On July 22, Jason Rezaian, an American-Iranian Washington Post reporter, was detained in Tehran by Iranian authorities along with his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, and two other people whose names have been kept private.
The reason for the arrests was never publicly announced, and today, more than four months later, everyone but Rezaian has been released.
Salehi was released on bail in October, but any hope that Rezaian would soon join his wife was dashed on Dec. 3 when Human Rights Watch reported that Rezaian has been officially charged (the Post has since corroborated the report). We still don’t know the nature of the charges—only that his detention has been extended until mid-January while the investigation against him continues.
Rezaian’s arrest, which reportedly involved a raid on his home, came as a shock to everyone who knew him. He is a friend to many (including myself) in the press, and the general public. He is the kind of person who will set aside time to talk to anyone who reaches out to him.
A native of California who was born to an Iranian father and American mother, Rezaian’s interest in Iran from an early age ultimately grew into a love affair with the country. He ended up moving there, and even though Iran has long been criticized for its record on press freedom, became the Post’s Bureau Chief in 2012. He has since covered various aspects of the Islamic Republic, from its nuclear program to the effects of the sanctions regime on average Iranians to the growing popularity of American-style burger joints.
Since he was arrested, Rezaian’s family has reserved its calls for his release to only a few outlets, including the Washington Post, and CNN, which featured Rezaian and Salehi in the Iran-focused episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown show. Rezaian and his wife were detained shortly after the show was filmed, and Bourdain has since joined Rezaian’s family in calling for his release. A Facebook page and petition have also been setup for Rezaian.
The appeals for Rezaian’s release by his family (and Bourdain) have been extremely respectful of the Iranian authorities (just watch this video-message by Rezaian’s mother, Mary). This has been the case even though his family says the lawyer they hired to represent Rezaian has not been allowed to see his client (Salehi has visited her husband since she was released) and Jason has at least one health condition that requires consistent care.
Now Rezaian’s family has issued a public statement, which I am publishing in full below. The tone of this statement is considerably stronger than his family’s previous appeals, a likely testament to their growing state of distress.
FAMILY OF WASHINGTON POST REPORTER JASON REZAIAN RESPONDS TO CHARGES AGAINST HIM BY IRANIAN GOVERNMENT
December 7, 2014
Our family is deeply saddened to confirm that, after being held in solitary
confinement without charge for 137 days, Jason Rezaian was charged with
unknown crimes by the government of Iran.In its ongoing disregard of Iran’s own laws, the Iranian judiciary has
continued to deny Jason access to legal representation, denied his request
for bail, and prevented access to review of his case file.This continued disrespect for Iran’s judicial system should be a concern not
only to the international community who are eagerly awaiting normalization
of relations with Iran, but also to all those Iranians who claim that Iran
is a country of laws which should be recognized as such by major world
powers.We urge Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to show the international
community that Iran is indeed a country that respects its laws, and order
the immediate and unconditional release of Jason and Yeganeh and end what
Iran’s own Head of the Judiciary’s Human Rights Council Mohammad Javad
Larijani, recently described as a “fiasco”.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Mo Davari
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
Like many of us, I’ve been very busy on social media since Israel began its military operation in Gaza. I see a lot of ignorant nonsense there, and it’s not limited to the pro-Israel side. I also see a lot of shoddy thinking and ignorance of the facts. Since [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
Like many of us, I’ve been very busy on social media since Israel began its military operation in Gaza. I see a lot of ignorant nonsense there, and it’s not limited to the pro-Israel side. I also see a lot of shoddy thinking and ignorance of the facts. Since I had to study up a lot of this for my job as the Director of the US Office of B’Tselem, I thought I might set the record straight.
“War crimes”
Various memes make the rounds in discussions of war crimes. One that I found particularly laughable was “Even the UN says Hamas is committing war crimes but they say Israel only might be.” I’ve also seen defenses of Hamas’ firing of missiles at civilian targets in Israel based on Palestinians’ right of self-defense.
Here is the long and short of it: War crimes are defined as “Serious violations of international humanitarian law constitute war crimes.” That’s going to encompass pretty much every violation that might become a public issue in any conflict.
International law recognizes that civilians are going to be hurt, killed and dispossessed in war. The obligation of combatants is to do all they can to minimize the death and destruction if they do need to operate in areas where it is likely that civilians will be hurt.
As a result, when Israel proclaims its innocence of violating these laws, no matter how suspicious we may be, enforcers of international law cannot declare that war crimes have been committed without an investigation. Reasonable people who are not international lawyers can make assumptions, but the investigation needs to happen, and it is always possible, especially when the conflict involves an area as densely populated as Gaza, that it will turn out that the state in question did its best to avoid civilian casualties. High civilian casualty numbers are not proof, but they obviously raise suspicions.
On Hamas’ side, this is true as well, but Hamas makes no secret of its use of weapons which, by their very nature, cannot be used in a manner that can discriminate between civilian and military targets. So, while the UN or other bodies would still investigate and make a case before taking any action, Hamas is committing war crimes. It’s not unfair to say so.
