Israel boards Gaza-bound ships, 15 dead: reports

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – About 15 people were killed on Monday when the Israeli navy intercepted a convoy of aid ships that activists were trying to sail to the Gaza Strip, Israel's Channel 10 private television network said.




Earlier, a spokesman for the Free Gaza Movement which organized the six-ship flotilla said at least two were killed.




Casualties could hurt Israel's international image and diplomatic relations, especially its long-time regional Muslim ally Turkey, whose flag some of the aid ships were flying.




Israel has said it was absolutely determined to maintain its blockade of the Islamist Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory of 1.5 million. It has previously halted such activist ships, although others have reached Gaza before.




Amid Israeli military censorship and a refusal of Israeli officials to comment on what appeared to be a continuing operation three hours after dawn broke over the Mediterranean, Channel 10 made clear it was not citing foreign sources.




After initially reporting that at least 10 people were dead, it later said the death toll was between 14 and 16. It said commandos who had boarded the convoy were still conducting searches and encountering what it called violent resistance.




"Two people have been killed on board the Turkish boat and 30 or more were wounded," said Mary Hughes Thompson, a spokesewoman for the Free Gaza Movement, which was behind the convoy.




"As far as we know IDF (Israeli military) commandos descended on the boat from helicopters and took it over."




The convoy set off in international waters off Cyprus on Sunday in defiance of an Israeli-led blockade of the Gaza Strip and warnings that it would be intercepted.




The flotilla was organized by pro-Palestinian groups and a Turkish human rights organization. Turkey had urged Israel to allow it safe passage and said the 10,000 tonnes of aid the convoy was carrying was humanitarian.




KEY ALLY




Turkey, long Israel's best Muslim friend and a key ally in a hostile Middle East, was highly critical of Israel's attack on Gaza 18 months ago, in which 1,400 Palestinians were killed. Relations between the two states are now distinctly chilly and bloodshed at sea will do nothing to improve them.




CNN showed pictures of a commando apparently sliding down a rope and clashing with a man wielding a stick. Other TV images showed what appeared to be rubber boarding launches.




France 24 television aired video of a woman in a Muslim headress holding a stretcher with a large bloodstain on it. Below her lay a man, apparently wounded, in a blanket.




Israel had said it would prevent the convoy from reaching the Gaza Strip.




Israel and Egypt tightened a blockade on Gaza after Hamas took over the territory in 2007. Israel launched a devastating military offensive in Gaza in December 2008 with the aim of halting daily rocket fire toward its cities.




Most of the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza rely on aid, blaming Israel for imposing restrictions on the amount and type of goods it allows into the territory.




The United Nations and Western powers have urged Israel to ease its restrictions to prevent a humanitarian crisis. They have been urging Israel to let in concrete and steel to allow for postwar reconstruction.





Israel denies there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, saying food, medicine and medical equipment are allowed in regularly. It says the restrictions are necessary to prevent weapons and materials that could be used to make them from reaching Hamas.





(Jerusalem newsroom)

Israelis Kill 3, Injure Dozens in Assault on Gaza Ship Convoy Carrying Humanitarian Aid

Israeli commandos surround convoy, fire live ammunition upon Mavi Marmara, with hundreds of aid workers and activists aboard, including Chicago activist Fatima Mohammadi.


Media contacts:
Kevin Clark, Free Gaza Movement/Midwest: FGMinchicago @aol.com, cell 312-259-4380
Fatima Mohammadi, Chicagoan on board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla: Satellite phone: +8821636619168; email: fatmoh@gmail.com
Huwaida Arraf on board the Challenger: 0088 216 5207 2093
Ewa Jasciewica on board the Challenger: 0088 163 184 7926
Bianca Shana'a, Free Gaza Movement, Paris: 00336 63 59 20 28

Greta Berlin, Free Gaza Movement: 00 357 99 18 72 75
Mary Hughes: 00 357 96 38 38 09


10 PM CST: Solidarity activists aboard one of six relief vessels traveling to Gaza with humanitarian report that they have been attacked by Israeli forces, with three of their human rights volunteers killed and roughly 30 injured. The assault comes in the wake of the flotilla being surrounded earlier today by three Israeli warships in international waters, roughly 70 miles away from the Israeli coast. The Flotilla moved further west, deeper into international waters to avoid any conflict with Israeli navy vessels, but had been concerned all night that Israeli forces would send small inflatable military boats towards the flotilla and attempt to attack and board the humanitarian vessels.


Those fears have apparently been realized, with people aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship with hundreds of aid workers and activists aboard, reporting that they have been attacked. At least three passengers have been killed and dozens more wounded. Israeli commandos apparently repelled onto the Mavi Marmara, whose passengers range in age from 88 to a year old and include Christians, Muslims and Jews seeking to end the blockade. Midwest U.S. activists have been unable to reach Chicagoan Fatima Mohammadi, traveling aboard the Mavi Marmara.


Live video from the flotilla shows Israeli naval commando vessels pulling alongside the aid ships, and what sounds like gunfire can be heard in the background. No-one on the aid ships is carrying any kinds of weapons, including for defense against a feared Israeli attack in international waters.


Hundreds of elected officials, former diplomats, aid workers and activists -- including a Nobel laureate and many European legislators -- are with the flotilla, traveling by sea to Gaza to break Israel's blockade of the tiny strip of land. Foreign news correspondents and independent journalists are traveling aboard the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship with hundreds of aid workers and activists aboard which is also running its own press operation reachable at the satellite number +8821636619168. A total of six ships, including two cargo ships and other passenger vehicles, are carrying thousands of tons of humanitarian aid to the beseiged region, which has been under Israeli blockade since 2006.


