John Crewdson

Chicago Tribune / January 8, 2007

(MCT)

MILAN, Italy - The CIA chief in this northern Italian city opposed the intelligence agency’s planned abduction of a radical Muslim cleric as ill-conceived and counter-productive, according to evidence gathered by prosecutors here.

Had the abduction of Abu Omar been stopped, the CIA would have been spared what has become one of the most embarrassing episodes in its post-Sept. 11 war on terror.

And Robert Seldon Lady, the now-retired Milan CIA chief, would likely still be living with his wife in the Italian villa they bought with their life savings, high on a hillside overlooking a lush green valley with long, straight rows of vines that provide the grapes for Asti’s famous sparkling wines.

Instead, Lady is a fugitive from Italian justice, one of 25 past and present CIA operatives charged with the kidnapping of Abu Omar, whose given name is Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr.

A preliminary hearing in the case begins here Tuesday. Lady and the other Americans are not expected to attend. All would be subject to arrest the moment they set foot in Italy, or any of the other 26 member countries of the European Union.

But Lady, who is believed to be living somewhere in the United States, is the only defendant who had to leave a picturebook retirement villa behind. Says a former CIA colleague: “Everybody feels bad that Bob has been left holding the bag.”

After simmering for nearly three years, the unparalleled investigation is about to come to a rolling boil here in the massive Tribunale di Milano, the first case in anyone’s memory in which CIA operatives have been charged with non-espionage-related crimes.

The evidence that will be laid out in the preliminary hearing is more than the story of the CIA’s lax “tradecraft” in abducting Abu Omar in February 2003, a remarkable degree of sloppiness that allowed the Milan police to unravel an operation costing hundreds of thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

For the future of American intelligence and the war on terrorism, the most consequential revelations may concern schisms within the CIA over the value and risks of “rendition,” the agency’s euphemism for its once-secret practice of snatching suspected terrorists abroad and transporting them to countries where they are likely to be interrogated under torture.

An Italian intelligence official’s recollection that the CIA’s Lady opposed the abduction from the start is perhaps the most startling disclosure buried in the mountains of evidence gathered by Deputy Chief Public Prosecutor Armando Spataro and his investigators.

Spataro’s evidence indicates that Lady was overruled by his immediate boss, the chief of the CIA’s station in Rome. The evidence also suggests that the Rome chief, then considered a rising star within the agency, overstated the threat posed by Abu Omar in obtaining approval for the abduction from CIA higher-ups in Washington.

A veteran senior CIA official who has been interviewed about the Abu Omar rendition by the CIA’s independent Office of Inspector General said an internal review of what went wrong in Milan had generated tension within the agency.

“All of a sudden people are having trouble remembering meetings they were in,” he said.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., the White House and the highest levels of the CIA have signaled strong support for a new genre of “paramilitary” intelligence-gathering operations, of which rendition is only one.

But not everyone at CIA headquarters shares that enthusiasm, and there are signs that the pendulum is swinging back.

Last week, Gen. Michael Hayden, the CIA director, told CIA employees they had been given a “mandate” on the collection of human intelligence through the cultivation of informers and sources - a practice at which the agency traditionally has excelled.

The veteran senior CIA officer quoted earlier in this report, who like others of his generation spent much of his career recruiting human spies abroad, expressed skepticism about “all this paramilitary stuff,” declaring that “We never got any good (intelligence) product from a rendition.”

Lady, the former Milan CIA chief who fled Italy after discovering that he was a target of the kidnapping investigation, has been offered an opportunity to testify for the prosecution in return for a promise that, under a new Italian law, he will not have to serve time in prison even if he is convicted.

Lady’s Italian lawyer, Daria Pesce, declined to make her client available for an interview with the Chicago Tribune but said she had advised him to accept the prosecution’s offer. He has until the conclusion of the preliminary hearing at the end of February to make his intentions known to the prosecutors.

At the moment, none of the two dozen other CIA defendants - all except Lady represented by court-appointed lawyers who say they have had no contact with their clients - is expected to return voluntarily to Milan to stand trial.

The Italian Justice Ministry has not yet forwarded to Washington a request from the court in Milan that the American defendants be formally extradited. But the presence of the American defendants is not crucial to the prosecution’s case.

Investigators here have compiled thousands of pages of documents and testimony from past and present officials of SISMI, the CIA’s Italian counterpart. Several of them have acknowledged collaborating with the Americans in planning Abu Omar’s rendition.

