While western mainstream media may celebrate the 65th anniversary of the State of Israel these days, this is usually also associated with al-Nakba, the catastrophe of the Palestinian people. Forceful expulsion and expropriation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians then living in Mandatory Palestine. That al-Nakba might have begun one and half centuries earlier, when General Bonaparte with his 13.000 French soldiers attempted to advance into Ottoman Palestine in 1799 in order to check British expansion is not so well-known. In his recent book Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East, Juan Cole only briefly touches the brutal Syrian campaign of 1799.
According to Al Jazeera’s critically acclaimed documentation of 2008, the later Napoleon then had encouraged the “Jews of the world to reclaim their land in league with France.”
“This story [the Nakba] starts in 1799, outside the walls of Acre in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, when an army under Napoleon Bonaparte besieged the city. It was all part of a campaign to defeat the Ottomans and establish a French presence in the region.
In search of allies, Napoleon issued a letter offering Palestine as a homeland to the Jews under French protection. He called on the Jews to ‘rise up’ against what he called their oppressors.
Napoleon’s appeal was widely publicised. But he was ultimately defeated. In Acre today, the only memory of him is a statue atop a hill overlooking the city.
Yet Napoleon’s project for a Jewish homeland in the region under a colonial protectorate did not die, 40 years later, the plan was revived but by the British.”
Whether this was Bonaparte’s real intentions, is highly questionable, though. It seems to be one of the numerous myths about the origins of Zionism.
Great opportunity. Since I am in Germany, unintentionally and somewhat enervated, I might have a chance to visit once more one of the major Jazz festivals in the world. I was a regular concertgoer there in the late 1970s and most of the 1980s, but had somehow lost interest in New Jazz later.
Just before I moved to the Middle East in 2001 (a couple of weeks before September 11, which then changed the world), The Residents (something which I had in fact predicted in 1982), Fred Frith, and David Thomas performed on one evening, which was dedicated to “Art Rock” (not Jazz at all; pretty unforgettable) in one of the largest circus tents of the world in the rather unlikely city of Moers on the Lower Rhine, except for Pentecost just backwater.
Fred Frith who is among the most frequent artists at Moers will come again this year, as well as John Zorn who got the whole first evening together with his gang. See the full program here.
As Noam Chomsky has described earlier this year President Obama’s drone war on terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Yemen and several other countries as just a “global assassination campaign”, designers at Pitch Interactive have now described every known attack by the US since 2004 in a stunning, well shocking, interactive graph and movie using data from the the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Accordingly, a mere 1.5% of high profile targets were killed while 175 casualties were children and 535 civilians.
It’s ten years after G.W. Bush and his allies (UK, Australia and a “coalition of the willing”) attacked Iraq and quickly toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. The war was illegal, weapons of mass destruction have never been found, at least 130,000 Iraqis have been killed, millions displaced. Torture in detention centers, abuse in Abu Ghuraib and elsewhere. The Iraq War Logs, leaked by Bradley Manning and published by WikiLeaks and major main stream media in 2010, must be regarded one of the most significant documents of our time, and its full analysis will take more years if not decades. Responsible figures such as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair and others are now retired, never indicted for any war crimes at least in their own countries, but elsewhere, sure.
These days, the so far 3rd war (not the second!) in the Gulf region marks its 5th anniversary. The operation was called Shock & Awe and I was watching the bombing of Baghdad live on my TV in a flat in Kuwait. Incredible, Baghdad and its avenues at the Tigris river were brightly illuminated when the first bombs blasted! It looked more like a Hollywood movie. How could that be broadcast to the World? While we were sitting here in a totally dark, blacked-out Kuwait!
I really can tell, I was shocked and awed. We had spent the last days before the outbreak of war with shopping of the special kind, hoarding meat, tuna fish and vegetables in cans, getting large amounts of rice and noodles, buying candles.
Our former Faculty Dean had briefed the brave of us, who were about to stay, in one of the then rare Faculty meetings: There might be curfews in Kuwait. The Americans troops will be in Baghdad within 72 hours. University will be closed for a week or so. Life will go on. But the women were free to leave Kuwait for some time, of course.
A couple of days earlier, a Scandinavian colleague had proudly presented his gas mask which the German Embassy had lent him. Scandinavians do not have their own Embassies in Kuwait. When making a telephone call to the Embassy, the most helpful Ms Lorenz there, who had served the quickly changing German Ambassadors for 30 years or so, calmed me down. But maybe taping of the windows would be a good idea.