In this case, however, Israel has declared that the homes of leading Hamas activists (and those of other factions) are legitimate targets. They have, in fact, willfully bombed such houses during these engagements as a result. Unlike the 2002 assassination of Salah Shehade, where Israel claimed (falsely, many say) to have believed Shehade to be alone in the building they bombed, Israel has made no such claims this time around. Therefore, it is also not unfair to say that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, even before an investigation.
If not for Iron Dome, there would have been many more Israeli casualties
This statement seems to make sense, but the numbers don’t back it up. A study done through July 14, when rocket fire into Israel was at its most intense, showed that the number of rockets being fired from Gaza was fewer than in Operation Cast Lead and the frequency of hits was about the same.
I’m all for Iron Dome. Any defensive system whose purpose is to protect civilians is something I consider an absolute positive, and I only wish more countries would invest in such systems, endeavoring to protect, rather than avenge, their civilians. The concern that iron Dome would make Israel even more reckless and grant it even more impunity does not seem to be borne out by its actions in the current onslaught. Those actions, brutal as they are, are no worse than what Israel did in 2008 and 2012 to Gaza or what it did in 2006 to Lebanon. So, yeah, please let’s see more Iron Domes in the world.
By the same token, however, it doesn’t seem like Iron Dome is actually protecting Israeli civilians nearly as much as the rockets’ lack of any sort of targeting ability.
Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people
Opponents of Israeli policies in the United States and in Israel itself have an uphill battle against an entrenched propagandistic view of the entire conflict. We do ourselves no favors by using bombastic, easily assailable language in making our arguments.
Genocide has a specific meaning in international law. It does not mean large scale killing. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide provides that definition:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of thr group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
There is no evidence that this is what Israel is trying to do. Indeed, the best evidence that Israel is not doing this is the simple fact that the Palestinian population, in both the West Bank and Gaza, continues to grow, despite the occupation and all its concomitant hardships.
Would Israel like to find a way to get rid of the Palestinians in the West Bank and cut off Gaza? Sure, but that is not genocide, it is ethnic cleansing, and frankly, that’s bad enough. Israel has done that very gradually over the years, confiscating more and more land, forcing Palestinians into ever smaller enclaves and turning Gaza into one big open air prison.
Making claims that are contradicted by the facts, especially the weighty accusation of genocide, is irresponsible and self-defeating; it plays right into Israel’s propaganda hands.
Hamas is exercising legitimate self-defense
It is absolutely true that an occupied people has the right to resist its occupiers. It is also true that the unusual nature of Israel’s occupation makes it very difficult for guerrilla groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees and others to take any violent action that would conform to international legal standards. As international legal expert Noura Erekat puts it: “Hamas has crude weapons technology that lacks any targeting capability. As such, Hamas rocket attacks ipso facto violate the principle of distinction because all of its attacks are indiscriminate. This is not contested.”
It is also true that Israel itself does not differentiate between attacks on its civilians and its soldiers. It views them as equally illegitimate and labels it all “terrorism,” even though legally, Israeli soldiers are combatants while on duty. Take, for example, the killing of IDF soldier Natanel Moshiashvili in 2012. The IDF statement about his death plainly states: “The IDF will not tolerate any attempt to harm Israeli civilians or IDF soldiers, and will operate against anyone who uses terror against the State of Israel.”
Nonetheless, the fact that Palestinians are mostly unable to strike exclusively at Israeli military targets does not mean that it is suddenly legal to use indiscriminate weapons or to target civilians. These are war crimes, and any credible investigation must investigate both sides while also taking into account the massive differences in capabilities and power of the two. Israel must also be scrutinized more closely because it has a far greater ability to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants than Hamas.
Hamas is using human shields
Saying something over and over again doesn’t make it true, but it does make a whole lot of people believe it. For instance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu willfully and repeatedly lied to the Israeli public and the world about Hamas’ complicity in the kidnap and murder of the three young Israeli settlers, which sparked this latest round. He kept saying he had proof that he never produced, and now the Israeli police are admitting what everyone who was actually paying attention at the time knew: this was an independent act of violence.
It’s the same with the human shield argument. Like genocide, the term “human shield” has a legal definition. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, “… the use of human shields requires an intentional co-location of military objectives and civilians or persons hors de combat with the specific intent of trying to prevent the targeting of those military objectives.” Again, as Erekat wrote: “International human rights organizations that have investigated these claims have determined that they are not true.” Erekat correctly cites reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which focused on past engagements. There is also doubt being cast by journalists in Gaza today.
In fact, no evidence has ever been presented to support the accusation apart from the high number of civilian casualties and Israel’s word. On the other hand, Israel’s own High Court had to demand that Israel stop using human shields. That happened in 2005, but the practice continued.
In any case, even the presence of human shields does not absolve or mitigate Israel’s responsibility to minimize civilian casualties. Again quoting Erekat: “Even assuming that Israel’s claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties…In the over three weeks of its military operation, Israel has demolished 3,175 homes, at least a dozen with families inside; destroyed five hospitals and six clinics; partially damaged sixty-four mosques and two churches; partially to completely destroyed eight government ministries; injured 4,620; and killed over 700 Palestinians. At plain sight, these numbers indicate Israel’s egregious violations of humanitarian law, ones that amount to war crimes.”
