BY JUDY REBICK
For people sitting at home and watching TV news last night, Toronto was burning. The same police car on Queen St W. burned and blew up over and over again. The same image of a young man very violently smashing Starbucks windows appeared over and over again. Windows smashed all along Yonge St. None of us had ever seen Toronto like this. It was shocking.
Most of the 400 protesters arrested last night and others who may have avoided arrest didn't see that violence. From their perspective, they were facing a violent police state. These demonstrations, militant but overwhelming peaceful, were resisting the right of the police to hold them to Queen Street. They think the people have a right to protest in a place where political leaders can hear them. They had nothing to do with torching police cars or trashing windows.
TVO host Steve Paiken was down at the Novotel last night with peaceful protesters. He tweeted his experiences, "Shame on those that ordered peaceful protesters attacked and arrested. that is not consistent with democracy in toronto, G20 or no G20."
I was on Queen West and Spadina when the trouble started. David Fernandez has written an excellent report on what happened on his facebook page.
"Rewind to just before the riot happened, thousands of us marched in a very briskly moving group until we hit the intersection of Spadina and Queen. Folks from the labour movement tried in vain to encourage the march to move back up towards queens park, but the mood was clear. Many thousands of protestors were interested in being closer to the summit and letting the police know that we couldn't be intimidated.
But nothing official was planned. Labour walked back up the street leaving thousands to mill about in the confusion of what to do next. And in that confusion, several hundred people changed their clothes and took off together running down queen street while thousands of riot cops picked their noses. In full police view, they let a mob destroy banks and trash Yonge street.
And while riot cops had shields AND bikes and thousands of dollars in body armor to protect them from the remaining peaceful protestors, somehow they were so scared of us that they abandoned police cars."
The police spokesperson told Metro Morning today that they waited until later when it was safer to make arrests but that cannot be true. I was there and like David I believe the cops could have arrested the Black Bloc right at the beginning of the action but they abandoned their police cars and allowed them to burn, not even calling the fire department until the media had lots of time to photograph them. They had a water cannon but they didn't even use a fire extinguisher. Why?
A comment released to a media outlet last night from official police spokesperson tells some of the story, "We have never tried to curtail people's rights to lawfully protest. All you have to do is turn on the TV and see what's happening now. Police cars are getting torched, buildings are being vandalized, people are getting beat up and the so-called 'intimidating' police presence is essential to restoring order. That is the reality on the ground."
Police playing politics, justifying the expense and responding to the critiques building all week about excessive and arbitrary police powers. A politicized police force is unacceptable in a democratic society. There are serious questions that must be answered and they have not been satisfactory answered.
People were shocked last night by a city out of control but the Toronto police -- without all the huge expenditures, extra police from across the country and sophisticated new toys -- have kept the peace in riots with a lot more people and in hundreds of demonstrations much larger and often angry. I disagree with torching police cars and breaking windows and I have been debating these tactics for decades with people who think they accomplish something. But the bigger question here is why the police let it happen and make no mistake the police did let it happen. Why did the police let the city get out of control? And they did let it get out of control. The police knew exactly what would happen and how.
Christopher Watt was there when the first police car was torched,
"The officers clustered and formed a line. A second picket of officers lined up behind them, facing the crowd where I stood. They started to move, but they weren't clearing the street; they were clearing out and abandoning two police cars, including the one with the shattered windshield...
In moments like this, someone needs to make a decision. This time it was a man in dreadlocks and no shirt, red paint all over his torso. He moved towards the police car, grabbing the squawking police radio...
Following the lead of the dreadlocked man, someone else pulled what looked like a leather folder from inside the car and spread its contents over the trunk. A kid wearing sunglasses, his face covered by a scarf, inspected the paperwork. Soon after, the squad cars would be on fire. (The gas cap appeared to have been removed from one of them even before the crowd moved in.)"
It was a perfect storm. A massive police presence who were primed for "dangerous anarchists" after a week of peaceful protests. No more than one hundred, probably fewer, young men who think violent confrontations with the police will create a radicalization and expose the violence of the state. A new generation of young people who are becoming activists believing they live in a democratic society and are shocked by the degree of police violence arrayed to stop them.
But it is the police that let the handful of people using Black Bloc tactics run wild and then used the burning police cars and violent images as a media campaign to convince the people of Toronto that the cost and the excessive police presence was necessary. They knew what would happen and they knew how it would happen. It is the police that bear the responsibility for what happened last night. They were responsible for keeping the peace and they failed to do it.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
I Would so much Like to be Wrong
When these lines are published in the Granma newspaper tomorrow, Friday, the date of July 26, when we proudly remember the honor of having resisted the imperialists’ attacks, will be felt distant, despite the fact that it is only 32 days away.
Those who determine every step of humanity’s worst enemy –the US imperialism, a combination of miserable material interests, contempt and underestimation of the other peoples who inhabit this planet—have calculated everything with mathematical precision.
In the Reflection of June 16, I wrote: “The diabolic reports slide down little by little in between matches of the Football World Cup, so that nobody takes notice.”
The famous sports contest is now in its most exciting moment. For 14 days, the teams with the best players from 32 nations have been competing to advance to the stage of quarter-finals, semi-finals and then the final competition.
The sports enthusiasm grows constantly attracting hundreds of millions or perhaps even billions of people worldwide.
But, we should be wondering how many are aware that from June 20 US warships, including the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman, escorted by one or more nuclear submarines and other warships carrying missiles and cannons more powerful than the old battleships used during the last World War between 1939 and 1945, have been moving towards the Iranian coasts via the Suez Canal.
This movement of the Yankee naval forces is accompanied by Israeli military ships, carrying equally sophisticated weaponry, intended to supervise any vessel involved in the import or export of commercial products required by the Iranian economy for its operations.
Following a US proposal supported by the United Kingdom, France and Germany, the UN Security Council passed a tough resolution which was not vetoed by any of the five countries with the right to do it.
Another tougher resolution was adopted by the US Senate.
Later, a third and even tougher resolution was approved by the member countries of the European Community. All of this happened before June 20, which motivated French President Nicolas Sarkozy to make an urgent trip to Russia --according to press reports-- to meet with the head of Sate of that powerful country, Dmitri Medvedev, in hope of negotiating with Iran and preventing the worst from happening.
Now, it’s a matter of calculating when the American and Israeli naval forces will be deployed off the coasts of Iran joining there the aircraft carriers and other US military ships already on watch in the region.
It is still worse that, the same as the United States, Israel --its gendarme in the Middle East—has state-of-the-art fighter planes and sophisticated nuclear weapons supplied by the United States, which have turned it into the sixth nuclear power on Earth, in terms of its fire power, and one of eight such powers that include India and Pakistan.
The Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 without firing one shot. But then the United States imposed on that nation a war with chemical weapons whose components it supplied to Iraq along with the information required by this country’s combat units; such weapons were used against the Guardians of the Revolution. Cuba knows this because, as we have said before, our country chaired the Non- Aligned Movement at the time. We know very well the damage done to the populations. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, currently the head of State of Iran, was chief of the sixth army of the Guardians of the Revolution and chief of the Guardians Corps in the western provinces, which carried the bulk of that war.
Today, in 2010, thirty-one years later, both the United States and Israel underestimate the one-million men that make up Iran’s Armed Forces and their fighting capacity on the ground as well as the air, sea and ground forces of the Guardians of the Revolution.
These forces are compounded by 20 million men and women, ages 12 through 60, selected and systematically trained by their various armed institutions, from the 70 million people who live in that country.
The US administration worked out a plan to promote a political movement that based on capitalist consumerism would divide the Iranians and overthrow the government.
Such hope is now harmless. It’s simply ridiculous to think that the US warships and Israeli forces combined could win the sympathies of even one Iranian citizen.
I initially thought, as I analyzed the current situation, that the conflict would start at the Korean peninsula, where the second Korean War would break out, and that another war would immediately follow; the one that the United States would impose on Iran.
Now, we are witnessing a different turn of events: the war in Iran will immediately spark off that of Korea.
The leadership of North Korea, which was accused of sinking the ‘Cheonan’ and which knows only too well that said ship was sunk by a mine attached to its hull by the Yankee intelligence services, will not miss a second to act as soon as Iran is attacked.
It is only fair that football fans freely enjoy the competitions of this World Cup. I simply fulfill my duty of informing our people, as I think mostly of our youths, full of life and hopes, especially our wonderful children, so that the developments do not catch them by surprise.
It hurts to think of the dreams conceived by human beings and the amazing things they have created in barely a few thousand years.
At a time when the most revolutionary dreams are coming true and our homeland is firmly on the path to recovery, I would so much like to be wrong!
Those who determine every step of humanity’s worst enemy –the US imperialism, a combination of miserable material interests, contempt and underestimation of the other peoples who inhabit this planet—have calculated everything with mathematical precision.
In the Reflection of June 16, I wrote: “The diabolic reports slide down little by little in between matches of the Football World Cup, so that nobody takes notice.”
The famous sports contest is now in its most exciting moment. For 14 days, the teams with the best players from 32 nations have been competing to advance to the stage of quarter-finals, semi-finals and then the final competition.
The sports enthusiasm grows constantly attracting hundreds of millions or perhaps even billions of people worldwide.
