Thursday, December 8, 2016

Turkish judges urged not to drop charges against Israeli officers

Israeli ambassador Eitan Na’eh, left, presents his credentials to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the Turkish capital Ankara on 5 December.Presidency of Turkey

Charlotte Silver-8 December 2016

An Istanbul court remained in session until midnight last Friday as a panel of judges considered whether the case brought against four senior Israeli military officials accused of ordering the lethal raid on the flotilla to Gaza in 2010 should be dropped.

The judges failed to make a decision, scheduling another hearing for 9 December.

A Turkish prosecutor is arguing the case must be dropped, citing the reconciliation pact signed over the summer.

In June, Turkey promised immunity for Israeli officials in exchange for $20 million in compensation to the victims’ families. The Turkish parliament approved the agreement in August.

The agreement thawed a six-year freeze in military and political relations between the two countries. This month, the governments resumed an exchange of ambassadors.

Life sentences

In May 2010, Israel attacked the Turkish-owned Mavi Marmara as it sailed in international waters as part of a flotilla to Gaza, killing nine people and fatally injuring a tenth.

In 2012, the families of the victims filed a criminal complaint against four Israeli officers: Gabi Ashkenazi, who was the Israeli chief of staff at the time; Eliezer Marom, who was the commander of naval forces; Avishai Levi, who was director of air force intelligence and Amos Yadlin who was head of intelligence.

Among the lengthy list of charges against the Israeli officials are instigating plunder, instigating torture, instigating deprivation of liberty and instigating armed injury.

Prosecutors had been seeking life sentences for the four defendants.

But now prosecutors are demanding the case be dropped so as to comply with the political normalization agreement reached between Turkey and Israel.

The official text states, “This agreement will constitute full release from any liability of Israel, its agents and citizens with respect to any and all claims, civil or criminal, that have been or will be filed against them in Turkey.”

“The Government of Israel, its agents and/or citizens, shall be indemnified by the Government of Turkey against all costs, damages, and/or expenses,” the agreement states.

Messy agreement

Mustafa Ozbek, the spokesperson for the Humanitarian Relief Foundation, known by its Turkish initials IHH, a group that helped organize the flotilla, told The Electronic Intifada the judges have indicated they will throw out the case.

But the attorneys representing the families and victims are pushing the court to uphold the complaint by emphasizing holes in the one-page agreement between the two governments.

Ozbek says the families of the slain victims have not received “a single dollar in compensation.”

Media reported that Israel delivered the money to the account of the Turkish justice ministry in September.

“Even if they do in the future, this is not an action for damages but a criminal case,” Ozbek said. “With regards to these points the prosecution should proceed.”

Since 2014, IHH has opposed dropping its lawsuits in exchange for any compensation.

Attorneys note that citizens from 37 countries are involved in the lawsuit, making the case extend beyond the scope of the Turkey-Israel pact.

“The agreement is concerned about the families of 10 victims only,” Ozbek said. “However there were 715 victims on board. Their right to seek justice cannot be dismissed either according to Turkish or international law.”

Turkish law also states that a pardon or general amnesty can only be granted by a three-fifths supermajority – or 330 votes – in the national assembly. The Turkey-Israel agreement passed with only 206 votes.

“Therefore the parliamentary endorsement of the agreement is null and void. It violates the constitution in this regard,” Ozbek asserted.

Israel has never directly responded to the complaint, according to IHH, but demanded the lawsuit be dropped as a precondition to any normalized relations with Turkey.

Victims of the Mavi Marmara attack are also pursuing justice in US courts as well as in the International Criminal Court.

White Helmets in east Aleppo plead for help after regime advances

Rescue group says volunteers fear for their lives as Syrian army, backed by Iranian militia, approaches rebel-held areas

A member of the White Helmets stands amid the rubble of a destroyed building after airstrikes in Aleppo in October. Photograph: Karam Al-Masri/AFP/Getty Images

Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor-Thursday 8 December 2016

The Syrian White Helmets rescue group has urged international organisations to protect its volunteers in rebel-held parts of eastern Aleppo, warning that they face torture and execution.

The rescue group said it believed it had less than 48 hours before the Syrian army, backed by Iranian militia, reached the districts in which it has been operating.

“If we are not evacuated, our volunteers face torture and execution in the regime’s detention centres,” the group said. “We have good reason to fear for our lives.”