Finally, one last point and one more citation of Noura Erekat. The claim that Israel is merely acting in self-defense fails on a number of counts. As I and others have been saying from the beginning, the Netanyahu government willfully and cynically used the murders of three Israelis as an excuse to provoke Hamas with mass arrests and widespread activities that included the deaths of nine Palestinian civilians before this operation started. That removes the self-defense argument from the start. But more than that, the Gaza Strip, despite it being emptied of settlements and soldiers, remains under Israeli control, and is thus occupied territory, contrary to Israel’s claims. Please check out Erekat’s excellent write-up of what this means for the right of self-defense. And please note, she never denies that Israel has a right to protect its own civilians, but that is not the same thing.
Photo: International and Palestinian volunteers accompanied Civil Defense and other rescue crews, as well as family members, into Shujaya, a neighborhood by the separation barrier in the east of Gaza City, in an attempt to locate survivors of overnight and ongoing shelling by the Israeli army on July 20. Credit: Joe Catron
]]>by Tyler Cullis
Today Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a rather harrowing report on a US drone strike on an alleged Yemeni wedding convoy this past December:
The [December 12] strike . . . killed at least 12 men ages 20 to 65 and wounded at least [...]]]>
by Tyler Cullis
Today Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a rather harrowing report on a US drone strike on an alleged Yemeni wedding convoy this past December:
The [December 12] strike . . . killed at least 12 men ages 20 to 65 and wounded at least 15 others, according to survivors, relatives of the dead, civil society members, and multiple media reports. The relatives said the dead included the son of the groom from his previous marriage. They said shrapnel grazed the bride under one eye, and blew her trousseau to pieces.
For advocates of the US drone program, one convenience is that areas under siege often prove inaccessible to both journalists and other civil society activists. This allows US officials to at first plausibly deny knowledge of/or participation in individual strikes and later leak to the press rosy-colored, post-hoc assessments of the strikes, without much challenge. In this way, the US public is rendered relatively immune to the human consequences of the drone program, as the victims are silenced and thus removed from the ongoing legal, ethical, and policy debates surrounding the U.S.’ targeted killing program.
Some organizations have made it a point to name the nameless. For instance, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has performed important work on tracking US drones strikes and calculating its victims, started up a project in September 2013 called “Naming the Dead,” which is aimed at recording the names of drone victims. Others, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have undertaken in-depth research and reporting to both accurately assess the civilian toll of US drone strikes and question the legal underpinnings of the US’ drone program as a whole. This work has proved vital for placing pressure on the Obama administration to declare publicly the legal and policy foundations on which its program is based.
The pressure, however, has not proven altogether successful. Despite successive rounds of official statements regarding the drone program — the latest being President Obama’s May 2013 speech at the National Defense University — the White House’s legal rationale for drone strikes remains murky at best. Also, a wide chasm continues to divide the administration’s targeted killing policy (such as the promise that civilians will go unharmed) from what is actually taking place in the field from Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. The White House has, to this day, refused to offer the legal rationale for individual strikes, as human rights groups have requested, and official post-hoc assessments of the strikes. This makes it impossible to adequately assess the administration’s compliance not only to international legal norms but also to its own “targeted killing” policies.
The initial US reaction to media reports of the drone strike now documented by HRW in Yemen was textbook. Officially, Washington denied any knowledge of or participation in the strike. Unofficially, US officials leaked to the press that all those killed in the strike were militants, targetable under the administration’s drone policy. Yemen’s government contributed to this narrative, likewise alleging that all those killed were “terrorists.” In neither case was any evidence offered to justify the characterization, but transparency was beside the point. Rather, the intended effect was to preempt allegations that civilians had been struck in the attack.
Nonetheless, protests in Rad’a, the capital of the province where the strike took place, as well as the work of Yemeni activists, pushed hard against this narrative, arguing that what was believed to be a military convoy was, in fact, nothing but a wedding procession, and that those struck were neither militants nor terrorists as US and Yemeni government officials alleged. Instead, this event was another case of a US drone strike gone terribly awry, and one that ran directly counter to US drone policy.
With its latest report, entitled, “A Wedding That Became a Funeral,” HRW confirms the basic facts of the case as they have been represented by Yemeni activists: this was indeed a wedding procession en route to the groom’s hometown for additional celebration. Whether members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) were in attendance is unclear, though as HRW astutely notes, “the burden is on the attacker” [i.e., the US] to justify the resort to lethal force and thus the lawfulness of the attack, not vice versa.
Despite US promises to undertake a review of the strike, HRW found no evidence of an ongoing internal investigation. This is particularly troubling, for as the organization notes, “the attack may have violated the laws of war . . . [and]raises serious questions as to whether US forces are complying with [US]policy requirements on targeted killings.” Following the release of the report, a Pentagon spokesperson referred reporters to statements from the Yemeni government alleging that the targets were “dangerous senior al-Qaida militants.”
The Human Rights Watch report is an important read, and one that hopefully will be widely distributed and closely parsed. So long as the pressure remains on the Obama administration to not just enunciate a restrictive targeted killing policy but to ensure internal compliance with that policy and accountability for officials who deviate from it, we are likely to see the administration take additional action to dampen public criticism. The December 12 strike in Yemen looks to be a serious case of non-compliance with both the laws of war and the US’s own drone policies, and justice for its victims will thus require strict accountability here at home.