But, we should be wondering how many are aware that from June 20 US warships, including the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman, escorted by one or more nuclear submarines and other warships carrying missiles and cannons more powerful than the old battleships used during the last World War between 1939 and 1945, have been moving towards the Iranian coasts via the Suez Canal.
This movement of the Yankee naval forces is accompanied by Israeli military ships, carrying equally sophisticated weaponry, intended to supervise any vessel involved in the import or export of commercial products required by the Iranian economy for its operations.
Following a US proposal supported by the United Kingdom, France and Germany, the UN Security Council passed a tough resolution which was not vetoed by any of the five countries with the right to do it.
Another tougher resolution was adopted by the US Senate.
Later, a third and even tougher resolution was approved by the member countries of the European Community. All of this happened before June 20, which motivated French President Nicolas Sarkozy to make an urgent trip to Russia --according to press reports-- to meet with the head of Sate of that powerful country, Dmitri Medvedev, in hope of negotiating with Iran and preventing the worst from happening.
Now, it’s a matter of calculating when the American and Israeli naval forces will be deployed off the coasts of Iran joining there the aircraft carriers and other US military ships already on watch in the region.
It is still worse that, the same as the United States, Israel --its gendarme in the Middle East—has state-of-the-art fighter planes and sophisticated nuclear weapons supplied by the United States, which have turned it into the sixth nuclear power on Earth, in terms of its fire power, and one of eight such powers that include India and Pakistan.
The Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 without firing one shot. But then the United States imposed on that nation a war with chemical weapons whose components it supplied to Iraq along with the information required by this country’s combat units; such weapons were used against the Guardians of the Revolution. Cuba knows this because, as we have said before, our country chaired the Non- Aligned Movement at the time. We know very well the damage done to the populations. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, currently the head of State of Iran, was chief of the sixth army of the Guardians of the Revolution and chief of the Guardians Corps in the western provinces, which carried the bulk of that war.
Today, in 2010, thirty-one years later, both the United States and Israel underestimate the one-million men that make up Iran’s Armed Forces and their fighting capacity on the ground as well as the air, sea and ground forces of the Guardians of the Revolution.
These forces are compounded by 20 million men and women, ages 12 through 60, selected and systematically trained by their various armed institutions, from the 70 million people who live in that country.
The US administration worked out a plan to promote a political movement that based on capitalist consumerism would divide the Iranians and overthrow the government.
Such hope is now harmless. It’s simply ridiculous to think that the US warships and Israeli forces combined could win the sympathies of even one Iranian citizen.
I initially thought, as I analyzed the current situation, that the conflict would start at the Korean peninsula, where the second Korean War would break out, and that another war would immediately follow; the one that the United States would impose on Iran.
Now, we are witnessing a different turn of events: the war in Iran will immediately spark off that of Korea.
The leadership of North Korea, which was accused of sinking the ‘Cheonan’ and which knows only too well that said ship was sunk by a mine attached to its hull by the Yankee intelligence services, will not miss a second to act as soon as Iran is attacked.
It is only fair that football fans freely enjoy the competitions of this World Cup. I simply fulfill my duty of informing our people, as I think mostly of our youths, full of life and hopes, especially our wonderful children, so that the developments do not catch them by surprise.
It hurts to think of the dreams conceived by human beings and the amazing things they have created in barely a few thousand years.
At a time when the most revolutionary dreams are coming true and our homeland is firmly on the path to recovery, I would so much like to be wrong!
When Police Stick to a Phony Script: The Miami Model
By Catherine Porter
They call it the Miami Model.
But it could be called the Genoa model, the Pittsburgh model and, after this weekend, the Toronto model.
It refers to police tactics used in Miami seven years ago, during the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, and, more importantly, the protests erupting on the streets outside.
Manny Diaz, Miami’s then-mayor, called the police methods exemplary — a model to be followed by homeland security when confronting protesters.
Human rights groups including Amnesty International called it a model of police brutality and intimidation.
Protesters were beaten with tear gas, sticks, rubber bullets . . . You can watch police stun cowering protesters with Tasers on YouTube. Last year, the city agreed it had trampled citizens’ right to free speech by forcing marchers back from planned protests and settled out of court with Amnesty International.
What is the Miami Model?
I called Naomi Archer to find out. She is an indigenous rights worker from North Carolina who happened to be giving a lecture on the Miami Model yesterday at the U.S. Social Forum — the G20 for community activists.
Archer, who was in Miami as a liaison between protesters and police, has a 40-box checklist to identify the Model. Here are the main themes.
• Information warfare. This starts weeks before the event. Protesters are criminalized and dehumanized, and described as dangerous “anarchists” and “terrorists” the city needs to defend against.
“Often, a faux cache is found,” says Archer. “They are usually ordinary objects, like bike inner tubes, camping equipment, but the police make them out to look threatening. It lays the groundwork for police to be violent and it means there’s a reduced accountability of law enforcement.”
• Intimidation. Police start random searches of perceived protesters before any large rallies. They are asked where they are staying, why they are walking around. Police raid organizer’s homes or meeting places, “usually just before the summit, so there’s maximum chaos organizers have to deal with,” says Archer.
“All this is meant to dissuade participants. The best way to make sure you don’t have a critical mass of people taking over the streets like in Seattle is to reduce the numbers at the outset.”
This is usually made possible by last-minute city regulations, curtailing the right to protest. In Miami, the city commission passed a temporary ordinance forbidding groups of more than seven to congregate for more than 30 minutes without a permit.
• “They threw rocks.” That’s the line police use after tear-gassing or beating protesters most times, Archer says. Urine and human feces are variations on the theme. But it’s always the protesters who triggered the violence. A popular police tactic is called “kettling.” Officers on bike or horses herd protesters into an enclosed space, so they can’t leave without trying to break through the police line. Take the bait; you provoke a beating or arrest. And of course, there are the famous agent provocateurs, outted publicly two years ago in Montebello. Police officers dressed up like militant protesters to protect the peaceful crowd, they say; Archer says it’s to instigate trouble.
In Montebello, one of the three cops dressed in black was holding a rock.
“It’s the same lies every single protest,” she says. “It’s justification by law enforcement for their violent actions. This is a propaganda war.”
• Job well done. At the end, regardless of the bodies clogging the temporary holding cells and hospitals, the police always congratulate themselves. And by the time the cases go to court, the story is long forgotten and the circus has moved to a new unsuspecting town.
More than 270 people were arrested in Miami during the summit seven years ago. How many were convicted, in the end? I called the American Civil Liberties Union to find out.
“None,” said lawyer Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, who was the president of the Miami chapter back then.
So far in Toronto, the police show has unrolled according to script; we’ve seen the propaganda, the cache, the intimidation, the secretive new regulations, the scary military arsenal. . . .
Next up, rocks. Will we all believe that one too?
They call it the Miami Model.
But it could be called the Genoa model, the Pittsburgh model and, after this weekend, the Toronto model.
It refers to police tactics used in Miami seven years ago, during the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, and, more importantly, the protests erupting on the streets outside.
Manny Diaz, Miami’s then-mayor, called the police methods exemplary — a model to be followed by homeland security when confronting protesters.
Human rights groups including Amnesty International called it a model of police brutality and intimidation.
Protesters were beaten with tear gas, sticks, rubber bullets . . . You can watch police stun cowering protesters with Tasers on YouTube. Last year, the city agreed it had trampled citizens’ right to free speech by forcing marchers back from planned protests and settled out of court with Amnesty International.
What is the Miami Model?
I called Naomi Archer to find out. She is an indigenous rights worker from North Carolina who happened to be giving a lecture on the Miami Model yesterday at the U.S. Social Forum — the G20 for community activists.
Archer, who was in Miami as a liaison between protesters and police, has a 40-box checklist to identify the Model. Here are the main themes.
• Information warfare. This starts weeks before the event. Protesters are criminalized and dehumanized, and described as dangerous “anarchists” and “terrorists” the city needs to defend against.
“Often, a faux cache is found,” says Archer. “They are usually ordinary objects, like bike inner tubes, camping equipment, but the police make them out to look threatening. It lays the groundwork for police to be violent and it means there’s a reduced accountability of law enforcement.”
• Intimidation. Police start random searches of perceived protesters before any large rallies. They are asked where they are staying, why they are walking around. Police raid organizer’s homes or meeting places, “usually just before the summit, so there’s maximum chaos organizers have to deal with,” says Archer.
“All this is meant to dissuade participants. The best way to make sure you don’t have a critical mass of people taking over the streets like in Seattle is to reduce the numbers at the outset.”
This is usually made possible by last-minute city regulations, curtailing the right to protest. In Miami, the city commission passed a temporary ordinance forbidding groups of more than seven to congregate for more than 30 minutes without a permit.
• “They threw rocks.” That’s the line police use after tear-gassing or beating protesters most times, Archer says. Urine and human feces are variations on the theme. But it’s always the protesters who triggered the violence. A popular police tactic is called “kettling.” Officers on bike or horses herd protesters into an enclosed space, so they can’t leave without trying to break through the police line. Take the bait; you provoke a beating or arrest. And of course, there are the famous agent provocateurs, outted publicly two years ago in Montebello. Police officers dressed up like militant protesters to protect the peaceful crowd, they say; Archer says it’s to instigate trouble.
