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  • Bush claims Arctic as parting gesture

    From The Guardian

    The United States has declared its intention to exploit the vast oil and mineral wealth hidden below the Arctic circle by extending its “sovereign rights” over the seabed.

    A detailed policy directive – issued a week before George Bush quits the White House – makes explicit the extent of US ambitions in the polar region beyond Alaska.

    “The United States is an Arctic nation, with varied and compelling interests in that region,” the document – National Security Presidential Directive 66 – states in its introduction, while acknowledging “a growing awareness that the Arctic region is both fragile and rich in resources”.

    There is a qualified acceptance of “the effects of climate change and increasing human activity in the Arctic region” but the main thrust of the paper concerns how the US can tap potential energy resources.

    One of the main obstacles to staking a claim on the Arctic seafloor has been opposition in the Senate to ratification of the United Nations’ 1982 Law of the Sea Convention.

    The White House implicitly urges senators to overcome residual suspicions of the UN in the interests of national security, environmental protection and business opportunity. The US is one of the few nations not to have signed up to the agreement which allows countries to extend their control of the seabed from 200 miles to up to 350 miles beyond their coastline.

    Ratification, it says, would define “with certainty the area of the Arctic seabed and subsoil in which the United States may exercise its sovereign rights over natural resources such as oil, natural gas, methane hydrates, minerals, and living marine species… “

    Methane hydrates are solidified gases formed under great pressure and at low temperatures on the seafloor. They have been identified as an extensive energy source in future, although some environmentalists have warned they could trigger runaway global warming.

    The directive calls for “all actions necessary to establish the outer limit of the continental shelf appertaining to the United States, in the Arctic and in other regions, to the fullest extent permitted under international law.”

    The paper sounds a note of scepticism about the extent of global warming. “High levels of uncertainty remain concerning the effects of climate change and increased human activity in the Arctic,” it remarks. “An understanding of the probable consequences of global climate variability and change on Arctic ecosystems is essential to guide the effective long-term management of Arctic natural resources and to address socioeconomic impacts of changing patterns in the use of natural resources.”

    Two years ago a Russian submarine planted a flag on the seabed under the Arctic ice, intensifying the race for offshore Arctic resources. The Russian government has commissioned detailed marine, geological work to determine the external border of the Russian continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean. It is due to be completed by 2011.

    The US and Canada still have an unresolved boundary in the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska, an area thought to be rich in oil and natural gas deposits. The new US policy is binding on future administrations until replaced.

    Britain has signalled that it will have lodged five claims on the Atlantic seabed with UN’s Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf by May this year. Its latest submission, covering the area Hatton/Rockall basin west of Scotland, is due to be handed in to the UN offices in New York shortly.

     

  • Coastal retreat plans recommended

    The rise in sea level is accelerating, the report said, because warmer water occupies more space and because of runoff from melting inland glaciers and ice sheets. The Middle Atlantic States are particularly vulnerable because the rates of rise are “moderately high” there, the region is subject to storms, it is densely populated and much of its infrastructure is in low-lying areas.

    The report, which is available at climatescience.gov, says that in the 20th century, rates of erosion in the region varied from 2.4 millimeters to 4.4 millimeters a year, or about a foot over 100 years. In the future, the report said, “it is virtually certain” that coastal headlands, spits and barrier islands will erode faster than they have in the past.

    If sea level rises at a rate of seven millimeters a year or about two feet per century, “it is likely that some barrier islands in this region will cross a threshold,” and begin to break up, the report said. The islands forming the Outer Banks of North Carolina are particularly threatened.

    The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations climate effort, estimated in its most recent report that sea level might rise by about as much as two feet by 2100. Many experts regard the estimate as optimistic.

    Even a modest acceleration of sea level rise will have a negative effect on the region’s coastal wetlands, the report says, adding, “It is likely that most wetlands will not survive” a two-foot rise.

    In natural environments, wetlands survive rises in sea level by shifting inland to higher ground. But in the Middle Atlantic States, the report notes, valuable infrastructure like buildings and roads stands in their way.

    The report said public officials should consider the vulnerability of coastal areas and take action when necessary, for example, by limiting development in vulnerable areas. But it noted that there was great uncertainty about the timing and extent of the effects of sea level rise and that the region had conducted “only a limited number of analyses and resulting statewide policy revisions” to address the issue.

