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vrijdag 1 februari 2019

US Interrogators in Yemen


US Interrogators Are Working in 

UAE Prisons in Yemen


January 31, 2019 at 9:58 am

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(MEMO) — US interrogators are present in UAE prisons in Yemen, the Daily Beast has revealed today, providing shocking evidence that the American military is a witness to the torture of Yemenis.
In a series of interviews, two former detainees have testified to being interrogated by men with American accents, who looked on as they were beaten and electrocuted.
“They would strip me naked, they would beat me very harshly and slowly you start to understand the dynamics in the room. These are the two people, one of them is overseeing the whole interrogation and the other is doing the questioning and ordering the torture,” a Yemeni man identified only as Salvatore said, suggesting that the US was more than an unwilling observer.
In December, the Pentagon formally acknowledged for the first time that US military personnel operate in the Yemen prisons: “US forces do not conduct detention operations in Yemen; rather, US forces conduct intelligence interrogations of detainees held in partner custody,” the Pentagon reported.
is not only a witness but a partner to the torture of detainees. Both men say they saw Americans in military uniforms, complete with American flag insignia, and that a larger US presence was witnessed in a prison in Aden, where they were electrocuted, beaten and sexually threatened, and where others have been raped.
Independently, the two former prisoners and another Yemeni attorney also described a dog inside the Coalition Base which Emirati guards would use to threaten detainees. The dog, said to have a blonde coat, was nicknamed Shakira.
The CIA and the Emirati embassy in Washington refused to comment on the allegations; the US has previously said it has found no evidence that any US allies have abused detainees in Yemen.
It has maintained this stance despite Amnesty International calling for the UAE to be investigated for war crimes, due to the extent of torture taking place in secret prisons around Yemen. A report by the Associated Press last year also found that hundreds of prisoners had been sexually abused, with detainees detailing their experiences in drawings; one showed a man hanging naked from chains while he is being electrocuted, another, an inmate on the floor surrounded by snarling dogs as several people kick him, as well as several graphic depictions of anal rape.
“With each brave and credible account of appalling mistreatment in these jails, the Department of Defence’s see-no-evil denial becomes harder to credit. How much more evidence does the Pentagon need that Americans are complicit in the UAE’s brutal torture regime?” Reprieve Staff Attorney Jennifer Gibson said in a statement.
“These brave Yemenis have come forward at huge personal risk. Their stories should shock Americans who thought we had closed the book on torture after the horrors of the waterboarding era.”
A Saudi-led coalition, including the UAE, launched a campaign into Yemen in 2015 after Houthi rebels overran much of the country and took over the capital, Sanaa. With US support, the coalition launched a devastating air campaign aimed at rolling back Houthi gains.
The violence has devastated Yemen’s infrastructure, including its health and sanitation systems. Fighting has killed thousands of civilians, bringing some 85,000 children to the brink of starvation, prompting the UN to describe the situation as one of the worst humanitarian disasters of modern times.
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US Senate Wants War


Senate Vote Opposes Ending US Wars in Syria and Afghanistan

February 1, 2019 at 8:02 am

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(ANTIWAR.COM) — In a surprising vote Thursday, the Senate voted 68-23 to pass a resolution from Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) expressing opposition to President Trump’s plan to withdraw US troops from Syria, and expressing opposition to any theoretical pullout from Afghanistan that might result from a negotiated deal to end that war.
The non-binding resolution was passed with overwhelming support from the Republican majority, setting them squarely against parts of President Trump’s foreign policy. A number of Democrats who voted against it expressed concern that it was tantamount to a vote advocating a state of permanent war.
Which it realistically is. The 2001 authorization for the Afghan War was built around 9/11 and the defeat of al-Qaeda. Neither are hugely relevant issues in 2019 Afghanistan, and a peace treaty being negotiated centers heavily around the Taliban promising to keep al-Qaeda and ISIS out of the country in the future.
Congress never actually authorized the war in Syria at all, dodging that obligation repeatedly because of political concerns. President Obama invaded Syria unilaterally to “fight ISIS,” and President Trump has declared ISIS effectively defeated now that they have virtually no territory left.
button issue for many hawks, who argue variously that either ISIS isn’t defeated, that the US should transition the Syria War to fighting Iran, or that the US should transition the Syria War into permanently protecting  the Syrian Kurdish groups the US was aligned with against Turkey. Within the administration, a number of hawks oppose leaving Syria just because the broad assumption was that the US would always be there.
By Jason Ditz / Republished with permission / ANTIWAR.COM / Report a typo
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Zionism’s DNA


