After receiving news that a team of US Navy Seals had shot dead Osama Bin Laden at a compound in northern Pakistan, President Barack Obama announced that justice had been done.

The demise of the man held responsible for mass atrocities, including the 11 September 2001 attacks, was welcomed around the world.

But as the US narrative of the raid has developed - and changed - since Monday's raid, there have been growing questions about whether it was legal to kill the al-Qaeda leader.

At one level, these questions have focused on what happened during the operation at the building in Abbottabad in which Bin Laden was found.

"The issue here is whether what was done was an act of legitimate self-defence," said Benjamin Ferencz, an international law specialist who served as a prosecutor during the Nuremburg trials and argued that it would have been better to capture Bin Laden and send him to court.

"Killing a captive who poses no immediate threat is a crime under military law as well as all other law," he told the BBC World Service.

'Killing appropriate'

Putting the case for the legality of the raid on Wednesday, US Attorney General Eric Holder said it was "conducted in a way that was consistent with our law, with our values".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13318372

An Orthodox Jewish newspaper apologised for digitally deleting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton from a photo of President Barack Obama and his staff watching Navy SEALs move in on Osama bin Laden.

The Brooklyn weekly Di Tzeitung, which says it doesn't publish images of women, printed the doctored photo Friday.

It issued a statement saying its photo editor hadn't read the "fine print" accompanying the White House photo that forbade any changes. The newspaper said it has sent its "regrets and apologies" to the White House and the Department of State.

A second woman, Counterterrorism Director Audrey Tomason, also was deleted from the photo, which captured a historic moment in the decade-long US effort to apprehend the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Di Tzeitung said it has a "long standing editorial policy" of not publishing women's images.

Yes Gus, I'll post them a burqa .... it's designed specifically for that sexist task!!

If the ninja-clad gunmen start charging up the stairs and shooting up your relatives, you are perfectly entitled to stick your head out of your bedroom door and have a gander. If you are so rash as to duck back into your bedroom, you will apparently entitle the SEALs to follow you into the matrimonial chamber, shoot your wife in the leg and then blow you away with a shot in the chest and one in the head.

Yup, it was Osama bin Laden's ''hostile act'' of bullet-dodging that cost him his life, the White House says. As an explanation for killing an unarmed man, this is starting to get embarrassing. I am reminded of the old South African police force, which used to explain deaths in custody by saying that unarmed black detainees had launched savage attacks with their left temples and the smalls of their backs on the steel toecaps of their police guards.

So why don't we all just cut the cackle and admit the groaningly obvious. There was no firefight. Osama bin Laden did not cower behind his wife, spraying the US troops from his AK-47 like some scene from Call of Duty: Black Ops. That was a lie that went round the world faster than it took the truth to get its boots on, and the truth was that bin Laden hadn't even got his dressing gown on, let alone his boots, before he was dispatched into the arms of Shaitan.

This was an assassination, a liquidation, an extrajudicial killing and a termination with extreme prejudice. Whichever way you look at it, Barack Obama has carried out one of the most effective whack jobs ever seen, and if he doesn't get re-elected I will be amazed. Osama is a has-bin, who sleeps with the fishes of the North Arabian sea, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

But when the President tells us that ''justice has been done'', I think he needs to be a bit fuller in his definition of ''justice''. It was 10 years ago this December, when the net was closing in on bin Laden in Tora Bora, that I wrote a pious piece urging that the mass murderer should be put on trial.

It may be painful and problematic, I argued, but that is the difference between them and us. It's what we're fighting for, I said; and 10 years on I have to admit I can see why the Americans have not found it easy to follow my advice. Having pinpointed his lair, they could hardly have asked the Pakistanis to put him on trial - not when the Pakistani security services seem to be some kind of affiliate of al-Qaeda. They couldn't hold the trial in the Hague, since the US does not recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

In an ideal world, they would have put him on trial in New York, the scene of his greatest crime. And then what? A secret trial would have been deemed suspicious; so we would have endured a long, showboating courtroom drama, with lawyers from the school of the O.J. Simpson defence trying to cast doubt on any connection between the accused and September 11, and the cameras of the world would have been trained for weeks on the noble and priestly features of the accused, as he subjected America to some of his finger-wagging denunciations.

Though a New York jury would certainly have sent him down, they don't have the death penalty there - and so his place of incarceration would have become a shrine, the nearby pavements covered with the wax of cretinous candlelit vigils. That is perhaps where the Americans could mount a legitimate argument for what they have done. Bin Laden may represent a threat to US interests, dead or alive, but the reality is he is much less of a threat in his current subaquatic position than he would be in either a courtroom or a prison.

Osama bin Laden

US Attorney General Eric Holder has said that the raid on Osama Bin Laden's hideout, in which the al-Qaeda leader was killed, was "not an assassination".

Mr Holder told the BBC the operation was a "kill or capture mission" and that Bin Laden's surrender would have been accepted if offered.

The protection of the Navy Seals who carried out the raid was "uppermost in our minds", he added.

Bin Laden was shot dead on 2 May in the complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The raid has had a mixed reaction in Pakistan, and on Thursday several hundred supporters of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif rallied in Abbottabad shouting anti-US slogans.

The marchers shouted "Go, America Go", "Down with [US President Barack] Obama" and "Down with [Pakistani President Asif Ali] Zardari", and waved the green flags of Mr Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N party.

Mr Sharif has called for a full judicial inquiry into the raid.

