Nearly 12,000 Prisoners Join California Hunger Strike to End Torture Conditions

According to an October 1 article at Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity (PHSS), the Federal receiver's office has indicated that "nearly 12,000 prisoners were on hunger strike, including California prisoners who are housed in out of state prisons in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma."

This is the second hunger strike in less than four months, with prisoners at the Supermax Pelican Bay Prison and other California state prisons protesting the use of long-term solitary confinement, in addition to four other main demands, including provision of adequate and nutritious food, an end to administrative abuses (such as group punishments), and expansion, and in some cases provision, of "Constructive Programming and Privileges for Indefinite SHU Status Inmates."

But besides an end to state-sanctioned isolation, which amounts to torture, the most salient demand is an end to the hated "debriefing" system, which places inmates in solitary if prison officials determine they are "gang members." As I noted in an article last July, determination of "gang" status includes “acquisition or exchange of personal or state property amounting to more than $50…. tattooing or possession of tattoo paraphenalia…. possession of $5 or more without authorization…. [and] refusal to work or participate in a program as assigned,” among others. Indeed, even refusal to submit to "debriefing," i.e., interrogation of prisoners to get them to "snitch," or give names of other "gang" members, is reason to label someone a gang member and put them in solitary indefinitely. The prisoners call this "snitch, parole, or die."

Both isolation and forced confessions are illegal forms of incarceration. The 2006 Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons, co-chaired by former Chief Judge of U.S. Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, John Gibbons and former Attorney General Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, called for an end to isolation in U.S. prisons. (See summary of findings and recommendations, PDF.)

A Fight for Dignity, Justice, and Humanity

California prisons are a stinking mess, a scandal of gigantic proportions. The health care component of the California prison system has been in federal receivership for years because of the awful, insufficient care provided to the sick and mentally ill. As reported in a McClatchy article last May, the U.S. Supreme Court "cited 'serious constitutional violations' in California's overcrowded prisons and ordered the state to abide by aggressive plans to fix the problem." The court rejected state pleas to put off the necessary changes, and ordered the prison system to lower its population by approximately 37,000. (A plan to implement the changes is meeting some skepticism.)

According to the McClatchy article:

One hundred and twelve California prison inmates died unnecessarily because of inadequate medical care in 2008 and 2009, analysts found. Acutely ill patients have been held in "cages, supply closets and laundry rooms" because of overcrowding, investigators found. Suicides by California inmates have been double the national average.

No wonder the prisoners' hunger strike is gaining so much support in California prisons, where inmates are held like animals. The overcrowding is largely due to long-time incarceration for drug charges, including simple possession, and California's onerous Three Strikes law.

The prisoners have indicated they will conduct "rolling" hunger strikes, allowing prisoners to come off strike to regain their strength. They indicated they have resumed their strike after changes promised after the July hunger strike by the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR) failed to materialize, in particular "demands related to solitary confinement and gang validation."

Meanwhile, CDCR has indicated they will punish strikers. Two attorneys representing prisoners in mediation talks with the CDCR have been "banned from all prisons pending an investigation into whether or not they had 'jeopardized the safety and security of CDCR' institutions."

According to an article at the PHSS website, "The CDCR has delivered memos to prisoners at each state prison threatening that any participation or support for the hunger strike will result in disciplinary actions, such as placement in Ad-Seg/ASU [Administrative Segregation Unit] or SHUs [Security Housing Units] (for prisoners currently in General Population), increased destructive cell searches, removal of canteen items, and worse. We know that a number of prisoners lost their jobs as added punishment for supporting the strike in July."

International Support

The renewed strike has gotten support from Palestinian hunger strikers protesting the use of isolation in the imprisonment of Palestinian leaders such as Ahmad Sa’adat. The use of isolation to punish and break prisoners is not limited to California or U.S. prisons, but cases involving American prisoners have made the news in recent months, including the incarceration of Bradley Manning, and the ongoing refusal to release the last British resident prisoner at Guantanamo, Shaker Aamer, who is also on a hunger strike to protest the conditions he is held under.

