps of Afghanistan's highly flawed election, Sudan offers another test of whether elections in volatile environments are a good idea. The CPA called for nationwide elections mid-way through the six-year "interim period." Those elections have endured several delays, and are now scheduled for April 2010, with the CPA expiring in 2011. Preparations are underway, with voter registration commencing, in haphazard fashion, at the beginning of November. But substantial flaws in the process are already emerging: the Carter Center recently noted concerns including "slow implementation of electoral preparations...unresolved operational decisions related to voter registration activities...delays in the finalization of national, regional, and state geographic constituencies; and continued harassment of political party and civil society activity across Sudan." There are also real risks of elections triggering new or renewed violence, especially in the volatile areas of the country on both sides of the north-south border.

Many Sudanese, especially in the south, profess little interest in the elections. They are skeptical of the election process and those organizing it, and, in the south, are instead counting the days until the 2011 referendum on unity or secession. During the CPA negotiations neither the northerners nor southerners were especially keen to see elections be part of the deal; it was the international community, led by the United States, which insisted that elections come first, ostensibly to legitimize the referendum. But that insistence may be backfiring, with the international community pouring substantial funds into a process that could ultimately be perceived as illegitimate and may result in the confirmation of an unhappy and unstable status quo. If that is the outcome, little will have changed, except that precious time, effort and funds will have been devoted to elections rather than to meeting mounting humanitarian needs and preparing for the referendum and what comes after it. Should this be the result, valid questions will again be asked about elections in fragile states and whether they should be a priority. It is unlikely to be the last time such questions arise.

David Quigg: Part Exposé, Part Cover-Up: 1968's My Lai Massacre Photos Have Big Lessons For Citizen Journalists

2009-11-24T05:03:43Z

The front page of last Friday's edition of The Cleveland Plain Dealer included a story headlined "Photographer destroyed photos of soldiers in the act of killing." Before I type even one sentence more, I want to make clear that I have never ever done anything brave enough to make me believe I am better than Ron Haeberle, the Army combat photographer in that headline.

Decency really demands that I try to imagine myself in Haeberle's boots, entering the soon-to-be-infamous Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai with fellow U.S. soldiers on the soon-to-be-infamous date of March 16, 1968.

Would I, as Haeberle did, have had the guts to carry my Army-issue camera and a contraband camera of my own that day? Would I, as Haeberle did, have had the guts to snap photos as my fellow soldiers marauded through My Lai, slaughtering hundreds of Vietnamese men, women, and children? Would I have had the guts to bring my film back home to America at the end of my deployment? Would I have had the guts to develop the film? Would I have had the guts in 1969 to corroborate reporter Seymour Hersh's My Lai massacre exposé by bringing my photos in to my local newspaper?

I just don't know. I really don't.

So if I slip into moral-superiority mode here, please just stop reading. This post's usefulness rides entirely on whether I can confine myself to spotlighting the journalistic implications of this quote from Haeberle's new interview with Plain Dealer reporter Evelyn Theiss:

I realized that there's no way I can really release photographs showing who the actual persons are doing what. I figured I'm not going to point my finger at any one soldier. I'm there. I'm part of it. I'm as guilty as anybody else. Not for shooting a person, but for not reporting it. It's just like one big cover-up. But there are photographs I could have pinpointed who did what and the actual falling with the smoke out of the muzzles and stuff like that. It's just kind of [pause] a decision I made myself.

Haeberle went on to talk about getting a visit from an Army investigator assigned to probe the My Lai massacre:

He asked me the question: Did I have any more photographs? So I said no. I answered him honestly. But I never said the words, "I destroyed them." ... I never said that. So what the Army got are some photographs that really aren't worth something unless somebody talks about them. Like a photograph's worth 1,000 words. These photographs aren't worth anything unless somebody actually talks about them.

There were limits to the justice that military prosecutors managed to wring from the evidence that hadn't been destroyed or otherwise covered up. As Theiss wrote in last Friday's Plain Dealer, "Twenty-six soldiers of the 50-member unit were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions, but only Lt. William Calley was convicted of premeditated murder."

People -- here and in Vietnam and all over the world, really -- can take these facts and these new quotes from Haeberle and judge him however they choose.

But I'm focused on something else. It's not some epoch-changing idea. It's not something that will require a lot of words. I simply want today's would-be "citizen journalists" to consider this: Even though Haeberle's shocking photos appeared in a newspaper, they do not qualify as journalism.

They could have been journalism. But they weren't. They lost their claim to being journalism when Haeberle destroyed photos, when Haeberle cut the tongue from his own work, when he turned his photos, as he said, into images that "aren't worth anything unless somebody actually talks about them."

It's not that all of Haeberle's photos needed to run in a newspaper. In fact, it's doubtful that anything so gory and disturbing would have. Rather, one value of the destroyed photos would have been this: to give editors as complete a sense as possible of the story behind the corpses in his surviving photos.

Whether our next iconic, history-making image is shot by an amateur with a blurry camera phone or a pro lugging around state-of-the-art gear, the person behind the camera should aspire to journalism, should photograph both the beatings by the riot cops and the crimes of the rioters. That's a lot to ask. Most of us, thrown suddenly into a news event, will fail to create some ideal journalistic record. So perfection and seasoned professionalism cannot be our standard for citizen journalism.

Rather, our standard must grow out of the next stage, the editing stage. Citizen journalists must not do today's equivalent of what Haeberle did. Citizen journalists must not give in to the urge to un-take a photo, to click delete and banish the evidence for the parts of a story that shame them, their cause, their friends, their country, their species. In citizen journalism, we might as well rename the delete button and think of it as the "cover-up button."

If people resist pushing that cover-up button, we stand a real chance of having robust citizen journalism. If people don't resist, we will slouch more and more toward citizen propaganda. That would be a great shame.

Huffington Post blogger David Quigg lives in Seattle. This piece originally appeared on his personal blog. See "What Will Vietnam Think of Army Combat Photographer's New My Lai Revelation?" for further thoughts on Haeberle's disclosure.

Khmer Rouge Trial: Television Helps Spread Word To Nation

2009-11-20T11:04:05Z

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- When the former Khmer Rouge prison chief, Kaing Ghek Eav, first took the stand eight months ago, most Cambodians had scarce knowledge of the tribunal that was trying him.

John Demjanjuk: 'The Last Great Nazi Trial'

2009-11-11T16:55:18Z

It is being touted as the last great Nazi trial. In November, John Demjanjuk--now ﬁrst on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted war criminals--will appear before a Munich court. He is charged with 27,900 counts of accessory to murder for his role as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk is 89, and those in favour of prosecuting him feel a sense of urgency. "It's a race against time," says Michael Scharf, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who has worked on the trials of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. "They're trying to close the book on justice before [his] life ends naturally."

Georgianne Nienaber: Ashley Judd: Please, Population Control is Not the Answer for Congo

2009-11-11T15:08:54Z

Ashley Judd's op-ed in USATODAY drove me to the Tao Te Ching before my head exploded. In another example of celebrity naiveté falling prey to the obfuscations of non-governmental organizations in Congo, Judd wrote: "In Congo, 600,000 babies a year are born only to suffer and die." She added, "My husband and I despondently call these precious little ones 'the born to dies.'" Judd's solution, a parroting of the NGO Population Services International, is that family planning is the answer, since fewer babies means less babies will die and society as a whole will benefit.

Image: Ashley Judd

This is a naïve analysis, since the population in Congo is barely sustainable with a life expectancy at birth of 54.15 years, and it is far less in remote areas. The statistics Judd uses are hardly compelling when she says that 20 percent of Congolese men and women approached in 2007 said they did not wish to have more children. I am sure Ashley Judd is a nice person with good intentions, but she is another example of NGO's using the bully pulpit of celebrity to line their coffers, while they operate with a western sensibility, forcing western values on tribal populations.

Let's do a reality check.

