The images of Palestinians massed at Israel’s borders on 15 May represented a dream for some, and a nightmare for others. On the 63rd anniversary of the declaration of the Jewish state and of the nakba (catastrophe) for the many thousands of Palestinians expelled from their homes, demonstrators from Syria , Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza converged on the promised land. They were only a few thousand but the world wondered what would happen if millions marched peacefully to the borders and walls next time. These refugees – neglected by the PLO since the 1993 Oslo accords despite having inspired the Palestinian awakening of the 1960s – may have decided to take their future into their own hands.

The banners in Ramallah demanded the right of all Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Beirut or Amman to elect a national representative council, and a radical reform of the PLO. This could represent a new stage in the liberation struggle, and Israel’s brutal response on 15 May, killing 14 unarmed Palestinians, shows how worried its leaders are. It is this new aspiration of ordinary Palestinians after the Arab uprisings, overlooked by both Hamas and Fatah, which has pushed the rivals to end their long quarrel and agree an accord, ratified in Cairo on 4 May by representatives of 13 Palestinian factions. It anticipates the formation of a government of technocrats or independents; the liberation of prisoners from both sides held in Gaza and the West Bank; presidential and legislative elections within one year; reform of the PLO; and the merging of the security forces on a strictly professional basis. Priority is given to reconstructing Gaza, which remains under Israeli blockade.

Unsurprisingly, the agreement was quickly rejected by Israel, with its prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, telling Fatah to choose between peace and Hamas. He did not mention that for months Israeli officials had justified their reluctance to agree an accord with Mahmoud Abbas (head of the Palestinian Authority and leader of Fatah) on the grounds that he only represented half the Palestinians. Netanyahu even claimed that Hamas was only the local version of al-Qaida. This intransigence was ratified by President Barack Obama in his speech on 19 May, when he said he understood that these were “profound and legitimate questions for Israel: how can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognise your right to exist?” But Obama and Netanyahu are familiar with the wording of the Oslo accords, which they claim to adhere to, that mandate the PLO, not the Palestinian government, to negotiate a final status agreement with Israel. Hamas does not belong to the PLO. The leaders gave no credit to the statements by Khaled Meshaal, the political leader of Hamas, who has repeated his support for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with Jerusalem as its capital, and confirmed that, if it came about, Hamas would renounce violence.

The agreement between Fatah and Hamas surprised all observers of the negotiations between them over the years. It is hard to see to what extent it will be put into effect, as many points remain vague and there is still deep mistrust. But it has come about as the result of powerful factors, relating to the Palestinian scene and developments in the region. The refugees, who had been the most noticeable absentees from the last 20 years of negotiations, have now been invited in.

‘Down with division’

Fatah and Hamas have been confronted by the rise of the protest movement in the West Bank and even Gaza. Unlike other Arab countries, the main slogan was not “Down with the government”, but “Down with division”, shouted by many young people. As Jamil Hilal, a social scientist in Ramallah, said: “We have no government and no state, just an authority, and on top of that, the occupation.” Although Fatah and Hamas responded with repression and pressure, they were forced to take notice of popular demands, since they are in a strategic deadlock.

The peace process, on which Fatah has staked everything since 1993, has been dead for years, but it was only with the fall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, the chief promoter of the supposed negotiations, that Abbas agreed to sign its death warrant: the rise in settlement-building removes any significance from dialogue with Israel. (On the day of Obama’s speech, the Israeli government announced the construction of another 1,550 homes in East Jerusalem).

Hamas, which claims to be the Palestinian “resistance”, has maintained a ceasefire with Israel, which it imposes on other Palestinian factions, if necessary by force. In Gaza, it has to deal with Salafist groups (whom some believe are linked to al-Qaida) that blame Hamas for not fighting the “Zionist enemy”, and for not making society more Islamic. The murder in April of Vittorio Arrigoni, a pro-Palestinian Italian activist based in Gaza, by an extremist group, was a warning. The Israeli blockade and daily problems of ordinary Gazans have eroded Hamas’s influence. Neither Fatah nor Hamas have alternative strategies and they are going through a crisis of legitimacy. Their behaviour in Ramallah and Gaza – authoritarian, corrupt, clientelist – is not so different from the behaviour of other Arab leaders, and is provoking the same revolt.

