500lbguerilla
07-16-2006, 11:48 PM
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_22471.shtml
Look who's been kidnapped!
By Arik Diamant
Jul 8, 2006, 13:21
Hundreds of Palestinian 'suspects' have been kidnapped from their homes and will never stand trial
It's the wee hours of the morning, still dark outside. A guerrilla force comes out of nowhere to kidnap a soldier. After hours of careful movement, the force reaches its target, and the ambush is on! In seconds, the soldier finds himself looking down the barrel of a rifle.
A smash in the face with the butt of the gun and the soldier falls to the ground, bleeding. The kidnappers pick him up, quickly tie his hands and blindfold him, and disappear into the night.
This might be the end of the kidnapping, but the nightmare has just begun. The soldier's mother collapses, his father prays. His commanding officers promise to do everything they can to get him back, his comrades swear revenge. An entire nation is up-in-arms, writing in pain and worry.
Nobody knows how the soldier is: Is he hurt? Do his captors give him even a minimum of human decency, or are they torturing him to death by trampling his honor? The worst sort of suffering is not knowing. Will he come home? And if so, when? And in what condition? Can anyone remain apathetic in the light of such drama?
Israeli terror
This description, you'll be surprised to know, has nothing to do with the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. It is the story of an arrest I carried out as an IDF soldier, in the Nablus casbah, about 10 years ago. The "soldier" was a 17-year-old boy, and we kidnapped him because he knew "someone" who had done "something."
We brought him tied up, with a burlap sac over his head, to a Shin Bet interrogation center known as "Scream Hill" (at the time we thought it was funny). There, the prisoner was beaten, violently shaken and sleep deprived for weeks or months. Who knows.
No one wrote about it in the paper. European diplomats were not called to help him. After all, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the kidnapping of this Palestinian kid. Over the 40 years of occupation we have kidnapped thousands of people, exactly like Gilad Shalit was captured: Threatened by a gun, beaten mercilessly, with no judge or jury, or witnesses, and without providing the family with any information about the captive.
When the Palestinians do this, we call it "terror." When we do it, we work overtime to whitewash the atrocity.
Suspects?
Some people will say: The IDF doesn't "just" kidnap. These people are "suspects." There is no more perverse lie than this. In all the years I served, I reached one simple conclusion: What makes a "suspect"? Who, exactly suspects him, and of what?
Who has the right to sentence a 17-year-old to kidnapping, torture and possible death? A 26-year-old Shin Bet interrogator? A 46-year-old one? Do these people have any higher education, apart from the ability to interrogate? What are his considerations? If all these "suspects" are so guilty, why not bring them to trial?
Anyone who believes that despite the lack of transparency, the IDF and Shin Bet to their best to minimize violations of human rights is naïve, if not brainwashed. One need only read the testimonies of soldiers who have carried out administrative detentions to be convinced of the depth of the immorality of our actions in the territories.
To this very day, there are hundreds of prisoners rotting in Shin Bet prisons and dungeons, people who have never been –and never will be – tried. And Israelis are silently resolved to this phenomenon.
Israeli responsibility
The day Gilad Shalit was kidnapped I rode in a taxi. The driver told me we must go into Gaza, start shooting people one-by-one, until someone breaks and returns the hostage. It isn't clear that such an operation would bring Gilad back alive.
Instead of getting dragged into terrorist responses, as Palestinian society has done, we should release some of the soldiers and civilians we have kidnapped. This is appropriate, right, and could bring about an air of reconciliation in the territories.
Hell, if this is what will bring Gilad home safe-and-sound, we have a responsibility to him to do it.
Arik Diamant is an IDF reservist and the head of the Courage to Refuse organization.
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_22471.shtml
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++
In war, semantics is everything
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/in-war-semantics-is-everything/2006/07/15/1152637913747.html
July 16, 2006
In 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, was on his way to work in Prague when his car was attacked by two Czech resistance fighters. Heydrich was mortally wounded and died in hospital.
We designate the assassins "resistance fighters" retrospectively. To the Germans, they were terrorists. When they struck, they were not in uniform and they had been trained for their murderous task in Britain and secretly returned to Czechoslovakia. They were, by anyone's definition, terrorists. If German might had prevailed in Europe, that is how they would have gone down in history.
The Germans, determined to protect the lives of any of their citizens, "waded through blood", in Hitler's words, to exact revenge.
They chose the town of Lidice to demonstrate their rage and their reach. When the avenging Germans had finished, they left behind a pile of rubble and 1300 corpses - because one German had been murdered. Or was it murder?
Were the assassins freedom fighters or terrorists? Was Heydrich a civilian government official or a soldier? Only the victors assign the tags. The side that eventually won declared the punishment of Lidice to be an atrocity and a war crime and there was a sort of consensus that collective punishment of the innocent, either as revenge or to discourage others, is a morally unacceptable technique for waging war.