Judd profiles a home in Kinshasa, the capitol of DR Congo, and bemoans the lack of amenities in the home she visited. Let's remember that Kinshasa is one of the safest places to be in Congo these days. She describes a family with two toothbrushes, some furniture and bad drinking water. The conditions are horrible, but this family has a roof over its head and is not living in the open-air, plastic tents and volcanic rock environment of eastern Congo. Travel in eastern Congo and you will learn that the women there are fighting to have their children and keep them alive. New life equals hope and Judd has completely missed the tenacity and resolve of poor Congolese women. Judd says, " In my work around the world with PSI and our many partners, I have seen irrefutable evidence that unregulated fertility undermines every other effort to improve health, living standards, the economy and the environment."

Image © Nienaber: Home in the IDP Camps Where Children are Cherished

Is this true? Hardly.

Congo's economy is not undermined by "unregulated fertility" rates. Why do these NGO's feel they have the right to regulate birth rates? Civil society has been destroyed by decades of war and over a hundred years of exploitation of Congo's wealth by international interests. Congo is not a country. It is a place on the map where the tribal population struggles to survive. Local populations are fed up with western interests meddling in their lives.

Consider this report from the November 4 Weekly Threat Assessment issued by the UN mission in Congo, MONUC. It is a window into the anger the Congolese feel regarding conservation and medical NGO's.

Human rights abuses by men in uniform are widely reported all over the province and the FDLR continue to pose a threat to peace and security.

During the weekend, the civil society of Lubero demonstrated violently against the deterioration of the security situation in Lubero Territory since the beginning of the Kimia II operations. They presented several grievances, including urgent action to be taken against perpetrators of human rights abuses, the extrication of the FARDC from Lubero town, a stronger MONUC presence in the backing of the FARDC operations and the removal of all NGOs (claiming they want security instead of food).

"Security instead of food," and one might argue life and liberty instead of "family planning."

The statistics are heartbreaking. 83.11 deaths per 1,000 live births. Since the outbreak of fighting in August 1998, at least 5.4 million people have died. Although only 19 percent of the population consists of children, children and infants account for 47 percent of the deaths in DR Congo. How can Ashley Judd maintain that the solution for the Congolese is having fewer children?

Image © Nienaber: The camps. Are they better off not being born?

In villages around Goma, 70% to 80% of delivery cases are performed at home and only 20% to 30% are performed at medical centers. Volunteer midwives brave rape and shootings to visit these villages to assist fragile new life as babies and mothers struggle to survive. The family is the heart-center of village life. Who are American celebrities to deny women the right to bear children?

In January of this year we met with Josephine K. who has been a witness to war and brutality for most of her 86 years. She is also a founding member of a midwife grass roots organization operating out of Goma. Josephine told us that when she was a child there were hardly any white men. With the coming of "the whites," the wars became worse. "There are so many wars, what do you want me to say?"

Image © Nienaber : Midwife

Now, the white western world wants to tell these poor black women not to have so many children. When will it stop? I would invite Judd to accompany me to the IDP camps in Kivu and meet the midwives who risk all to save babies and offer mothers nourishment in order to swell shriveled breasts.

In a separate arena, conservation groups, in some cases, are using community health initiatives and birth control as a smokescreen for land grabs and fundraising. In 2007 I visited an area in the Graueri Landscape of eastern Congo as part of an investigation into NGO abuses. American mainstream press organizations, celebrities, and television shows tout wildlife conservation and community health in this region as progress. What we found was something else. Congolese doctors and nurses in these conservation arenas explained that NGO's are paying their salaries and at the same time requiring that health professionals convince the local women--the poorest woman in the world--that they should not be having babies, because having babies is "dangerous to their health." Resist chemical sterilization and you cannot use the clinic.

But the women know that three out of five babies will die, and they resist the "required" shots of Depo-Provera which line the shelves of these remote "clinics." How do conservation organizations conserve primates in the wild? They stop hungry people from trying to keep their children alive or even having children. Meanwhile the diamonds, gold, coltan, uranium and niobium flow out of these areas and into the profits of the mining cartels in America, England, Russia and China.

Based on projections made by the United States Department of Agriculture and the Census Bureau, the American population is projected to increase to 392 million by 2050 -- more than a 50 percent increase from the 1990 population size.

Amazing. We look to be worse off than Africa, but no one is shoving Depo-Provera down our collective throats like the conservation and family planning organizations are doing in Africa. I hate to source myself, but no sense reinventing the blog here.

Joint operations between Congo and Rwanda since January 2009, have exacted a terrible toll on the civilian population and human rights groups have accused the United Nations of complicity. Most of the estimated 1200 deaths per day in eastern Congo are due to the ravages of war and preventable disease.

I have yet to see a major op-ed on United State's Special Envoy Howard Wolpe's call for the arrest of Bosco Ntaganda in conjunction with the failed operation Kimia II. This is something celebrities could really sink their teeth into if they would do some research on their own and not regurgitate the agenda's of NGO's. Congo unfortunately is the cause "du jour" on the cocktail circuit now that Sudan has exhausted its turn in the news cycle.

Former rebel general Jean Bosco Ntaganda, also known as "the Terminator", is a deputy commander of an anti-rebel offensive (the regular Congolese army, FARDC) that is being supported by the U.N. mission in Congo, MONUC. But the UN keeps denying it is supplying Ntaganda, despite repeated proof offered by human rights organizations.

Speaking like the diplomat he is, Wolpe offered a weak condemnation, but at least it was something coming from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's turf.

We just feel that anybody who has committed war crimes should not participate in military operations of this sort at the moment and he needs to be held accountable. We're trying now to work with (MONUC) and others to manage that situation in a way that will allow continued pressure on the FDLR but hopefully minimize the risk to civilians.

I addition, there is an un-reported and under-investigated story that the International Crimes Tribunal in the Hague is about to indict the former governor of North Kivu, Eugene Serufuli, for collusion with Ntaganda, who is already wanted by the Hague for war crimes in Ituri-Bunia, as Wolpe noted. Sources tell us it is assumed that General James Kabarebe of Rwanda financed both men and their militias.

Given the real stories coming out of Congo, it is a terrible thing to see USA Today giving op-ed space to "family planning" as a solution to the tragedy known as Congo. Judd termed the death of 8 million children worldwide "genocide," a bastardization of the term.

Judd should take some time and visit with the wise woman midwives who risk all for new life. The solution to the suffering of children is not the removal of children from the equation. I am not a religious person but the phrase, "suffer the children to come unto me for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," has some meaning here.

Ashley Judd is recipient of USA TODAY's Hollywood Hero Award and is also on the board of director's of Population Services International.

Navi Pillay: Turning a Blind Eye to Killing and Rape in DR Congo

2009-11-10T10:19:48Z

On November 11, the United Nations Security Council will discuss the pressing, but still elusive issue of protection of civilians in armed conflict. Accountability for crimes committed in the course of hostilities should be at the forefront of that debate. History shows that there can neither be durable peace nor meaningful security without a measure of justice. Accountability is not only necessary to address the claims of victims after the fact, but also as a deterrent for future crimes. Yet, all too often, during conflicts, or in their aftermath, the issue of accountability has been considered a dispensable element of peacemaking and has been relegated to the backburner.

Perhaps nowhere is this attitude more blatantly evident than in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where a long drawn-out conflict has made millions of victims and where sexual violence has been at epidemic levels for many years.

A case in point is the recent admission by Congo Information Minister Lambert Mende that the authorities were aware of the April 2009 massacre of at least 50 civilians perpetrated by the regular army at Shalio in the east of the country. In the same breath, however, the Minister maintained that Congolese authorities were unwilling to arrest the army officer who reportedly ordered the attack, a former Tutsi rebel commander known as Colonel Zimulinda. The rationale the Minister offered for this reprehensible lack of action was that Zimulinda's arrest might destabilize the army's fragile integration of dozens of other former rebel commanders and militias whose brutal actions had been a permanent feature of the conflict.

As a former judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, I have seen ample evidence that turning a blind eye to egregious human rights abuses is a recipe for disaster. Impunity only emboldens perpetrators to commit further crimes and encourages others to join their ranks. With no recourse to justice, victims are left to fend for themselves.

