RESOURCES
5-144000
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z
|
Israeli and U.S. death squads infesting the world
Posted by Lev/Christopher on November 7, 2008 at 5:13am in Prophecy & End Times
Some readers will remember the 1969 film, “The Assassination Bureau”, a
tongue-in-cheek romp based on Jack London's unfinished novel. The
setting is the turn of the century a hundred years ago, a fanciful time
for regime change and the purging of corrupt monarchs and cruel
tyrants. The bureau's hit team is for hire provided that Ivan
Dragomiloff, founder and mastermind, deems the targeted killing
"socially justifiable" and there’s proof of the candidate's misdeeds.
Eventually, however, the moral rectitude of the enterprise gives way to
financial greed, and the day comes when the bureau accepts a mission to
eradicate an unnamed but prominent public figure. The fee is paid in
advance, proof supplied, job accepted, then the name is revealed. The
target is Dragomiloff himself. The Assassination Bureau cannot go back
on its word and Dragomiloff finds himself pitted against the killing
machine he himself created and perfected.
Assassination is the targeted killing of persons usually for political
or ideological (and often insane) motives. This is OK, but not OK.
In 1976, U.S. President Ford issued an Executive Order which was
enacted after revelations that the CIA had made several attempts on the
life of Cuba's Fidel Castro. Henceforth, targeted political killings
were outlawed: "No employee of the United States government shall
engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." Every
U.S. president since then has upheld Ford's prohibition on
assassinations – or somehow got round it.
Carter and Reagan reaffirmed the ban, although it didn't stop the U.S.
bombing Gaddafi's home in 1986 in the hope of rubbing him out, or the
Clinton administration firing cruise missiles at suspected guerrilla
camps in Afghanistan in 1998, or Bush instructing the CIA to engage in
"lethal covert operations" (based on an intelligence “finding”) to
destroy Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda organization.
Nice and legal, though
White House and CIA lawyers claim that an intelligence “finding” makes
a difference because the ban on political assassinations doesn't apply
in wartime. Hey presto! The right sort of finding puts everything on a
war footing. They also say that the prohibition won’t prevent the U.S.
taking action against terrorists. And in the wake of 9/11 it won’t stop
the United States acting in self-defence.
So, all the U.S. has to do is invent or manufacture a “finding”, label
the folk who stand in their way “terrorists” and claim the murder was
an act of self-defence in a war situation, and they're home and dry.
Reports suggest the Bush administration has got together with Israel to
establish the legal framework for a new American targeted-assassination
policy. The Israelis, of course, are world experts. Annoying pockets of
resistance to their land-grabs, ethnic cleansing, abductions, illegal
settlements and other “criminal” activities in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip are answered with the wholesale imposition of specially concocted
warfare laws for the benefit of Israel's “self-defence”, or “homeland
security”, but which trample on everyone else’s rights. This is the
sort of chicanery that suits Bush admirably as he presses ahead with
his war-without-end on terror.
Israel's liking for assassination and murder goes way back to pre-state
days when such atrocities were practised against Arab and British
targets by the Irgun, a thoroughly unpleasant organization that
believed political violence and terrorism were legitimate tools for
removing obstacles to the Zionist cause and driving the Arabs off their
lands. Assassination became official Israeli policy in 1999 when the
military planned “initiated attacks” to stop Yasser Arafat's militia,
the Tanzim, from firing on illegal Jewish settlers in the West Bank and
Gaza.
The Israelis demonstrated rare ingenuity in bumping off bomb maker
Yahya Ayyesh. In 1996 this master-technician in the art of bombing had
been on Israel's most-wanted list for three years. Shabak (Israel's
secret service) finally tricked a friend into giving Ayyash a
booby-trapped mobile phone. When Ayyash used it, Shabak detonated it.
Earlier this year they excelled themselves again by terminating
Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyeh, “the fox”, with an exploding headrest in
his Mitsubishi.
However, their preferred method of assassination is the air strike,
which is lazy, lacking in finesse and often messy. In 2002 Israeli F-16
warplanes bombed the house of Sheikh Salah Shehadeh, the military
commander of Hamas, in Gaza City, scandalously killing not just him but
at least 11 other Palestinians, including seven children, and wounding
120 others.
In 2004, at the second attempt on Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh
Ahmed Yassin, wheelchair-bound since the age of 12, and nine innocent
bystanders were killed in a helicopter gunship attack. Yassin had
survived an F-16 bomb blast the previous year. Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon characterized Yassin as "the mastermind of Palestinian
terror" and a "mass murderer", which was comical coming from the war
criminal who ran Israel's death squad, Unit 101, and was found
indirectly responsible for the massacres in the Sabra and Chatila
refugee camps.
According to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem ,231
Palestinians have been assassinated, 385 innocent bystanders murdered
and heaven knows how many injured or mutilated by Israel since the
second intifada in 2000. "The use of state assassinations by Israel
against Palestinian suspects is undermining the rule of law and
fuelling the cycle of violence in the region", Amnesty International
warns.