As thousands muster at protests across the country, such as the Occupy Wall Street protests covered here at The Dissenter, in the deepest, darkest holes of misery in this country people are fighting with their lives for basic humanity and just treatment by a system that treats its victims -- whether they are prisoners, or whether they are impoverished unemployed, thrown on the trash heap by financiers and indifferent politicians -- with indifference at best, or sadistic animus at worst.

The prisoners cannot win their battle without public support. The public must see that the fate of the men and women thrown into American prisons is part of their own struggle, as the methods and attitudes fostered by the prison establishment are turned increasingly on the U.S. population as a whole, just as surveillance, mass round-ups, torture, and economic shock treatment has metastasized from imperialist foreign policy to a domestic program of immiserating working Americans to pay for Wall Street's follies and the Pentagon's wars.


Originally posted at The Dissenter/FDL

Israeli Ethnic Cleansing of "Infiltrators", by Which They Mean Palestinian Families

CarolynC has an important diary up at FDL/The Seminal describing the latest legal moves by Israel to remove Palestinians from the West Bank, deporting them to the Gaza gulag, where they are jammed into one of the most densely populated, and immiserated, small regions on the planet.

Binyamin Netanyahu’s project to colonize East Jerusalem gained momentum with the first eviction of a Palestinian, Ahmad Sabah, from the West Bank to Gaza, forcibly separating him from his wife and children. Juan Cole writes that his deportation kicks off Netanyahu’s plan to ethnically cleanse the West Bank of Palestinians, making more room for Israeli colonists. He adds that Gaza, a poverty-stricken region blockaded by the Israelis, appears to have become the chosen dumping ground for the Palestinians Netanyahu plans to deport.

In an article entitled "IDF Order Will Enable Mass Deportation From West Bank," Haaretz confirms that the purpose of the policy is to enable the exile of large numbers of Palestinians to Gaza:

A new military order aimed at preventing infiltration will come into force this week, enabling the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank, or their indictment on charges carrying prison terms of up to seven years.

Despite some tut-tuts by the Obama administration, the Israelis maintain overwhelming support from the U.S. Congress, including key Democrats. In fact, as CarolynC's article points out, Sen. Chuck Schumer went apoplectic over even the most mild-mannered criticisms by the State Deparment about how Israeli actions were harming the "peace process."

On a day in which President Obama again failed to label the 1,500,000 deaths in the Armenian Genocide as “genocide,” this story of ethnic cleansing in another portion of the former Ottoman Empire is an ominous foreshadowing of greater violence and retribution to come. The actions of Congressional Democrats such as Sen. Schumer are despicable.

This is a speed-up of ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Jerusalem that has been going on for some time. One of the most ominous aspects of the new military order is the expansion of who is considered an “infiltrator” — a word meant to conjure up the worse sorts of connotations, and place anyone so labeled as a person that can be treated with extreme prejudice.

From the Haaretz article:

The new order defines anyone who enters the West Bank illegally as an infiltrator, as well as “a person who is present in the area and does not lawfully hold a permit.” The order takes the original 1969 definition of infiltrator to the extreme, as the term originally applied only to those illegally staying in Israel after having passed through countries then classified as enemy states – Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria.

The order’s language is both general and ambiguous, stipulating that the term infiltrator will also be applied to Palestinian residents of Jerusalem, citizens of countries with which Israel has friendly ties (such as the United States) and Israeli citizens, whether Arab or Jewish. All this depends on the judgment of Israel Defense Forces commanders in the field....

Another group expected to be particularly harmed by the new rules are Palestinians who moved to the West Bank under family reunification provisions, which Israel stopped granting for several years.

The actions of the Israeli government must be condemned, and the military order rescinded. Congress must hear from its constituents that the policy of Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank is not supported by the American people.

British Jews Decry Israel's Holocaust-like Attack

From Stephen Soldz's blog, which has switched into high-gear coverage of the criminal and ongoing attack by Israeli military forces on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip:

The Guardian has published an important letter from over 70 British Jews objecting to the war on Gaza and making the natural connection with the Warsaw Ghetto. They call for “a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions”:

We the undersigned are all of Jewish origin. When we see the dead and bloodied bodies of young children, the cutting off of water, electricity and food, we are reminded of the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto. When Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, talked of putting Gazans “on a diet” and the deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, talked about the Palestinians experiencing “a bigger shoah” (holocaust), this reminds us of Governor General Hans Frank in Nazi-occupied Poland, who spoke of “death by hunger”.

