Eyewitness in Gaza

Death in Gaza
Channel 4 Documentary, 25 May

James Miller was a talented cameraman who turned his lens on Gaza and died in May 2003. The film was finished with the help of friends, family and associates.

The doc was pretty good, apart from the regular inclusion of dramatic breaks and mood music - the topic of a journalist's death among a thousand others in the Rafah ghetto is clearly far too insubstantial to carry itself.

The sub-Massive Attack mood swell certainly detracted from the significance of a foreign cameraman being shot dead with apparent impunity by Israeli (Arab) soldiers in an APC. White flags and media markings meant nothing. Interesting to note that a significant minority of Israeli soldiers (especially those posted to places like Rafah) are Arabs. Not on their National Service I suspect. To date no-one has been held accountable for Miller’s death. Surprises.

Miller had been focusing on 12-year-old bezzies Ahmed and Mohammed and 16-year-old Najla. The education kids receive in Rafah and elsewhere is tainted by the paramilitaries’ hands which fund classes and ensures a conveyor belt of martyrs. Particularly in Rafah, Palestinians are the living dead, ensnared in the politics of religious machismo and historical genocide. Martyrdom is seen as a glorious choice. No wonder Sharon is upping the ante every day – the Palestinians are a brutalised people who will take generations to recover from generations of persecution; bit like the Jewish diaspora post-WW2. Sorry, I just remembered, I can't say that because I am in a museum demonstrating anti-Semitism whenever I use such words..

What was very emotive was the widescreen shots of a kid’s funeral – the umpteenth death in Najla’s extended family. The march and the rhetoric from the loudspeakers is one of defiant celebration; the boy is to be venerated for his frontline death. Where Sharon provokes, the Palestinians respond in kind. The intifada is unflinching. Concessions scarce. The irony is that Gaza is a shithole that only hardline Jewish settlers on its coast would want to stay in. If the Occupied Territories ever acceded to statehood, how would the isolated Gaza ever work with the West Bank?

Ahmed was so affected by Miller’s death he eschewed the path of the martyrs and decided to become a cameraman. An insignificant decision among the thousands, but a message of hope was the message.

Israel this week admitted it was only pausing for breath in its obscene ‘Operation Rainbow’ – the Rafah offensive that has seen scores of kids die and thousands left homeless – the voiceover on the end credits said as much. Even Israeli Minister Tommy Lapid said the offensive was a grim reminder of the holocaust. The IDF can legitimately go after weapons smugglers/kill jihad leaders/seal off tunnels but once again it has far exceeded the terms of engagement. In such a climate of aggression and inevitable resistance, Ahmed’s volte-face is a tiny gesture relevant only to his life and the film’s closure.

  ¶ 1:25 PM

  Iraqi smarting after feeling back of old mate’s hand

"The Interior Ministry had nothing better to do than to ransack my office and vandalize my belongings. This will happen to any other political party that opposes the United States. We avoided by a hair's breadth an armed clash between the police and my guards. We could have had a lot of people killed" Ahmad Chalabi

Ahmad Chalabi was the key Iraqi National Congress exile who persuaded the Project American madmen that not only that their cause of invading Iraq was a good idea, but also that it was justified because Saddam was armed to the teeth with more than a packet of sarin. Chalabi also assured such a ‘liberation’ would be welcomed and that when he seized power with US help, non-aggression deals would be done with Israel.

Fourteen months on from the start of operations, and the reality is different. Chalabi has as much credibility in the country as the Americans – no surprise there. UN man Brahimi has advised that governing council members be excluded from the new administration (a wish specifically targeting members like Chalabi) and he has seen his proposal that no Baathists/Republican guards be used in security dismissed as impractical. Alienated and with his American financial backing withdrawn, it seems as though Chalabi, ever the smooth operator, may have been passing information to Khatami of Iran. Time for the CPA to act then. And fast. etc.

"A small group of people were detained by these criminals and tortured," said Hussain al-Moathin, a judge in Iraq's new Central Criminal Court, after the raid. "Also, there have been a number of incidents of kidnapping and killing someone for personal purposes. And they have also captured or took over some government facilities."

