Witness to the Israeli assault on humanitarian aid ship

Last week, I posted excerpts from Iara Lee’s footage of Israel’s attack on the humanitarian aid ship that was attempting to break the illegal blockade of Gaza.  Today, I’m posting all of the raw footage.

The following text is the video description as posted on the Cultures of Resistance Youtube page:

On the night of Sunday, May 30, showing a terrifying disregard for human life, Israeli naval forces surrounded and boarded ships sailing to bring humanitarian aid to the blockaded Gaza Strip. On the largest ship, the Mavi Marmara, Israeli commandos opened fire on civilian passengers, killing at least 9 passengers and wounding dozens more. Others are still missing. The final death toll is yet to be determined. Cultures of Resistance director Iara Lee was aboard the besieged ship and has since returned home safely.

Despite the Israeli government’s thorough efforts to confiscate all footage taken during the attack, Iara Lee was able to retain some of her recordings. Above is raw footage from the moments leading up to and during the Israeli commandos’ assault on the Mavi Marmara.

In addition, here is a terrific Dave Lindorff piece based on the testimony of Mavi Marmara eyewitness, Kevin Neish.

What Kevin Neish Saw
Eyewitness to the Israeli Assault on the Mavi Marmara
DAVE LINDORFF

Kevin Neish of Victoria, British Columbia, didn’t know he was a celebrity until he was about to board a flight from Istanbul to Ottawa. “This Arab woman wearing a beautiful outfit suddenly ran up to me crying, ‘It’s you! From Arab TV! You’re famous!’” he recalls with a laugh. “I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she told me, ‘I saw you flipping through the Israeli commando’s book! It’s being aired over and over!’”

A soft-spoken teacher and former civilian engineer with the Canadian Department of Defense, Neish realized then that a video taken by an Arab TV cameraman in the midst of the Israeli assault on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza of him flipping through a booklet had been transmitted before the Israelis blocked all electronic signals from the flotilla. The booklet had pictures and profiles of all the passengers, and he’d found it in the backpack of an Israeli Defense Force commando.

Neish, 53, was on the second deck of the flotilla’s lead ship, the Turkish Mavi Marmara, with a good view of the stern, when the IDF, in the early morning darkness of May 31, began its assault with percussion grenades, tear gas and a hail of bullets. He then moved to the fourth deck in an enclosed stairwell, from which he watched took photographs as casualties were carried down past him to a makeshift medical station. Several IDF commandos, captured by the passengers and crew, were also brought past him.

“I saw them carrying this one IDF guy down,” he recalls. “He looked terrified, like he thought he was going to be killed. But when a big Turkish guy, who had seen seriously injured passengers who had been shot by the IDF, charged over and tried to hit the commando, the Turkish aid workers pushed him off and pinned him to the wall. They protected this Israeli soldier.”

That was when he found the backpack which the soldier had dropped. “I figured I’d look inside and see what he was carrying,” Neish says. “And inside was this kind of flip-book. It was full of photos and names in English and Hebrew of who was on all the ships. The booklet also had a detailed diagram of the decks of the Mavi Marmara.”

Meanwhile, he says, more and more people were being carried down the stairs from the mayhem above—people who’d been shot, and people who were dying or people already dead. “I took detailed photos of the dead and wounded with my camera,” he says, adding, “There were several guys who had two neat bullet holes side by side on the side of their head–clearly they were executed.”

Neish smuggled his photos out of Israel to Turkey despite his arrest on the ship and imprisonment in Israel for several days. “I pulled out the memory card, tossed my camera and anything I had on me that had anything to do with electronics, and then kept moving the chip around so it wouldn’t be found,” he says. “The Israelis took all the cameras and computers. They were smashing some and keeping others. I put the chip in my mouth under my tongue, between my butt cheeks, in my sock, everywhere, to keep them from finding it,” he says. He finally handed it to a Turk who was leaving for a flight home on a Turkish airline. He says the card ended up in the hands of an organization called Free Gaza, and he has seen some of his pictures published, so he knows they made it out successfully.

Neish says that claims that the Israeli commandos were just armed with paint guns and 9 mm pistols are “Bullshit–at one point when I was in the stairwell, a commando opened a hatch above, stuck in a machine gun, and started firing. Bullets were bouncing all over the place. If the guy had gotten to look in and see where he was shooting, I’d have been dead, but two Turkish guys in the stairwell, who had short lengths of chain with them that they had taken from the access points to the lifeboats, stood to the side of the hatch and whipped them up at the barrell. I don’t know if they were trying to hit the commando or to use them to snatch away the gun, but the Israeli backed off, and they slammed and locked the hatch.”

