2-Jun-10 News -- Turkey: Gaza is 'turning point in history'

[John]

2-Jun-10 News -- Turkey: Gaza incident is 'turning point in history'

** 2-Jun-10 News -- Turkey: Gaza incident is 'turning point in history'
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi ... 02#e100602

Contents:
"Turkey's PM Erdogan says that Israel must be punished for Gaza incident"
"Israel's armed forces are charged with incompetence"
"'Martyrdom on the beaches of Gaza'"
"Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip"
"Japan's Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama resigns"
"Additional links"

[OLD1953]

Pretty much what I've been thinking, Turkey found themselves a batch of useful idiots and got them to fling themselves at a military blockade.

It's fairly plain to me this group was a very mixed bag, at least half were Turks (according to the WSJ yesterday) and a large group of Muslim fanatics from all over. It would be very interesting to get the news on friction on those ships, fanatic Muslims wanting to be martyred (far right by my definitions), European leftists wanting to confront Israel, a former US ambassador - there just HAD to be some major clashes going on.

The current Turkish govt wants to split from Israel forever, and Israel has become a paranoid state, striking wildly and blindly at the least provocation. Such a situation will lead to conflict without doubt.

Costner's centrifugal gimmick - good lord. That's got to be the silliest thing I've seen in ages. Krebs cyclones would do the same job faster, and IT DOESN"T MATTER. There are about 643 quadrillion gallons of water in the gulf. If you managed to pump a million gallons per second (a fantastic job) you would clean up a quadrillion gallons in 30 years. What do you do about the other 642 quadrillion?

[Guest]

@OLD1953 - RE: Costner's centrifugal gimmick

You don't have to clean ALL the water in the gulf.

If you want to clean 100,000 square km of water to a depth of 1m at the fastest rate reported for Costners machine (about 800 litres per minute) it would take one machine about 250 years without stopping. That's still impractical, but it might be a useful technology for smaller oil spills, or to clean up the worst affected areas of a big spill, particularly if you consider some kind of disaster response ship with several of the machines working simultaneously.

At the end of the day, I give kudos to Costner for trying to doing something useful with his money.

[Guest]

@OLD1953 - RE: Costner's centrifugal gimmick

You don't have to clean ALL the water in the gulf.

If you want to clean 100,000 square km of water to a depth of 1m at the fastest rate reported for Costners machine (about 800 litres per minute) it would take one machine about 250 years without stopping. That's still impractical, but it might be a useful technology for smaller oil spills, or to clean up the worst affected areas of a big spill, particularly if you consider some kind of disaster response ship with several of the machines working simultaneously.

At the end of the day, I give kudos to Costner for trying to doing something useful with his money.

100,000 sq km, 1m deep, contain 100,000,000,000,000 liters of water. At 800 liters per minute, it'll take 237,823 years to clean all that water.

[Greg]

from http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/dershowitz/ ... e_entirely

Although the wisdom of Israel's actions in stopping the Gaza flotilla is open to question, the legality of its actions is not. What Israel did was entirely consistent with both international and domestic law. In order to understand why Israel acted within its rights, the complex events at sea must be deconstructed.

First, there is the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which included a naval blockade. Recall that when Israel ended its occupation of Gaza, it did not impose a blockade. Indeed it left behind agricultural facilities in the hope that the newly liberated Gaza Strip would become a peaceful and productive area. Instead Hamas seized control over Gaza and engaged in acts of warfare against Israel. These acts of warfare featured anti-personnel rockets, nearly 10,000 of them, directed at Israeli civilians. This was not only an act of warfare, it was a war crime. Israel responded to the rockets by declaring a blockade, the purpose of which was to assure that no rockets, or other material that could be used for making war against Israeli civilians, was permitted into Gaza. Israel allowed humanitarian aid through its checkpoints. Egypt as well participated in the blockade. There was never a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, merely a shortage of certain goods that would end if the rocket attacks ended.

The legality of blockades as a response to acts of war is not subject to serious doubt. When the United States blockaded Cuba during the missile crisis, the State Department issued an opinion declaring the blockade to be lawful. This, despite the fact that Cuba had not engaged in any act of belligerency against the United States. Other nations have similarly enforced naval blockades to assure their own security.