Photo: Mousid al-Taysi near a vehicle destroyed on Dec. 12, 2013 in an alleged US drone strike. Credit: Rooj Alwazir/Al Jazeera
]]>by Jim Lobe
A Guatemalan court this afternoon found former President Efrain Rios Montt guilt of genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the indigenous Mayan Ixil population as a result of the counter-insurgency campaign he directed as president from 1982 to 1983; that is, in the middle of Elliott [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
A Guatemalan court this afternoon found former President Efrain Rios Montt guilt of genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the indigenous Mayan Ixil population as a result of the counter-insurgency campaign he directed as president from 1982 to 1983; that is, in the middle of Elliott Abrams’ tenure as the Reagan administration’s assistant secretary of state for human rights. While human rights, church groups, and the American Anthropological Association repeatedly denounced that campaign (with some actually calling it “genocide”), the administration moved during that period to restore and increase military aid to the government. In fact, after visiting personally with Rios Montt in Honduras in early December, 1982, Reagan himself declared that the born-again president was getting a “bum rap” from rights groups and journalists and that he was “a man of great personal integrity” who faced “a brutal challenge from guerrillas armed and supported by others outside Guatemala.”
Here’s what Human Rights Watch, with which Abrams clashed quite frequently over rights conditions in Central America, including Guatemala, during Rios Montt’s reign, said tonight after the verdict was announced:
Guatemala: Rios Montt Convicted of Genocide
Landmark Ruling against Impunity, Judicial Control Needed in Handling Appeals
(New York, May 10, 2013)—The guilty verdict against Efraín Ríos Montt, former leader of Guatemala, for genocide and crimes against humanity is an unprecedented step toward establishing accountability for atrocities during the country’s brutal civil war, Human Rights Watch said today.
“The conviction of Rios Montt sends a powerful message to Guatemala and the world that nobody, not even a former head of state, is above the law when it comes to committing genocide,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Without the persistence and bravery of each participant in this effort – the victims, prosecutors, judges, and civil society organizations – this landmark decision would have been inconceivable.”
Rios Montt was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the crime of genocide and 30 years for crimes against humanity in a sentence that was handed down on May 10, 2013 by Judge Yassmin Barrios in Guatemala City. In her decision, Barrios said Rios Montt was fully aware of plans to exterminate the indigenous Ixil population carried out by security forces under his command.
The genocide conviction was the first for a current or former head of state in a national court, Human Rights Watch said.
Clearly, tonight’s conviction should prove rather embarrassing for Abrams, as this genocide occurred “on his watch,” so to speak, and there’s no on-the-record indication that he ever disagreed with the defense that the administration mounted on Rios Montt’s behalf or that he opposed its repeated efforts to provide Guatemala’s army with military aid. Nor, of course, did Abrams resign in protest over those efforts.
Precisely what his stance vis-a-vis Guatemala policy was during this period remains somewhat cloudy, as the American Republic Affairs (ARA) bureau, then led by the late Tom Enders (the man who oversaw the secret bombing of Cambodia), was the main public spokesman for the administration’s policy. Hopefully, the National Security Archive, whose dogged work played a major role in making Rios Montt’s prosecution possible, will soon release declassified documents that will shed light on what Abrams did or did not do on Guatemala during this period and specifically whether he signed off on/objected to/tried to amend testimony and other public statements made by Enders and other officials. (It would be very interesting to find out whether he may have, as the chief human rights official, personally briefed Reagan before the “bum rap” statement.)
For example, after Amnesty International issued a searing report detailing 112 incidents in which from one to 100 men, women and children were reportedly massacred by Guatemalan troops, Enders sent a letter to Congress contesting the findings, noting, among other things, that Amnesty had relied on groups “closely aligned with, if not largely under the influence of, the guerrilla groups attempting to overthrow the Guatemalan government.” His letter was based on an unpublished memorandum from the U.S. embassy in Guatemala which, among other assertions, concluded that “a concerted disinformation campaign is being waged in the US against the Guatemalan Government by groups supporting the leftwing insurgency in Guatemala; this has enlisted the support of conscientious human rights and church organizations which may not fully appreciate that they are being utilized.”
At about the same time, Enders’ principal deputy, Stephen Bosworth, testified before the House Subcommittee on International Development — the administration was moving to increase balance-of-payments support to Rios Montt and lift Carter-era, human rights-related bans on U.S. support for loans from the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank — that Rios Montt was doing great things for the native population in the Ixil Triangle:
Political violence in rural areas continues and may even be increasing, but its use as a political tactic appears to be a guerrilla strategy, not a government doctrine. Eyewitness reports of women among the attackers, Embassy interviews with massacre survivors, the use of weapons not in the army inventory, and most importantly, the increasing tendency of rural villagers to seek the army’s protection all suggest that the guerrillas are responsible in major part for the rising levels of violence in rural areas.
Given what we have learned about Rios Montt’s “Beans-and-Bullets” strategy, these assertions today seem utterly laughable, if the actual events were not so terrible.