Israel has marshalled its most lethal military vessels to try to stop the humanitarian marine convoy, and at around 2:20 pm Central Standard Time (US) the first reports of unmanned drone planes buzzing the vessels was received from convoy passengers.


Two boats in the aid flotilla, one currently traveling with the convoy to Gaza and another in port in Cyprus for repairs, are flagged and registered in the United States. The ships are U.S. territory under maritime law, and the U.S. government is required to intervene if this "U.S. property" is attacked or illegally confiscated by Israeli authorities -- a tactic Israel has threatened and deployed in the past. Israel has a long history of attacking ships whose missions are deemed undesirable. In December 2008, it rammed the Dignity, carrying medical and humanitarian aid, doctors, human rights workers and a former U.S. congresswoman, without warning in international waters.


Israel intensified its 2006 blockade after attacking the area in a weeks-long assault that ended in January 2009, killing more than 1,400 and leaving thousands more homeless and reducing huge swaths of housing to rubble. The blockade has created mass unemployment and extreme poverty, leaving four out of five Gazans -- half of whom are children -- dependent on humanitarian aid.


The Freedom Flotilla carries more than 10,000 tons of relief and developmental aid to Gaza, along with roughly 700 participants from more than 30 countries, among them volunteers from South Africa, Algeria, Turkey, Macedonia, Pakistan, Yemin, Kosovo, the UK and US and Kuwait – and an exiled former Archbishop of Jerusalem who currently lives in the Vatican. The cargo includes prefabricated homes and playgrounds, cement and other home-building supplies, medical devices and medications, textiles and food, in defiance of Israel's siege on Gaza, which restricts the entry of all materials, including food and medicine. The flotilla's supplies were gathered by a coalition of international civil society and human rights organizations to be sent directly to the people of Gaza by sea, using only international waters and the coastal waters immediately off of Gaza for passage. The flotilla is expected to arrive in Gaza as early as today.


Participants on board speak languages that include English, Turkish, Kurdish, over ten dialects of Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Portugeuse, French, Malaysian, Indonesian, Norweigen, Swedish, Urdu, Punjabi, Farsi, Hindi, German, Flemish, Greek, Catalon, Russian, Bosnian, Chechen, Macedonian and Albanian. Reporters on board hail from locations that include the United Kingdom, Spain, Malaysia, Indonesia, Venezuela, Kuwait, South Africa, Pakistan, Jordan, the Persian Gulf and across the Arab world.


Protests in support of the aid convoy have been occuring around the world since Thursday, with Chicagoans scheduled to protest again at 4:30 PM on Tuesday, June 1, in front of the Israeli consulate at 111 E. Wacker Dr. in Chicago.


U.S.-based humanitarian projects with news updates on the Gaza aid flotilla:


LIVE video feed: www.livestream.com/ insaniyardim
www.WitnessGaza.com
www.freegaza.org
gazafreedommarch.org
http://fpmdigitalship. blogspot.com/
www.ihh.org.tr
savegaza.eu/eng
www.perdana4peace.org/Default. aspx
www.shiptogaza.gr
shiptogaza.se
www.commondreams.org


Recent news reports on the aid flotilla:
Gaza aid flotilla anticipates high-seas standoff with Israel - LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/ news/nationworld/world/ middleeast/la-fg-gaza- flotilla-20100531,0,7691835. story
Gaza Aid Convoy Showdown Poses Challenge for Israel - Time Magazine: http://www.time.com/ time/world/article/0,8599, 1992205,00.html
Pro-Palestinian aid flotilla sets sail for Gaza - Associated Press: http://www.google.com/ hostednews/ap/article/ ALeqM5ioi_ 0jtO9RjMwPNRoXNCndRPRq3gD9G172 NG0
Gaza Freedom Flotilla Shows Power of Nonviolent Resistance - Huffington Post: http://www. huffingtonpost.com/robert- naiman/gaza-freedom-flotilla- sho_b_594407.html
Rel ief convoy sails from Cyprus for Gaza- Reuters: http://www.iol.co.za/ index.php?set_id=1&click_id= 123&art_id= nw20100530102034310C692180
Convoy of ships resumes journey toward Gaza - CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2010/ WORLD/meast/05/30/gaza. protest/?hpt=T2
Aid ships set out to bust Gaza blockade - AFP: http://www.google.com/ hostednews/afp/article/ ALeqM5gx- Zcxvyt5gEOZXW1NrQEoxEB_pw
Cyprus stops MPs from joining Gaza flotilla - Cyprus Mail: http://www.cyprus-mail. com/cyprus/cyprus-stops-mps- joining-gaza-flotilla/20100529
Gaza-bound aid ships leave Cyprus - Aljazeera.net: http://english.aljazeera.net/ news/middleeast/2010/05/ 201053062124985747.html
Report: Israeli navy prepares to stop Freedom Fleet - Maan News Agency (Palestine): http://www. maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails. aspx?ID=288217
Gaza-bound aid ships leave Cyprus - Aljazeera.net: http://english. aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/ 2010/05/201053062124985 747.html
- end -

Appeals Panel Bars Detainees From Access to U.S. Courts

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.





The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.





But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus hearings, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release. The court reasoned that Bagram was on the sovereign territory of another government and emphasized the “pragmatic obstacles” of giving hearings to detainees “in an active theater of war.”





The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A lower court judge had previously ruled that the three Bagram detainees were entitled to the same rights, although he had found that others captured in Afghanistan and held there were not.





A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.





“The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said. “We have to remember that Obama is not the last president of the United States.”





Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and an influential lawmaker in the long-running debate over detentions, called the ruling a “big win” and praised the administration for appealing the lower court’s ruling.





“Allowing a noncitizen enemy combatant detained in a combat zone access to American courts would have been a change of historic proportions,” he said. “It also would have dealt a severe blow to our war effort.





