SYRIA: New images said to show security forces opening fire on small town

Syrian security forces opened fire into a crowd in the village of Sheik Miskeen near the besieged southern city of Dara on Friday, according to video posted online that could not be verified.

In the video posted on YouTube, about 100 men are seen milling around in a rural street before coming under fire. The description posted by the user says the event took place at a military checkpoint and that eight people were killed and dozens wounded.

Activists said at least 24 people had been confirmed dead across the country as of early Friday evening, but that number is expected to rise in the coming hours.

Fatah and Hamas sign reconciliation deal

The fox and the scorpion shake hands.

You may recall the story:

The fox and the scorpion stand on the banks of the river Jordan looking into Israel.

The scorpion says to the fox, "If I hop on your back, we can swim over and conquer the Israelis."

The fox looked at the scorpion incredulously and said, "You must be joking. One bite from you and I would be dead."

"That I wouldn't do." replied the scorpion, "Then we both would die".

"True", thought the fox. "OK - hop on". And they plunged into the water.

About halfway over, the scorpion bit the fox.

"Why did you do that?" exclaimed the fox in his dying breath.

The scorpion replied, as the waters swallowed them both up, "It's the middle east, my friend, it's the middle east..."

Thank God they are not Jews

The Jews in their desire to establish independence and realize control of their own democratic institutions accepted the UN partition of Palestine in 1947. They were attacked by the surrounding Arab nations who had rejected the UN partition plan. After a hard fought War of Independence the Jews were not "pushed into the sea", the State of Israel was declared and established. 500,000 Arab refugees were created - a sad fact that was to be manipulated and distorted and misused far outweighing in the eyes of so-called impartial third party observers the criminal acts of the rejectionists of the UN partition.

And who are these rejectionists who have constantly supported terrorist actions and promoted, participated in wars against the State of Israel? Who are these rejectionists who took the high moral ground when judging Israel’s almost impossible task of policing the intifadas that were fuelled by these rejectionists' anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli rhetoric?

They are the same toilets (Gadaffi and Assad et al.) who are indiscriminately killing their own people for the terrible crime of wanting control of their own democratic institutions.

A Holy week in Libya

So what's happened this week:

* hundreds have been killed
* thousands of refugees have been created
* western "military advisers" are on the ground
* drones are flying
* Gaddaffi's compound has been bombarded
* the Pope asks for a diplomatic solution
* the relentless fighting continues in Misrata
* and more...

You could say, as some invariably do (probably because they like the sound of the words) that "mission creep" is taking place. But what is happening is war. And unless anyone successfully takes up the Pope's advice, war is being fought with all its terrible consequences.

What NATO and the UN must do now is choose between loosing this war and loosing the diplomatic road as well. It would appear that the present strategy does not allow success in either of these ways.

There needs to be a radical revision: either total full out war and get Gadaffi, his supporters and hold them to account, or declare a pause in all military activity to allow diplomatic discussions to take place with all parties without the threat of violence.

Status for NATO and Libya

Since 31 March 2011 NATO has been in charge of implementing UN Security Council resolution 1973 which demands:

"an immediate ceasefire" and authorizes the international community to establish a no-fly zone over Libya and to use all means necessary short of foreign occupation to protect civilians

Information about the casualties in this war is understandably very unreliable, but prior to NATO's involvement there were these assessments of the number deaths caused by Gadaffi Loyalist forces:

• On February 22, the International Coalition Against War Criminals gave an estimate that 519 people had died, 3,980 were wounded and over 1,500 were missing.
• Human Rights Watch have estimated that at least 233 people had been killed by February 22.
• On February 23, Italy's Minister of Foreign Affairs Franco Frattini stated that according to his information 1,000 people had died so far.
• On February 24, the IFHR said that 130 soldiers had been executed in Benghazi and al-Baida, after they mutinied and sided with the protesters.
• On February 25, Navi Pillay, the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the United Nations, said that reports indicated that "thousands may have been killed or injured".
• On March 20, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, spokesman for the National Transitional Council, stated that "more than 8,000" people are killed as a result of the uprising.