The Arab awakening

The upheaval in the region has also led to compromise. Fatah has lost its chief ally, Mubarak. Demonstrations in Syria, and their violent repression, have weakened a regime that is an essential support of Hamas, and has sheltered its external leaders since their expulsion from Jordan. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of Sunni Islam’s most popular preachers, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood (from which Hamas emerged), strongly condemned Bashar al-Assad’s government on 25 March and said the Ba’ath Party could no longer run Syria. Meanwhile, despite pressure from Damascus, Hamas has been careful not to rush to defend the Syrian regime.

Another regional shift troubles Hamas’s leaders. The repression of the democratic uprising in Bahrain and the violence of the anti-Shia campaign by the Gulf states – led by Saudi Arabia – have increased tensions between the Arab world and Iran. Hamas is partly funded by businessmen in the Gulf who are not keen on its association with Iran. Hence its interest in making up with Egypt, a Sunni power; this has been made easier by the political orientation of the Cairo regime after the overthrow of Mubarak.

Without going so far as to break with the US, or question the peace treaty with Israel, Egypt is ending its subservience to Israeli and US interests. Mubarak opposed unity between Fatah and Hamas because he feared the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He considered Gaza a security problem and took part in its blockade, and he led Arab defiance against Iran. While the Muslim Brotherhood prepare to take part in September’s elections, and perhaps even in the next government, these fears are now out of place, since the democratic climate in Egypt allows people to express their solidarity with the Palestinians, as the government is well aware.

Egypt’s foreign minister has said the Rafah border crossing will be opened, and has described the Israeli blockade of Gaza as shameful. The chief of staff, Sami Anan, has given Israel a warning on his Facebook page: “The Israeli government must show restraint when it discusses peace talks. It must refrain from intervening in the internal matters of Palestine”. As the former Egyptian ambassador to Syria, Mahmoud Shukri, said: “Mubarak was always taking sides with the US, but the new way of thinking is entirely different. We would like to make a model of democracy for the region, and we are ensuring that Egypt has its own influence”. The effect of this has been a thaw in relations with Iran, and both Tehran and Damascus have welcomed the Fatah-Hamas accord.

What hope for US intervention?

Obama’s latest speech, two years after he addressed the Muslim world in Cairo, was in response to the new situation in the region, and the failure of his mediation in the Palestinian conflict, confirmed by the resignation of US Special Envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell. Obama wanted to show that the US was on “the right side of history” at a time of regional turmoil. He announced that the US wanted to combine its interests and values; for example he denounced the repression by the government in Bahrain, where the US Fifth Fleet is based, but stayed silent about Saudi Arabia, which has assisted it.

Introducing him, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “America’s leadership is more essential than ever”. Robert Dreyfuss of the US weekly The Nation asked whether anyone in the region was still listening to the US. After describing Pakistan and Afghanistan’s defiance of the US, he wrote: “Iran, despite onerous sanctions and repeated threats of US military action, has not only refused to compromise over its nuclear programme, but Tehran is supporting anti-American movements in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and the Gulf states. Iraq, whose very government is the creation of the US invasion in 2003, has all but shut the door on a continued US military presence there, and its leadership touts its new alliance with Iran. Saudi Arabia, where anti-American sentiment has been growing for a decade, is seething over US policy in the region, and Riyadh is reaching out to Beijing, Moscow and other powers, despite its overwhelming dependence on weapons and security assistance from Washington.” Saudi Arabia has also expressed its displeasure at the way Obama dropped Mubarak and criticised the repression in Bahrain.

Netanyahu resisted calls to halt settlement building and rejected any return to the June 1967 borders, or even using those borders as a basis for negotiations, as suggested by Obama. When they met at the White House on 20 May, Netanyahu lectured Obama on history and geopolitics with the arrogance of someone who knows he can’t lose. Despite the media coverage about their differences the Israeli prime minister told his aides: “I went in with certain concerns. I came out encouraged”. Obama hailed their excellent relations, the only inviolable principle in the region, but also the major obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian state. Obama announced in September 2010 that it would be created by 2011 (his predecessor, George W Bush, had promised it by 2005, then 2008).

With 17 months to go before the US presidential election, the chances of Obama realising his aim are slim. What is certain is that this September, when the UN Assembly meets to decide whether to recognise a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, the US will oppose it, as they have opposed any pressure on Israel, which has for years violated every UN resolution, including those voted by the US.