Netanyahu’s Brand of Tolerance for Anti-Semitism Goes Back 120 Years

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The Israeli prime minister’s ease with neo-Nazism and revisionist Holocaust history are not as surprising as they might seem, writes Daniel Lazare.

Special to Consortium News
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a soft spot for rightwing authoritarians.  This is no surprise since Netanyahu is a rightwing authoritarian himself, one who sees Israel as an old-fashioned ethno-state in which Jewish national aspirations are the only ones that count – as his support for last year’s “Nation-State Law” makes clear. 
But what may come as a surprise is that he also has a soft spot for rightwing authoritarians with a pronounced anti-Semitic streak.  Last July, he welcomed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban to Israel even though Orban has led a
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Wikimedia)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Wikimedia)
campaign to rehabilitate Miklos Horthy, the pro-Axis dictator who sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to death camps and bragged, “I have been an anti-Semite throughout my life.”  Two months later, he welcomed Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who once compared himself to Hitler, saying, “There are three million drug addicts [in the Philippines].  I’d be happy to slaughter them.” 
He issued a joint statement with Polish Premier Mateusz Morawiecki lauding Poland’s wartime efforts to alert the world to the Nazi death camps, a statement that Israel’s own Yad Vashem Holocaust museum later repudiated on the grounds that it “contains highly problematic wording that contradicts existing and accepted historical knowledge in this field.”  His government has also supplied weapons to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalionfighting pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Ukraine.
So what’s the explanation?  If Netanyahu is a hawk’s hawk when it comes to enemies of the Jewish state, then doesn’t it follow that he should be no less militant when it comes to enemies of the Jews? 
The answer is, no, it doesn’t, for the simple reason that Zionism’s attitude toward anti-Semitism is more ambiguous than people realize.  Theodore Herzl, the Viennese journalist who founded modern Zionism, made this clear in the 1890s.  Rather than combatting anti-Semitism, he argued that Jews should accept it as an ineradicable fact of life.  Instead of opposing it, they should make use of it as a lever with which to pry their co-religionists loose from western society so that they would move to Palestine. As he put it in “The Jewish State,” the 1896 manifesto that put modern Zionism on the map:
“Great exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the [emigration] movement.  Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus.  They need only do what they did before, and then they will create a desire to emigrate where it did not previously exist, and strengthen it where it existed before.” 
Theodor Herzl en route to Israel aboard a ship in 1898. (Wikimedia)
Theodor Herzl en route to Israel aboard a ship in 1898. (Wikimedia)
Herzl’s goal was twofold: to provide Jews with a homeland and to win over non-Jews by removing an irritant from their midst.  Jews, he wrote, “continue to produce an abundance of mediocre intellects who find no outlet, and this endangers our social position as much as it does our increasing wealth. Educated Jews without means are now rapidly becoming Socialists.”  The more radical they become, the more Christian society would close ranks against them.  The solution was to provide them with a homeland of their own so they would cease subverting someone else’s.
 “They will pray for me in the synagogues, and in the churches as well,” Herzl confided to his diary.  Not only would Jews liberate themselves, but they would be liberating Christians too, “liberating them from us.”