NATO's response has been the following missions:

1. 1 April 2011 - A coalition air strike near Brega killed at least thirteen people after a rebel convoy was fired upon. An A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft was believed to attacked after an anti-aircraft gun was fired from the convoy. In the same region, up to seven civilians were reported to have been killed and 25 injured after an attack on an ammunition truck triggered an explosion that destroyed several buildings. French patrol Mirage 2000D and Super Etendard a strike on a car was conducted in the Al Khums, located west of Misrata.
2. 2 April 2011 - French Navy Rafale fighter jets destroyed five tanks in Sirte.
3. 3 April 2011 - French Air Force destroyed several armoured vehicles in Ras Lanuf.
4. 4 April 2011 - A US Marine Corps AV-8B Harrier and a US Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt II flew missions near Serta and Brega respectively. 4 April also marked the last day of US armed forces taking an active role in military action, as all American forces were placed in reserve that evening, to be used only if requested by NATO.
5. 5 April 2011 - Fighter jets from Jordan flew missions from an unidentified European airbase to escort transport aircraft delivering humanitarian aid in eastern Libya. NATO aircraft flew fourteen sorties near Misrata, attacking anti-aircraft installations and ground vehicles.
6. 6 April 2011 - RAF Tornados flew missions around rebel-held Misrata and Sirte. The targets were six armoured fighting vehicles and six battle tanks. Two Typhoon aircraft had flown from Gioia del Colle air base, southern Italy, to police the no-fly zone, while two RAF VC10 aircraft provided air-to-air refuelling. The RAF announced four Typhoon jets will join 16 RAF ground-attack aircraft already under NATO command.
7. 8 April 2011 - NATO aircraft attack a column of rebel tanks, killing five rebels. Earlier the same week in another incident, a NATO air-strike killed 13 rebel fighters.
8. 9 April - NATO war-planes force a rebel MiG-23 to land. The fighter jet took off from an airfield east of Benghazi and was detected by an airborne early-warning air-plane. This is the first no-fly zone violation by any aircraft since NATO took command. Also, an anonymous NATO official claimed that they had destroyed 17 and damaged nine loyalist tanks in and around Misrata and Brega in the previous two days, of which five were destroyed by British planes. However, there was no independent confirmation of the claims, though footage of three tanks destroyed had surfaced.
9. 10 April - NATO claimed to have hit 11 tanks or armoured vehicles in the early part of the day outside Ajdabiya. A Reuters correspondent saw 15 charred corpses of Gaddafi's forces near several destroyed armoured vehicles.
10. 15 April - NATO has launched three new air-strikes in and around Tripoli. They struck a missile battery and two other targets.

But there is disagreement within NATO about the nature and degree of operations. This also extends to the amount of effort and resources made available by the individual countries.

So where do NATO countries stand?

Would escalate military action

UK

France

Conducting air-strikes

US

Canada

Belgium

Norway

Denmark

Reconnaissance missions only

Italy

Spain

Netherlands

Offering some military support

Albania

Bulgaria

Greece

Romania

No military support

Croatia

Czech Rep

Estonia

Germany

Hungary

Iceland

Latvia

Lithuania

Luxembourg

Poland

Portugal

Slovakia

Slovenia

Turkey

Source: NATO, news agencies, BBC Analysis and Research 

Meanwhile...

Many evacuees fleeing the fighting along Libya's coast have been left without access to all the medical facilities and support they desperately need
Misurata remains besieged, with Gaddafi's forces shelling the city in western Libya overnight, battling their way into the centre of town. More than 100 rockets pounded the city yesterday.

Can Batman save Gotham City?

...or is that the Joker?

Amid the theatricals and false bravado of a fool lost in his own delusions, the Big 3 have at last demonstrated their resolve (if only in words at this moment). BARACK OBAMA, DAVID CAMERON, and NICOLAS SARKOZY have published  their outline of Libya’s Pathway to Peace. In this document they make no doubt of their intentions and demands:

"...
It is unthinkable that someone who has tried to massacre his own people can play a part in their future government. The brave citizens of those towns that have held out against forces that have been mercilessly targeting them would face a fearful vengeance if the world accepted such an arrangement. It would be an unconscionable betrayal.
...
The regime has to pull back from the cities it is besieging, including Ajdabiya, Misurata and Zintan, and return to their barracks. However, so long as Qaddafi is in power, NATO must maintain its operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the regime builds. Then a genuine transition from dictatorship to an inclusive constitutional process can really begin, led by a new generation of leaders. In order for that transition to succeed, Qaddafi must go and go for good. ..."

