Puppet MastersS


Attention

Israeli news broadcasters don't cry: Shlomi Eldar reflects on the live television report that profoundly changed the way he sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Ayelett Shani
Haaretz
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:35 UTC
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© Gali EytanShlomi Eldar
As a commentator, you're considered an odd bird.

Let's say that for a time I was a person whom people liked not liking. It's very easy to be a well-liked commentator: you simply tell the public what it wants to hear. But I always chose to tell the truth. And regrettably, I was never wrong. Both in Operation Cast Lead [the 2008-09 campaign in Gaza] and [last November's follow-up] Operation Pillar of Defense, people were furious at me. People cursed me, sent messages, found me on Facebook and called me a Hamas man. But I saw where it was all going, and said so.

Not as a provocation.

No. I just say what I think. I read the situation, I don't go by gut feelings or political beliefs. I thought it was wrong to assassinate Ahmed Jabari [the head of Hamas' military wing]. Not because he didn't deserve to die. He deserved to die. But the method of eliminating some top person and thinking someone better will replace him is wrong. All you do is heighten the problem. A top figure in the defense establishment told me, "Israel built up Hamas, not by its deeds but by its failures."

Because we are always putting out fires.

All the decisions of the political leadership are made ad hoc, and aimed at putting out fires.
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Attention

Israeli reporter admits suppressing images of 'piles of bodies of civilians' when Israel went 'crazy' in Gaza

Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss
Sun, 20 Jan 2013 15:42 UTC
A staggering, doom-laden interview published by Haaretz with an Israeli television journalist suggests that the full truth of what happened in Gaza 4 years ago was suppressed not only when the United States and its author stomped the Goldstone Report-- which alleged deliberate targeting of civilians-- but suppressed by Israelis too. Shlomi Eldar was Gaza correspondent for Channel 10 news. Here is what he saw and could not live with but put in "an envelope" and has never published, awaiting a commission of inquiry that never has come:
"I came into possession of shocking material. The kind of material that sends you to a psychologist. I have never shown it. Children who were shot. Piles of bodies of civilians... I came into possession of material about very grim events relating to the idea that Israel was deliberately 'going crazy.' Testimonies, images and much more. So many people were killed there."
Reflect that this was a slaughter initiated by a centrist government now perceived as center-left in Israeli politics. Reflect that a story that Eldar did report, a documentary called Precious Life about Israelis working to treat a Gaza infant born with an immune deficiency, was written up at great length by Tom Friedman in the New York Times, with a lecture to his readers that if they were going to criticize Israel, they should watch this video about the "real Middle East" so as to be "constructive."
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Dollar

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein gets 75 percent raise

Mark Gongloff
Huffington Post
Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:37 UTC
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Angry about your paycheck shrinking this year because the payroll tax cut expired? Well, this should cheer you right up: Goldman Sachs's CEO got a 75 percent raise this year.

Lloyd Blankfein made $21 million last year, including a $2 million salary and a $19 million bonus, CNN/Money reports. That bonus includes $5.6 million in cash. Bloomberg pegs the total pay at $19 million, but what's a couple of million dollars, really?

Blankfein's haul represents a 75 percent pay increase from the year before, CNN/Money notes. It is also nearly double the paltry $11.5 million that Jamie Dimon, CEO of the nation's biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, took home.
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War Whore

US assassination drones kill 8 in central Yemen


Press TV
Sun, 20 Jan 2013 13:17 UTC
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An American assasination drone
Eight people have been killed in the latest US assassination drone attacks in the Yemeni province of Marib.

Yemeni military officials said that the attacks were carried out by two American unmanned aerial vehicles in Abieda valley in the central province late on Saturday.

Local residents also said that two Saudi nationals were among the victims of the drone strikes.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the local residents said that three of the bodies were burnt beyond recognition.

The US has increased the number of its drone attacks in Yemen.
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Megaphone

New violence in Belfast may be about more than the flag

John F. Burns
NY Times
Sun, 20 Jan 2013 09:30 UTC
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© Peter Muhly/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagePolice officers in Belfast, Northern Ireland, remained with their armored vehicles as a car burned after violence between unionists and loyalists on Jan. 12.
For more than six weeks, it has been a dismal case of back-to-the-future, a crudely sectarian upheaval that has defied all attempts at peacemaking.

The scenes recall the sectarian bitterness that infused the 30 years of virtual civil war known as the Troubles: night after night of street protests marshaled by balaclava-wearing militants, who have updated their tactics by using social media to rally mobs; death threats to prominent politicians, some of whom have fled their homes and hidden under police guard; firebombs, flagstones and rocks hurled at churches, police cars and lawmakers' offices; protesters joined by rock-throwing boys of 8 and 9; neighborhoods sealed off for hours by the police or protesters' barricades.

Many had hoped that the old hatreds between Northern Ireland's two main groups - the mainly Protestant, pro-British unionists, and the mainly Roman Catholic republicans, with their commitment to a united Ireland - would recede permanently under the auspices of the Good Friday agreement. That accord was reached 15 years ago as a blueprint for the power-sharing government that now rules the province.
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USA

Aaron Swartz: Cannon fodder in the war against internet freedom

John Naughton
Guardian
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:45 UTC
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© Photograph: Noah Berger/ReutersAaron Swartz, the US hacker and internet activist who killed himself earlier this month.
Governments are determined to control the internet, and if hackers like Swartz get in the way, they will be crushed.