If the court agrees, Spataro can try the CIA operatives in absentia. Even so, there will be live defendants in the dock: Italy’s former top spymaster, Nicolo Pollari, removed in November from his post as chief of SISMI, and four of Pollari’s former aides, all charged with having known about and supported the CIA’s kidnapping plot.

Like all CIA employees, Lady signed a secrecy agreement upon joining the CIA, and he is said to be concerned that by testifying he might violate the agreement and become liable for criminal prosecution in the U.S.

However, Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel who sometimes advises the Tribune on legal matters, said in an interview that the agreement is aimed at limiting what CIA employees can publish while in government or after retirement, and that it provides for civil, rather than criminal, penalties.

The most the CIA can do under the agreement, Smith said, is sue a CIA author to recover the profits from a book or other publication that has not been vetted by the agency in advance. Veteran CIA officers said they could remember only one case in the agency’s nearly 60-year history in which the agreement had been invoked in court.

Thus far the prosecutors have received no indication of what Lady has in mind.

Among Lady’s responsibilities in Milan were maintaining contact with the local police and their anti-terrorist unit, known as DIGOS, which had Abu Omar under close surveillance because of his suspected role in helping young European Muslims make their way to Iraq to take up arms against the expected allied invasion.

According to a DIGOS commander, the Italians were sharing the “take” from that surveillance with Lady. Then, in the fall of 2002, Lady was told that the CIA wanted to take Abu Omar out of circulation.

Luciano Pironi, an officer in the Carabinieri, Italy’s military police, who served as an informal liaison with the CIA in Milan, told prosecutors that, as explained to him by Lady, Abu Omar was to be temporarily “relocated” while efforts were made to recruit him as an informer.

The idea, according to Pironi, was that Abu Omar’s collaborators would believe he had been abducted and then returned home a few days later - never suspecting that he had agreed to work for the CIA. Pironi is also charged in the abduction.

In a separate conversation with Stefano D’Ambrosio, then Lady’s counterpart as the SISMI chief in Milan, Lady identified the CIA’s Rome station chief as the person who devised the Abu Omar rendition scheme, D’Ambrosio told prosecutors.

D’Ambrosio’s SISMI superiors later confirmed to prosecutors that the initiative to “render” Abu Omar had come from the Rome station chief.

In his closed-door testimony to investigators, D’Ambrosio quoted Lady as saying that CIA operatives already were in Milan, posing as tourists and staying at some of Europe’s most expensive hotels while monitoring Abu Omar’s movements in preparation for the snatch.

The actual abduction, Lady reportedly said, would be carried out by “the heavies,” one of the CIA’s elite Special Operations Groups composed mostly of former Army Green Berets, Delta Force operators and Navy SEALs.

According to D’Ambrosio, Lady made no secret of his opinion that the rendition of Abu Omar was a bad idea. Among his other concerns, D’Ambrosio said, Lady worried that the CIA would anger DIGOS by abducting the target of one of its major investigations without its knowledge, damaging both a productive surveillance and an excellent working relationship.

Removing Abu Omar from the picture, moreover, meant DIGOS would have to redouble its efforts to figure out who had taken his place as one of the main Italian contacts recruiting “foreign fighters” for Iraq.

D’Ambrosio told the prosecutors that when he agreed with Lady that the Abu Omar rendition made no sense, Lady spread his arms in despair, explaining that the operation had support at the highest CIA levels.

Under guidelines established after Sept. 11, each proposed rendition must be approved at several levels within the CIA, but not by the White House itself. The veteran senior CIA official said one of those who signed off on the Abu Omar abduction was Stephen Kappes, at the time the agency’s associate deputy director for operations and currently its No. 2 official.

Through a CIA spokesman, Kappes declined to be interviewed for this article. The CIA has refused to comment on any aspect of the Abu Omar case or to acknowledge that it played a role in the Milan rendition.

Had he known that Lady objected to the Abu Omar kidnapping, the veteran CIA officer said, “I’d have stopped it.”

But he said neither he nor anyone else whom he was aware of at CIA headquarters had been told that Lady harbored reservations. He said that it would have been unlike Lady to have gone directly to headquarters behind the Rome chief’s back.

D’Ambrosio recalled thinking that Lady had told him about the planned Abu Omar rendition in hopes that once SISMI became aware of what the CIA had in mind, it would object and stop the operation.