The real reason for the attack on Gaza is that Israel is only willing to deal with Palestinian quislings. The main crime of Hamas is not terrorism but its refusal to accept becoming a pawn in the hands of the Israeli occupation regime in Palestine.

The decision last month by the EU council to upgrade relations with Israel, without any specific conditions on human rights, has encouraged further Israeli aggression. The time for appeasing Israel is long past. As a first step, Britain must withdraw the British ambassador to Israel and, as with apartheid South Africa, embark on a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Ben Birnberg, Prof Haim Bresheeth, Deborah Fink, Bella Freud, Tony Greenstein, Abe Hayeem, Prof Adah Kay, Yehudit Keshet, Dr Les Levidow, Prof Yosefa Loshitzky, Prof Moshe Machover, Miriam Margolyes, Prof Jonathan Rosenhead and 65 others

Meanwhile, the latest news from Gaza continues to be terribly grim. From today's New York Times:

JERUSALEM — Israeli troops pushed into a heavily populated area of Gaza City from the south on Sunday in fierce fighting as senior Israeli officials said that they believe the Hamas military wing is beginning to crack, and that Hamas leaders inside Gaza are looking for a cease-fire....

According to Palestinian Ministry of Health figures on Sunday, nearly 900 Palestinians have died so far in the conflict, including 275 children and 93 women. The figure does not include complete figures for Hamas fighters, who have not been brought to hospitals....

Three rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel on Sunday morning, Israeli Army radio said. Two exploded near Beersheva, injuring several people. The third hit empty land....

In a press conference on Sunday, a senior United Nations official, Maxwell Gaylard, the deputy special coordinator for UNSCO, the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, said that the humanitarian situation for Gaza’s 1.5 million people is deteriorating.

“People are terrified, hungry, thirsty and traumatized,” he said. “The civilian population is caught in the middle of this conflict,” he said, and added: “This is a conflict where the civilian population has nowhere to flee.”

The near-total impotence of the forces of peace, who rely on appeals to the same criminals that either conduct the atrocities, or to those political forces that back them, especially the U.S. government, could not be clearer. Yet someone needs to do something, and the large rallies internationally opposing the Israel attack and atrocities represent a genuine effort to express outrage and some kind of attempt to do something to mobilize public opinion.

Now Reuters reports from Cairo that Egyptian police have arrested 21 members of the Muslim Brotherhood after a rally was held in protest against Israel's offensive.

The Egyptian government and security agencies have been eager to suppress protests against the Israeli attacks on Gaza, in which protesters frequently condemn the government for what they see as its complicity in the blockade of the coastal strip.

In recent days protesters have called for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to Cairo, and for Egypt to open its Rafah border crossing with Gaza to allow Palestinians to flee the 16-day onslaught which has killed 869 people.

Up to 40 protesters may have been arrested at rallies in London, and similar arrests have taken place in protests from Paris to Denmark. Numerous protests across the United States, from Times Square and Chestnut Hill/Boston to Los Angeles/Westwood and San Francisco, have been mostly peaceful, but controversy and tension between pro-Israeli groups or individuals and those who defend the Palestinians have broken out at times. The intensity of the conflict in Gaza, and the agony over the attack upon innocent civilians with loss of life in the hundreds, has ratcheted up feelings among concerned citizens around the world.

Protesters and political activists should add to their list of demands the release of all protesters and activists arrested for protesting Israel's criminal assault.

The Grapes of Wrath

The atrocities against civilians in Gaza never seem to end, as Israel continues its assault against the Palestinians and the Hamas party and militia. The death toll is now over 700; thirteen Israelis are said to have died during the attack, some from "friendly fire."

Half of Gaza has no electricity. The International Red Cross suspended aid deliveries temporarily after its one of its convoys came under Israeli fire. Four U.N. Relief and Works Agency local staff have been killed. Now the United Nations has indefinitely suspended all humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, blaming Israel's attacks against their facilities. The list goes on and on.