Zionism’s DNA

Modern observers might dismiss such ideas as ancient history since they date to more than 120 years ago.  But they have become part of Zionism’s DNA.  Instead of battling anti-Semites, the movement has repeatedly followed Herzl’s advice by emulating them and adopting their techniques for their own purposes.
In the 1920s, Jews were thus shocked when Zionist settlers organized a movement to drive out Arab workers in Palestine.  The reason is that it was all too similar to anti-Semitic nationalists in Poland who were seeking to drive out Polish Jews.  An immigrant socialist complained in the Jewish Daily Forward, according to the historian Yaacov N. Goldstein, that the “conquest of labor” campaign“sends shudders through the Jewish workers in the Diaspora countries because the gentiles could try out this principle against the Jewish workers….”  Said another: “How do we react when the reactionary chauvinists in Poland fight for their ‘conquest of labor,’ meaning prevention of Jews working in Polish industrial and commercial enterprises?  How do we respond to the ‘conquest of labor’ of the Romanians?”
In the 1930s, a growing rightwing Zionist movement latched onto Benito Mussolini for much the same reason – because he wished to purify Italy just as they wished to purify Palestine.  With Mussolini’s permission, a rightwing Zionist leader named Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky opened a training school in Civitavecchia, some 40 miles west of Rome.  According to the Marxist historian Lenni Brenner, this is how an Italian Zionist newspaper described the opening ceremonies:
 “The order – ‘Attention!’  A triple chant ordered by the squad’s commanding officer – ‘Viva L’Italia! Viva Il Re!  Viva Il Duce!’ resounded, followed by the benediction which rabbi Aldo Lattes invoked in Italian and Hebrew for God, the king, and Il Duce…. ‘Giovinezza’ [the Fascist Party anthem] was sung with much enthusiasm….”
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in Munich, Germany, ca. June 1940 (Flickr)
Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler in Munich, ca. June 1940. (Flickr)
Mussolini praised Jabotinsky as a good fascist in 1935 while Abba Ahimeir, a leader of the Palestinian branch of Jabotinsky’s “Revisionist” movement, wrote a regular newspaper column entitled “Diary of a Fascist.” Ahimeir’s editor was Benzion Netanyahu, father of the current prime minister, who would later become Jabotinsky’s personal assistant.  In Poland, the leader of the Revisionists was a young man named Mieczslaw Biegun, better known by the Hebrew name Menachem Begin, who would serve as Israeli prime minister from 1977 to 1983.
When Begin embarked on a U.S. speaking tour in 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, and some two dozen other Jewish intellectuals sent a letter to the The New York Times denouncing his movement as “akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties,” one that “preache[s] an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.”
Given this rich history of fascism, it’s no surprise 70 years later that Netanyahu would enjoy hobnobbing with a new generation of rightwing strong men (including new Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro) or that he would look the other way when it comes to the anti-Semitism of the Polish government, which last year made it a crime to say that Poles were complicit in the Holocaust, or of Orban’s campaign against international financier George Soros.  Indeed, it’s no surprise that Netanyahu’s 26-year-old son Yair would join in the fun by posting an anti-Semitic cartoon on Facebook showing George Soros directing a conspiracy against his father.
“Is this what the kid hears at home?” wondered former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who was also targeted by the cartoon.  But not everyone was displeased.  “Welcome to the club, Yair – absolutely amazing, wow, just wow,” tweeted Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Declared the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website: “Yair Netanyahu is a total bro.  Next he’s going to call for gassings.”
Role Model for Xenophobes
What’s a little anti-Semitism among friends?  Netanyahu’s devotion to Jewish ethnic purity has meanwhile turned him into a role model for xenophobes the world over.  So has his hostility to refugees.  Last March, he declared that illegal African migrants are “much worse” than terrorists, adding: “How could we assure a Jewish and democratic state with 50,000 and then 100,000 and 150,000 migrants a year?  After a million, 1.5 million, one could close up shop.  But we have not closed down. We built a fence and at the same time, with concern for security needs, we are making a major investment in infrastructures.” This is the same fence that Donald Trump now points to as his model for his Mexican wall.
Thanks to such attitudes at the top, Israel has seen an upsurge of racial violence.  In 2014, an Israeli stabbed a baby three times in the head, telling police: “They said that a black baby, blacks in general, are terrorists.”  A few months later, a mob shot and beat to death an African refugee named Haltom Zarhum in the southern city of Beer Sheva. A year after that, two Israeli teenagers beat to death an African refugee named Babikir Ali Adham-Abdo in a suburb of Tel Aviv.
Netanyahu, of course, will reply that he was nowhere near the scene of the crime.  But the more Zionism’s true colors come out, the more such atrocities are likely to occur.
It must be stressed that the problem with Jewish nationalism lies not with the first half of the term but the second.  Nationalism in general suffers from a similar combination of chauvinism and separatism. Examples are rife.  Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is a well-known anti-Semite who last summer inveighed against “Satanic Jews who have infected the whole world with poison and deceit.” His ideological predecessor, Marcus Garvey, whose back-to-Africa movement in the 1920s had curious parallels with Zionism, repeatedly provoked black leftists of the day by speaking out in favor of Jim Crow and meeting with a Ku Klux Klan leader named Edward Young Clarke in Atlanta.
 “I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together,” he wrote.  “I like honesty and fair play.  You may call me a Klansman if you will, but, potentially, every white man is a Klansman as far as the Negro in competition with whites socially, economically and politically is concerned, and there is no use lying.”
Garvey’s dark side was forgotten in the 1960s when he emerged as a hero of the Black Power movement.  Zionism’s dark side was similarly forgotten after the Six Day War in 1967 when it emerged as a favorite ally of the United States.  Thereafter, anyone who tried to bring up the love affair with fascism was ostracized by neo-conservatives, many of them Jewish, who increasingly dominated intellectual discourse. 
But with ethno-chauvinism now staging a powerful comeback, Zionism’s far-right past has returned to haunt it — and the rest of the world as well. 