I had arrived from a scientific meeting in San Antonio already on the 12th of March 2003. I had made my final decision of coming back to Kuwait only at the airport in Frankfurt, when I had met our Vice Dean and another chairman of our Faculty. The three of us had the same thoughts but didn’t tell: Okay, these guys are also going back to Middle East!
The flight from Frankfurt to Kuwait City was horrible, a nightmare. The airspace was already closed over Iraq. Instead of taking the direct route from the Balkans, Turkey, Iraq to Kuwait, we had to fly over Jeddah at the eastern coastline of the Red Sea, then cross the whole Arabian Peninsula and Rhub Al Khali, then towards Bahrain, and then back to Kuwait. The plane was shaken by an enormous sandstorm between the tiny island in the Gulf and Kuwait and I almost had to say my final prayers. It was the first in a series of nearly weekly sandstorms which hit Kuwait later until May.
In Kuwait, it turned out that I had lost my luggage, and I had it back only after several weeks. Lufthansa had stopped flying to the Middle East, no way to go there during the war operations. I was promised, it would be safer in Frankfurt.
For one week we were advised not to drive in Kuwait by car, to stay at home and listen to any alerts. There were 20 or so, and one missile hit in fact the sea close to the Sultan Center in Souq Sharq. No casualties, fortunately. No poison gas either. Were there any shelters? We were at least not informed. Indeed, University was closed only for a week or so, and then life went on. The numerous, weekly sandstorms were most probably caused by military operations in the North. Embedded journalists (with questionable professional ethics) reported from what seems to be a big adventure every day. People in Basrah did not welcome the British troops, but when Baghdad was taken, we saw pictures of delighted inhabitants waving and dancing in the streets. An ugly statue of Saddam in Firdos Square was toppled already in early April. But Bush’s declaration of the end of military action on May 1, 2003 on aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (“Mission accomplished”) turned out to be an illusion. Abu Ghuraib, only one year later, changed everything. The emerging civil war in Iraq led millions of people flee to neighboring countries, if they could. Some said that about 1 million civilians have died in the meantime, but figures may have been overestimated. The Iraqi body count may be found here.
In the meantime, the head of the U.S. Central Command, Admiral William “Fox” (another desert fox) Fallon, has resigned after having given the Esquire an interview (which will appear next month). There were heavy disputes, of course, with the Commander-in-Chief on Iraq and Iran policies, and even with his General Petraeus, who had reported (and is about to report again) on the successful ‘surge’, gated communities in Baghdad, and a general better life in Baghdad and Iraq. Right now, presidential candidate John McCain visits the site, and soon Vice President Dick Cheney will arrive for respective celebrations.
What to say five years after the U.S.-led invasion to end years of dictatorship? We wish the Iraqi people a better future, honestly. And, the last the world could afford is another military conflict in the region.
While the original 35-page statement by Bradley Manning last week at the pretrial hearing at Fort Meade, Md, has not yet been released, one can read through a rough transcript of it on the Bradley Manning Support Network. It is a testimony of an exemplary young American soldier, highly competent in his work as intelligence analyst, committed to his tasks, reliable and responsible. Well, and no longer loyal when having experienced war crimes.
“After sending this [the compressed data files of CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A SigActs which became the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs when WikiLeaks published them], I left the SD card in a camera case at my aunt’s house in the event I needed it again in the future. I returned from mid-tour leave on 11 February 2010. Although the information had not yet been published by the WLO (WikiLeaks Organization), I felt this sense of relief by them having it. I felt I had accomplished something that allowed me to have a clear conscience based upon what I had seen and what I had read about and knew were happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan everyday.” (Emphasis added.)
True, after having sent the Iran and Afghanistan War Logs in February 2010 from his aunt’s home in Maryland, he became a repeater when later sending to WikiLeaks the 10 Reykjavik 13 cable, and outright “war porn” as what has become known as the Collateral Murder video of the 12 July 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad. It’s amazing to read Manning’s words here.
“The aerial weapons team crew members sound like they lack sympathy for the [killed in the attack] children or the parents. Later, in a particularly disturbing manner, the aerial weapons team crew vocalizes enjoyment at the sight of one of the ground vehicles driving over one of the bodies.
As I continued my research [on the Apache helicopter attack], I found an article discussing a book, The Good Soldiers, written by Washington Post writer David Finkel.