Batman: "Remember the Boy Scouts' motto." 

Robin: "'Be prepared'." 

Batman: "It would do well to keep that in mind at all times."

Moussa Koussa's reward

Tut, tut.

3.24pm: Libyan state TV is reporting casualties from the air strikes in Tripoli, according to Reuters.


Meanwhile, in Britain the Treasury has removed former Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa from an EU sanctions list, removing a freeze on his assets.


Far be it from me to allege any connection. 

The catch 22 of Libya

Reinforcements on their way

The almost eternal dilemma of this crisis: angling for a diplomatic solution whilst engaged in military action.

How can a party accept a diplomatic end to a crisis whilst the opposition are pounding their houses with shells and killing their children? How can a side win a war when politicians (both glory seekers and those who genuinely want a settlement) are softening all actions with restraint and caution always disproportionate to the military needs?

On the one hand the press rapport "Libyan rebels receive boost of support from international community" but the reality of this support would appear to be limited to second hand body armour. Within NATO there is little agreement with the UK and France, which have conducted the bulk of the attack missions, pressing Italy and Belgium to take part in targeting Libyan forces. "We have sent more ground strike aircraft in order to protect civilians," Hague said. "We do look to other countries to do the same."

Meanwhile the talking continues:

• The contact group which met in Doha on Wednesday discussed a "temporary financial mechanism" to channel cash into a trust fund to aid rebels fighting Gaddafi's forces.
• In Cairo, international leaders will focus on political solutions and look for ways to "reinforce co-ordination between the Arab League, UN, African Union and Organisation for the Islamic Conference".
• While in Berlin, Libya will be on the top of the agenda for NATO's foreign ministers As their military strategy in the conflict comes under the spotlight.

But I am getting the horrible thought that NATO may have lost its way:

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato's secretary general, defended the alliance's record after its aircraft flew more than 2,000 sorties. But since its mandate was to protect civilians it had to be cautious. "We do our utmost to strike the right balance," Rasmussen said.

Unfortunately war is not about striking the right balance, it is about offering and taking lives so that you can win your own way - and if you are not prepared to fully engaged in this awful equation then you should not fight.

Is this "the truth"?

From Syria:
Syrian soldiers have been shot by security forces after refusing to fire on protesters, witnesses said, as a crackdown on anti-government demonstrations intensified.
Witnesses told al-Jazeera and the BBC that some soldiers had refused to shoot after the army moved into Banias in the wake of intense protests on Friday.
 Human rights monitors named Mourad Hejjo, a conscript from Madaya village, as one of those shot by security snipers. 'His family and town are saying he refused to shoot at his people,' said Wassim Tarif, a local human rights monitor."
From Bahrain:
One courageous young Bahraini pro-democracy activist, Zainab al-Khawaja, has seen the brutality up close. To her horror, she watched her father, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a prominent human-rights activist, be beaten and arrested:


"Security forces attacked my home. They came in without prior warning. They broke down the building door, and they broke down our apartment door, and instantly attacked my father without giving him a chance to speak and without giving any reason for his arrest. They dragged my father down the stairs and started beating him in front of me. They beat him until he was unconscious. The last thing I heard my father say was that he couldn't breathe. When I tried to intervene, when I tried to tell them: 'Please to stop beating him. He will go with you voluntarily. You don't need to beat him this way,' they told me to shut up, basically, and they grabbed me … and dragged me up the stairs back into the apartment. By the time I had got out of the room again, the only trace of my father was his blood on the stairs."

Exploring "the truth"

The former US Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan composed an aphorism as he watched dictatorships pile opprobrium on democracies: "The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there." Journalists, lawyers, academics and opposition politicians can investigate the injustices of democracies, and because they can investigate, injustice is kept in check. They cannot expose the greater atrocities of dictatorships because there is no freedom to report, and hence their greater crimes pass unnoticed.