Nothing has been more horrifying than the massacre of Palestinian civilians. The news is grim. The Red Cross has rescued children, too weak to stand, lying next to their dead mothers. From the L.A. Times report:

The Israeli army had built earth walls, making it impossible to bring ambulances into the neighborhood, the report said. "Therefore, the children and the wounded had to be taken to the ambulances on a donkey cart," it said.

Israeli soldiers also ordered the rescue team to leave the area but the team refused to depart, the report said.

The Red Cross said it "believes that in this instance the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded. It considers the delay in allowing rescue services access unacceptable."

On Monday, one Gaza house was totally destroyed by Israeli shelling. Incredibly, up to 60 or 70 family members of the extended al Samouni clan, gathered for protection in the house, died in that attack. Two days ago the Israelis shelled a UN school in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp, killing 40 Palestinians, and injuring scores more. Today, the Israelis admitted they knew there was no firing coming from the school itself, and yet still they shelled it. The UN had been sheltering refugees from the fighting in these schools.

In Gaza, there is no place safe left, and the Israeli assault is relentless.

The anger building towards the Israeli attack is intense. Psychologically, as the event plays out on the world media and Internet stage, the sense of personal impotence by watching such slaughter from afar is excruciating. At one professional listserv that I know, members with differing opinions on the conflict are ripping themselves apart, lost in acrimonious exchanges about who is right and wrong, and what should be done. The conflict threatens the very existence of the listserv, which had been very active in organizing for social causes.

Of course, listservs are small potatoes compared to what the Palestinians themselves are suffering. And outside Gaza, one wonders how many newly embittered and angry souls are filling their hearts with dreams of vengeance. Gleen Greenwald had the same thought, and so did Juan Cole, who Greenwald quoted in a posting today (emphasis in original):

In 1996, Israeli jets bombed a UN building where civilians had taken refuge at Cana/Qana in south Lebanon, killing 102 persons; in the place where Jesus is said to have made water into wine, Israeli bombs wrought a different sort of transformation. In the distant, picturesque port of Hamburg, a young graduate student studying traditional architecture of Aleppo saw footage like this on the news [graphic]. He was consumed with anguish and the desire for revenge. As soon as operation Grapes of Wrath had begun the week before, he had written out a martyrdom will, indicating his willingness to die avenging the victims, killed in that operation--with airplanes and bombs that were a free gift from the United States. His name was Muhammad Atta. Five years later he piloted American Airlines 11 into the World Trade Center. . . .

On Tuesday, the Israeli military shelled a United Nations school to which terrified Gazans had fled for refuge, killing at least 42 persons and wounding 55, virtually all of them civilians, and many of them children. The Palestinian death toll rose to 660.

You wonder if someone somewhere is writing out a will today.

Meanwhile, the pathetic and craven United States Senate passed a non-binding resolution in support of Israel, while calling for a ceasefire. No one mentioned, of course, the amount of U.S. bombs and shells shipped to Israel for their criminal offensive.

Considering the dire situation, Psychologists for Social Responsibility have issued this "action alert":

Dear PsySR Members and Friends,

Psychologists for Social Responsibility urges you to join us in strongly advocating that the U.S. Congress, the U.S. government, and the leaders of other nations and international organizations immediately prioritize:

(1) Immediate international action for a ceasefire on all sides in Gaza and Israel.
(2) Intensive humanitarian relief efforts.
(3) Much more vigorous and sustained international leadership for negotiations involving all sides and including the issue of mutual recognition and security for Israel, Gaza, and all Palestinians.

The emergency humanitarian crisis in Gaza demands such immediate action.

PsySR urges you to contact today your lawmakers, national government officials, and all other relevant contacts that you can make to strongly advocate for such emergency U.S. and international action.