'Legal operation'

Mr Holder said the special forces had acted "in an appropriate way" in the absence of any clear indication Bin Laden had been going to surrender.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13370919

US linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has been named as the winner of this year's Sydney Peace Prize.

He is to travel to Australia in November to give an address and receive the award, which carries a $50,000 purse and handmade glass trophy.

Previous winners of the prize include South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, journalist John Pilger, former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, Palestinian activist Hanan Ashwarwi, and Indigenous human rights activist Patrick Dodson.

Chomsky became the centre of controversy most recently over his critical comments following the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

"It's increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law," he wrote then.

He also cast doubt on bin Laden's role in the 9/11 attacks, saying US president Barack Obama was "simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that 'we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Al Qaeda'".

"Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden's 'confession,' but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement," Chomsky wrote.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/02/3233197.htm

See toon at top... and visit Gus's blog...

see also: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/controversy-dogs-chomsky-as-he-accepts-sydney-peace-prize-20110601-1fgqf.html

French authorities suspended a customs inspector for having a photo taken of himself with US president Barack Obama's passport as the leader entered France for the G8 summit, officials said.

The inspector annoyed travelling US officials by posing for a souvenir picture after stamping Mr Obama's passport as the White House delegation arrived on May 26, a union and local radio station France Bleu Cotentin reported.

"The American officials who handed over the passports of their delegation did not appreciate it," said Philippe Bock, a local customs workers' representative of the Solidaires labour union, confirming the report.

"The punishment came quickly," he added, saying the inspector was suspended and is likely to be transferred to another department.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/04/3235504.htm?section=justin

see toon at top...

British spies hacked into an Al Qaeda website to replace instructions on how to build a bomb with recipes for making cupcakes, newspapers report.

The cyber offensive took place last year when the English language magazine called Inspire, aimed at Muslims in the West, was launched by supporters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

British intelligence officers based at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the state eavesdropping service, attacked the 67-page magazine, leaving most of it garbled, British newspapers said.

Instead of being able to read how to "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom", readers were greeted with computer code which actually contained recipes from The Best Cupcakes in America, published by US chat show host Ellen DeGeneres.

The Washington Post reported that the British action followed a dispute between the CIA and the newly formed US Cyber Command.

The cyber unit had wanted to block the Al Qaeda magazine but the CIA, which had countered such an attack would expose sources and intelligence methods, won the debate and declined to allow an attack on Inspire.

The paper reported that it took almost two weeks for AQAP to post a corrected version of the magazine after it had been sabotaged.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/03/3235456.htm?section=justin

Gus: I was going to let this news item go, as, of course enlightened al quaeda operatives would soon fix the stitch, but this story reminded me of a cookbook once where the amount of baking soda for a cake had been metricated wrongly... A teaspoon of baking soda had become larger than a full cup... The cakes used to explode in the ovens... True story... See toon at top...

JERUSALEM — The man who ran Israel’s Mossad spy agency until January contends that Israel’s top leaders lack judgment and that anticipated pressures of international isolation as the Palestinians campaign for statehood could lead to rash decisions — like an airstrike on Iran.

The former intelligence chief, Meir Dagan, who stepped down after eight years, has made several unusual public appearances and statements in recent weeks. He first made headlines a few weeks ago when he asserted at a Hebrew University conference that attacking Iran militarily would be “a stupid idea.”

This week Mr. Dagan, speaking at Tel Aviv University, said that attacking Iran “would mean regional war, and in that case you would have given Iran the best possible reason to continue the nuclear program.” He added, “The regional challenge that Israel would face would be impossible.”

Mr. Dagan went on to complain that Israel had failed to put forward a peace initiative with the Palestinians and that it had foolishly ignored the Saudi peace initiative promising full diplomatic relations in exchange for a return to the 1967 lines. He worried that soon Israel would be pushed into a corner.

On Thursday he got more specific, naming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, but this time through a leaked statement to journalists. It had to do with his belief that his retirement and those of other top security chiefs had taken away a necessary counterforce in decision making.

In recent months, the military chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, and the director of the Shin Bet internal security agency, Yuval Diskin, also stepped down. Mr. Dagan was quoted in several newspapers as saying that the three of them had served as a counterweight to Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Barak.

“I decided to speak out because when I was in office, Diskin, Ashkenazi and I could block any dangerous adventure,” he was quoted as saying. “Now I am afraid that there is no one to stop Bibi and Barak,” he added, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/world/middleeast/04mossad.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

 “How old are these people?” he asked, according to two officials present. “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”

It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve.

In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?hp&pagewanted=print 

See toon at top...     

The threat to global health from the hunt for bin Laden

As an intelligence operation, it must have seemed like pure genius: Recruit a Pakistani doctor to collect blood samples that could identify Osama bin Laden’s family, under cover of an ongoing vaccination program. But as an ethical matter, it was something else.

The CIA’s vaccination gambit put at risk something very precious — the integrity of public health programs in Pakistan and around the globe. It also added to the dangers facing nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in a world that’s increasingly hostile to U.S. aid organizations.