“There is a reason we have never allowed enemy prisoners detained overseas in an active war zone to sue in federal court for their release. It simply makes no sense and would be the ultimate act of turning the war into a crime.”





It was not entirely clear how the ruling might affect detention policies for terrorism suspects caught outside Afghanistan or Iraq. While the Obama administration has stepped up the use of Predator drone strikes to kill terrorism suspects and has relied on other countries, like Pakistan, to hold and interrogate suspects who are captured alive, it is not known whether the United States has directly captured anyone outside Afghanistan or Iraq recently — and, if so, where it has taken them.





A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, would not comment on the decision.





David Rivkin, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the Special Forces Association urging the court to side with the government, said the ruling would have broad significance by removing doubts over whether the United States could capture and interrogate terrorism suspects without worrying about having to collect, in dangerous situations, evidence that would later stand up in court.





“This is an excellent decision,” said Mr. Rivkin, who was a White House lawyer in the administration of the first President Bush. “It has restored a considerable degree of sanity to what threatened to be a crazy legal regime that would have deprived the United States, for the first time in history, of the opportunity to capture and detain — outside of the United States, in theaters of war — high-value combatants. That has been solved, and it will apply to many other situations in the future.”





The case was brought on behalf of a Tunisian man who says he was captured in Pakistan in 2002, a Yemeni man who says he was captured in Thailand in 2002, and another Yemeni man who says he was captured in 2003 at another location outside Afghanistan that has not been disclosed. (The government has disputed the second Yemeni’s claim.)





The men’s case was originally heard by Judge John D. Bates of the Federal District Court, an appointee of former President George W. Bush. The Bush and Obama administrations had both urged Judge Bates not to extend habeas corpus rights beyond Guantánamo, arguing that courts should not interfere with military operations inside active combat zones.





But in April 2009, Judge Bates ruled that there was no difference between the three men who had filed suit and Guantánamo prisoners. His decision was limited to non-Afghans captured outside Afghanistan — a category that fits only about a dozen of the roughly 800 detainees at Bagram, officials have said.





In urging the appeals court to let Judge Bates’s decision stand, lawyers for the detainees argued that reversing it would mean that the government would be able “to evade judicial review of executive detention decisions by transferring detainees into active combat zones, thereby granting the executive the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.”





But in the appeal panel’s decision reversing Judge Bates, Chief Judge David B. Sentelle said there had been no such gamesmanship in the decision to bring the three detainees to Bagram because it happened years before the Supreme Court’s Guantánamo rulings.





Still, he left the door open to approving habeas corpus rights for prisoners taken to prisons other than Guantánamo in the future, writing, “We need make no determination on the importance of this possibility, given that it remains only a possibility; its resolution can await a case in which the claim is a reality rather than speculation.”





Ms. Foster vowed to keep fighting. But Mr. Rivkin said that the detainees’ chances for overturning the decision were dim because the three appeals judges spanned the ideological spectrum: Chief Judge Sentelle, appointed by President Ronald Reagan; Judge Harry T. Edwards, appointed by President Jimmy Carter; and Judge David S. Tatel, appointed by President Bill Clinton.





It could also be difficult to win a reversal by the Supreme Court, where five of the nine justices supported giving habeas rights to detainees in the Guantánamo case. Among the narrow majority in that case was Justice John Paul Stevens, who is retiring.





The nominee to replace him, Elena Kagan, who as solicitor general signed the government’s briefs in the case, would most likely recuse herself from hearing an appeal of the decision, and a four-four split would allow it to stand.




Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

The sinking of the Cheonan: Another Gulf of Tonkin incident

By Stephen Gowans

While the South Korean government announced on May 20 that it has overwhelming evidence that one of its warships was sunk by a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine, there is, in fact, no direct link between North Korea and the sunken ship. And it seems very unlikely that North Korea had anything to do with it.

That’s not my conclusion. It’s the conclusion of Won See-hoon, director of South Korea’s National Intelligence. Won told a South Korean parliamentary committee in early April, less than two weeks after the South Korean warship, the Cheonan, sank in waters off Baengnyeong Island, that there was no evidence linking North Korea to the Cheonan’s sinking. (1)

South Korea’s Defense Minister Kim Tae-young backed him up, pointing out that the Cheonan’s crew had not detected a torpedo (2), while Lee Ki-sik, head of the marine operations office at the South Korean joint chiefs of staff agreed that “No North Korean warships have been detected…(in) the waters where the accident took place.” (3)

Notice he said “accident.”


Soon after the sinking of the South Korean warship, the Cheonan, Defense Minister Kim Tae-young ruled out a North Korean torpedo attack, noting that a torpedo would have been spotted by radar, and no torpedo had been spotted. Intelligence chief Won See-hoon, said there was no evidence linking North Korea to the Cheonan’s sinking.
Defense Ministry officials added that they had not detected any North Korean submarines in the area at the time of the incident. (4) According to Lee, “We didn’t detect any movement by North Korean submarines near” the area where the Cheonan went down. (5)

When speculation persisted that the Cheonan had been sunk by a North Korean torpedo, the Defense Ministry called another press conference to reiterate “there was no unusual North Korean activities detected at the time of the disaster.” (6)

A ministry spokesman, Won Tae-jae, told reporters that “With regard to this case, no particular activities by North Korean submarines or semi-submarines…have been verified. I am saying again that there were no activities that could be directly linked to” the Cheonan’s sinking. (7)

Rear Admiral Lee, the head of the marine operations office, added that, “We closely watched the movement of the North’s vessels, including submarines and semi-submersibles, at the time of the sinking. But military did not detect any North Korean submarines near the country’s western sea border.” (8)

North Korea has vehemently denied any involvement in the sinking.