The plea came as Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said the Syrian army was suspending all military operations in eastern Aleppo to allow as many as 8,000 residents to leave. Russian and US officials would discuss detailed documents at the weekend in Geneva, he said, adding that Moscow was determined to beat all “terrorists” until their full elimination, in line with UN security council resolutions.

Russia has hinted at such deals in the past, only for them to collapse. The US said it welcomed the “indication that something positive could happen but we’re going to have to wait and see”. White House spokesman Josh Earnest added: “Our approach to the situation has been to listen carefully to what the Russians say, but scrutinise their actions.”

The UN security council will be briefed by the UN’s special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, at a closed doors session on Friday.

The White Helmets in Aleppo fear they will be “be treated as terrorists” and could face detention or execution by advancing regime troops. “We hold the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross], the United Nations and the [UN] security council responsible for our lives and we call on you to secure safe passage,” a statement added.

Western sources said there were credible reports of people being arbitrarily arrested and executed in Aleppo, though there was a lack of firm information.

The White Helmets operate in rebel-held territory throughout Syria and have won international acclaim for their work in the aftermaths of attacks. The Bashar al-Assad regime has always described the group as a western propaganda tool, but it contends it has no political affiliation, working only to save civilian lives in highly dangerous circumstances. It was nominated for the Nobel peace prize this year and is backed by UK funds.

The plea symbolises the collapse of the resistance in eastern Aleppo, with two thirds of the city now captured by the regime, and as few as 100,000 civilians still in rebel held parts of the city. Despite the regime advance, many citizens have not left due to the lack of a safe route and the risk of re-entering the conflict zone.

Jan Egeland, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Syria in Geneva, said the parties to the conflict were poles apart on agreeing the terms of a ceasefire.

Five months of negotiations over aid plans had all failed and produced “nothing”, Egeland said, adding that it was up to Moscow and Washington to agree a safe voluntary evacuation from east Aleppo.

“The member states that are supposed to help us get access to civilians in the crossfire are poles apart in how they regard what is happening in Syria. We are not having a united humanitarian diplomacy by the parties and we see that in a diminishing access on the ground.

“I have never been in my many, many years of humanitarian negotiations in as difficult negotiations and as frustrating talks that produced nothing in spite of thousands of contacts with all of the parties, and it is with bitterness and frustration that we have to report that we have not been able even to evacuate the wounded.”

A rebel call on Wednesday for a five-day ceasefire and the evacuation of civilians to opposition territory was rejected by Assad.

The Russians insisted they were discussing the details of a ceasefire but, in the past few weeks, Russia has repeatedly shown a willingness to negotiate but not reached a deal.

Lavrov spoke to the outgoing US secretary of state, John Kerry, in Hamburg, but the US has virtually no negotiating leverage.

Kerry will confer with foreign ministers in Paris on Saturday to discuss the humanitarian consequences of the crisis in Aleppo, and to map out a political strategy for after the city’s likely fall. Many diplomats insist the fall of Aleppo will not mean the end of the civil war, but simply signal the start of a more brutal insurgency phase.

The rebels are likely to want to flee to Idlib, 35 miles west of Aleppo, or to the Euphrates Shield area north of Aleppo.

The capture of eastern Aleppo will put Syria’s five major cities, the south, central spine and western flank bordering the Mediterranean, under Assad’s control, but power is still fragmented. Assad wants to press ahead to retaking the whole of the country, but is dependent on Russian and Iranian support to do so.

'I NEVER SAW SUCH A TRAGEDY'

Charred remains of Pakistan plane crash victims wrapped in CLOTH BUNDLES as rescuer workers tell of horrific scenes at crash site

Witnesses describe the smell of burning flesh and body parts littering the floor, with relatives told they wouldn't recognise what was left of their loved ones

RESCUE workers have told of nightmarish scenes at the site of a Pakistan plane crash which killed 48 people yesterday.

BY TOM MICHAEL AND SAM WEBB-7th December 2016

The aircraft, belonging to Pakistan‘s national carrier Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), crashed in a massive fireball on Wednesday, killing all 48 people on board, the airline chairman and police said.

Pakistani soldiers were among those called in to search for victims among the wreckage - Witnesses told of hellish scenes at the crash site, which reportedly stank of burning flesh

Senior police officer Khurram Rasheed told reporters the rescue effort had now ended-The scorched bones of the victims were wrapped in cloth in bundles

And emergency workers and volunteers have now revealed the horror that awaited them when they arrived at the site of the disaster.