But the question remains: what was Abrams doing during this period about Guatemala. Did he review the embassy report? Did he clear Enders’ letter or Bosworth’s testimony? Was he — by all accounts, an effective bureaucratic infighter — in the loop while this genocide was taking place and the administration was pushing hard to arm the genocidaires? (We know his office received this cable.) How did he respond?
Rios Montt’s conviction may prove embarrassing not only to Abrams, but also to some of his fellow-neocons who also defended Guatemala during this period. Here’s the Wall Street Journal celebrating Reagan’s blessing as a “Guatemalan Breakthrough” (Dec 15, 1982):
Change in Guatemala would vindicate the Reagan administration’s much maligned human rights policy. Unlike the Carter administration’s confrontational posturing, the quiet argument of Reagan’s men seems to be finding an audience. Much of the changed atmosphere is undoubtedly due to the coup that installed General Rios Montt, a born-again evangelical Christian. The early promise of Rios Montt’s rule was tarnished by reports of massacres of Indians and of renewed “death squad” activity. But perhaps General Rios Montt had recognized the key point — that human rights not only make moral sense but also are the only practical base on which to build a legitimate government.
Thus General Rios Montt seems to have ordered his troops in the field to observe strict rules not to molest or steal from peasants, borrowing a page from the guerrilla textbook. At the same time, the peasants are being encouraged to join government forces in return for food and shelter, thus denying a source of manpower to the guerrillas.
Doubtless the Rios Montt approach also owes something to the way the Reagan administration is handling human rights. An absolute insistence on every detail of the most advanced democracy can prove devastating to our authoritarian friends.
Sounds a little naive in retrospect, doesn’t it?
Also likely to be somewhat embarrassed is the government of Israel which moved into the vacuum created by Carter’s and Congress’s cut-off of military and intelligence assistance and subsequently expanded its involvement with Rios Montt’s counter-insurgency efforts with the Reagan administration’s encouragement. In 1982, just before Reagan’s visit, Ríos Montt told ABC News that his success in allegedly defeating the guerrillas was due the fact that “our soldiers were trained by Israelis.” It was the same year as the Sabra and Shatila massacres by Israel-backed Phalange militiamen in Beirut. Now, its Central American client has been convicted of genocide.
]]>via IPS News
In a move certain to ratchet up already-high tensions with Iran, the administration of President Barack Obama will remove a militant anti-regime group from the State Department’s terrorism list, U.S. officials told reporters here Friday.
The decision, which is expected to be formally announced before Oct. [...]]]>
via IPS News
In a move certain to ratchet up already-high tensions with Iran, the administration of President Barack Obama will remove a militant anti-regime group from the State Department’s terrorism list, U.S. officials told reporters here Friday.
The decision, which is expected to be formally announced before Oct. 1, the deadline set earlier this year by a federal court to make a determination, was in the process of being transmitted in a classified report to Congress, according to the Department’s spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland.
The decision came several days after some 680 members of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), or People’s Mojahedin, were transferred from their long-time home at Camp Ashraf in eastern Iraq close to the Iranian to a former U.S. base in at Baghdad’s airport in compliance with Washington’s demands that the group move. The transfer leaves only 200 militants at Camp Ashraf out of the roughly 3,200 who were there before the transfers began.
Most analysts here predicted that the administration’s decision to remove the MEK from the terrorism list would only worsen already abysmal relations with Iran and possibly make any effort to defuse the gathering crisis over its nuclear programme yet more difficult.
“Delisting will be seen not only by the Iranian regime, but also by most Iranian citizens, as a hostile act by the United States,” Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst who served as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, told IPS.
“The MEK has almost no popular support within Iran, where it is despised as a group of traitors, especially given its history of joining forces with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War,” Pillar, who now teaches at George Washington University, added.
“Any effect of the delisting on nuclear negotiations will be negative; Tehran will read it as one more indication that the United States is interested only in hostility and pressure toward the Islamic Republic, rather than coming to terms with it.”
The decision followed a high-profile multi-year campaign by the group and its sympathisers that featured almost-daily demonstrations at the State Department, full-page ads in major newspapers, and the participation of former high-level U.S. officials, some of whom were paid tens of thousands of dollars to make public appearances on behalf of the MEK.
Officials included Obama’s first national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, former FBI chief Louis Freeh, and a number of senior officials in the George W. Bush administration, including his White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, attorney general Michael Mukasey, and former U.N. ambassador John Bolton.
Created in the mid-1960s by Islamo-Marxist university students, the MEK played a key role in the 1979 ouster of the Shah only to lose a bloody power struggle with the more-conservative clerical factions close to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The group went into exile; many members fled to Iraq, which they used as a base from which they mounted military and terrorist attacks inside Iran during the eight-year war between the two countries. Its forces were also reportedly used to crush popular rebellions against President Saddam Hussein that followed the 1991 Gulf War.
During a brief period of détente between Washington and Tehran, the administration of President Bill Clinton designated the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) in 1997 based in part on its murder of several U.S. military officials and contractors in the 1970s and its part in the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover, as well as its alliance with Saddam Hussein.
