Israel faces UN war crimes probe

Mother and child, Zeitoun, south-east Gaza.

First the Israeli army drops the leaflets warning Palestinians to get out of their homes because there will be an air raid. Then they pack 110 of them, half of whom are children, into a single-storey house in Zeitoun, south-east Gaza, "for their safety". Then they bomb the house. Repeatedly. Then they refuse to allow medical teams to evacuate the wounded.

Israel faces UN war crimes probe
The UN, which has called for an "immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of Israeli ground troops from Gaza" (Security Council Vote 14-0, US abstaining), has called for an investigation.

The Guardian totals it up :

"The UN put the Palestinian death toll at 758, of whom it said 42% were women and children – 60 women and 257 children. Around 3,100 Palestinians have been injured.
Three Israeli soldiers were killed bringing the Israeli death toll to 13, of whom three were civilians.

"There is no safe space in the Gaza Strip – no safe haven, no bomb shelters, and the borders are closed and civilians have no place to flee," said a report from the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs. It said three quarters of Gaza's 1.5 million people had now been without electricity since Sunday, and 800,000 Gazans had no running water.

"The UN relief and works agency, by far the largest humanitarian agency in Gaza, suspended its operations yesterday, after Israeli forces opened fire on a UN-contracted convoy collecting food aid from the Erez crossing in north Gaza. One man was killed and two others injured. Later , a marked UN convoy of two armoured vehicles was hit by Israeli troops when they stopped to try to recover the dead body of a Palestinian UN staff member during a scheduled three-hour ceasefire."

I wonder what was so difficult to figure out about a white truck with a big red cross painted on the roof. Perhaps that 14-0 UN resolution for complete withdrawal from Gaza was to blame.

The Guardian again :

"15,000 Gazans are sheltering in UN schools because they have been forced to flee their homes in the face of the Israeli air and ground offensive, or even ordered out by Israeli troops. The UN has opened 27 of its schools as shelters."

So far Israel has bombed two of them, despite the UN giving the GPS coordinates to the IDF, claiming they were countering mortar fire from the vicinity of the school. However as we read inthe Israeli paper Haaretz :

"UN: IDF officers admitted there was no gunfire from Gaza school which was shelled ... all the footage released by the IDF of militants firing from inside the school was from 2007 and not from the incident itself. "

And what's the reaction in Canada?
Michael "empire-lite" Ignatieff in The Star yesterday:

"Liberal leader echoes Tory government, blames Hamas for `organizing, instigating rocket attacks'

"Federal Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff says Israel is justified in taking military action to defend itself against attacks by Hamas from the Gaza Strip.
"Canada has to support the right of a democratic country to defend itself," he told reporters in Halifax yesterday after speaking to a forum of business leaders on the economy.
"Israel has been attacked from Gaza, not just last year, but for almost 10 years," Ignatieff said. "They evacuated from Gaza so there is no occupation in Gaza."

Horrifying and disgusting, I know, but not particularly surprising and all points we dispensed with yesterday.
Blog reactions to Iggy's tripe were swift : POGGE , PSA at Canadian Cynic, Dr.Dawg, Runesmith, Beijing York
Iggy actually did have more nuancey things to say than CP and the Star suggest, as transcribed by supporter James Morton, but Iggy's pro-Israel lines are the familiar AIPAC quotes that the Canadian press will recognize and parrot.


So where are we getting our Gaza news, apart from a Canadian pro-Israel press and "The Megaphone"?
And where is the outcry from journalists that they have been denied access to Gaza?
If you follow no other links here today, please be sure to click this one at Sudbury Against War and Occupation - Justin Podur : Turn Off the Canadian Media, Please :

"Modern Western armies, like those of Israel, the US, and Canada, think of information as part of warfare. They expend tremendous time and resources mobilizing support for their violence. They do this by controlling information, disallowing independent journalists (as Israel is doing), using embedded journalists, and running a massive public relations machinery designed specifically to deliver arguments and propaganda for the foreign press and for foreign consumption.

There is a special machinery just for Canadians, and a special strategy to sell war in Canada. There was one for the Iraq war, there is one for the Afghanistan war, and one for Israel's wars as well. What is so unusual about the media environment today is that all this expense, all this media machinery, can be circumvented by anyone in its target audience by the simple click of a mouse. So click away."

Good advice and excellent alternative recommendations to be found there.

P.S. Signed the Amnesty International Canada petition yet?
Speak out for peace and the people in Gaza because the ConservaLiberals aren't going to.