But the US runs the risk of being isolated, for the agreement between Hamas and Fatah, the creation of a single Palestinian government and Israel’s intransigence have created a more favourable context for Abbas’s demands. And it seems several European countries have decided to support the resolution. Washington could, once again, impose its veto. But a massive vote in favour by the General Assembly would at least allow the Palestinian state (not just the PLO) to be granted observer status at the UN and join UN organisations such as Unesco and the FAO, and put the issue of the occupation of a state (and not just “territories”) before international opinion and justice. A small step forward, but a step all the same.

Alain Gresh is vice president of Le Monde diplomatique and heads its Middle East/Muslim world department.

Tel Aviv — In the video, there was screaming, cursing and shooting that left one prisoner dead. But when, in early April, Israelis were given a fly-on-the-wall view of one of the most violent nights in the history of their prison service, other media outlets met it with a collective shrug.

Those involved in monitoring Israel’s treatment of Palestinian security prisoners say this reflects a broader hardening of attitudes toward their treatment by the legal establishment and the general public.

At 2 a.m. on October 22, 2007, Masada, the Israel Prison Service’s operational control unit, entered Ketziot Prison in southern Israel with the intention of searching inmates. [See related video]

In general, security prisoners’ cell blocks are “more relaxed than you would expect,” according to Leslie Sebba, a criminologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who reports to the government biannually on the state of prisons. Even in the assessment of Anat Matar, head of the Israeli Committee for the Palestinian Prisoners, conditions are “by and large reasonable.”

But for several hours on the night in question, Masada shattered this calm. The operation, which official documents later showed took place in part to boost “morale and motivation” among Prison Service staff, led to a mass riot of some 1,000 prisoners and the death of Mohammed Ashkar, 29, from the northern West Bank. He died from head injuries a day later, while handcuffed to his bed at Soroka Medical Center, in Beersheba.

On April 7, Channel 2 aired footage from Masada’s video record of that night, which showed what a chaotic scene its raid had created. The station has not revealed how it obtained the footage.

Viewers could see the jail, silent as prisoners slept. Then, Masada operatives ran in, holding loaded weapons. Prisoners resisted, throwing unidentifiable objects; the operatives threatened tear gas if orders were not obeyed, and they shot ammunition — the nature of which has never been revealed — into prisoners’ tents in the dark. A prisoner injured in his leg is shown asking for medical attention but not receiving any and trying to treat himself. A wounded Ashkar is shown lying on the ground. The TV report said that Masada operatives deviated from plans to handcuff and search prisoners and extended the operation to wings of the prison that were not part of the plan.

The footage shown on-air was dramatic — all the more so because the authorities had tried hard to keep it secret. The Prison Service, with the backing of both the courts and successive public security ministers, blocked it from reaching the public, until they finally agreed in the Supreme Court, before the court ruled on the matter, to let it air. “These pictures, a whole system has tried for three years to hide them,” the Channel 2 narrator announced.

But for all the disturbing questions it raised, the piece received hardly a mention in the media beyond the televised report. Experts say that the video came as public concern about maltreatment of Palestinian prisoners — generally low — is particularly minimal following Hamas’s holding of Gilad Shalit for almost five years without allowing a Red Cross visit. “In general there’s a sense that justice has to be done — that they should be held in the same conditions that Shalit is being held,” Bar-Ilan University sociologist Avi Dawidowicz told the Forward.

The video had been the Holy Grail for the Ashkar’s family, offering them the chance to document how Ashkar was fatally injured. Smadar Ben-Natan, the family’s attorney, first became aware of its existence in 2008. Though she was granted access to most documents from a police investigation into the killing that recommended no charges be pressed, she received notification that the video was being withheld.

In September 2009, the Prison Service gave her 58 seconds of the video but refused to release more. In November 2010, she petitioned the Supreme Court to secure her access to the video. It was while this request was still pending that Channel 2 won the right to air the video, or, more precisely, 10 minutes of the video, which is actually several times longer. Ben-Natan regards the airing of the footage as important for transparency. But she is pessimistic that it will help her ongoing attempt to initiate the prosecution of the Prison Service officials who approved the operation. “I find it hard to believe that somebody will actually be prosecuted,” she told the Forward.

Ben-Natan based her view on the Israeli justice system’s track record in dealing with complaints from interrogations, which, in contrast to life in the main cellblocks, are reportedly sometimes tense and violent.