When U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2001, the MEK declared its neutrality and eventually agreed to disarm in exchange for Washington’s agreement that its members could remain at Camp Ashraf as “protected persons” under the Geneva Convention, an arrangement that expired in 2009.
The government of President Nour Al-Maliki, however, has been hostile to the MEK’s continued presence in Iraq. Two violent clashes since 2009 between Iraqi security forces and camp residents resulted in the deaths of at least 45 MEK members.
Last December, the UN reached a U.S.-mediated accord with the MEK to re-locate the residents to “Camp Liberty” at Baghdad’s airport, which would serve as a “temporary transit station” for residents to resettle in third countries or in Iran, if they so chose, after interviews with the UN High Commission on Refugees.
Until quite recently, however, the group — which Human Rights Watch (HRW) and a significant number of defectors, among others, have described as a cult built around its long-unaccounted-for founder, Massoud Rajavi, and his Paris-based spouse, Maryam — has resisted its wholesale removal from Ashraf. Some observers believe Massoud may be based there.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s increasingly blunt suggestions that the MEK’s failure to co-operate would jeopardise its chances of being removed from the terrorism list, however, appear to have brought it around.
The MEK claims that it halted all military actions in 2001 and has lacked the intent or the capability of carrying out any armed activity since 2003, an assertion reportedly backed up by the State Department.
Earlier this year, however, NBC News quoted one U.S. official as confirming Iran’s charges that Israel has used MEK militants in recent years to carry out sabotage operations, including the assassination of Iranian scientists associated with Tehran’s nuclear programme.
“The Iranian security establishment’s assessment has long believed that foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the CIA, Israeli Mossad, and the UK’s MI6 utilise the MEK for terror attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists, nuclear sabotage and intelligence gathering,” noted Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former senior Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator currently at Princeton University.
“Therefore, the delisting of MEK will be seen in Tehran as a reward for the group’s terrorist actions in the country,” he wrote in an email exchange with IPS. “Furthermore, Iran has firmly concluded that the Western demands for broader inspections (of Iran’s nuclear programme), including its military sites, are a smokescreen for mounting increased cyber attacks, sabotage and terror of nuclear scientists.
“Delisting MEK would be considered in Tehran as a U.S.-led effort to increase sabotage and covert actions through MEK leading inevitably to less cooperation by Iran with the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency).”
He added that government in Tehran will use this as a way of “demonstrating to the public that the U.S. is seeking …to bring a MEK-style group to power” which, in turn, “would strengthen the Iranian nation’s support for the current system as the perceived alternative advanced by Washington would be catastrophic.”
That view was echoed by the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which noted that the decision opens the doors to Congressional funding of the MEK and that leaders of the Iran’s Green Movement have long repudiated the group.
“The biggest winner today is the Iranian regime, which has claimed for a long time that the U.S. is out to destroy Iran and is the enemy of the Iranian people,” said NIAC’s policy director, Jamal Abdi.
“It will certainly not improve U.S.-Iranian relations,” according to Alireza Nader, an Iran specialist at the Rand Corporation, who agreed that the “delisting reinforces Tehran’s longstanding narrative regarding U.S. hostility toward the regime.
“Nevertheless,” he added, “I don’t think it is detrimental to U.S. interests as Tehran suspects U.S. collusion with the MEDK anyhow, whether this perception is correct or not.”
Karim Sadjadpour, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the move was unlikely to be “game-changer” in that “the MEK will continue to be perceived inside Iran as an antiquated cult which sided with Saddam Hussein during the (Iran-Iraq) war, and U.S. Iran relations will remain hostile.”
“It doesn’t help (Washington’s) image within Iran, certainly, and some Iranian democracy activists may misperceive this as a U.S. show of support for the MEK, which could have negative ramifications,” he noted.
Another casualty of the decision may be the credibility of the FTO list itself, according to Mila Johns, a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.
“The entire atmosphere around the MEK’s campaign to be removed from the FTO list – the fact that (former) American government officials were allowed to actively and openly receive financial incentives to speak in support of an organisation that was legally designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, without consequence – created the impression that the list is essentially a meaningless political tool,” she told IPS.
“It is hard to imagine that the FTO designation holds much legitimacy within the international community when it is barely respected by our own government,” she said.
No other group, she noted, has been de-listed in this way, “though now that the precedent has been set, I would expect that other groups will explore this as an option.”
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Yet here we find in a press release issued Thursday by the neo-conservative Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) — the successor organization of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) — the announcement that senior officials of the national chapter of Amnesty International (AIUSA), Human Rights Watch, and Human Rights First have signed an open letter to President Obama, apparently drafted by FPI, urging him to take a series of steps to “demonstrate your administration’s commitment to human rights issues in China” in advance of and during next week’s state visit to Washington of President Hu Jintao.
Now, I have no problem with the specific content of the letter or with the general concern expressed in it about the status of human rights observance in China. Nor do I doubt the sincerity of anyone who signed the letter. (And, given their history, I’m not so surprised that Freedom House or Reporters Without Borders would go along with this kind of thing.) But why, oh why, would serious human rights groups that derive their credibility precisely from their independence from governments or political movements hitch their wagon to an organization whose founders and directors — Bill Kristol, Bob Kagan, Dan Senor, Eric Edelman — are so closely tied to the aggressive unilateralism of George W. Bush’s first term, the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the defense of Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, and the conduct of Israel’s wars against Lebanon and Gaza?