     

  • US media more censored than Israel’s

    Indeed, the cease-fire was part of the military plan to decimate the civilian areas of Gaza; it was a hoax, a scam, a deliberate feint to buy time for military preparations — precisely the same strategy followed by the Bush Regime (and its bipartisan Establishment supporters) in “going to the UN” to seek a “peaceful solution” to the “Iraqi crisis” — when the invasion was already in the works.

    Haaretz reports on the Israel’s deceit in the latest outrage, in the aptly titled piece, “Disinformation, secrecy and lies: How the Gaza offensive came about”:

    Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public – all these stood behind the Israel Defense Forces “Cast Lead” operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, which began Saturday morning. he disinformation effort, according to defense officials, took Hamas by surprise and served to significantly increase the number of its casualties in the strike.

    Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. According to the sources, Barak maintained that although the lull would allow Hamas to prepare for a showdown with Israel, the Israeli army needed time to prepare, as well..


    The story also notes that the recent racheting of tension was sparked, deliberately, by a heavy-handed Israeli incursion into Gaza:

    The plan of action that was implemented in Operation Cast Lead remained only a blueprint until a month ago, when tensions soared after the IDF carried out an incursion into Gaza during the ceasefire to take out a tunnel which the army said was intended to facilitate an attack by Palestinian militants on IDF troops….

    While Barak was working out the final details with the officers responsible for the operation, Livni went to Cairo to inform Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, that Israel had decided to strike at Hamas. In parallel, Israel continued to send out disinformation in announcing it would open the crossings to the Gaza Strip and that Olmert would decide whether to launch the strike following three more deliberations on Sunday – one day after the actual order to launch the operation was issued.

    “Hamas evacuated all its headquarter personnel after the cabinet meeting on Wednesday,” one defense official said, “but the organization sent its people back in when they heard that everything was put on hold until Sunday.”


    Not only did this deception lead Hamas to send its officials back to work — it also meant that there was no general warning to the masses of civilians packed like sardines into Gaza’s hellish confines. It meant that civilian casualties would be maximized — especially when the initial assault was launched in the middle of the day, with thousands of schoolchildren out at their lesson.

    As Glenn Greenwald notes, Israel’s massive bombing of civilian areas — even if couched in terms of “retaliation” for scattershot strikes on Israeli territory by a political faction — constitutes “a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.” Greenwald also adroitly turns Barack Obama’s campaign kowtowing to Israeli militarism on its head:

    [Obama on the campaign trail]: “The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if — I don’t even care if I was a politician — if somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

    Can’t the exact same mentality be deployed to justify everything Hamas has done and is doing, to wit:  “if a foreign power were brutally occupying my country for four decades — or blockading my country and denying my children medical needs and nutrition and the ability even to exit — I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that.  And I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing”?  But the last thing that our political class ever extends is reciprocal, two-sided analysis to this dispute.


    What is the ultimate context of this carnage? The fact that the Arab inhabitants of Palestine had their land taken away from them by force — not in some ancient, historic era, but within the lifetime of many thousands of Palestinians still living. I hold no brief for Hamas; like the Angry Arab, whose coverage of the conflict has been relentless and penetrating, I don’t care for any party based on religious extremism. But as Greenwald notes, every action taken by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups could be characterized as “retaliation” for the theft of their land, not to mention the war crime of collective punishment and genocidal blockades visited upon the Occupied Territories for years.

    But there is not a single peep of this perspective from America’s ruling class and its media courtiers. Of course, it is a bit much to expect a nation which itself was built on land theft, repression and slaughter to see anything wrong or “disproportionate” in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. What else are you supposed to do when those dang heathen savages come around with their war parties and tomahawks, trying to get back the land that God Almighty has granted to good white folk?

    Meanwhile, here’s what Israel’s “Manifest Destiny” looks like on the ground in Gaza. From the Maan News Agency (via the Angry Arab, as was the photo above):

    Death shrouds the hallways of Gaza City’s Ash-Shifa medical compound Saturday, its smell creeping in from all corners. mputated bodies are strewn throughout hallways because morgues in the city can no longer accommodate the dead. In one corner a man stands with his seven year old son in a cardboard box because the hospital ran out of sheets to cover the dead with. This is how he will carry him home and bury him. Another man stands dazed, in shock after watching his son Mohammed killed during his graduation ceremony at the de facto police headquarters. The father of one of Mohammed’s classmates stood next to his son as he was decapitated. The man is still screaming.