Israeli Blitzkrieg in Gaza: Background to the Conflict

Today, the news reports that Israel has moved beyond its land/air/sea bombardment of Gaza, which has killed hundreds, including many civilian men, women and children. Tanks, motorized forces and troops have virtually cut the territory in half. While four Israelis have died from Hamas rocket attacks since the invasion began, BBC reports:

According to Hamas officials and witnesses, the main fighting is now centred on four areas: east of the Jabaliya refugee camp; in the Zeitoun neighbourhood to the east of Gaza City; on the coastal road close to the site of the former Jewish settlement of Netzarim, south of Gaza City; and in an uninhabited area in the centre of Gaza.

Hamas said its fighters were in some cases engaged in "face-to-face battles" with Israeli soldiers.

Earlier, the Israeli military said the militants were not engaging its troops in close combat but using mortars and improvised bombs.

The Palestinian health ministry says more than 500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have now been killed since the Israelis began their assault on Gaza eight days ago. A further 2,500 have been wounded.

Over and over as I watched the Sunday morning pundits on U.S. television "report" on the Gaza invasion, the issue of the rockets sent by Hamas into civilian areas of Israel was repeated over and over. While meant to inspire fear, perhaps, more than destruction, they appear to satisfy the Palestinian need for some kind of self-defensive action, as the population has suffered immensely under an onerous blockade for many months now.

But no one on American television ever mentions this blockade, or the situation in Gaza that predates this invasion. Here is a major excerpt from a report by Amnesty International last August on conditions in Gaza. I offer it in the hope it will be picked up and used in an barrage of understanding and context that will counter U.S. and Israeli propaganda around this terrible and indefensible military action, an action that cannot be described as anything but a war crime.

From the Amnesty report last summer:

TRAPPED - COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT IN GAZA
27 August 2008

"The Israeli siege has turned Gaza into a big prison. We cannot leave, not even for medical care or to study abroad, and most of what we need is not available in Gaza. We are not living really; we are barely surviving and the outlook for the future is bleak." – Fathi, a Gaza resident.

With Gaza locked down and cut off from the outside world by a stifling Israeli blockade, 46 peace activists from the world over set sail for Gaza on 22 August to, in their words, “break the siege that Israel has imposed on the civilian population of Gaza…, to express our solidarity with the suffering people of Gaza, and to create a free and regular channel between Gaza and the outside world”.

An Israeli peace activist on board the Free Gaza boats, Professor Jeff Halper, said: “The mission is to break the Israeli siege, an absolutely illegal siege which has plunged a million and a half Palestinians into wretched conditions: imprisoned in their own homes, exposed to extreme military violence, deprived of the basic necessities of life, stripped of their most fundamental human rights and dignity. The siege violates the most fundamental principle of international law: the inadmissibility of harming civilian populations… I cannot stand idly aside… To do so would violate my commitment to human rights”.

The blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip over a year ago has left the entire population of 1.5 million Palestinians trapped with dwindling resources and an economy in ruins. Some 80 per cent of the population now depend on the trickle of international aid that the Israeli army allows in. This humanitarian crisis is man-made and entirely avoidable.

Even patients in dire need of medical treatment not available in Gaza are often prevented from leaving and scores of them have died. Students who have scholarships in universities abroad are likewise trapped in Gaza, denied the opportunity to build a future.

The Israeli authorities argue that the blockade on Gaza is in response to Palestinian attacks, especially the indiscriminate rockets fired from Gaza at the nearby Israeli town of Sderot. These and other Palestinian attacks killed 25 Israelis in the first half of this year; in the same period Israeli forces killed 400 Palestinians.

However, the Israeli blockade does not target the Palestinian armed groups responsible for attacks – it collectively punishes the entire population of Gaza.

In April 2008, Robert Serry, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and Personal Representative of the UN Secretary General, called on Israel to restore fuel supplies to Gaza and allow the passage of humanitarian assistance and commercial supplies.

"The collective punishment of the population of Gaza, which has been instituted for months now, has failed," he said.

Though a ceasefire between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups has held in Gaza since 19 June 2008, the Israeli blockade remains in place.

Economic collapse and poverty

Israel has banned exports from Gaza altogether and has reduced entry of fuel and goods to a trickle – mostly humanitarian aid, foodstuff and medical supplies. Basic necessities are in short supply or not available at all in Gaza. The shortages have pushed up food prices at a time when people can least afford to pay more. A growing number of Gazans have been pushed into extreme poverty and suffer from malnutrition.

