In this issue:

Bush's Hands Bloodied by Israel's Death Squads

Sharon: I Told Bush I Can Kill Arafat

Who Will Be Dumped? Chalabi or Brahimi?

UN Envoy Calls Israeli Policy Biggest Poison

Corruption Consumes Iraq Reconstruction Funds

From Volume 3, Issue Number 17 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Apr. 27, 2004
Mideast News Digest

Bush's Hands Bloodied by Israel's Death Squads

Israel's death squads are violating international law, announced Asma Jahangir, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, in an April 20 statement. Condemning the April 17 assassination of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Hamas leader in Gaza, the statement says, "Aerial bombings or 'targetted assassinations' against civilian populations will only lead to escalating violence," and calls on the Israeli forces "to immediately end this unacceptable practice." Jahangir reports on death-squad activities to the UN Commission on Human Rights, and her statement came out after an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council on April 19, called to pass a resolution condemning the Rantisi killing by the Israelis.

Importantly, in the UN debate on April 19, it was not Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who was blamed, but the United States for having vetoed, on March 24, a Security Council resolution that condemned the earlier "extra-judicial execution" of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was Rantisi's predecessor. Twenty-six days later, Rantisi was killed. On April 21, the Palestinian Authority reported that Israeli snipers on rooftops in a town north of Gaza, were shooting young Palestinian men in the street below, aiming for their chests and heads. Eleven had been killed by 6:00 p.m. Israeli time.

At the April 19 UN debate, more than 40 countries spoke against the assassinations, but only two of them—the U.S. and Israel—defended the assassination policy. Nonetheless, the U.S. representative, Deputy UN Ambassador James Cunningham, said the U.S. will again veto the resolution, because it does not speak of Hamas terrorism against Israel.

Even the U.S.'s imperial partner in Iraq, Britain, condemned the barbaric attack on Rantisi, which was a blow to Tony Blair, who had stood with President Bush in the Rose Garden at the White House one day earlier, praising Bush's embrace of Sharon's phony plan for "unilateral disengagement" as a step for peace.

Palestinian envoy to the UN Nasser al-Kidwa told the Council that it had allowed Israel "to continue acting beyond the parameters of international law.... It is without a doubt that the recent failure of the Security Council ... to take urgent measures to address the deterioration of the situation, due to the veto cast by one of the Council's permanent members [the U.S.], has further emboldened the Israeli government to continue to carry out such illegal actions with impunity."

And both Palestinian Foreign Affairs Minister Nabil Shaath and legislator Hanan Ashrawi, who are well-known speakers in the U.S., blamed the U.S. for not stopping Israel's illegal assassinations.

However, it was Algerian envoy to the UN Human Rights Commission Mohamed-Salah Dembri, who made a crucial point about Israel's behavior. Israel has "made the physical liquidation of its opposers a doctrine," he said. "Never, including the worst moments of contemporary history, or even [in] the Rwandan genocide" had death squads been so open. Instead, "All had tried to hide or deny it." - Perpetual War -

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are in awe of Sharon's killing prowess, and the Sharon doctrine of extra-judicial executions is the basis for Cheney's doctrine of preventive war. The Cheney doctrine is a declaration of "perpetual war" on civilization, and in effect, Bush and Cheney are pulling the trigger every time a Palestinian dies in one of Sharon's assassinations, or an Israeli dies in the inevitable terrorist revenge attack.

Peace was never a goal for Sharon, who has secretly called his Administration Israel's "Second War of Independence"—which he kicked off in September 2000, when Israeli security forces used live ammunition to gun down Palestinian rioters armed with rocks after Sharon's march on the Temple Mount with 3,000 Israeli police.

It was the beginning of Sharon and his generals' asymmetrical war against the Palestinians: bullets against stones; F-16s and Apache helicopters firing rockets against dynamite-stuffed vests delivered by human bombs. One "targetted assassination" in July 2002 wounded 140 Palestinians, and killed 12, including an infant, when the Israelis dropped a 1,000-pound bomb on an apartment house in Gaza City in order to kill Salah Sehadeh, head of the military wing of Hamas. Sehadeh was killed, but in the next year, scores of suicide bombers gave their lives in order to kill hundreds of Israeli civilians, and wound thousands of other Israelis.

But with the U.S. backing this policy of murder, on April 14 Sharon got what he wanted to accomplish in this "Second War of Independence," in a letter from Bush. The letter gives Sharon a new border for Israel, with the legal authority to annex the lands won by the Israeli Army in the 1967 War, lands in which the settlements were set up in order to create Jewish "population centers" which had not existed before. This is in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 242.