On 11 January, a young American geek named Aaron Swartz killed himself, and most of the world paid no attention. In the ordinary run of things, "it was not an important failure", as Auden put it in Musée des Beaux Arts.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

But Swartz's death came like a thunderbolt in cyberspace, because this insanely talented, idealistic, complex, diminutive lad was a poster boy for everything that we value about the networked world. He was 26 when he died, but from the age of 14 he had been astonishing those of us who followed him on the internet. In 10 years he had accomplished more than most people do in a lifetime.

In the days following his death, the blogosphere resounded with expressions of grief, sadness and loss not just from people who had worked with him, but also from those who only knew him from afar - the users of the things he helped to create (the RSS web feed, social news website Reddit, the Creative Commons copyright licences, for example), or those who had followed his scarily open and thoughtful blogging.
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Target

Mali's army suspected of abuses and unlawful killings as war rages

Afua Hirsch
Guardian
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:38 UTC
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© Photograph: Thibault Camus/APMalian soldiers on manoeuvres. Asked if troops were guilty of war crimes, justice minister Malick Coulibaly said: ‘No army is perfect.’
There are growing reports of extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses in Mali, as troops battle Islamist militants in the west African country.

Residents of Mopti, in the centre of the country, told the Observer of arrests, interrogations and the torture of innocents by the Malian army of those mistakenly suspected of involvement in rebel activity. "One day my son just disappeared," said a woman from the Fulani ethnic group, who asked not to be named. "We looked for him there for two or three days, but couldn't find him. Then some people told us that on the day he left, the army shot two people and put them in a pit inside the military base."

The victim's cousin, who also asked to remain anonymous for fears of reprisals, said: "We are Fulani people, the soldiers can tell from our dress that we come from the north.

"Because of that, the army suspects us - if we look like Fulani and don't have an identity card, they kill us. But many people are born in the small villages and it's very difficult to have identification.

"We are all afraid," the cousin continued. "There are some households where Fulanis or others who are fair-skinned don't go out any more. We have stopped wearing our traditional clothes - we are being forced to abandon our culture, and to stay indoors."
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Pistol

Central America's tiny states caught in deadly crossfire of battle with cartels

Ed Vulliamy
Guardian
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:35 UTC
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© Photograph: John ColettiThe National Theatre in San José, Costa Rica. Even this tourist-friendly Central American country has become tangled in the drugs trade
President Otto Pérez Molina presides over a small nation at a major junction in the history of the Americas - and now of the drug war. Central America faces a menace from the conflict even greater, relatively, than that faced by its Mexican neighbours to the north, or by Colombians to the south.

For while Colombia, which has all but neutralised the major cartels, and Mexico, which fights all-out war against them, are strong societies with significant economies, the same cannot be said of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, which have become the passageway for the drugs to which the North American "gringo" is so determinedly addicted.

They are poor, hospitable and breathtakingly beautiful countries but frail, largely agrarian societies just recovering from decades of ideological "dirty wars" - on to which the narco cartels' battles now superimpose themselves.

There was, therefore, a bitter echo in the arrival of the US Marines' Operation Martillo in Guatemala last year, after 36 years of US-backed "dirty war" that left 200,000 dead, mostly indigenous Mayan peasant farmers.
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Eye 2

Is Britain guilty of systemic torture in Iraq?

Ed Vulliamy
Guardian
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:31 UTC
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© Photograph: ReutersA British soldier guards Iraqi prisoners in the city of Basra in April 2003.
In the Lebanese capital of Beirut, far from the theatre of war in Iraq and his office in Birmingham, one of Britain's leading civil rights lawyers has gathered some of the most damning allegations ever levelled against this country's armed forces - certainly since the worst days of Northern Ireland's Troubles.

As Britain's invasion of Iraq approaches its 10th anniversary in March, Phil Shiner - who founded the Public Interest Lawyers group - and members of his team have held face-to-face meetings with survivors of alleged abuse and torture by British soldiers and intelligence officers and with relatives of those unlawfully killed during and after the war that defined the premiership of Tony Blair.

The statements - 180 of them, with 871 to follow - go before a judicial review hearing at the high court in London next week in a claim seeking to demonstrate that Britain broke international laws of war by pursuing a policy of systematic torture.

The testimony is shocking, such as from "Khalid", a detained Iraqi civilian: "[A British soldier] then grabbed my penis and dragged me around the floor while holding it. He also made me squat up and down whilst naked and inserted his finger into my anus. I would have preferred to have been killed than subjected to this."
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Bad Guys

British troops face fresh charges of Iraq war torture and killings

Ed Vulliamy
Guardian
Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:29 UTC
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© Photograph: PAA still from video of a British soldier screaming abuse at hooded Iraqi detainees played to the public inquiry into the death of of Baha Mousa.
Britain will face fresh charges of breaching international law over the alleged torture and killing of prisoners during the war in Iraq, which began almost exactly 10 years ago. The allegations will be unveiled in the high court, when Britain will stand accused of a "systemic" policy of abuse committed over five years, from 2003 to 2008.

At a hearing scheduled over three days from 29 January, lawyers for 180 Iraqis who claim they are victims of abuse, or that their family members were unlawfully killed, will place a file of statements before two judges presiding over the court in London accusing British soldiers and intelligence officers of unlawful interrogation practices. These include hooding and the use of "stress positions", sexual abuse, beating and religious abuse of illegally detained prisoners. In some cases, the testimonies allege, the torture led to the death of the prisoner.

The statements were compiled during meetings with victims and relatives, mostly in Lebanon, by human rights lawyer Phil Shiner of the Public Interest Lawyers group, based in Birmingham.
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