Altaf Hussain, a rescue worker who transported the remains of passengers in an ambulance, said the hellish crash site smelled of burnt flesh and oil and that body parts were scattered everywhere.

“We collected the burned bones of the ill-fated passengers and wrapped them in cloth,” he said.

Ambulance driver Duray Hussain said the remains of the passengers were “beyond recognition”.

One official, Farman Ghori, was crying outside the hospital, saying he saw the faces of two toddlers among the remains.

“Oh God, I never saw such a tragedy,” Ghori said.

Boris Johnson: could careless talk cost his job?

8 DEC 2016

Has Boris Johnson lost a life? Has he moved closer to the exit door with his indiscreet words at a conference in Italy.

The Guardian’s scoop shows him suggesting there’s some kind of equivalence between Saudi Arabia (an ally of the BritishGovernment which supports its attacks on Iranian-backed forces in Yemen) and Iran (a country we deeply distrust and who Theresa May said in Bahrain on Wednesday needed to be pushed back on the many fronts where it fights through proxies).

It’s not his first offence – amongst others are upsetting some EU leaders at various points (they start from the point of seeing him as public enemy no. 1 so that wasn’t difficult but he made it easy). He’s also upset diplomats at the FCO, not least for suggesting Turkey’s President Erdogan should be excused a little capital punishment splurge (opposing capital punishment has been a decades long campaign by the FCO).

But this is the offence that most impinges on his boss’s world. Theresa May was barely back on British soil after expending energy and air miles in Bahrain talking to Saudi and other Gulf allies than she heard the Foreign Secretary’s loose-tongued words.

One former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia suggested to us on Channel 4 News tonight that the Saudis would take a lot more notice of the PM travelling all the way to see them and gushing with measures of affinity and good faith. The Boris Johnson words might have caused a flurry but not much more. No. 10 though just couldn’t resist venting some of the anger that was no doubt witnessed at the top of government last night.

Theresa May likes control of the message. We are only just learning how much with messages to senior civil servants and ministers warning of severe and intrusive leak inquiries even where national security is not at risk.

Boris Johnson’s modus operandi must offend many elements of her very being.

But when she was forming her Cabinet, I understand, Mrs May decided she had to have one of the two senior figures in the Vote Leave campaign at her top table. She didn’t feel she could appoint Michael Gove because of her trust levels in him being low and Boris-leaning Leave supporters’ trust being pretty low too.

So Boris Johnson it was with the hope that office would change him.

To sack him this early in her Government would reflect on her judgement in appointing him and he’s no unknown.

When Nigel Farage and his entourage visited President-elect Donald Trump at his skyscraper New York home I’m told Mr Trump asked: “Is that blond guy still popular?”

Donald Trump insulted a union leader on Twitter. Then the phone started to ring.

The Washington Post's Libby Casey and Danielle Paquette sit down, Dec. 8, with Chuck Jones, the Indianapolis union leader who President-elect Donald Trump attacked on Twitter. (The Washington Post)

By Danielle Paquette December 7 at 10:15 PM
Chuck Jones uses a flip phone, so he didn’t see the tweet. His friend of 36 years called him Wednesday night and said: The president-elect is smearing you on Twitter.

Jones, a union leader in Indianapolis, represents the Carrier workers whose jobs Donald Trump has pledged to save. He said the sudden attention from the country’s next leader didn’t feel real.

“My first thought was, ‘Well, that’s not very nice,’ ” he told The Washington Post on Wednesday night. “Then, 'Well, I might not sleep much tonight.' "

Jones, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999, told The Post on Tuesday that he believed Trump had lied to the Carrier workers last week when he visited the Indianapolis plant. On a makeshift stage in a conference room, Trump had applauded United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, for cutting a deal with him and agreeing to keep 1,100 jobs that were slated to move to Mexico in America’s heartland.

Jones said Trump got that figure wrong.

[He ‘lied his a– off': Carrier union leader on Trump’s big deal]

The Post's Fact Checker took a closer look at the claims President-elect Donald Trump made during a speech in Indiana on Dec. 1, about the deal to keep jobs at a Carrier plant there that were due to be shipped to Mexico. (Video: Jenny Starrs/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Carrier, he said, had agreed to preserve 800 production jobs in Indiana. (Carrier confirmed that number.) The union leader said Trump appeared to be taking credit for rescuing 350 engineering positions that were never scheduled to leave. Five hundred fifty of his members, he said, were still losing their jobs. And the company was still collecting millions of dollars in tax breaks.