So, a North Korean submarine is now said to have fired a torpedo which sank the Cheonan, but in the immediate aftermath of the sinking the South Korean navy detected no North Korean naval vessels, including submarines, in the area. Indeed, immediately following the incident defense minister Lee ruled out a North Korean torpedo attack, noting that a torpedo would have been spotted by radar, and no torpedo had been spotted. (9)

The case gets weaker still.

It’s unlikely that a single torpedo could split a 1,200 ton warship in two. Baek Seung-joo, an analyst with the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis says that “If a single torpedo or floating mine causes a naval patrol vessel to split in half and sink, we will have to rewrite our military doctrine.” (10)

The Cheonan sank in shallow, rapidly running, waters, in which it’s virtually impossible for submarines to operate. “Some people are pointing the finger at North Korea,” notes Song Young-moo, a former South Korean navy chief of staff, “but anyone with knowledge about the waters where the shipwreck occurred would not draw that conclusion so easily.” (11)

Contrary to what looks like an improbable North-Korea-torpedo-hypothesis, the evidence points to the Cheonan splitting in two and sinking because it ran aground upon a reef, a real possibility given the shallow waters in which the warship was operating. According to Go Yeong-jae, the South Korean Coast Guard captain who rescued 56 of the stricken warship’s crew, he “received an order …that a naval patrol vessel had run aground in the waters 1.2 miles to the southwest of Baengnyeong Island, and that we were to move there quickly to rescue them.” (12)

So how is it that what looked like no North Korean involvement in the Cheonan’s sinking, according to the South Korean military in the days immediately following the incident, has now become, one and half months later, an open and shut case of North Korean aggression, according to government-appointed investigators?


South Korean president Lee Myung-bak is a North Korea-phobe who prefers a confrontational stance toward his neighbor to the north to the policy of peaceful coexistence and growing cooperation favored by his recent predecessors. His foreign policy rests on the goal of forcing the collapse of North Korea.
The answer has much to do with the electoral fortunes of South Korea’s ruling Grand National Party, and the party’s need to marshal support for a tougher stance on the North. Lurking in the wings are US arms manufacturers who stand to profit if South Korean president Lee Myung-bak wins public backing for beefed up spending on sonar equipment and warships to deter a North Korean threat – all the more likely with the Cheonan incident chalked up to North Korean aggression.

Lee is a North Korea-phobe who prefers a confrontational stance toward his neighbor to the north to the policy of peaceful coexistence and growing cooperation favored by his recent predecessors (and by Pyongyang, as well. It’s worth mentioning that North Korea supports a policy of peace and cooperation. South Korea, under its hawkish president, does not.) Fabricating a case against the North serves Lee in a number of ways. If voters in the South can be persuaded that the North is indeed a menace – and it looks like this is exactly what is happening – Lee’s hawkish policies will be embraced as the right ones for present circumstances. This will prove immeasurably helpful in upcoming mayoral and gubernatorial elections in June.

What’s more, Lee’s foreign policy rests on the goal of forcing the collapse of North Korea. When he took office in February 2008, he set about reversing a 10-year-old policy of unconditional aid to the North. He has also refused to move ahead on cross-border economic projects. (13) The claim that the sinking of the Cheonan is due to an unprovoked North Korean torpedo attack makes it easier for Lee to drum up support for his confrontational stance.

Finally, the RAND Corporation is urging South Korea to buy sensors to detect North Korean submarines and more warships to intercept North Korean naval vessels. (14) An unequivocal US-lackey – protesters have called the security perimeter around Lee’s office “the U.S. state of South Korea” (15) – Lee would be pleased to hand US corporations fat contracts to furnish the South Korean military with more hardware.

The United States, too, has motivations to fabricate a case against North Korea. One is to justify the continued presence, 65 years after the end of WWII, of US troops on Japanese soil. Many Japanese bristle at what is effectively a permanent occupation of their country by more than a token contingent of US troops. There are 60,000 US soldiers, airmen and sailors in Japan. Washington, and the Japanese government – which, when it isn’t willingly collaborating with its own occupiers, is forced into submission by the considerable leverage Washington exercises — justifies its troop presence through the sheer sophistry of presenting North Korea as an ongoing threat. The claim that North Korea sunk the Cheonan in an unprovoked attack strengthens Washington’s case for occupation. Not surprisingly, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has seized on the Cheonan incident to underline “the importance of the America-Japanese alliance, and the presence of American troops on Japanese soil.” (16)

Given these political realities, it comes as no surprise that from the start members of


In 1964, Washington claimed that three North Vietnamese torpedo boats had launched an unprovoked attacked on the USS Maddox, a US Navy destroyer, in the Gulf of Tonkin. The incident was used by US president Lyndon Johnson to win the Congressional support he needed to step up military intervention in Vietnam. No attack had occurred.
Lee’s party blamed the sinking of the Cheonan on a North Korean torpedo (17), just as members of the Bush administration immediately blamed 9/11 on Saddam Hussein, and then proceeded to look for evidence to substantiate their case, in the hopes of justifying an already planned invasion. (Later, the Bush administration fabricated an intelligence dossier on Iraq’s banned weapons.) In fact, the reason the ministry of defense felt the need to reiterate there was no evidence of a North Korean link was the persistent speculation of GNP politicians that North Korea was the culprit. Lee himself, ever hostile to his northern neighbor, said his “intuition” told him that North Korea was to blame. (18) Today, opposition parties accuse Lee of using “red scare” tactics to garner support as the June 2 elections draw near. (19) And leaders of South Korea’s four main opposition parties, as well as a number of civil groups, have issued a joint statement denouncing the government’s findings as untrustworthy.