In Montebello, one of the three cops dressed in black was holding a rock.
“It’s the same lies every single protest,” she says. “It’s justification by law enforcement for their violent actions. This is a propaganda war.”
• Job well done. At the end, regardless of the bodies clogging the temporary holding cells and hospitals, the police always congratulate themselves. And by the time the cases go to court, the story is long forgotten and the circus has moved to a new unsuspecting town.
More than 270 people were arrested in Miami during the summit seven years ago. How many were convicted, in the end? I called the American Civil Liberties Union to find out.
“None,” said lawyer Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, who was the president of the Miami chapter back then.
So far in Toronto, the police show has unrolled according to script; we’ve seen the propaganda, the cache, the intimidation, the secretive new regulations, the scary military arsenal. . . .
Next up, rocks. Will we all believe that one too?
More Repression in Toronto: House Raids, Warrants and Arrests
By Tim Groves
Two houses where G20 protesters are staying were raided last night and activists staying at the houses were arrested. Six or more arrest warrants were issued and it is believed that at least three of the people named in the warrants have been arrested.
Police arrived at a house where 15 activists were staying at approximately 4:45am. There was no warrant provided but the police then forced themselves in to the house. Even when a warrant was later provided, those being arrested were not allowed to fully read the warrant before it was taken away from them.
"I was in a tent in the backyard, we got woken up, by two cops and put in cuffs, and there [were] probably at least 6 or 8 police in the house," said Marya Folinsbee, a friend of the man who was arrested. "They were trying to identify people. They had a big stack of papers with names and faces of activists, some were organizers and some were people just doing child care for the protests."
The upstairs neighbours, a family with a young baby, were also visited by police.
"The neighbours who were not connected to the protest had a gun held to his head when he woke up. It's so fucked, it's so fucked," said a shaken Folinsbee. "They put neighbours who lived in the building in cuffs."
One of the activists staying in the house was taken in his underwear into a paddy wagon waiting outside. The others in the house gathered on the front porch and sang loudly so that he could hear.
Another house had its door kicked in and a warrant left on the table. Two activists who live in the house are presumed to have been arrested and a third person staying at the house may also have been arrested, according to a source at the Toronto Community Mobilization Network.
Two other activists have been informed that there are warrants out for their arrest, and it is believed that they will be turning themselves in to police.
According to a tweet from the Movement Defence Committee the arrests were of "key organizers."
Supporters of those arrested will be gathering outside the Toronto Film Studios starting at noon to provide solidarity. The film studios have been converted into a temporary jail. They are located at 629 Eastern Ave.
Two houses where G20 protesters are staying were raided last night and activists staying at the houses were arrested. Six or more arrest warrants were issued and it is believed that at least three of the people named in the warrants have been arrested.
Police arrived at a house where 15 activists were staying at approximately 4:45am. There was no warrant provided but the police then forced themselves in to the house. Even when a warrant was later provided, those being arrested were not allowed to fully read the warrant before it was taken away from them.
"I was in a tent in the backyard, we got woken up, by two cops and put in cuffs, and there [were] probably at least 6 or 8 police in the house," said Marya Folinsbee, a friend of the man who was arrested. "They were trying to identify people. They had a big stack of papers with names and faces of activists, some were organizers and some were people just doing child care for the protests."
The upstairs neighbours, a family with a young baby, were also visited by police.
"The neighbours who were not connected to the protest had a gun held to his head when he woke up. It's so fucked, it's so fucked," said a shaken Folinsbee. "They put neighbours who lived in the building in cuffs."
One of the activists staying in the house was taken in his underwear into a paddy wagon waiting outside. The others in the house gathered on the front porch and sang loudly so that he could hear.
Another house had its door kicked in and a warrant left on the table. Two activists who live in the house are presumed to have been arrested and a third person staying at the house may also have been arrested, according to a source at the Toronto Community Mobilization Network.
Two other activists have been informed that there are warrants out for their arrest, and it is believed that they will be turning themselves in to police.
According to a tweet from the Movement Defence Committee the arrests were of "key organizers."
Supporters of those arrested will be gathering outside the Toronto Film Studios starting at noon to provide solidarity. The film studios have been converted into a temporary jail. They are located at 629 Eastern Ave.
G20 Policing Puts a Visible Face on a Silent War
By Dawn Paley
As G8 heads of state meet in Huntsville, Ontario, people in Toronto are preparing to spend the weekend in what is being described more and more frequently as a police state. Some might feel that its over the top to talk about Toronto being a police state*, but not those who've already been subject to arbitrary detentions, or who have lived through situations of armed conflict.
For refugees living in Canada, the sight of hundreds of police surrounding a gathering in a park can trigger painful memories of the wars that they lived through.
"As a survivor of the war in Guatemala, I feel bad," said Edgar Godoy, who now lives in Toronto and organizes with the Latin American Trade Union Coalition. The 36-year-long internal conflict in Guatemala is today recognized as having been a genocide against Indigenous Guatemalans, with over 250,000 dead and 50,000 still disappeared. Most of the victims were killed by the Guatemalan police and military. "I lost half my family and I have wounds that have not healed. Seeing all the police here, it terrorizes me," he said.
The thousands of police officers in Toronto for the G20 appear to have orders to stop, detain and interrogate people for wearing anti-G20 t-shirts, for videotaping, or for carrying a picket sign.
"We can't mobilize, we can't speak. That's what we lived in Guatemala in the 70s and 80s," said Godoy. "We have a name for that in Latin America, we call it the criminalization of resistance and the right to speak out."
When two men were detained and one of them was arrested yesterday for walking downtown, neither was aware that the Ontario Public Works Protection Act now applies to the G20 fence.
"We both refused to give our names, we said we do not consent to a search," said Fenton. "They said that under the Public Works Act they had the right to arrest us, search us and learn our names even without due cause, without charges."
Franklin López, an independent video producer who was on assignment with Democracy Now!, was pulled off a streetcar yesterday by four young police officers who were concerned that he was filming them.
"The charter gives us freedom of the press, and if we're going to have a truly free press, police intimidation can't be part of the process," said López. "Four police officers interrogating a journalist because he's filming the security situation in Toronto does not foment freedom of the press."
Even journalists from the status quo media have complained about police overkill. After being surrounded by what sounds like dozens of police officers including bomb sniffing dogs on his way to Huntsville, veteran Canadian Press reporter Terry Pedwell started to get a little annoyed.
"I was still being detained, nearly two hours after being pulled over. And I was growing only slightly aggravated by the lengths to which they were going to interrogate a reporter," he wrote. He thinks that the police might have had a concern about press freedom when he was denied the right to videotape the interrogation, after which he was finally let go.
But anyone who thinks that these policies are but exceptional interruptions in an otherwise democratic society ought to think again.
"I feel actually quite badly for [street-involved] people who have those sorts of encounters with police on a regular basis and I'm actually quite concerned about what's coming next... Civil liberties seem to be going out the window these days," said Micheal Walsh, after being stopped in Toronto yesterday for carrying picket signs.
On the ground organizers are explicitly connecting mobilizations in Toronto to daily struggles against criminalization, repression and police brutality.
"On June 25th, we will march alongside community groups who organize daily against the indignities and dehumanization of poverty, discrimination, lack of inclusive services, wage-slave working conditions, repressive immigration policies, gentrification, environmental degradation, and police brutality," reads a statement by No One Is Illegal.
As G8 heads of state meet in Huntsville, Ontario, people in Toronto are preparing to spend the weekend in what is being described more and more frequently as a police state. Some might feel that its over the top to talk about Toronto being a police state*, but not those who've already been subject to arbitrary detentions, or who have lived through situations of armed conflict.
For refugees living in Canada, the sight of hundreds of police surrounding a gathering in a park can trigger painful memories of the wars that they lived through.
"As a survivor of the war in Guatemala, I feel bad," said Edgar Godoy, who now lives in Toronto and organizes with the Latin American Trade Union Coalition. The 36-year-long internal conflict in Guatemala is today recognized as having been a genocide against Indigenous Guatemalans, with over 250,000 dead and 50,000 still disappeared. Most of the victims were killed by the Guatemalan police and military. "I lost half my family and I have wounds that have not healed. Seeing all the police here, it terrorizes me," he said.
The thousands of police officers in Toronto for the G20 appear to have orders to stop, detain and interrogate people for wearing anti-G20 t-shirts, for videotaping, or for carrying a picket sign.
"We can't mobilize, we can't speak. That's what we lived in Guatemala in the 70s and 80s," said Godoy. "We have a name for that in Latin America, we call it the criminalization of resistance and the right to speak out."
When two men were detained and one of them was arrested yesterday for walking downtown, neither was aware that the Ontario Public Works Protection Act now applies to the G20 fence.
"We both refused to give our names, we said we do not consent to a search," said Fenton. "They said that under the Public Works Act they had the right to arrest us, search us and learn our names even without due cause, without charges."
Franklin López, an independent video producer who was on assignment with Democracy Now!, was pulled off a streetcar yesterday by four young police officers who were concerned that he was filming them.
"The charter gives us freedom of the press, and if we're going to have a truly free press, police intimidation can't be part of the process," said López. "Four police officers interrogating a journalist because he's filming the security situation in Toronto does not foment freedom of the press."