According to data provided by the state, more than 600 complaints of subjection to physical pressure by people under interrogation have been received since 2001 [Some of them  American citizens tortured by Israel. Despite an article exposing this on Foreign Service Journal, US media did not report on it]. But all were closed by the attorney general without initiation of any criminal investigations — many of them on the advice of an assessor from Shin Bet, the body that conducts the interrogations. Internal Shin Bet investigations took place in some cases, but results of these are classified.

Human rights groups had hoped on two occasions in the past 25 years that Israel would put an end to the use of physical pressure in interrogation of security detainees. But while the Landau Commission of 1987 limited the use of violence, it permitted the use of a “moderate measure of physical pressure.” And while a Supreme Court ruling of 1999 removed even this permission for physical pressure, it specified that the attorney general retained discretionary authority to excuse the use of physical pressure after-the-fact if he believed the interrogation tactics served an immediate security “necessity.” The option not to prosecute does not apply if the alleged force falls under the United Nations Convention Against Torture — but whether it does is also an internal decision for the attorney general.

[New Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan's "judicial hero," Israeli High Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak, had been a leading advocate of allowing torture.]

Critics say that though there has been a significant reduction in the use of force since 1999 high court ban, the fact that the attorney general can retroactively approve such force allows it to continue. “The legal culture is one of almost total impunity for law enforcement agents who deal with Palestinian security prisoners,” Ben-Natan said.

Legal experts doubt that the Israeli judiciary will act to reduce the use of force — or make those who use it more accountable — anytime soon. Hebrew University law professor David Kretzmer, author of the 2002 book “The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories,” said that the legal establishment thinks that with the 1999 ruling it went “far enough.” He added, “It would seem that there is an institutional bias in favor of the security services.” Daphne Barak-Erez, chair of law and security at the Tel Aviv University law faculty, said that she does not expect to see a change in the law because current practices reflect where things have come to rest given “the different pressures in Israeli society, from security services and human rights organizations.”

Last February, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and four other Israeli not-for-profit groups petitioned the high court, asking it to compel the attorney general to open criminal investigations in all claims of the use of force during interrogations. Hearings for this petition are due to begin in early 2012.

We had been acutely aware of the Israeli spying aspects described below and that both the mainstream media and Democracy Now had failed to cover them. It’s interesting to see, as the analysis below reveals, that when Democracy Now finally mentioned these, it did so in a way to minimize the impact and the facts.

On the contrary, the excellent Washington Report on Middle East Affairs had an article about this early on by editor Richard Curtiss. The Washington Report has been published since 1982 and is one of the two best print publications for information on Israel-Palestine in the U.S.. The other is AMEU’s The Link. Yet, Amy Goodman has never had editors from either publication on her program. As a result, many activists around the country don’t even know they exist. She has similarly ignored If Americans Knew, whose founder Alison Weir has been writing and speaking about Israel-Palestine for 11 years. (See related article.)

And when activists, despite Democracy Now’s omission, do learn about the Washington Report, they are sometimes told by similar left gatekeepers that the magazine is “conservative.” In reality, it is non-doctrinaire, its editors and writers are committed humanitarians, and it consistently publishes extremely strong journalism both on Israel-Palestine and on the Israel Lobby. We suspect that is why it is being “disappeared” by the left gatekeepers who so long kept Palestine out of progressive activism that Jeffrey Blankfort exposes so well. For example, he describes: 

If there is one event that exposed their influence over of the movement, it is what occurred in the streets of New York on June 12, 1982, when 800,000 people gathered in front of the United Nations to call for a ban on nuclear weapons. Six days earlier, on June 6th, Israel had launched a devastating invasion of Lebanon. Its goal was to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization, then based in that country. Eighty thousand soldiers, backed by massive bombing from the air and from the sea were creating a level of death and destruction that dwarfed what Iraq would later do in Kuwait. Within a year there would be 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese dead and tens of thousands more wounded.

And what was the response that day in New York? In recognition of the suffering then taking place in his homeland, a Lebanese man was allowed to sit on the stage, but he would not be introduced; not allowed to say a word. Nor was the subject mentioned by any of the speakers. Israel and its lobby couldn’t have asked for anything more.

[The person largely responsible for this was Leslie Cagan, who similarly minimized discussion of Palestine in the post-9/11 antiwar movement. Cagan now, oddly, has a paid position with the US Boat to Gaza.]