Cross-posted at Creekside

Operation Enduring Freedom From Inconvenient Facts

It was back in October when we first heard about the possibility of US Marines relocating from Iraq to Afghanistan :

"The US Marine Corps has insisted that its forces be removed from Iraq and sent to Afghanistan instead to take the lead in combat there.
According to senior military and Pentagon officials, the suggestion was raised in a session last week convened by Defence Secretary Robert M Gates for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and regional war-fighting commanders, theNew York Times reported.
This would leave the Iraq war in the hands of the Army while the Marines would play an important role in Afghanistan, under overall NATO command."

Then came the Manley panel report and the whole drama of Harper's conditions for staying on in Afghanistan - where oh where would the 1000 extra troops and air power evah come from? - and now the US Marines are indeed relocating to Afghanistan as planned and Operation Enduring Freedom is in da house!

CBC : Afghanistan joint command

"There were sighs of relief in government circles earlier this month when the United States agreed to provide at least an additional 1,000 marines to the Canada-led mission in Kandahar.
Finding an extra 1,000 combat soldiers to help the 2,500-strong Canadian military mission in troubled southern Afghanistan was a key Canadian condition — along with more air power — for keeping our troops there until the end of 2011."

Way to keep up, CBC. I do believe we've already bitched that one.

But in what CBC refers to as the "new, more side-by-side relationship between American and Canadian soldiers in southern Afghanistan", a few questions arise about our differing policies.
Quite apart from how the command structure is supposed to work, there's the American propensity for wiping out marijuana and poppy crops, ie Afghani livelihood; their greater reliance on air strikes, ie bombing Afghan civilians; and the little matter of their torturing detainees/POWs, ie Bagram., the US internment facility where Afghan detainees known to be innocent of any crimes have been beaten to death.

Uh-oh - detainees. Already a big optics headache for Harper in Canada, news that detainees might fall under US - Canadian joint jurisdiction is bound to play badly for the Cons.
But wait!

CTV : Ottawa hopes to block probe into Afghan detainees :

"The government is seeking to block an independent investigation by the Military Police Complaints Commission into Canada's handling of Afghan detainees, according to court documents filed in Federal Court.
Amnesty International Canada and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association filed a complaint with the commission last year, after allegations surfaced that detainees had been tortured by local Afghan authorities.
Government lawyers filed an application Friday to halt the investigation, saying the commission does not have jurisdiction to probe the complaints."

Something they really might have mentioned at any time since the commission began its investigation.
And as Pogge points out, if the commission doesn't have jurisdiction, then why has the government of Canada been complying, however reluctantly, with its demands for documentation up till now?

Possibly because now we're under deadline to get aligned with Operation Enduring Freedom From Inconvenient Facts before the 'joint partnership' begins in July.

Canada : Ankle-deep in blood and shit

A request for desert camel boots from Stockwell Day's newly arrived leader of a Correctional Service Canada inspections team in Afghanistan in February, 2007:

"They afford the appropriate ankle support when getting in and out of the LAV/Coyote/Nyala vehicles. Additionally the colour is more appropriate in the summer heat. On a Health and Safety level we will be walking through blood and fecal matter when either on patrol or in the prison and should not be wearing our personal footwear as it will track into our personal quarters."

It's certainly tracking all over the carpets in Ottawa now.

G&M : Nov 19, 2007 "The government was forced to release the documents on detainee conditions after a federal judge ordered it to disclose them as part of a suit brought by Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association."

CP Nov 5, 2007 "The government had argued that the issues involved were political rather than judicial, that human rights advocates lacked any legal standing to mount a challenge, and that the case should be thrown out because it has no chance of succeeding."

Co-council to both human rights groups, Amir Attaran, has been trying to alert us and get some action on this since at least March 2006, when he and Michael Byers along with Canadian rep at the UN Louise Arbour all published papers on the abuse of Afghan detainees.

The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, in 2004 :

"Torture continues to take place as a routine part of police procedures.
The AIHRC has found torture to occur particularly at the investigation stage in order to extort confessions from detainees."

This is what Con House leader Peter Van Loan still airily refers to as "allegations by the Taliban".

Are we ready to deal with this yet? Could we please get some grown-ups on this?

Look, we have a lot of serious and difficult issues to deal with in Canada : important stuff like fixing our debt to First Nations, stopping the sell-off of Canadian companies and the flow south of our resouces, getting serious on the environment, to name just a few.

Canada is already a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. We simply don't have time to go back and re-fight and re-argue all the battles for the some semblance of civilization we have already won.

And we certainly don't have time for any government that hasn't figured that out yet.

Mattt at Bastard.logic links to skdadl's comment over at Pogge :

"I think we call this the banality of evil. I have to walk through blood and fecal material, so I need better boots. This is the road to Nuremberg, folks. And this is being done in our name. Everyone happy to sit here quietly and be a "Good Canadian"? "

Cross-posted at Creekside