Someone who looks very much like me has done something very bad in my neighborhood. I’ve been stopped by cops demanding to see some ID three times this weekend. The first time, it was by two undercover cops who pulled up to a sudden halt in a battered old car, jumped out and strode towards me with great purpose demanding to know who I was. It was kind of scary; before they flashed some badges, I thought it might be a mugging or assault or something (to be fair, they were quite polite as soon as I said that I wasn’t the guy they were looking for but would definitely cooperate with them).
Regular readers may recall that my hair mysteriously fell out a few months back. Here’s what I imagine a police sketch artist’s rendition of the suspect would look like (but without the eyebrows): READ FULL POST
The death toll from the Israeli attack on a flotilla bearing aid to Gaza has reached at least 10, according to most news organizations. However, little is known about passengers who have been detained. Adalah, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel have submitted a petition to the Supreme Court of Israel, demanding information about victims of the attack. From the press release:
The human rights organizations demanded that the state provide the names of people who were killed and injured on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla by the Israeli navy; the names and locations of those detained, as well as their condition; the legal status of the passengers on the ships; and access to those arrested, detained or in hospital without the restrictive pre-condition of requiring powers of attorney.
The habeas corpus petition was filed by Adalah Attorney Orna Kohn against the Minister of Defense, the Military Advocate General (MAG), the Israel Prison Service (IPS), the Israeli Police, and the Immigration Authority.
This morning, the Israeli military took control over the Freedom Flotilla, a humanitarian aid convoy, while it was in international waters en route to Gaza. Around 700 people from 40 countries are on the ships including human rights and peace activists, journalists, and members of parliament. According to media reports, about 15 people were killed and dozens were injured. Following Israel’s military control over the boats, the petitioners had no way to contact the passengers either by internet or telephone. Some of the injured were taken to hospitals in Israel, and others were taken from the hospitals to detention centers.
The organizers of the Freedom Flotilla asked for legal representation from Adalah in cases of arrests and detentions. Passengers’ families have also contacted Adalah, PCATI and PHR-I and have asked for legal assistance as well as information on the health and well-being of their relatives who are passengers on the boats. Many lawyers and doctors have also contacted the petitioners to lend their support and services, after hearing the media reports on the killings and injuries.
The human rights organizations contacted the Military Advocate General’s Office (MAG), the Attorney General’s Office, and the IPS seeking the names of those detained or hospitalized, the places of detention and/or hospitalization, and the status of these individuals so that the petitioners could meet them and offer legal representation or medical services. The petitioners received no information concerning the individuals who were killed or injured. Regarding the detainees, the AG’s Office informed the petitioners, in general, that those individuals who were given deportation orders were taken to detention centers in Beer el-Sabe (Beer Sheva).
The AG’s office also stated that attorneys could contact a center in the Ashdod Port and give them the powers of attorney for each individual. This reply is not responsive to the information sought by the petitioners, and it also places too restrictive of a condition for legal representation on the detainees in this situation. The refusal to provide this information violates the right of the detainees to consult with attorneys, a right guaranteed by numerous decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court. It also violates the state’s legal duty to provide information on the location of a detainee as provided in Article 33 of the Criminal Procedure Law (Powers of Arrest) – 1996, and the individuals’ right to dignity, which is a constitutional right.
This post originally appeared on Daily Kos.
After telling David Gregory that he thought Tony Hayward is “doing a fantastic job,” BP Managing Director Bo Dudley comes up with a novel argument for saving Hayward’s skin: that nobody thought the blowout preventer could fail.
CROWLEY: Do you think after this is all over that there are BP executives that ought to resign over the fact that there didn’t seem to be any contingency plans for this sort of thing?
DUDLEY: Well, Candy, this is an unprecedented accident in the oil and gas industry. … The failure of the blowout preventers, which is the ultimate multiple redundant fail-safe system, has not happened like this before … everyone in the industry now has to step back, look at this piece of equipment that generally the industry regarded as fail-safe, go back, figure out what happens, understand it, disseminate that, make sure it doesn’t happen anywhere, anytime — anywhere in the world again.
Let’s look at this in a couple of different ways.
First, assume that Dudley is correct and nobody thought the blowout preventer could fail. Isn’t that incredibly damning? He’s basically saying that everybody failed to anticipate the possibility of a massive blowout like the one gushing into the Gulf. If that’s really true, that’s a really, really big screw up. It’s so big that not only should Hayward be fired, but the entire drilling industry should pack up their bags, because if they can’t see the risk in a blowout preventer failing, they’ve got no business working in dangerous waters.
Second, assume that Dudley is wrong, and that there were people who anticipated the possibility of a blowout preventer failure. (This scenario seems infinitely more plausible, at least to me.) If that is the case, what possible argument is there against firing Hayward? We know BP was cutting corners. If BP (as seems overwhelmingly likely) also knew that cutting corners increased the risk of blowout preventer failure, getting fired should be the least of Hayward’s concerns.