By signing on to such a letter, these human rights groups — which do so much good work — not only lend some of their credibility to FPI and thus help rehabilitate a political movement that has long used human rights and democracy as an instrument for expanding U.S. power and undermining Washington’s perceived enemies (including the UN and international law). They also damage that same credibility by offering ammunition to those governments and others who see the human rights movement as a handmaiden of U.S. and western imperialism. (How does this advance their human rights advocacy in Iran, for example?) Would they have signed the letter — with their institutional affiliations! — if the sponsoring organization had indeed called itself the Project for a New American Century of which, of course, FPI is the reincarnation?
Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened. In July, 2009, shortly after its birth — or reincarnation — FPI published an open letter in which its 39 signatories called on Obama to take steps to show his commitment to human rights in Russia in advance of his first summit meeting with Dmitri Medvedev. Among the 39, which were dominated by the same neo-conservative crowd (James Woolsey, Josh Muravchik, Danielle Pletka, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt, etc.) that used to sign PNAC letters about Iraq, were several bona fide human-rights activists, including — albeit not in their institutional capacity — Larry Cox, AIUSA’s executive director; Mort Halperin, senior adviser of the Open Society Institute (OSI); and Stephen Rickard, OSI’s Washington director. At least, OSI appears to have begged off this latest effort.
But, as I pointed out back then, what prevents the serious human rights groups from drafting and sending their own letters? Why must they enlist themeslves in FPI/PNAC’s initiative?
]]>Here’s the Times report, by Ben Birnbaum (my emphasis throughout), minus the article’s last two [...]]]>
Here’s the Times report, by Ben Birnbaum (my emphasis throughout), minus the article’s last two paragraphs about an Iranian air defense war game:
Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said Tuesday that there were indicators that international sanctions on Iran had caused a rift between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme LeaderAyatollah Ali Khamenei.
“I personally believe they’re still intent on acquiring nuclear weapons, but also the information that we have is that they have been surprised by the impact of the sanctions,” he said. “Those measures have really bitten much harder than they anticipated, and we even have some evidence that Khamenei now is beginning to wonder if Ahmadinejad is lying to him about the impact of the sanctions on the economy and whether he’s getting the straight scoop in terms of how much trouble the economy really is in.”
Mr. Gates said “the only long-term solution in avoiding an Iranian nuclear weapons capability is for the Iranians to decide it’s not in their interest” and “everything else is a short-term solution.”
On Nov. 8, Mr. Gates cited the success of the sanctions to push back against comments from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “a credible threat of a military operation” is the only way to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.
Speculation continues to run wild over whether Israel will launch air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities if Western diplomatic and economic measures are seen as failing.
Not a word on Gates’ warning about an attack, a warning that echoes the concerns of a wide array of former top Pentagon brass and diplomats and prominent Iranian dissidents — namely, that an attack would unify Iran against the United States and destroy the nascent opposition.
Birnbaum simply doesn’t report this aspect of the talk.
Compare his story with Reuters’s lede:
Sanctions against Iran are biting hard and triggering divisions among its leadership, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday, as he argued against a military strike over Tehran’s nuclear program.
And the Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, reiterating his long-standing opposition to a military attack on Iran, said Tuesday that new sanctions led by the Obama administration are causing divisions within the Iranian leadership.
Kessler, a mere two paragraphs later, adds:
Gates, who has repeatedly warned against military strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities, said, “I personally believe they are intent on acquiring nuclear weapons…”
Lest Reuters and the Washington Post be accused of some sort of liberal bias, here’s the right-wing Israeli Jerusalem Post‘s third paragraph:
Additionally, Gates told the [audience] that a military strike would not succeed at halting Iran’s nuclear program. He said it would only result in it becoming more secretive than it already is, and strengthen the country’s unity.
While most of those pieces were longer than Birnbaum’s, it’s clear these other publications reported what was a central thrust of Gates’s answer to the question he was asked about Iranian nukes — that attacking Iran is a bad idea. Birnbaum leaves this out entirely, instead juxtaposing Gates’s recent PR work for sanctions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for a “credible military threat” against Iran. Given that Birnbaum had enough “white space” to tack on two paragraphs about Iranian wargames, it seems that brevity was not the issue, either.
The Washington Times, which until recently faced some financial problems, has a decidedly hawkish bent. Their opinion section regularly publishes some of the most belligerent voices in U.S. foreign policy. That does not necessarily reflect poorly on the newsroom; the Times has featured Eli Lake’s informative national security reporting.
I’m not as familiar with much of Birnbaum’s work, but it seems good enough. Eli Clifton, on this blog, reported an instance when the Bahraini government took issue with a diplomat’s comments to Birnbaum, but it seems to have been a standard walk-back. Our colleague Daniel Luban also took a little issue with Birnbaum’s New Republic hit piece on Human Rights Watch, but said from the get-go that Birnbaum’s piece “actually isn’t terrible, at least by the (admittedly low) standards of TNR hit pieces.” That’s pretty much how I feel about what little I’ve read.