Why did the Germans destroy Lidice and its inhabitants? Probably because they could. War makes us angry and anger sends us morally blind and we soon succumb to the argument that for every one of us we will kill 10 or 100,000 of them. We will lay waste their country because they are terrorists and we are the innocents.
Such self-indulgence is only available to the overwhelmingly powerful. There was no counterforce in Czechoslovakia to stop the mighty German army doing what it wanted. They were able to give themselves permission to behave disgracefully and they did.
By the logic of disproportionate revenge for a terrorist outrage, Australia should have destroyed the water systems and power lines of Indonesia from one end of the country to the other as retribution for the killing of 88 Australians in Bali in 2002. The murderers may call themselves holy warriors, but we know that they are terrorists.
There was always some doubt about the intention or ability of the Indonesian judicial system to deal properly with the killers and we now know that our scepticism was justified. So why are we not bombing their airports and blockading their ports? Why are we not blowing up their bridges and attacking their cities? Why do we not assassinate their politicians?
The US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, says that a nation has every right to defend its citizens. And here we get into the semantics of war and how we fix a perspective on events by the words we choose to use. If we say soldiers are "kidnapped", we create one impression. If we say they are "taken prisoner", we legitimise the same act. If we kill a man, his wife and his five children and call them "terrorists", we are defending our citizens. Labels, in war, are everything.
But what can we do? From time immemorial, the one with the biggest guns gets to write the moral rules. Any sort of universal moral imperative is for decent people and weaklings.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
And more on the current mindless violence...
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Americans Rescued from Lebanon Will Have to Pay to Be Repatriated :.
Let me get this straight... U.S. taxpayers give Israel billions of dollars per year. Without any warning, Israel, using U.S. made weapons, destroys Lebanon, striking civilian infrastructure at will, closing all means of escape and stranding tens of thousands of Americans in a swirling sh*tstorm. And what is the U.S. State Department's response to the stranded people?
You better be sitting down for this one:
The State Department added that the government would not provide free transportation but could provide repatriation loans "to those in financial need."
http://cryptogon.com/2006_07_09_blogarchive.html#115301329289729636
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Wildly disproportionate attack on Lebanon seems like pretext to confront Iran, says Linda McQuaig
Jul. 16, 2006. 01:00 AM
As Israeli firepower rained down on Lebanon last week, pundits here in the West wasted no time pinning the blame on — Iran.
"Iran and its radical allies are pushing toward war," wrote Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar%2FLayout%2FArticle_ Type1&c=Article&cid=1152913812442
Look who's been kidnapped!
By Arik Diamant
Jul 8, 2006, 13:21
Hundreds of Palestinian 'suspects' have been kidnapped from their homes and will never stand trial
It's the wee hours of the morning, still dark outside. A guerrilla force comes out of nowhere to kidnap a soldier. After hours of careful movement, the force reaches its target, and the ambush is on! In seconds, the soldier finds himself looking down the barrel of a rifle.
A smash in the face with the butt of the gun and the soldier falls to the ground, bleeding. The kidnappers pick him up, quickly tie his hands and blindfold him, and disappear into the night.
This might be the end of the kidnapping, but the nightmare has just begun. The soldier's mother collapses, his father prays. His commanding officers promise to do everything they can to get him back, his comrades swear revenge. An entire nation is up-in-arms, writing in pain and worry.
Nobody knows how the soldier is: Is he hurt? Do his captors give him even a minimum of human decency, or are they torturing him to death by trampling his honor? The worst sort of suffering is not knowing. Will he come home? And if so, when? And in what condition? Can anyone remain apathetic in the light of such drama?
Israeli terror
This description, you'll be surprised to know, has nothing to do with the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. It is the story of an arrest I carried out as an IDF soldier, in the Nablus casbah, about 10 years ago. The "soldier" was a 17-year-old boy, and we kidnapped him because he knew "someone" who had done "something."
We brought him tied up, with a burlap sac over his head, to a Shin Bet interrogation center known as "Scream Hill" (at the time we thought it was funny). There, the prisoner was beaten, violently shaken and sleep deprived for weeks or months. Who knows.
No one wrote about it in the paper. European diplomats were not called to help him. After all, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the kidnapping of this Palestinian kid. Over the 40 years of occupation we have kidnapped thousands of people, exactly like Gilad Shalit was captured: Threatened by a gun, beaten mercilessly, with no judge or jury, or witnesses, and without providing the family with any information about the captive.
When the Palestinians do this, we call it "terror." When we do it, we work overtime to whitewash the atrocity.
Suspects?
Some people will say: The IDF doesn't "just" kidnap. These people are "suspects." There is no more perverse lie than this. In all the years I served, I reached one simple conclusion: What makes a "suspect"? Who, exactly suspects him, and of what?
Who has the right to sentence a 17-year-old to kidnapping, torture and possible death? A 26-year-old Shin Bet interrogator? A 46-year-old one? Do these people have any higher education, apart from the ability to interrogate? What are his considerations? If all these "suspects" are so guilty, why not bring them to trial?