The second issue is whether it is lawful to enforce a legal blockade in international waters. Again, law and practice are clear. If there is no doubt that the offending ships have made a firm determination to break the blockade, then the blockade may be enforced before the offending ships cross the line into domestic waters. Again the United States and other western countries have frequently boarded ships at high sea in order to assure their security.

Third, were those on board the flotilla innocent non-combatants or did they lose that status once they agreed to engage in the military act of breaking the blockade? Let there be no mistake about the purpose of this flotilla. It was decidedly not to provide humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, but rather the break the entirely lawful Israeli military blockade. The proof lies in the fact that both Israel and Egypt offered to have all the food, medicine and other humanitarian goods sent to Gaza, if the boats agreed to land in an Israeli or Egyptian port. That humanitarian offer was soundly rejected by the leaders of the flotilla who publicly announced:

"This mission is not about delivering humanitarian supplies, it's about breaking Israel's siege on 1.5 million Palestinians." (AFP May 27, 2010.)

The act of breaking a military siege is itself a military act, and those knowingly participating in such military action put in doubt their status as non-combatants.

It is a close question whether "civilians" who agree too participate in the breaking of a military blockade have become combatants. They are certainly something different than pure, innocent civilians, and perhaps they are also somewhat different from pure armed combatants. They fit uncomfortably onto the continuum of civilianality that has come to characterize asymmetrical warfare.

Finally, we come to the issue of the right of self defense engaged in by Israeli soldiers who were attacked by activists on the boat. There can be little doubt that the moment any person on the boat picked up a weapon and began to attack Israeli soldiers boarding the vessel, they lost their status as innocent civilians. Even if that were not the case, under ordinary civilian rules of self defense, every Israeli soldier had the right to protect himself and his colleagues from attack by knife and pipe wielding assailants. Lest there be any doubt that Israeli soldiers were under attack, simply view the accompanying video and watch, as so-called peaceful "activists" repeatedly pummel Israeli soldiers with metal rods.

Every individual has the right to repel such attacks by the use of lethal force, especially when the soldiers were so outnumbered on the deck of the ship. Recall that Israel's rules of engagement required its soldiers to fire only paintballs unless their lives were in danger. Would any country in the world deny its soldiers the right of self defense under comparable circumstances?

Notwithstanding the legality of Israel's actions, the international community has once again ganged up on Israel. In doing so, Israel's critics have failed to pinpoint precisely what Israel did that allegedly violates international law. Some have wrongly focused on the blockade itself. Others have erroneously pointed to the location of the boarding in international waters. Most have simply pointed to the deaths of so-called peace activists, though these deaths appear to be the result of lawful acts of self-defense. None of these factors alone warrant condemnation, but the end result surely deserves scrutiny by Israeli policy makers. There can be little doubt that the mission was a failure, as judged by its results. It is important, however, to distinguish between faulty policies on the one hand, and alleged violations of international law on the other hand. Only the latter would warrant international intervention, and the case has simply not been made that Israel violated international law.

[OLD1953]

My point was, it just isn't practical. The best they could possibly do would be to try to intercept the "plumes" and get some of that contained, and even that would be a much bigger job than they apparently think it is.

[Tom Acre]

Until the leak is sealed cleanup is impractical. Didn't I read that in the past the only way such a leak has been sealed is with a low yield nuclear warhead?

[streetman]

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0 ... t-of-raid/

Reporters Dispute Israeli Account of Raid
By ROBERT MACKEY

Updated | 5:02 p.m. On Thursday, Al Jazeera English broadcast an interview with Jamal Elshayyal, one of the channel’s journalists who was on board the Mavi Marmara on Monday when it was intercepted by Israeli commandos enforcing a naval blockade on Gaza.

In his account of the start of the raid, which left nine activists dead and has sparked calls for an independent investigation, Mr. Elshayyal insisted that the Israelis had fired live ammunition at the ship from the air before commandos landed on the boat and said that he had seen someone shot and killed by a bullet that hit the top of his head. He said, in part:

As soon as this attack started, I was on the top deck and within just a few minutes there were live shots being fired from above the ship, from above, from where the helicopters were. [...]