Daniel Lazare is the author of “The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy” (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics.  He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nationto Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at Daniellazare.com.

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Macron en 'De Russen' hebben het gedaan

Macron: media-aandacht van gele hesjes, “manipulatie” ondersteund door een “buitenlandse mogendheid”

  
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Een Du Point-verslaggever rapporteert de opmerkingen van de president over degele hesjes-crisis en de Benalla-affaire: hij is van mening dat hun overmedia-aandacht een “manipulatie” is, met name geregisseerd door Rusland en RT France.

De journalist van Du Point Emmanuel Berretta meldde op 1 februari verschillende opmerkingen van de President van de Republiek over gele hesjes en hun berichtgeving in de media, wat een overzicht kan zijn van zijn analyse van deze crisis.
Als hij “het deel van de dingen” zou doen, zich ervan bewust dat de “legitieme beweringen van de Franse rondes” niet moeten worden verward met “40 000 tot 50 000 ultra-gewelddadigen die de instellingen willen kappen”, Emmanuel Macron zou zeer  achterdochtig zijn over de protestbeweging, die hij punt voor punt zou hebben geanalyseerd met radicale opmerkingen.
Gele vesten: vastgezet door RT en de “Russosphere”
“Russische Poetin die volgens Macron via Rusland Today of Spoetnik”  de boel verdraaid van de toespraak van de President van de Republiek, volgens Emmanuel Berretta. “De president van de republiek wijst op de verantwoordelijkheid van de media, hun” naïviteit “naar wat hij als een manipulatie van uitersten beschouwt, met de hulp van een buitenlandse macht,” voegt de journalist eraan toe.
Volgens de president zijn 90% van de media verantwoordelijk van de grote onlusten in Parijs.
Steeds meer nieuwszenders zeggen ” dit is belangrijk, dit is legitiem ” omdat er beweging op internet is. Deze beweging wordt gemaakt door groepen te manipuleren, en twee dagen later wordt het een onderwerp in de nationale dagbladen en in weekbladen overgenomen. “Volgens de president zou het daarom duidelijk zijn dat de gele hesjes geradicaliseerd zouden zijn” geadviseerd door vreemde bronnen:’ Autoritaire structuren kijken ons lachend aan. Wees niet dom. We zijn buitengewoon naïef. ”
“De officiële communicatie van alle traditionele bewegingen is heel weinig actief, heel weinig wordt goed doorgegeven. Mensen die teveel geïnvesteerd hebben in netwerken zijn de twee uitersten. En daarna zijn het mensen die accounts kopen en trollen. Het is Russia Today, Sputnik, etc. Kijk, vanaf december, de bewegingen op internet, het is niet langer BFM (Fransestaatszender) die aan de leiding staat, het is Russia Today, “gelooft hij.