Either way, it’s just amazing that after a screw up of this magnitude, Tony Hayward isn’t looking for a job. The fact that he’s still in the driver’s seat tells you a lot about the character of the people at BP. And it sheds light on how this occurred in the first place.
This post originally appeared on Hullabaloo.
Karen Tumulty said something on Washington Week In Reviewwhich I think crystallizes the central problem with the first year of the Obama administration:
The reason the president is so exposed on this politically is that the accident happened three weeks after he announced a dramatic expansion of offshore drilling. He said this may open up hundreds of thousands of acres of offshore drilling and one of his arguments was that the technology is so advanced that drilling is a lot safer than it used to be. So I think the president is dismayed, I’m told, that the assurances that he relied upon to make that decision turned out not to be true.
This is the story of his early days, I’m afraid, from trusting Wall Street to the CIA to the Insurance lobby to big oil — to the Republicans. It’s nice to think that these people are all operating in good faith, but unfortunately, it’s just not realistic. Skepticism of all the elite institutions, not trust, is what required for successful leadership in this era.
Update: Or, as Bob Herbert said:
These are not Little Lord Fauntleroys who can be trusted to abide by some fanciful honor system.
This post originally appeared on Booman Tribune.
Well, now Israel has done it. They have actually provoked Turkey to the point that they may start a war over this incident massacre:
Turkey has threatened Israel with unprecedented action after Israeli forces attacked an aid vessel, killing 10 peace activists headed to Gaza.Israel said 10 people died while those on the ship said at least 15 were killed.
Photo by magnetomotive via Flickr
I live next to the Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, where thousands of soldiers are on their backs, staring into the earth above them, their last memory a moment of pain in the Civil War. Their bullets were removed, and their bodies carried on wagons and trains back to New York where their loved ones stared at them hard and sang to them and wept, and then one by one they too lay down next to their fathers and brothers and sons.
I live next to the Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, where thousands of soldiers are on their backs, staring into the earth above them, their last memory a moment of pain in the Civil War. Their bullets were removed, and their bodies carried on wagons and trains back to New York where their loved ones stared at them hard and sang to them and wept, and then one by one they too lay down next to their fathers and brothers and sons.
In the United States, we won’t remember these things on Memorial Day. Not in the way of a strong memory that moves us. Our minds will be cleared of the images so that we are ready for our next directed act of consumption. For instance, we will be readied to experience war as visual entertainment, war as an event without meaning, battles as ads – so that we will forget Viet Nam and buy Iraq, forget Iraq and buy Afghanistan.
And personally, I live in a time of my life when my body is mimicking the memory loss of society at large. If the culture of the USA is memory-erasing, I too have to fight for the sensual details of my personal past. We are hyped literally out of our minds until Memorial Day turns into a three-day weekend. I hope today that we are able to remember the dead and resurrect the future.
The Massey coal blast, and BP’s poisoning of the gulf – these are interruptions that worry the corporate marketers because they revive our memory. These two disasters are man-made, but oil and coal is the Earth too and the Earth is finding inventive ways to excite our memory. That oil won’t stop because that bleeding wound is necessary. Nothing that comes from modern culture can shock us. There are no Picassos or Elvis Presleys anymore. But the Earth, the Earth can more than shock us.
We are Earth’s rogue species. The Earth says that this is the time that our drilling down into the ancient sunlight of oil and coal be replaced by a view of the millennia of life there, that we see the original life buried beneath the mountains and oceans, that we see it and remember it. Our personal ancestors live too, with untapped energy, beneath our mountains of disinformation. My neighbors died so that we would not enslave our fellow Americans. If we really remembered this on Memorial Day, we wouldn’t be afraid of the corporations and fundamentalists. Remembering is a radical act.
This post originally appeared on Think Progress.
The Associated Press reports that “Israeli naval commandos stormed a flotilla of ships carrying aid and hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists to the blockaded Gaza Strip on Monday, killing at least 10 passengers in a predawn raid that set off worldwide condemnation and a diplomatic crisis”:
Israel said the forces encountered unexpected resistance as they boarded the vessels. Dozens of passengers and at least five Israeli soldiers were wounded in the confrontation in international waters.
The Israeli military said in a statement: “Navy fighters took control of six ships that tried to violate the naval blockade (of the Gaza Strip) … During the takeover, the soldiers encountered serious physical violence by the protesters, who attacked them with live fire.”
The Israeli raid has “triggered widespread condemnation across Europe; many of the passengers were from European countries. The raid also strained already tense relations with Israel’s longtime Muslim ally Turkey, the unofficial sponsor of the mission, and drew more attention to the plight of Gaza’s 1.5 million people.”