This approach is the very negation of the fundamental concept of civilian inviolability in times of peace and in times of war. It enables a State to disregard two of its primary responsibilities, namely the duty to protect civilian in all circumstances and to provide justice when violations occur, irrespective of the perpetrators' roles and affiliations.

Instead, the DRC government seems intent on deflecting the responsibility for massive human rights abuses at the hands of its own officers and soldiers. It also appears to repeat unquestioningly the trite and ill-founded argument that justice can be sacrificed for the sake of peace and that accountability can be waived without consequence.

The DRC has voluntarily signed and ratified numerous human rights treaties, including the Statute of the International Criminal Court which encompasses war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. According to national and international law, legal responsibility is engaged when an individual commits a crime, or aids, abets or otherwise assists in its commission or its attempted commission. This includes providing the means for its commission. Since the massacre in Shalio was carried out by the regular army and the army is deployed by the government, government officials may be deemed responsible on several accounts.

At a minimum, the government has an obligation to investigate allegations. Moreover, the UN Security Council has clearly and unequivocally directed the DRC government to establish a vetting mechanism to prevent those who have committed human rights violations from joining its administrative apparatus and security forces. The Security Council has also called upon the UN force in the DRC to assist the Government in pursuing this objective.

The DRC long-suffering population is entitled to protection from a professional and disciplined army. The government must comply with the Security Council's decisions and with its obligations under international law. Above all, it must show that violations of human rights are no longer tolerated and that victims are given the justice that they have been denied for years. With millions already dead since the mid 1990s, and countless women already subjected to some of the most brutal forms of rape and sex slavery, effectively condoning the actions of mass murderers and rapists is not an acceptable course of action. The Security Council must make patently clear once again that the international community demands full accountability for human rights abuses in the DRC and elsewhere.

David Sullivan: Electronics and Atrocities: Tech Supply Chains Must Do No Harm

2009-11-05T18:53:23Z

Sarah K. Dreier, a graduate student at the University of Washington and a former researcher at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, co-authored this post, which originally appeared on The Wonk Room.

From the satellite mapping of atrocities and data-driven prosecution of war criminals to the use of social networking to mobilize against repressive regimes, advances in science and technology hold unprecedented potential to make human rights a reality across the world.

A new report from the Center for American Progress, "New Tools for Old Traumas," calls on President Obama -- recently dubbed "Scientist in Chief" for his unprecedented commitment to research and development -- to lead efforts to use these new tools to bring human rights perpetrators to justice; halt ongoing atrocities; and empower victims to fight against injustice. Cell phone companies have crucial roles to play as well because part of the complexity of this issue is ensuring that these tools do not foster human rights atrocities as well as stop them.

Today, the mobile phone that an activist uses to mobilize protesters in Tehran is made with tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, whose mining in eastern Congo has fueled the world's deadliest conflict since World War II.

All electronic devises -- from satellites to smart phones -- require these specialized metals. Tin is used to affix components to circuit boards. Tantalum is a vital element of capacitors that store electrical charge. And tungsten is a key ingredient in vibrate alert functions and LCD displays.

Unfortunately, the mines in eastern Congo that produce these mineral ores fuel and support armed groups on all sides of the conflict. These groups -- including the Rwandan Hutu rebels who helped commit the 1994 genocide and Congo's ill-disciplined and predatory armed forces -- exploit impoverished miners and extort exorbitant 'taxes' from this trade. They use the profits to finance some of the worst human rights abuses in the world, including an epidemic of sexual violence that makes eastern Congo the most dangerous on the globe to be a woman or a girl.

Eastern Congo is the sight of the worst abuses in the supply chain for electronics products, but it is by no means the only one. From extraction in mining to unsafe and exploitative conditions in manufacturing facilities in Asia, the intricate supply chains that produce these products are opaque and electronics companies have yet to fully assume responsibility for the behavior of their suppliers or their suppliers' suppliers.

These tools, which have such potential for fostering free expression and abating atrocities, must no longer be used to fuel this violence.

Last week, Washington took a small but important step forward on this issue. The Defense Authorization legislation that President Obama signed into law contains a requirement for the U.S. government to support efforts to map the militarized mining sites of eastern Congo. This will help to increase transparency of the trade and aid efforts to distinguish between mines controlled by armed groups and those that are free of conflict. But government cannot solve this problem on its own -- the makers of mobile phones and other electronics products have a central role to play.

Electronics companies should commit resources to trace supply chains back to the point of extraction, conduct independent audits and spot check assurances for fraud, and ultimately certify electronics products as conflict-free.

As daily consumers and users of laptops and cell phones, average citizens too must demonstrate that we are willing to pay to make this happen. Give your mobile phone company a call, and tell them, "I want to buy a conflict-free phone."

Ensuring that these products do no harm will require an ethical revolution in how we manage the intricate and globalized supply chains for electronics. We should care as much for how our technology is made as we do for the pleasure and convenience we derive from using it.

Daniel Machover: No Safe Haven for Suspected War Criminals

2009-11-05T09:10:02Z

London - The Jerusalem Post recently quoted Michael Oren, Israel's
ambassador to the US, as lamenting the "tactical" problem of Israel
being unable to defend itself without facing prosecution. He added
that "no one in Israel buys" that the Israeli military targeted
civilians during Operation Cast Lead last winter.

"It goes not just against all of our principles, but the personal
knowledge of people who participated in the operation," he said,
adding that he was speaking from personal experience.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, human rights campaigners and
lawyers working in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been collecting
evidence of serious human rights violations by Israel's military for
many years. Some of those violations appear to amount to grave
breaches (i.e. war crimes) contrary to the Fourth Geneva Convention
1949, which protects civilians living under military occupation.
After many years of placing the evidence of such war crimes before the
Israeli legal system and attempting to seek justice locally,
Palestinian victims have lost any faith in the Israeli legal system.

The massive scale of the destruction and loss of life achieved by the
Israeli armed forces during Operation Cast Lead makes the shortcomings
of the Israeli courts all the more noteworthy.

The UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza conflict, headed up by Justice
Richard Goldstone, made a core recommendation for the Security Council
to pass a "Chapter 7 resolution" (i.e. fully binding on Israel)
requiring Israel and the Hamas authorities to mount credible criminal
investigations. Without this recommendation being taken up, there is
little chance the Israeli Government will step out of the fantasy
world inhabited by Michael Oren and virtually all Israeli leaders.

Personal attacks on Justice Richard Goldstone and his colleagues are a
distraction from a proper analysis of the report's contents and from
the clear need to build upon and act on the report's recommendations.

The most worrying aspect of the Goldstone Report is not the strong
evidence of war crimes in virtually all of the 36 specific incidents
that it examined in detail (which resulted in the death of more than
220 persons, at least 47 of whom were children and 19 of whom were
adult women). No, the most shocking finding is that all went to plan:
"...[T]he incident and patterns of events that are considered in this
report have resulted from deliberate planning and policy decisions
throughout the chain of command, down to the standard operating
procedures and instructions given to the troops on the ground."

The Commission found that what happened is in line with the so-called
"Dahiya doctrine," developed following the end of the Lebanon conflict
in 2006 and named after a quarter of Beirut fired on with hugely
disproportionate force. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserted in
January 2009, "We have proven to Hamas that we have changed the
equation. Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it
does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens
it responds by going wild - and this is a good thing."

In September 2005, it was the evidence of the involvement of Doron
Almog in the destruction of just 59 homes in the south of the Gaza
Strip, in Rafah, in January 2002 that persuaded a District Judge in
London to grant an arrest warrant against him. When he arrived at
Heathrow airport, had Almog been brave enough to leave the El Al
aircraft that brought him to the UK he would have faced a detailed
criminal investigation and possible charges for war crimes.