Anyone who believes that despite the lack of transparency, the IDF and Shin Bet to their best to minimize violations of human rights is naïve, if not brainwashed. One need only read the testimonies of soldiers who have carried out administrative detentions to be convinced of the depth of the immorality of our actions in the territories.
To this very day, there are hundreds of prisoners rotting in Shin Bet prisons and dungeons, people who have never been –and never will be – tried. And Israelis are silently resolved to this phenomenon.
Israeli responsibility
The day Gilad Shalit was kidnapped I rode in a taxi. The driver told me we must go into Gaza, start shooting people one-by-one, until someone breaks and returns the hostage. It isn't clear that such an operation would bring Gilad back alive.
Instead of getting dragged into terrorist responses, as Palestinian society has done, we should release some of the soldiers and civilians we have kidnapped. This is appropriate, right, and could bring about an air of reconciliation in the territories.
Hell, if this is what will bring Gilad home safe-and-sound, we have a responsibility to him to do it.
Arik Diamant is an IDF reservist and the head of the Courage to Refuse organization.
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_22471.shtml
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ +++
In war, semantics is everything
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/in-war-semantics-is-everything/2006/07/15/1152637913747.html
July 16, 2006
In 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, was on his way to work in Prague when his car was attacked by two Czech resistance fighters. Heydrich was mortally wounded and died in hospital.
We designate the assassins "resistance fighters" retrospectively. To the Germans, they were terrorists. When they struck, they were not in uniform and they had been trained for their murderous task in Britain and secretly returned to Czechoslovakia. They were, by anyone's definition, terrorists. If German might had prevailed in Europe, that is how they would have gone down in history.
The Germans, determined to protect the lives of any of their citizens, "waded through blood", in Hitler's words, to exact revenge.
They chose the town of Lidice to demonstrate their rage and their reach. When the avenging Germans had finished, they left behind a pile of rubble and 1300 corpses - because one German had been murdered. Or was it murder?
Were the assassins freedom fighters or terrorists? Was Heydrich a civilian government official or a soldier? Only the victors assign the tags. The side that eventually won declared the punishment of Lidice to be an atrocity and a war crime and there was a sort of consensus that collective punishment of the innocent, either as revenge or to discourage others, is a morally unacceptable technique for waging war.
Why did the Germans destroy Lidice and its inhabitants? Probably because they could. War makes us angry and anger sends us morally blind and we soon succumb to the argument that for every one of us we will kill 10 or 100,000 of them. We will lay waste their country because they are terrorists and we are the innocents.
Such self-indulgence is only available to the overwhelmingly powerful. There was no counterforce in Czechoslovakia to stop the mighty German army doing what it wanted. They were able to give themselves permission to behave disgracefully and they did.
By the logic of disproportionate revenge for a terrorist outrage, Australia should have destroyed the water systems and power lines of Indonesia from one end of the country to the other as retribution for the killing of 88 Australians in Bali in 2002. The murderers may call themselves holy warriors, but we know that they are terrorists.
There was always some doubt about the intention or ability of the Indonesian judicial system to deal properly with the killers and we now know that our scepticism was justified. So why are we not bombing their airports and blockading their ports? Why are we not blowing up their bridges and attacking their cities? Why do we not assassinate their politicians?
The US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, says that a nation has every right to defend its citizens. And here we get into the semantics of war and how we fix a perspective on events by the words we choose to use. If we say soldiers are "kidnapped", we create one impression. If we say they are "taken prisoner", we legitimise the same act. If we kill a man, his wife and his five children and call them "terrorists", we are defending our citizens. Labels, in war, are everything.
But what can we do? From time immemorial, the one with the biggest guns gets to write the moral rules. Any sort of universal moral imperative is for decent people and weaklings.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
And more on the current mindless violence...
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Americans Rescued from Lebanon Will Have to Pay to Be Repatriated :.
Let me get this straight... U.S. taxpayers give Israel billions of dollars per year. Without any warning, Israel, using U.S. made weapons, destroys Lebanon, striking civilian infrastructure at will, closing all means of escape and stranding tens of thousands of Americans in a swirling sh*tstorm. And what is the U.S. State Department's response to the stranded people?
You better be sitting down for this one:
The State Department added that the government would not provide free transportation but could provide repatriation loans "to those in financial need."
http://cryptogon.com/2006_07_09_blogarchive.html#115301329289729636
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Wildly disproportionate attack on Lebanon seems like pretext to confront Iran, says Linda McQuaig
Jul. 16, 2006. 01:00 AM
As Israeli firepower rained down on Lebanon last week, pundits here in the West wasted no time pinning the blame on — Iran.
"Iran and its radical allies are pushing toward war," wrote Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar%2FLayout%2FArticle_ Type1&c=Article&cid=1152913812442