    In the packed hospital waiting room a mother sits silently staring into the distance; her son was pronounced dead shortly after she brought him in… Forty-year-old mother Nawal Al-Lad’a did not find the bodies of her two sons in the medical compound, so she left to look amid the rubble.

    Husam Farajallah, a university student, was at the hospital collecting the body of his relative. He called what happened in Gaza a “black day” in the lives of all Palestinians, and wondered how the world could watch and do nothing.

    Medics in Gaza confirmed that the majority of those killed in the day’s attacks were civilians, including men, women and children. Most were cut to pieces, making the job of doctors and medics difficult, and the task of giving bodies back to families painful and gruesome. The medics working in the field continue to dig up bodies from the densely populated urban areas of Gaza City.

    The scenes remind many Palestinians of the images that came out of the Sabra and Shatila massacres from Beirut in 1982, when thousands of Palestinians were killed by the Lebanese Phalangist militia.

    As the death toll climbs and no word on a halt to the attacks has come from Israel, Gazans fear for their lives and loved ones.

  • Federal politician slams Israeli lies

    It’s the oldest trick in the book: if they look and sound like us, we are more likely to be sympathetic towards them. Anyone putting an alternative view is immediately cast as anti-Semitic. Our media glibly accept the excuses of the Israeli public relations machine and ignore the horrific realities of Israel’s barbaric behaviour in Gaza.

    It’s the same in most Western countries – the groundwork has been laid and the responses of world leaders are predictable. When the Israeli attacks began, right on cue Western leaders regretted the killing of children but in the same breath condemned Palestinians for firing rockets from their walled ghetto into Israel.

    While French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for an immediate ceasefire by both sides, US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called only for Hamas to halt rockets fired from Gaza. They did not call for Israel to halt its bombing.

    There was a lot of handwringing by world leaders but no tough talk when it came to the bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza or the killing of 40 civilians in a United Nations school. We saw the same during the 2006 Israeli war against Lebanon.

    It all reminds me of an old story from the days of the Roman Empire. The Emperor Nero was upset that his prized lions were being distressed by Christians who ran away from them in the Colosseum. Nero ordered that at the next circus a Christian was to be buried up to his neck in the sand to make things easier for the lions. When the lions entered the ring, the biggest and meanest saw the hapless condemned, swaggered over and stood astride the Christian’s head, roaring for approval from the crowd. At that moment, the Christian craned his neck and bit off the lion’s testicles. The crowd was shocked. “Fight fair! Fight fair!” they yelled.

    It seems that no matter what injustice Palestinians have suffered in the past 60 years, they should be grateful for the privilege of being able to live under the jackboot of Israeli occupation.

    For three years since daring to democratically elect a government not favoured by Israel or the US, the people of Gaza have been subjected to a starvation blockade. Yet the civilised world has barely raised a note of concern. Is this the standard by which we judge the behaviour of nations? We talk about Darfur and Zimbabwe but say little of the gross abuse of human rights that occurs daily in the illegally occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Our double standards have made a mockery of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention.

    Our failure to condemn the totally disproportionate, not to say illegal, attacks by the Israeli Defence Force has changed the way conflict is regarded around the world. Last August, Russia employed the same tactics in its attack on Georgia as Israel did against Lebanon.

    Neither Russia nor China sought UN Security Council emergency meetings in response to the Israeli attacks on Gaza. What happens in the Middle East today sets the standard for the world. And that applies to weapons as well as tactics.

    Using cluster bombs or phosphorus bombs against civilian targets is perfectly legal if you can believe the Israeli Defence Force.

    Assassinating Hamas leaders during a ceasefire does not constitute a breach. Collective punishments against communities, obstructing medical and humanitarian relief – all part of Israel’s tactics – could now be considered acceptable behaviour in national and international conflict.

    How can we criticise brutal regimes elsewhere in the world when we condone worse atrocities when they are committed by Israel? The Security Council has become a laughing stock. The Secretary-General is a pathetic figure reduced to faint pleas for a ceasefire while UN personnel are murdered on the ground in Gaza. And who will pick up the pieces when the bloodshed has finally stopped? The rest of the world will, of course. Through the world’s contributions to the UN, its largest budget item is the UN Relief and Works Agency. With an annual $700 million budget going to support Palestinian refugees, the biggest component is being spent on Gaza.

