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    At the twilight, a moon appeared in the sky;

     
    At the twilight, a moon appeared in the sky;

    Then it landed on earth to look at me.

    Like a hawk stealing a bird at the time of prey;

    That moon stole me and rushed back into the sky.

    I looked at myself, I did not see me anymore;

    For in that moon, my body turned as fine as soul.

    The nine spheres disappeared in that moon;

    The ship of my existence drowned in that sea.

     

    (~Rumi)

    1:15 | コメントの投稿 | 固定リンク | この記事を引用 | Sufi Poetry

    7 Facts You Might Not Know about the Iraq War

    Published on Monday, August 21, 2006 by TomDispatch.com
    7 Facts You Might Not Know about the Iraq War
    by Michael Schwartz
     
    With a tenuous cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon holding, the ever-hotter war in Iraq is once again creeping back onto newspaper front pages and towards the top of the evening news. Before being fully immersed in daily reports of bomb blasts, sectarian violence, and casualties, however, it might be worth considering some of the just-under-the-radar-screen realities of the situation in that country. Here, then, is a little guide to understanding what is likely to be a flood of new Iraqi developments -- a few enduring, but seldom commented upon, patterns central to the dynamics of the Iraq war, as well as to the fate of the American occupation and Iraqi society.

    1. The Iraqi Government Is Little More Than a Group of "Talking Heads"

    A minimally viable central government is built on at least three foundations: the coercive capacity to maintain order, an administrative apparatus that can deliver government services and directives to society, and the resources to manage these functions. The Iraqi government has none of these attributes -- and no prospect of developing them. It has no coercive capacity. The national army we hear so much about is actually trained and commanded by the Americans, while the police forces are largely controlled by local governments and have few, if any, viable links to the central government in Baghdad. (Only the Special Forces, whose death-squad activities in the capital have lately been in the news, have any formal relationship with the elected government; and they have more enduring ties to the U.S. military that created them and the Shia militias who staffed them.)

    Administratively, the Iraqi government has no existence outside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone -- and little presence within it. Whatever local apparatus exists elsewhere in the country is led by local leaders, usually with little or no loyalty to the central government and not dependent on it for resources it doesn't, in any case, possess. In Baghdad itself, this is clearly illustrated in the vast Shiite slum of Sadr city, controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and his elaborate network of political clerics. (Even U.S. occupation forces enter that enormous swath of the capital only in large brigades, braced for significant firefights.) In the major city of the Shia south, Basra, local clerics lead a government that alternately ignores and defies the central government on all policy issues from oil to women's rights; in Sunni cities like Tal Afar and Ramadi, where major battles with the Americans alternate with insurgent control, the government simply has no presence whatsoever. In Kurdistan in the north, the Kurdish leadership maintains full control of all local governments.

    As for resources, with 85% of the country's revenues deriving from oil, all you really need to know is that oil-rich Iraq is also suffering from an "acute fuel shortage" (including soaring prices, all-night lines at gas stations, and a deal to get help from neighboring Syria which itself has minimal refining capacity). The almost helpless Iraqi government has had little choice but to accept the dictates of American advisors and of the International Monetary Fund about exactly how what energy resources exist will be used. Paying off Saddam-era debt, reparations to Kuwait from the Gulf War of 1990, and the needs of the U.S.-controlled national army have had first claim. With what remains so meager that it cannot sustain a viable administrative apparatus in Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country, there is barely enough to spare for the government leadership to line their own pockets.

    2. There Is No Iraqi Army

    The "Iraqi Army" is a misnomer. The government's military consists of Iraqi units integrated into the U.S.-commanded occupation army. These units rely on the Americans for intelligence, logistics, and -- lacking almost all heavy weaponry themselves -- artillery, tanks, and any kind of airpower. (The Iraqi "Air Force" typically consists of fewer then 10 planes with no combat capability.) The government has no real control over either personnel or strategy.

    We can see this clearly in a recent operation in Sadr City, conducted (as news reports tell us) by "Iraqi troops and US advisors" and backed up by U.S. artillery and air power. It was one of an ongoing series of attempts to undermine the Sadrists and their Mahdi army, who have governed the area since the fall of Saddam. The day after the assault, Iraqi premier Nouri Kamel al-Maliki complained about the tactics used, which he labeled "unjustified," and about the fact that neither he, nor his government, was included in the decision-making leading up to the assault. As he put it to an Agence France-Presse, "I reiterate my rejection to [sic] such an operation and it should not be executed without my consent. This particular operation did not have my approval."

    This happened because the U.S. has functionally expanded its own forces in Iraq by integrating local Iraqi units into its command structure, while essentially depriving the central government of any army it could use purely for its own purposes. Iraqi units have their own officers, but they always operate with American advisers. As American Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad put it, "We'll ultimately help them become independent." (Don't hold your breath.)

    3. The Recent Decline in American Casualties Is Not a Result of Less Fighting (and Anyway, It's Probably Ending)

    At the beginning of August, the press carried reports of a significant decline in U.S. casualties, punctuated with announcements from American officials that the military situation was improving. The figures (compiled by the Brookings Institute) do show a decline in U.S. military deaths (76 in April, 69 in May, 63 in June, and then only 48 in July). But these were offset by dramatic increases in Iraqi military fatalities, which almost doubled in July as the U.S. sent larger numbers of Iraqi units into battle, and as undermanned American units were redeployed from al-Anbar province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, to civil-war-torn Baghdad in preparation for a big push to recapture various out-of-control neighborhoods in the capital.

    More important, when it comes to long-term U.S. casualties, the trends are not good. In recent months, U.S. units had been pulled off the streets of the capital. But the Iraqi Army units that replaced them proved incapable of controlling Baghdad in even minimal ways. So, in addition, to fighting the Sunni insurgency, American troops are now back on the streets of Baghdad in the midst of a swirling civil war with U.S. casualties likely to rise. In recent months, there has also been an escalation of the fighting between American forces and the insurgency, independent of the sectarian fighting that now dominates the headlines.

    As a consequence, the U.S. has actually increased its troop levels in Iraq (by delaying the return of some units, sending others back to Iraq early, and sending in some troops previously held in reserve in Kuwait). The number of battles (large and small) between occupation troops and the Iraqi resistance has increased from about 70 a day to about 90 a day; and the number of resistance fighters estimated by U.S. officials has held steady at about 20,000. The number of IEDs placed -- the principle weapon targeted at occupation troops (including Iraqi units) -- has been rising steadily since the spring.

    The effort by Sunni guerrillas to expel the American army and its allies is more widespread and energetic than at any time since the fall of the Hussein regime.

    4. Most Iraqi Cities Have Active and Often Viable Local Governments

    Neither the Iraqi government, nor the American-led occupation has a significant presence in most parts of Iraq. This is well-publicized in the three Kurdish provinces, which are ruled by a stable Kurdish government without any outside presence; less so in Shia urban areas where various religio-political groups -- notably the Sadrists, the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Da'wa , and Fadhila -- vie for local control, and then organize cities and towns around their own political and religious platforms. While there is often violent friction among these groups -- particularly when the contest for control of an area is undecided -- most cities and towns are largely peaceful as local governments and local populations struggle to provide city services without a viable national economy.

    This situation also holds true in the Sunni areas, except when the occupation is actively trying to pacify them. When there is no fighting, local governments dominated by the religious and tribal leaders of the resistance establish the laws and maintain a kind of order, relying for law enforcement on guerrilla fighters and militia members.

    All these governments -- Kurdish, Shia and Sunni -- have shown themselves capable of maintaining (often fundamentalist) law and (often quite harsh) order, with little crime and little resistance from the local population. Though often severely limited by the lack of resources from a paralyzed national economy and a bankrupt national government, they do collect the garbage, direct traffic, suppress the local criminal element, and perform many of the other duties expected of local governments.

    5. Outside Baghdad, Violence Arrives with the Occupation Army

    The portrait of chaos across Iraq that our news generally offers us is a genuine half-truth. Certainly, Baghdad has been plunged into massive and worsening disarray as both the war against the Americans and the civil war have come to be concentrated there, and as the terrifying process of ethnic cleansing has hit neighborhood after neighborhood, and is now beginning to seep into the environs of the capital.

    However, outside Baghdad (with the exception of the northern cities of Kirkuk and Mosul, where historic friction among Kurd, Sunni, and Turkman has created a different version of sectarian violence), Iraqi cities tend to be reasonably ethnically homogeneous and to have at least quasi-stable governments. The real violence often only arrives when the occupation military makes its periodic sweeps aimed at recapturing cities where it has lost all authority and even presence.

    This deadly pattern of escalating violence is regularly triggered by those dreaded sweeps, involving brutal, destructive, and sometimes lethal home invasions aimed at capturing or killing suspected insurgents or their supporters. The insurgent response involves the emplacement of ever more sophisticated roadside bombs (known as IEDs) and sniper attacks, aimed at distracting or hampering the patrols. The ensuing firefights frequently involve the use of artillery, tanks, and air power in urban areas, demolishing homes and stores in a neighborhood, which only adds to the bitter resistance and increasing the support for the insurgency.

    These mini-wars can last between a few hours and, in Falluja, Ramadi, or other "centers of resistance," a few weeks. They constitute the overwhelming preponderance of the fighting in Iraq. For any city, the results can be widespread death and devastation from which it can take months or years to recover. Yet these are still episodes punctuating a less violent, if increasingly more run-down normalcy.

    6. There Is a Growing Resistance Movement in the Shia Areas of Iraq

    Lately, the pattern of violence established in largely Sunni areas of Iraq has begun to spread to largely Shia cities, which had previously been insulated from the periodic devastation of American pacification attempts. This ended with growing Bush administration anxiety about economic, religious, and militia connections between local Shia governments and Iran, and with the growing power of the anti-American Sadrist movement, which had already fought two fierce battles with the U.S. in Najaf in 2004 and a number of times since then in Sadr City.

    Symptomatic of this change is the increasing violence in Basra, the urban oil hub at the southern tip of the country, whose local government has long been dominated by various fundamentalist Shia political groups with strong ties to Iran. When the British military began a campaign to undermine the fundamentalists' control of the police force there, two British military operatives were arrested, triggering a battle between British soldiers (supported by the Shia leadership of the Iraqi central government) and the local police (supported by local Shia leaders). This confrontation initiated a series of armed confrontations among the various contenders for power in Basra.

    Similar confrontations have occurred in other localities, including Karbala, Najaf, Sadr City, and Maysan province. So far no general offensive to recapture the any of these areas has been attempted, but Britain has recently been concentrating its troops outside Basra.

    If the occupation decides to use military means to bring the Shia cities back into anything like an American orbit, full-scale battles may be looming in the near future that could begin to replicate the fighting in Sunni areas, including the use of IEDs, so far only sporadically employed in the south. If you think American (and British) troops are overextended now, dealing with internecine warfare and a minority Sunni insurgency, just imagine what a real Shiite insurgency would mean.

    7. There Are Three Distinct Types of Terrorism in Iraq, All Directly or Indirectly Connected to the Occupation

    Terrorism involves attacking civilians to force them to abandon their support for your enemy, or to drive them away from a coveted territory.