No wonder. Lee announced, even before the inquiry rendered its findings, that a task force will be launched to overhaul the national security system and bulk up the military to prepare itself for threats from North Korea. (20) He even prepared a package of sanctions against the North in the event the inquiry confirmed what his intuition told him. (21) There was no chance it wouldn’t.

On August 2, 1964, the United States announced that three North Vietnamese torpedo boats had launched an unprovoked attacked on the USS Maddox, a US Navy destroyer, in the Gulf of Tonkin. The incident handed US president Lyndon Johnson the Congressional support he needed to step up military intervention in Vietnam. In 1971, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon report, revealed that the incident had been faked to provide a pretext for escalated military intervention. There had been no attack. The Cheonan incident has all the markings of another Gulf of Tonkin incident. And as usual, the aggressor is accusing the intended victim of an unprovoked attack to justify a policy of aggression under the pretext of self-defense.

1. Kang Hyun-kyung, “Ruling camp differs over NK involvement in disaster”, The Korea Times, April 7, 2010.
2. Nicole Finnemann, “The sinking of the Cheonan”, Korea Economic Institute, April 1, 2010. http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/kei/issues/2010-04-01/1.html
3. “Military leadership adding to Cheonan chaos with contradictory statements”, The Hankyoreh, March 31, 2010.
4. “Birds or North Korean midget submarine?” The Korea Times, April 16, 2010.
5. Ibid.
6. “Military plays down N.K. foul play”, The Korea Herald, April 2, 2010.
7. Ibid.
8. “No subs near Cheonan: Ministry”, JoongAng Daily, April 2, 2010.
9. Jean H. Lee, “South Korea says mine from the North may have sunk warship”, The Washington Post, March 30, 2010.
10. “What caused the Cheonan to sink?” The Chosun Ilbo, March 29, 2010.
11. Ibid.
12. “Military leadership adding to Cheonan chaos with contradictory statements”, The Hankyoreh, March 31, 2010.
13. Blaine Harden, “Brawl Near Koreas’ Border,” The Washington Post, December 3, 2008.
14. “Kim So-hyun, “A touchstone of Lee’s leadership”, The Korea Herald, May 13, 2010.
15. The New York Times, June 12, 2008.
16. Mark Landler, “Clinton condemns attack on South Korean Ship”, The New York Times, May 21, 2010.
17. Kang Hyun-kyung, “Ruling camp differs over NK involvement in disaster”, The Korea Times, April 7, 2010.
18. “Kim So-hyun, “A touchstone of Lee’s leadership”, Korea Herald, May 13, 2010.
19. Kang Hyun-kyung, “Ruling camp differs over NK involvement in disaster”, The Korea Times, April 7, 2010; Choe Sang-Hun, “South Korean sailors say blast that sank their ship came from outside vessel”, The New York Times, April 8, 2010.
20. “Kim So-hyun, “A touchstone of Lee’s leadership”, The Korea Herald, May 13, 2010.
21. “Seoul prepares sanctions over Cheonan sinking”, The Choson Ilbo, May 13, 2010.

Most of the articles cited here are posted on Tim Beal’s DPRK- North Korea website, http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~caplabtb/dprk/, an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Korea.

Updated May 21, 20110.

Dean Elena Kagan: Harvard's Gitmo Kangaroo Law School -- The School for Torturers