As he believed Italian law required him to do, D’Ambrosio informed his SISMI superiors that the CIA was planning a kidnapping on Italian soil.

But D’Ambrosio was unaware of what would be alleged later by the prosecutors: that SISMI officials - allegedly including the SISMI official to whom D’Ambrosio made his report and SISMI director Pollari - were not only aware of the impending abduction but had pledged to help the CIA.

Within a few weeks, D’Ambrosio was abruptly replaced as the SISMI chief in Milan.

The Rome station chief had compiled an excellent record as an agent-handler in Pakistan and India, the veteran CIA official said. But D’Ambrosio said Lady made clear that his opinion of his boss as a terrorism fighter was not high.

“What do you expect someone who is a Buddhist, burns incense in his office, and listens to the music of Bob Marley, to know about terrorism?” D’Ambrosio quoted Lady as saying.

Other CIA sources described Lady’s former boss as something of an eccentric who maintained a shrine to the late rock musician Jimi Hendrix in his office at the intelligence agency’s headquarters.

By late summer of 2003, his four-year tour as Rome station chief at an end, Lady’s boss was promoted to a senior position at CIA headquarters.

CIA personnel working under diplomatic cover who played a part in the Milan rendition were reassigned to other U.S. embassies and consulates abroad.

The deep-cover surveillance teams that had patiently shadowed Abu Omar through the neighborhoods of Milan also disappeared from Italy, driving their rented cars across the Alps and fading back into the twilight world of phony passports and fabricated identities whence they had emerged.

The only one left in Italy was Robert Lady, who retired from the CIA at the end of 2003 and took up full-time residence with his wife in their villa.

Eighteen months later, the Milan police, headed by Spataro’s lead investigator, Inspector Bruno Megale, appeared at the villa to seize the hard drives from Lady’s personal computers and boxes of documents stacked in his garage.

Lady’s wife was there but Lady was gone, having retreated to Honduras, where he had grown up as the son of a mining engineer.

As soon as the police left, Martha Lady called her husband to report what had happened. The police were tapping their phone.

“Hear me out and don’t say anything,” she began, according to a transcript of the call. “They came to the house today, the Milan police, and they seized stuff. They looked everywhere, outside, inside, and they took off with everything they found, your PC and the hard drives in your office.

“They took all your documents and floppy disks. They showed me the judge’s warrant. Megale was also there and others whom I’d never seen, but they knew you. It’s bound to become public news tomorrow in the press.”

“And they found nothing?” Lady asked.

“What are they supposed to find if there’s nothing to find?” his wife shot back.

But there were things to find. One hard drive contained a surveillance photograph of Abu Omar walking at almost the precise spot where he would be abducted a few days later.

Another contained travel reservations for a visit by Lady to Cairo four days after Abu Omar’s arrival there.

Also on one of the hard drives was an e-mail from a former CIA colleague. The woman had just received an e-mail warning “Italy, don’t go there,” and was worried about Lady.

“I was truly concerned,” the woman wrote, “that you were sitting in some Italian holding cell.”

How the U.S. Is Losing the PR War in Iraq

Insurgents using simple cell-phone cameras, laptop editing programs and the Web are beating the United States in the fierce battle for Iraqi public opinion.

Scott Johnson

Newsweek / January 8, 2007

Jan. 15, 2007 issue - For nearly four years, U.S. military officials have briefed the Baghdad press corps from behind an imposing wooden podium. No longer. Last week U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell relaxed with reporters around a “media roundtable.” He replaced the cumbersome headset once used for Arabic translations with a discreet earpiece. He cut short his opening statement, allowing for more back-and-forth banter. Yet even as Iraq emerged from the deadliest month in 2006 for American soldiers, Caldwell maintained the relentlessly upbeat patter that has come to characterize the briefings. “The key difference you’re going to see in 2007,” he said proudly, “is this is truly the year of transition and adaptation.”

Another year, another message. In the United States this week, President George W. Bush’s speech laying out his new strategy for Iraq will be scrutinized for its specifics—the numbers of an anticipated troop surge, the money for reconstruction and jobs programs. But at least as critical to success may be whether Bush is convincing. A draft report recently produced by the Baghdad embassy’s director of strategic communications Ginger Cruz and obtained by NEWSWEEK makes the stakes clear: “Without popular support from US population, there is the risk that troops will be pulled back … Thus there is a vital need to save popular support via message.” Under the heading DOMESTIC MESSAGES, Cruz goes on to recommend 16 themes to reinforce with the American public, several of which Bush is likely to hit: “vitally important we succeed”; “actively working on new approaches”; “there are no quick or easy answers.”

