Tuesday, 1 June 2010
Israel: Pirates?
Via Craig Murray
A word on the legal position, which is very plain. To attack a foreign flagged vessel in international waters is illegal. It is not piracy, as the Israeli vessels carried a military commission. It is rather an act of illegal warfare.
Because the incident took place on the high seas does not mean however that international law is the only applicable law. The Law of the Sea is quite plain that, when an incident takes place on a ship on the high seas (outside anybody’s territorial waters) the applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred. In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory.
There are therefore two clear legal possibilities.
Possibility one is that the Israeli commandos were acting on behalf of the government of Israel in killing the activists on the ships. In that case Israel is in a position of war with Turkey, and the act falls under international jurisdiction as a war crime.
Possibility two is that, if the killings were not authorised Israeli military action, they were acts of murder under Turkish jurisdiction. If Israel does not consider itself in a position of war with Turkey, then it must hand over the commandos involved for trial in Turkey under Turkish law.
In brief, if Israel and Turkey are not at war, then it is Turkish law which is applicable to what happened on the ship. It is for Turkey, not Israel, to carry out any inquiry or investigation into events and to initiate any prosecutions. Israel is obliged to hand over indicted personnel for prosecution.
Info released on Saturday!
The Israeli army and navy, under direct supervision and orders from the Israeli government, prepared a plan dubbed “Operation Sky Wind” to attack the Freedom Flotilla” heading to Gaza and kidnap and the activists onboard.
Israeli sources reported that the navy had concluded all preparations to takeover the Freedom Flotilla, by force in needed, in an attempt to prevent it from reaching the Gaza coast to break the four-year long ongoing siege.
The planned offensive includes four stages;
1. Warning stage; the navy will try to stop the ships from reaching a “line” dubbed
as a red line, should the ships reach the designated line, they will be warned and informed that they “violate the law”.
2. Boarding and controlling the ships; should the ships fail to adhere to the demands of the navy, the navy will attack and control the eight ships carrying nearly 800 activists. The ships will then be taken to Ashdod Port and the activists will be detained in a huge tent installed for this purpose.
3. Deportation by air; Israeli soldiers and policemen would order the detained activists to sign statements accepting to be deported to their countries, and will be deported by air via the Ben Gurion Airport.
4. Arrest before deportation; those who refuse to sign deportation statements, will be arrested, sent to medical examination, then transferred to the Nahshon Brigade which belongs to the Israeli Prison Administration before being sent to Be’er Sheva Prison and likely other prisons.
They will be prosecuted and deported at a later stage.
Some 600 human rights activists boarding the eight solidarity ships heading to Gaza said that they are determined to reach Gaza regardless of Israel’s threats.
Greta Berlin, spokesperson of the Free Gaza Movement, stated that “nothing is going to stop the ships”, and that the human rights activists are determined to break the illegal Israeli siege on 1.5 million Palestinian in Gaza, and deliver the humanitarian supplies.
The planned offensive includes four stages;
1. Warning stage; the navy will try to stop the ships from reaching a “line” dubbed
as a red line, should the ships reach the designated line, they will be warned and informed that they “violate the law”.
2. Boarding and controlling the ships; should the ships fail to adhere to the demands of the navy, the navy will attack and control the eight ships carrying nearly 800 activists. The ships will then be taken to Ashdod Port and the activists will be detained in a huge tent installed for this purpose.
3. Deportation by air; Israeli soldiers and policemen would order the detained activists to sign statements accepting to be deported to their countries, and will be deported by air via the Ben Gurion Airport.
4. Arrest before deportation; those who refuse to sign deportation statements, will be arrested, sent to medical examination, then transferred to the Nahshon Brigade which belongs to the Israeli Prison Administration before being sent to Be’er Sheva Prison and likely other prisons.
They will be prosecuted and deported at a later stage.
Some 600 human rights activists boarding the eight solidarity ships heading to Gaza said that they are determined to reach Gaza regardless of Israel’s threats.
Greta Berlin, spokesperson of the Free Gaza Movement, stated that “nothing is going to stop the ships”, and that the human rights activists are determined to break the illegal Israeli siege on 1.5 million Palestinian in Gaza, and deliver the humanitarian supplies.
(Thanx Fifi!)
Dialectic Physics
One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions - what are you going to land on - one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic physics.
WOW!
Dulux Walls - Global film for the Let's Colour Campaign by Euro RSCG London
Let's Colour is a worldwide initiative to transform grey spaces with colourful paint.
This 2 minute global film was shot by multi-award winning director Adam Berg over four weeks in Brazil, France, London and India. Every location is real and they remain transformed by a palette consisting of 120 different colours. The people in the film are not actors, they are real people who rolled up their sleeves to transform their community with colour.
Read more about the Let's Colour project here:
www.letscolourproject.com/blog
www.letscolourproject.com
Let's Colour is a worldwide initiative to transform grey spaces with colourful paint.
This 2 minute global film was shot by multi-award winning director Adam Berg over four weeks in Brazil, France, London and India. Every location is real and they remain transformed by a palette consisting of 120 different colours. The people in the film are not actors, they are real people who rolled up their sleeves to transform their community with colour.
Read more about the Let's Colour project here:
www.letscolourproject.com/blog
www.letscolourproject.com
Israeli Raid Complicates U.S. Ties and Push for Peace
Israel’s deadly commando raid on Monday on a flotilla trying to break a blockade of Gaza complicated President Obama’s efforts to move ahead on Middle East peace negotiations and introduced a new strain into an already tense relationship between the United States and Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel canceled plans to come to Washington on Tuesday to meet with Mr. Obama. The two men spoke by phone within hours of the raid, and the White House later released an account of the conversation, saying Mr. Obama had expressed “deep regret” at the loss of life and recognized “the importance of learning all the facts and circumstances” as soon as possible.