by Francis A. Boyle Ph.D. Not surprisingly, the January 2007 issue of the American Journal of Imperial Law — otherwise known as the self-styled American Journal of International Law but originally founded a century ago and still operated by U. S. War and State Department legal apparatchiks and their law professorial fellow-travelers — published an article by Harvard Law School's recently retired Bemis Professor of International Law Detlev Vagts (who only taught me the required course on Legal Accounting) arguing in favor of the Pentagon's Kangaroo Courts System on Guantanamo despite the fact that they have been soundly condemned by every human rights organization and every human rights official and leader in the entire world as well as by the United States Supreme Court itself in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006). I am not going to bother to recite here all the grievous deficiencies of the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts under International Law and U.S. Constitutional Law. But suffice it to say that the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts constitute war crimes under the Laws of War, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and even the U. S. Army's own Field Manual 27-10, The Law of Land Warfare (1956). Field Manual 27-10 was drafted for the Pentagon by my Laws of War teacher Richard R. Baxter, who was generally recognized as the world's leading expert on that subject. That is precisely why I voluntarily chose to study International Law with him and his long-time collaborator Louis B. Sohn, and not with the bean-counter Vagts. For the entire post-World War II generation of international law students at Harvard Law School, Louis Sohn shall always be our real Bemis Professor of International Law and never the False Pretender to that Throne known as Detlev Vagts. Since those student days I have personally appeared pro bono publico in five U.S. military courts-martial proceedings involving warfare that were organized in accordance with the Congress's Uniform Code of Military Justice (U.C.M.J.) — which still does not apply to the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts despite the ruling by the U. S. Supreme Court in Hamdan that the U.C.M.J. should be applied in Guantanamo — on behalf of five U. S. military personnel who each acted as matters of courage, integrity, principle, conscience and at great risk to their own freedom: 1. U. S. Marine Corporal Jeff Paterson, the first U.S. military resister to President Bush Sr.'s genocidal war against Iraq; 2. Army Captain Doctor Yolanda Huet-Vaughn, the highest ranking U. S. commissioned officer to be court-martialed for refusing to participate in President Bush Sr.'s genocidal war against Iraq; 3. Captain Lawrence Rockwood, who was court-martialed by the U. S. Army for trying to stop torture in Haiti after the Clinton administration had illegally invaded that country in 1994; 4. Army Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, the first U. S. military resister to be court-martialed for refusing to participate in President Bush Jr.'s war of aggression against Iraq; and 5. Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, the first U. S. commissioned officer to be court-martialed for his refusal to participate in President Bush Jr.'s war of aggression against Iraq. As I can attest from my direct personal involvement, each and every one of these five courts-martial under the U.C.M.J. were Stalinist show-trials produced and directed by the Pentagon that predictably and readily degenerated into travesties of justice. These five U.C.M.J. courts-martial involving U.S. warfare each proved correct the old adage attributed to Groucho Marx that military justice is to justice as military music is to music. By comparison, the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts will not even be run in accordance with the U.C.M.J. despite the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan that they should be. The Marx Brothers are running the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts. Whenever they are up and fully operating the Gitmo Courts will constitute Stalinist Show Trials as well as Kangaroo Courts, and their preliminary proceedings have already proven them to be Travesties of Justice. Even worse yet, fully-functioning Stalinist Gitmo Kangaroo Courts will quickly become conveyor-belts of death for alleged and already tortured terrorist suspects along the lines of the Texas execution chamber operated by George Bush Jr. when he was the "governor" of that state and tortured to death 152 victims by means of lethal injection. Gitmo and/or Gitmo-North in Illinois will become Americas first-ever Nazi-style death camp. But today under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, executing persons detained as a result of armed conflict without a fair trial before a regularly constituted court constitutes a grave war crime. To be sure, under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution Harvard Law Professor Vagts has the freedom to advocate war crimes so long as he does not participate in their commission, or incite them, or aid and abet them. But precisely where is that line to be drawn for law professors? In this regard, the Harvard Law School Faculty currently has at least five professors who have advocated torture and war crimes: 1. Vagts himself, who supported abusing the then recently captured President of Iraq Saddam Hussein despite his being publicly acknowledged to be a Prisoner of War by the Bush Jr. administration itself and thus absolutely protected by the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Convention against Torture; 2. the infamous Alan Dershowitz, a self-incriminated war criminal in his own right. Dersh publicly acknowledged being a member of a Mossad Committee for approving the murder and assassination of Palestinians, which violates the Geneva Conventions and is thus a grave war crime; 3. the Neo-Con Con Law non-entity known as Richard Parker; 4. Another one of my teachers, Waco Phil Heymann. Previously, Waco Phil had been Deputy to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, the Butcher of Waco. Reno ordered the Waco Massacre, while Heymann ordered its cover-up and thus earned his well-deserved sobriquet of Waco Phil as an Accessory After The Fact. All those incinerated women and children! 5. The war criminal Jack Goldsmith who while working as a lawyer for the Bush Jr. administration at both the Pentagon and later its Department of In-Justice did much of the legal spade-work designing, justifying and approving the hideous human rights atrocities that the Bush Jr. administration inflicted on everyone after 9/11. Goldsmith and his co-felon accomplice and co-conspirator from the Bush Jr. administration Professor John Yoo — now desecrating Berkeley's Law School where my friend and colleague the late, great Dean Frank Newman had taught Human Rights and International Law — are functionally analogous to Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt, who justified every hideous atrocity that Hitler and the Nazis inflicted on anyone, including the Jews. Despite my best efforts to prevent it, the Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans hired the war criminal Goldsmith right out of the Bush Jr. administration knowing full well that he was up to his eyeballs in the Gitmo Kangaroo Courts, torture, war crimes, enforced disappearances, murder, kidnapping, and crimes against humanity, at a minimum. And when Goldsmith's proverbial "smoking-gun" Department of In-Justice Memorandum was published by the Washington Post, then Harvard Law School's Dean Elena Kagan contemptuously boasted in response about how "proud" she was to have hired this notorious war criminal. Previously Kagan had also publicly bragged that the future of International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School would be in the "good hands" of their resident war criminal Goldsmith. How perversely and tragically true! The Neo-Conservative Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans deliberately hired this Neo-Nazi legal architect of the Bush Jr. administration's bogus and nefarious "war against terrorism" because they fully support it together with all its essential accouterments of torture, kangaroo courts, war crimes, murder, kidnapping, enforced disappearances, crimes against humanity, and Nuremburg crimes against peace. By contrast, after the terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols in alleged revenge for the Waco Massacre and Cover-up by Janet Reno and Waco Phil Heymann, to the best of my recollection I do not remember that the Neo-Conservative Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans advocated kangaroo courts, torture, war crimes, and racist profiling for America's population of White Judeo-Christian Males. Yet after 9/11 the fundamentally White Racist Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans have no problem with inflicting torture, kangaroo courts, war crimes, and racist profiling upon Muslims/Arabs/Asians of Color, which is exactly why they hired the war criminal Goldsmith to teach such criminal practices to their own law students and thus someday turn them into racist U. S. governmental war criminals in their own right. This is because for the most part the Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans have always been viscerally bigoted and racist against Muslims/Arabs/Asians and other People of Color since at least when I first matriculated there in September of 1971. The Harvard Law School (H.L.S.) Faculty and Deans are no longer fit to educate Lawyers, Members of the Bar, and Officers of the Court. They are a sick joke and a demented fraud. Groucho Marx would have had a field day with them: Harvard is to Law School as Torture is to Law. The Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans torture the Law. Do not send your children or students to Harvard Law School where they will grow up to become racist war criminals! Harvard Law School is a Neo-Con cesspool. As for Harvard Laws Neo-Con Dean Kagan, Harvard Law Graduate President Barack Obama appointed her Solicitor General in his Department of Justice as the third highest ranking official in that department and thus as the proverbial oeTenth Justice for the 9-Justice U.S. Supreme Court. In this capacity Kagan has quarter-backed, supervised, and defended in all U.S. federal courts the Obama administrations continuation of the Bush Jr. administrations hideous atrocities perpetrated against human rights, international law, civil rights, civil liberties, the U.S. Constitution, and Americas Bill of Rights. As payback for her yeoman Neo-Con efforts, Kagan is now reportedly at the top of a very short list for President Obama to nominate to the U.S. Supreme Court upon the expected retirement of Mr. Justice Stevens, the reputed leader of the Courts oeliberal wing. Of course Stevens widespread denomination as a oeliberal just proves how far to the reactionary right the Supreme Court has moved since Stevens was recommended for the Supremes to President Gerald Ford by the arch-reactionary jurist Edward Hirsh Levi, then U.S. Attorney General and previously Dean of the arch-reactionary University of Chicago Law School where Antonin Scalia, Obama, Kagan, and her pet war criminal Goldsmith would all teach. As President of the entire arch-reactionary University of Chicago itself, Levi drove out about 30% of my undergraduate class that in 1968 had unwittingly entered this Birthplace and Warren for the Neo-Con Movement that was founded there by Chicago Professor Leo Strauss, a protégé of Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt. Americas Neo-Cons are Neo-Nazis. In an interview she recently gave to National Public Radio, Obamas Neo-Con Solicitor General Kagan went out of her way to proclaim: oeI love the Federalist Society! (Emphasis in the original.) The Federalist Society is a gang of lawyers, law professors, and judges who for the most part are right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, elitist, war-mongering, and totalitarian. For example, almost all of the Bush Jr. administration lawyers responsible for its war criminal torture scandal were and still are members of the Federalist Society. Likewise, five Justices on the current U.S. Supreme Court were/are members of the Federalist Society: Harvard Law Graduate Roberts; Harvard Law Graduate Scalia; Harvard Law Graduate Kennedy; Yale Law Graduate Thomas; and Yale Law Graduate Alito. Thats what an oeelite legal education will do for you. In any event, H.L.S. President Obamas elevation of the H.L.S. Neo-Con Kagan to the Supremes would cement the Federalist Societys Neo-Con stranglehold over the U.S. Supreme Court for the next generation. As for another publicly touted Supremes candidate, the Neo-Con Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School, who is currently working at the White House as Obamas Disinformation and Infiltration Czar, would be just as lethal as Kagan to the American Constitution and Republic if sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court. Time for the Ordinary People of America to get organized against these Neo-Con legal elites!