    The original terrorists in Iraq were the military and civilian officials of the Bush administration -- starting with their "shock and awe" bombing campaign that destroyed Iraqi infrastructure in order to "undermine civilian morale." The American form of terrorism continued with the wholesale destruction of most of Falluja and parts of other Sunni cities, designed to pacify the "hot beds" of insurgency, while teaching the residents of those areas that, if they "harbor the insurgents," they will surely "suffer the consequences."

    At the individual level, this program of terror was continued through the invasions of, and demolishing of, homes (or, in some cases, parts of neighborhoods) where insurgents were believed to be hidden among a larger civilian population, thus spreading the "lesson" about "harboring terrorists" to everyone in the Sunni sections of the country. Generating a violent death rate of at least 18,000 per year, the American drumbeat of terror has contributed more than its share to the recently escalating civilian death toll, which reached a record 3,149 in the official count during July. It is unfortunately accurate to characterize the American occupation of Sunni Iraq as a reign of terror.

    The Sunni terrorists like those led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have utilized the suicide car bomb to generate the most widely publicized violence in Iraq -- hundreds of civilian casualties each month resulting from attacks on restaurants, markets, and mosques where large number of Shia congregate. At the beginning of the U.S. occupation, car bombs were nonexistent; they only became common when a tiny proportion of the Sunni resistance movement became convinced that the Shia were the main domestic support for the American occupation. (As far as we can tell, the vast majority of those fighting the Americans oppose such terrorists and have sometimes fought with them.) As al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote, these attacks were justified by "the treason of the Shia and their collusion with the Americans." As if to prove him correct, the number of such attacks tripled to current levels of about 70 per month after the Shia-dominated Iraqi government supported the American devastation of Falluja in November 2004.

    The Sunni terrorists work with the same terrorist logic that the Americans have applied in Iraq: Attacks on civilians are meant to terrify them into not supporting the enemy. There is a belief, of course, among the leadership of the Sunni terrorists that, ultimately, only the violent suppression or expulsion of the Shia is acceptable. But as Zawahiri himself stated, the "majority of Muslims don't comprehend this and possibly could not even imagine it." So the practical justification for such terrorism lies in the more immediate association of the Shia with the hated occupation.

    The final link in the terrorist chain can also be traced back to the occupation. In January of 2005, Newsweek broke the story that the U.S. was establishing (Shiite) "death squads" within the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, modeled after the assassination teams that the CIA had helped organize in El Salvador during the 1980s. These death squads were intended to assassinate activists and supporters of the Sunni resistance. Particularly after the bombing of the Golden Dome, an important Shia shrine in Samarra, in March 2006, they became a fixture in Baghdad, where thousands of corpses -- virtually all Sunni men -- have been found with signs of torture, including electric-drill holes, in their bodies and bullet holes in their heads. Here, again, the logic is the same: to use terror to stop the Sunni community from nurturing and harboring both the terrorist car bombers and the anti-American resistance fighters.

    While there is disagreement about whether the Americans, the Shia-controlled Iraqi Ministry of Defense, or the Shia political parties should shoulder the most responsibility for loosing these death squads on Baghdad, one conclusion is indisputable: They have earned their place in the ignominious triumvirate of Iraqi terrorism.

    One might say that the war has converted one of President Bush's biggest lies into an unimaginably horrible truth: Iraq is now the epicenter of worldwide terrorism.

    Where the 7 Facts Lead

    With this terror triumvirate at the center of Iraqi society, we now enter the horrible era of ethnic cleansing, the logical extension of multidimensional terror.

    When the U.S. toppled the Hussein regime, there was little sectarian sentiment outside of Kurdistan, which had longstanding nationalist ambitions. Even today, opinion polls show that more than two-thirds of Sunnis and Shia stand opposed to the idea of any further weakening of the central government and are not in favor of federation, no less dividing Iraq into three separate nations.

    Nevertheless, ethnic cleansing by both Shia and Sunni has become the order of the day in many of the neighborhoods of Baghdad, replete with house burnings, physical assaults, torture, and murder, all directed against those who resist leaving their homes. These acts are aimed at creating religiously homogeneous neighborhoods.

    This is a terrifying development that derives from the rising tide of terrorism. Sunnis believe that they must expel their Shia neighbors to stop them from giving the Shiite death squads the names of resistance fighters and their supporters. Shia believe that they must expel their Sunni neighbors to stop them from providing information and cover for car-bombing attacks. And, as the situation matures, militants on both sides come to embrace removal -- period. As these actions escalate, feeding on each other, more and more individuals, caught in a vise of fear and bent on revenge, embrace the infernal logic of terrorism: that it is acceptable to punish everyone for the actions of a tiny minority.

    There is still some hope for the Iraqis to recover their equilibrium. All the centripetal forces in Iraq derive from the American occupation, and might still be sufficiently reduced by an American departure followed by a viable reconstruction program embraced by the key elements inside of Iraq. But if the occupation continues, there will certainly come a point -- perhaps already passed -- when the collapse of government legitimacy, the destruction wrought by the war, and the horror of terrorist violence become self-sustaining. If that point is reached, all parties will enter a new territory with incalculable consequences.

    Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on numerous Internet sites, including Tomdispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones.com, and ZNet; and in print in Contexts, Against the Current, and Z Magazine. His books include Radical Protest and Social Structure, and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is Ms42@optonline.net.

    1:12 | コメントの投稿 | 固定リンク | この記事を引用 | News and politics
    8月15日

    AWOL Army Sgt. On the Run for a Year Speaks Out for the First Time

    Friday, August 11th, 2006
    Broadcast Exclusive...AWOL Army Sgt. On the Run for a Year Speaks Out for the First Time

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    In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we speak with Sgt. Ricky Clousing, an Army interrogator who served in Iraq from December 2004 until April 2005. He became a war resister after witnessing how the war was being fought. Within months after returning home, he went AWOL and remained in hiding for a year. We speak with Sgt. Clousing just hours before he plans to go to Fort Lewis to turn himself in to military officials. [includes rush transcript]
    The Pentagon is now estimating that as many as 40,000 troops have deserted the U.S. Armed Forces over the past six years. Many have refused to fight in Iraq.

    Today, we are joined by an Army sergeant, who chose to serve in Iraq as an army interrogator with the 82nd Airborne Division out of Fort Bragg. But he became a war resister after witnessing how the war was being fought.

    His name is Sgt. Ricky Clousing. He is a 24-year-old from Sumner, Washington. He served in Iraq from December 2004 until April 2005. Within months after returning home, he went AWOL.

    In June 2005, Sgt. Clousing sneaked out of Fort Bragg in the middle of the night. He left behind a quote from Martin Luther King. It read, "Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" But conscience asks the question, "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right."

    Today Sgt. Ricky Clousing plans to go to Fort Lewis to turn himself in to military officials. But first he joins us live from Seattle.

    • Sgt. Ricky Clousing, Iraq combat vet and U.S. Army Interrogator.

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    RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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    AMY GOODMAN: Today, Sgt. Ricky Clousing plans to go to Fort Lewis in Washington to turn himself in to military officials. But first, in this first national live broadcast after going AWOL, he joins us in a studio in Seattle. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Sgt. Ricky Clousing.

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: Thank you.

    AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us. Why did you go AWOL?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I chose to leave after experiencing the brutalities of war in this war in Iraq, and it was a process that I considered long and hard upon my return to Fort Bragg. Those two-and-a-half months of my integration back into the military and back into society really questioned and really forced me to reevaluate my beliefs and my own personal feelings and convictions, politically and spiritually, about my involvement in the war in Iraq and also the organization of the military in general.

    JUAN GONZALEZ: Could you talk to us about some of your specific experiences while you were there? My understanding is you actually witnessed some killings of innocent civilians that really affected you deeply?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: Yes, I was assigned to a tactical infantry unit, which meant basically that I was out on patrols with infantry units. The particular incident you’re referring to, I was in Mosul on a convoy en route, and we stopped to assist another convoy that had been struck by an IED. And during that time, I was ordered to pull rear security on the convoy, where I proceeded to go behind the rear Humvee and guard the road, basically to ensure that nobody turned down and posed a threat to U.S. forces assisting soldiers in their personal crisis, what was going on with the IED.

    As I was doing that, I had seen a vehicle turn down our road going approximately 15 miles an hour. I saw directly in the window. It was a young boy, or a young man, I should say, and as soon as he saw U.S. troops, he was terrified, took his hands off the wheel. It was evident that he was scared that U.S. troops were there, weapons drawn. He didn't know what was going on. He was making an effort to brake the vehicle and to turn around immediately, when a soldier in the turret of the Humvee behind me proceeded to open up fire and fired four to five rounds inside of the vehicle.

    I went over to the vehicle with a medic and broke the window out and dragged the civilian into the road, which is common to provide first aid upon injured civilians, and even insurgents, but I look downed at him as the medic was performing first aid. And the situation, obviously, was really -- I was in shock. I didn't know what was going on. It was really fast. But as I looked down in the eyes of the boy, I could tell that he was just scared. He was frightened. And I don't speak Arabic, and obviously there was no words exchanged, but I could look into his eyes and see that he was confused and hurt and didn't know what was going on. You know, I could sense that from the soul he was crying out, you know, “Why is this happening to me? What’s going on? What did I do? I was turning my car around.”

    I spoke with the leaders afterwards and told them that basically they needed to instruct their soldiers to assess and analyze a situation properly, as the proper procedures were neglected. The escalation of force by waving of the arms and firing a warning shot and then proceeding to try to disengage the vehicle by shooting the tires, and then actually if the vehicle doesn't stop and it poses a threat still, you're authorized to engage into the vehicle and engage the civilian. All of those procedures were ignored, and it was directly -- basically the civilian was fired on immediately.

    And I thought that this Iraqi died innocently, and I was really disturbed by it, really shook my foundation of why I thought we were there. And I had skepticism before, but that particular incident, along with some other ones, really just made me second guess what we were doing there and what really is happening.

    AMY GOODMAN: Did you raise it with your superiors?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I did raise it to the superiors that were in charge of the convoy. I did.

    AMY GOODMAN: And what did they say?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I brought it up to them. And it was hard for me to do that, because I was never deployed before, because I wasn't an infantry soldier. I was a military intelligence soldier attached to these infantry guys. But when I did, I spoke what I felt I needed to say and bring up issues that needed to be questioned and concern. And when I did, I was really shot down by the superiors, basically that I didn't know how convoy operations worked, and I had never been deployed before and I didn’t understand that this happens and that that’s just something that’s a reality of war, and that I apparently didn't know what I was talking about.

    JUAN GONZALEZ: And how prevalent, in your experience, were these kinds of incidents of innocent civilians being needlessly killed?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I, myself, only witnessed this particular incident where an innocent civilian was killed, although because I was an interrogator, my security clearance granted me access to the S-2 room, which is the intelligence briefing room. It’s where they have all the intelligence updates. There is a board called the daily intelligence summary, and that holds information on how many times in our area of operation that soldiers have received small arms fire, how many IEDs have gone off and also the number of local nationals or noncombatant Iraqi civilians that are killed. And as I said, I only saw this personally one time, but the number of innocent Iraqis killed on the bleeder board, or on the intelligence board, definitely climbed the whole time I was in Iraq. The number never -- it gradually increased day by day that we were there in the sector.