The devastation wrought recently by the Israeli military far surpasses
the destruction that was alleged to constitute a war crime in the case
of Almog. It is therefore highly likely that similarly strong
evidence tying named Israeli suspects to the destruction of so many
civilian homes, buildings, and civilian deaths will result in the
grant of arrest warrants, should such suspects ever come to the United
Kingdom. Likewise, such suspects face the possibility of arrest and
prosecution if they travel to many other countries across Europe and
elsewhere, including South Africa. Indeed, the Goldstone report backs
the use of universal jurisdiction in clear terms as "a potentially
efficient tool" for enforcing international criminal law, "preventing
impunity and promoting international accountability."

Consequently, those of us who have collected such evidence and act for
victims of alleged war crimes will continue to make case files
available to the prosecuting authorities of any country where a
suspect may travel. Prosecution is simply a matter of time.

Fundamentally, what is required is for the victims on both sides to
see a judicial process that they can have confidence in unfold as
quickly as possible. It is in the absence of such judicial processes
that the victims on both sides of the divide will decide that the only
recourse they have is to support yet more naked aggression and
criminality.

Daniel Machover, partner at London law firm Hickman & Rose,
specializes in assisting victims of alleged international crimes gain
access to justice.

Fred Abrahams: On Israel, Congress Tolerates Abuse

2009-11-04T08:03:11Z

Yesterday the US Congress gravely insulted hundreds of civilians who were wounded or killed in the most recent war in the Middle East.

By a vote of 344 to 36, the House condemned the report of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, also known as the Goldstone report, which documents violations of the laws of war by Israel and Hamas during the conflict last December and January. The 179 Democrats and 165 Republicans who voted yea are helping to shield those responsible on both sides.

The resolution succumbs to predictable American politics, in which criticisms of Israeli actions are rejected as delegitimizing attacks on Israel, and even as anti-Semitism. It misses a chance to break the impunity on all sides that has dogged the conflict and impeded efforts at peace. And, most significant for US foreign policy, it gives abusive governments around the world a handy excuse to deflect US criticism of their own unlawful conduct.

The nonbinding Resolution 867 calls the Goldstone report "irredeemably biased" and says the president and secretary of state should "oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration" of the report in multilateral forums. It says the report is being used to deny Israel the right to self-defense.

The 344 supporters have apparently not read the report. The 575-page document records violations of the laws of war by Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups, and concludes that all sides committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. Both Israelis and Palestinians need to carry out investigations that meet international standards or face international prosecution.

The UN Human Rights Council adopted the report's conclusions in October, and the General Assembly is scheduled to consider the report later this week. The resolution before Congress rightly condemns the Human Rights Council's past bias against Israel, but ignores that in this case the Council asked the Goldstone mission to also examine Palestinian armed groups and then endorsed the findings that Hamas committed war crimes.

The report's conclusions about Israeli violations reflect the mission's research findings and not a "pre-judged" outcome, as the resolution suggests. Israel's three-week Operation Cast Lead involved a complex and multi-faceted campaign in which hundreds of civilians died in indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks.

Co-sponsored by Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Democrat Howard Berman, the resolution is also wrong on a number of points. The resolution contends that the fact-finding mission's mandate was biased, but fails to mention that the mandate was deliberately expanded to look at both sides. And the resolution claims that Hamas significantly shaped the report's findings "by selecting and pre-screening some of the witnesses." Goldstone has adamantly rejected that claim, and no one has provided any evidence that Hamas selected or pre-screened witnesses.*

The resolution also repeats an oft-heard critique that the report "denied the State of Israel the right to self-defense." The report does not question Israel's right to use military force. It examines whether Israel and Hamas, in resorting to force, conducted military operations in compliance with the laws of armed conflict, which are designed to spare civilians as much as possible the hazards of war.

Congressional critics also ignore elements of the report that the Obama administration has embraced. Top US officials have strongly criticized the Goldstone report but have also said that the findings deserve attention and that Israel should conduct credible investigations. Some Israeli officials are now saying the same.

Rejecting the call for accountability also harms the US government's ability to push for justice in other parts of the world, such as the Congo and Darfur. When Washington turns a blind eye on violations by Israel, it gives abusive governments and their supporters a way to deflect criticisms of their unlawful conduct. It also dilutes President Obama's message in Cairo that the United States will take a more principled stance in the Middle East.

This approach and this resolution will not help Israel or the region. Instead of denouncing the report, members of Congress should urge Israel and Hamas to conduct credible investigations, bring those responsible to justice and halt the unlawful attacks on civilians that for too long has fueled hatred and hindered efforts at peace.

* CorrectionThis paragraph has been corrected from an earlier version that mistakenly said the resolution condemns the Goldstone report for failing to mention rocket and mortar attacks. It actually condemns the mandate of the fact-finding mission in this regard, not the report itself.

Fred Abrahams is a senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch, who led the organization's research team during the Gaza war.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich: Standing Against the 'Wrong is Right' Goldstone Resolution

2009-11-03T15:08:02Z

Today we journey from Operation Cast Lead to Operation Cast Doubt. Almost as serious as committing war crimes is covering up war crimes, pretending that war crimes were never committed and did not exist.

Because behind every such deception is the nullification of humanity, the destruction of human dignity, the annihilation of the human spirit, the triumph of Orwellian thinking, the eternal prison of the dark heart of the totalitarian.

The resolution before us today, which would reject all attempts of the Goldstone Report to fix responsibility of all parties to war crimes, including both Hamas and Israel, may as well be called the "Down is Up, Night is Day, Wrong is Right" resolution.

Because if this Congress votes to condemn a report it has not read, concerning events it has totally ignored, about violations of law of which it is unaware, it will have brought shame to this great institution.

How can we ever expect there to be peace in the Middle East if we tacitly approve of violations of international law and international human rights, if we look the other way, or if we close our eyes to the heartbreak of people on both sides by white-washing a legitimate investigation?

How can we protect the people of Israel from existential threats if we hold no concern for the protection of the Palestinians, for their physical security, their right to land, their right to their own homes, their right to water, their right to sustenance, their right to freedom of movement, their right to the human security of jobs, education and health care?

We will have peace only when the plight of both Palestinians and Israelis is brought before this House and given equal consideration in recognition of that principle that all people on this planet have a right to survive and thrive, and it is our responsibility, our duty to see that no individual, no group, no people are barred from this humble human claim.

Karadzic Defiant At UN War Crimes Court

2009-11-03T11:31:47Z

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Radovan Karadzic appeared at his U.N. war crimes trial on Tuesday for the first time since it began last week, claiming his "fundamental rights have been violated" by judges who started without him.

The former Bosnian Serb leader, accused of masterminding Serb atrocities throughout the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, had boycotted the first three days of the trial. On Tuesday, Karadzic, who is defending himself, again insisted that he needed more time to prepare.

Tony Judt: Justice Goldstone and the Jews

2009-10-29T16:31:37Z

We Jews should be very proud of Richard Goldstone. In an ancient tradition of Jewish self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling, the author of the recent report from the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict has braved personal vilification and institutional mendacity to describe the crimes committed by Israeli forces in the course of their invasion of Gaza in December 2008.

To be sure, the Goldstone Report also itemizes the crimes of Hamas, notably in its campaign of rocket-firing into Israel. But the scale of human rights abuses by Israel vastly outdoes anything Hamas could hope to have achieved: Israeli civilian victims of Hamas rocket attacks numbered less than ten. The attack on Gaza by the IDF resulted in at least 1,100 Palestinian civilian deaths. The major perpetrator of human rights abuses in this conflict is without question the State of Israel, and Justice Goldstone records as much.

That the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen to conduct an international campaign against Justice Goldstone and his report need not surprise us. Israel refused to cooperate with the UN investigation; long before its conclusions were published, Netanyahu had set in motion a campaign to deny and denigrate them. More dispiriting, and of greater political consequence, is the pitiful and humiliating response of the Obama Administration. The "fierce urgency of now" apparently required that Washington join Tel Aviv in discrediting the Goldstone Report, and with it the UN inquiry.

This response is of course in keeping with America's long-standing determination to protect Israel against the consequences of its actions at home and abroad; but the universal international condemnation of the destruction of Gaza renders the Obama Administration's response peculiarly self-defeating -- everyone knows what happened in Gaza, so Washington's collusion in covering it up merely draws further attention to the discrediting of U.S. foreign policy and moral standing brought about by our unhealthy relationship with Israel.