I have my doubts about the universal jurisdiction of Moynihan's Law — America was responsible for many great crimes while he was its good and faithful servant. But his insight explains why Jeremy Bowen is blinking at his cameraman in Tripoli, like some startled, uncomprehending mammal who has been shaken by the convulsions around him from a hibernation that has lasted for most of his career.

The BBC's Middle East editor is not the only expert whose expertise now looks spurious. The Arab uprising is annihilating the assumptions of foreign ministries, academia and human rights groups with true revolutionary élan. In journalistic language, it is showing they had committed the greatest blunder a reporter can commit: they missed the story. They thought that the problems of the Middle East were at root the fault of democratic Israel or more broadly the democratic West. They did not see and did not want to see that while Israelis are certainly the Palestinians' problem — and vice versa — the problem of the subject millions of the Arab world was the tyranny, cruelty, corruption and inequality the Arab dictators enforced.
Nick Cohen

Hypocrisy and "the truth" - the real canker

I always told the truth. Didn't I?

It is sobering to be reminded, whilst at war again in Africa, of the atrocities committed under the Kenya Emergency between 1952 and 1960.

The full horror of a brutal campaign of torture meted out by British officials on Kenyan rebels including Barack Obama's grandfather has emerged for the first time.

A cache of secret documents detailing efforts to suppress the Mau Mau uprising has lain hidden in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in London, for 50 years.

Removed from Kenya on the cusp of independence, they were uncovered in January after five Kenyans launched a lawsuit against the British government.

The claimants say they suffered castration, sexual abuse and severe beatings in detention camps administered by the British government and want an apology and financial compensation.

"Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned and mutilated Mau Mau suspects, ostensibly to gather intelligence for military operations and as court evidence." Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. By CAROLINE ELKINS (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).

"British officer describes his actions after capturing three known Mau Mau:
I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth and I said something, I don’t remember what, and I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two Mickeys [Mau Mau] were standing there looking blank. I said to them that if they didn’t tell me where to find the rest of the gang I’d kill them too. They didn’t say a word so I shot them both. One wasn’t dead so I shot him in the ear. When the sub-inspector drove up, I told him that the Mickeys tried to escape. He didn’t believe me but all he said was 'bury them and see the wall is cleared up.'" 

"Settler groups, displeased with the government's response to the increasing Mau Mau threat created their own units to combat the Mau Mau. One settler with the Kenya Police Reserve's Special Branch described an interrogation of a Mau Mau, suspected of murder, which he assisted: 'By the time I cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.'" Professor David Anderson MA (BA Sussex; PhD Cantab); University Lecturer in African Politics.

I remember how we, back in Britain, were told about the terrible massacres committed against the white settlers. About how it was necessary to use brutal means against brutal black men. Yet the truth of the matter is 32 European settlers lost their lives and 50,000 black Kenyans were killed.

Propaganda, subtle or otherwise, can so easily distort our perception of what is real. For example John Pilger in his otherwise interesting analysis in the New Statesman on the Libyan uprising feels compelled, from the luxury of received truths, to make this remark:

"With Gaddafi now the accredited demon, Israel, the real canker, can continue its wholesale land theft and expulsions."

On this, and many other matters, I tend to hold to the remarks made in an article by Jeremy Bowen (with whom I often disagree!) of the BBC from Tripoli:

"The same day a man waiting in a traffic jam next to the press minibus wound down his window.

'Don't believe anything,' he said. And without another word, drove off."

Greater intensity urged on NATO against human rights abuser

Another time and place. Is there a difference?

In an effort to keep back-slider Turkey on the straight and narrow now that the "honourable men" of Africa have muddied the waters with the toilet paper they have called a peace plan, Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister said on France Info radio:

"NATO must play its role fully. It wanted to take the lead in operations, we accepted that. It must play its role today which means preventing that Gaddafi uses heavy weapons to bomb populations."