    AMY GOODMAN: It’s called the “bleeder board”?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: It’s an intelligence summary board, basically of all the updates in the area of operation that we conduct in, all of the significant events.

    AMY GOODMAN: Sgt. Ricky Clousing, can you go back to the beginning and tell us when and why you joined the military, the Army?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I joined in 2002. I was actually taking some time off school, and I was doing some mission work in Thailand in an orphanage. And I ended up coming back from that trip and not knowing whether to pursue school or not. So I moved to Europe to live with my father for a little while, and I was there for about four months, backpacking around. I was traveling, and I encountered soldiers coming back from Afghanistan, which was fairly after 9/11, fairly short after that. And I really just started considering the possibility of serving in the military in this new era of these all new ideas that had been thrown out there. So I started contemplating. I went and spoke with a recruiter, and the job title that seemed appealing to me was an interrogator, partly because of the nature of the job and also because of the possibility to learn a foreign language and just the new experiences that I would have.

    JUAN GONZALEZ: And when you decided to go AWOL, could you take us through some of your thoughts then, and why you decided you had to do this?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: Well, as I said, the particular incident that I saw definitely disturbed me. There’s a number of other incidents that happened that really added to my confusion and my conflict of conscience, you could say. And it really -- although some might call these incidents isolated, and even in the media, you watch on the news the events that happened in Haditha, you read about the 14-year-old girl that was raped and killed by soldiers or even the abuses of Abu Ghraib. Every month or every couple months, there is always a headline issue, it seems to be, that there’s some sort of abuse of power that’s going on in Iraq.

    But what’s not really covered by the media and what really isn’t spoken about are the daily injustices that happened. And my experiences over there were daily injustices, which included that innocent civilian that was killed, but as I said, there was also a number of other incidents where I -- to sum it up, I really saw the physical, psychological and emotional harassment of civilians. The abuse of power that goes on in Iraq each day really was just not -- I believe should not be tolerated. And these events aren’t covered by the media.

    So those events that I witnessed and I was exposed to really forced me to second guess my ability to perform daily functions as a soldier, to train my soldiers that I was in charge of and to be trained. I was basically kind of -- I felt stuck in my situation, where I really felt like -- as I got home, I really dug into information leading up to the war in Iraq and also through foreign policy in general, and I just really was -- I felt stuck, that I’m in an organization right now that I’m discovering, based on my experiences and the knowledge that I’m reading, that I really do not believe that I can honorably serve and be a part of at this time, so --

    AMY GOODMAN: Sergeant Clousing, we have to break for 60 seconds. We’re going to come back. We want to talk to you about that process that night when you left Fort Bragg and also what you’ve done over this past year. It has been difficult. You’ve gone AWOL. Today, you’ll be holding a news conference in Washington State and turning yourself in. We would like to talk about that, as well. We are talking to Sgt. Ricky Clousing, speaking out nationally for the first time. Today, he will turn himself in in Fort Lewis. Stay with us.

    [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: Our guest in Seattle today is speaking out nationally for the first time. His name is Sergeant Ricky Clousing, served as an army interrogator in Iraq from December 2004 to April 2005. This is more than a year later. Ricky Clousing, what did you do the night you left Fort Bragg, and did others there know that you were leaving, placing that quote of Dr. Martin Luther King, leaving it behind you and walking out of the base?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: Well, I didn't actually plan a day that I was going to depart from my unit. Like I mentioned a little bit before, it was a process of when I integrated back home of my feelings really intensifying over time, and it intensified to the point in June, where I really felt like the only decision that I had in obeying my conscience and living honorably was to separate myself from the military in that way. So nobody else in my unit knew that I was going to be leaving. It wasn't -- I didn't talk to anybody about it. I basically -- I knew this was a time I had to move and I had to separate myself. So, as you mentioned, I left a note on my door explaining my feelings, which my unit was well aware of. My superiors already understood my conflict, and I left a quote by Martin Luther King, which you read earlier, which I feel kind of explained in a summary of how I felt in the whole matter.

    JUAN GONZALEZ: What about your fellow soldiers? Did any of them share your frustration and your disillusionment with what was going on there, or were you pretty much a loner on this issue?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: When I was in Iraq, I was primarily attached to infantry units, so I was around a different mentality of soldiers. When I returned home and spoke to some of the people that I had trained with and stuff in my intelligence unit, there's definitely, even among the infantry soldiers, there was absolutely a feeling of confusion, a feeling of questioning whether or not we're actually in Iraq for the reasons we were told, because men and women are dying each day, you know. Even these infantry guys are losing their friends each day in roadside bombs, losing their friends in gunfire attacks, and absolutely, the -- I mean, people are wondering, “Why am I here? I mean, I was sent here for a reason.” And people still, soldiers in particular, they definitely feel this question of “What is really going on?” It’s not so much spoken about on a big platform, because it’s kind of like this inner question that I had before I went to Iraq, as well. It’s just that the experiences that I had really kind of forced me to deal with these questions on the forefront, kind of like compelled me to answer them.

    AMY GOODMAN: Sergeant Clousing, last November we interviewed a former U.S. Army interrogator specialist. His name is Tony Lagouranis. He, too, served in Iraq. He was at Abu Ghraib beginning in April 2004. He was in other places, as well, began to speak out about what he witnessed there. During the interview, he talked about the methods of interrogation he used.

      TONY LAGOURANIS: We were using dogs in the Mosul detention facility, which was at the Mosul airport. We would put the prisoner in a shipping container. We would keep him up all night with music and strobe lights, stress positions. And then, we would bring in dogs, and the prisoner was blindfolded, so he didn't really understand what was going on, but we had the dog controlled. He was being held by a military police dog handler on a leash, and the dog was muzzled so he couldn't hurt the prisoner. That was the only time I ever saw dogs used in Iraq.

      AMY GOODMAN: Did the prisoner know that there was a muzzle on the dog?

      TONY LAGOURANIS: No, because he was blindfolded, so the dog would be barking and jumping on the prisoner, and the prisoner wouldn't really understand what was going on.

      AMY GOODMAN: What did you think of this practice that you were engaging in?

      TONY LAGOURANIS: Well, I knew that we were really walking the line, and I was going through the interrogation rules of engagement that was given to me by the unit that we were working with up there, trying to figure out what was legal, what wasn't legal. And according to this interrogation rules of engagement, that was legal. So when they ordered me to do it, I had to do it. And, you know, as far as whether, you know, I thought it was a good interrogation practice, I didn't think so at all, actually. It didn't -- we never produced any intelligence.

    AMY GOODMAN: Former Army interrogator, Tony Lagouranis, talking about his experiences. You, too, were in Mosul, Sgt. Ricky Clousing, as well as Baghdad. Did you have experiences like this, you, too, an Army interrogator?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I actually was never exposed to the mistreatment of prisoners. It could have been because of the differences between the specific unit I was working with. There’s two separate possibilities basically for an interrogator. You’re basically assigned to a strategic unit, which are -- a lot of those units are -- they’re basically not attached to infantry units. They're not an infantry support unit. Those are the interrogators that were at Abu Ghraib. Those are the interrogators that are at Guantanamo Bay and a lot of the larger interrogation facilities. Those are strategic unit interrogators.

    It just happened to be, primarily because of my airborne qualification, that I was stationed with the 82nd Airborne, which happens to be a tactical infantry unit. So, because of that, my interrogation experiences were tactical questioning out in the city after raids, after searches and whatnot, but also in the interrogation facilities. But during my time in the interrogation facility, I never witnessed, like I said, mistreatment of prisoners. My unit back at Fort Bragg was very adamant and was very particular about the treatment and the proper handling of prisoners.

    But, however, I did hear stories from other interrogators in Iraq that things went on. I heard stories from Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities of methods used, and using dogs is one of them, using some of the interrogation practices now that are deemed inhumane, I guess. I've heard of stories like that. The common idea in a lot of the mentality in the military is “out of sight, out of mind,” and that definitely prevails in that instance with interrogations being held in Iraq.

    JUAN GONZALEZ: Sergeant, next Thursday U.S. Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada is going to face a pretrial hearing for refusing to deploy to Iraq. Two months ago, he became the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse deployment. This is an excerpt of a video recording he issued at the time, explaining why he's refusing to fight.

      EHREN WATADA: The war in Iraq violates our democratic system of checks and balances. It usurps international treaties and conventions that, by virtue of the Constitution, become American law. The wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of Iraqis is not only a terrible moral injustice, but it is a contradiction to the Army's own law of land warfare. My participation would make me party to war crimes. Normally, those in the military have allowed others to speak for them and act on their behalf. I believe that time has come to an end.

    AMY GOODMAN: First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, he's in Washington State. Suzanne Swift, who also went AWOL and was confined to the Fort Lewis base, from Eugene in Washington. Also, James Yee, the chaplain who was arrested from Guantanamo, comes from Olympia, Washington. And now, you today, here in Seattle, you're going to Fort Lewis. Can you talk about the atmosphere in Washington State? Why do you think there are so many of you? Or are we just hearing people going public in Washington State? After all, we hear there are tens of thousands of people who have left the military, according to the Pentagon's figures.

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I think that there is definitely a wide amount of people that feel the same feelings I have, the same questions that Lieutenant Watada had, as many -- just like a lot of other war resisters that are standing up. Going public is something that is basically an individual choice that has to be made that -- I know other soldiers who have left AWOL and other soldiers who even would like to leave AWOL. I don't think it’s necessarily that the Northwest is particular to those people. It does so happen to be that Suzanne Swift is from the Northwest, I myself am from the Northwest. Lieutenant Watada is from Hawaii. He's stationed here in the Northwest.

    But I would definitely say that there is a progressive idea of involvement and of collective consciousness here about questioning politics and questioning what’s going on in Iraq, which really needs to involve our whole society. I think that that's the kind of the lack of civil responsibility, I maybe could say, that people in this nation have kind of stepped back from and not understood that not only are soldiers really responsible for, you know, certain situations they find themselves in in Iraq, I think as a whole our society really needs to step back and realize what's going on in Iraq and that we are directly and indirectly responsible for the injustices happening over there, whether you're military or not.

    If you're a civilian and you don't speak out against what’s going on and don't make an attempt to understand it and then do something about it, I think we all share that same responsibility. So, like I say, going public is one way I chose that I felt like I wanted to share my experiences in Iraq and shed light on a window of reality that I think has kind of been absent from the media, which is, like I said, the daily abuse of power that goes without accountability.

    JUAN GONZALEZ: Let me ask you, you have been in hiding now for over a year. Could you talk about that experience? Were you aware of any attempts by the Army to track you down or to detain you? What’s been the reaction of your family and your friends to your situation?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I’ve been very grateful that my family has been very supportive of me. They've loved on me this whole time I've been gone. They've been really supportive of me. My friends, as well. I’ve had friends in different parts of the country that are standing by me. Even friends that don't necessarily agree with my politics of my decision, they still know that I’m a person of conviction and they still support my decision.