    Even before the Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza, the UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur responsible for reporting on conditions in the occupied territories, Richard Falk, was denied entry to Gaza.

    Last month, Falk called for an International Criminal Court investigation to determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.

    To that long list of war crimes and crimes against humanity we can now add the atrocities committed in this recent invasion. But, with its superior public relations forces, Israel can easily deflect concern about its barbaric assault.

    And will the world call Israel’s leaders to account for their crimes? Not likely. Western leaders – including Australia’s – will merely call on Palestinians to fight fair.

    Julia Irwin is Federal MP for the NSW seat of Fowler and a member of the Parliament’s Palestinian Friendship Group.

  • Who Runs America?

    Prime minister Olmert of Israel, who has been forced to stand down because of allegations of corruption, telephoned President Bush to make the latter alter his orders to his Secretary of State to support a mild resolution in the UN Security Council that called for a ceasefire in Gaza. The barely believable transcript of Olmert’s boasting of his success is on public record. He said:

    “I [Olmert] spoke with him [Bush]; I told him: You can’t vote for this proposal. He said: listen, I don’t know, I didn’t see, don’t know what it says. I told him: I know, and you can’t vote for it! He then instructed the secretary of state, and she did not vote for it.”

    There is no other head of government in the entire world who could say such words to the president of the United States. And will Olmert’s successor be able to speak with Bush’s successor in the same way and with a similar result?

    We know the name of the next US president, but we don’t know who the next Israeli prime minister will be. It looks as if it might be a choice between two steel-minded sadists, Tzipi Livni or Binyamin Netanyahu, both dedicated haters of Palestine, Palestinians and Arabs in general. So what might they be able to say to President Obama? Will they be able to pick up the phone and call him to suggest forcefully that he alter the voting intention of the United States of America in the UN Security Council? And what would he do, if they did?

    Given the commitment to Israel of Mr Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as was obvious in their groveling speeches last year to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, there is no guarantee that they will, either of them, ever utter a word in criticism of Israel.

    There is one thing certain: the US Congress is going to continue its unconditional support for Israel, no matter what war crimes are committed by its disgusting thugs-in-uniform. The Reps need the money, after all, which they get through political action committees which are generously funded by American Jews. And they are scared to political death by the threat that pro-Israel agencies will destroy them politically if they dare say a word against Israel.

    There are very few Representatives of the people of America who would dare challenge Israel, or who might possibly criticize Israel, or who have the courage to condemn atrocities committed by Israel.

    ***

    The worst of all the barbarians who are killing children and their mothers and fathers in Gaza are the Israeli pilots who mercilessly bomb houses occupied by terrified families. And they are staunchly supported by the House of Representatives of the United States of America.

    These pilots, these vile little war-gamers of the skies, these latter-day examples of what Tom Wolfe called “The Right Stuff”, can zoom over towns full of traumatized children and happily heave and hurl their bombs and rockets to kill yet more Palestinian kids without the remotest chance of being shot down. How heroic; how truly gladiatorial. How contemptible. They are blood brothers with the pilots of the Nazis’ Stuka ground attack aircraft of yesteryear, with their terrifying sirens, who bombed columns of fleeing refugees all round Europe.

    But the US House of Representatives rushed to praise Israel, and endorse its invasion and its merciless air strikes, and committed America to a motion “Recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza, reaffirming the United States’ strong support for Israel, and supporting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.”

    ***

    Not many Americans know anything about the hideous barbarity in Gaza, because US cable networks and newspapers rarely carry pictures of disfigured blood-splashed children who have been killed, maimed or orphaned by the Israelis. But here in Europe we have access to some TV channels and newspapers that are very different from the pliant pro-Zion patsies of the major news outlets across the Atlantic.

    And if US television channels carried pictures like the ones we see, there would be such outbursts of horror and indignation that even the US Congress might be forced to condemn the Israeli fascists for their barbarity. But the all-powerful Israel lobby makes sure that little of the sort will appear.

    Who runs America?