Kagan's Troubling Record

By Marjorie Cohn

After President Obama nominated Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, he made a statement that implied she would follow in the footsteps of Justice Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights giant and first black Supreme Court justice. Kagan served as a law clerk for Marshall shortly after she graduated from Harvard Law School. Specifically, Obama said that Marshall's "understanding of law, not as an intellectual exercise or words on a page, but as it affects the lives of ordinary people, has animated every step of Elena's career." Unfortunately, history does not support Obama's optimism that Kagan is a disciple of Marshall.

Kagan demonstrated while working as his law clerk that she disagreed with Marshall's jurisprudence. In 1988, the Supreme Court decided Kadrmas v. Dickinson Public Schools, a case about whether a school district could make a poor family pay for busing their child to the closest school, which was 16 miles away. The 5-justice majority held that the busing fee did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. They rejected the proposition that education is a fundamental right which would subject the statute on which the school district relied to 'strict scrutiny.' The Court also declined to review the statute with 'heightened scrutiny' even though it had different effects on the wealthy and the poor. Instead, the majority found a 'rational basis' for the statute, that is, allocating limited governmental resources.

Marshall asked clerk Kagan to craft the first draft of a strong dissent in that case. But Kagan had a difficult time complying with Marshall's wishes and he returned several drafts to her for, in Kagan's words, "failing to express in a properly pungent tone - his understanding of the case." Ultimately, Marshall's dissent said, "The intent of our Fourteenth Amendment was to abolish caste legislation." He relied on Plyler v. Doe, in which the Court had upheld the right of the children of undocumented immigrants to receive free public education in the State of Texas. "As I have stated on prior occasions," Marshall wrote, "proper analysis of equal protection claims depends less on choosing the formal label under which the claim should be reviewed than upon identifying and carefully analyzing the real interests at stake." Kagan later complained that Marshall "allowed his personal experiences, and the knowledge of suffering and deprivation gained from those experiences to guide him."

Kagan evidently rejects these humanistic factors that guided Marshall's decision making and would follow a more traditional approach. This is a matter of concern for progressives, who worry about how the Supreme Court will deal with issues like a woman's right to choose, same sex marriage, "don't ask, don't tell," and the right of corporations to donate money to political campaigns without restraint. While Kagan has remained silent on many controversial issues, she has announced her belief that the Constitution provides no right to same-sex marriage. If the issue of marriage equality comes before the Court, Justice Kagan would almost certainly rule that denying same sex couples the right to marry does not violate equal protection.

There are other indications that should give progressives pause as well. During her solicitor general confirmation hearing, Kagan said, "The Constitution generally imposes limitations on government rather than establishes affirmative rights and thus has what might be thought of as a libertarian slant. I fully accept this traditional understanding..." But the Constitution is full of affirmative rights - the right to a jury trial, the right to counsel, the right to assemble and petition the government, etc. Does Kagan not understand that decisions made by the Supreme Court give life and meaning to these fundamental rights? Is she willing to interpret those provisions in a way that will preserve individual liberties?

While Kagan generally thinks the Constitution serves to limit governmental power, she nevertheless buys into the Republican theory that the Executive Branch should be enhanced. In one of her few law review articles, Kagan advocated expansive executive power consistent with a formulation from the Reagan administration. This is reminiscent of the 'unitary executive' theory that George W. Bush used to justify grabbing unbridled executive power in his 'war on terror.'

As solicitor general, Kagan asserted in a brief that the 'state secrets privilege' is grounded in the Constitution. The Obama White House, like the Bush administration, is asserting this privilege to prevent people who the CIA sent to other countries to be tortured and people challenging Bush's secret spying program from litigating their cases in court.