    The last year has been obviously an interesting year, where I was really trying to piece together a lot of ideas, where as a 24 year-old man trying to recalculate my world view and my perception of not only the military, but of our government and my association in it and my involvement and my responsibilities -- these are all questions that I've pondered and thought about the last year -- I spent a lot of the year in reflection and a lot of it really trying to just be centered and, yeah, like I said, come to grips with a lot of these questions and answers.

    AMY GOODMAN: Sgt. Clousing, today you're going to hold a news conference. And then, well, tell us how the day will proceed. You're turning yourself in after a year.

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: Yes, there's a news conference planned today at 9:00 Pacific time, where it’s actually in coordination with the Vets for Peace conference with the Iraq Veterans Against the War. I'm going to be kind of speaking out not only for myself, but also just in support of the war resisters. But that's going to happen at 9:00 Pacific time for approximately an hour, and then at the conclusion, as you mentioned, I’m going to drive down to Fort Lewis and surrender myself to military custody.

    AMY GOODMAN: And what will happen to you then?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: It’s basically dependent upon the military's reaction of what will happen. I can't -- I don't know what to expect, or I can't make speculations at this time. I have no idea.

    JUAN GONZALEZ: I'd like to ask you, during the year that you have been in hiding, obviously you've had a chance to see news coverage on the 6:00 news or in the newspapers here in this country of the war in Iraq and the reported death tolls now of a hundred people a day being killed. What do you think, given your experience, what are the American people missing in what they're getting from the reporting from our own media here about the war?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: As I mentioned before, I really think there’s just an indifference, and also really these incidences that keep being thrown into the media -- they are these huge, tragic events -- seem to be discovered. I mean, they're not brought up by media, and they're not brought into the light of the population because of a moral issue: is this right? They're not questioning the basis of the war in general. They're just saying, this event was discovered so we have the responsibility to report that to our people.

    AMY GOODMAN: Haditha, Mahmoudiya, did these surprise you?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: They actually didn't. I mean, my experience, especially working with infantry soldiers and seeing their reaction in circumstances that they're put in, it didn't surprise me, because I think that these events that you're talking about and the experiences that I saw are basically a larger picture of the daily devastation in Iraq and a symptom of the dehumanization of the Iraqi people and the dehumanization that happens as a soldier, naturally, of being able to take another person's life for whatever reason.

    It's just these are just symptoms of the larger problem that really America has neglected to face in the last three years and that need to be talked about. They need to be brought up in the media, these daily -- like you mentioned, the hundred people that are dying a day in Iraq, these issues need to be brought up. The mistreatment of prisoners, the mistreatment of civilians, whether or not they are detained or not, these are all --

    AMY GOODMAN: Sgt. Clousing, we just have ten seconds, but you are now turning yourself in. Are you willing to go to jail for going AWOL, absent without leave?

    SGT. RICKY CLOUSING: I knew when I made my decision that there would be consequences, and I felt like I needed to be true to my conscience, so whatever the result is, I feel at peace, and I feel calm and collected that this is destiny and that I am standing up for what I really believe in.

    AMY GOODMAN: Sgt. Ricky Clousing, I want to thank you for joining us. We will certainly follow this case in a Monday report to our listeners and viewers about what has taken place, speaking to us from Seattle, turning himself in at the base at Fort Lewis.

    To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877

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    Seymour Hersh: U.S. Helped Plan Israeli Attack, Cheney "Convinced" Assault on Lebanon Could Serve as Prelude to Preemptive Attack on Iran

    Monday, August 14th, 2006
    Seymour Hersh: U.S. Helped Plan Israeli Attack, Cheney "Convinced" Assault on Lebanon Could Serve as Prelude to Preemptive Attack on Iran

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    Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports in this week's issue of the New Yorker that Israeli officials visited the White House earlier this summer to get a "green light" for an attack on Lebanon. The Bush administration approved, Hersh says, in part to remove Hezbollah as a deterrent to a potential US bombing of Iran. [includes rush transcript]
    Israel and Lebanon saw continued violence on the last day before a UN ceasefire. South Lebanon continued to come under intense Israeli bombardment Sunday. In the most lethal attack, fifteen Lebanese were reported killed after Israel bombed the village of Rachat. Meanwhile, Hezbollah launched more than 250 rockets into Northern Israel. It was the highest number of rockets Hezbollah has fired into Israel since fighting began. At least one Israeli was killed.

    The past month's violence broke out after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight others. Israel rejected Hezbollah's demand for a prisoner exchange, and launched a full-on attack targeting Lebanon's vital infrastructure, including a power station, the main airport and scores of roads and bridges. An estimated 1,000 Lebanese have been killed and more than one million displaced. At least forty Israeli civilians have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced under a daily barrage of Hezbollah rockets.

    The Bush administration has openly backed Israel's campaign. The administration resisted international efforts for a ceasefire and rushed arms to the Israeli military.

    A major new article says U.S. support for the invasion of Lebanon has gone even further than we already know. That in fact, White House support for the massive bombing of Lebanon even predates the day those two Israeli soldiers were seized.

    In this week's issue of the New Yorker, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports Israeli officials visited the White House earlier this summer to get a "green light" for an attack on Lebanon. The Bush administration approved, Hersh says, in part to remove Hezbollah as a deterrent to a potential US bombing of Iran. A government consultant said the Bush administration also saw the attack on Lebanon as a "demo" for what it could expect to face in Iran.

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    AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He joins us in Washington, D.C. His latest piece is called “Watching Lebanon: Washington's Interests in Israel's War.” We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Seymour Hersh.

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Hi.

    AMY GOODMAN: Hi. Can you just start off by telling us what you know at this point of what Washington's interests in Israel's war are?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, when you say Washington, you have to talk about Dick Cheney. I can tell you pretty firmly that it's his office. I guess you could say it's sort of the home of the neoconservative thinking in Washington -- some of his aides and the people close to him in the White House: Elliott Abrams, David Wurmser, others.

    What I understand is this: our military, our Air Force has been trying for a year to get plans for a major massive bombing assault on Iran pushed through the Pentagon, pushed through the process. And there's been sort of an internecine fight inside the Pentagon over just basically the idea of strategic war against Iran. They're very dug in Iran. The Persians have been digging in for -- what? -- centuries and centuries. And the Marines and the Navy and the Army have said, No way we're going to start bombing, because it will end up with troops on the ground. So there's been a stalemate. I've written a lot about it.

    And in this spring, as part of the stalemate, the American Air Force approached the Israeli Air Force, which as you know is headed by General Dan Halutz, who is an Air Force -- I think the first IDF commander, the commander of the Israeli Defense Forces, to be an Air Force guy, and another believer of strategic war, and the two had a lot of interests. And so, out of these meetings in the spring became an agreement, you know, sort of we'll help you, you help us, and it got to Cheney's attention, this idea of Israel planning a major, major strategic bombing campaign against Hezbollah. And for -- I can't tell you where Bush is, but you have to assume he’s right with him. Obviously everything he's done makes that clear.

    Cheney's idea was this, that we sort of -- it's like a three-for. We get three for one with this. One, here we're having this war about the value of strategic bombing, and the Israeli Air Force, whose pilots are superb, can go in and -- if they could go in and blast Hezbollah out of their foxholes or whatever they are, their underground facilities, and roll over them, as everybody in the White House and I'm sure everybody in the Israeli Air Force thought they could do, that would be a big plus for the ambitions that I think the President and Cheney have for Iran. I don't think this president, our president, is going to leave office with Iran being, as he sees it, a nuclear threat.

    The second great argument you have, of course, is if you are going to do Iran, you're going to need -- you can't attack Iran without taking care of the Hezbollah missiles or rockets. They're really rockets. They're not independently guided. Even their long-range rockets that go a few hundred kilometers, you cannot attack Iran without taking them out, because obviously that's the deterrent. You hit Iran, Hezbollah then bombs Tel Aviv and Haifa. So that's something you have to clean out first.

    And thirdly, of course, is if you get rid of Hezbollah and Nasrallah, why, you get rid of a terror -- a man who’s considered to be, as somebody famously said, Richard Armitage, the “A-Team of terrorism.”

    So on that basis, there was a tremendous interest in Israel going ahead. There were meetings. There were an enormous amount of contacts. I should add, Amy, that of course -- and this is reflected in the story -- Israel doesn't need the United States to know they have a problem with Hezbollah. And so, they were going to do something anyway. But it's a question of timing, and that's one of the big issues.

    This summer, earlier this summer, there was -- and late, I guess after the Israelis began their reoccupation -- occupation of Gaza, after the first Israeli soldier was captured, a soldier named Shalit, I think, June 28th, after he was captured, the traffic, the signals traffic that the Israeli signals community gets showed an enormous amount of talk about doing something on the northern border. That is, on the border between Syria -- I mean between Lebanon and Israel.

    And so, on that basis, it was clear this summer, the next time Hezbollah made a move, and there's been a cat-and-mouse game between Israel and Hezbollah for about six years, since the Israelis were kicked out or driven out by Nasrallah in 2000. It’s been cat-and-mouse. Both sides have been going against each other, nickel-dime stuff. And the next time Hezbollah made a move, the Israeli Air Force was going to bomb, the plan was going to go in effect. The move came very quick. It came about ten days after or twelve days after the first Israeli soldier was captured.

    AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, his latest piece appears in this week's issue of the New Yorker magazine. You say the Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits, quoting a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel.

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, sure. I mean, believe me, Israel thought, you know -- I guess the only other time in history where you can look back on such misguided optimism or one of the more recent times was, of course, us going into Iraq. Shades of Iraq, deja-vu or however you want to put it. Israel was convinced it would be easy. The Air Force was going to go and clean them out.

    There was another element, and you mentioned that in your intro and also in your news report. One of the things that struck me right away, as soon as I saw how Israel was bombing, and my instinct told me there was something there, because in one of the Air Force plans that I knew about but didn't write about, one of the Air Force options for taking out Iran was, of course, shock and awe, a massive, massive bombing well beyond any of the nuclear facilities. Go hit the country hard for 36 hours, drive people into underground bunkers. Don't target civilians, necessarily, but hit their infrastructure, hit the roads, hit the power plants, hit the water facilities.

    And so, when they come out of their bunkers after 36 hours, they look around. In the American neo-con view, they were going to say to each other, “Oh, my god, the mullahs did this to us, the religious mullahs who run the country. We're going to overthrow them and install a secular government.” That was the thinking for the last year. That is the thinking for the last year inside some elements of the Pentagon, the civilian side, and also in Cheney's shop.

    So when you watch what Israel did in its opening salvo, the first targets, I remember vividly, was -- and everybody should -- they took out the civilian airstrip. They took away civilian -- the ability to use aircraft to travel. They took out highways. They took out roads. They took out petrol stations. They basically isolated Southern Lebanon. But I think part of the reason they did so much damage to the infrastructure was they believed -- and I think the Israelis have been very clear about it -- that the Christian population and the Sunni population -- don't forget Hezbollah is Shia -- would rise up against Hezbollah, and it would be a great feather in the cap, etc., etc., etc.

    AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. His latest piece is called "Watching Lebanon: Washington’s Interests in Israel’s War." We'll come back with him in a minute.