There is a special irony to the public slandering of Justice Goldstone now under way. In the first place he is not only Jewish but has close family links to Israel and the Zionist ideal. Secondly, Richard Goldstone has an impeccable resumé as a critic of racism, prejudice and repression -- most notably as an active opponent for many years of the apartheid regime in his native South Africa. During the '90s he served as Chief Prosecutor at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals dealing with human rights abuses, crimes and genocide in the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. It would be hard to fictionalize a more convincing biography for an engaged and ethically uncompromising jurist in the great tradition of Jewish political activism. Goldstone's standing in the world will only rise as a consequence of Israel's short-sighted attempts to discredit the man, the report and the facts. That our own government has chosen to join in this unworthy exercise should be a source of deep embarrassment and shame.

Please join me and Jews from all over the world in signing the Jewish Appeal Letter in Support of the Goldstone Report written by Jews Say No an organization in NY. Go to: http://www.petitiononline.com/UNreport/petition.html

Charles Karel Bouley: A City and Nation of Bystanders

2009-10-29T10:51:21Z

How could any American, any human, stand by as another is brutally raped? How could other Americans join in, jeer, take photos and videos with their cell phones as a 15 year old girl has man after man crawl on top of her drunken body, as she's held down to a bench in an alley, just 200 feet away from where her homecoming was going on? How could up to 20 people ignore this over two hours, two of the longest hours this girl would ever live, either walking past, or popping in to take a look or even a quickie? What was she thinking as man after man used her, abused her, as others ignored her, as two hours passed?

It's a scene right out of a movie like Jodie Foster's The Accused or The Brave One except it's real, a scene that played out Saturday, October 24, 2009 in an alley outside a high school in the town of Richmond, CA, a town of about 120,000 just outside of San Francisco. That's right, not in the backwoods of Podunkia, USA, not in a nation that doesn't value women, but in Richmond, a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) ride away from one of the most liberal cities in the world.

So far, four people have been arrested for rape, for assault, robbery and sexual assault with a foreign object. Up to 10 are said to have raped her, according to police and up to two dozen, yup, 24 people are said to have watched or happened upon the rape. And those that read the story wonder how? How could this happen here, in this country?

It's bystander syndrome, according to Drew Carberry, a director with the National Crime Prevention Council in Arlington, VA; the Genovese Effect. That's right, this phenomenon is so common it has a name.

"When people happen upon a scene, a crime, a horrific event, the norm become the norm, if that makes sense," he commented on my syndicated radio show Wednesday, October 28, 2009.

If a group of people are watching the event, it almost becomes acceptable for no one to do anything, if no one is doing anything. Inaction leads to more inaction in larger groups. A person passes a bad wreck on the freeway and sees everybody looking at it, and then don't call it in because they figure somebody else has. It's the same thing, they assume somebody else is taking care of it. ...

There's also the fear of getting involved. Many see things like this as somebody else's problem, in fact, the more people observing, the more people are apt to think it's up to somebody else to do something, that they don't need to act. There's also fear of retaliation, of what the involvement will entail and their overall feelings about the victim, the crime or the circumstance. ...

Before we called it 'Bystander Syndrome' it was, and is, known as 'Genovese Syndrome. Kitty Genovese was killed while many people watched, up to 60 that we know about. She was on the street in 1964 in New York when she was attacked, raped and then killed. When those in her building that heard the attack and/or saw the attack were interviewed in the New York Times, most simply said 'They didn't want to get involved.' Genovese's death rattled the community, the inaction more than the death in most cases, and Genovese Syndrome was named.

There's another name for that action, or inaction: cowardice. Only a coward would sit by and do nothing when someone is in trouble. And this rape, this crime, and Kitty Genovese's and others draws a frightening parallel to society as a whole. As many try to figure out how this could happen in Richmond, CA, others will wonder how this could happen in The United States of America.

America has been raped, pillaged and beaten so severely it's in the intensive care unit and may not recover. War criminals paraded around as the leaders of the country and extorted the nation, beat the nation in to compliance using terror, fear and verbal abuse unimpeded. A large group sat and sits inactive, like the group of spectators at the rape, doing nothing while the crimes against the American people continue and go unpunished.

533 people sit and do nothing while each year 45,000 Americans die, actually die, cease to exist, stop breathing, often after suffering for a long period of time, and the 433 members of Congress and 100 members of the Senate do nothing that will really help them immediately. Any help is delayed until 2013 and that help won't be to help the nation, or those truly needing the assistance needs. It is acceptable to this group of spectators to let over 100,000 Americans die over the years that they do nothing, debate, contemplate or refuse to act at all. They turn away to their chambers as real people, not numbers, but 45,000 real people die each year and those 533 people could end it and don't.

533 people sat and watched as American after American was, and is, marched off to the untold terror of war for no clear reason, no clear gain, with no clear plan. 4671 of them died as those 533 sat by and not only did nothing; in fact, they facilitated, paid for, cleared the way for more killing and death. Another 1493 died as these 533 turned their eyes on a new prize, a new battle a new war (both figures on Iraq and Afghanistan found at iCasualties.com).

533 people sat by as a leader terrorized a nation with false information and the manipulation of events for personal and professional gain. 533 people sit by as Americans are beaten or killed, denied benefits or discriminated against simply because of who or what they are.
And worse, 307 million others sat, and sit, by as their livelihood, their honor, dignity, their country and their culture is raped and ravaged, as their neighbors fall ill or fall in to poverty, as others are told they don't belong, as their institutions crumble.

George W. Bush is a war criminal, and no one drops a dime on him. Still. Dick Cheney a criminal, and no one turns him in, reports the crimes, punishes him. Congress lets Americans die each day from lack of health care and the only urgency they show is a half-assed plan that may help some four years down the line.

Let's face it, most Americans, especially those in power, have Bystander's syndrome, Genovese effect. Most have been bystanders in their country's fall. And why not, it's not a crime to ignore harsh truths, horrifying situations.

"It is a crime to not report a crime happening to a child," Carberry explained. "The law states in California that if you see something happening, know of something illegal happening, to someone under the age of 14 and do not report it, it's a crime," he added. "However, the girl was 15, so in this case, simply not calling the police, unfortunately, is not a crime."
Not a crime to see a crime and not report it, unless it can be proven that your actions or inactions in some way contributed to or incited someone to commit the crime? Turning a blind eye isn't illegal be it a crime in the alley against a young innocent girl or crimes being committed in the halls of Congress, White House or Wall Street?

A host on KGO Radio San Francisco, Bernie Ward, downloaded and looked at images of underage girls, nude and in "provocative" positions and then emailed them to one person. He downloaded them in one day, emailed them another. Three days of debauchery, total, as stated in court records. He's in jail in Texas for seven years as part of a plea bargain, they wanted him to get 17 years. He never took the photos. He never touched a teenager, ever. He downloaded photos from a site, and emailed a few. Disgusting, yes. But he will serve more time in jail than the student quoted by the AP on Tuesday, October 27, 2009, identified only as "Rubio" who said to the AP that some "dudes" came up to him in the courtyard of the school, told him there was a girl naked in the alley and said if he wanted to "get some" he should go back. He didn't, but he didn't call anyone. He could have ended the rape an hour into it, an hour, instead of the two, and he didn't. He knew a girl was being raped, was told so, did nothing, and he won't see the inside of a cell. No one that saw, looked, and then didn't want to get involved will see the inside of a cell.

As of now, the war criminals that destroyed America and the current bunch that sit and do nothing as we sink further, as we die, will not only not be punished but will prosper. And those that sit by and watch, the millions of Americans that did and do nothing about the Iraq War, that do nothing about Afghanistan, that do nothing about 45,000 annual deaths from lack of health care, the same people that sat by as AIDS ravaged the gay community in the 1980s, the same country that does nothing as tens of thousands are slaughtered in its name or as a select few make billions while Americans starve or lose their homes to banks and corporate criminals...the only punishment for their inactivity, for our inactivity, is having to live in the country that apathy creates.