Winter Patriot

Here are some of the comments Haaretz found on the Facebook page: “We’re leading the Arabushes around by the nose;” “With God’s help let this be the first one killed today and not the last;” “They have to be sprayed like cockroaches;” “Every stinking SOB Muslim who dies is a holiday for me.”

These comments and many others were published by registered surfers, who are identified by their name and picture – and were not deleted by the police. A spokesperson for the police says that if they missed the offensive quotes, this was due to human error.

The official Israel Police page is considered a lively Facebook page, with more than 43,000 friends. The police use it for reporting various topics, from traffic jams to security incidents.

However, in many reports concerning security issues, the discussion on the page degenerates into curses, manifestations of racism, incitement to violence and more.

The violent rhetoric of the Israeli surfer may not come as a shock, but what does surprise is the police response: The force is in charge of enforcing the law and protecting the public, but many of the comments continue to adorn the page for a long time.

“We have no law that says what the platform owner’s responsibility is when he provides the stage for surfers,” says Pearl Cohen Zedek Latzer attorney Dan Or-Hof, a specialist in the areas of the Internet and information. “There has been a series of rulings in Israeli courts but not by the Supreme Court, so there is no obligatory precedent,” he says. “One ruling exempted the provider from responsibility if he did not know at the outset about the specific entry that breaks the law, and deleted it when he found out about it.”

“Practically speaking,” Or-Hof adds, “it is possible to pursue a number of paths – to approach the police with a request to delete specific messages, or go with a more general demand from people who are systematically harmed by expressions in the profile. It has to be remembered that this is a government authority and if a person continues to be hurt, he can try to file a civil damages suit against the state. There is another way, and that is to report the page to Facebook and hope they will deal with it.”

“Regardless of the legal aspect,” he concludes, “the police have a public obligation not to have such expressions appearing on their page. At the public level this is disturbing and inappropriate.”

Chief Insp. Sharon Yeminha, a new media officer in the police spokesman’s department, is in charge of the police Facebook profile. He tells Haaretz: “During the past three weeks more than 1,500 racist and violent messages of every kind have been deleted. Most of the people who wrote the comments have been warned against using those expressions again and the surfers who continued to write these racist responses have been blocked from responding on the page.

“The police Facebook page is considered one of the most active pages in the country,” Yeminha adds, “and every day we go over the posts written by surfers and the responses. It is possible some of the responses have not been deleted – we are only human, after all. Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention.”

Bassam Abu Shareef said Ross obstructed all US initiatives aiming to achieve progress in the peace process, and blamed the deputy’s bias for Mitchell’s resignation Saturday.

Abu Shareef said senior American officials informed him that Mitchell viewed the appointment of Ross a step to obstruct the peace process. He added that Mitchell believed Ross was working against US interests.

The official paraphrased comments he said were made by Mitchell during a meeting, where he asked: “How can Dennis Ross assist in the peace process when he refuses to meet with the Palestinians, when he despises their leadership and hates their president?”

Abu Shareef also said Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “rejects peace,” and would have no part of a Palestinian state with Hamas in its leadership.

“This means they are opening war on Palestinians and their nation,” he added.

Bloomberg will issue a formal proclamation at an event Wednesday evening in New York City set to be attended by more than 1,000 alumni of the free Israel trip for Jews aged 18 to 26.

The Taglit-Birthright Israel organization said May will feature events in cities across North America for trip alumni, special Birthright Shabbat celebrations at more than 100 synagogues, visits to communities by Israeli soldiers who participated in Birthright Israel trips and special donor functions.

The organization this month plans to publicize its goal of increasing participation from 30,000 a year to 51,000 a year by 2013, or one of every two young Jewish adults.

In January, the government of Israel announced that it would contribute $100 million to Taglit-Birthright Israel over the next three years. Birthright also plans to increase its fundraising this year by $10 million to $58.6 million, and then add another $20 million next year in order reach its participant goal for 2013.

“As Americans who are committed to a strong and vigorous foreign policy, we are deeply concerned about the prospective presidential campaign of Congressman Ron Paul,” the RJC’s executive director, Matt Brooks, said in a May 12 statement about the Texas lawmaker. “While Rep. Paul plans to run as a Republican, his views and past record place him far outside of the Republican mainstream.”

Paul launched his campaign for the Republican nomination on Friday. Like his son, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Paul has advocated cutting $3 billion in annual defense assistance to Israel, as well as to deny funding to its Arab neighbors.