In Mr. Finkel['s] book, he writes about the aerial weapons team attack. As I read an online excerpt in Google Books, I followed Mr. Finkel’s account of the event belonging to the video. I quickly realize[d] that Mr. Finkel was quoting, I feel verbatim, the audio communications of the aerial weapons team crew.
It is clear to me Mr. Finkel obtained access and a copy of the video during his tenure as an embedded journalist. I was aghast at Mr. Finkel’s portrayal of the incident. Reading his account, one would believe the engagement was somehow justified as payback for an earlier attack that lead to the death of a soldier. Mr. Finkel ends his account of the engagement by discussing how a soldier finds an individual still alive from the attack. He writes the soldier finds him and sees him gesture with his two forefingers together—a common method in the Middle East to communicate that they are friendly. However, instead of assisting him, the soldier makes an obscene gesture with his middle finger.
The individual apparently dies shortly thereafter.
“I saved a copy of the video on my workstation. I searched for and found the rules of engagement, the rules of engagement annexes, and a flow chart from the 2007 time period, as well as an unclassified Rules of Engagement smart card from 2006. On 15 February 2010 I burned these documents onto a CD-RW at the same time I burned the 10 Reykjavik 13 cable onto a CD-RW. At the time, I placed the video and rules for engagement information onto my personal laptop in my CHU [Containerized Housing Unit]. I planned to keep this information there until I re-deployed in Summer 2010. I planned on providing this to the Reuters office in London to assist them in preventing events such as this in the future.
“After the release, I was concern[ed] about the impact of the video and how it would be[..] received by the general public. I hoped that the public would be as alarmed as me about the conduct of the aerial weapons team crew members. I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan were targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare. After the release I was encouraged by the response in the media and general public who observed the aerial weapons team video. As I hoped, others were just as troubled—if not more troubled—tha[n] me by what they saw.
At this time, I began seeing reports claiming that the Department of Defense an CENTCOM could not confirm the authenticity of the video. Additionally, one of my supervisors, Captain Casey Fulton, stated her belief that the video was not authentic. In [my] response, I decided to ensure that the authenticity of the video would not be questioned in the future. On 25 February 2010, I emailed Captain Fulton a link to the video that was on our T-drive, and a copy of the video published by WLO that was collected by the open source center so she could compare them herself.“
Manning describes that several attempts to inform superiors about what he had to analyze on a daily basis were unavailing. He sent, to WikiLeaks, the Guantanamo files; then, between 28 March and 3 May 2010, he downloaded the diplomatic cables. He also saved on his computer the video of the Granai air strike of May 2009 in Afghanistan when probably more than 100 civilians, mainly women and children, had “accidentally” been killed.
Shortly after that, Manning had been betrayed by a former hacker with whom he had chatted by email and was then arrested by the FBI. During his 28 February 2013 pretrial hearing, he pleaded guilty to 10 of 22 lesser charges but anyway has to expect to be held in prison between 20 years or lifelong.
9 March 2013 @ 2:54 pm.
Last modified March 9, 2013.
Update March 12. The audio recording of Bradley Manning when reading his manuscript on February 28 in his pretrial hearing in Fort Meade has been leaked by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). You can hear it after having clicked here. See more information by Glenn Greenwald here. He concludes,
“It [the leak by FPF] is a cause for celebration that the US government’s efforts to silence his voice, literally, have now been thwarted. Now, people can and should hear directly from Manning himself and make their own assessment. Whoever made this illicit recording (as well as the FPF in publishing it) acted in the best spirit of Manning himself: defying corrupt, unjust and self-protecting government secrecy rules in order to inform the world about vital matters.”
That Bradley Manning had unavailingly contacted the Washington Post, the New York Times and, almost, Politico, before providing WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents including diplomatic cables of US embassies around the world and the notorious Collateral Murder video of the Apache helicopter massacre in Baghdad in 2007 showing the killing of at least twelve, mainly civilian, people, comes as a big surprise from the pretrial hearing in Fort Meade where he for the first time took “full responsibility” for the leak, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired reports. This may be more even more amazing as Washington Post journalists, Joshua Partlow and David Finkel, had already reported on the Apache helicopter incident in 2007. As Paul Adams at BBC reports, he said, “[t]he most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust the aerial weapons team happened to have.” He compared the troops to children “torturing ants with a magnifying glass”. It would be important to get to know who Manning had actually contacted at the Washington Post to interest her in the Iraq and Afghanistan documents and who did not take “him seriously”.