Greater international attention and sympathy to the plight of Palestinians suffering under the Israeli-Egyptian- (and U.S.) enforced siege of Hamas-ruled Gaza is precisely what Israeli authorities were hoping to avoid. In the days and weeks leading up to the launch of the flotilla, the Israeli government and its American mouthpieces were hard at work both todownplay the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and to present the flotilla’s sponsors as supporters of terrorism. (The evidence for the latter claim seems to amount to the usual game of “Six Degrees of Osama bin Laden,” wherein everyone who has ever contributed money to a Palestinian cause is linked to global jihadism.)
Responding to claims that the aid flotilla itself represented a “provocation,” Hussein Ibish of the American Task Force on Palestine writes, well, yeah: “The whole point of the ‘Gaza flotilla’ was to get a reaction out of Israel and call international attention to the problem of the blockade of Gaza…like all other acts of civil disobedience it was designed to provoke a response.”
Writing that the attack “is likely to create sustained international attention to the way Israel has treated the Gaza Strip in a way that nothing else has since the Gaza war and possibly since the beginning of the blockade,” Ibish suggests we compare the flotilla “to the ‘Mississippi Freedom Summer’ in which young white Americans from around the country went to the bastion of Jim Crow in order to organize local African-Americans, register them to vote, educate them and confront segregation”:
They knew it was a dangerous situation, and they were shocked but not surprised when James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were abducted and killed by the KKK as the project just got going. There were many other acts of quasi-official violence meted out to the volunteers, and while the organizers obviously would have preferred to have avoided all of that, they expected it and it was part of their strategy. The largely but not entirely unstated reasoning was that the country would continue to ignore massive violence directed towards the African-American community in Mississippi, but could and would not remain oblivious to similar violence directed towards young, white, middle-class college students from New York City and other metropolitan centers. This, indeed, proved the case.The violence directed at the Mississippi Freedom Summer shocked the conscience of the country and was among the numerous decisive moments in the civil rights movement that ultimately succeeded in dismantling the apparatus of formalized racism in the United States.
Like segregation in the American South, the siege of Gaza (and the entire Israeli occupation, for that matter) is a moral abomination that should be intolerable to anyone claiming progressive values. It’s sad that it should require the deaths of non-Palestinians to finally shake the international community from apathy and inaction, but, as with the tragic murders of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner, if it contributes to ending the situation then that’s a positive outcome.
Unfortunately, the killings will also likely result in the strengthening of support for Hamas vis a vis more moderate Palestinian leaders, greater unrest and more violence, which is not.
White House spokesman Bill Burton said in a written statement that “the United States deeply regrets the loss of life and injuries sustained, and is currently working to understand the circumstances surrounding this tragedy.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has expressed his “full backing” for the raid,has canceled his scheduled meeting tomorrow with President Obama.
[update: IBN-CNN broadcast news reports that the Turkish government has pledged to send more supply vessels in the Gaza relief effort: "Ankara warned that further supply vessels will be sent to Gaza, escorted by the Turkish Navy, a development with unpredictable consequences."]
Last night 15 peace activists were killed and dozens wounded as Israeli forces attacked an unarmed humanitarian aid convoy in international waters off the Gaza Strip coast. Al Jazeera puts the death toll at nineteen, and some accounts report sixty wounded. Among the civilians aboard the six-ship convey carrying 10,000 tons of aid, including wheelchairs, bound for Gaza were an 85 year old Holocaust survivor, European legislators, and a Nobel Peace prize recipient.
The Israeli IDF claims that as its commandos boarded the lead ship of the so-called Freedom Flotilla, carrying desperately-needed supplies for residents of the Gaza Strip, “demonstrators” on the Mavi Marmara, “attacked the IDF Naval personnel with live fire and light weaponry including knives and clubs”. But the Free Gaza Movement, which organized the flotilla, claims that “Israeli commandoes dropped from a helicopter onto the Turkish passenger ship, Mavi Marmara, and began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck. They fired directly into the crowd of civilians asleep.”
As the liberal-center Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz characterized it, the IDF attack on the Mavi Marmara was purely defensive: “The Israel Defense Forces said its troops were to forced to react after they came under fire from the activists while intercepting the convoy.” Meanwhile, some liberal American websites are describing the carnage as a “massacre.”
As Greta Berlin, one of the leaders of the Free Gaza Movement told the New York Times, the Israeli Defense Force account of the incident was “a lie,” stressing the absurdity of the claim that civilians on the Mavi Marmara would have been “waiting up to fire on the Israeli military, with all its might.”
As shown in footage recorded from a live video stream onboard the Mavi Marmara, during the early stages of the attack a journalist describes Israeli forces opening fire on the ship, killing at least one civilian and wounding several others, after which according to the report Israeli troops continued firing while people on the ship waved white flags. The chaotic footage shows seriously wounded civilians and numerous gunshots can be heard in the background.