The rape in Richmond, CA, and the fact that 20 or more watched it and did nothing isn't an aberration, it's now the norm. Sitting by and watching as Americans are harmed, or die, isn't unusual, it's business as usual for Congress, the Senate, the President and most of We, the People.

Americans have bystander's syndrome, Genovese effect, not just on the streets of New York or Richmond, CA, but it would appear in every nook and cranny, in every area of American life. People afraid to get involved, afraid to speak up, frustrated that it won't matter, people that condone inaction because they don't approve of the person or thing being attacked have become the norm, while those that try and stop the harm, stop the devastation, stop the violence are few and far between.

A 15 year old girl will have to grow up and know that while she lay being raped and beaten, robbed and degraded beyond belief over two dozen watched and did nothing, or even participated. A nation will have to go on knowing that while it lay injured, broke, sick, confused, afraid, millions sat by and did nothing, participated or even prospered. And if it keeps up, will watch as 533 people, and 300 million others watch doing little or nothing and when it all finally crumbles and falls apart will ask themselves "Why?"

The "Why?" is simple: because people today, en masse, won't do the right thing, won't get involved, won't say Stop! This is Wrong! Wait! Do Something Now! Because no one is demanding immediate action, because everyone believes someone else will, or is, taking care of it, and in doing so, will be bystanders to the fall of one of the greatest nations in history.

To Hear Karel's segment on this, hear more podcasts, read more Huffington Post columns or watch videos of these discussions go to RadioKRL.com .

Radovan Karadzic, Former Bosnian-Serb Leader, Heard Discussing Massacre In Phone Tap Evidence

2009-10-27T11:26:00Z

Sensational new wireteap evidence of Radovan Karadzic discussing the mass slaughter of 300,000 Muslims was unveiled today at the genocide trial of the former Bosnian Serb leader.

Heinrich Boere, Nazi Hit Man, Goes On Trial In Germany

2009-10-27T09:42:07Z

BERLIN — Heinrich Boere has admitted to gunning down three men as part of a Waffen SS death squad – civilians killed in retribution for partisan attacks in Holland as the tide of World War II turned against the Nazis.

But for more than six decades after the war, he managed to avoid punishment – first escaping from a prisoner of war camp in the Netherlands, then successfully eluding the courts in Germany.

Radovan Karadzic Boycotts His Own War Crimes Trial

2009-10-26T10:45:24Z

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — His chair was empty, his headphones lay idle on the desk. In Courtroom One at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, outraged survivors of Bosnia's bloody war gasped in disbelief Monday as judges adjourned the opening day of Radovan Karadzic's trial after just 15 minutes.

The former Bosnian Serb leader boycotted his war crimes trial, claiming he did not have enough time to prepare his defense – even though he was indicted in 1995 and had known he would be tried since being captured in Belgrade over 15 months ago.

Benjamin Netanyahu On Iranian Threat: "The Issue Is Not The Security Of Israel But Of The World"

2009-10-24T16:23:33Z

NEWSWEEK's Lally Weymouth spoke to Netanyahu in Jerusalem last week. Excerpts:

WEYMOUTH: What did you think of the Goldstone report?
NETANYAHU: I thought there were limits to hypocrisy, but I was obviously wrong. The so-called human-rights commission accuses Israel--which legitimately defended itself against Hamas--of war crimes.

Dave Lindorff: Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

2009-10-16T17:34:05Z

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined "Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange," which was sure to be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13 ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also responsible for three more dread diseases -- Parkinson's, ischemic heart disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by exposure to Agent Orange.

This is another belated step forward in the decades-long struggle by Vietnam War veterans to get the Defense Department and the VA to acknowledge the American government's responsibility for poisoning them and causing permanent damage to them and often to their children and grandchildren. Dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances known to man, is known to cause many serious systemic diseases, autoimmune illnesses, cancers and birth defects. (It is also a warning about the general Pentagon and government approach to other hazards caused by its battlefield use of toxins -- most significantly the increasingly common use of depleted uranium projectiles in bombs, shells and bullets -- an approach which features lack of concern about health effects on troops and civilians, denial of information to troops, and denial of care to eventual victims.)

Missing from the Times article, written by military affairs reporter James Dao, which did include mention of the obstructionist role the government has played through this whole sorry saga, was a single mention of the far larger number of victims of Agent Orange in Vietnam -- the people on whose heads and lands the toxic chemical was actually dropped, or of the adamant refusal by the US government to accept any responsibility for what it did to them.

According to the article, the VA estimates that there may be as many as 200,000 US veterans who are suffering from Agent Orange-related illnesses. But according to a court case brought on behalf of Vietnamese victims, which was dismissed by a US Federal District Judge who ruled that there was "no basis for the claims," there are at least three million Vietnamese, and possibly as many as 4.8 million, who are suffering the same Agent Orange-related illnesses as American veterans and their children. It is estimated that as many as 800,000 Vietnamese in the country's south currently suffer from chronic health problems due to Agent Orange exposure, either to themselves, or to a parent or grandparent. Most of these victims, some of whom are retarded, and others of whom cannot walk or have no use of their arms, need constant care.

Veterans for Peace, an organization whose membership includes a large number of Vietnam War veterans, has issued a call for the US to provide funds for health care, education, vocational education, chronic care, home care and equipment to clean up hotspots of dioxin in Vietnam -- a call which Congress and the White House have consistently ignored. Tests have found dioxin levels around the sites of the three main former US bases in what was South Vietnam to be 300-400 times recognized safe levels. The US dumped huge amounts of Agent Orange for miles around those bases to kill off jungle cover that Vietnamese fighters could use to approach the bases, but it was never cleaned up when the US pulled out.

One organization that includes a number of American veterans, including former military doctors or soldiers who later became physicians, is the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA Inc., which raises funds to help establish communities in Vietnam to care for the victims of Agent Orange.

It may seem a pathetic stab at principle given America's use of two nuclear weapons against civilian targets in Japan a few years later, but back in World War II, in the midst of the most brutal island-to-island fighting during the Pacific War, a US Judge Advocate General in the Pentagon ruled that a military request for permission to use herbicides against the Japanese on Pacific islands would be illegal under the Hague Convention (forerunner of what are now called the Geneva Conventions). He ruled that trying to destroy the crops of civilians on those islands to deny food to the Japanese troops would be a war crime. The US went ahead and used the herbicides anyway, arguing that even though it was illegal, the US was free to go ahead, since the Japanese had already broken the laws of war by using strychnine to kill military guard dogs in Siberia. Under the rules of war, if one side breaks a rule, the other side is no longer bound by it.

But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese never used toxic materials against US forces or against South Vietnamese forces. And the Pentagon in the Vietnam War never even considered whether spraying a highly toxic herbicide over 1.4 million hectares--12% of the total land area of Vietnam and almost 25% of the southern half of the country -- might be a war crime.

Moreover, the Pentagon knew, before it began its massive defoliation campaign, about studies showing that Agent Orange was heavily laced with deadly dioxin, but covered up those studies, some by the chemical's makers, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, and never even warned the troops who handled the material daily, or who were sent out to fight in areas that had been heavily sprayed.

The ongoing medical disaster in Vietnam caused by America's criminal use of Agent Orange to defoliate a nation would be a good place for President Obama to start earning his just-awarded Nobel Peace Prize. He could kick off his peace campaign by finally honoring President Richard Nixon's immediately broken promise to provide several billion dollars in reconstruction aid to Vietnam at the conclusion of peace talks at the end of the war. Not a dollar of such aid was ever given.

Dao says he didn't mention significance for Vietnamese dioxin victims of the VA's decision to recognize three new diseases as being Agent Orange-linked, because "my beat is veterans," and because he only had 800 words in which to cover his story. That may be true (though surely the Vietnamese at least deserved a one-sentence mention). But back on July 25, when the Times ran a story (by Janie Lorber, not by Dao) about the finding by an expert panel of the National Institute of Medicine linking Parkinsons, ischemic heart disease and leukemia to Agent Orange, upon which the latest VA decision was based, it also failed to mention the Vietnamese victims. In that case, the lapse was simply journalistically inexcusable, since it was about a new medical finding, not a policy decision regarding the treatment of veterans.