Manning denied that he was compromising national security although he conceded that many of the diplomatic cables would be embarrassing. He pleaded guilty to ten of 22 charges, among them “to improperly storing classified information; having unauthorized possession of such information; willfully communicating it to an unauthorized person.” He pleaded not-guilty to 12 more charges , including “aiding the enemy and disseminating any information that he believed could harm U.S. national security.”
How it was possible that a 22-yr-old intelligence analyst and, well, outcast at “Forward Operating Base Hammer” in Iraq could access, investigate, spirit away and then leak at least half a million military and diplomatic documents (which, according to Manning, were available to “thousands” of people throughout the U.S. government) and videos has not been publicly assessed so far. The case of Bradley Manning, according to many one of the heroes of our time, is made up solely to make an example of what will happen if that happens again. His own motives for the leak are utterly noble. He “believed, and still believe… [the leaked documents] are some of the most significant documents of our time.” What he wants to reveal is, in his words, “war porn” like the Apache helicopter video. As so many, he does not feel comfortable with the situation of Guantanamo where “we found ourselves holding an increasing number of individuals indefinitely.”
If he had been the contact person at WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, whose name he apparently mispronounced throughout the hearing, had apparently not revealed his identity. Manning said, that no one at WikiLeaks had ever encouraged him to leak.
Well, whether that will help Assange or whether Manning’s confession of the lesser charges will ultimately spare him up to 20 years in prison is uncertain after all.
Wired‘s Danger Room’s Noah Shachtman drew last week world-wide attention to an airbase under construction in the Arabian desert Rub’ Al Khali near the border to Yemen. He speculated that this might have been the American drone base from which American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, as well as Samir Khan had been assassinated in September and October 2011. Prior to that, the Washington Post had prepared its readers,
“The Post learned Tuesday night that another news organization was planning to reveal the location of the base, effectively ending an informal arrangement among several news organizations that had been aware of the location for more than a year (emphasis added),”
which is the real scandal. Wired had become quite infamous in the Bradley Manning case when one of its reporters computer hackers who had been contacted by email by Manning in May 2010 had betrayed him to the FBI a couple of days later who had then been arrested immediately. So, the two ex-officers who talked to Shachtman should be on alert. Whistle-blowing is heavily prosecuted under Obama’s administration. Shachtman writes,
“But a pair of former American intelligence officers tell Danger Room that they are reasonably sure that this is the base revealed by the media earlier this week.
‘I believe it’s the facility that the U.S. uses to fly drones into Yemen,’ one officer says. ‘It’s out in eastern Saudi Arabia, near Yemen and where the bad guys are supposed to hang out. It has those clamshell hangars, which we’ve seen before associated with U.S. drones.’
The former officer was also impressed by the base’s remote location. ‘It’s way, way out in the Rub al Khali, otherwise known as Hell, and must have been built, at least initially, with stuff flown into Sharorah and then trucked more than 400 kilometers up the existing highway and newly-built road,’ the ex-officer adds in an e-mail. ‘It’s a really major logistics feat. The way it fits inconspicuously into the terrain is also admirable.’”
Well, not really. The region seems to be replete with air bases, as cryptome.org knows. Besides Um Al Melh (the one revealed by Shachtman), another one just 8 km south to the border to Yemen, apparently Oyba Al Badie according to Cryptome, can easily be identified in Google Earth.
As Cryptome writes,
“Comparison of several Saudi Arabia and Yemen border guard airports with the base identified by Wired as a possible CIA drone base shows that the Wired base is markedly more complex with dual runways — the main one longer — with hangars and extensive support structures lacking in the existing simpler bases.
This suggests that the Saudis may have named the Wired base as a border guard base to camouflage Saudi participation in the drone program with drone launch capabilities inserted into border guard functions.
However, with the US-assisted global spread of drone use, the Saudis may well have added drone capabilities to its border defense in response to the rise in Al Qaeda threats from Yemen.”
The site displays satellite images of numerous air bases in the (Saudi) Arabian desert (most having been taken around 2007, long before the reported (by Wired) late 2010/early 2011 start of construction of the CIA drone base). But drone launch platforms do not need airports.
“Drone launch platforms are likely to increase at airports, air strips, highways, roads, fields, dry lake beds, prairies, flat mountain tops, ice fields, from whereever aircraft have traditionally gone aloft. As drones decrease and increase in size it should be expected that launch sites will proliferate in benign dual-use locations to cloak their operation.”