What’s gotten attention in America is the plight of Dr. Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani physician who helped the CIA through his vaccination campaign in the tribal areas and the nearby province where bin Laden was hiding. The doctor was sentenced last week to 33 years in prison for treason, prompting indignant protests from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

U.S. officials shouldn’t treat the Afridi case simply as outrageous behavior by Pakistan. They’re right that the doctor’s actions weren’t treasonous: He was seeking information about terrorist leaders who were Pakistan’s enemies. I hope he’ll be released, but in any event Afridi and his handlers should reckon with the moral consequences of what they did.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-cia-gambit-in-pakistan-threatens-a-global-vaccination-program/2012/05/29/gJQAW6W1zU_print.html

A Pakistani doctor who helped the US find Osama bin Laden was imprisoned for aiding fighters and not for links to the CIA, as Pakistani officials had said, according to a court document. 

Last week, a court in the Khyber tribal region near the Afghan border jailed Shakil Afridi for 33 years. 

At the time, Pakistani officials told Western and domestic media the decision was based on treason charges for aiding the CIA in its hunt for the al-Qaeda chief. 

"When the verdict came out on May 23, it said he was being charged for treason because of his involvement with the CIA," Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said.

However, the judgement document made available to the media on Wednesday states that Afridi was jailed because of his close ties to the banned group Lashkar-e-Islam. 

"Americans lashed out at Pakistan, but when the ruling came out today, it made no mention of the CIA," Hyder said.

"People are asking all sorts of questions - whether the Americans overreacted, or the Pakistanis overreacted."

The government may have wanted to show a largely anti-US public that Pakistan will not tolerate any co-operation with the US spy agency, especially at a time of troubled relations with Washington.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia/2012/05/201253015503713861.html

...

Well, I pause here. Dr Afridi was brought before a secret trial in the Khyber tribal area – no charge sheets, no lawyers, no statements from the defendant or the prosecution, just a measly accusation of conspiracy against the state of Pakistan and "high treason". I've never known the difference between "treason" and "high treason" but – since Pakistan's security apparatus is a mirror image of the British Empire – I assume it was invented by us. "High treason" means treason against the monarch. By fingering Bin Laden, after using a ruse about vaccinating his family against hepatitis B to gain access to him, Dr Afridi was committing treason against King Asif Ali Zardari, otherwise known as the President of Pakistan.

But hold on a moment. Let's suppose Vladimir Putin sent a KGB/FSB hit squad to Britain to murder a former agent called Alexander Litvinenko who had turned against his old spymasters. And let's suppose that the Russians murdered Litvinenko. Which – in real life – they did. And Litvinenko – in real life – was indeed a trusted agent of the Russians, just as Bin Laden was a much-admired servant of the CIA when he was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.

There was also a posthumous award. It went to Jan Karski, a Polish resistance fighter who tried to tell the outside world about the mass murder of Jews in his country. It is a remarkable story. Karski, a Catholic, smuggled himself into both the Warsaw Ghetto and one of the concentration camps, which allowed him to see what was happening first hand.

Karski then took that information to then-president Franklin D Roosevelt and other Allied leaders, pleading for the world to act. He later became a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He died in 2000.

In saying a few words about each honouree, Obama described the concentration camps as "Polish death camps". Geographically, he was correct; six of Adolf Hitler's concentration camps were located in Poland.

Still, to suggest that somehow the Poles were involved in operating the camps was a dreadful error.

The US president's remarks have dominated the news in Poland. Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, summed up the national feeling: "We always react in the same way when ignorance, lack of knowledge, bad intentions lead to such a distortion of history, so painful for us here in Poland, in a country which suffered like no other in Europe during World War II."

http://blogs.aljazeera.com/blog/americas/obamas-ignorant-error

from Tom Engelhardt

New York, NY - Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren't just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they - and the vast national-security structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalised around the presidential self - are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against. They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.

Thanks to a long New York Times piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, "Secret 'Kill List' Proves a Test of Obama's Principles and Will", we now know that the president has spent startling amounts of time overseeing the "nomination" of terrorist suspects for assassination via the remotely piloted drone programme he inherited from President George W Bush and which he has expanded exponentially. Moreover, that article was based largely on interviews with "three dozen of his current and former advisers". In other words, it was essentially an administration-inspired piece - columnist Robert Scheer calls it "planted" - on a "secret" programme the president and those closest to him are quite proud of and want to brag about in an election year.

The language of the piece about our warrior president was generally sympathetic, even in places soaring. It focused on the moral dilemmas of a man who - we now know - has personally approved and overseen the growth of a remarkably robust assassination programme in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan based on a "kill list". Moreover, he's regularly done so target by target, name by name. (The Times did not mention a recent US drone strike in the Philippines that killed 15.) According to Becker and Shane, President Obama has also been involved in the use of a fraudulent method of counting drone kills, one that unrealistically deemphasises civilian deaths.

Historically speaking, this is all passing strange. The Times calls Obama's role in the drone killing machine "without precedent in presidential history". And that's accurate.

It's not, however, that American presidents have never had anything to do with or been in any way involved in assassination programmes. The state as assassin is hardly unknown in our history. How could President John F Kennedy, for example, not know about CIA-inspired or -backed assassination plots against Cuba's Fidel Castro, the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, and South Vietnamese autocrat (and ostensible ally) Ngo Dinh Diem? (Lumumba and Diem were successfully murdered.) Similarly, during Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the CIA carried out a massive assassination campaign in Vietnam, Operation Phoenix. It proved to be a staggeringly profligate programme for killing tens of thousands of Vietnamese, both actual enemies and those simply swept up in the process.