    The only honorable members of the House, voting against unconditional support for Israeli killing of Palestinian children, were Democrats Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), Maxine Waters (California), Gwen Moore (Wisconsin), and Nick Rahall (West Virginia), along with Texas Republican Ron Paul. And Mr Kucinich put the whole case for their vote when he said

    “In Gaza, the United Nations gave the Israeli army the coordinates of a UN school, and the school was then hit by Israeli tank fire, killing about 40. The UN put flags on emergency vehicles, coordinating the movements of those vehicles with the Israeli military, and the vehicles came under attack, killing emergency workers. The Israeli army evacuated 100 Palestinians to shelter, and then bombed the shelter, killing 30 people.”

    Blunt stuff – but it cut no ice with the 390 members of the House who voted for Israel to continue its killing.

    The Israelis have killed over a thousand Palestinians, and the UN reports that at least 500 of these deaths were civilians, and that half of these were women and children. One million of Gaza’s 1.5 million people have no electricity, and about 750,000 are without water. They are existing in conditions of appalling squalor and fear, with US-supplied helicopter gunships and F-16s striking at will, and tanks and artillery destroying their houses and killing their children.

    Yet the House votes for Israel. And the President of the United States of America jumps to obey the Israeli prime minister. But will there be any change under Obama and Clinton?

    A year ago Hillary Clinton told the American Israeli Committee that “we stand with Israel because of our shared values and our shared belief in the dignity of men and women and the right to live without fear or oppression.”

    Last June Barack Obama told the American Israeli Committee “Now is the time to be vigilant in facing down every foe, just as we move forward in seeking a future of peace for the children of Israel, and for all children. Now is the time to stand by Israel . . .”

    Will they continue to support Israel, the country that has laid waste a land and murdered over 200 women and children?

    If they do, the question must be asked: Who runs America?

    Brian Cloughley‘s book about the Pakistan army, War, Coups and Terror, has just been published by Pen & Sword Books (UK) and will be published in the US in May by Skyhorse (New York).

  • War of extermination closes in

    The Palestinians are mostly silent; each man working out where he finds himself and what he’s going to do. Fearing for their wounded and fearing for those they’ve left behind, they are silent but unfailingly courteous.

    They try to answer questions. They must be exhausted? “The people of Gaza,” they say (not “we”; they’re too proud for that), “the people of Gaza just wish for an hour’s sleep.” The case you’re accompanying? “I’m here with my nephew. He’s 19. Shrapnel in his head. He was sitting with his friends. He’s a student. Architecture. The helicopter dropped a bomb and seven of the group were killed and six were injured. They found a boy’s hand on a 3rd floor balcony.”

    Later, I see a boy sitting up in bed with a bandage round his head. He has wide brown eyes flecked with green and he frowns a little, as though he was trying to remember something important. In the next bed a 12-year-old also with a bandaged head is not quite conscious yet. He is flushed and fretful.

    The Palestinians say: “This is a war of extermination.” They describe bombs which break into 16 parts, each part splintering into 116 fragments, the white phosphorus which water cannot put out; which seems to die and then flares up again.

    No one I spoke to has any doubt that the Israelis are committing war crimes. According to the medics here, to reports from doctors inside the Gaza Strip and to Palestinian eye-witnesses, more than 95% of the dead and injured are civilians. Many more will probably be found when the siege is lifted and the rubble is cleared. The doctors speak of a disproportionate number of head injuries – specifically of shrapnel lodged in the brain.

    They also speak of the extensive burns of white phosphorus. These injuries are, as they put it, ‘incompatible with life’. They are also receiving large numbers of amputees. This is because the damage done to the bone by explosive bullets is so extensive that the only way the doctors in Gaza can save lives is by amputating.

    One of the nurses said to me that the nurses and paramedics were horrified by what they were seeing. “We deal with cases all the time,” she said. “But what we’re seeing these days we’ve never seen before or imagined.”

    Upstairs a professor of economics, accompanying his brother, sees me staring at my notes and says: “Exaggerate. Whatever you write will not be as bad as the truth.”

    In the silence that followed someone put a mobile in my hand.

    “Look!” On a rubble-strewn street lay the body of a roasted and charred child. Two bones were sticking out where her thighs had been. “The dogs ate her legs,” he explains. For a moment I put a hand over my eyes. The phone goes round the table, each man gravely contemplating the burned child on the screen. Then someone asks: “What will it take to make the Israelis stop?”

    • Ahdaf Soueif is a writer whose novel The Map of Love was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker prize