In this context it is not odd at all that Chalabi has been playing hardballs with the US, and expressing divergent views on the transition of power. It must be fairly easy to criticise the US after the receipt of millions of dollars for advice, from the posh Mansoor district. Whatever happens, the Tigris/Euphrates would have to freeze over first before he gets any popular support.

Chalabi was on the radio this morning and he is a slippery fucker. Just the sort of good old boy the US thought they could use, sorry, trust, but his info was cak and he was clearly exploiting them as much as they him.

Playing the nationalist card is a pretty transparent ploy on his part. I don't know where the suggestion that somehow he is conducting/obstructing an inquiry into the food-for-oil UN programme has come from but, of course, it is couched in intentionally ambiguous terms so that he can claim he is exposing the ‘abuse’ of ‘the Iraqi people’ which the UN programme constituted or exposing Saddam's abuse of the programme, depending on who he's talking to.

He is a businessman first and foremost. The US raiders could also have asked him why during the 1990s he had to flee Iraq through Jordan in the boot of a car when large sums from a bank he was involved in mysteriously disappeared...

http://www.counterpunch.org/chalabi05202004.html

  ¶ 12:08 PM

  Words of mass deception: Reflections on the prisoner torture revelations

1) Systematic abuse by khakied twats, whether in official army legion or outsourced enterprise, is no surprise. Check the CIA torture manuals that have been regularly produced since WW2 and the portrayal of Arabs and foreigners generally in the media of the greatest multi-ethnic democracy in the world.

2) Abuse misuse. Although the impression of Rumsfeld being held accountable for this is being given, he has already successfully altered (or is that censored?) the language used by (most of) the media to describe these incidents incident by asserting that it isn't torture but ‘abuse’. As Donald ‘Rumstud’ has a well documented grasp of semantics, grammar and linguistics, I think we can all agree that he is right and we are wrong and adjust the language of our reportage/opinions and comment on this incident accordingly. At least that’s what seems to have been the collective editorial consensus. Most attractive are the papers that highlight this pedantic prevarication from Rumsfeld and then proceed to refer to the torture in all subsequent reports as 'abuse' (Guardian, Independent, Times). Best example of this is from the loyally outraged Tallahassee Democrat: ever in denial, Rumsfeld refused to call what happened at Abu Ghraib prison “torture,” but the 53-page report by Army Gen. Antonio Taguba contradicts him.

Quoting several witnesses, Taguba charges that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." ‘Abuses’ included: punching, slapping and kicking detainees; arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them; forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick; positioning a naked detainee on an MRE box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes and penis to simulate electric torture.

If that's not torture, I don't know what is.

As if that's not bad enough, now we learn that the pattern of abuse is even more widespread. It wasn't limited to one prison, nor to Iraq. The Army is also investigating 25 cases of suspicious deaths of inmates in Iraq and Afghanistan, two of which have already been identified as cold-blooded murder of prisoners by American military guards.

Bush was right to condemn the abuses, even to go on Al-Arabiyya and the (US-sponsored) Al-Hurra channels. And the Army was right to file charges against six officers involved, while reprimanding seven others. But unfortunately the damage has already been done, to the military and to the country, and we can take their preaching about ‘civilised’ values with even bigger pinches of salt. Ahead of the 30 June transition, opposition will grow. Iraq will be further away from any normalisation. Other than Saddam Hussein's retaking power, nothing could be worse for the image of the US around the world.

3) The flouting of the Geneva Convention (again), Which was consistently (and rightly) used to bring pressure to bear on the Vietnamese when they had US PoWs. Oh sorry, yes, these are not soldiers, they are Iraqis unfortunate enough to have a point of view on totalitarian Baathist dictator Saddam being replaced by a proxy military dictatorship, brought to them by the brand leader among western christian democracies. The nerve ("will be severed if you don't dance for me buster!" – prod)

http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/8607028.htm
http://www.alhurra.com/
the TORTURE pictures: http://www.thememoryhole.org/
  ¶ 3:36 PM