In return for downsizing its move south of the border, United Technologies would receive $7 million in tax credits from Indiana, to be paid in $700,000 installments each year for 10 years. Carrier, on top of that, has agreed to invest $16 million in its Indiana operation. United Technologies, meanwhile, still plans to shuttle 700 factory jobs from Huntington, Ind., to Monterrey, Mexico.

Jones, who said the union wasn't involved in the negotiations, said he's working to lift his members' spirits. He said he didn't have time to worry about Trump.

“He needs to worry about getting his Cabinet filled,” he said, “and leave me the hell alone.”

[I’m the union leader Donald Trump attacked. I’m tired of being lied to about our jobs.]

Representatives for Trump did not respond to The Post's requests for comment.

Over the past two decades, the United States has lost about 4.5 million manufacturing jobs, a consequence economists ascribe to trade and automation. Jones said he has fought to keep work on U.S. soil, bargaining repeatedly with Carrier and Rexnord, another Indianapolis plant that plans to relocate jobs to Mexico.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence tweeted his support for Jones earlier this year:

Half an hour after Trump tweeted about Jones on Wednesday, the union leader's phone began to ring and kept ringing, he said. One voice asked: What kind of car do you drive? Another said: We’re coming for you.

He wasn’t sure how these people found his number.

“Nothing that says they’re gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids,” Jones said later on MSNBC. “We know what car you drive. Things along those lines.”

“I’ve been doing this job for 30 years, and I’ve heard everything from people who want to burn my house down or shoot me,” he added. “So I take it with a grain of salt and I don’t put a lot of faith in that, and I’m not concerned about it and I’m not getting anybody involved. I can deal with people that make stupid statements and move on.”

Brett Voorhies, president of the Indiana State AFL-CIO, called Jones after Trump’s tweet caught his eye. Jones, he said, had just left his office in Indianapolis, where he manages the needs of about 3,000 union members.

“This guy makes pennies for what he does,” Voorhies said. “What he has to put up with is just crazy. Now he’s just got the president-elect smearing him on Twitter.”

It Was a Corruption Election. It’s Time We Realized It.

BY SARAH CHAYES-DECEMBER 6, 2016

I have an odd perspective on the election of Donald Trump: a warped kind of déjà vu. For the past decade, I’ve worked on the issue of corruption around the world. In particular, I’ve spent a lot of time explaining that people who live in structurally corrupt political and economic systems are sometimes driven to extremes. I have always understood that the analysis was relevant in the United States — just maybe not how relevant.

In the past 10 years, populations have rejected “rigged systems” that had stood for decades. They have risen up in mass protests in Brazil, Guatemala, South Africa, and South Korea. They have overthrown their governments in open insurrections like the Arab Spring and Ukraine’s Maidan. Or they have fallen in behind self-proclaimed Robin Hoods such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Occasionally, they have joined violent religious movements like the Islamic State or Boko Haram.

With Trump’s election, the United States just joined this list.

It might make his voters uncomfortable to hear that they’ve behaved much as my former neighbors in Kandahar, Afghanistan, who re-embraced the Taliban in their disgust at the corruption of Hamid Karzai’s government. Hillary Clinton voters might be equally upset to consider the degree to which the United States has come to resemble that regime or those of other corrupt countries I have been studying.

We Americans may not be subjected to shakedowns by the police, the judge, or the county clerk. But consider current realities: Networks that weave together public officials and business magnates (think the food or energy industries, pharmaceuticals, or Wall Street) have rewritten our legislation to serve their own interests. Institutions that have retained some independence, such as oversight bodies and courts, have been deliberately disabled — starved of operating funds or left understaffed. Practices that, while perhaps not technically illegal, clearly cross the line to the unethical, the inappropriate, or the objectively corrupt have been defended by those who cast themselves as bulwarks of reason and integrity.

How many of us have said — in any meaningful way — “That’s a red line!”?Who among us refused, in the end, to take the money or make the excuses?

For me, the seminal moment came on June 27, when the Supreme Court overturned former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s conviction on corruption charges. A businessman had lavished luxury travel, designer clothes, a Rolex watch, and tens of thousands of dollars on McDonnell and his wife, apparently in return for their help persuading public universities to perform clinical trials on his company’s tobacco-based anti-inflammatory supplement.