What’s even more telling is that the IRAQI MESSAGES—the very next section—are still “TBD,” to be determined. Indeed, the document so much as admits that despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars, the United States has lost the battle for Iraqi public opinion: “Insurgents, sectarian elements, and others are taking control of the message at the public level.” Videos of U.S. soldiers being shot and blown up, and of the bloody work of sectarian death squads, are now pervasive. The images inspire new recruits and intimidate those who might stand against them. “Inadequate message control in Iraq,” the draft warns, “is feeding the escalating cycle of violence.” (A U.S. Embassy spokesperson claims the document reflects Cruz’s personal views, not official policy.)

Sunni insurgents in particular have become expert at using technology to underscore—some would say exaggerate—their effectiveness. “The sophistication of the way the enemy is using the news media is huge,” Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, told NEWSWEEK just before he returned to the United States. Most large-scale attacks on U.S. forces are now filmed, often from multiple camera angles, and with high-resolution cameras. The footage is slickly edited into dramatic narratives: quick-cut images of Humvees exploding or U.S. soldiers being felled by snipers are set to inspiring religious soundtracks or chanting, which lends them a triumphal feel. In some cases, U.S. officials believe, insurgents attack American forces primarily to generate fresh footage.

Guerrillas have always sought alternative technologies to undermine their better-equipped enemies. What’s different now is the power and accessibility of such tools. Production work that once required a studio can now be done on a laptop. Compilation videos of attacks on U.S. forces sell in Baghdad markets for as little as 50 cents on video CDs. Advancements in cell-phone technology have made such devices particularly useful. Their small video files—the filming of Saddam Hussein’s hanging took up just over one megabyte—are especially easy to download and disseminate. “Literally, it’s only hours after an attack and [the videos] are available,” says Andrew Garfield, a British counterinsurgency expert who has advised U.S. forces in Baghdad. “You can really say it’s only a cell-phone call away.”

What the insurgents understand better than the Americans is how Iraqis consume information. Tapes of beheadings are stored on cell phones along with baby pictures and wedding videos. Popular Arab satellite channels like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya air far more graphic images than are typically seen on U.S. TV—leaving the impression, say U.S. military officials, that America is on the run. At the extreme is the Zawra channel, run by former Sunni parliamentarian Mishan Jibouri, who fled to Syria last year after being accused of corruption. (Jibouri says he’s being persecuted for political reasons, and can return to Iraq whenever he wants.) Since November the channel has been spewing out an unending series of videos showing American soldiers being killed in sniper and IED attacks. The clips are accompanied by commentary, often in English, admonishing Iraqis to “focus your utmost rage against the occupation.” Among Sunnis and even some Shiites, Zawra has become one of the most popular stations in Iraq. “I get e-mails from girls in their 20s from Arab countries; some of them are very wealthy,” Jibouri boasts. “Some offer to work for free, some offer money.”

The U.S. military’s response, on the other hand, usually sticks to traditional channels like press releases. These can take hours to prepare and are often outdated by the time they’re issued. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, director of the military’s press operations in Baghdad until this past September, complains that all military-related information has to be processed upward through a laborious and bureaucratic chain of command. “The military wants to control the environment around it, but as we try to [do so], it only slows us down further,” he says. “All too often, the easiest decision we made was just not to talk about [the story] at all, and then you absolutely lose your ability to frame what’s going on.”

An even bigger problem, say other U.S. officials, may be the message itself. The videos on Zawra are powerful precisely because they confirm the preconceptions many Iraqis have about the occupation. Col. William Darley, editor of the influential Military Review at the Combined Arms Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kans., argues that merely changing podiums in the briefing room misses the point. “You can cook up a kind of shrewd, New York City-style advertising campaign for a candy bar, and if the candy bar tastes lousy, you can’t sell it,” says Darley. “If Iraq has no electricity, spotty medical care, no security, then [we] cannot succeed.”