Even journalists from the status quo media have complained about police overkill. After being surrounded by what sounds like dozens of police officers including bomb sniffing dogs on his way to Huntsville, veteran Canadian Press reporter Terry Pedwell started to get a little annoyed.
"I was still being detained, nearly two hours after being pulled over. And I was growing only slightly aggravated by the lengths to which they were going to interrogate a reporter," he wrote. He thinks that the police might have had a concern about press freedom when he was denied the right to videotape the interrogation, after which he was finally let go.
But anyone who thinks that these policies are but exceptional interruptions in an otherwise democratic society ought to think again.
"I feel actually quite badly for [street-involved] people who have those sorts of encounters with police on a regular basis and I'm actually quite concerned about what's coming next... Civil liberties seem to be going out the window these days," said Micheal Walsh, after being stopped in Toronto yesterday for carrying picket signs.
On the ground organizers are explicitly connecting mobilizations in Toronto to daily struggles against criminalization, repression and police brutality.
"On June 25th, we will march alongside community groups who organize daily against the indignities and dehumanization of poverty, discrimination, lack of inclusive services, wage-slave working conditions, repressive immigration policies, gentrification, environmental degradation, and police brutality," reads a statement by No One Is Illegal.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Court Affirms Ban on Aiding Groups Tied to Terror
By ADAM LIPTAK
WASHINGTON — In a case pitting free speech against national security, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a federal law that makes it a crime to provide “material support” to foreign terrorist organizations, even if the help takes the form of training for peacefully resolving conflicts.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 decision, said the law’s prohibition of providing some types of intangible assistance to groups the State Department says engage in terrorism did not violate the First Amendment.
The decision was the court’s first ruling on the free speech and associations rights of Americans in the context of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks. The law has been an important tool for prosecutors: Since 2001, the government says, it has charged about 150 defendants for violating the material-support provision, obtaining about 75 convictions.
The court’s majority said deference to the other branches was called for, given the threat posed by terrorism.
“At bottom,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “plaintiffs simply disagree with the considered judgment of Congress and the executive that providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization — even seemingly benign support — bolsters the terrorist activities of that organization.”
Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority decision.
The material-support law bars not only contributions of cash, weapons and other tangible aid but also “training,” “personnel” “service” and “expert advice or assistance.”
Justice Stephen G. Breyer took the unusual step of summarizing his dissent from the bench. He said the majority had drawn a false analogy between the two kinds of assistance.
“Money given for a charitable purpose might free up other money used to buy arms,” Justice Breyer said from the bench. But the same cannot be said, he continued, “where teaching human rights law is involved.”
The decision was a victory for Solicitor General Elena Kagan, who argued the case in February and whose confirmation hearings for a seat on the court are scheduled to start next week. But Chief Justice Roberts said the government had advanced a position that was too extreme and did not take adequate account of the free-speech interests at stake.
“The government is wrong,” the chief justice wrote, “that the only thing actually at issue in this litigation is conduct” and not speech protected by the First Amendment. But he went on to say that the government’s interest in combating terrorism was enough to overcome that protection.
In his written dissent, which was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Breyer said the majority had been too credulous in accepting the government’s argument that national security concerns required restrictions on the challengers’ speech and had “failed to insist upon specific evidence, rather than general assertion.”
The law was challenged by, among others, Ralph D. Fertig, a civil rights activist who has said he wanted to help the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey find peaceful ways to achieve its goals.
On Monday, Mr. Fertig said the decision, which effectively ended 12 years of litigation, was a grave disappointment. “This is a very dark day in the history of the human rights struggle to assist groups overseas that are being oppressed,” he said.
The other plaintiffs were a doctor and six domestic organizations. Some of them said they had sought to help the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group that seeks to create an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka.
Both groups, along with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Khmer Rouge and some 30 others, were designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department. The United States says the Kurdish group, sometimes called the P.K.K., has engaged in widespread terrorist activities, including bombings and kidnappings. The Tamil group, the government said, was responsible for a 1996 bombing that killed 100 people and injured more than 1,400.
The plaintiffs said they had sought to aid only the two groups’ nonviolent activities. For instance, they said, they wanted to offer training in how to use international law to resolve disputes peacefully and “how to petition various representative bodies such as the United Nations for relief.”
That sort of help, they said, was speech protected by the First Amendment.
David D. Cole, a lawyer for the plaintiffs with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the court’s rejection of that argument was disappointing. “This decision basically says the First Amendment allows making peacemaking and human rights advocacy a crime,” Mr. Cole said.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled in 2007 that bans on training, service and some kinds of expert advice were unconstitutionally vague. But it upheld the bans on personnel and expert advice derived from scientific or technical knowledge.
All nine justices said the appeals court was wrong to strike down the law as too vague. They differed, though, about the role the First Amendment had to play in analyzing the law and whether it should be read to apply only where a defendant intended to support a designated group’s terrorist activities.
Chief Justice Roberts emphasized what he said was the limited reach of the decision, which applies only to activities coordinated with the designated groups. Other sorts of speech remain protected, he said.
“Plaintiffs may say anything they wish on any topic,” he wrote. “They may speak and write freely about” the Kurdish and Tamil groups, “the governments of Turkey and Sri Lanka, human rights and international law.” Indeed, the chief justice added, the plaintiffs are free to become members of the two groups.
What they cannot do is make a contribution to a foreign terrorist organization, even if that contribution takes the form of speech. “Such support,” he wrote, “frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends,” “helps lend legitimacy to foreign terrorist groups” and strains “the United States’ relationships with its allies.”
Justice Breyer, in dissent, said the activities at issue “involve the communication and advocacy of political ideas and lawful means of achieving political ends.” It is elementary, he went on, that “this speech and association for political purposes is the kind of activity to which the First Amendment ordinarily offers its strongest protection.”
The majority opinion said it expressed no view about whether Congress could bar assistance to domestic groups.
But Justice Breyer said he feared that the decision in the case, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, No. 08-1498, had implications for all sorts of speech said to threaten national security. The majority’s logic, he said, amounts to “a rule of law that, contrary to the Constitution’s text and First Amendment precedent, would automatically forbid the teaching of any subject in a case where national security interests conflict with the First Amendment.”
WASHINGTON — In a case pitting free speech against national security, the Supreme Court on Monday upheld a federal law that makes it a crime to provide “material support” to foreign terrorist organizations, even if the help takes the form of training for peacefully resolving conflicts.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 decision, said the law’s prohibition of providing some types of intangible assistance to groups the State Department says engage in terrorism did not violate the First Amendment.
The decision was the court’s first ruling on the free speech and associations rights of Americans in the context of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks. The law has been an important tool for prosecutors: Since 2001, the government says, it has charged about 150 defendants for violating the material-support provision, obtaining about 75 convictions.
The court’s majority said deference to the other branches was called for, given the threat posed by terrorism.
“At bottom,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “plaintiffs simply disagree with the considered judgment of Congress and the executive that providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization — even seemingly benign support — bolsters the terrorist activities of that organization.”
Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority decision.
The material-support law bars not only contributions of cash, weapons and other tangible aid but also “training,” “personnel” “service” and “expert advice or assistance.”
Justice Stephen G. Breyer took the unusual step of summarizing his dissent from the bench. He said the majority had drawn a false analogy between the two kinds of assistance.
“Money given for a charitable purpose might free up other money used to buy arms,” Justice Breyer said from the bench. But the same cannot be said, he continued, “where teaching human rights law is involved.”
The decision was a victory for Solicitor General Elena Kagan, who argued the case in February and whose confirmation hearings for a seat on the court are scheduled to start next week. But Chief Justice Roberts said the government had advanced a position that was too extreme and did not take adequate account of the free-speech interests at stake.
“The government is wrong,” the chief justice wrote, “that the only thing actually at issue in this litigation is conduct” and not speech protected by the First Amendment. But he went on to say that the government’s interest in combating terrorism was enough to overcome that protection.
In his written dissent, which was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Breyer said the majority had been too credulous in accepting the government’s argument that national security concerns required restrictions on the challengers’ speech and had “failed to insist upon specific evidence, rather than general assertion.”
The law was challenged by, among others, Ralph D. Fertig, a civil rights activist who has said he wanted to help the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey find peaceful ways to achieve its goals.
On Monday, Mr. Fertig said the decision, which effectively ended 12 years of litigation, was a grave disappointment. “This is a very dark day in the history of the human rights struggle to assist groups overseas that are being oppressed,” he said.
The other plaintiffs were a doctor and six domestic organizations. Some of them said they had sought to help the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group that seeks to create an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka.
Both groups, along with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Khmer Rouge and some 30 others, were designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department. The United States says the Kurdish group, sometimes called the P.K.K., has engaged in widespread terrorist activities, including bombings and kidnappings. The Tamil group, the government said, was responsible for a 1996 bombing that killed 100 people and injured more than 1,400.
The plaintiffs said they had sought to aid only the two groups’ nonviolent activities. For instance, they said, they wanted to offer training in how to use international law to resolve disputes peacefully and “how to petition various representative bodies such as the United Nations for relief.”
That sort of help, they said, was speech protected by the First Amendment.