The Supreme Court’s decision was unanimous. Not one of the eight justices could come up with a reason why such behavior might violate the law. None even thought the matter significant enough to warrant separate comment or a cry to our collective conscience: “Given the wording of the statute, I had to vote this way. But the legal definition of corruption has grown too narrow. These statutes had better change if America as we know it is to survive.”

Subsequent commentary was signally lacking in outrage. On NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show that day, for example, the guests (two legal scholars and a journalist) practically skipped over the McDonnell decision. Rehm had to push them to grapple with it. Their consensus seemed to be that if the standard enshrined in the lower court’s decision to convict McDonnell were to prevail, every politician in Washington would be liable.

Well, exactly.

These are moral issues. And the very laws we depend on to enforce what should be bedrock standards have sometimes undermined them. Do we reject corruption? Of course we do — just as we refuse to countenance torture. But then come the legal definitions. What counts as torture? How bad does it have to hurt? What do you mean by corruption? The head of an Egyptian business association once told me:

“That’s part of the brilliance of corruption in Egypt; they make it legal!” The United States is going down the same road:The laws we hold so dear have narrowed the definition of corruption almost to the point of irrelevance.

Two candidates — Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump — made the word “corruption” central to their campaigns. Together they drew easily more than half of votes cast. Yet to use this word to describe America remains almost taboo in polite circles. In the hundreds of pages of post-election commentary, how often has it been emphasized?

One remark from 2013 says a lot about what has befallen America. When then Salon writer Alex Pareene described some of JPMorgan Chase’s practices as corrupt, CNBC host Maria Bartiromo slapped him down. “Should we talk about the financial strength of JPMorgan, at this point?” she wondered. “Even with all of these losses, the company continues to churn out tens of billions of dollars in earnings and hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. How do you criticize that?”

Indeed. How do you criticize money these days?

In a country full of sophisticated lawyers and lobbyists and rationalizers, it is now urgent to ask whether we still understand what corruption is. To say it’s what is proscribed by law is to fall into a logical sinkhole.

What does corruption mean when a senior public official receives gifts from foreign leaders, via an institution bearing her name, while she is making decisions regarding these same foreign leaders? How should someone like me talk about corruption overseas when five different police departments use force against peoples whose lands were stolen through repeated treaty violations, on behalf of a private company pleading the letter of property laws?

What is the definition of corruption when a bank defrauds millions of customers without losing its license? When 2 million American adults are behind bars for trivial offenses, their lives permanently derailed, while no legal institution has punished any executive for bringing about the collapse of the world economy?

It’s time to see past the rationales and the rhetoric. No matter who won our vote, we must come to grips with these questions.

Whatever our affiliation or walk of life, we must also, each of us, discover and hold on to that dividing line that marks off the reasonable compromises from the unacceptable.

For, like the people of Mosul in Iraq or northern Nigeria, who traded intolerably corrupt regimes for Islamist crusaders who were worse, Americans will wake up in January under a system that is more corrupt than the one that fueled their rebellion. That is the irony of resorting to a wrecking ball to bring down a corrupt regime. Too often, the kleptocratic networks prove resilient, while those who revolted end up with crushed heads.

Already, President-elect Trump’s questionable affiliations and potential conflicts of interest — as genteel vocabulary would have it — are making headlines. The issue is not one of technical legality or poor vetting. His actions and associations are deliberate. While tweeting out distractions to disguise the fact, he will unleash a feeding frenzy. Our laws and institutions will be bent to the purposes of personal enrichment. Industry lobbyists will draft the bills. He will negotiate business deals with foreign counterparts, confusing his personal interests for the good of the nation. Agencies that try to hold the line will see their budgets slashed, their officials belittled in public. Law enforcement will be even more selective than it is today. The labor of human beings, the land, and what’s on it or under it will be converted to cash as efficiently as possible. And what can’t be converted will be bulldozed out of the way.

And what will Americans do in the face of this exacerbation of our own brand of corruption? Will we further relax our standards, shrugging our shoulders and referring to the letter of ever-changing laws? Or will we reach for a definition of corruption that is in line with common sense and rebuild our foundations upon that bedrock?

Our answer to that challenge will determine whether this is a crisis the United States survives and from which it emerges renewed — or whether we lurch into some more violent and damaging cataclysm.

Photo credit: Getty Images/Foreign Policy illustration