Nonetheless, in this instance, Birnbaum’s omission raises serious questions his reporting.
]]>That said, the article actually isn’t terrible, at least by the (admittedly low) standards of TNR hit pieces. While author Benjamin Birnbaum provides a predictably anti-HRW spin to the piece, he is at least honest enough to include facts that help undercut the HRW-haters’ case. There are some interesting tidbits in this regard: for example, Marc Garlasco, the HRW military analyst who was forced out after the hardliners pounced on his penchant for collecting WWII (including Nazi) memorabilia, was apparently an internal critic of some of the organization’s criticisms of Israel — leading Birnbaum to conclude that in its zeal to discredit HRW, “the pro-Israel community had lynched one of the people at HRW who was most sympathetic to its concerns.”
Still, Birnbaum is clearly out to make the case that HRW has an anti-Israel animus — a case that proves to be rather thin, despite the piece’s length. It basically boils down to two main points. First, some principal figures in HRW’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division have a history of harsh criticism of Israeli policies. Second, some members of the HRW board, as well as founder Robert Bernstein, accuse the organization of devoting excessive attention to Israel’s misdeeds. (Bernstein leveled this accusation in a New York Times op-ed from last year; I previously criticized the piece’s argument here.)
Regarding the first point, I would simply note a quote from the article by MENA head Sarah Leah Whitson, a frequent target of the hardliners.
“For people who apply for jobs to be the researcher in Israel-Palestine, it’s probably going to be someone who’s done work on Israel-Palestine with a human rights background,” [Whitson] explained. “And guess what? People who do work with a human rights background on Israel-Palestine tend to find that there are a lot of Israeli abuses. And they tend to become human rights activists on the issue.”
On some level, whether or not one thinks that the backgrounds of HRW’s MENA staffers are problematic simply boils down to one’s opinions about the broader Israeli-Palestinian and Israel-Arab conflicts. For those who think that Israel is primarily an aggrieved and innocent party in the conflict, it may seem that a history of criticizing Israeli policies is irrefutable evidence of anti-Israel bias. For those, however, who accept that Israel’s human rights record during the occupation and its recent wars has been poor, it only stands to reason that HRW’s staffers have criticized it. Human rights workers should be unbiased, but this does not mean that they must be “impartial” in the sense of allotting equal criticism to all sides — on the contrary, part of their job is to decide which abuses are most conspicuous and most remediable. The notion that HRW staffers must balance every criticism of Israel with a matching criticism of Palestinians is reminiscent of nothing so much as the “he-said, she-said” style of domestic political reporting so common in the mainstream media, in which the typical story simply repeats Democratic and Republican talking points verbatim without delving into which ones are actually true.
As for the internal criticisms by various HRW board members, I don’t have inside knowledge about any of the parties. Still, anyone who spends much time in well-to-do East Coast Jewish circles will note the prevalence of the PEP (Progressive Except for Palestine) personality trait. This is the familiar type who is relentlessly liberal on every domestic issue, overflowing with compassion for the people of Sudan and Zimbabwe and Burma and so on, but strangely defensive — not to say militant — when the subject comes to Israel. Given the wealthy New York philanthropic circles from which the HRW donor base (and board) is disproportionately drawn, it is hardly surprising that there would be a few disgruntled PEP types among the organization’s higher-ups who are willing to go public with their criticisms. (Bernstein’s own criticisms in his Times op-ed were, as noted, quite poorly argued, and showed telltale signs of PEP-itis.)
The larger context of this latest attack is, of course, the broader assault on human rights groups critical of Israel. While I suspect that HRW will not suffer measurably from TNR’s would-be expose, it and other rights groups can surely expect more attempts to discredit them so long as they persist in their criticism.
]]>This latest attack on the Israeli human rights sector comes in the context of an ugly smear campaign launched against the New Israel Fund, the leading progressive Israeli funding organization, by the right-wing group Im Tirzu. The lowlight of the campaign was a full-page ad in the Jerusalem Post attacking NIF head Naomi Chazan, the former deputy speaker of the Knesset. The ad — “reminiscent of Der Sturmer,” in Didi Remez’s words — labeled Chazan “Naomi Goldstone-Hazan” and showed her wearing a horn. (Remez and co. have been doing the best reporting on the war against human rights NGOS over at Coteret.)
This stepped-up attack on human rights groups is a reminder of the fundamental disingenuousness of the argument, frequently made by Israel’s hardline apologists, that international human rights groups should butt out due to Israel’s own vibrant human rights sector. Former Human Rights Watch chairman Robert Bernstein, for instance, attacked his former organization last year for its reporting on Israel, arguing that Israel’s open society and plethora of human rights organizations made international investigation redundant and that resources would be better spent on Arab countries.
But although the hardliners may sing the praises of the Israeli human rights sector in the international context in order to discredit the likes of Goldstone and HRW, one finds that — with few exceptions — they tend to be the same people leading the charge domestically against these very same human rights groups. It is not that they believe that criticism of Israel’s human rights record should be left to B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, rather than Goldstone and HRW; quite obviously, if Gerald Steinberg et al got their way there would be no criticism of Israel’s human rights record whatsoever.
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