In previous eras, however, presidents either stayed above the assassination fray or practiced a kind of plausible deniability about the acts. We are surely at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or his election team) assembles his aides, advisors, and associates to foster a story that's meant to broadcast the group's collective pride in the new position of assassin-in-chief.

Religious cult or mafia hit squad?

read more http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/06/201266145132644760.html

see toon at top...

International medical organisation Médecins Sans Frontières says the fake CIA vaccination program that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden has fuelled distrust of medical workers in Pakistan.

The death toll from a string of attacks on polio vaccination teams in Pakistan this week rose to nine overnight, as a wounded health worker succumbed to his injuries in hospital.

Mohammad Hilal, was shot in the head on Wednesday while helping distribute polio drops on the edge of Peshawar, the main city in Pakistan's north-west.

Bloodshed marred every day of a UN-backed immunisation drive this week, with health volunteers shot by gunmen on motorbikes in Karachi and several other towns.

The Taliban is believed to be responsible for the killings, claiming the vaccinations are a plot to sterilise Pakistani children.

A fake vaccination program was used a front to obtain DNA samples from members of Bin Laden's family before the US special forces raid which led to his death last year.

Médecins Sans Frontières operations co-ordinator Chris Lockyar says that has led to suspicion of vaccination programs as a whole.

"There has been a series of events where aid and medical action in particular has been manipulated for political or military reasons," he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-21/death-toll-from-polio-attacks-rises/4439534

See toon at top...

The caption under the image reads: Sandra (25) from Grimstad is romantic partner with the son of one of the world's foremost terror targets (Thank you, Paul Goldstein, for the correction).

Yair Netanyahu, son of the Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, is dating a non-Jewish girl from Norway, media in Sweden reported after the Prime Minister informed Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg of the relationship at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Yair and Leikanger met at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, where both of them are studying. Her family is from an evangelical Christian community, and Sandra’s sister lives in Israel. After the Norwegian press had picked up the scoop, Leikanger removed the couple’s pictures from her Facebook page.

The press also couldn’t find out whether there had been special security arrangement in place while Netanyahu Jr. was visiting her in Norway. The newspaper Grimstad Adressetidende asked Conrad Myrland, head of the With Israel for Peace (MIFF) organization what he thought about the young couple’s relationship, and he said, “This is good news and it’s nice that Netanyahu could tell Norwegian journalists about it” during his visit. Myrland also said he did not think this would have any political significance.

Wanna’ bet?

If Prime Minister Netanyahu really wants Israel to be recognized as a Jewish state, and if Yair and his blonde girlfriend Sandra Leikanger become husband and wife one day, she may have to go through an Orthodox Jewish conversion

Read more at: http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/netanyahus-son-dating-non-jewish-daughter-from-norway/2014/01/26/

Happiness is in the eye of the besotted ... See toon at top.

The basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC. The WCA members are seated around a large table with Ned at the head of it.

NED: (Bangs gavel.) I’d like to welcome everyone to the Tuesday night Atone for Drones group of War Criminals Anonymous. My name is Ned, and I’m a recovering massacrist.

EVERYONE ELSE: Hi, Ned!

NED: Let’s start this meeting with a moment of silence for all the war criminals out there still suffering in their addictions. (They bow their heads.) May they find their way to our rooms. Our founder-in-spirit, Smedley Butler, wrote:

EVERYONE TOGETHER: War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

NED: Michelle, would you read the Six Steps for us, please?

MICHELLE: Sure. I’m Michelle, and I’m a recovering torturer.

EVERYONE ELSE: Hi, Michelle!

MICHELLE: (Reading from sheet on the table.) One, we admitted we were war criminals. Two, we discovered a spiritual power could save us. Three, we made a list of our crimes. Four, we made amends to our victims. Five, we asked our spiritual power to forgive us and to remove all desire to commit war crimes. Six, we carried the message of recovery to other war criminals.

NED: Thanks, Michelle. I have a couple of announcements. The summer bake sale has been canceled due to the public’s fears of eating poisoned muffins. So instead we’re going to have a sidewalk fair to raise funds. Buster agreed to be the clown (Buster nods.) and we’ve restored Blake’s old whack-a-journalist game back to whack-a-mole. (Blake waves.) Also, the people we talked to said they’d be happy to pay for our pies, but only if they got to throw them in our faces, so we’re going to oblige them…

EVERYONE ELSE: (Groans.)

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/02/24/war-criminals-anonymous-a-play-in-one-act/

Read from top.

The US Department of State announced on Thursday that it is offering a reward "of up to $1 million" for information that leads to the capture of Hamza bin Laden, the son of deceased former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

A statement released by the department goes on to note that Hamza "is emerging as a leader in the [al-Qaeda] franchise" and that "since at least August 2015, he has released audio and video messages on the Internet calling on his followers to launch attacks against the United States and its Western allies."

It also notes that Hamza has made threats against the US in the name of "revenge for the May 2011 killing of his father by US service members."

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201903011072849878-us-state-department-reward...

Very thoughtful to call Osama Bin Laden deceased when he was assassinated (see at top)...

Daesh’s new territories

by Thierry Meyssan

Although there is no longer any reason for the jihadists to split themselves between Al-Qaïda and Daesh, the two organisations continue their war in the Greater Middle East. Paradoxically, it is now Al-Qaïda which runs a pseudo-State, the governorate of Idlib, and Daesh which organises attacks far from the battle-fields, in the Congo and Sri Lanka.