During her forthcoming confirmation hearing, senators should press Kagan to define her judicial philosophy. Several of the radical right-wingers on the Court define themselves as 'originalists,' claiming to interpret the Constitution consistent with the intent of the founding fathers.

I would like to hear Kagan say that her judicial philosophy is that human rights are more sacred than property interests. I would hope she would declare that her judicial philosophy favors the right to self-determination - of other countries to control their destinies, of women to control their bodies, and of all people to choose whom they wish to marry.

Kagan is likely to be circumspect about her views. She will frequently decline to answer, protesting that issues may come before the Court. We should be wary about how Justice Kagan will rule when they do.

ICE's Misplaced Priorities: The Numbers Speak for Themselves and the Stories Cry out for Justice

By Azadeh Shahshahani

This past Wednesday, Jessica Colotl was released from the Etowah Detention Center in Alabama and allowed to reunite with her family back in Cobb County, Georgia. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has granted Jessica deferred action on her deportation case.

Jessica is a 21-year-old smart hard working student at Kennesaw State who has worked nights in order to pay her tuition. She hopes to become a lawyer after graduating in the fall.

So why was Jessica at a detention center all the way in Alabama in the first place? A few weeks ago, as Jessica pulled into her university parking lot, a campus police officer pulled her over, telling her that she was "impeding the flow of traffic." She could not produce a driver's license due to her undocumented status and eventually ended up at the Cobb County jail. This is when 287(g) kicked in. Per an agreement between Cobb County and ICE, some Cobb sheriff deputies have been granted certain enforcement powers of an immigration officer. Jessica was placed in deportation proceedings. Before long, she found herself behind bars at the Alabama detention center, awaiting deportation to Mexico, a country she has not lived in for over 10 years and which she hardly remembers. Jessica was only released after strongly voiced and sustained demands by the community, including her sorority sisters, and after the ACLU contacted the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) headquarters on her behalf.

Is it unusual for ICE and the localities to waste limited resources meant for targeting perpetrators of the most dangerous crimes by going after individuals with great potential like Jessica?

Unfortunately not. Jessica is just one of the untold numbers of hard-working people who get caught up in the local immigration enforcement programs, including 287(g). In a sense, Jessica's case is very unusual, as she actually won respite (albeit temporary) from deportation. Most people in her situation, faced with prolonged detention at a jail, oftentimes isolated and hours away from their families, opt to give up their immigration case and are subsequently deported.

An ACLU of Georgia report released in October 2009 recounted stories of 10 community members in Cobb and their families impacted by 287(g). As documented by the report entitled, "Terror and Isolation in Cobb: How Unchecked Police Power under 287(g) had Torn Families Apart and Threatened Public Safety," mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters are torn apart from their families every day in Cobb County, many with little recourse.

In one case, a husband and father was pulled over for "an incomplete stop" on the way to the bank. Angel subsequently ended up at the Stewart Detention Center. He left behind his wife Sharon, an American citizen who is physically disabled and who "depended on [her] husband for everything." Sharon and Angel had to "celebrate" their 7-year wedding anniversary apart; their only means of contact was a phone call by Angel from the Stewart Detention Center.

In Cobb, immigrants disappear into detention for violations such as a broken tail light or tinted windows on their car. In 2008, Cobb County turned over 3,180 detainees to ICE for deportation. Of those, 2,180, about 69 percent, were arrested for traffic violations.

But you don't only have to rely on the ACLU of Georgia report to believe there is something wrong with this picture. A Government Accountability Office investigation of 287(g) released in January 2009 found that ICE was not exercising proper oversight over local or state agencies. And a report released in March 2010 by the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) documents significant lapses in 287(g) priorities and oversight. ICE claims that 287(g)'s mandate is to focus on non-citizens who pose a threat to national security or are dangers to the community. But less than 10 percent of those sampled by OIG were ICE "Level 1" offenders. Almost half had no involvement in crimes of violence, drug offenses, or property crimes.

This trend of misplaced priorities is shared by other ICE local enforcement programs.

Last week, a piece appeared by John Morton, the head of ICE, in the Atlanta Journal Constitution as well as other papers around the country defending the "Secure Communities" initiative through which arrestees' fingerprints are checked against DHS databases with information about civil immigration history, rather than just against FBI criminal databases. Morton claims that his agency is prioritizing perpetrators of dangerous crimes for deportation.

Morton's strongest rebuttal is his own numbers. According to the data ICE released in November 2009, out of 113,000 non-citizen individuals identified in the program during its first year of operation, more than 101,000, or close to 90 percent, were never charged with or convicted of dangerous crimes. "Secure Communities" is in fact designed to sweep up any foreign-born individual who is arrested by local law enforcement for any reason whatsoever, including traffic infractions, even if that person is never charged with, or convicted of, any crime at all. An alarming 5 percent of the total number of individuals identified were actually U.S. citizens, testifying to the inaccuracy and incompleteness of the federal agency databases against which fingerprints are matched.

Meanwhile, precious resources are diverted from identifying and removing perpetrators of the most dangerous crimes.

Contrary to Morton's assertion, the program is also profoundly susceptible to abuse and racial profiling, similar to the misguided 287(g) program. Any police officer or sheriff's deputy can arrest individuals simply to bring them to the attention of immigration officials. Without federal standards or oversight, this creates an unacceptably high risk of unlawful racial profiling.

The risk of racial profiling through local enforcement programs is compounded in Georgia, as there is no state legislation banning racial profiling and mandating accountability and transparency for law enforcement.

It is past time for ICE to match their rhetoric regarding priorities with action and put an immediate end to the unaccountable outsourcing of immigration enforcement functions. If the numbers weren't enough proof, Jessica's story and other accounts cry out for justice.