Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Be advised there are graphic images of violence in this post, partly because the American TV networks have suppressed such imagery. Nothing is quite as elusive as Arab blood on American eyeballs. Now that's information warfare.
When God looks down on a "proportionate response," what does S/He see (via the agonist)? Beirut satellite image:
I won't go into details, but always look at Juan Cole's site. Some of the links come from there today. The Agonist is also essential reading, and Antiwar.com's blog. Good points about Western hypocrisy, and said today:
This whole thing was about Olmert proving he had stones as big as Sharon. (Shades of Fallujah in 2004 if you ask me.)
Pat Lang, formerly a top dog at the Defense Intelligence Agency, observes of the IDF withdrawal from Bint Jbeil:
Sounds Like They Couldn't Stand The Heat.
The IDF pulled its ground forces out of Bint Jbeil Saturday all the way back into Galilee. They fought there for days to take the town, lost some men and then started house demolitions. According to my Israeli sources, Hizbullah counter-attacked in strength starting Friday night. The next day Israel withdrew from the town.
It sounds like the politicians couldn't stand the prospect of real war. Or, more fancifully the IAF has laid an elaborate trap for HA. Some of the members of our seminar will prefer that idea.
A week ago the Jerusalem Post said that a "civil administration" (i.e. occupation) government for South Lebanon was being prepared, but it looks like it won't be needed at all.
Essential reading (and not just because I interviewed the guy!) in the Nation:
Anger in the Arab World by Rashid I. Khalidi - posted July 27
In what passes for analysis of the war involving Israel, Lebanon and Palestine in US and Israeli government circles, in the well-oiled PR machine that shills for them, and in much of the US media, we are told about a struggle against terrorism by a state under siege. The basic argument is that Israel is "responding to terrorist violence," and that the only real question is, How soon will Israeli force, backed by American determination, prevail? But this scenario has little to do with reality in the Middle East.
There will be no "destruction" of Hezbollah, and no "uprooting" of its infrastructure or that of Hamas, whatever the results of Israel's siege of Gaza and its merciless attacks against Lebanon. The rhetoric about "terrorism" has mesmerized those who parrot it, blinding them to the fact that Hezbollah and Hamas are deeply rooted popular movements that have developed as a response to occupation--of the West Bank and Gaza for nearly forty years, and of southern Lebanon from 1978 to 2000. Whatever one might say about the two movements' callousness in targeting civilians (a subject on which Israel's defenders are hardly in a position to preach), both have won impressive victories in elections and have provided social services and protection to their people.......
.....Much depends on whether an Israeli, American or Israeli-American war with Syria and, much more serious, Iran can be avoided. If escalation of what is already a major war in Gaza and Lebanon can be prevented, the conflict's regional effects will be mitigated. Much depends on how fast European public opinion, turning rapidly, expresses its revulsion at what is happening in Lebanon. Tales of the massive destruction and civilian casualties are being carried home by tens of thousands of French, British, Italian and German evacuees, many of them dual nationals, appearing on French and British TV talking about the atrocities they have seen. Much also depends on how adventurous Iran and Syria choose to be, how much punishment Hezbollah can take and still keep fighting, and how wise the Palestinians are in dealing with their difficult internal situation. And much depends on how far the man in the White House will go with his instincts. If he reins in his darker impulses and those of the Israeli general staff, which is running the show on that end of the alliance, the current slide into the abyss can yet be halted. If not, the Middle East and the United States are headed for catastrophe.
Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian: The neocon resurgence: The delusional US mindset that made the Iraq war a disaster has resurfaced in Lebanon. Lebanon Daily Star: "America's credibility will be a casualty of Israel's war: Whatever reasons arabs ever had to trust washington are going up in smoke".
Osama Bin Laden wins BIG: July 21: "Doing bin Laden's Work for Him" by Michael Scheuer, the CIA guy that ran the Bin Laden unit for years. Gotta read this one:
Most damaging for G-8 leaders will be this week's validation for Muslims of bin Laden's assertion that the West considers Muslim lives cheap and expendable. They will see that three kidnapped Israeli soldiers and several dozen dead Israelis are worth infinitely more to the West than the thousands of Muslims held for years in Israel's prisons, the hundreds already killed in Lebanon, and the eradication of Lebanon's modern infrastructure.
So bin Laden wins without lifting a finger........The impact of this Israel-Hezbollah round will not stop with the inevitable truce that will be declared after Israel ruins Lebanon. While temporary order may return to the Levant, America, Britain, and the West should not fool themselves. They have again gratuitously picked sides in a fight between two inconsequential nations; the survival of neither is a genuine national security interest for any G-8 state. Led by Washington's absurd, 30-year obsession with the minimal Shia threat to America, and blind to the hatred generated among Muslims by their foreign policies, the G-8 have mightily strengthened the enmity, durability, and resolve of the Sunni extremist movement that bin Laden leads and personifies.
Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly On-Line: First Iraq, now Lebanon: Mainstream media is making the same excuses furnished in Iraq for the destruction of infrastructure and the mass killing of civilians in Lebanon, writes Firas Al-Atraqchi.
Where were those Israeli soldiers captured? Obviously the moral foundation of the war is that Hezbollah captured those Israeli soldiers over the 'Blue Line', inside Israel. But there are stories burbling up that they were actually captured inside Lebanon on some kind of Israeli commando raid. It seems implausible, but the story is out there.
Neo-cons ginning up Iran war NOW: This is a MUST-read: Iran: The Next War:
Even before the bombs fell on Baghdad, a group of senior Pentagon officials were plotting to invade another country. Their covert campaign once again relied on false intelligence and shady allies. But this time, the target was Iran. BY JAMES BAMFORD
This story HAS to be read. It explains the AIPAC spy scandal, how Ahmed Chalabi told the Iranians that the U.S. was reading their encrypted messages, how Michael Ledeen is gearing up the Iranian opposition to stir up more trouble in Iran. This is a very big deal. I won't quote a lot from here, but this story tracks with a lot of the stuff we've tried to cover here on HongPong in the past. And now it is really getting put into motion. Some jackass on National Review denies everything.
Lebanon Daily Star reports yesterday that Israeli military casualties has forced a change in Israel's military strategy, abandoning a large expansion of ground warfare.
Middle East Report: Israel's War Against Lebanon's Shiites by Jim Quilty in Beirut - July 25. Features copies of Israeli propaganda leaflets (pictured here). Lots of details about those tricky complexities of Lebanese politics.
CSM: UN deaths prompt 'diplomatic firestorm': Annan calls attack on observers in Lebanon 'apparently deliberate,' but Israel angrily denies charge. July 28: "Israeli strikes may boost Hizbullah base: Hizbullah support tops 80 percent among Lebanese factions." July 26: Asia Times Online: Hezbollah banks on home-ground advantage By Sami Moubayed.
Antiwar.com: Be sure to read Fourth Generation War in Lebanon by Ehsan Ahrari. Justin Raimondo: Lebanon: Are the Yanks Coming? Let's hope not…. and Lebanon: Winners and Losers: Bin Laden wins, and we lose. Also, Israel is winning the battle, but not the war on July 25. However, it appears they have lost the battle too. The Fire Next Time by Osamah Khalil about the impact on the rest of the Arab world. Lawless by Nebojsa Malic. Israeli Offensive Targeting Relief Efforts? by Aaron Glantz. Five Myths that sanction Israel's war crimes by Jonathan Cook. (This article was too long though)
On Iraq check out the review of Unembedded, about freelance photo-journalists in Iraq. The photo below was in the book.
Voice of America News conveys Lebanese refugee stories:
'Tehfa says the bombs are not the only danger. Yaroun is all but cut off from the outside world. "Plus, the people die without food. There is no water, no electricity, no gas. Nothing!" she added. Tehfa literally walked to safety, wearing a pair of black flip-flop sandals and carrying nothing but her shiny black handbag. After nearly two weeks under siege, she and a group of about 70 townspeople - waving a large white flag - walked six kilometers to the nearest village, a place called Rmeich. Another Australian, Fatima Salim, managed to find a car to take her to Rmeich, and then slept in a cramped apartment with 80 other people for three days. "I lost my mother, my brother, my sister-in-law. I do not know where they are gone," she said. "Because I go out from one door, they go out from another door. And for one minute, I cannot see my parents. I do not know where they are." '
Some angry Lebanese post photos of wounded Lebanese children, and photos of Israeli children writing messages on bombs. Graphic. They also posted images of the "Marwaheen Massacre" where Israeli jets pounded and killed a fleeing Lebanese familiy earlier in fighting. The family had previously been turned away from a UN post, which is why the Blue Helmets had to pick up the pieces, literally:
Washington Post editorial from Tuesday: "Air Power Won't Do It" as I said earlier. Interview from a week ago with a former Bush hand on Lebanon in Harpers.
News updates from Wednesday, noted because the Dell this fleeing Beirut guy is heaving over the fence looks just like the old HongPong server. Civilians killed as Israelis target ambulances. From nearly a week ago, the AP was reporting the tenacity of Hezbollah fighters against Israel. Hezbollah fighters popped up in Beirut shortly after Israeli bombings without delay. On the 26th, UK Times said Ferocity of Hezbollah comes as a surprise as Israeli intelligence turns out to be incredibly shitty:
[Israeli] domestic support remains strong, but the first cracks have appeared, with media commentators accusing the army of providing an “insulting level of intelligence” about Hezbollah’s defences. As they munched watermelon yesterday, sweating Israeli soldiers were visibly shocked by the stiff opposition they had encountered, describing their Hezbollah opponents as a “guerrilla army” with landmines and anti-tank missiles capable of crippling a Merkavah battle tank.
