US Killing Civilians With 'Impunity' in Hidden War on Somalia: Report

Common Dreams 

"The attacks appear to have violated international humanitarian law."

A human rights group is accusing the United States of waging a shadow air war in Somalia that is killing civilians with abandon. 

Amnesty International issued its findings on the African war Tuesday evening in a report titled The Hidden US War in Somalia (pdf).

The U.S. has been covertly engaging in conflicts in Somalia for decades, but in April 2017, the Donald Trump administration upped airstrikes and attacks targeted at the rebel group Al-Shabaab.

The human rights advocacy group studied five of more than 100 strikes on Somalia over the past two years and found that 14 civilians were killed in the attacks. Eight others were injured, the report says.

"These five incidents were carried out with Reaper drones and manned aircraft in Lower Shabelle," Amnesty said in a press release, "a region largely under Al-Shabaab control outside the Somali capital Mogadishu."

The U.S. military denied to Amnesty that any civilians have been killed as a result of American operations in Somalia.

However, Amnesty's report claims its methodology is sound and that the evidence is overwhelming. 

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Amnesty International’s Troubling Collaboration with UK & US Intelligence

Alexander Rubenstein
Mintpress News

Amnesty International, the eminent human-rights non-governmental organization, is widely known for its advocacy in that realm. It produces reports critical of the Israeli occupation in Palestine and the Saudi-led war on Yemen. But it also publishes a steady flow of indictments against countries that don’t play ball with Washington — countries like Iran, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua, North Korea and more. Those reports amplify the drumbeat for a “humanitarian” intervention in those nations.

Amnesty’s stellar image as a global defender of human rights runs counter to its early days when the British Foreign Office was believed to be censoring reports critical of the British empire. Peter Benenson, the co-founder of Amnesty, had deep ties to the British Foreign Office and Colonial Office while another co-founder, Luis Kutner, informed the FBI of a gun cache at Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s home weeks before he was killed by the Bureau in a gun raid.

These troubling connections contradict Amnesty’s image as a benevolent defender of human rights and reveal key figures at the organization during its early years to be less concerned with human dignity and more concerned with the dignity of the United States and United Kingdom’s image in the world.

A conflicted beginning

Amnesty’s Benenson, an avowed anti-communist, hailed from a military intelligence background. He pledged that Amnesty would be independent of government influence and would represent prisoners in the East, West, and global South alike.

But during the 1960s the U.K. was withdrawing from its colonies and the Foreign Office and Colonial Office were hungry for information from human-rights activists about the situations on the ground. In 1963, the Foreign Office instructed its operatives abroad to provide “discreet support” for Amnesty’s campaigns.

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Amnesty warns of new ‘zero tolerance’ policy by Israel soldiers at Gaza fence

Middle East Monitor 

 

Amnesty International today warned of a new “zero tolerance” policy by Israeli forces towards Palestinian demonstrators in the occupied Gaza Strip, raising “fears of escalating bloodshed”. 

 

In a statement, the human rights organisation urged the Israeli government “to rein in its armed forces, which have routinely used unnecessary or excessive force during Gaza’s weekly ‘Great March of Return’ demonstrations”. 

 

Saleh Higazi, Amnesty’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, said: “Given Israeli forces’ horrific track record of using deadly force against Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza, as well as journalists, medics and others, the announcement of a ‘zero tolerance’ policy is deeply alarming.” 

 

Higazi added: “There are serious fears that this policy will further sanction the use of deadly force against unarmed protesters during today’s demonstrations, and that Israeli forces will be given carte blanche authorisation to carry out large-scale, unlawful killings escalating the bloodshed.”

Israel has repeatedly used lethal force unnecessarily and excessively against unarmed protesters in shameless violation of international law.

Amnesty’s statement comes in response to a reported new policy agreed on by Israel’s cabinet, instructing Israeli forces to open fire on Palestinians nowhere near Gaza’s perimeter fence.

Israel’s Housing Minister and former head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command, Yoav Gallant, was quoted in Israeli media stating that “the rules of the game are about to change”.

“The three armed conflicts between Israel and Hamas have had catastrophic consequences for the population of Gaza, which continues to suffer from 11 years of living under a brutal blockade,” said Amnesty’s Higazi.

“It is now time the international community shows ‘zero tolerance’ towards Israel’s flagrant contempt for Palestinian lives and disregard for its obligations under international law.” 

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Israel Still Deporting Africans to Uganda, Reveals Amnesty International

Red Ice TV

Even though the Israeli plan to forcibly mass deport all African invaders in that country back to Africa—or to white countries—is on hold, the Jewish ethnostate continues to deport blacks to Uganda, regardless of their nationality, and these deportations are not truly “voluntary,” a new report from Amnesty International has revealed.

The report, titled “Forced And Unlawful Israel’s Deportation of Eritrean and Sudanese Asylum seekers to Uganda,” says that between 2015 and March 2018, Israel deported 1,700 Sudanese and Eritreans to Uganda.