In 2008, Paul mounted an insurgent campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and built a passionate base of support with his libertarian views and denunciations of American foreign policy. He was not a serious contender, however, in the primaries.

Paul had run as the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 1988.

“His candidacy, as we’ve seen in his past presidential campaigns, will appeal to a very narrow constituency in the U.S. electorate,” Brooks said. [In reality, Paul draws from across the political spectrum.] “Throughout his public service, Paul has espoused a dangerous isolationist vision for the U.S. and our role in the world. He has been a virulent and harsh critic of Israel during his tenure in Congress.”

……. US newspapers and television networks have famously been in a state of deepening crisis in the last few years. But the Arab Awakening has been a watershed in this decline. It was CNN’s reporting of the first Gulf War from Baghdad in 1991 that made it the channel that presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers and journalists around the world had to watch. Back in 2003, CNN and the US networks CNN and the US networks still had the most ample coverage of the start of the war in Iraq. But since the start of the Arab Awakening even the White House has reportedly been watching al-Jazeera English to find out what was happening (though the BBC has not been far behind).

It is depressing how swiftly the corps of American foreign correspondents has shrunk over the last five years. Papers like the Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Boston Globe, which once had a full roster of reporters, no longer do so. US television networks that used to rent whole floors of hotels, to the envy of non-American broadcasters, are now down to a single journalist to cover a story. At least one US network did not send a single correspondent to report the uprising in Tunisia in January that began the capsizing of the regional political status quo.

Does it matter? In one sense it obviously does, since there are fewer effective journalists in the business. The drop in their numbers would be more evident if so many Arab countries in turmoil like Syria and Yemen had not banned reporters from obtaining entry visas. The consequences of more limited journalistic resources being deployed is also masked by the use of YouTube, photographs taken on mobile phones, and conversations with eyewitnesses on satellite phones.

This sort of evidence is powerful but easier to manipulate than it looks. Governments that kick out foreign correspondents may breathe a sigh of relief without realizing that they have created a vacuum of information that can easily be filled by their enemies. Thus much of the reporting of demonstrations, arrests, shootings and killings in Syria now comes courtesy of opponents of the regime.

It is difficult to feel much sympathy for governments whose abortive attempts at censorship make them vulnerable to hostile propaganda, but it does make it very difficult to verify what is going on. For instance, at the end of February I was in Tehran where exile websites reported that there were continuing street demonstrations. I could see none of these though there were plenty of black-helmeted riot police. Local Iranian stringers for foreign publications had mostly had their press credentials suspended so they could not write.

“In any case,” one of the stringers complained to me, “the news agenda for Iran is now being set by exiles and, if we report that nothing much is happening, nobody will believe us.” On YouTube I noticed one video of a demonstration in Tehran that had supposedly taken place in February showing all the men in shirts and without jackets, though the temperature in the Iranian capital was only a couple of degrees above freezing. I suspected that the video had been taken at the height of the Iranian protests in the summer of 2009.

This is not to say that flickering films of atrocities by the Syrian security forces are not true, but collection and control of such information by the exiled opposition, makes it impossible to judge the extent of the violence.

It is naïve to be too nostalgic about the passing of the age when the US dominated the foreign news media. What made CNN’s coverage so distinctive in 1991 was that Peter Arnett, their correspondent in Baghdad, was prepared to take a sceptical approach to US government claims about the accuracy of its bombing and the identity of its victims. CNN lost its critical edge over the years, while network correspondents, often privately critical about US government policy, were prevented by their bosses in New York from straying too far from conventional political wisdom

The press has always been more dependent on the powers-that-be than it likes to admit. American journalists outside Washington often express revulsion and contempt at the slavish ways of the Washington press corps. But it is difficult to report any government on a day-to-day basis without its cooperation, cooperation that can be peremptorily withdrawn to bring critics into line. Also, contrary to every film about journalism, people tend not to admit voluntarily to anything that might do themselves damage. Woodward and Bernstein learned about Watergate almost entirely from secondary sources such as judges, prosecutors and government investigative agencies which could force witnesses to come clean by threatening to put them in jail.