Eric Drouet de leider van de gele hesjes: “is een mediaproduct”

“Drouet is een mediaproduct, een product van sociale netwerken”, zei Emmanuel Macron, terwijl hij klaagde over “de troosteloosheid van traditionele media om hun werk te doen”, door te zeggen dat “de verschillende lagen gele vesten, de deconstructie” wat is de beweging, haar invloeden, de deconstructie van haar externe invloeden, die we heel weinig hebben gehoord. ” Emmanuel Macron wees dus ook op “een vorm van versnelde legitimatie van wat deze beweging was”.
Boxer Dettinger “spreekt niet als een zigeuner”
Een ander onderwerp waarover de president zou zijn teruggekeerd: de zaak van de bokser Christophe Dettinger, gearresteerd na het plegen van geweld tegen gendarmes tijdens act 8 van de gele Vesten. “De bokser en de video die hij maakte voordat hij zich overgaf werd geïnformeerd door een uiterst linkse advocaat. Het laat zien! Die vent, hij heeft niet de woorden van een zigeuner. Hij heeft niet de woorden van een zigeunerbokser, zeikte Marcon. ‘
“Hernieuw de prioriteit van de lyrics”
Emmanuel Macron trok de consequenties van deze observaties verder: ‘De dagbladen, wat ze ook zijn, maken het nieuws niet meer. Maar je kunt de debatten manipuleren. Er is iemand die zich aan de technologische grens van deze transformatie bevindt, het is Trump. Dit is een vraag die gesteld moet worden. Dat betekent dat zappen permanent is, dat er niets aan de hand is, maar dat betekent dat een van de functies die journalisten hebben, juist om prioriteit te geven aan wat, in informatie, is bijkomstig en wat belangrijk of zinvol is, is opgegeven. ‘
“Als we dingen in onze samenleving willen herbouwen, moeten we accepteren dat er een hiërarchie van woorden is”, zegt het staatshoofd. “Ik geloof helemaal niet in horizontaliteit. De horizontaliteit van een debat is erg goed. Maar je moet jezelf de vraag stellen: “Waar kom je vandaan, wat is je legitimiteit?” Degene die de burgemeester is, degene die lid is van het parlement, degene die de minister is, heeft legitimiteit of verantwoordelijkheid. De gewone burger heeft niet hetzelfde. Hij vertegenwoordigt alleen zichzelf. Als ik met burgers praat, zet ik ze allemaal op gelijke voet. Maar ik heb hier niet het hoofd van gele vesten ontvangen. Bovendien is er geen. En wanneer er gele vesten in de debatten zijn, spreek ik niet eerst met hen. Ik praat met burgers, gele jassen of niet, “voegt hij eraan toe.
“De president denkt daarom aan een manier om de kwaliteit van de informatie te beveiligen tegen de stroom vals nieuws in. Hij wil in onze democratie ‘vertrouwde derde partijen’ herstellen, “legt Emmanuel Berretta uit, voordat hij de volgende woorden van het staatshoofd citeert:” Wanneer u naar mensen luistert, wat is het dan? wat zeggen ze? Ze willen het hoofd van de president afsnijden. Ze zeggen dat de leden allemaal klootzakken zijn. Ze besluiten dat iedereen die beslist, onwettig is. Ze willen niet eens dat iemand in hun midden beslist. En ze zeggen dat journalisten liegen. […] Het is de ontbinding van een democratie als we ze volgen. ”
Hoe wil Emmanuel Macron het aanpakken? “Er is een echt werk voor pers, wat is de politieke functie, wat zijn de vakbonden, de politieke partijen. Er moet een mogelijkheid zijn om de lyrics opnieuw te prioriteren. Dat is fundamenteel. Omdat anders complot het autoritarisme voedt. ‘

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