While the administration’s public response was restrained, American officials expressed dismay in private over not only the flotilla raid, with its attendant deepening of Israel’s isolation around the world, but also over the timing of the crisis, which comes just as long-delayed American-mediated indirect talks between Israelis and Palestinians were getting under way.
Some foreign policy experts said the episode highlighted the difficulty of trying to negotiate peace with the Palestinian Authority without taking into account an element often relegated to the background: how to deal with Hamas-ruled Gaza. Hamas, the Islamist organization that refuses to recognize Israel’s existence, operates independently of the Palestinian Authority and has rejected any peace talks. Gaza has repeatedly complicated Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
“This regrettable incident underscores that the international blockade of Gaza is not sustainable,” Martin S. Indyk, the former United States ambassador to Israel, said Monday. “It helps to stop Hamas attacks on Israelis, but seriously damages Israel’s international reputation. Our responsibility to Israel is to help them find a way out of this situation.”
The Obama administration officially supports the Gaza blockade, as the Bush administration did before it. But Mr. Obama, some aides say, has expressed strong frustration privately with the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
At a time when the United States is increasingly linking its own national security interests in the region to the inability of Israelis and Palestinians to make peace, heightened tensions over Monday’s killings could deepen the divide between the Israeli government and the Obama administration just as Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu were trying to overcome recent differences.
“We’re not sure yet where things go from here,” one administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic delicacy of the issue. The White House statement said that Mr. Obama “understood the prime minister’s decision to return immediately to Israel to deal with today’s events” and that they would reschedule their meeting “at the first opportunity.”
No matter what happens, foreign policy experts who advise the administration agreed that if Mr. Obama wanted to move ahead with the peace talks, preceded by the so-called proximity or indirect talks, the flotilla raid demonstrated that he may have to tackle the thornier issue of the Gaza blockade, which has largely been in effect since the takeover of Gaza by Hamas in 2007.
Since then, Israel, the United States and Europe have plowed ahead with a strategy of dealing with the Palestinian Authority, which has control over the West Bank, while largely ignoring Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians.
Gaza was left with a deteriorating crisis as Hamas refused to yield to Western demands that it renounce violence and recognize Israel.
“You can talk all you want about proximity talks, expend as much energy as Obama has, but if you ignore the huge thorn of Gaza, it will come back to bite you,” said Robert Malley, program director for the Middle East and North Africa with the International Crisis Group.
For the Obama administration, the first order of business may be figuring out a way to hammer out a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas that will end the blockade of Gaza. Several attempts in the past two years to reach such an agreement have come close, but ultimately failed, the last time when the two sides were unable to reach a consensus on the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas, Gilad Shalit.
Mr. Indyk, the director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, says that after things cool down, the administration needs to work on a package deal in which Hamas commits to preventing attacks from, and all smuggling into, Gaza. In return, Israel would drop the blockade and allow trade in and out. “That deal would have to include a prisoner swap in which Gilad Shalit is finally freed,” he said.
It was unclear whether the indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority would suffer an immediate delay. George J. Mitchell, the Obama administration envoy to the Middle East, was still planning to attend the Palestine Investment Conference in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Wednesday and Thursday.
The indirect talks involved American negotiators shuttling between the Israelis and Palestinians, and are widely viewed as a step back from nearly two decades of direct talks.
But their structure may actually serve the purpose of keeping them going. Mr. Mitchell and his staff have been shuttling between the two sides for more than a year, meaning that the preparation for indirect talks and the talks themselves do not look different from the outside. As a result, the American brokers could continue their shuttles despite the flotilla attack.
While the blockade of Gaza has been widely criticized around the world, Israeli officials say it has imposed political pressure on Hamas. The group has stopped firing rockets at southern Israel and is fighting discontent among the people in Gaza.
Damn right it does!
BabyBarista blogger resigns from The Times over their decision to charge
Barrister and writer Tim Kevan has withdrawn the BabyBarista Blog from The Times in reaction to their plans to hide it away behind a subscription-based paywall. He commented: “I didn’t start this blog for it to be the exclusive preserve of a limited few subscribers. I wrote it to entertain whosoever wishes to read it.” The re-launched site is at www.babybarista.com and includes numerous cartoons of the blog’s characters by Times cartoonist Alex Williams.
By way of background, BabyBarista is a fictional account of a junior barrister at the English Bar. The stories he tells appeared on The Times for over three years and they also led to him getting two book deals with Harry Potter's publisher Bloomsbury . BabyBarista and the Art of War was published as a trade paperback last year and was described by broadcaster Jeremy Vine as “a wonderful racing read - well-drawn, smartly plotted and laugh out loud” and by The Times as “a cross between the talented Mr Ripley, Rumpole and Bridget Jones's Diary”. A mass market edition with the new title Law and Disorder is due out in August. Book Two of the BabyBarista Files will also be published by Bloomsbury . The provisional title is Law and Peace and although a date hasn't been finalised it is likely to be published in 2011.
Hippos'n'crocs
Hippos have an odd habit of licking crocodiles — tempting as it may be to want to find out what makes them so yummy, it's not recommended unless you weigh a few tons and have the ability to bite them in half if they protest.
PZ Myers @'Pharyngula'
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