Some 80 per cent of the population now depends on international aid, compared to 10 per cent a decade ago. The restrictions imposed by Israel have resulted in higher operational costs for UN aid agencies and humanitarian organizations. Food assistance costs the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) US$20 per person per day compared to less than US$8 in 2004.

Gaza’s fragile economy, already battered by years of restrictions and destruction, has collapsed. Unable to import raw materials and to export produce and without fuel to operate machinery and electricity generators, some 90 per cent of industry has shut down.

Essential services jeopardized

The fuel shortage has affected every aspect of life in Gaza. Patients’ hospital attendance has dropped because of lack of transport and universities were forced to shut down before the end of the school year as students and teachers could not continue to travel to them. Fuel-powered pumps for wells and water distribution networks are often not working.

Medical facilities in Gaza lack the specialized staff and equipment to treat a range of conditions, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. In addition, hospitals are now under ever greater pressure, as they face shortages of equipment, spare parts and other necessary supplies as a result of the blockade.

With the ceasefire holding, the suffering in Gaza has fallen off the international news agenda....

"... fallen off the international news agenda"... but not for long it seems.

Meanwhile, the Times of India reports that Israel has detained two reporters from Al-Jazeera. The Supreme Court of Israel had to intervene to oppose the military's refusal to allow any journalists in to report on the situation inside Gaza itself, but the government continues to sabotage such efforts, and no reporters have yet made their way to the battlefield. Again... no comment from the U.S. big, "free" press.

Here's the latest from Al-Jazeera itself:

The International Committee for the Red Cross said on Sunday its medical emergency team had been prevented for a third day from entering the territory.

Egypt has also completely closed the Rafah crossing, cutting off aid supplies to the territory.

The UN has warned that there were "critical gaps" in aid reaching Gaza, despite claims from Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, that there was no crisis and that aid was getting through.

However, Christopher Gunness, the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) spokesman said the idea that there is no humanitarian crisis is absurd.

"The organization for which I work - Unrwa - has approximately 9-10,000 workers on the ground. They are speaking with the ordinary civilians in Gaza... People are suffering. A quarter of all those being killed now are civilians. So when I hear people say we're doing our best to avoid civilian casualties that rings very hollow indeed."

Elsewhere in the strip, heavy artillery, tracer fire and rockets could be heard while reports said Israeli troops had reached the northern towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun.

Soldiers and fighters were also locked in gun battles east of the Hamas stronghold of Zeitoun.

U.S. Arms Attack: Oppose Israeli War Crimes Against Gaza

Much of the world has shuddered in revulsion and protested loudly Israel's "all-out" air assault against Hamas in the teeming, crowded ghetto mini-state that is Gaza. Hundreds have been killed in the bombings, and over a thousand injured -- mostly women and children -- and the attack continues.

In the United States, the protest is muted, as U.S. politicians tout the "special relationship" of the U.S. with Israel. Using new U.S.-supplied "smart" bunker-buster bombs -- the GPS-guided GBU-39 missile, manufactured by Boeing and Lockheed Martin -- the Israelis have spent months planning the attack, which in its disproportionate "response" to crude missiles that Hamas forces have sent into Israel, constitutes a "war crime."

The GBU-39, whose 250-lb. size is touted "the next evolution of miniature munition weapons development," has already been deployed in Iraq by the U.S. Air Force. Last September, Congress authorized the sale of 1000 of these missiles to Israel.

Daily Kos readers, who have been subjected to weeks of banner advertising by the Aerospace Industries Association, should question the feasibility at this point of allowing this advertising to continue, as AIA is implicated in promoting just the kind of bombs (called SDBs, or Small Diameter Bombs) as the Israelis are using, i.e., the GBU-39 mentioned just above.

AIA describes itself as "implementing solutions to industry-wide issues related to national and homeland security, civil aviation, and space," and "the premier organization representing the U.S. aerospace, defense, and homeland security industry and its collective interests." Behind these high-sounding words lies the reality of their product, in the dead and mangled bodies of men, women and children in the ruins of Gaza.