David D. Cole, a lawyer for the plaintiffs with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the court’s rejection of that argument was disappointing. “This decision basically says the First Amendment allows making peacemaking and human rights advocacy a crime,” Mr. Cole said.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled in 2007 that bans on training, service and some kinds of expert advice were unconstitutionally vague. But it upheld the bans on personnel and expert advice derived from scientific or technical knowledge.
All nine justices said the appeals court was wrong to strike down the law as too vague. They differed, though, about the role the First Amendment had to play in analyzing the law and whether it should be read to apply only where a defendant intended to support a designated group’s terrorist activities.
Chief Justice Roberts emphasized what he said was the limited reach of the decision, which applies only to activities coordinated with the designated groups. Other sorts of speech remain protected, he said.
“Plaintiffs may say anything they wish on any topic,” he wrote. “They may speak and write freely about” the Kurdish and Tamil groups, “the governments of Turkey and Sri Lanka, human rights and international law.” Indeed, the chief justice added, the plaintiffs are free to become members of the two groups.
What they cannot do is make a contribution to a foreign terrorist organization, even if that contribution takes the form of speech. “Such support,” he wrote, “frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends,” “helps lend legitimacy to foreign terrorist groups” and strains “the United States’ relationships with its allies.”
Justice Breyer, in dissent, said the activities at issue “involve the communication and advocacy of political ideas and lawful means of achieving political ends.” It is elementary, he went on, that “this speech and association for political purposes is the kind of activity to which the First Amendment ordinarily offers its strongest protection.”
The majority opinion said it expressed no view about whether Congress could bar assistance to domestic groups.
But Justice Breyer said he feared that the decision in the case, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, No. 08-1498, had implications for all sorts of speech said to threaten national security. The majority’s logic, he said, amounts to “a rule of law that, contrary to the Constitution’s text and First Amendment precedent, would automatically forbid the teaching of any subject in a case where national security interests conflict with the First Amendment.”
Monday, June 7, 2010
Without conscience: Medical experimentation and torture
BY SUSAN BROOKS THISTLETHWAITE
The moral slippery slope down which Americans have been sliding in the use and justification of the torture of detainees in the so-called "war on terror" just got steeper. Physicians for Human Rights has just released a report that documents new evidence they have uncovered indicating that after 9/11, during the Bush Administration, illegal experimentation on detainees was conducted. Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the "Enhanced" Interrogation Program details the role of health professionals in research and experimentation on the torture of detainees. The report calls for an investigation by the Department of Justice into these alleged activities.
Physicians for Human Rights is a Nobel Prize-winning organization that "mobilizes health professionals to advance health, dignity, and justice and promotes the right to life of all." The group has issued this white paper to draw attention to the fact that the role of health professionals in the CIA "enhanced interrogations programs, i.e. the torture of prisoners, was not limited to "monitoring" but extended to collecting comparative data that was used to draw conclusions about the comparative efficacy of different kinds torture. It was research. Medical personnel engaged in this research to help "improve" these methods and assess "susceptibility to severe pain." In addition, human research and experimentation was applied directly to waterboarding to measure its effects and try to adapt it to avoid fatalities.
These alleged experiments violate the professional standards of medical personnel on human subject research and experimentation. The American Medical Associations' Code of Ethics directly prohibits health professionals from using their skills and expertise in any form of interrogation. In addition to professional violations, however, if medical personnel participated in these ways in the torture of detainees, they broke the law. In the U.S., the "Common Rule" governs all people subject to medical research and experimentation, including research conducted b the CIA and the Department of Defense. They may also be guilty of war crimes.
(According to the Times, the C.I.A. denied the group's charges. "The report is just wrong," said Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman. "The C.I.A. did not, as part of its past detention program, conduct human subject research on any detainee or group of detainees. The entire detention effort has been the subject of multiple, comprehensive reviews within our government, including by the Department of Justice.")
The principles that should guide medical experimentation are "respect, beneficence, and justice." We require that human subject research be conducted on volunteers who are informed and who consent. Detainees were obviously not "volunteers," the pain to which they were subjected was not for a beneficial purpose, and had no relationship to justice or respect.
An additional shocking allegation in the report is that one of the reasons for the medical experimentation was to give legal cover to those conducting the torture. The Bush Administration, through its lawyers, attempted to "re-brand" torture as "enhanced interrogation" and establish "acceptable" levels of harm. The presence of medical professionals gives cover to this idea, and to the idea that it is possible to cause harm and not call it torture. This is a deeply corrupting idea, for it permits those involved in torturing to delude themselves into thinking that they are not committing crimes against humanity.
Torture is wrong; it is always wrong and there is no "acceptable" level of torturing someone. Torture assaults human dignity in a profound way, both for the tortured and also for the torturer. Pain becomes an end in itself. Torture has never been shown to be effective in obtaining information. It does not "keep us safe," it is the very thing that continues to cause the United States to lose respect around the world, and thus it makes us less safe.
The "medical cover" for torture takes us further down the slippery slope where Americans conclude that the standards of acceptable human decency do not, somehow, apply to us. If these charges in the report of Physicians for Human Rights are investigated and proved by the Department of Justice, the conduct of health professionals in doing research on how to make torture more effective is truly horrible.
And why do I even have to ask if the charges will be investigated? I have to ask, because I, at least, am not sure anybody at the Department of Justice will think it is necessary to investigate these allegations from an internationally respected organization. That's how far down the slope we've slid.
The moral slippery slope down which Americans have been sliding in the use and justification of the torture of detainees in the so-called "war on terror" just got steeper. Physicians for Human Rights has just released a report that documents new evidence they have uncovered indicating that after 9/11, during the Bush Administration, illegal experimentation on detainees was conducted. Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the "Enhanced" Interrogation Program details the role of health professionals in research and experimentation on the torture of detainees. The report calls for an investigation by the Department of Justice into these alleged activities.
Physicians for Human Rights is a Nobel Prize-winning organization that "mobilizes health professionals to advance health, dignity, and justice and promotes the right to life of all." The group has issued this white paper to draw attention to the fact that the role of health professionals in the CIA "enhanced interrogations programs, i.e. the torture of prisoners, was not limited to "monitoring" but extended to collecting comparative data that was used to draw conclusions about the comparative efficacy of different kinds torture. It was research. Medical personnel engaged in this research to help "improve" these methods and assess "susceptibility to severe pain." In addition, human research and experimentation was applied directly to waterboarding to measure its effects and try to adapt it to avoid fatalities.
These alleged experiments violate the professional standards of medical personnel on human subject research and experimentation. The American Medical Associations' Code of Ethics directly prohibits health professionals from using their skills and expertise in any form of interrogation. In addition to professional violations, however, if medical personnel participated in these ways in the torture of detainees, they broke the law. In the U.S., the "Common Rule" governs all people subject to medical research and experimentation, including research conducted b the CIA and the Department of Defense. They may also be guilty of war crimes.
(According to the Times, the C.I.A. denied the group's charges. "The report is just wrong," said Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman. "The C.I.A. did not, as part of its past detention program, conduct human subject research on any detainee or group of detainees. The entire detention effort has been the subject of multiple, comprehensive reviews within our government, including by the Department of Justice.")
The principles that should guide medical experimentation are "respect, beneficence, and justice." We require that human subject research be conducted on volunteers who are informed and who consent. Detainees were obviously not "volunteers," the pain to which they were subjected was not for a beneficial purpose, and had no relationship to justice or respect.
An additional shocking allegation in the report is that one of the reasons for the medical experimentation was to give legal cover to those conducting the torture. The Bush Administration, through its lawyers, attempted to "re-brand" torture as "enhanced interrogation" and establish "acceptable" levels of harm. The presence of medical professionals gives cover to this idea, and to the idea that it is possible to cause harm and not call it torture. This is a deeply corrupting idea, for it permits those involved in torturing to delude themselves into thinking that they are not committing crimes against humanity.
Torture is wrong; it is always wrong and there is no "acceptable" level of torturing someone. Torture assaults human dignity in a profound way, both for the tortured and also for the torturer. Pain becomes an end in itself. Torture has never been shown to be effective in obtaining information. It does not "keep us safe," it is the very thing that continues to cause the United States to lose respect around the world, and thus it makes us less safe.
The "medical cover" for torture takes us further down the slippery slope where Americans conclude that the standards of acceptable human decency do not, somehow, apply to us. If these charges in the report of Physicians for Human Rights are investigated and proved by the Department of Justice, the conduct of health professionals in doing research on how to make torture more effective is truly horrible.
And why do I even have to ask if the charges will be investigated? I have to ask, because I, at least, am not sure anybody at the Department of Justice will think it is necessary to investigate these allegations from an internationally respected organization. That's how far down the slope we've slid.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
From Klinghoffer to the Gaza Flotilla
By YVONNE RIDLEY
I wonder how many of you remember the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro way back in October 1985?
Four members of the Palestine Liberation Front took control of the liner off Egypt as she was sailing from Alexandria to Port Said. It was a bungled operation in which the hijackers killed disabled Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer and then threw his body overboard.
The incident created headlines around the world and polarized people over the Palestinian cause. It also prompted the law makers to create new legislation making it an international crime for anyone to take a ship by force.
And this is the reason for the brief history lesson - under article 3 of the Rome Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation of 1988, it is an international crime for any person to seize or exercise control over a ship by force, and also a crime to injure or kill any person in the process.