The liberation of the zone administered by Daesh as a state does not mean the end of this jihadist organisation. Indeed, while Daesh is a creation of the NATO Intelligence services, it represents an ideology which mobilises jihadists and may outlive it.

Al-Qaïda was an auxiliary army for NATO – we saw them fight in Afghanistan, then in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and finally in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Its principal operations were acts of war (under the command of the « Mujahideen », the « Arab League », or others), and alternatively, but more openly, terrorist operations like those in London or Madrid.

Oussama Ben Laden, officially listed as Public Enemy Number One, in fact lived in Azerbaïdjan under US protection, as revealed by an FBI whistle-blower. [1]

Let us not forget that the attacks of 11 September in New York and Washington have never been claimed by Al-Qaïda, that Oussama Ben Laden declared that he was not implicated, and that the video in which he contradicted this original statement has been authenticated only by his employer, the Pentagon, but has been declared to be false by all independent experts.

While Oussama Ben Laden apparently died in December 2001, according to the Pakistani authorities, and representatives of MI6 attended his funeral, certain individuals stood in for him until 2011, the date at which the United States pretended to have assassinated him, without ever showing his corpse. [2]

The official death of Oussama Ben Laden enabled the relooking of the jihadists as combatants led astray by their evil leader, which in turn allowed NATO to use the the support of Al-Qaïda, quite openly, in Libya and Syria, as it had done in Bosnia-Herzegovina [3].

Daesh, on the other hand, is a project for the administration of a territory, known as Sunnistan or the Caliphate, intended to separate Iraq and Syria, as was explained by Pentagon researcher Robin Wright with the aid of maps which were drawn up before this organisation was created [4]. It was financed and armed directly by the United States during operation « Timber Sycamore » [5]. It impacted public opinion by installing a ready-made law, the Charia.

If the jihadists of Al-Qaïda and Daesh were defeated in Iraq and Syria, it is first of all due to the courage of the Syrian Arab Army, then due to the Russian Air Force, which used penetrating bunker-buster bombs against the underground installations of the combatants, and finally, due to their allies. But if the military war is now over, [6], it is thanks to Donald Trump, who prevented the importation of new jihadists from the four corners of the world, mostly from the Arab peninsula, Maghreb, China, Russia, and finally the European Union.

Al-Qaïda is an auxiliary paramilitary force for NATO, while Daesh is an Allied land army.

Paradoxically, while Daesh lost the area for which it had been trained, it is Al-Qaïda which now administrates a territory, despite the fact that it was opposed to this kind of charge. The Syrians pushed the different jihadist groups back and boxed them in at the governorate of Idlib. Unable to break with this type of opportunistic ally, Germany and France took charge of them, in humanitarian terms, for their food and health needs. So when the Europeans speak today of the aid they are offering to the Syrian refugees, we should understand that they mean their support for the members of Al-Qaïda, who are generally neither civilians nor Syrians. Furthermore, the withdrawal of US troops from Syria changes very little as long as they continue to support their Al-Qaïda mercenaries in Idlib.

Since Daesh has been deprived of its territory, the survivors can no longer play the role which was handed to them by the Westerners, but only a function similar to that of Al-Qaïda – a terrorist militia. Besides which, while it was still operational, the Islamic state already practised terrorism away from the battle-geounds, as we saw in Europe as from 2016.

The attacks it carried out recently, on 16 April in the Congo [7], or on 21 April in Sri Lanka [8] had been anticipated by no-one, including ourselves. They could have been attributed indifferently to one organisation or another. Daesh’s only advantage over Al-Qaïda is its barbaric image, which can not last much longer.

If Daesh was able to emerge in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it was by entrusting its flag to the combatants of the « Allied Democratic Forces » of Uganda.

If it managed to act in such a spectacular manner in Sri Lanka, it’s because the Intelligence services were turned entirely towards the Hindu minority, and were not paying attention to the Muslims. It is perhaps also because these services had been trained by London and Tel-Aviv, or perhaps because of the opposition between the President of the Republic, Maithripala Sirisena, and the Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, which hindered the circulation of the intelligence.

Sri Lanka is particularly vulnerable because it imagines that it is too refined to be able to produce such bestiality. This is wrong - the country still has not thrown light on the way in which more than 2,000 Tigers of Tamil were executed in 2009, although they had been defeated and had surrendered. But every time we refuse to look clearly at our own crimes, we expose ourselves to the danger of committing new crimes because we believe that we are more civilised than the others.

In any case, the horrors in the Congo and Sri Lanka demonstrate that the jihadists will not disarm, and that the Western powers will continue to use them outside of the Greater Middle East.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation 

Pete Kimberley

Read more:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article206359.html

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Trump confirmed on Sunday that al-Baghdadi had been killed in a “daring nighttime raid” in Idlib, northwestern Syria. In a live address from the White House, the US president thanked Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Kurdish forces for aiding the US operation.

He praised the “great cooperation” with Russia, which opened up airspace under its control to allow US warplanes and drones to use the area.

“Iraq was excellent,” the president continued, before thanking Turkey for allowing US forces to fly in low and fast over its territory.

Trump also thanked Syria’s Kurds, who he said “gave us some information that turned out to be helpful.”Until a ceasefire was called last week, Kurdish militias had been targeted by Turkish forces and their allied groups in northern Syria, while Trump was criticized at home from pulling US troops from the area.