The first shots that were fired were either some sort of sound grenades, there was some tear gas that was fired as well as rubber-coated bullets. They were fired initially and the live bullets came roughly about five minutes after that.

Asked if the shots fired at the ship by the Israeli forces had seemed to come from ships nearby or the helicopters above, Mr. Elshayyal said:

It was evident there was definitely fire from the air, because one of the people who was killed was clearly shot from above — he was shot, the bullet targeted him at the top of his head. There was also fire coming from the sea as well. Most of the fire initially from the sea was tear gas canisters, sound grenades, but then it became live fire. After I finished filing that last report and I was going down below deck one of the passengers who was on the side of the deck holding a water hose — trying to hose off, if you will, the advancing Israeli navy — was shot in his arm by soldiers in the boats below. [...]

There is no doubt from what I saw that live ammunition was fired before any Israeli soldier was on deck. What I saw, the sequence of events that took place, there was a pool camera, so reporters took it in turns to file, so after I had done my first file, I turned around to see what was going on and there were several shots fired. In fact, one of the helicopters at the front of the ship, you could almost see the soldiers pointing their guns down through some sort of hole or compartment at the bottom side of the helicopter and firing almost indiscriminately without even looking where they were firing. And those bullets were definitely live bullets.

Mr. Elshayyal’s account, of course, is only one part of the puzzle, and it will not be accepted easily by people who see his network as biased against Israel. That said, now that the accounts of activists and journalists who were detained by Israel after the raid are starting to be heard, it is clear that their stories and that of the Israeli military do not match in many ways.

On Thursday, Today’s Zaman, an English-language newspaper in Turkey, reported that the president of the Turkish aid group that helped to organize the flotilla said that a photographer working for the group “was shot in the forehead by a soldier one meter away from him.” Bulent Yildirimhe, the president of the aid organization Insani Yardim Vakfi (known in English as the I.H.H.), told the newspaper on Thursday after he returned from Israel: “Our Cevdet [Kiliclar], he is a press member. He has become a martyr. All he was doing was taking pictures. They smashed his skull into pieces.” The newspaper added:

Kevin Ovenden of Britain, an activist on the ship that arrived in İstanbul on Thursday, also said a man who had pointed a camera at the soldiers was shot directly through the forehead with live ammunition, with the exit wound blowing away back of his skull.

In another report, the newspaper said that Israeli officials had confiscated images taken by one of its photographers in the flotilla:

A photojournalist from Today’s Zaman Kursat Bayhan who was on board an international aid convoy for Gaza said he tried to hide a flash disk which included the photos from the moments of Israeli attack on the convoy under his tongue to prevent Israeli authorities from seizing it but his effort failed during a medical examination.

The report added, “Bayhan said the journalists in the ship including him tried to protect the video footage and photos they took,” after the ships were seized by Israeli commandos, but “all the materials of the press members, including their passports and identity cards, were taken away.”

The way these accounts diverge from that of Israel’s military would seem to make an independent investigation into the events crucial. That is particularly true since, as The Lede noted on Wednesday, Israel is apparently in possession of much more video evidence than it has yet released.

In a post making the case that Israel should not conduct that inquiry, Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli journalist and blogger, pointed out that journalists in the flotilla seem to have left Israeli custody without any of the video they shot during the raid that might bolster their accounts.

Israel has confiscated some of the most important material for the investigation, namely the films, audio and photos taken by the passengers [and] journalists on board and the Mavi Marmara’s security cameras. Since yesterday, Israel has been editing these films and using them for its own PR campaign. In other words, Israel has already confiscated most of the evidence, held it from the world and tampered with it. No court in the world would [trust] it to be the one examining it.

[gerald]

there is an ancient saying -- or words to the effect
"The children of my enemy, will be the enemy of my children, therefore, to protect my children, I must kill, the children of my enemy."

[John]

there is an ancient saying -- or words to the effect
"The children of my enemy, will be the enemy of my children, therefore, to protect my children, I must kill, the children of my enemy."

No kidding! Wait till you see the story I post tonight -- assuming that
I can stay awake long enough.

John