Second, Bush's letter unilaterally declares that Israel has the right to prevent Palestinian refugees from ever returning to their homes in what is now the state of Israel. Bush says that the solution to the Palestinian refugee problem will be "found in the establishment of a Palestinian state, and settling the Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel." This not only violates UNSCR 242, which affirms "just settlement of the refugee problem," but also the 1949 UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which says, "The refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date...."

Sharon: I Told Bush I Can Kill Arafat

Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in an interview with Ha'aretz on April 23, said he told President George Bush he is no longer going to keep his pledge not to kill Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

"I told the President, in our first meeting about three years ago, I accepted your request not to harm Arafat physically," Sharon told Ha'aretz. "I told him I understand the problems surrounding the situation, but I am released from that pledge." Sharon did not say what Bush's response was. The statement did draw responses from the Bush Administration, reiterating the policy that Arafat should not be harmed. However, in light of the recent Bush-Sharon summit, and the Bush Administration's veto in March of a Security Council resolution condemning Israel's targetted assassinations of Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, no one is confident that statements from the Bush Administration on this issue carry much weight, or are necessarily even a reflection of the Administration's true policy. Vice President Dick Cheney is known to be a long-time advocate of the elimination of Arafat, and there are widespread reports that Israeli commandos are part of U.S. Special Forces and private mercenary teams, hunting down and assassinating rebels inside Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jibril Rajoub, Arafat's National Security Advisor said that if Israel harmed Arafat, it would constitute a declaration of war on all Palestinians, all Arabs, and the entire Muslim world." Nabil Abu Rudeineh, an aide to Arafat, warned that Sharon's "dangerous statements ... could push the whole region into tremendous danger.... We call upon the U.S. Administration to clarify its position on these statements and to bear its responsibility toward this escalation."

Who Will Be Dumped? Chalabi or Brahimi?

A well-placed Egyptian source reported that there will be a "heavy storm" of backlash against special UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi—not because he criticized Israel (though that will be the cover), but because he has recommended the firing of Ahmed Chalabi, his relatives, and cronies in the Iraqi Governing Council and the newly installed Iraqi ministries, in the interim government.

The source says that Brahimi made known his recommendation for dismissing those Chalabi-linked and other figures on the IGC, who would be eliminated from the next interim government. In addition, against strong opposition from U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and the neo-cons, Brahimi told the Americans that former Iraqi military officers had to be brought in to run the new Iraq military, and that de-Baathification was a serious error.

Behind the scenes, there is much rage and attempts to regroup to keep open the neo-con options, and keep Chalabi on board, said the source.

UN Envoy Calls Israeli Policy Biggest Poison

United Nations Special Envoy to Iraq, Lakdar Brahimi, linked Israel's policy toward the Palestinians to the situation in Iraq. "The big poison in the region is the Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians," Brahimi told an interviewer on France's Inter radio April 22. He also said his job was complicated by Iraqi perceptions of "Israel's completely violent and repressive security policy and determination to occupy more and more of Palestinian territory."

Brahimi's forthrightness immediately drew fire. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan replied through his spokesman, insisting that Brahimi "was expressing his personal views." Israel's UN Deputy Ambassador Arye Mekel, rebuked Brahimi's comments as "disturbing." There could be more backlash from this.

Corruption Consumes Iraq Reconstruction Funds

A report by National Public Radio's "Marketplace" program, in conjunction with the Center for Investigative Journalism, has concluded that corruption in Iraq is so rampant that it is costing as much as 20% of the billions of dollars that have been allocated for reconstruction. The corruption includes bribery by Iraqi companies to get contracts, the pocketing of money by Iraqi ministry officials, the selling of medical supplies and other equipment on the black market, and so forth.

The report emphasizes, however, that Washington is sinking in as much corruption as Baghdad. The Bush Administration has been in a race to privatize everything, as shown in the case of Halliburton and its $2.64 per gallon gasoline. Aside from that, the Bush Administration also successfully fought attempts in Congress to add anti-corruption measures, such as outlawing war profiteering, to last fall's $87 billion Iraq war appropriations bill. The result was that the money is going out with very little oversight. The Pentagon, itself only has about 80 people qualified to audit contracts, when outside experts say that at least twice that number is needed. The response of the Defense Department to the staff shortage is—you guessed it—to outsource the auditing to private companies.

This raises its own set of problems, as Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif) pointed out. There's nothing to prevent one private contractor from overseeing another, with whom it may have had, or will have business, in the future.

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