The treaty necessarily adopts a strict approach. One cannot attack a ship and then claim self-defense if the people on board resist the unlawful use of violence.
In other words, according to international law, the actions of the Israeli military were beyond the law and those involved should be treated no differently than, say, the Somali pirates who are also in the habit of boarding ships by force.
Any rights to self defense in such dramatic circumstances rests purely with the passengers and crew on board. Under international maritime law you are legally entitled to resist unlawful capture, abduction and detention.
What those on board the Freedom Flotilla did was perfectly legal. I believe they acted with great courage in the face of heavily armed IDF commandos, while others might have thought their actions reckless. Whatever your view, a number paid the ultimate price for their international right to resist.
Israel now stands virtually alone having exposed itself as a pariah state. I wrote an article last year calling them the Pirates of the Mediterranean after they had illegally boarded other aid ships, kidnapping crew and passengers.
Now I want you to ask yourself this question … if a group of Somali pirates had forced their way onto half a dozen humanitarian aid ships from the West, slaughtering around nine or 10 people and injuring scores more what do you think the international reaction would have been?
Let me tell you. A NATO task force would by now be steaming towards the Horn of Africa accompanied by a couple of drones and various members of the press to record the occasion. (On a point of interest the Achille Lauro sank in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia in 1994.)
So why is Israel allowed to get away with murder? In a pre-meditated act the Zionist State showed once again its total disregard for human life – and international law.There were pensioners, women and children on board those ships which were carrying bags of cement, electric wheelchairs, toys, medicines and water purifiers for Gaza's people.
Realizing Israel had shot itself in the foot, Isrsael’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu then started shooting from the lip.
He asked us to believe that his troops were acting in self-defense. And then, 24 hours later, given time to come up with more lies he told the world that the soldiers were armed with paintballs and had not expected to use their weapons. Not content with insulting our intelligence he said his nice, cuddly IDF folk had only boarded the boats to carry out an inspection and inventory.
Then backing him up was Mark Regev, Israel’s political Pinocchio. He reckons these evil-doers on board the boats grabbed the IDF’s real guns and used them to fire on the soldiers.
These are the same soldiers that come from an elite, highly trained, crack squad … hmm Mr Regev, if that’s the case why would you send in the A-Team if they were just going to do an inventory? And if they were such a hot squad how did a bunch of civilians manage to overpower them and give them a good slap?
Either Israeli soldiers fight like a bunch of old women – which Hizb’Allah says they do – or they intended to massacre those on board to make sure that no other peace activists get involved in trying to help the Palestinian people of Gaza.
Well if that was the aim then it has failed. As I write this some heroic friends of mine from the Free Gaza Movement including Malaysian lawyer Matthias Chang are bound for Gaza now onboard the appropriately named ship Rachel Corrie.
Yvonne Ridley is a British Journalist and author of In The Hands of the Taliban which is due to be updated and republished later this year. She is also a presenter for The Agenda and co-presenter of the Rattansi & Ridley show, both of which are broadcast on Press TV. In addition she is a founding member of the Stop the War Coalition as well as the RESPECT political party.
I wonder how many of you remember the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro way back in October 1985?
Four members of the Palestine Liberation Front took control of the liner off Egypt as she was sailing from Alexandria to Port Said. It was a bungled operation in which the hijackers killed disabled Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer and then threw his body overboard.
The incident created headlines around the world and polarized people over the Palestinian cause. It also prompted the law makers to create new legislation making it an international crime for anyone to take a ship by force.
And this is the reason for the brief history lesson - under article 3 of the Rome Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation of 1988, it is an international crime for any person to seize or exercise control over a ship by force, and also a crime to injure or kill any person in the process.
The treaty necessarily adopts a strict approach. One cannot attack a ship and then claim self-defense if the people on board resist the unlawful use of violence.
In other words, according to international law, the actions of the Israeli military were beyond the law and those involved should be treated no differently than, say, the Somali pirates who are also in the habit of boarding ships by force.
Any rights to self defense in such dramatic circumstances rests purely with the passengers and crew on board. Under international maritime law you are legally entitled to resist unlawful capture, abduction and detention.
What those on board the Freedom Flotilla did was perfectly legal. I believe they acted with great courage in the face of heavily armed IDF commandos, while others might have thought their actions reckless. Whatever your view, a number paid the ultimate price for their international right to resist.
Israel now stands virtually alone having exposed itself as a pariah state. I wrote an article last year calling them the Pirates of the Mediterranean after they had illegally boarded other aid ships, kidnapping crew and passengers.
Now I want you to ask yourself this question … if a group of Somali pirates had forced their way onto half a dozen humanitarian aid ships from the West, slaughtering around nine or 10 people and injuring scores more what do you think the international reaction would have been?
Let me tell you. A NATO task force would by now be steaming towards the Horn of Africa accompanied by a couple of drones and various members of the press to record the occasion. (On a point of interest the Achille Lauro sank in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia in 1994.)
So why is Israel allowed to get away with murder? In a pre-meditated act the Zionist State showed once again its total disregard for human life – and international law.There were pensioners, women and children on board those ships which were carrying bags of cement, electric wheelchairs, toys, medicines and water purifiers for Gaza's people.
Realizing Israel had shot itself in the foot, Isrsael’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu then started shooting from the lip.
He asked us to believe that his troops were acting in self-defense. And then, 24 hours later, given time to come up with more lies he told the world that the soldiers were armed with paintballs and had not expected to use their weapons. Not content with insulting our intelligence he said his nice, cuddly IDF folk had only boarded the boats to carry out an inspection and inventory.
Then backing him up was Mark Regev, Israel’s political Pinocchio. He reckons these evil-doers on board the boats grabbed the IDF’s real guns and used them to fire on the soldiers.
These are the same soldiers that come from an elite, highly trained, crack squad … hmm Mr Regev, if that’s the case why would you send in the A-Team if they were just going to do an inventory? And if they were such a hot squad how did a bunch of civilians manage to overpower them and give them a good slap?
Either Israeli soldiers fight like a bunch of old women – which Hizb’Allah says they do – or they intended to massacre those on board to make sure that no other peace activists get involved in trying to help the Palestinian people of Gaza.
Well if that was the aim then it has failed. As I write this some heroic friends of mine from the Free Gaza Movement including Malaysian lawyer Matthias Chang are bound for Gaza now onboard the appropriately named ship Rachel Corrie.
Yvonne Ridley is a British Journalist and author of In The Hands of the Taliban which is due to be updated and republished later this year. She is also a presenter for The Agenda and co-presenter of the Rattansi & Ridley show, both of which are broadcast on Press TV. In addition she is a founding member of the Stop the War Coalition as well as the RESPECT political party.
Gaza flotilla activists were shot in head at close range
Exclusive: Nine Turkish men on board Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times, autopsy results reveal
Robert Booth
Crowds at the funeral of one of the Turkish victims of the Gaza flotilla raid, at the Beyazit mosque in Istanbul. Photograph: Vadim Ghirda/AP
Israel was tonight under pressure to allow an independent inquiry into its assault on the Gaza aid flotilla after autopsy results on the bodies of those killed, obtained by the Guardian, revealed they were peppered with 9mm bullets, many fired at close range.
Nine Turkish men on board the Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times and five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head, according to the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice today.
The results revealed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, who also has US citizenship, was shot five times from less that 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, said Yalcin Buyuk, vice-chairman of the council of forensic medicine.
The findings emerged as more survivors gave their accounts of the raids. Ismail Patel, the chairman of Leicester-based pro-Palestinian group Friends of al-Aqsa, who returned to Britain today, told how he witnessed some of the fatal shootings and claimed that Israel had operated a "shoot to kill policy".
He calculated that during the bloodiest part of the assault, Israeli commandos shot one person every minute. One man was fatally shot in the back of the head just two feet in front him and another was shot once between the eyes. He added that as well as the fatally wounded, 48 others were suffering from gunshot wounds and six activists remained missing, suggesting the death toll may increase.
The new information about the manner and intensity of the killings undermines Israel's insistence that its soldiers opened fire only in self defence and in response to attacks by the activists.
"Given the very disturbing evidence which contradicts the line from the Israeli media and suggests that Israelis have been very selective in the way they have addressed this, there is now an overwhelming need for an international inquiry," said Andrew Slaughter MP, a member of the all party group on Britain and Palestine.
Israel said tonight the number of bullets found in the bodies did not alter the fact that the soldiers were acting in self defence. "The only situation when a soldier shot was when it was a clearly a life-threatening situation," said a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London. "Pulling the trigger quickly can result in a few bullets being in the same body, but does not change the fact they were in a life-threatening situation."
Protesters from across the country will tomorrow march from Downing Street to the Israeli embassy to call for Israel to be held to account for its actions.
Earlier this week, William Hague, the foreign secretary, said the government would call for an inquiry under international auspices if Israel refuses to establish an independent inquiry, including an international presence.
The autopsy results were released as the last of the Turkish victims was buried.
Dr Haluk Ince, the chairman of the council of forensic medicine in Istanbul, said that in only one case was there a single bullet wound, to the forehead from a distant shot, while every other victim suffered multiple wounds. "All [the bullets] were intact. This is important in a forensic context. When a bullet strikes another place it comes into the body deformed. If it directly comes into the body, the bullet is all intact."