    [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: We continue our conversation with Seymour Hersh. His piece in the latest New Yorker is called "Watching Lebanon: Washington's Interests in Israel's War." So, can you take us through the timeline, as you understand it, that started before the capture of the two Israeli soldiers, the meetings that were taking place?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, I don't know an awful lot about it, because, obviously, this is secrecy cubed here in this town, Washington, this White House. I don't even know how much Bush was involved in the direct planning. Certainly he’s carrying out the policy. The best guess I have is that this spring there was a tremendous fight in the Pentagon over a nuclear option for Iran, with the generals standing up, standing up quite a bit against this White House. And I think it's a sign, I guess, of the perceived weakness, political weakness, of the Bush administration at this point. And nuclear option was taken off the table for Iran.

    Iran's underground. The nuclear facilities, the alleged nuclear facilities, I’ve also written, we can't find any evidence of a significant weapons program. But in any case, they're certainly doing research in Iran, and they may indeed have intentions, but they're deep underground, buried under a lot of rock, 75 feet, etc. etc. We've all heard that. And at that point in the spring, when the nuclear option was gone and there was a lot of concern about how do you drive down 75 feet and guarantee knocking out a potential weapons system, it was then that our Air Force began to talk with the Israeli Air Force, because the Israelis have been shipped -- we have sent them an awful lot of large 5,000-pound bunker busters. And they’ve done a lot of research into the idea of using two or three bombs on top of each other, etc.

    And so, spring is when I began -- I think you can really trace the American military involvement with the Israeli military. And the way it was described to me, eventually this talk, the planning between the two of them, the sharing of intelligence, which is sort of normal -- we and Israel are very close, a lot of stuff is shared with their military and their intelligence service -- eventually it bubbled up, is the way it came to me, into the Pentagon, into the top leadership, Donald Rumsfeld, and eventually got to Cheney, whose idea was, “Let's push this. This is a great idea.”

    I’m not suggesting that Washington forced Israel to go more quickly than it wanted to, but I don't think there's any question that the Israeli Defense Force, the Air Force, was surprised by how quickly Nasrallah, Hezbollah moved into the business of capturing. As I said, the first Israeli soldier was captured in Gaza on June 28. There was traffic about going, heating up the north. But for Nasrallah to move on 12th of July was very quick. But it was agreed that the next step he made, whenever, and I think the best guess people had is it could have been as late as fall, September or October, that they would go. They went quickly. And people I talked with in Israel -- I spent a lot of time in this story talking to people in Israel -- one of the things that everybody remarked on was the quickness with which the Air Force moved, not that they didn't have plans in effect, but it was very quickly.

    AMY GOODMAN: You also talk about Elliott Abrams, and you talk about Donald Rumsfeld's role.

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, what's interesting about Rumsfeld, because for the first time -- and not everybody agreed, but people that -- you know, I’m long of tooth, Amy, and I’ve been around this town a long time, and obviously, since 9/11, a lot of people talk to me. And for the first time, Rummy doesn't seem to be on board, is what I’m hearing. Actually, somebody even suggested he's getting a little bit like Robert McNamara. If you remember, McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who, under both Kennedy and Johnson, was a great advocate of the Vietnam War and its chief salesman, basically, one of its chief salesmen all during the ’60s, and by ’67, he decided it wasn't winnable and ended up being shoved out and put in the World Bank.

    Rumsfeld is very concerned about the 150,000 American troops on the ground in Iraq, who are potentially in a very untenable position. There's no question Iraq’s lost. There's a lot of question about what we're doing in Afghanistan. We're sort of 0-for-2 in those two. And so, Rumsfeld was not happy about this policy, about going in in a protracted war in Southern Lebanon with Nasrallah, because, of course -- I think Nasrallah is his own man. None of us really know. I think he decides what he wants to do. I don't think Syria and Iran control him the way Washington, this White House seems to believe everything comes from Iran. You know, anybody who meets Nasrallah, as I have a couple of times, he's rather formidable. In any case --

    AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, when did you meet him?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, I’ve met him a lot. I mean, I’ve interviewed him. I’ve interviewed him in the New Yorker. And I just spent time with him over this winter.

    AMY GOODMAN: In Lebanon?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Yeah, sure.

    AMY GOODMAN: And can you describe your sense of him?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: I think he believes in -- he's religious, in the sense that -- I’ve met religious leaders, Archbishop O'Connell here in New York. One of these people who you really, you know -- for an agnostic like me, you come away from a meeting with those people believing that there is something to this business of religion, because these people are so devout. He is very much a believer, Nasrallah, in his own religion, and he doesn't have dead eyes. He's got alive eyes, and he's got humor.

    The reason I started seeing him, I see intelligence people around the world and some of the intelligence people in the Middle East, when the Iraqi war began to start, they encouraged me to see him, on grounds that this guy has a better feel for what's going on in Iraq, as a Shia -- he's very close to the Shia leadership, to Sistani, also to the Iranians, who have a lot of juice inside Iran. So just as a reporter, I would go see him, and we’d talk about mostly Iraq in the beginning, and obviously.

    In any case, the whole point here is, Rumsfeld -- to get back to Rumsfeld, there's no question that Iran has enormous influence inside Iraq, dominated now by the Shia, Shia Iran, and I think Rumsfeld’s concern, I was told, is that a protracted war against Nasrallah will only cause the Iranians, in support of Hezbollah, to start squeezing our troops in Iraq.

    And we're -- you know, as I say, it's an untenable position in Iraq. And nobody quite knows -- this government has no idea on how to get out, just like I don't think the Israelis -- you know, the same pattern you saw in Israel as you saw with this Bush White House going into Iraq: they were so sure of victory that they never looked at the downside. Actually, I quote somebody in this article in the New Yorker, a really high-level guy in one of the military services, saying, “You can't get this White House to think about the downside of anything.” And you saw that with the Israelis. They had no idea, once they got into the quagmire, of how to extract, except to add more forces and increase the death toll to themselves, too.

    AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, you've also written about the U.S. rejecting overtures from Syria in dealing with the war on terror. Can you talk about that, as, of course, you can't talk about Lebanon or Iraq with this administration without talking about Syria and Iran?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, look, this is an administration that still refuses to deal with people it doesn't like. You know, I don't know. When my children were in pre-nursery, you know, little boys will get into a fight, and the nursery school teacher would take the two little boys who were fighting and say, “You two shake hands and go back to the sandbox,” and they would. And so we have a president that won't talk to the Iranians, although they’ve wanted to, and there’s been a lot of stories written about that. And they won't talk to the Syrians.

    And I’ve obviously -- maybe not so obviously, but I’ve interviewed the President of Syria, Bashar al-Asad, a couple of times. And one of the last times, with great pain he told me -- I think he showed me, even showed me, he was -- this was in 2005. He's written letters to George Bush, saying, “Let's get together. Let's talk. We have a lot in common. We can help you. We and Iran basically both have more -- we can do more for you in Iraq than any other country. Why aren't you using us? We don't need a Somalia on our borders. We're not interested in chaos there.” And this White House doesn't believe it. And the letters weren't answered, he told me. His ambassador here in Washington, Imad Mustafa, is absolutely isolated. All this talk that the White House has made, Condoleezza Rice, about having openings to Iran, to Syria, are just, you know -- they're not worth much. There's been some low-level talk. Nobody has made any efforts.

    Syria has, as I’ve written in the New Yorker years ago, was one of the biggest helpers we had after al-Qaeda struck us, because Syria is -- the old man Asad, the father of the current president, hated Jihadism. He did not like the Muslim Brotherhood. They were his opponents. And he kept the best books going on the Muslim Brotherhood, which is very closely connected to al-Qaeda. In fact, we learned more about al-Qaeda from Syria after 9/11 than from any other country. Asad, the president, gave us thousands access -- agreed to give us access to thousands of files. And I wrote a story, I think in ’02 or ’03 for the New Yorker, in which I quoted a senior intelligence official of Syria saying, “We're willing to even talk about our support for Hezbollah with you. We want to see you win the war on terror.”

    So it's been an amazingly horrific performance by this White House, which is of par. You know, I don't think any of us -- I certainly won't breathe easy until we get to 2009, inauguration of a new president. But there's just no question that if we were to approach Syria right now, something else I didn't write at the time -- that's because I wasn't writing about it -- I don't think there's any question that Israel was interested in talking to Syria in ’03, even about the Golan Heights, which is a tough issue for them, and --

    AMY GOODMAN: In fact, Sy --

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Let me finish this. And we discouraged Israel from doing it.

    AMY GOODMAN: Why?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: I don't know. I guess we didn't want our friends to talk to our enemies.

    AMY GOODMAN: You wrote in 2003 about the U.S. bombing of a convoy inside Syria that once and for all smashed the attempts of Syria to communicate with Washington.

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, it didn't really. At the time, it did. But there he is again, the President of Syria, Mr. Asad, tried again and certainly in ’05, the letter he sent me, I saw, had just been written. He was still trying to make contact with Washington, because, obviously, in his view, he had a lot to offer us about resolving the crisis in Iraq. And it's a crisis for Syria, too, in Iraq, because there's now 400,000 or 500,000 Iraqi refugees living in Damascus and elsewhere, a couple hundred thousand now of Lebanese. And so real estate property has gone out of sight there.

    The irony is that as much as we can't stand Syria, for the first time in their life, the Syrians are getting an awful lot of foreign investment, because, you know, with the oil at $75 a barrel, all of the Gulf countries, which are -- they're just washed with money. They don't know what to do with the money they're making every day. And they don't want to invest anymore in America, because some of them have contributed money to charities that have been put on a watch list by the United States. So there's a fear in some of the Gulf countries that if they invest the hundreds of billions of dollars they’ve collected in Washington or real estate here, they might have the property seized for being aiders and abetters of terrorism, so they're dumping money into Syria right now. They were dumping a lot of money into Lebanon, too, but not any more.

    AMY GOODMAN: Bob Parry writes at “Consortium News,” that it was U.S. neo-cons who pushed Israel even further than Israel wanted to go around this issue of the attack of Hezbollah. Do you agree with that?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: The Israelis I talked to said, “Look, you know, there might have been a question being pushed on timing, but Israel certainly wanted to go.” I just don’t -- Bob Parry was right in so many things back in Iran-Contra. I just don't have the same information he does on that. But that there was certainly a decision that -- I quote somebody as saying, we told them basically, “You know, guys” -- in this article I quote somebody as saying in effect -- the Americans telling the Israelis, “Sooner than later, we want this to happen before this president is out of office,” -- that is, taking out Hezbollah so you can take out Iran.

    AMY GOODMAN: Just a few months ago, you wrote the piece, "The Iran Plans: How Far Will the White House Go?" talking about the U.S. plans to bomb Iran. Where do you think the current situation now leaves the United States and the Middle East?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you can't apply rationality to it, because I think it's simply something Bush and Cheney want to do. As I said earlier, they want to take out Iran. They don't want to talk to it. They believe it’s, you know, the axis of evil cubed. And so, frankly, my real worry is what's going to happen -- I think nothing's going to happen before this election. That's impossible. My real worry is what's going to happen when George Bush is a lame duck. He's talking about, privately now, so I’m told and so I’ve written, about Winston Churchill. If you remember, after leading England to war in World War II, he was turned out by the voters, and he wasn't fully appreciated until years later. So I think he sees himself in the position of “I know I’m right. They don't quite believe me. But I’m going to do the thing I think is right, the right thing. And maybe in 30 or 50 years, they'll come to accept me for the great president I think I am.” And so, that's what we really have as leadership right now.