“Upon arrival in Uganda, deportees find a shambolic reception, which leaves them without papers, without protection and without sustainable resources,” the report continues.

“This pushes many to continue their journeys to other African countries or to Europe.”

This report says that “Israel’s deportations to Uganda violate Israel’s obligations under international law. Israel’s deportation policy is a way to abdicate its responsibility towards the refugees and asylum-seekers under its jurisdiction and shift it to less wealthy countries with bigger refugee populations.”

Please read the entire article at The New Observer.

The Gaza Platform: Online digital mapping of Gaza assault refutes every Israeli lie, shows evidence of deliberate war crimes

Annie Robbins
MondoWeiss

 

Amnesty International (AI) has teamed up with Forensic Architecture of Goldsmiths, University of London, launching The Gaza Platform, a digital mapping tool that can be used to collate, map, explore and analyze patterns in attacks on Gaza during last summer's brutal Israeli military offensive against the tiny blockaded enclave.

AI's press release announcing the launch states the "purpose is to help push for accountability for war crimes and other violations of international humanitarian law." The platform is an extraordinarily ambitious collaboration and is available to anyone, researchers, journalists, and activists alike.  

[...]

From AI's press release: Launch of innovative digital tool to help expose patterns of Israeli violations in Gaza The preliminary data currently plotted on the Platform, which will be updated over the coming months, already highlights a number of patterns in the attacks by Israeli forces that indicate that grave and systemic violations were committed.

"The Gaza Platform is the most comprehensive record of attacks during the 2014 conflict to date. It allows us to piece together more than 2,500 individual attacks, illustrating the vast scale of destruction caused by Israel's military operations in Gaza during the 50-day war last summer," said Philip Luther, Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Program.

"By revealing patterns rather than just presenting a series of individual attacks, the Gaza Platform has the potential to expose the systematic nature of Israeli violations committed during the conflict. Our aim is for it to become an invaluable resource for human rights investigators pushing for accountability for violations committed during the conflict." 

 

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Amnesty Intl. Explains Why It Won’t Oppose All Drone Murders

Comment: The stand by Amnesty International on drones and war in general is beyond ridiculous. Talk about drowning in its own contradictions...Politically correct doesn't even come close.

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By DavidSwanson

Washginton's Blog

I was on Margaret Flowers’ and Kevin Zeese’s Clearing the Fog Radio today ( http://clearingthefogradio.org ) together with Naureen Shah of Amnesty International.  The show ought to appear soon on iTunes here, and mixcloud here, and is already on UStream here although it seems to be missing the audio.  I had earlier published a critique of AI’s report on drones.

On this show, Shah explained that Amnesty International cannot oppose all drone strikes in an illegal war, because Amnesty International has never opposed a war, because doing so would make it look biased, and A.I. wants to appear to be an unbiased enforcer of the law.  But, of course, an illegal war is a violation of the law — usually of the U.N. Charter which most lawyers whom A.I. hangs out with recognize, never mind the Kellogg-Briand Pact which they don’t.

Refusing to recognize the UN Charter, in order to appear unbiased, is a twisted notion to begin with, but perhaps it had good intentions at one time.  However, now the U.N. special rapporteur finds that drones are making war the norm rather than the exception.  That’s a serious shifting of the ground, and might be good reason to reconsider the ongoing feasibility of  a human rights group avoiding the existence of laws against war.

Shah also argued against banning weaponized drones on the grounds that they could be used legally.  That is, there could be a legal war (ignoring Kellogg-Briand) and during that legal war a drone could legally kill people in accordance with someone’s interpretation of necessity, discrimination, proportionality, intention, and so forth.  Shah contrasts this with chemical weapons, even though I could imagine a theoretical scenario in which a targeted murder in a closed space could use chemical weapons in plausible accord with all of the lawyerly notions of “legal war” other than the ban on chemical weapons.

Of course, practically speaking, weaponized drones are slaughtering and traumatizing innocent people and will do so as long as they’re used.  The notion of civilizing and legalizing atrocity-free war was ludicrous enough before the age of drone murder.  It’s beyond outrageous now.

Hillary Clinton Aide at the Helm of Amnesty International USA

Voltairenet

Suzanne Nossel, former assistant to Richard Holbrooke in his capacity as UN Ambassador and currently Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Assistant for International Organization Affairs, has been selected as the new Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. In the discharge of her duties at the State Department, she diligently exploited human rights to benefit imperial ambitions.

Ms. Nossel had previously worked for Human Rights Watch, as well as for Bertelsmann Media Worldwide and the Wall Street Journal as Vice President of Strategy and Operations.

The AI-USA Board of Directors deemed that Suzanne Nossel’s commitment to the Clinton and Obama administrations was sufficient proof of her competence and decided not to hold a grudge against her for the crimes committed in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, etc.

Ms. Nossel has launched several campaigns against Iran, Libya and Syria. In recent months she made a name for herself by misinforming the Human Rights Council in Geneva with a view to getting the resolution authorizing the war on Libya adopted by the Security Council. Ms. Nossel’s allegations have since been debunked.

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