He added that all but one of the bullets retrieved from the bodies came from 9mm rounds. Of the other round, he said: "It was the first time we have seen this kind of material used in firearms. It was just a container including many types of pellets usually used in shotguns. It penetrated the head region in the temple and we found it intact in the brain."
An unnamed Israeli commando, who purportedly led the raid on the Mavi Marmara, today told Israeli news website Ynet News that he shot at a protester who approached him with a knife. "I was in front of a number of people with knives and clubs," he said. "I cocked my weapon when I saw that one was coming towards me with a knife drawn and I fired once. Then another 20 people came at me from all directions and threw me down to the deck below …
"We knew they were peace activists. Though they wanted to break the Gaza blockade, we thought we'd encounter passive resistance, perhaps verbal resistance – we didn't expect this. Everyone wanted to kill us. We encountered terrorists who wanted to kill us and we did everything we could to prevent unnecessary injury."
Tonight the Rachel Corrie, an Irish vessel crewed by supporters of the Free Gaza movement, remained on course for Gaza. Yossi Gal, director general at the Israeli foreign ministry, said Israel had "no desire for a confrontation" but asked for the ship to dock at Ashdod, not Gaza.
"If the ship decides to sail the port of Ashdod, then we will ensure its safe arrival and will not board it," he said.
Robert Booth
Crowds at the funeral of one of the Turkish victims of the Gaza flotilla raid, at the Beyazit mosque in Istanbul. Photograph: Vadim Ghirda/AP
Israel was tonight under pressure to allow an independent inquiry into its assault on the Gaza aid flotilla after autopsy results on the bodies of those killed, obtained by the Guardian, revealed they were peppered with 9mm bullets, many fired at close range.
Nine Turkish men on board the Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times and five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head, according to the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice today.
The results revealed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, who also has US citizenship, was shot five times from less that 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, said Yalcin Buyuk, vice-chairman of the council of forensic medicine.
The findings emerged as more survivors gave their accounts of the raids. Ismail Patel, the chairman of Leicester-based pro-Palestinian group Friends of al-Aqsa, who returned to Britain today, told how he witnessed some of the fatal shootings and claimed that Israel had operated a "shoot to kill policy".
He calculated that during the bloodiest part of the assault, Israeli commandos shot one person every minute. One man was fatally shot in the back of the head just two feet in front him and another was shot once between the eyes. He added that as well as the fatally wounded, 48 others were suffering from gunshot wounds and six activists remained missing, suggesting the death toll may increase.
The new information about the manner and intensity of the killings undermines Israel's insistence that its soldiers opened fire only in self defence and in response to attacks by the activists.
"Given the very disturbing evidence which contradicts the line from the Israeli media and suggests that Israelis have been very selective in the way they have addressed this, there is now an overwhelming need for an international inquiry," said Andrew Slaughter MP, a member of the all party group on Britain and Palestine.
Israel said tonight the number of bullets found in the bodies did not alter the fact that the soldiers were acting in self defence. "The only situation when a soldier shot was when it was a clearly a life-threatening situation," said a spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London. "Pulling the trigger quickly can result in a few bullets being in the same body, but does not change the fact they were in a life-threatening situation."
Protesters from across the country will tomorrow march from Downing Street to the Israeli embassy to call for Israel to be held to account for its actions.
Earlier this week, William Hague, the foreign secretary, said the government would call for an inquiry under international auspices if Israel refuses to establish an independent inquiry, including an international presence.
The autopsy results were released as the last of the Turkish victims was buried.
Dr Haluk Ince, the chairman of the council of forensic medicine in Istanbul, said that in only one case was there a single bullet wound, to the forehead from a distant shot, while every other victim suffered multiple wounds. "All [the bullets] were intact. This is important in a forensic context. When a bullet strikes another place it comes into the body deformed. If it directly comes into the body, the bullet is all intact."
He added that all but one of the bullets retrieved from the bodies came from 9mm rounds. Of the other round, he said: "It was the first time we have seen this kind of material used in firearms. It was just a container including many types of pellets usually used in shotguns. It penetrated the head region in the temple and we found it intact in the brain."
An unnamed Israeli commando, who purportedly led the raid on the Mavi Marmara, today told Israeli news website Ynet News that he shot at a protester who approached him with a knife. "I was in front of a number of people with knives and clubs," he said. "I cocked my weapon when I saw that one was coming towards me with a knife drawn and I fired once. Then another 20 people came at me from all directions and threw me down to the deck below …
"We knew they were peace activists. Though they wanted to break the Gaza blockade, we thought we'd encounter passive resistance, perhaps verbal resistance – we didn't expect this. Everyone wanted to kill us. We encountered terrorists who wanted to kill us and we did everything we could to prevent unnecessary injury."
Tonight the Rachel Corrie, an Irish vessel crewed by supporters of the Free Gaza movement, remained on course for Gaza. Yossi Gal, director general at the Israeli foreign ministry, said Israel had "no desire for a confrontation" but asked for the ship to dock at Ashdod, not Gaza.
"If the ship decides to sail the port of Ashdod, then we will ensure its safe arrival and will not board it," he said.
Reporters Dispute Israeli Account of Raid
By ROBERT MACKEY
On Thursday, Al Jazeera English broadcast an interview with Jamal Elshayyal, one of the channel’s journalists who was on board the Mavi Marmara on Monday when it was intercepted by Israeli commandos enforcing a naval blockade on Gaza.
In his account of the start of the raid, which left nine activists dead and has sparked calls for an independent investigation, Mr. Elshayyal insisted that the Israelis had fired live ammunition at the ship from the air before commandos landed on the boat and said that he had seen someone shot and killed by a bullet that hit the top of his head. He said, in part:
As soon as this attack started, I was on the top deck and within just a few minutes there were live shots being fired from above the ship, from above, from where the helicopters were. [...]
The first shots that were fired were either some sort of sound grenades, there was some tear gas that was fired as well as rubber-coated bullets. They were fired initially and the live bullets came roughly about five minutes after that.
Asked if the shots fired at the ship by the Israeli forces had seemed to come from ships nearby or the helicopters above, Mr. Elshayyal said:
It was evident there was definitely fire from the air, because one of the people who was killed was clearly shot from above — he was shot, the bullet targeted him at the top of his head. There was also fire coming from the sea as well. Most of the fire initially from the sea was tear gas canisters, sound grenades, but then it became live fire. After I finished filing that last report and I was going down below deck one of the passengers who was on the side of the deck holding a water hose — trying to hose off, if you will, the advancing Israeli navy — was shot in his arm by soldiers in the boats below. [...]
There is no doubt from what I saw that live ammunition was fired before any Israeli soldier was on deck. What I saw, the sequence of events that took place, there was a pool camera, so reporters took it in turns to file, so after I had done my first file, I turned around to see what was going on and there were several shots fired. In fact, one of the helicopters at the front of the ship, you could almost see the soldiers pointing their guns down through some sort of hole or compartment at the bottom side of the helicopter and firing almost indiscriminately without even looking where they were firing. And those bullets were definitely live bullets.
Mr. Elshayyal’s account, of course, is only one part of the puzzle, and it will not be accepted easily by people who see his network as biased against Israel. That said, now that the accounts of activists and journalists who were detained by Israel after the raid are starting to be heard, it is clear that their stories and that of the Israeli military do not match in many ways.
On Thursday, Today’s Zaman, an English-language newspaper in Turkey, reported that the president of the Turkish aid group that helped to organize the flotilla said that a photographer working for the group “was shot in the forehead by a soldier one meter away from him.” Bulent Yildirimhe, the president of the aid organization Insani Yardim Vakfi (known in English as the I.H.H.), told the newspaper on Thursday after he returned from Israel: “Our Cevdet [Kiliclar], he is a press member. He has become a martyr. All he was doing was taking pictures. They smashed his skull into pieces.” The newspaper added:
Kevin Ovenden of Britain, an activist on the ship that arrived in İstanbul on Thursday, also said a man who had pointed a camera at the soldiers was shot directly through the forehead with live ammunition, with the exit wound blowing away back of his skull.
In another report, the newspaper said that Israeli officials had confiscated images taken by one of its photographers in the flotilla:
A photojournalist from Today’s Zaman Kursat Bayhan who was on board an international aid convoy for Gaza said he tried to hide a flash disk which included the photos from the moments of Israeli attack on the convoy under his tongue to prevent Israeli authorities from seizing it but his effort failed during a medical examination.
The report added, “Bayhan said the journalists in the ship including him tried to protect the video footage and photos they took,” after the ships were seized by Israeli commandos, but “all the materials of the press members, including their passports and identity cards, were taken away.”
The way these accounts diverge from that of Israel’s military would seem to make an independent investigation into the events crucial. That is particularly true since, as The Lede noted on Wednesday, Israel is apparently in possession of much more video evidence than it has yet released.
In a post making the case that Israel should not conduct that inquiry, Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli journalist and blogger, pointed out that journalists in the flotilla seem to have left Israeli custody without any of the video they shot during the raid that might bolster their accounts.
Israel has confiscated some of the most important material for the investigation, namely the films, audio and photos taken by the passengers [and] journalists on board and the Mavi Marmara’s security cameras. Since yesterday, Israel has been editing these films and using them for its own PR campaign. In other words, Israel has already confiscated most of the evidence, held it from the world and tampered with it. No court in the world would [trust] it to be the one examining it.