    AMY GOODMAN: And where does Condoleezza Rice fit into this picture?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Well, you know, my guess is that she was smart enough to know this going -- this last trip she made to the Middle East, I've written that she didn't want to go, because she knew she had nothing to offer anybody. And I think there was a story the other week in the New York Times that was, clearly she inspired to her people about how Cheney is plotting against her, and Elliott Abrams, when he was on the trip with her, he was constantly calling up the White House behind her back and filling them in.

    You mention Abrams. Abrams is sort of the key intellectual player, I think, of this policy that Cheney's involved in. He's not in Cheney's office. He works directly for the President as a Special Assistant in the National Security Council office, but there's no question, his influence is enormous on this.

    AMY GOODMAN: And Seymour Hersh, for young people who don't remember Iran-Contra, can you just fill people in on who Elliott Abrams is, his history?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Elliott Abrams was one of the key players in this incredibly wacky scheme we had in the Iran-Iraq war of two decades ago. Between 1980 and 1988, Iran and Iraq fought each other, and we supported Iraq. We supported Saddam Hussein, the United States did, with a lot of secret arms, secret intelligence, even shipping him secret formulas that could be used to make biological weapons and chemical stuff and intelligence, etc, etc. And that was because of course, Khomeini -- we had been kicked out of Iran, when our Shah, the Shah was overthrown.

    We were terrified of the Shiite leadership there. And so, one of the plans, one of the schemes was, in the middle of all of this hostility, Ronald Reagan was so committed to the Contra War in Latin America, that is, defeating what he thought was a communist-led insurgency in Nicaragua in an election there, that he cut a deal to ship arms -- let's see. It's complicated. They sold arms to Israel, which they were shipped, I think, into Iran. You help me out on this.

    Anyway, the bottom line was that it was a policy that brought us into contact with Iran, secret trading. We were going to get weapons that were going to -- the Israelis were going to buy weapons. Money was -- they were going to sell weapons to Iran. Money was going to be generated from that sale to support covertly, outside of Congress's knowledge, to support aid for the opposition in Nicaragua that we favored --

    AMY GOODMAN: For the Contras.

    SEYMOUR HERSH: The Contras, yes, and so there we are. It was totally a crazy policy. When it unraveled, it should have probably led to, in a normal process, an impeachment proceeding for Ronald Reagan, but by that time, he was -- everybody understood he was -- he wasn't well with Alzheimer's or whatever.

    AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that some of the weapons Hezbollah is using today could have come from that sale from the United States?

    SEYMOUR HERSH: No. I think what's happened is, if you really want to know, I think the best guess is, and again, this is -- I quoted somebody to this effect, Vali Nasr, who is a professor at one of the Navy post-graduate schools, very competent guy. What really probably happened is this: once we made our move, the Bush administration and the French, to drive the Syrians out of Lebanon, that famous 1559 you always hear about -- we always hear about 1559. We never hear much about UN Resolution 242, which called for Israel to go back to its original borders. Anyway, 1559 called for Syria to get out of Lebanon and Lebanon to take control, a civilian government come in and also take -- disarm Hezbollah. That was what it called for. Well, of course, it's impossible in Syria, because the Lebanese army is probably 50% Shia and very close to Hezbollah. It was -- that's an impossibility. And so -- wait, I've lost my track of thought. What was I saying?

    AMY GOODMAN: You were just saying that after --

    SEYMOUR HERSH: Oh, yes, I remember. I'm sorry, Amy. So what happened is, once it was clear that the White House and French were getting our way with the UN, and Syria was going to get out, which only could only be interpreted by Iran and by Syria and by Hezbollah, as the pressure was going to be on them to be disarmed -- at that point, Iran really began to step up its support for Hezbollah, not so much in terms -- yes, there's always been close support of aid and arms, but they sent a lot of technicians into Hezbollah to help them dig and help them to improve their ability to mask what they were doing, hide their weapons, their launchers for their rockets, go deeper underground, build command and control bunkers, build a lot of facilities that fooled the Israeli's intelligence.

    The Israelis -- some commando units did go into the war early on and hunter-killer teams, and they were completely bamboozled and hurt hard, because everything they thought would be in place was not. The intelligence stunk, and I think Iran, in the last 18 months, probably played a role in improving Hezbollah's intelligence or its capability to withstand a bombing attack.

    AMY GOODMAN: Seymour Hersh, I want to thank you very much for joining us. His latest piece, "Watching Lebanon: Washington's Interests in Israel's War" is in this week's issue of the New Yorker magazine.

    To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877

    2:29 | コメントの投稿 | 固定リンク | この記事を引用
    8月13日

    Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land

    Thursday, August 3rd, 2006
    Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land: Documentary Examines US Media Coverage of the Israeli Palestinian Conflict

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    How has the US media covered the conflict in the Middle East? We play an excerpt of the documentary “Peace Propaganda and the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” The film was directed by Bathsheba Ratzkoff and Sut Jhally of the Media Education Foundation. [includes rush transcript]

    We continue our coverage of the situation in the Middle East by examining how the U.S. press has been reporting on Lebanon, Israel and Gaza. Some have suggested that America is watching a different war than much of the world. The British journalist Julian Borger came to that conclusion after watching the news in Washington and London.

    The British press, he said, overwhelmingly emphasized the civilian casualties in Lebanon. Meanwhile the U.S. media has focused on the situation in Israeli cities like Haifa. Some journalists from the Middle East are now refusing to work with American news outlets.

    Earlier this week, two producers working for Fox News in Amman Jordan resigned in protest. In their resignation letter, Serene Sabbagh and Jomana Karadsheh wrote "We can no longer work with a news organization that claims to be fair and balanced when you are so far from that. Not only are you an instrument of the Bush White House, and Israeli propaganda, you are war mongers with no sense of decency, nor professionalism.”

    We air an excerpt from the documentary “Peace Propaganda and the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” The film was directed by Bathsheba Ratzkoff and Sut Jhally of the Media Education Foundation.

    • Peace Propaganda and the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Film directed by Bathsheba Ratzkoff and Sut Jhally of the Media Education Foundation. More info on the documentary online at www.pppl.org
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    AMY GOODMAN: In a few minutes, we're going to speak with a panel of media analysts and journalists here in New York, in Beirut and in Tel Aviv. But first, an excerpt from the documentary, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. The film was directed by Bathsheba Ratzkoff and Sut Jhally of the Media Education Foundation.

      NARRATOR: Americans rely on the news media for information about events occurring around the world. News, especially television news, exerts a powerful influence on our perceptions, telling us which events are important and shaping our understanding of the issues. Given the central role played by the United States in the Middle East conflict and thus the vital role played by American voters, influencing U.S. media coverage of the conflict is crucial. Controlling the images and words used to explain the conflict has become an important extension of the struggle.

      PROF. ROBERT JENSEN: Israel is really fighting a war on two fronts. The first is a military campaign being waged in the Occupied Territories against the Palestinian people. And the second is a PR campaign being waged here in the U.S. through the American media to ensure continued support for Israel's occupation. Alon Pinkas, Consul General for Israel in New York and the coordinator of Israel’s PR efforts, was recently quoted as saying, “We are currently in a conflict with the Palestinians, and engaging in a successful PR campaign is part of winning the conflict.” So you could say that in addition to the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is also involved in an attempt to ideologically occupy the American media.

      NARRATOR: The roots of Israel's public relations campaign go back to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that earned it worldwide criticism, in particular the massacre of Palestinian civilians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila. To the Israeli government, the problem was not the deaths of thousands of civilians. Rather, it was the damage to Israel's public image, a public relations disaster in need of damage control.

      ROBERT FISK: They surrounded Beirut. In three months, 17,500 people, almost all of them civilians, were killed. I saw many thousands of their bodies. Then came the massacre of Sabra and Chatila by Israel's own allies, as the camp was surrounded by Israeli troops. And they desperately said, “What went wrong?” It was concluded that the problem was, it wasn't good enough public relations.

      PROF. ROBERT JENSEN: After the public relations disaster of Lebanon, Israel decided to set up permanent institutional structures to control how Americans would think about the Middle East. In 1983, Israel launched the Hasbara Project, the aim of which was to ensure good press in the U.S. media. The goal was to train Israeli diplomats in communications and public relations. For example, they trained press officers in Israeli consulates in the U.S. to ensure that American journalists would write stories favorable to Israel. As one of these press officers said in the 1980s, he had breakfast, lunch and dinner with journalists and that a typical day would involve conversations with producers at leading news and TV talk shows about the content of the program. He described it as, in fact, quote, a “joint formulation of ideas.” This targeting of the American media goes on in the present day.

      ALISA SOLOMON: The Israeli press office is spitting out press releases, statements, information all the time. So you could sit in a bureau in Jerusalem and file stories from there all the time, without really having to have much imagination or have much energy or have much drive. The Palestine Authority press office is almost useless, and they certainly aren't providing you with readymade stories the way the Israeli press office is.

      HUSSEIN IBISH: Because of the lack of access to Palestinian officials in the West Bank and the sophistication of Israel's PR techniques inside Israel, a lot of times the stories are already tilted in Israel's favor, before they ever leave American journalists sitting in the area.

      ALISA SOLOMON: When you're talking about how the story’s covered from the U.S., the propaganda machine is even more effective than it is in Israel.

      NARRATOR: American news coverage is influenced by a complex set of institutional relationships. These influences can be thought of as a series of filters through which the news must travel before it emerges in the voices of news anchors. To understand how American news media report on the Middle East conflict, we need to understand how these institutional filters operate.

      Among the most important of these filters are the business interests of the corporations that own the mass media, interests that extend beyond the United States and across the globe to the Middle East. The economic interests of media owners are shared by political elites, politicians and policymakers who form a second filter. These political elites have the power to access and influence mainstream media and are themselves part of a system dominated by corporate money and interests. The strategic importance of the Middle East to these two groups is reflected in media coverage of the region and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

      A third filter, Israel's own public relations efforts, further affects the coverage. The government of Israel employs some of the largest American public relations firms as image consultants to coordinate its political and media campaigns. Nine Israeli consulates helped implement these PR campaigns by developing relationships with journalists and monitoring media outlets.

      Scores of private American organizations, both Christian and Jewish, reiterate the official line and organize grassroots opposition to any coverage deemed unfavorable to Israel. The most important of these is AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, widely regarded as the most powerful foreign lobby in Washington. This institutional framework of American business and political interests in combination with Israeli public relations shapes media coverage of the Middle East.

      At the same time, those progressive organizations opposing Israeli government policy, such as Jews Against the Occupation and Americans for Peace Now, rarely make it through these filters. Finally, if any news stories critical of Israeli policy do surface, there are a host of media watchdog groups that monitor and pressure journalists and media outlets, the most important of which is CAMERA.

      ALISA SOLOMON: You have activist organizations from the right, the pro-Israeli right, that very effectively, they say monitor, I would say harass, journalists and their editors and try to make sure that the coverage is objective, by which they mean pro-Israel.