This was further underlined late in the day by British Foreign Secretary William Hague on arrival at a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Luxembourg:

'We must maintain and intensify our efforts in NATO. That is why the United Kingdom has in the last weeks supplied additional aircraft capable of striking ground targets threatening the civilian population ... of course it would be welcome if other countries also did the same."

Are you listening Turkey?

It is well known that human rights is a cloudy issue in the land of the Ottomans, but perhaps, this time Ankara just might listen to the above and the following.

Captured rebel Libyan fighters have been found shot in the head with their hands tied behind their backs, Amnesty International said, adding it has strong evidence of other human rights abuses. Forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had also deliberately killed unarmed protesters and attacked civilians fleeing fighting, Amnesty said, citing evidence gathered by its delegates in eastern Libya over the past six weeks.

The rights group said Gaddafi's troops appeared to have executed captured rebel fighters close to the town of Ajdabiyah. Its researchers in eastern Libya had in recent days seen the bodies of two opposition fighters who had been shot in the back of the head after their hands had been bound behind their backs.

Amnesty said it had received credible reports of four similar cases, where bodies of captured fighters were reportedly found with their hands tied behind their backs and multiple gunshot wounds to the upper parts of their bodies. Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International's director for the Middle East and North Africa, said:

"The circumstances of these killings strongly suggest that they were carried out by the forces loyal to Colonel Gaddafi."

Who is helping Gaddafi out?

Look! No blood on my hands.

Troops under the leadership of Muammar Gaddafi continue to resist NATO’s military strikes thanks to the help that Belarus military advisers are rendering, says the Russian press.

At least five hundred Belarus military advisers are now stationed in Libya and are fighting for the interests of the country’s leader, said one of the Belarusian mercenaries, Mikhail, to Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. Some of the military there are dealing with military hardware maintenance, while others perform the duties of the Libyan commanders’ advisers, explained the officer. Perhaps it is the foreign mercenaries that are helping Gaddafi retain his military success.

According to English speaking Iranian TV, Israel is sending 5000 recruited African mercenaries to help out their eternal friend and guardian the (reported in the Islamic press as) Jewish Muammar al-Gaddafi . At a charge of $2,000 per day.

Sounds like a good deal to me.

Although those honest purveyors of truth in Tehran did not say if the mercenaries' guns would be pointing to the east or to the west.

Die on their feet or live on their knees

Mustafa Jabril, TNC spokesman:

"This proposal today was determined more than a month ago, the initiative comes in line with the resolutions of the UN Security Council - including the ceasefire, protection of civilians, and granting the freedom of the Libyan people to determine their future.


Col Gaddafi during this time [this past month] did not respect these resolutions and continued to bombard civilians from the air and artillery shelling. He laid siege with militia forces and positioned security personnel in plain clothes and snipers on rooftops - which cannot allow the Libyan people to determine their future.

For more than one month, he has disregarded the UN resolutions.

You are aware how many deaths and injuries have occurred this month. You are also aware how many material assets have been destroyed, how many oil fields wrecked. Therefore, this proposal presented today is outdated.

We are also aware the demands of our people from day one is that Gaddafi must step down. Therefore, any initiative which does not include this key popular demand will not be regarded.

Muammar Gaddafi and his sons should depart immediately if he will, to save himself, otherwise the flood of the Libyan people is heading its way to him.

We cannot negotiate the blood of our martyrs. We will die with them or be rewarded with victory.

I must extend my thanks to the international forces which have saved the lives of civilians.

Without the air strikes that have destroyed Gaddafi's forces, we would have been history.

We hail their efforts and ask for more, in accordance with the UN Security Council resolution, which stipulates that, for the protection of civilians, all necessary measures must be taken in this respect."

It would appear that the honourable men have produced a "road map" fit only for the latrines.

Why are we not surprised?

Honourable men arrive in Libya

See anyone who was democratically elected?