“It was really scary. Most of our armoured personnel carriers have holes,” a paramedic told The Times after recovering three wounded tank soldiers. “It’s a very hard situation. We were in Lebanon before but it wasn’t like this for a long time.” A tank commander said: “It’s a real war.” In the Galilee town of Safed, Brigadier-General Shuki Shachar, deputy commander of the northern forces, conceded that the foe was not an easy one. “Hezbollah is a fanatical organisation. It is highly motivated to fight. I don’t want to give grades to the enemy, but they are fighting. They are not escaping,” he said. He insisted, however, that Israel was “changing the balance” after a belated recognition that the Shia group was dug in deeper than expected.
“After a few days we realised that Hezbollah prepared itself over the last six years with thousands of rockets, with hundreds of shelters, bunkers, with hundreds of rockets hid in houses of civilians inside south Lebanon,” he said. [this is one of those small things you figure out BEFORE you launch a war --Dan]
His forces had never intended to “conquer every square inch” of Bint Jbeil but had now achieved their objectives of taking the high ground. Wherever the Israel Defence Forces decided to act, the general said, “we have no problem to do so, no restrictions”.
Which is why they have already departed Bint Jbeil. Because they launched a war unaware of the honeycombs of bunkers and rockets. Hmm.
Things are definitely getting worse in Iraq but at least we got Lasers now?!! under the radar, it seems. News analysis: U.S. could face a showdown with al-Sadr, even more so as the U.S. eggs Israel on to kill more Shiites. In a shrewd move, the U.S. Army fired a gay Arab linguist. War Crimes trials for abusing and torturing detainees are a possibility. Time magazine: How the Lebanon Crisis Complicates U.S. Prospects in Iraq. Democracy Now reports: Star Wars in Iraq: Is the U.S. Using New Experimental Tactical High Energy Laser Weapons in Iraq? It doesn't quite sound like a laser. My money is on directed microwave radiation... I won't make a joke, because this is too creepy:
MAJID AL GHEZALI: Just the head was burnt, and the other parts of the bodies wasn’t anything happened on it.
NARRATOR: Al Ghezali reported that he had seen three passengers in a car, all dead, with their faces and teeth burnt, the body intact, and no sign of projectiles.
MAJID AL GHEZALI: There wasn’t any bullet. I saw the teeth, just the teeth and no eyes, all of them. With the body, nothing for the bodies. Just the teeth, and all the -- I mean, the heads were burnt.
NARRATOR: There were other inexplicable aspects. The terrain where the battle took place was dug up by the American military and replaced with other fresh earth. The bodies that were not hit by projectiles had shrunk to just slightly more than one meter in height.
......DOCTOR NO. 2: It seems to be a new weapon.
SAAD AL FALLUJI: Yes, a new weapon.
DOCTOR NO. 2: They are trying to do experiments on our civilians. Nobody can identify what the type of this weapon.
Ohohoho those crazy Iraqis and their stories. "How could such a thing be true?" says the skeptic. One possibility: half a billion dollars in spending may have produced something larger than a pen laser to fuck around with occupied Muslim populations. The last bit of the article:
WILLIAM ARKIN: So, right now you have about $50 million a year being spent on non-lethal weapons. You have about another $200 million or so being spent on high power microwaves, active denial-type systems. You’ve got probably another $100 to 200 million being spent on secret black laser programs. And then you’ve got the big lasers, the high energy laser of the Air Force and the other tactical lasers. So probably, when you add all of that up, you know, the United States is probably spending a half of a billion dollars a year right now on directed-energy weapons, you know, probably somewhere in the order of 300-400 million euros. So this is a significant amount of money. This is the size of the defense budgets of some countries in Europe.
On a lighter note, Joe Klein on Lieberman's Last Stand and another one of his friends ditches him. Polls are showing Lamont doing real, real well. Oddly, we discover that John Ashcroft was against torture, which is part of the reason they got rid of him.
Blog bits: The Guns of August on DailyKos.com was an interesting roundup of everything. William Arkin tries pretty hard at the WaPo to keep tabs on this stuff. Al Qaeda says it ought to fight alongside Hezbollah and Hamas, a surprising twist. Some general remarks from Obsidian Wings. Neo-con blather about Arab governments supporting Israel turns out to be false. Arab-American Abu Aardvark notes that the Rome conference was a failure.