Speaking following Trump's announcement, Kurdish military leaders told AFP that they now expect that Islamic State “sleeper cells will seek revenge for al-Baghdadi’s death." The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) holds more than 10,000 IS prisoners, a commander said, adding “this is why anything is possible, including attacks on prisons.”

According to Trump, the secrecy of Saturday night’s raid meant US helicopters needed to fly low to avoid detection. This low approach was made possible through coordination with other forces in the area, who were warned in advance of the incoming American troops. 

Trump said that the Russians were notified of the flyover, but weren’t clued in to the raid.

“ISIS fighters are hated as much by Russia and some of these other countries as they are by us,” the president told reporters.

According to Trump, al-Baghdadi detonated a suicide vest after trying to flee through a tunnel with three of his young children. Although badly mutilated, Trump claimed that they were able to use tests to identify his body.

“He died like a dog, like a coward. The world now is a much safer place,” the US president said.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/471978-russia-turkey-iraq-helped-kill-baghdadi/

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Apparently the United States killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi yesterday. US Special Forces allegedly killed the ISIS leader during a raid on a stronghold in Idlib.

As far as we know, this man was already dead. Maybe twice. He reportedly faked his death once as well.

The debate about whether or not Baghdadi was killed by US Special Forces, killed himself with a suicide vest, is still alive or died years ago has raged all day.

Trump says he died like a coward. The Russians maintain they have no data suggesting any attack was carried out at all. But that is far from conclusive.

From a domestic point of view, the purpose of the attack is fairly obvious: Donald Trump has an election coming up, and potential Presidents like nothing more than being seen to be tough. That means taking out some “bad guys”.

Of course, none of that matters.

It doesn’t matter what happened, it doesn’t matter why it happened and it doesn’t matter whether who it (allegedly) happened to was real, or alive…or otherwise.

Because, as always, the problem is not the specifics. It’s the principle and the precedent.

Let’s just assume that – for the first time in its entire existence – the Pentagon is telling the exact truth about both its actions, and the motives for those actions.

Well, then this is still unacceptable.

The United States is publicly claiming the right to carry out military strikes on foreign soil for the purpose of conducting extra-judicial executions.

This is completely illegal.

Syria is a sovereign state. Whatever the motivation for the alleged raid, carrying it out without the cooperation or permission of the legitimate government of Syria was illegal.

al-Baghdadi was (is?) not a US citizen, or an enemy combatant, and has never been convicted of any crime, in any court, by anyone. Whether or not he is alive…he as a right to be alive under the UN Charter of Human Rights.

And we’re all forgetting that.

Just a few weeks ago Trump announced the US was “pulling out” of Syria. Well, we now know what we suspected at the time, that the announcement is meaningless. This “raid” is their way of saying “just kidding!”

ISIS will still be used as they have always been used: as an excuse for the United States to occupy, attack, destabilise and control the Middle East.

Lost in this hubbub about ISIS, and Hollywood theatricals about daring night-raids on enemy compounds, the United States marched soldiers into North-Eastern Syria to “protect” oil fields.

At the end of the day THAT is really what this was about. Not hurting ISIS, or fighting terrorism, or even making Donald look cool to Rust Belt patriots…it was about an Empire acting as they would, and us letting them. It was about narrative control

Don’t forget the famous quote from Karl Rove:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” 

When we argue about the specifics we let those in power control the conversation. 

The US broke international law, and claim it as an achievement. They ignore borders and treaties and conventions on a whim, and we are so used to it we’re debating their motives and their effectiveness. 

They proclaim loudly that they’re above the law. And, in letting them set that conversation, we agree with them. Even in our outrage.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/10/28/al-baghdadi-raid-is-the-us-empire-cr...

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Rise and Kill First describes the targeted killings carried out by Israeli secret agencies and the personalities and the tactics used. The book's title is inspired by a statement in the Talmud: "If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first".[2]Based on a thousand interviews and thousands of documents, the book is the story of many political and intelligence figures[1][2] such as agents of Mossad, Shin Bet, and the Israeli military, some of them speaking under their real identity. Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, former Israeli prime ministers, and Meir Dagan, a recent head of Mossad for eight years, were among those interviewed.[2]

The book begins with the founding of Bar Giora in 1907 by Yitzhak Ben Zvi. The organization later became Hashomer, then the Haganah and finally the core of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).[3] According to Bergman, Israeli covert agencies have undertaken targeted assassinations against "Arab adversaries throughout its pre- and post-statehood periods".[4] They have assassinated more people than any western country since World War II,[3] carrying out "at least" 2,700 assassination operations in the seventy-year period since Israel's formation.[2] "Poisoned toothpaste that takes a month to end its target's life, armed drones, exploding mobile phones, spare tires with remote-controlled bombs, assassinating enemy scientists and discovering the secret lovers of Muslim clerics," are among the methods described in the book used by Israel to carry out assassinations.[2] Bergman discusses the assassination of British officials, Hamas, Hezbollah and PLO leaders, and Iranian nuclear scientists.[5] According to the author, some of the assassinated individuals include: PLO leader Yasser Arafat; Ali Hassan Salameh, leader of Black September; Abu Jihad, Arafat's aide and co-founder of the Fatah party; Yahya Ayyash known as the "Engineer", Hamas' chief bomb maker;[4] and Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter.[3] Menachem Begin, Yitzak Shamir, Ariel Sharon,[3] described by Bergman as a "pyromaniac",[1] and Ehud Barak, each of whom would later lead the government of Israel, are named as assassins in Rise and Kill First.[3]