At this point, the only way theNew York Times can salvage a bit of its journalistic reputation on this topic would be by having Dao, Lorber or some other reporter write a piece about the impact of America's Agent Orange use on the people of Vietnam. They could start by calling a veteran at Veterans for Peace or the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA.

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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Bradley Burston: Goldstone, Israel's Frankenstein Monster

2009-10-15T17:33:34Z

I put off reading the Goldstone report the same way I put off scheduling a colonoscopy. I now realize it was for many of the same reasons. You know it's going to be tremendously uncomfortable, you don't want to know what they're going to find, and the consequences could be life-threatening. I know that I am not alone. Despite the many people who have made strident declarations about the report, few have actually read it, end to end.

It's a tough slog, the hundreds of pages of the UN-sponsored report on allegations of war crimes in Gaza. The material is infuriating at times, the content inconsistent, the methodology slapdash. But for anyone who cares about the future of this place, and for anyone who has paid close attention to the hyperbole and factual errors of Israeli leaders in condemning it, the read is more than worthwhile -- if only for the key element of its surprise ending: A marked degree of fairness.

It does not question the right of Israel -- or, for that matter, the Palestinians -- to self-defense, but it accuses both sides of having resorted to war crimes in the course of, or in the name of, defending themselves. The inquiry breaks new ground for the UN, and breaks sharply from its original mandate, in addressing Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians.

From the start, Israel's responses have been that of the brilliant blockhead -- the lawyer so in love with his own case that he persuades no one. And everything that Israel has done in its own defense has made its situation worse.

You know the Golem story. It opens with political pressures and popular frustration, channeled and fueled by frankly anti-Semitic clerics and their disciples under arms, all backed by a regional power interested in stirring up local trouble to consolidate and expand its own restive, second-rate empire. The result: attacks and threats of mass-murder against the Jews.

You know the response as well: A leader of the Jews, well-versed in tradition and tragedy, creates and puts into operation a monster to save his people. After apparent initial success, the leader discovers that the monster can be neither controlled, deactivated, nor dismantled. Its actions, taken the name of self-defense, have put the Jews, once again, in danger.

In retrospect, the Golem story was much more than Jewry's 16th century precursor to Frankenstein, the well-intentioned living construction which ultimately turns on its creator, who is a man too smart by far for his own good. It also turns out to have been the blueprint for Israeli history and policy from its very inception.

The direct outcome of success in facing the apparent prospect of wholesale slaughter of Jews in 1948 has stalked Israel ever since, in the ever-swelling form of the Palestinians' own version of the Golem, the Naqba. The direct outcome of success in averting the apparent prospect of wholesale murder of Jews in 1967 was the grand Golem of the occupation. The direct outcome of success in grooming Islamic fundamentalist charities and prayer groups to counter ostensibly Marxist Palestinian armed groups in Gaza in the '70s and '80s, was the creation in 1987 of the Islamic Resistance Movement -- for short, Hamas.

And now, as an outgrowth of all of these, and of Israel's war in Gaza and its handling of the fallout of that war, comes a dark new threat, amorphous, which with nothing more than a long shadow has struck terror into the most powerful men in Israel - many of whose decisions were instrumental in building it into what it is today, the monster whom Israel has come to know and dread by the name of Goldstone.

Like all contemporary versions of the Frankenstein story, this one has a twist. And like all version of the Golem story, the Jews have the best of intentions, no clue about the worst-case scenario, and an uncanny ability to make that scenario come to life.

What was Israel's role here? It began long before the creature began to take form, and long, long before it took its first tentative steps.

It was rooted in the belief that the only way to counter and deter Hamas, and, optimally, bring about its downfall, was a show of force of devastating proportion. It was rooted in the belief that after the poorly planned, poorly managed debacle of the Second Lebanon War, and 12,000 rockets and mortar shells pumped into the Negev from Gaza over eight years, an angry Israeli public, feeling abandoned by the world and inconsequential to their own leaders, would tolerate only a minute number of IDF casualties when war came, even if that meant a nearly unlimited number of Palestinian civilian losses.

It was also rooted in the belief -- oddly un-Israeli, more an outgrowth of the Polish shtetl than the Palmach -- that a fair hearing for Israel in international bodies of justice was so inconceivable, that the best defense was no defense at all.

Israel's decision not to cooperate with the Goldstone Mission, and, in many respects, to actively hamper its work, was calamitous. In revealing correspondence pointedly reproduced in the report, Justice Goldstone all but gets down on hands and knees to beg Israel to allow it to balance the report with on-site visits to rocket-torn Sderot, extensive direct testimony from victims of Qassam attacks, and first-person accounts and explanations of soldiers accused of violations of international law. Israel says no. Benjamin Netanyahu won't even go so far as to answer Goldstone's letter.

Now the report is out, alive and ticking, and Israel -- in its desperation to deflect the monster, no matter the consequences -- has already managed to hand it as a stick to Hamas, to beat and perhaps eventually defeat Fatah, Mahmoud Abbas, and the Palestinian Authority.

...

The bottom line, for Israelis, is simply this: Israel desperately needs a respected commission of inquiry of its own, to probe precisely the charges leveled by the Goldstone Mission. Israel owes its own citizens no less. It needs this, first and foremost, for the sake of its own future, and for the moral standards that it has explicitly set for itself. In fact, this is what Justice Goldstone is recommending that Israel do, specifically to avoid a summons to the Hague.

Then again, this government is led by Benjamin Netanyahu of MIT and Ehud Barak of Stanford, two men who may still be too blinded by their own brilliance to be able to see how blind they have become. Their temptation now will be to choose the risk of sacrificing their country's best long-term interests over the risk of being proven wrong. And, if current indications hold, both options may well come to pass.

Now I'll have to schedule that colonoscopy.

Daoud Kuttab: Lessons From the Palestinian Goldstone-Gate

2009-10-08T14:50:24Z

The angry political and public reaction to the decision by the Palestinian leadership to postpone discussions of the Goldstone war crimes report requires a sober look at the reasons and lessons that need to be learned to avoid repetition.

Anger came from Palestinians and non-Palestinians alike, including many supporters of Palestine. Arab media, especially Al Jazeera dedicated hours and hours of prime time TV to give space to bombastic attacks against Mahmoud Abbas and his leadership. Public accusations calling Abbas a traitor who sells out the blood of Palestinians in Gaza have become so common that it is worrisome.

Anti-Abbas demonstrations took place in Gaza and Ramallah, and many petitions, public statements and web-based messages were issued.

While the Palestinian president has established a PLO committee headed by a non-Fateh member to investigate what happened, a number of facts are undisputed. The Human Rights Commission members were ready and willing to vote in favour of turning the report over to the UN Security Council. At least 33 of the 45-member council appeared to be willing to vote for it.

It is also undisputed that although the Palestinian observer delegation has no right to vote, its clear support for the postponement was key to the decision of the voting delegates. Arab and Muslim leaders who were also under US pressure said in public that they could not be more Palestinian than the Palestinian leadership.

Many more details have now come out about the US and Israeli pressure and arm-twisting tactics. President Barack Obama called Abbas and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worked her diplomatic machine using the US consulate in Jerusalem, all apparently due to the pleading of the Israelis.

The Israeli media publicly talked about harsh economic pressures threatened if the Goldstone Report is not postponed. The Palestinians were apparently blackmailed with the possibility of denying license to a second cellular phone company, which would have cost the Palestinian government $300 million in punitive fees. The fact that the second company includes some direct and indirect relations to the PA leadership has not been denied by Ramallah.

The Palestinian leadership was caught completely off guard and has failed to provide satisfactory justifications. Attempts to say that they are not voting members or that the war crimes report also implicated Hamas failed to convince anyone.