From AIA's newsletter, The Supplier's Voice, May 2004 (alternate non-PDF link):

The U.S. Air Force recently selected AIA Associate Member Marotta Controls as part of The Boeing Company team for continued development of the Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) system for manned and unmanned aircraft....

The Small Diameter Bomb, 70 inches long and 7.5 inches wide, allows for an increased weapons load on each aircraft.

War Crimes and Deadly Cynical politics

Calling the Israeli attack a war crime is not just my opinion. That's the conclusion of Richard Falk, the special investigator for the UN High Commission for Refugees regarding Israeli actions in the Palestinian Territories. Falk, who is also professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University, cites the Israelis' disproportionate military response, in this instance, and the targeting of the civilian population via the doctrine of collective responsibility viz. the population of Gaza for the rockets fired into Israel. The rockets have killed approximately a dozen Israelis over the last six years.

But this vicious shock-and-awe attack was not meant for retribution against "terrorists." As Tariq Ali pointed out in the Guardian:

The assault on Gaza, planned over six months and executed with perfect timing, was designed largely, as Neve Gordon has rightly observed, to help the incumbent parties triumph in the forthcoming Israeli elections. The dead Palestinians are little more than election fodder in a cynical contest between the right and the far right in Israel. Washington and its EU allies, perfectly aware that Gaza was about to be assaulted, as in the case of Lebanon in 2006, sit back and watch....

The moth-eaten Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt and Nato's favourite Islamists in Ankara failed to register even a symbolic protest by recalling their ambassadors from Israel. China and Russia did not convene a meeting of the UN security council to discuss the crisis.

Of course, it matters little to U.S. leaders and opinion makers that Hamas was democratically elected to their positions in Hamas, that they have been the inheritors of a situation in the Middle East where Palestinians have been increasingly marginalized and pushed off lands, squeezed into bantustans with the economic choke hold points held by Jerusalem. The recent Israeli blockade of Gaza was a humanitarian disaster:

...the bombs dropped on Gaza are only a variation in Israel's method of killing Palestinians. In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food, cancer treatments and other medicines by an Israeli blockade that targeted 1.5 million people -- mostly refugees and children -- caged into the Gaza Strip. The orders of Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, to hold back medicine were just as lethal and illegal as those to send in the airplanes.

"Terrorism" and Repression

As Tariq Ali put it, "Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office." Instead, the Israeli government labels Hamas terrorists, and declares anyone harboring them will suffer their fate.

Long ago, the Zionists who sought a homeland in Palestine, chased out of Europe by genocidal anti-semitism, were themselves branded terrorists by the Western powers, most infamously the Irgun, one of whose leaders, Menachem Begin, became a Prime Minister of Israel, despite his involvement in the 1946 terrorist bombing of Jerusalem's King David hotel, killing almost 100 people. But then, "terrorist" is really an epithet used to denounce your opponent and declare them outside the pale of ordinary treatment, whether that be the laws of war, or civilized codes regarding the treatment of prisoners or civilians in the zones of conflict.

The following is a good example of the sinister use of the word "terrorist," and just the kind of treatment Gaza civilians are getting. From the Jerusalem Post:

Sunday, Military Intelligence's Psychological Warfare Department broke into radio broadcasts in Gaza and warned Palestinian civilians not to cooperate with Hamas terrorist activity.

Palestinians reported that they received phone calls to their cellular phones and landlines from the IDF. The phone call, the Palestinians said, conveyed a recorded message ordering the immediate evacuation of homes that were next to Hamas infrastructure or being used by the terrorist organization.

On Sunday, head of the Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration Col. Moshe Levy was interviewed by several Arab news outlets during which he stressed that Israel was not against the Palestinian public in Gaza but was operating against Hamas.

Defense officials said Sunday that Israel would, however, not hesitate to target the homes of civilians who protected Hamas terrorists throughout the operation.

"We will go after every Hamas operative, no matter where he is," one official said. "We urge the Palestinians not to cooperate with terrorists."