On Thursday, Al Jazeera English broadcast an interview with Jamal Elshayyal, one of the channel’s journalists who was on board the Mavi Marmara on Monday when it was intercepted by Israeli commandos enforcing a naval blockade on Gaza.
In his account of the start of the raid, which left nine activists dead and has sparked calls for an independent investigation, Mr. Elshayyal insisted that the Israelis had fired live ammunition at the ship from the air before commandos landed on the boat and said that he had seen someone shot and killed by a bullet that hit the top of his head. He said, in part:
As soon as this attack started, I was on the top deck and within just a few minutes there were live shots being fired from above the ship, from above, from where the helicopters were. [...]
The first shots that were fired were either some sort of sound grenades, there was some tear gas that was fired as well as rubber-coated bullets. They were fired initially and the live bullets came roughly about five minutes after that.
Asked if the shots fired at the ship by the Israeli forces had seemed to come from ships nearby or the helicopters above, Mr. Elshayyal said:
It was evident there was definitely fire from the air, because one of the people who was killed was clearly shot from above — he was shot, the bullet targeted him at the top of his head. There was also fire coming from the sea as well. Most of the fire initially from the sea was tear gas canisters, sound grenades, but then it became live fire. After I finished filing that last report and I was going down below deck one of the passengers who was on the side of the deck holding a water hose — trying to hose off, if you will, the advancing Israeli navy — was shot in his arm by soldiers in the boats below. [...]
There is no doubt from what I saw that live ammunition was fired before any Israeli soldier was on deck. What I saw, the sequence of events that took place, there was a pool camera, so reporters took it in turns to file, so after I had done my first file, I turned around to see what was going on and there were several shots fired. In fact, one of the helicopters at the front of the ship, you could almost see the soldiers pointing their guns down through some sort of hole or compartment at the bottom side of the helicopter and firing almost indiscriminately without even looking where they were firing. And those bullets were definitely live bullets.
Mr. Elshayyal’s account, of course, is only one part of the puzzle, and it will not be accepted easily by people who see his network as biased against Israel. That said, now that the accounts of activists and journalists who were detained by Israel after the raid are starting to be heard, it is clear that their stories and that of the Israeli military do not match in many ways.
On Thursday, Today’s Zaman, an English-language newspaper in Turkey, reported that the president of the Turkish aid group that helped to organize the flotilla said that a photographer working for the group “was shot in the forehead by a soldier one meter away from him.” Bulent Yildirimhe, the president of the aid organization Insani Yardim Vakfi (known in English as the I.H.H.), told the newspaper on Thursday after he returned from Israel: “Our Cevdet [Kiliclar], he is a press member. He has become a martyr. All he was doing was taking pictures. They smashed his skull into pieces.” The newspaper added:
Kevin Ovenden of Britain, an activist on the ship that arrived in İstanbul on Thursday, also said a man who had pointed a camera at the soldiers was shot directly through the forehead with live ammunition, with the exit wound blowing away back of his skull.
In another report, the newspaper said that Israeli officials had confiscated images taken by one of its photographers in the flotilla:
A photojournalist from Today’s Zaman Kursat Bayhan who was on board an international aid convoy for Gaza said he tried to hide a flash disk which included the photos from the moments of Israeli attack on the convoy under his tongue to prevent Israeli authorities from seizing it but his effort failed during a medical examination.
The report added, “Bayhan said the journalists in the ship including him tried to protect the video footage and photos they took,” after the ships were seized by Israeli commandos, but “all the materials of the press members, including their passports and identity cards, were taken away.”
The way these accounts diverge from that of Israel’s military would seem to make an independent investigation into the events crucial. That is particularly true since, as The Lede noted on Wednesday, Israel is apparently in possession of much more video evidence than it has yet released.
In a post making the case that Israel should not conduct that inquiry, Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli journalist and blogger, pointed out that journalists in the flotilla seem to have left Israeli custody without any of the video they shot during the raid that might bolster their accounts.
Israel has confiscated some of the most important material for the investigation, namely the films, audio and photos taken by the passengers [and] journalists on board and the Mavi Marmara’s security cameras. Since yesterday, Israel has been editing these films and using them for its own PR campaign. In other words, Israel has already confiscated most of the evidence, held it from the world and tampered with it. No court in the world would [trust] it to be the one examining it.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Condemnation of Israeli assault complicates relations with U.S.
By Glenn Kessler
The worldwide condemnation of the deadly Israeli assault on the Gaza aid flotilla will complicate the Obama administration's efforts to improve its tense relations with Jerusalem and will probably distract from the push to sanction Iran over its nuclear program.
The timing of the incident is remarkably bad for Israel and the United States. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Obama were scheduled to meet Tuesday in Washington as part of a "kiss and make up" session. The United Nations, meanwhile, was set to begin final deliberations on Iran in the weeks ahead.
Now the White House talks have been scrubbed, Israel's actions were the subject of an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting Monday and the administration increasingly faces a difficult balancing act as Israel's diplomatic isolation deepens.
In contrast with forceful statements from European, Arab and U.N. officials -- and impromptu demonstrations from Athens to Baghdad -- the White House responded to the assault Monday by saying only that Obama had held a phone conversation with Netanyahu in which the prime minister expressed "deep regret at the loss of life" and "the importance of learning all the facts and circumstances around this morning's tragic events."
Hours later, the State Department issued a statement saying that the United States remains "deeply concerned by the suffering of civilians in Gaza" and "will continue to engage the Israelis on a daily basis to expand the scope and type of goods allowed into Gaza."
Even before Monday's incident, Israel was on shaky diplomatic ground. After the government was accused of using forged foreign passports in the assassination of a Palestinian militant in Dubai, Britain expelled an Israeli diplomat in March. Australia did the same last week.
The latest furor may have caused irreparable harm to Israel's relations with Turkey -- a Muslim state with which Israel has long had close ties -- because so many of those onboard were Turkish. At the United Nations, Turkey's foreign minister urged the Security Council to condemn Israel's raid and set up a formal inquiry to hold those responsible for it accountable.
"This is terrible for Israel-Turkey relations," Namik Tan, the Turkish ambassador to the United States, said in an interview. "I am really saddened by it."
Tan, who served as ambassador to Israel from 2007 through 2009, said Israel's actions demand condemnation from every country because the flotilla incident took place in international waters and involved civilians on a humanitarian mission. But he said the Obama administration's initial statement was wanting. "We would have expected a much stronger reaction than this," he said.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will be in Washington on Tuesday to discuss Iran with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, but Turkey's fury over the Gaza incident will inevitably top the agenda.
Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator now at the New America Foundation in Washington, said it's not the first time Israel has done itself a disservice.
"Israel constantly claims it wants the world to focus on Iran, but then it ends up doing something that gets everyone to focus on itself," he said.
The worldwide condemnation of the deadly Israeli assault on the Gaza aid flotilla will complicate the Obama administration's efforts to improve its tense relations with Jerusalem and will probably distract from the push to sanction Iran over its nuclear program.
The timing of the incident is remarkably bad for Israel and the United States. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Obama were scheduled to meet Tuesday in Washington as part of a "kiss and make up" session. The United Nations, meanwhile, was set to begin final deliberations on Iran in the weeks ahead.
Now the White House talks have been scrubbed, Israel's actions were the subject of an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting Monday and the administration increasingly faces a difficult balancing act as Israel's diplomatic isolation deepens.
In contrast with forceful statements from European, Arab and U.N. officials -- and impromptu demonstrations from Athens to Baghdad -- the White House responded to the assault Monday by saying only that Obama had held a phone conversation with Netanyahu in which the prime minister expressed "deep regret at the loss of life" and "the importance of learning all the facts and circumstances around this morning's tragic events."
Hours later, the State Department issued a statement saying that the United States remains "deeply concerned by the suffering of civilians in Gaza" and "will continue to engage the Israelis on a daily basis to expand the scope and type of goods allowed into Gaza."
Even before Monday's incident, Israel was on shaky diplomatic ground. After the government was accused of using forged foreign passports in the assassination of a Palestinian militant in Dubai, Britain expelled an Israeli diplomat in March. Australia did the same last week.
The latest furor may have caused irreparable harm to Israel's relations with Turkey -- a Muslim state with which Israel has long had close ties -- because so many of those onboard were Turkish. At the United Nations, Turkey's foreign minister urged the Security Council to condemn Israel's raid and set up a formal inquiry to hold those responsible for it accountable.
"This is terrible for Israel-Turkey relations," Namik Tan, the Turkish ambassador to the United States, said in an interview. "I am really saddened by it."
Tan, who served as ambassador to Israel from 2007 through 2009, said Israel's actions demand condemnation from every country because the flotilla incident took place in international waters and involved civilians on a humanitarian mission. But he said the Obama administration's initial statement was wanting. "We would have expected a much stronger reaction than this," he said.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu will be in Washington on Tuesday to discuss Iran with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, but Turkey's fury over the Gaza incident will inevitably top the agenda.
Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator now at the New America Foundation in Washington, said it's not the first time Israel has done itself a disservice.
"Israel constantly claims it wants the world to focus on Iran, but then it ends up doing something that gets everyone to focus on itself," he said.
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