But this systematic extermination is regarded as "legal and legitimate"
by Israel's attorney-general. "If anyone has committed or is planning
to carry out terrorist attacks, he has to be hit. It is effective,
precise and just," Israeli minister Ephraim Sneh said in 2001,
indifferent to the frequent lack of precision, the collateral
casualties and the possibility that his information is wrong – and the
justice of it.
It’s catching, though. The U.S. State Department similarly describes
its own hits on Al-Qaeda as "legal and necessary". But pre-emptive
strikes are not America’s only tool. There’s the detention facility at
Guantanamo Bay where hundreds of prisoners of “war”, from 13 years old
upwards, are held long-term under inhuman conditions, without “due
process” and in flagrant breach of the Geneva Conventions. Many have
now been “rendered” to other countries. It’s a living death and many
will actually die in unlawful captivity, victims of a quite different
form of assassination.
U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney told Fox News:
If you’ve got an organization that has plotted or is plotting some kind
of suicide bomber attack, for example, and they [the Israelis] have
hard evidence of who it is and where they’re located, I think there’s
some justification in their trying to protect themselves by pre-empting.
This endorsement gave a welcome boost to Sharon’s accelerated
assassination programme. Arafat claimed the Israeli cabinet had
approved a plan to kill a large number of leading Palestinians. Sharon
denied it but defended assassinations as a “defensive counter-terrorism
measure”. He said he had sent the Palestinians a list of 100 terrorists
the Palestinian Authority must arrest, otherwise Israel would continue
to “exercise our right of self-defence”.
We’re told Israeli advisers are now training U.S. special forces in
aggressive counter-insurgency methods in Iraq, including the use of
assassination squads against guerrilla leaders. Urban warfare
specialists are sharing the skills they have honed against Palestinians
in the West Bank and Gaza in order to help the U.S. set up its own
hunter-killer teams.
Israeli death squads here in the UK?
Even more worrying are reports that Israeli death squads have been
authorized to enter "friendly" countries and kill those suspected of
being a threat to the Jewish state wherever they are hiding. Targeted
killings were pretty much restricted to occupied Palestine but the
appointment of a new Mossad director, Meir Dagan, in 2002 changed all
that.
Sharon was said to have given his old buddy Dagan a mandate to revive
the traditional methods of Mossad, including assassinations abroad,
even at the risk to Israel's bilateral relations. So our home
secretary, the fragrant Jacqui Smith, had better tell us truthfully
whether Mossad hoodlums are at this moment prowling the streets of
London, Bradford, Glasgow and Manchester snuffing out plotters against
their rotten racist regime.
Attending Israel's 60th birthday celebrations a fawning George “Dubya”
Bush bent the knee to his Zionist paymasters and declared that the U.S.
was proud to be their "closest ally and best friend in the world". He
told them they had worked tirelessly for peace and fought valiantly for
freedom. “You have built a mighty democracy that will endure forever
and can always count on America to stand at its side." It must be clear
to the rest of the world which side the U.S. commander-in-chief’s bread
is buttered.
And addressing the Knesset on the subject of Iran, the Tame Texan said,
unaware of the irony: "Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror
to possess the world's deadliest weapon would be an unforgivable
betrayal of future generations." He went on to liken those who urged
negotiations with "terrorists and radicals" to appeasers of the Nazis
before World War II, the fool apparently being unable to tell the
difference.
Genocidal tyrants, corrupt leaders and bloodthirsty heads of state
hankering for global domination and wishing to keep the world in
turmoil once again infest the planet. They are often born and nurtured
in the Western democracies the world is told to admire but which are
now so corrupt they disgust many right-thinking people. These menaces
can’t be brought to justice in the normal way, so it’s a job for a
revived and revamped Assassination Bureau.
Military commanders in the resistance and bomb-making freedom fighters
are not the issue. The people of the world need an instrument to
eradicate the low life in high places that threatens humanity. They
need to dispatch those who deal in mega-deaths, who meddle massively
where they have no business, who create injustice and who make life
miserable for millions. We all have our wish list. I’ll wager the same
target names keep reappearing.
Think of it: a socially-responsible international public riddance
service ready to do business with any member of the public who feels
himself at war with these evil forces and can put a good case for a
slaying before the bureau chief and his panel. I see long queues
forming to enlist the bureau’s help in eliminating the world’s
tormentors. For them there is no hiding place. Riddance requests have
to be accompanied by a suitable “intelligence finding”, of course.
The work of an Assassination Bureau would be perfectly “legal” and
“legitimate”, and most certainly “necessary”. It would simply follow
the precedent set by America and Israel.
Dream on!
-- Stuart Littlewood is a businessman-turned-writer from Norfolk,
England. He recently published a book entitled Radio Free Palestine
about the plight of the Palestinians under occupation (see details on
RadioFreePalestine.co.uk). This article appeared in Redress Information
& Analysis.
|
This page was created on 5 May 2010
Updated on 5 May 2010
Copyright © 1987-2010 NCCG - All Rights Reserved
|
|