The longer the Palestinian leadership refused to take responsibility the longer the attacks have continued.

Even the high marks Abbas garnered coming out of the sixth Fateh congress and the holding of the Palestine Central Council that elected pro-Abbas executive committee members failed to shield the Palestinian leader from angry public attacks.

Understanding some of the circumstances surrounding this scandal can help put things into context. The terrible results, in Palestinian eyes, of the New York tripartite summit after months of high expectations from the Obama administration left Palestinians and their supporters totally disillusioned and hopeless in a US-led diplomatic breakthrough.

With disappointment from the political process high, the only option to put real pressure on the Israeli occupiers seems to be in dealing with Israel's crimes of war. The Goldstone Report was a Godsend and the squirming of the Israelis proved to many that the threat of effective war crime accusations might be their Achilles heel.

Another circumstantial problem is the controversy over the licensing of the Watania cellular company. For over two years the PA, with help from Tony Blair and others in the Quartet, has been pushing Israel to release the airwaves that would allow for the second cell phone company to work.

On the eve of the Goldstone discussions, the Israelis bluntly came out in public saying that the licensing of Watania was conditional on the PA's position regarding the report.

Whether this was the motive behind the Palestinian decision or not, the appearance of a quid pro quo became fodder for discussions, to the point that even the former UN special rapporteur for Palestine, Robert Falk, mentioned this as a reason, even though he was unable to provide evidence of this allegation when confronted by a reporter.

Even supporters of the Palestinian Authority admit that it was clearly outmaneuvered by the Israelis and the Americans, and was seen to be totally out of touch with its own public and the Arab and international supporters.

What are the lessons that the Palestinian Authority should derive?

To begin with, it is clear that Abbas relied much more on his close advisers than on the legal bodies that represent Palestinians, or at least the ruling Fateh faction. Neither Fateh's central committee nor the executive committee of the PLO were consulted or involved in the decision. Leaks from the two groups say that whatever discussions took place within these bodies was totally unfavourable to postponing discussion on the report.

Even the Fayyad administration, while mostly a technocratic government, is reported to have been opposed to this decision. Had he sought and received approval from these two representative bodies, Abbas would have saved himself much of the personal attacks and would have made all involved responsible.

What comes out of the behind-the-scenes discussions is that Abbas and his top advisers rarely use the weapon of political and public opposition in Palestine. At a time when the Israeli government stands up to tremendous US pressure, stressing its refusal to fulfill international obligations, the Palestinians are not used to saying that a decision will not fly by the opposition or the public at large.

In this context, it appears that Abbas seems to exaggerate the consequences of saying no to the US then the Western-trained pro-US Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Reliable sources told this correspondent that Fayyad rejected US pressure on this issue, saying that the Palestinian public cannot handle this problem after what happened in New York.

Furthermore, the Palestinian leadership seems ill equipped to deal politically and publicly with such experienced and cunning counterparts. Instead of being caught off guard, the Palestinian leadership rarely makes political demands or uses the media to preempt a potential problem.

Imagine if the PA requested and received an Israeli release of 1,000 prisoners or the stoppage of house demolition in Jerusalem in return for its support for this unpopular move. Imagine if the PA leaked news of the US pressure in order to prepare the public for its decision, or used such a leak to seek Arab and Muslim support so as not have to face the unbearable pressure alone.

The PA also needs to have a much better understanding of the feelings of its people. A trial balloon of the possibility of such a decision would have brought enough reactions to alert the leadership of the possible consequences.

Finally, as has been learned by so many scandals involving senior officials, the cover-up is often worse than the original mistake.

The Palestinian president did well to appoint a committee to investigate, but that is not enough. He needs to address his people, take responsibility for his actions, take some tough decisions, including firing some advisers, and then vow to keep his ears closer to the public.

Jessica Montell: The Goldstone Report on Gaza

2009-10-01T13:08:58Z

JERUSALEM - For Jews around the world, the ten days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is the season of soul-searching, where we ask forgiveness both from God and from our fellow human beings for sins large and small. But this year the Jewish holiday season came just as the UN issued a scathing report on Israel's recent military operation in the Gaza Strip. And so, my government's representatives around the globe have turned the tradition upside-down; rather than taking responsibility and making amends, they spent the past ten days deflecting all accusation of wrongdoing.

The UN fact-finding mission headed by Richard Goldstone found that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes in last winter's military operation in Gaza. The report calls on both sides to launch criminal investigations into these allegations and to hold accountable anyone found to have committed these crimes. If either side fails to do so, the mission has requested various UN bodies to take measures to ensure such accountability.

Israel's response is a categorical condemnation of the report as biased and one-sided (Hamas has made a similar condemnation). Government spokespeople and major Jewish organizations claim the report is so fundamentally flawed as to be useless, or worse, a blood libel. The U.S. also criticized the report, dismissing calls for any serious international follow-up.

The full-throated, unequivocal denouncement is unsubstantiated: Israel claims the report ignores eight years of Hamas rocket fire at Southern Israel, though the report firmly denounces these attacks, calling them war crimes. Israel points to the one-sided mandate formulated by the UN Human Rights Council, though we know that Justice Goldstone accepted the offer to head the inquiry only on condition that its mandate was explicitly expanded to include all sides.

This is not to say that the report has no faults. I was disturbed by the framing of Israel's military operation as part of "an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience." The facts presented in the report itself would not seem to support such a far-reaching conclusion. In light of the sweeping conclusions regarding Israel, the very careful phrasing regarding Hamas abuses is particularly conspicuous. The mission did not find conclusive evidence regarding Hamas' use of mosques and civilian buildings for military purposes, nor does it criticize Hamas' firing from and shielding themselves within civilian areas. The evidence accumulated over the past eight months regarding both these phenomenon cannot be ignored.

Yet these lacunae are an indictment of Israel as much as of the UN report. Justice Goldstone all but begged Israel to cooperate with the mission and provide all the information it has to make its case. Israel refused, thereby dooming the report to a perhaps inevitable blind spot. I cannot avoid the feeling that Israel actually prefers this emphatically harsh, yet flawed report. Israel's generals and legal advisors will never acknowledge it publicly, but they must know their conduct in the Gaza operation did not accord with international requirements. This would also be reflected in the more measured, nuanced report that would have resulted from Israeli cooperation. Yet such a report would be much harder to denounce.

All the tendentious mudslinging and the more grounded criticism cannot delegitimize the report's central recommendation: that Israel itself must conduct credible investigations into its own conduct. The whole international system is based on the premise that justice should be done at home. Only in cases where there is no possibility of obtaining a domestic remedy does the international community step in to fill the vacuum. The Goldstone report reiterates this premise.

For months the Israeli human rights community has urged Israel to open credible, independent investigations into the hundreds of allegations of military misconduct. Israel has stubbornly refused, largely making do with military debriefings that categorically absolve Israeli forces of any wrongdoing. Only a handful of military police investigations have been opened, and the one criminal investigation to be concluded is the exception that proves the rule. A soldier in the Givati brigade was tried, convicted and sentenced -- for stealing a credit card.

After eight months of lobbying and advocacy, eight months in which B'Tselem sent dozens of cases to Israeli law enforcement officials, I must conclude that left to its own devices, Israel would never conduct the necessary investigations. Such an outcome is intolerable for the Palestinian residents of Gaza, who have no redress for all that they suffered. It is also harmful for Israeli society which has a right to know what was done in its name, and for Israeli democracy. And it is extremely damaging for the international legal system if such a high-profile case can be ignored. Under the circumstances, the international community cannot let this scenario occur.

So Israel now has a choice. It can continue to shoot the messenger and bury its head in the sand, hoping despite all signs to the contrary that this whole controversy will somehow disappear. Or it can initiate a genuine process of truth-telling and taking responsibility. Such a process may well be painful, but we will emerge stronger and healthier for it. As a friend and crucial supporter, the United States should not dismiss the report out of hand but rather encourage Israel to conduct serious investigations.

Jessica Montell is Executive Director of B'Tselem: the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. jmontell@btselem.org