Bergman describes the details of operations carried out in Iran,[2] Egypt, Syria and Germany.[3] According to the book, Ariel Sharon mistakenly ordered Mossad shoot down a plane, carrying 30 wounded Palestinian children, survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.[1] The operation was cancelled "at the last moment" after it was reported that Arafat was not on board.[6] He "even" consented to the downing of a commercial plane if it was carrying Arafat, Bergman says in his book.[1]

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_and_Kill_First

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TOM DESPATCH

Nick Turse, Osama Bin Laden’s Enduring Triumph

POSTED ON JULY 25, 2024

Here’s a strange thing to even begin to grasp. In all these years, at least in Washington, the heartland of American power, it hasn’t been understood, not even faintly. In — yes! — all these years, including significant parts of the last century and this one, this country has continually poured ever more money into its military budget. The numbers have become utterly staggering as that yearly budget heads for a cool trillion dollars.

And yet, in those same years, the United States, which now spends more on its military than the next nine (or is it 10?) countries combined, hasn’t been able to win a single war that mattered. In the last century, it essentially tied (if you can even use such a word in relation to a hell on earth) in the Korean War and distinctly lost in Vietnam. In this century, as part of its never-ending Global War on Terror, it spent 20 (yes, 20!) years losing its war in Afghanistan and functionally did the same thing in Iraq. Nor, as TomDispatch regular Nick Turse has reported brilliantly in these years, has it had real success in the rest of the Middle East or Africa, where, he’s estimated, since that war on terror began, deaths from terrorism have increased by more than 50,000% and terror attacks by more than 75,000%.

Given such a record of “success,” if it were any other government program, there would be severe cutbacks and major criticism (especially in an election year), but when it comes to the U.S. military, not a chance, not for a moment. And worse yet, as Turse points out today, even though the Global War on Terror has finally more or less ground to a halt, if not an end, almost 23 years after it was launched, the casualties from it continue to mount in a distinctly — yes! — suicidal fashion. What a horror… but let him explain as vividly as he always does. Tom

Suicide Squad

U.S. Troops Are Losing a War with Their Deadliest Enemy

BY NICK TURSE

At the end of the last century, hoping to drive the United States from Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sought to draw in the American military. He reportedly wanted to “bring the Americans into a fight on Muslim soil,” provoking savage asymmetric conflicts that would send home a stream of “wooden boxes and coffins” and weaken American resolve. “This is when you will leave,” he predicted.

After the 9/11 attacks, Washington took the bait, launching interventions across the Greater Middle East and Africa. What followed was a slew of sputtering counterterrorism failures and stalemates in places ranging from Niger and Burkina Faso to Somalia and Yemen, a dismal loss, after 20 years, in Afghanistan, and a costly fiasco in Iraq. And just as bin Laden predicted, those conflicts led to discontent in the United States. Americans finally turned against the war in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting there, while it took only a little more than a year for the public to conclude that the Iraq war wasn’t worth the cost. Still, those conflicts dragged on. To date, more than 7,000 U.S. troops have died fighting the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other militant groups.

As lethal as those Islamist fighters have been, however, another “enemy” has proven far more deadly for American forces: themselves. A recent Pentagon study found suicide to be the leading cause of death among active-duty U.S. Army personnel. Out of 2,530 soldiers who died between 2014 and 2019 from causes ranging from car crashes to drug overdoses to cancer, 35% — 883 troops — took their own lives. Just 96 soldiers died in combat during those same six years.

Those military findings bolster other recent investigations. The journalism nonprofit Voice of San Diego found, for example, that young men in the military are more likely to take their own lives than their civilian peers. The suicide rate for American soldiers has, in fact, risen steadily since the Army began tracking it 20 years ago.

Last year, the medical journal JAMA Neurology reported that the suicide rate among U.S. veterans was 31.7 per 100,000 — 57% greater than that of non-veterans. And that followed a 2021 study by Brown University’s Costs of War Project which found that, compared to those who died in combat, at least four times as many active-duty military personnel and post-9/11 war veterans — an estimated 30,177 of them — had killed themselves.

“High suicide rates mark the failure of the U.S. government and U.S. society to manage the mental health costs of our current conflicts,” wrote Thomas Howard Suitt, author of the Costs of War report. “The U.S. government’s inability to address the suicide crisis is a significant cost of the U.S. post-9/11 wars, and the result is a mental health crisis among our veterans and service members with significant long-term consequences.”

Military Shocked (Shocked!) by a Rise in Suicides

In June, a New York Times front-page investigation found that at least a dozen Navy SEALs had died by suicide in the last 10 years, either while on active duty or shortly after leaving military service. Thanks to an effort by the families of those deceased special operators, eight of their brains were delivered to a specialized Defense Department brain trauma laboratory in Maryland. Researchers there discovered blast damage in every one of them — a particular pattern only seen in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves like SEALs endure from weapons fired in years of training and war-zone deployments as well as explosions encountered in combat.

The Navy claimed that it hadn’t been informed of the lab’s findings until the Times contacted them. A Navy officer with ties to SEAL leadership expressed shock to reporter Dave Philipps. “That’s the problem,” said that anonymous officer. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”

None of it should, however, have been surprising.