African Union mediators left Mauritania for Libya to attempt to negotiate a ceasefire.
Let us look as these honourable men.
Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz of Mauritania was a colonel who came to power as a result of military coup. Abdel Aziz has the power to appoint the prime minister, military officials and civil servants in Mauritania.
Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville came to power through very dubious means. He is not known for his frugality. When Sassou Nguesso attended the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September 2006, almost £14,000 of room service at the Waldorf Astoria was added to his bill during another five-night stay. His entourage, including several members of his family, occupied 44 rooms which together ran up a bill of £130,000. The bills on September 19 included two bottles of Cristal champagne charged at £400. This was pointed out by the British newspaper The Sunday Times to be "comfortably more than the £106,000 that Britain gave the Republic of Congo in humanitarian aid in 2006."
Amadou Toumani Touré of Mali appears to be the angel in the group, although he also initially gained power via a coup. His presidency has been rather atypical; he is not a member of any political party and his government has members from all of the political parties in the country. He founded a children's foundation named Fondation pour l'enfance - a name shared with a similar organization, created by former French first-lady Danielle Mitterrand. President Toure now runs his foundation by the proxy of his wife, first lady Toure Lobbo Traore.
And Jacob Zuma of South Africa. A man who has ducked and darted his way through numerous allegations of corruption, rape and brutality. His utterances on sexual matters might endear him to some:

• He admitted that he had not used a condom when having sex with the woman who accused him of rape, despite knowing that she was HIV-positive. He stated in court that he took a shower afterwards to "cut the risk of contracting HIV". 
• Same-sex marriage was "a disgrace to the nation and to God": "When I was growing up, an ungqingili (a homosexual) would not have stood in front of me. I would knock him out."
• Zuma's solution to pregnancy in South African teenagers is to confiscate their babies and have the mothers taken to colleges and "forced" to obtain degrees.

So all in all plenty to chat about with the King of Kings Muammar Gaddafi and his family.

However, as a Mauritanian official told AFP, "They have just left, each in his own plane," it would appear they have a much chance of brokering a peace as they have of saving the ozone layer.

All your problems are caused by the Israelis

Jonathan Freedland wrote an article in the Guardian where he argued:

The Arab spring proves that Israel is not even the biggest issue in the Middle East – yet it gets all the attention

The consequence of this statement was that he managed to drag out from under their stones all the usual suspects baying for attention. Most of the comments posted had the erudition of football fanatics displaying even less knowledge of the Middle East than hooligans have of the noble game. I read about thirty of these and then I got bored. All of them seemed to miss this very important point made by Freedland:

Many respectable folks have spent decades insisting that the "core issue" in the Middle East, if not the world, is the Israel-Palestine conflict – that it is the "running sore" whose eventual healing will heal the wider region and beyond.

That was always gold-plated nonsense, but now the Arab spring has come along to prove it. Now the world can see that the peoples of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain have troubles aplenty that have nothing to do with Israel. There could be peace between Israelis and Palestinians tomorrow, but it wouldn't relieve those in Damascus or Manama or Sana'a from the yoke of tyranny. For them, Israel is not "the heart of the matter", as the cliché always insisted it was. The heart of the matter are the regimes who have oppressed them day in, day out, for 40 years or more.

The fellahin, be they Muslim or Christian, and the Jew, are united in their heart of hearts. They need:

1. To be able, without hindrance, to worship their God
2. To work in a dignified manner in order to put bread on their families' table.
3. That the cost of this “bread” does not consume their whole wage.
4. To live in the knowledge that their children have the freedom to develop to their full potential.
5. To live in security and peace.

Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Arab elites have sort to deny the fellahin these rights. Be they absentee landlords who sold the land from under the fellahin’s feet; religious leaders who flirted with the Nazis; political leaders who rejected a UN compromise of partition; family members from so-called “kingdoms” who exploited their land and refused any form of integration or assimilation; jumped up “corporals” who used the fellahin to consolidate their fascistic powers; intellectual terrorists who pumped up their own bank accounts with money for “the cause”; crazy financiers of even more terrorist activity who were diverting attention away from their  (now all too obvious) gross exploitation of their own people; “Royal” families living lives of decadence and unimaginable opulence whilst imposing extreme repression throughout their lands.

All of these share a bed with every western pseudo-intellectual who is desperate for a cause to divert attention from his own inadequacies and therefore subscribes to and promulgates this great conspiracy - all your problems are caused by the Israelis.

With friends like this...