If memory were to be invoked, was it not the doctrine of collective punishment and the epithet terrorist thrown at the citizens of the Czech village of Lidice, many of them children, brutally massacred, some shot, some gassed, for their "collective responsibility" for the "terrorist" attack that resulted in the death of Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Main Office (which included the Gestapo and SD)? Whether the comparison be with Lidice or with the Nazi assault on the Warsaw Ghetto, the cynical and calculated attack by the Zionist state resembles those two in its viciousness. Some of the Israeli press have responded with condemnation, but in the U.S., it's business as usual: silence, tsk-tsking, and the ring of cash registers in the midnight plants of war armament factories.

A World System in Chaos
The Israeli government, along with the various Arab regimes, have used the Palestinian people as a political football for decades, while thousands of Palestinians have been dispossessed, or languish in refugee camps that date back decades. The Palestinian leadership has not done well by its own people, either, engaging in internecine warfare that has left it either increasingly politically isolated with little program for a road forward (Hamas), or nothing but a shill for U.S./EU interests (the rump of the PLO).

It was the tragedy of the Palestinian leadership to seek a nationalist alliance in a world where it could not find a powerful enough bloc partner to ensure its claims of statehood. The Palestinians are not the only nation to fail to achieve its own state, or be held in occupation for decades. Just ask the Turkish Kurds, or the Chechens, or the Sikhs, or a hundred other oppressed peoples; nor should we forget those historically defeated nations, banished to reservations, refugee camps, or outright exterminated by disease and "superior" firepower. The vaunted "most powerful nation in the world," we should not forget, was built up out of a war of extermination and isolation of its native tribes, and the sweat and life's blood of generations of black slaves.

Humankind is at a crossroads in its history. Will it continue to operate as a barbaric chaos of nation states, with prejudices, wars, sectarian massacres, while the big imperialist powers make billions off the guns, bombs, shells, rockets and mines with which they ply the various warring states? Or will human beings find their way forward to an organization of society that transcends current injustices?

These questions project far into the future, beyond the lifespans of anyone reading this. In the meantime, it is essential that we stand up to denounce crimes such as Israel's bombing attack on Gaza. There should be an immediate cease-fire. U.S. citizens should call for their government to stop sending arms and money to the Zionist state. And the appropriate international institutions and courts should consider war crimes charges against the leaders of Israel.

Of course, this is just as likely as the same thing happening to the leaders of the U.S., who have killed thousands of times more innocent civilians in their varied imperialist adventures, from Vietnam to Iraq.

I'll close with a story on the human cost of the Israeli attack published in today's Guardian:

An Israeli bomb struck the refugee camp's Imad Aqil mosque around midnight, destroying the building and collapsing several shops and a pharmacy nearby. The force of the blast was so massive it also brought down the Balousha family's house, which yesterday lay in ruins. The seven eldest girls were asleep together on mattresses in one bedroom and they bore the brunt of the explosion. Five were killed where they lay: Tahrir, 17, Ikram 15, Samer, 13, Dina, eight and Jawahar, four....

... Anwar, 40, sat in another house where a mourning tent had been set up. He was pale and still suffering from serious injuries to his head, his shoulder and his hands. But like many other patients in Gaza he had been made to leave an overcrowded hospital to make way for the dying. Yesterday his house was a pile of rubble: collapsed walls and the occasional piece of furniture exposed to the sky. He spoke bitterly of his daughters' deaths. "We are civilians. I don't belong to any faction, I don't support Fatah or Hamas, I'm just a Palestinian. They are punishing us all, civilians and militants. What is the guilt of the civilian?" Like many men in Gaza, Anwar has no job, and like all in the camp he relies on food handouts from the UN and other charity support to survive.

"If the dead here were Israelis, you would see the whole world condemning and responding. But why is no one condemning this action? Aren't we human beings?" he said. "We are living in our land, we didn't take it from the Israelis. We are fighting for our rights. One day we will get them back."

For a list of links to humanitarian groups trying to aid the suffering in Gaza, click here to go to a diary by droogie6655321 at Daily Kos.

New Vanity Fair Expose: Bush Coup Attempt Against Hamas

From David Rose at Vanity Fair:

After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

I'm just getting to this now, but it seems like a must read.