Idiot on Fox talks about how great it is that Israel attacked UN peacekeeping posts. Greek antiwar protesters toppled a statue of Harry Truman (bet you didn't see that one coming). Kind of a funny video of these cute (Iranian?) girls talking about how much they like Hezbollah.
More Haaretz of course: Haaretz has an interesting feature on how Israeli intelligence agencies have attempted to wrap their heads around Hezbollah's tactical reality. Opening a window on intelligence. "No Time to Lose" by Amir Oren is about the peculiarity of the blaring American "green light" to bomb the shit out of Lebanon. The plan was 2 kilometers "cleared", but it ain't happening. Hezbollah, an empire of millions. Big questions, great frustration indeed. Moral Muddle - interesting questions at an IDF base about the morality of killing Lebanese civilians. A kind of funny article about Arab journalists. Check out The turnabout will come quickly By Meron Benvenisti, a peace guy explaining why the war will be abandoned in Israel. From Wednesday, The war so far / No goals attained By Ze'ev Schiff. Was there a proper decision process? By Aluf Benn. Has the army failed? By Amos Harel Finally,
Morality is not on our side By Ze'ev Maoz
There's practically a holy consensus right now that the war in the North is a just war and that morality is on our side. The bitter truth must be said: this holy consensus is based on short-range selective memory, an introverted worldview, and double standards.
This war is not a just war. Israel is using excessive force without distinguishing between civilian population and enemy, whose sole purpose is extortion. That is not to say that morality and justice are on Hezbollah's side. Most certainly not. But the fact that Hezbollah "started it" when it kidnapped soldiers from across an international border does not even begin to tilt the scales of justice toward our side.
German paper Der Spiegel has INTERVIEW WITH LEBANESE PRESIDENT EMILE LAHOUD: 'Hezbollah Freed Our Country'.
Mitch Prothero in Salon.com on the bullshit about Hezbollah hiding among civilians:
Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths -- the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.
But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters -- as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers -- avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators -- as so many Palestinian militants have been.
For their part, the Israelis seem to think that if they keep pounding civilians, they'll get some fighters, too.
The Anglican Christian Bishop in Jerusalem gets blown off by American Christians. Pretty scathing letter from the Bishop:
.....Movement of residents of the West Bank is difficult or impossible as “security measures” are heightened to break the backs of the Palestinian people and cut them off from their place of work, schools, hospitals, and families. It is family and community that has sustained these people during these hopeless times. For some, it is all that they had, but that too has been taken away with the continued building of the wall and check points. The strategy of ethnic cleansing on the part of the State of Israel continues.
This week, war broke out on the Lebanon-Israeli border (near Banyas where Jesus gave St. Peter the keys to heaven and earth). The Israeli government’s disproportionate reaction to provocation was consistent with their opportunistic responses in which they destroy their perceived enemy.
In her recent article, “The Insane Brutality of the State of Israel,” American, Kathleen Christison, a former CIA analyst says, “The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.” She continues, “A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer’s brutal murder of a thirteen year old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post (one of nearly seven hundred Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the Intifada began) is not a society with a conscience.” The “situation” as it has come to be called, has deteriorated into a war without boundaries or limitations. It is a war with deadly potential beyond the imaginations of most civilized people.
As I write to you, I am preparing to leave with other bishops for Nablus with medical and other emergency supplies for five hundred families, and a pledge for one thousand families more. On Saturday we will attempt to enter Gaza with medical aid for doctors and nurses in our hospital there who struggle to serve the injured, the sick, and the dying.
My plan is that I will be able to go to Lebanon next week - where we are presently without a resident priest - to bury the dead, and comfort the victims of war. Perhaps as others have you will ask, “What can I do?” Certainly we encourage and appreciate your prayers. That is important, but it is not enough. If you find that you can no longer look away, take up your cross. It takes courage as we were promised.
Write every elected official you know. Write to your news media. Speak to your congregation, friends, and colleagues about injustice and the threat of global war. If Syria, Iran, the United States, Great Britain, China and others enter into this war - the consequence is incalculable. Participate in rallies and forums. Find ways that you and your churches can participate in humanitarian relief efforts for the region. Contact us and let us know if you stand with us. I urge you not to be like a disciple watching from afar.
2 Corinthians 6.11:
“We have spoken frankly to you Corinthians, our heart is wide open to you. There is no restriction in our affections, but only in yours. In return - I speak as to children - open wide your hearts also.”
Blackwater blowback: As I just mentioned, the incident with the Blackwater guys in Fallujah was a big deal – so big, it may have crashed the American war effort altogether.
Well that took a long time. I am done blogging for a while, at least a few days. Things are too horrible to leave my mind in this frame. It's the last Saturday in July, and here I am, presenting all this death and doom. I don't want to spend precious days doing stuff like this any more.
Posted by HongPong at July 29, 2006 08:20 PM