The consequences of losing the propaganda battle are real. “One of these videos is worth a division of tanks to those people,” says Robert Steele, a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer. Not only do the insurgent videos draw recruits and donations, they don’t give ordinary Iraqis much incentive to cooperate with the Americans. Videos put out by sectarian death squads, like the one shown to NEWSWEEK by the watchdog SITE institute in which a Sunni militiaman saws the head off a Shiite prisoner with a five-inch knife, enrage the targeted community. The release of the ghoulish video of Saddam’s hanging prompted thousands of Sunnis to protest in Anbar province. Residents of Fallujah—the target of a multimillion-dollar hearts-and-minds campaign—renamed the city’s main thoroughfare the Street of the Martyr Saddam Hussein.

The damage goes beyond Iraq. Al Qaeda’s media arm, As-Sahab (”The Cloud”) has similarly improved the quality and frequency of its videos; the group, says former State Department adviser Philip Zelikow, uses “the Internet to provide a sense of virtual identity” now that its Afghan training camps have largely been destroyed. The question is how to fight back, when today’s most powerful technologies—the Web, cell phones—are better suited to small, nimble organizations. Back in the 1930s national leaders could almost wholly control the framing of their messages, says Donald Shaw, a professor of media theory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has written about reforms for military public-affairs officers. But now, “the podium has lost its influence.” For those who once stood behind it, that message at least is very clear.

With Michael Hastings in Baghdad and Benjamin Sutherland in Treviso

Bob Geiger / January 8, 2007 

Senator Joe Biden (D-DE), the new Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has announced a tentative schedule for hearings to investigate the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war and to examine further options to free the United States from that quagmire.

“The purpose of these hearings will be to seek an answer to the question currently dominating the national debate: what options remain to secure America’s interests in Iraq? Where do we go from here?” said Biden.

Biden, who just yesterday announced that he will seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, will be surveying a wide range of opinions on how to move forward in Iraq and has summoned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to testify about the conduct of the war until now.

The Delaware Senator has already said that he is opposed to the idea of a “troop surge,” which the White House is expected to announce this week and that he believes escalating U.S. presence in Iraq will do nothing to end America’s disastrous involvement there.

“We should be drawing down troops gradually, forcing the Iraqis to meet their own needs to end this civil war by a political agreement,” Biden said recently.

And, while Richard Lugar (R-IN), the ranking Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee, says he is in favor of the hearings, it’s important to remember that Lugar chaired that committee for two years in the do-nothing Republican Congress and did little to question why the war was going from bad to worse.

In contrast, Biden has been clamoring for such hearings for a long time and insists that he will show the leadership that’s been missing on the committee. He also believes oversight has become even more important now that the White House appears unwilling to admit what a mess Iraq has become and Bush gives clear signs that he is simply biding his time until he leaves in January of 2009.

“I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost,” Biden said last week. “They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy — literally, not figuratively.”

The Foreign Relations Committee has already begun assembling quite a roster of witnesses to join Rice, including former national security advisers and secretaries of state, Brent Scowcroft, Sandy Berger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright and George Shultz.

And, as if these hearings don’t already provide enough basis for drama, two other factors may make them even more compelling.

The first is the fact that the Foreign Relations Committee just happens to be stacked with people who may also be seeking the presidency in 2008. Also involved in these hearings with Biden will be John Kerry (D-MA), Barack Obama (D-IL), Chris Dodd (D-CT) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE). All of them — in addition to Biden — are against any escalation of U.S. involvement in Iraq and may also use the hearings as a high-profile springboard to their own presidential campaigns. Throw in freshman Senator (and highly-decorated Veteran) Jim Webb (D-VA) who has also been assigned to the committee, Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and there may be even more potential for some fiery rhetoric.

The other interesting dynamic is the timing of the hearings as they will coincide with both Bush’s speech this week — in which he is expected to announce the ill-advised Iraq escalation — and his State of the Union Address at the end of the month.

Should Bush make any provocative or questionable statements in either speech — as we know he has certainly done in the past — Biden and Senate Democrats can use these hearings as a huge platform on which to express their disagreement and to launch immediate investigations on any suspicious White House assertions.

Biden has been around this block once or twice, understands he’s in a good position to make some noise and recently told Bush at the White House “Mr. President, this is your war.” He also believes that, politically speaking, Democrats have very little to lose.

Said Biden: “I think we’ll only have to accept responsibility for the war if we remain silent.”

Stay tuned, folks.

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This Road is for Jews Only

SHULAMIT ALONI

Counter Punch / January 8, 2007

Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what’s right in front of our eyes. It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practises its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population.