After all, while writing for the Times in 2020, I revealed the existence of an unpublished internal study, commissioned by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), on the suicides of Special Operations forces (SOF). Conducted by the American Association of Suicidology, one of the nation’s oldest suicide-prevention organizations, and completed sometime after January 2017, the undated 46-page report put together the findings of 29 “psychological autopsies,” including detailed interviews with 81 next-of-kin and close friends of commandos who had killed themselves between 2012 and 2015.

That study told the military to better track and monitor data on the suicides of its elite troops. “Further research and an improved data surveillance system are needed in order to better understand the risk and protective factors for suicide among SOF members. Further research and a comprehensive data system is needed to monitor the demographics and characteristics of SOF members who die by suicide,” the researchers advised. “Additionally, the data emerging from this study has highlighted the need for research to better understand the factors associated with SOF suicides.”

Quite obviously, it never happened.

The brain trauma suffered by SEALs and the suicides that followed should not have been a shock. A 2022 study in Military Medicine found Special Operations forces were at increased risk for traumatic brain injury (TBI), when compared with conventional troops. The 2023 JAMA Neurology study similarly found that veterans with TBI had suicide rates 56% higher than veterans without it and three times higher than the U.S. adult population. And a Harvard study, funded by SOCOM and published in April, discovered an association between blast exposure and compromised brain function in active-duty commandos. The greater the exposure, the researchers found, the more health problems were reported.

Studies on the Shelf

Over the last two decades, the Defense Department has, in fact, spent millions of dollars on suicide prevention research. According to the recent Pentagon study of soldiers’ deaths at their own hands, the “Army implements various initiatives that evaluate, identify, and track high-risk individuals for suicidal behavior and other adverse outcomes.” Unfortunately (though Osama bin Laden would undoubtedly have been pleased), the military has a history of not taking suicide prevention seriously.

While the Navy, for example, officially mandated that a suicide hotline for veterans must be accessible from the homepage of every Navy website, an internal audit found that most of the pages reviewed were not in compliance. In fact, according to a 2022 investigation by The Intercept, the audit showed that 62% of the 58 Navy homepages did not comply with that service’s regulations for how to display the link to the Veterans Crisis Line.

The New York Times recently investigated the death of Army Specialist Austin Valley and discovered gross suicide prevention deficiencies. Having just arrived at an Army base in Poland from Fort Riley, Kansas, Valley texted his parents, “Hey mom and dad I love you it was never your fault,” before taking his own life. The Times found that “mental-health care providers in the Army are beholden to brigade leadership and often fail to act in the best interest of soldiers.” There are, for example, only about 20 mental-health counselors available to care for the more than 12,000 soldiers at Fort Riley, according to the Times. As a result, soldiers like Valley can wait weeks or even months for care.

The Army claims it’s working to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health support, but the Times found that “unit leadership often undermines some of its most basic safety protocols.” This is a long-running issue in the military. The study of Special Operations suicides that I revealed in the Times found that suicide prevention training was seen as a “check in the box.” Special operators believed their careers would be negatively impacted if they sought treatment.

Last year, a Pentagon suicide-prevention committee called attention to lax rules on firearms, high operational tempos, and the poor quality of life on military bases as potential problems for the mental health of troops. M. David Rudd, a clinical psychologist and the director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Memphis, told to the Times that the Pentagon report echoed many other analyses produced since 2008. “My expectation,” he concluded, “is that this study will sit on a shelf just like all the others, unimplemented.”

Bin Laden’s Triumph

On May 2, 2011, Navy SEALs attacked a residential compound in Pakistan and gunned down Osama bin Laden. “For us to be able to definitively say, ‘We got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who had been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world’ was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of,” President Barack Obama commented afterward. In reality, the deaths “here in the United States” have never ended. And the war that bin Laden kicked off in 2001 — a global conflict that still grinds on today — ushered in an era in which SEALs, soldiers, and other military personnel have continued to die by their own hands at an escalating rate.

The suicides of U.S. military personnel have been blamed on a panoply of reasons, including military culture, ready access to firearms, high exposure to trauma, excessive stress, the rise of improvised explosive devices, repeated head trauma, an increase in traumatic brain injuries, the Global War on Terror’s protracted length, and even the American public’s disinterest in their country’s post-9/11 wars.

During 20-plus years of armed interventions by the country that still prides itself on being the Earth’s sole superpower, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the peoples of those countries have suffered the most, U.S. troops have also been caught in that maelstrom of America’s making.

Bin Laden’s dream of luring American troops into a meat-grinder war on “Muslim soil” never quite came to pass. Compared to previous conflicts like the Second World War, Korean, and Vietnam wars, U.S. battlefield casualties in the Greater Middle East and Africa have been relatively modest. But bin Laden’s prediction of “wooden boxes and coffins” filled with the “bodies of American troops” nonetheless came true in its own fashion.

“This Department’s most precious resource is our people. Therefore, we must spare no effort in working to eliminate suicide within our ranks,” wrote Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a public memo released last year. “One loss to suicide is too many.” But as with its post-9/11 wars and interventions, the U.S. military’s effort to stem suicides has come up distinctly short. And like the losses, stalemates, and fiascos of that grim war on terror, the fallout has been more suffering and death. Bin Laden is, of course, long dead, but the post-9/11 parade of U.S. corpses continues. The unanticipated toll of suicides by troops and veterans — four times the number of war-on-terror battlefield deaths — has become another Pentagon failure and bin Laden’s enduring triumph.

https://tomdispatch.com/suicide-squad/

SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/48432

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