      SETH ACKERMAN: You can see all of the kind of pressure groups who write campaigns of letters to the editor against news outlets and ask for -- demand that stories be changed or that reporters be fired.

      ROBERT FISK: The abuse against the journalists is something you just have to take into account. Both literally and metaphorically, if you work in the Middle East, you've got to take the sticks and stones. What I object to is that my American colleagues don't seem to be prepared to do that.

      SETH ACKERMAN: And even in Israel itself, you know, you can find the main daily newspapers, like Ha’aretz, for example, provides coverage on the ground and analysis, some of which has views on the conflict that you would never -- that would be almost beyond the pail for an American journalist at the New York Times to write.

      ROBERT FISK: The main major television news networks and newspapers in the United States have long ago got their fear to be supreme over their duties as journalists. They are not monitoring the centers of power when it comes to the relationship between America and the Middle East, Israel and America, and America and the Arabs and the Palestinians. They will not ask the right questions. They will not report it using the correct words. They will not confront the reality. And they've given up. And I think once you acquire fear, it’s very difficult to get rid of it.

    AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, war correspondent of the Independent, in the documentary, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, produced by the Media Education Foundation. You can go to their website at pppl.org.

    To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877

    7:22 | コメントの投稿 | 固定リンク | この記事を引用

    Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah...

    Friday, July 28th, 2006
    NATIONAL EXCLUSIVE: Hezbollah Leader Hassan Nasrallah Talks With Former US Diplomats on Israel, Prisoners and Hezbollah’s Founding

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    The US government considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization, but several former US diplomats sat down with the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Lebanon earlier this year. In a US national exclusive, we play excerpts of the interview, and speak to former US Ambassador and White House Terrorism Task Force Director Edward Peck, who took part in the meeting. [includes rush transcript]

    Sheik Hassan Nasrallah is the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Although the United States considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization, three former U.S. diplomats had a chance to meet with Nasrallah this past February in Lebanon. The diplomats were members of a delegation organized by the Council for the National Interest.
    During the meeting, Nasrallah discussed Hezbollah’s strategy to free Lebanese prisoners being held in Israel. He also spoke about the origins of Hezbollah, and recounted an event that is back in the news this week—Israel’s bombing of a UN observation post in the southern Lebanese town of Qana in 1996 which killed 106 Lebanese refugees.
    One of the retired diplomats who met with Nasrallah in February was Edward Peck - he joins us from our Washington studio. Edward Peck is the former U.S. chief of mission in Iraq and ambassador to Mauritania. He served as the deputy director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism in the Reagan administration.

    • Edward Peck. Former U.S. Chief of Mission in Iraq and ambassador to Mauritania. He served as deputy director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism in the Reagan Administration.
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    JUAN GONZALEZ: During the meeting, Nasrallah was asked about Hezbollah's strategy to free Lebanese prisoners being held in Israel. This was his response.

      SHEIKH SAYYED HASSAN NASRALLAH: [translated] The only possible strategy is for you to have Israeli prisoners, soldiers, the soldiers as prisoners, and then you negotiate with the Israelis in order to have your prisoners released. Here, this is the only choice. Here, you don't have multiple choices in order for you to choose one of them. You have no multiple choices. You have two options, either to have these prisoners or detainees remain in Israeli prisons or to capture Israeli soldiers.

    AMY GOODMAN: That was Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. One of the retired diplomats who met with Nasrallah in February is Edward Peck. When we come back from our break, he joins us in studio. Edward Peck, former U.S. Chief of Mission in Iraq and ambassador to Mauritania.

    [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: We turn to one of the retired diplomats who met with Hassan Nasrallah in February, Edward Peck. He is the former U.S. Chief of Mission in Iraq and ambassador to Mauritania, served as the Deputy Director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism in the Reagan administration. We welcome to you Democracy Now!, Ambassador Peck.

    EDWARD PECK: Thank you, ma'am.

    AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Can you describe this meeting you had with the head of Hezbollah in Lebanon? And then we'll talk about the content of what he had to say, because this was before the capture of the two soldiers, and he basically said this was the plan.

    EDWARD PECK: Well, we were out there as international election observers in Gaza for the election, and then we traveled elsewhere through the area, to Israel, to the West Bank, to Jordan, Syria, and finally to Lebanon, where we met with Nasrallah. We had spoken already with senior officials in Egypt and for Hamas and Fatah and the presidents of Syria and Lebanon in an effort, which the Council for the National Interest was sponsoring, to get a feeling for the area, how it was at that time in January.

    It was interesting to meet with him, because we had already met with leaders of Hamas and Fatah before and after the election was over in Palestine, and his point was a fairly simple one, I think. Talking to us, retired diplomats, Americans, his key concerns were essentially how to free his country from the domination, which he perceived, and how to go about building the nation up again, despite all of the things that had happened to it over the years.

    So it was a logical, reasonable presentation. No screaming, no shrieking. You know, just an educated intelligent man talking about serious issues that he perceived. It was interesting in the sense that the projection of people like that in this country is of, you know, blood-soaked wackos, and there are some of those out there on all sides, but that certainly was not the case with him. He believes very strongly in what he’s doing, which is something that you want to think about as you deal with him, because he is intent on accomplishing the objectives that he believes are the right ones.

    JUAN GONZALEZ: And this issue of using Israeli, capturing Israeli soldiers to, in essence, trade for Lebanese prisoners is not unheard of, actually. Didn’t Nasrallah negotiate a major prisoner release back in 2004?

    EDWARD PECK: Yes, and the Palestinians and the Israelis and the Lebanese, Hezbollah and Israelis have negotiated prisoner exchanges before. As I think you're aware, the Israelis have been holding a number of Lebanese as prisoners that they kidnapped from Lebanon, which is one of the contentious issues that upsets the folks on the northern side of that border.

    AMY GOODMAN: I mean, he was very clear, Nasrallah, saying the only possible strategy is to have Israeli prisoners and soldiers as prisoners, and then you negotiate in order to get your prisoners. This is the only choice. You don't have multiple choices in order for you to choose. You have the two options, either to have your detainees remain in Israeli prisons or to capture an Israeli soldier.

    EDWARD PECK: Yeah, and it’s called a bargaining chip. It’s kind of a demeaning phrase, but if you've got some, and we've got some, then perhaps we can make an exchange. And that has indeed happened before. One of the things that concerns me, of course, is that I am not convinced that it’s the capture of those two soldiers, which has provoked this horrific Israeli response. I believe they were looking for an excuse, and there it was, and this is what’s happened since.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, let's go back to this videotape that we have gotten a copy of. During your meeting with Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, he also discussed the founding of Hezbollah.

      SHEIKH SAYYED HASSAN NASRALLAH: [translated] You know that in the year 1978, the Israelis invaded South Lebanon, and the UN Security Council issued or passed the Resolution 425. They requested that the Israeli forces immediately withdraw from South Lebanon, and the Israelis did not. On the contrary, in the year 1982, they invaded more Lebanese territory. They even occupied the capital, Beirut. Mr. Sharon was the defense minister then.

      Between 1978, 1982, up ’til the year 2000, the international community did nothing to help the Israeli occupation forces out of Lebanon, nor did it, meaning the international community, do anything to prevent these aggressions on Lebanon. There was a resolution called 425, but it was put on the shelf. We, as Lebanese, were left to face our fate.

      Lebanon is a small country, weak, an army with very humble capabilities. What is first is that the people is torn as a result of the civil war, while facing the strongest army in the Middle East, meaning the Israeli Army. Not only the international community, specifically the U.S. administration, did nothing, there's also the Arab League, the OIC, Organization of Islamic Countries, nobody did anything.

      We are a group of Lebanese youth. We took the decision that we needed to confront and resist the occupation. The resistance which we have established, when we started with it, I was -- our ages, he’s talking about the ages of the young who took part in this -- I was 22 years old then. The oldest among us was 27 years old, because those who were over 30 then believed that it was impossible to defeat Israel. They viewed themselves as sage, as wise people, and they viewed us or considered us as the crazy youth.

    AMY GOODMAN: Hezbollah founder Hassan Nasrallah, speaking with a group -- leader, not founder -- speaking with a group of U.S. diplomats, including Ambassador Edward Peck, who joins us in our studio in Washington. Juan?

    JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Ambassador, he mentions there this UN Resolution 425, which obviously is almost ancient history, forgotten in current crisis. But Israel is constantly mentioning UN Resolution 1559, and there are some, including Hezbollah, who believe that that resolution doesn't really apply to Hezbollah, per se. Could you explain that and the differences of opinion about even this latest resolution?

    EDWARD PECK: Well, let me start with saying that people in the Middle East, for obvious reasons, find it sort of ironic that Israel is now insisting on the implementation of 1559, whereas, as Nasrallah said, they ignored this earlier Security Council resolution demanding that they remove themselves from South Lebanon for 20 years, that that’s called selective morality. Everybody practices that, but it kind of cuts the ground up from under your stance if you think that only certain Security Council resolutions should be enforced.

    Hezbollah, the problem we face -- the problem the Lebanese government faces is that Hezbollah is a political party, as you’re aware, that does a lot of things in the humanitarian and social field, which is good, and does some things in the military field, which certain people consider to be not good. And the Lebanese government, which is weak and riven, as you know, by the many, many sectarian groups and the differences that they have religiously and socially, is in no position whatsoever to take on Hezbollah. That would be a civil war. And while Israel does not mind necessarily seeing that happen, would like very much to have Hezbollah go away, there’s no way in the world, as far as I can tell, that the Lebanese would even consider undertaking this. And this was made clear to us by the leaders of the Lebanese government with whom we also met on that trip.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Peck, did you have any inkling, when you met with Nasrallah, after talking to him, that something was imminent, that some kind of action was going to be taken?

    EDWARD PECK: No, ma'am. Certainly not from that meeting. But those of us who have lived in and worked on that part of the world for a long -- well, for any length of time recognize that eventually there’s going to be some kind of an explosion, to use the phrase correctly, because the situations like that, just they're rumbling. They’re like, you know, semi-nascent volcanic eruptions. Something is going to happen. But certainly, there was no indication at that moment that I detected, nor my colleagues either, that something like this was going to transpire.

    And it’s worthwhile noticing, by the way, that what some people call the disproportionality of the Israeli reaction -- if I could, I have a piece of paper here I would like to quote from, if I may, because this discussion comes up so many times. In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, they asked us -- this is a Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism; I was the Deputy Director of the working group -- they asked us to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities.

    After the task force concluded its work, Congress got into it, and you can google into U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2331, and read the U.S. definition of terrorism. And one of them in here says -- one of the terms, “international terrorism,” means “activities that,” I quote, “appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”

    Yes, well, certainly, you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in such activities. Ours is one of them. Israel is another. And so, the terrorist, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. And I think it’s useful for people who discuss that phrase to remember that Israel was founded by terrorist organizations and terrorist leaders, Menachem Begin, who became statesmen and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And Nasrallah may not be the same kind of guy, but his intentions are the same. He wants to free his country from domination by another.

    AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to the videotape. Nasrallah also mentioned an event that’s back in the news this week, and that’s Israel's bombing of a UN observation post in the southern Lebanese town of Qana in 1996. In that attack ten years ago, about 106 refugees were killed.

      SHEIKH SAYYED HASSAN NASRALLAH: [translated] Between the years 1985 and the year 2000, we went on with the resistance. There was, for example, the Qana massacre. You’ve heard about that. The UN Security Council did not to condemn the Qana massacre, due to the U.S. veto. In other words, our experience with the international community, first, it does not protect us, meaning it does not prevent Israeli aggressions on Lebanon. And even after the aggression takes place, they do not even condemn the aggressor. On the contrary, they condemn the victim and regard those who defend themselves as terrorists.

    AMY GOODMAN: Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, speaking with U.S. diplomats in February, among them, Ambassador Edward Peck, who is the former Deputy Director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism in the Reagan administration, joining us in Washington. You were meeting with Nasrallah, as, of course, the occupation and the war in Iraq continued. What effect was that having on him? How did he describe that?

    EDWARD PECK: I don't remember directly, but one of the things that we spoke -- I have to tell you that we spoke to so many interesting people, interesting in the sense of having things to say that we needed to hear, that I would have to remind myself. But I think it’s important for Americans to try to understand that those dots are connected. There is, in the minds of the people in that part of the world, at the very minimum, a connection between Palestine, West Bank and Gaza and Lebanon and Iraq and Afghanistan and the threats against Syria and Iran. And Nasrallah, who is an educated man, is certainly aware that these things are indeed linked, and he probably, and I have to -- I’m open to correction -- he probably implied that there was a direct connection between what America's involved in in Iraq and the American concerns with the security and safety of Israel at any cost.

    JUAN GONZALEZ: In your opinion as a veteran diplomat, what is the impact of these United States actions in the world at large, especially in the Arab world? How is our standing in the eyes of the Arab world developing, especially now in this latest Lebanon situation?

    EDWARD PECK: Well, the latest situation is merely, you know, further indications of the sorts of things that they had already come to believe. There are facts and there are facts, and then there are perceptions, and perceptions are the only reality. And the perceptions, in the minds of an awful lot of people in the Arab world and Europe and elsewhere, reflects the loss of American prestige, credibility, respect, as we go on doing things, which seem in the eyes of others to be irrational and unjustifiable.

    And now, when we have stepped up and say -- you know, the first thing that you do in any struggle anywhere in the world is try to get a ceasefire so you can work on solving or trying to solve underlying problems. And then the United States says, “No, no. No ceasefire. Let's let them go on bombing and killing.” I think that the damage to us is not only vital, I think it is going to have a lasting effect on our relations with the rest of the world commercially, socially, culturally, in every way imaginable.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Peck, the way the Western media deals with al-Qaeda, with Hamas, with Hezbollah, is sort of basically massing them all together. You have been meeting with people individually. What is your sense? I mean, the latest news, al-Qaeda releasing a new recording urging Muslims to attack Israel and its allies over the ongoing attacks in Lebanon and Gaza. What is your sense of where they agree and disagree and how much they work together?

    EDWARD PECK: I guess it’s the sort of thing that you could see -- it's a clumsy analogy, but it’s the sort of thing where Democrats and Republicans will work together towards the achievement of an objective that they both see desirable, and as soon as that is over, they’ll go back to squabbling again.

    And I think that that’s the sort of thing that applies with any political, economic, military operation, so that Hezbollah and Hamas, which are from different sects, different sections of Islam, are perfectly prepared, for example, to take money and arms, if they can get them, from Iran. But they have no desire, certainly in the case of Hamas, to become a Shiite-dominated fundamentalist government. It’s in the same way that we provide arms and money and so forth to Israel, but Israel certainly does not do our bidding, as we have seen many times, especially since we don't ask them to do much.

    The linkage of America with Israel with this perceived war on Islam is, to me, deeply concerning, because history has shown that you can build tremendous pressures of that kind, especially in societies which tend to be less developed than our own, which tend to be less well educated than our own in many cases, and which become -- you know, they're more traditional than we are, and you can generate an awful lot of anger and resentment, which we have succeeded in doing.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ambassador Peck, I want to thank you very much for being with us, former ambassador to Mauritania.

    EDWARD PECK: Sorry to talk so much.

    AMY GOODMAN: No. Thank you very much for speaking with us, speaking with us from Washington. Former White House Task Force Deputy Director on Terrorism in the Reagan administration.

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    8月8日

    Statement by His Eminence Sayyid Seestani (long may he live) on the events in Iraq


    English translation of the Statement by His Eminence Sayyid Seestani (long may he live) on the events in Iraq

    In The Name of Allah, The Compassionate, The Merciful



    *And hold fast, all of you together, to the Rope of Allâh (i.e. this Qur'ân), and be not divided among yourselves, and remember Allâh's Favour on you, for you were enemies one to another but He joined your hearts together, so that, by His Grace, you became brethren (in Islâmic Faith), and you were on the brink of a pit of Fire, and He saved you from it. Thus Allâh makes His Ayât (proofs, evidences, verses, lessons, signs, revelations, etc.,) clear to you, that you may be guided.* True are the words of Allah the high and mighty (Al-Imran: 103)

    With a heart griped in sorrow and pain I follow news of the atrocities and attacks the oppressed Iraqi people are being subjected to everyday; fear and forced displacement, kidnappings, murder and the parading of dead bodies, which words fail to express their ugliness and repulsiveness and the extent of their emptiness from all humane, religious and patriotic values.

    Since the first days of the occupation I was eager for the Iraqis to surmount this critical stage in their history without falling into sectarian or ethnic strife. I was aware of the magnitude of the danger that threatens the unity of this nation and its national composition, [which is] a result of past accumulations and scheming foreigners who take advantage through their wicked institutions plus other [influencing] factors.

    Through the cooperation and efforts made by good people and the patience of devout Muslims, it was possible to avoid descending into the abyss of sectarian discord for more than two years despite all the tragedies that the tens of thousands of innocent people were exposed to because of their religious identity.

    However, the enemies did not lose hope. They implemented their schemes to divide this country by expanding the gulf of discord among its citizens. Regrettably some local people aided them, leading to the great disaster of the bombing of the holy shrine of the two Askari Imams (peace be on them) and thus the sightless violence that we are witnessing today all over the country, including Baghdad - destroying its people under different banners and false pretexts with no deterrent or prohibition.

    Today, I reiterate my appeal to all Iraqi citizens from different sects and ethnicities who care about their country, to realize the extent of the danger that threatens the future of their country and to stand side by side in confronting this danger by discarding hatred and violence and replacing them with love and peaceful dialogue in order to solve all problems and disagreements.

    I also implore all those with sound opinions and ideas, religious and political leaders, heads of clans and others who are loyal and truly concerned about the unity and the future of this country and its citizens, to do their utmost to halt this chain of bloodshed because if it were to continue, according to the enemies’ wishes, it will inflict the most serious damage to the unity of this nation and hinder its hopes of freedom, stability and progress for a long time to come.

    I will also remind those who permit the shedding of Muslim blood and have no regard for innocent lives because of their sectarian inclinations, of the saying of the great Prophet (Allah’s peace and blessing be on him) when he said in his farewell Haj pilgrimage: “ No doubt your blood, your wealth, your wives are prohibited to one another like the prohibition of this day of this month in this country, no doubt those present will inform those who are absent”.

    Also of his saying (Allah’s peace and blessing be on him): “He who bears witness that there is no God but Allah and that Mohammad is his Messenger, has his blood and wealth protected, unless in a just cause, and Allah will hold him accountable ”.

    Also of his saying (Allah’s peace and blessing be on him): “He who assists in the slaying of a Muslim, even by one word, will meet Allah, The Glorified and The Majestic, on the day of judgment with the words ‘No hope of Allah’s mercy’ written between his eyes”.

    I also address those who target unarmed civilians and peaceful citizens by the words of Abu Abd-illah Al-Hussain (peace and blessing be on him) on the day of Ashoura when he addressed those who speared the attack on his family [women/children] “If you have no religion and you do not fear the day of judgment then have a free will in your life and return to your roots, if you are Arabs as you claim then... there is no sin [liability] on women”.

    Why then do you target people like the old, the women and children even university students and industrial labourers and government office staff and others who have no role in all the current happenings? If you are not deterred by a religion that you claim you follow, then will not the human form you appear in deter you from this?

    I say to those who cause injustice and harm to non-Muslim citizens like Christians, Sabians and others, have you not heard what the Commander of The Faithful (Amirul-Momineen) Ali (peace and blessing be on him) said when he learned of a non-Muslim woman who was confronted by men wanting to take her jewelry? He said (peace be on him): “If a Muslim dies of regret [for this action] I would not blame him, but rather agree with his comportment”. Why do you then harm your brothers in humanity and your fellow countrymen?

    Dear people of Iraq,
    The way out of the impasse in Iraq under the present circumstances requires a resolution from all the different parties to respect the sanctity of Iraqi lives, whoever they may be, and to stop reciprocal acts of violence in all its forms so that car bomb scenes, random executions in the streets and forced displacement campaigns and other such atrocious sights may vanish forever – God willing – and to replace them by cooperation with the nationally elected government and scenes of constructive dialogue to resolve any crisis and outstanding disagreements on the basis of fairness, justice and equality of rights and duties between all the citizens of this country – away from power struggles and ethnic and sectarian domination. Hoping this will be a gateway for Iraqis to reclaim the complete sovereignty of their country and to pave the way for a better tomorrow when they can enjoy security, stability, development and progress with Allah, Almighty’s support.

    May Allah grant everyone success to that which He pleases.
    Wassalamu alaikum warahmatullah wabarakatoh






    Seal and Signature of
    Ali Al Hussaini Al- Seestani
    22 Jumada al-Thani 1427
    18 July 2006




    Original text

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    Statement from His Eminence Sayyid Seestani on Lebanon


    Statement from His Eminence Sayyid Seestani (long may he live) on the events in Lebanon

    In The Name of Allah The Compassionate, The Merciful



    For several days Lebanon has been exposed to a continuous Israeli aggression, targeting its defiant people and its infrastructure on a wide scale. This has led to hundreds of people being martyred and wounded and tens of thousands of people being displaced as well as vast destruction to houses, roads and other civilian establishments.

    All this blatant repression is occurring under the persistent disregard of the whole world - except for a few ineffective words of condemnation and disapproval here and there.

    The world community needs to move on to stop the continuation of this flagrant aggression. The Muslim nation also needs to stand by in solidarity with the oppressed Lebanese people and aim to ensure the humanitarian requirements of the wounded and the displaced and others are met. The representatives of the religious Marja’iyyah in Lebanon and Momineen in general must implement the aforesaid with all the means they receive.

    The oppressions suffered by the nations of the region, among them the Lebanese, will increase the nations’ anger and rage towards the international policies supporting and/or condoning such actions - which will naturally intensify the tension and hinder peace and security throughout the region.

    May Allah protect Lebanon and its dear people and have mercy on its martyrs and grant the wounded a speedy recovery and good health.






    The Office of H. E. Sayyid Seestani (long may he live) - Najaf
    20 Jumada al-Akhar 1427
    17 July 2006




    Original text

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