The media is often credited or blamed for an independent sceptical spirit which it seldom shows in reality. In wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan effective media criticism has tended to follow rather than precede public opinion. Even then it usually needs important politicians to be standing on the same side of the fence. The Afghan war is unpopular in the US, but there is no effective anti-war movement because the Democrats, once so critical of the Iraq war, are now in the White House and, if Obama goes on being presented with targets as vulnerable as Trump, are likely to stay there. Read Full article

ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan – Three women, 12 children, cows, rabbits and chickens all hid behind the high wall where Osama bin Laden carved out a family life, set to the gentle rhythm of changing seasonal crops outside his gate.

Mobile phone video footage taken Tuesday by a Pakistani soldier offered a final glimpse into a life of rustic simplicity — a dozen eggs sitting in the kitchen sink, a few dishes on the side, large wooden cupboards open and bare.

Bin Laden’s final home, ransacked by US Navy SEAL commandos in an overnight raid last Sunday in the foothills of Pakistan’s Himalayan mountains, was not the luxury pile US reports first suggested.

The three-story building that became the fugitive terror chief’s last refuge was built in 2005, a white-walled square-built block without balconies, resembling a small clinic more than a country mansion.

A score [20] of people lived alongside the Al-Qaeda chief in his rural dwelling, including three of his wives and a dozen of their children.

At least five of them were killed during the US assault: bin Laden, whose body was taken by the Americans, one of his sons, his two bodyguards — known as the “Kuwaitis” – and a woman, according to Pakistani security sources.

The survivors — three women and their children — are in Pakistani army detention. During interrogation, the youngest of the wives, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, a 29-year-old Yemeni, told investigators that bin Laden had lived in the villa for five years.

US reports on Saturday said materials seized during the raid show bin Laden was still actively masterminding the Al-Qaeda network from the house.

Tuesday’s footage gives a flavor of the lives led there, organized by the “Kuwaitis” — two brothers called Arshad Khan and Tariq who circulated around Abbottabad frequently.

The men, who used false names, were Pakistani, despite their nickname, according to Pakistani media. Their father, who hails from the Islamist stronghold of Waziristan in the country’s northwest, was a friend of bin Laden from the time they met.

The house chosen for bin Laden had gray tile floor slabs with austere concrete walls and stairs. Its spartan interior had simple wooden furniture, foam mattresses on the floor and old television sets suggesting a life devoid of luxury.

The bedroom of the Saudi-born terror chief, who lived on the top two floors of the house with his family, was no less basic.

Outside, the bin Ladens raised chickens and grew vegetables in the shadow of their towering walls and tall poplar trees, cultivating a life of near self-sufficiency.

“They had two cows, dogs, and over a hundred chickens, that’s a lot. We could hear the chickens from our house,” said Mohammad Qasim, who lived next door.

Another neighbor, the young Zarar, 14, claims he once entered the property briefly.

“I saw two women who spoke Arabic, and they gave me a gift — two rabbits,” he said.

Only one man was, from time to time, allowed in the gardens: Shamrez Mohammad, the farmer in charge of feeding the animals and helping to grow the potatoes, cauliflower and other vegetables on the fertile land.

“Farm bin Laden” was perhaps “organic” if Shamrez, like his neighbors, avoided using pesticide sprays on the land.

Arrested by the Pakistani army just after the US raid, the key witness was released Friday. According to his son, he has since left town.

The army seized the house on Tuesday and has now emptied it. The soldiers will likely take the animals left behind to divide between them, said a neighbor.

Mohammad Kareem, a property agent in the area, said he saw “the soldiers chasing chickens” around the house on Monday. “They will share them out and eat them with their families,” he said.

As for the two cows, he says they are “probably on the way to a military-owned factory farm by now”.

The fate of the rabbits is still unclear.

According to sources familiar with jihadist networks, bin Laden was in poor health, with a kidney ailment that required medical care. But no neighbor recalls seeing regular visitors to the house.

Questioned on this point by the Pakistani services, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, quoted by local media, apparently replied that her husband, 25 years her senior, was “not weak or fragile.”

Drawing instead on the resources around him, the terror chief instead was being treated “successfully” with natural remedies, “including watermelon,” she said.

NEW YORK – The photograph showing President Barack Obama and staffers in the White House Situation Room carefully watching the raid in progress by US forces in Pakistan on the bin Laden compound last Sunday [sic*] has been published far and wide.

One Hassidic paper in Brooklyn, however, has chosen to alter the photo – excising Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and another female staffer from the picture.

[It has since come out that they did not actually watch the raid "in progress'"]