According to The Associated Press, President Obama has received the following letter:

Our son, Excellency,
President Obama
U.S.A 

We have been hurt more morally that physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. We still pray that you continue to be president of the U.S.A. We Endeavour and hope that you will gain victory in the new election campaigne. You are a man who has enough courage to annul a wrong and mistaken action. I am sure that you are able to shoulder the responsibility for that. 

Enough evidence is available, Bearing in mind that you are the president of the strongest power in the world nowadays, and since Nato is waging an unjust war against a small people of a developing country. This country had already been subjected to embargo and sanctions, furthermore it also suffered a direct military armed aggression during Reagan's time. This country is Libya.

Hence, to serving world peace ... Friendship between our peoples ... and for the sake of economic, and security cooperation against terror, you are in a position to keep Nato off the Libyan affair for good. As you know too well democracy and building of civil society cannot be achieved by means of missiles and aircraft, or by backing armed member of AlQuaeda in Benghazi.

You _ yourself _ said on many occasions, one of them in the UN General Assembly, I was witness to that personally, that America is not responsible for the security of other peoples. That America helps only. This is the right logic.

Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu oumama, your intervention is the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair. Libya should be left to Libyans within the African union frame.

The problem now stands as follows:-
1. There is Nato intervention politically as well as military.
2. Terror conducted by AlQaueda gangs that have been armed in some cities, and by force refused to allow people to go back to their normal life, and carry on with exercising their social people's power as usual.

Mu'aumer Qaddaffi
Leader of the Revolution
Tripoli 5.4.2011

The misspellings and grammatical errors are in the original letter.

"Misrata is our number one priority"

Some interesting quotes from Al Jazeera:

"Misrata is our number one priority," NATO deputy spokeswoman Carmen Romero told AFP news agency adding that alliance warplanes hit Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's military assets around Libya's third largest city on Monday.
"We have a clear mandate and we will do everything to protect the civilians of Misurata," Romero said, referring to the UN Security Council resolution permitting "all necessary measures" to defend Libya's population.

Al Jazeera's John Terret reported from Washington DC:

General Carter Ham who is the commanding general for all US forces in Africa said he still envisaged a go it alone role for the US and he said that would be if US interests were specifically targeted.
Ham also said later in his testimony that in future should there be any need for a rescue operation in Libya then the US will take the lead on that initiative.

An important question must be: will there now be a marked increase in NATO military activity? Especially after the UN has shown the way in Cote d'Ivoire?

If I was Mr. Gadaffi, I would be doing some rapid re-thinking.

Gadaffi and the banality of evil

Last Thursday (31 March 2011) was the 50th aniverasary of the execution of Adolf Otto Eichmann. He was found guilty of 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. He presented a famous defence:  "I never did anything, great or small, without obtaining in advance express instructions from Adolf Hitler or any of my superiors." Hannah Arendt  called him the embodiment of the "Banality of Evil", as he appeared at his trial to have an ordinary and common personality, displaying neither guilt nor hatred. She later went on to expand this remark into a thesis: the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.

This view, however, has been challenged by, amongst others, S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher, who have concluded: "Until recently, psychologists and historians have agreed that ordinary people commit evil when, under the influence of leaders and groups, they become blind to the consequences of their actions. This consensus has become so strong that it is repeated, almost as a mantra, in psychology textbooks and in society at large. However critical scrutiny of both historical and psychological evidence ... has produced a radically different picture. People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right. This is possible because they actively identify with groups whose ideology justifies and condones the oppression and destruction of others.


As we have suggested, this raises a whole set of new questions: Who identifies with such groups? When does identification become more likely? How do genocidal ideologies develop? What is the role of leaders in shaping group ideology?"

Or, as I would put it: What's a nice boy like Ibrahim Musa doing in a place like this?

An honest change of mind

"We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

The final report by the U.N. committee of independent experts — chaired by former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis — that followed up on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report has found that “Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza” while “the de facto authorities (i.e., Hamas) have not conducted any investigations into the launching of rocket and mortar attacks against Israel.”

Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and “possibly crimes against humanity” by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying — its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.
..."

Richard Goldstone