The US Jewish Establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practises a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. All this is done in order to keep an eye on the population’s movements and to make its life difficult. Israel even imposes a total curfew whenever the settlers, who have illegally usurped the Palestinians’ land, celebrate their holidays or conduct their parades.

If that were not enough, the generals commanding the region frequently issue further orders, regulations, instructions and rules (let us not forget: they are the lords of the land). By now they have requisitioned further lands for the purpose of constructing “Jewish only” roads. Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night–all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated and he is sent on his way.

On one occasion I witnessed such an encounter between a driver and a soldier who was taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order–this is a Jews-only road”, he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign indicating this fact and instructing [other] drivers not to use it. His answer was nothing short of amazing. “It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign here and let some antisemitic reporter or journalist take a photo so he that can show the world that Apartheid exists here?”

Indeed Apartheid does exist here. And our army is not “the most moral army in the world” as we are told by its commanders. Sufficient to mention that every town and every village has turned into a detention centre and that every entry and every exit has been closed, cutting it off from arterial traffic. If it were not enough that Palestinians are not allowed to travel on the roads paved ‘for Jews only’, on their land, the current GOC found it necessary to land an additional blow on the natives in their own land with an “ingenious proposal”.

Humanitarian activists cannot transport Palestinians either.

Major-General Naveh, renowned for his superior patriotism, has issued a new order. Coming into affect on 19 January, it prohibits the conveyance of Palestinians without a permit. The order determines that Israelis are not allowed to transport Palestinians in an Israeli vehicle (one registered in Israel regardless of what kind of numberplate it carries) unless they have received explicit permission to do so. The permit relates to both the driver and the Palestinian passenger. Of course none of this applies to those whose labour serves the settlers. They and their employers will naturally receive the required permits so they can continue to serve the lords of the land, the settlers.

Did man of peace President Carter truly err in concluding that Israel is creating Apartheid? Did he exaggerate? Don’t the US Jewish community leaders recognise the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination of 7 March 1966, to which Israel is a signatory? Are the US Jews who launched the loud and abusive campaign against Carter for supposedly maligning Israel’s character and its democratic and humanist nature unfamiliar with the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 30 November 1973? Apartheid is defined therein as an international crime that among other things includes using different legal instruments to rule over different racial groups, thus depriving people of their human rights. Isn’t freedom of travel one of these rights?

In the past, the US Jewish community leaders were quite familiar with the meaning of those conventions. For some reason, however, they are convinced that Israel is allowed to contravene them. It’s OK to kill civilians, women and children, old people and parents with their children, deliberately or otherwise without accepting any responsibility. It’s permissible to rob people of their lands, destroy their crops, and cage them up like animals in the zoo. From now on, Israelis and International humanitarian organisations’ volunteers are prohibited from assisting a woman in labour by taking her to the hospital. [Israeli human rights group] Yesh Din volunteers cannot take a robbed and beaten-up Palestinian to the police station to lodge a complaint. (Police stations are located at the heart of the settlements.) Is there anyone who believes that this is not Apartheid?

Jimmy Carter does not need me to defend his reputation that has been sullied by Israelophile community officials. The trouble is that their love of Israel distorts their judgment and blinds them from seeing what’s in front of them. Israel is an occupying power that for 40 years has been oppressing an indigenous people, which is entitled to a sovereign and independent existence while living in peace with us. We should remember that we too used very violent terror against foreign rule because we wanted our own state. And the list of victims of terror is quite long and extensive.

We do limit ourselves to denying the [Palestinian] people human rights. We not only rob of them of their freedom, land and water. We apply collective punishment to millions of people and even, in revenge-driven frenzy, destroy the electricity supply for one and half million civilians. Let them “sit in the darkness” and “starve”.

Employees cannot be paid their wages because Israel is holding 500 million shekels that belong to the Palestinians. And after all that we remain “pure as the driven snow”. There are no moral blemishes on our actions. There is no racial separation. There is no Apartheid. It’s an invention of the enemies of Israel. Hooray for our brothers and sisters in the US! Your devotion is very much appreciated. You have truly removed a nasty stain from us. Now there can be an extra spring in our step as we confidently abuse the Palestinian population, using the “most moral army in the world”.

[Translated by Sol Salbe]

Shulamit Aloni is the former Education Minister of Israel. She has been awarded both the Israel Prize and the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.