Israeli military spokesperson Avital Leibovich stated that the attack “happened in waters outside of Israeli territory, but we have the right to defend ourselves.”
The Freedom Flotilla was attempting to break an ongoing Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip that prevents the import into Gaza of a wide range of items. Human rights groups have warned that the blockade is damaging the health of Gaza’s residents, most of whom are children. According to the Israeli human rights group Gisha.org, items barred from Gaza by the blockade include:
“sage, cardamom, cumin, coriander, ginger, jam, halva, vinegar, nutmeg, chocolate, fruit preserves, seeds and nuts, biscuits and sweets, potato chips, gas for soft drinks, dried fruit, fresh meat, plaster, tar, wood for construction, cement, iron, glucose, industrial salt, plastic/glass/metal containers, industrial margarine, tarpaulin, sheets for huts, fabric (for clothing), flavor and smell enhancers, fishing rods, various fishing nets, buoys, ropes for fishing, nylon nets for greenhouses, hatcheries and spare parts for hatcheries, spare parts for tractors, dairies for cowsheds, irrigation pipe systems, ropes to tie greenhouses planters for saplings, heaters for chicken farms, musical instruments, size A4 paper, writing implements, notebooks, newspapers, toys, razors, sewing machines and spare parts, heaters, horses, donkeys, goats, cattle, and chicks”
According to longtime Mideast observer and specialist Juan Cole, there are two likely reasons for the violent incident aboard the Mavi Marmara were:
“One is that the Israeli troops boarding the vessels met some sort of resistance and over-reacted. Aid volunteers are unlikely, however, to have posed much real challenge to trained special forces operatives.
The other possible reason is that the far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu and his foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman gave a green light to the commandos to respond with excessive force. That is, the deaths and woundings may have been a brutally frank warning to any future Gaza aid activists that they are taking their lives in their hands if they plan any more flotillas to help the Palestinians. The Israeli far right may have felt that there was otherwise a danger that in a few months there would be an even bigger flotilla and that eventually the blockade of Gaza would be broken.”
As Cole goes on to describe, the Israeli right views all Gazans, even children, as “terrorists” a view he calls “paranoid and inhumane.”
In 2006 Dov Weisglass, adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, stated that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” But according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 61% percent of Gazans, 65% of whom are children under the age of 18, are “food insecure” and the level of anemia in infants 9-12 months old was as high as 65.5%.
As Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald observes, concerning the ongoing effects of the blockade on the Gazan population and economy,
“At the end of 2009, a U.N. report found that “insufficient food and medicine is reaching Gazans, producing a further deterioration of the mental and physical health of the entire civilian population since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against the territory,” and also “blamed the blockade for continued breakdowns of the electricity and sanitation systems due to the Israeli refusal to let spare parts needed for repair get through the crossings.”
This post first appeared on Washington Monthly.
In a development that is as stunning as it is tragic, this actually happened this morning.
At least 10 pro-Palestinian activists were killed and dozens were wounded aboard an aid flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip when Israeli naval commandos seized control of the boats early Monday, the Israeli army said.
Some Israeli, Turkish and Arab media outlets put the death toll as high as 20 activists. The wounded were evacuated to Israeli hospitals and the ships were being led into Israel’s Ashdod port, where the passengers and aid supplies are to be unloaded and screened. More than four naval personnel were also injured. [...]
Some in Israel, before the raid and after, questioned the wisdom of Israel trying to take the ships by force. Past flotillas either reached Gaza or were diverted to Israel peacefully.
There are, not surprisingly, competing versions of exactly what transpired, and Israeli officials not only defended the existing blockade policy, but said Israeli forces faced resistance on the ships. Every claim has a counter-claim, of course, and those condemning the violent raid this morning insist Israeli forces attacked peaceful civilians, including a flotilla carrying a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and 85-year-old Holocaust survivor.
Either way, as the AP noted, the pre-dawn violence has “set off worldwide condemnation and a diplomatic crisis.”
This much is clearly true. The ship was unofficially sponsored by Turkey, which has long been a key Israeli ally in the regional, and which recalled its ambassador to Israel this morning in the wake of the incident. The United Nations, among others, is demanding a detailed Israeli explanation.
The White House issued a written statement, noting that the United States “deeply regrets” the loss of life and injuries, and was gathering information to understand exactly what transpired in this “tragedy.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to visit the White House tomorrow, but whether that meeting will still occur is unclear.
Update: I just learned that Netanyahu will tend to this crisis, and not travel to D.C. tomorrow.
More than 100,000 people marched in Phoenix, Arizona on May 29th for human rights and to stop laws like SB1070 and HB2281. Media reports been sending out insane low numbers of 10,000??!! This is just a quick hit of RAW video to show what really happened.