“I never saw a single paint gun, or a sign of a fired paint ball!” he says.
He also didn’t see any guns in the hands of people who were on the ship. “In the whole time I was there on the ship, I never saw a single weapon in the hands of the crew or the aid workers,” he says. Indeed, Neish, who originally had been on a smaller 70-foot yacht called the Challenger II, had transferred to the Mavi Marmara after a stop in Cyprus, because his boat had been sabotaged by Israeli agents (a claim verified by the Israeli government), making it impossible to steer. “When we came aboard the big boat, I was frisked and my bag was inspected for weapons,” he says. “Being an engineer, I of course had a pocket knife, but they took that and tossed it into the ocean. Nobody was allowed to have any weapons on this voyage. They were very careful about that.”

What he did see during the IDF assault was severe bullet wounds. “In addition to several people I saw who were killed, I saw several dozen wounded people. There was one older guy who was just propped up against the wall with a huge hole in his chest. He died as I was taking his picture.”

Neish says he saw many of the 9 who were known to have been killed, and of the 40 who were wounded, and adds, “There were many more who were wounded, too, but less seriously. In the Israeli prison, I saw people with knife wounds and broken bones. Some were hiding their injuries so they wouldn’t be taken away from the others.” He also says, “Initially there were reports that 16 on the boat had been killed. The medical station said 16. There was a suspicion that some bodies may have been thrown overboard. But what people think now is that other seven who are missing, since we’re not hearing from families, may have been Israeli spies.”

Once the Israeli commandos had secured control of the Mavi Marmara, Neish says the ship’s passengers and crew were rounded up, with the men put in one area on deck, and the women put below in another area. The men were told to squat, and had their hands bound with plastic cuffs, which Neish says were pulled so tight that his wrists were cut and his hands swelled up and turned purple (he is still suffering nerve damage from the experience, which his doctor in Canada says he hopes will gradually repair on its own).

“They told us to be quiet,” he says. “But at one point this Turkish imam stood up and started singing a call to prayer. Everybody was dead quiet–even the Israelis. But after about ten seconds, this Israeli officer stomped over through the squatting people, pulled out his pistol and pointed at the guy’s head, yelling ‘Shut up!’ in English. The imam looked at him directly and just kept singing! I thought, Jesus Christ, he’s gonna kill him! Then I thought, well, this is what I’m here for, I guess, so I stood up. The officer wheeled around and pointed his gun at my head. The imam finished his song and sat down, and then I sat down.”

While the commandeered vessels were sailed to the Israeli port of Ashdot, the captives were left without food or water. “All we were given were some chocolate bars that the Israelis pilfered from the ship’s stores,” says Neish. “You had to grovel to get to go to the bathroom, and many people had to just go in their pants.”

Things didn’t get much better once the passengers were transferred to an Israeli prison. He and the other prisoners with him, who hadn’t eaten for more than half a day, were tossed a frozen block of bread and some cucumbers.

On the second day, someone from the Canadian embassy came around, calling out his name. “It turned out he’d been going to every cell looking for me,” says Neish. “My daughter had been frantically telling the Canadian government I was in the flotilla. Even though the Israelis had my name and knew where I was, they weren’t telling the Canadian embassy people. In fact the Canadians–and my daughter–thought I was dead, because people had said I’d been near the initial assault. The good thing is that as they went around calling out for me, they discovered two Arab-born Canadians that they hadn’t known were there.”

“Eventually they got to my cell and I answered them. The embassy official said, ‘You’re Kevin? You’re supposed to be dead.’”

After being held for a few days, there was a rush to move everyone to the Ben Gurion airport for a flight to Turkey. “It turned out that Israeli lawyers had brought our case to the Supreme Court, challenging the legality of our capture on international waters. There was a chance that the court would order the IDF to put us back on our ships and let us go, so the government wanted to get us out of Israel and moot the case. But two guys were hauled off, probably by Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency). So we all said, ‘No. We don’t go unless you bring them back.’”

The two men were returned and were allowed to leave with the rest of the group.

“I honestly never thought the Israelis would board the ship,” says Neish. “I thought we’d get into Gaza. I mean, I went as part of the Free Gaza Movement, and they had made prior attempts, with some getting in, and some getting boarded or rammed, but this time it was a big flotilla. I figured we’d be stopped, and maybe searched. My boat, the Challenger II, only had dignitaries on board including three German MPs, and then Lt. Col. Ann Wright and myself.

At one point in the Israeli prison, all the violence finally got to this man who had witnessed more death and mayhem than many active duty US troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. “I broke down and started crying,” he admits. “This big Turkish guy came over and asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Sixteen people died.’”

“He said to me, ‘No, they died for a wonderful cause. They’re happy. You just go out and tell your story.’”

$1 Trillion in minerals: What Afghanistan is really about

They hate us for our freedom.

We’re fighting over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here.

Oh, and let’s not forget that Afghanistan is the good war. That one never gets old, does it?

Never mind that the New York Times is reporting that Afghanistan has $1 trillion in mineral deposits.  And never mind that they’re reporting it as if it’s some shocking new revelation that’s never been reported before.

Forget that Hamid Karzai made the exact same claim in January of this year.

Forget that Earth Magazine reported in July of 2009 that Afghanistan has “vast untapped mineral wealth, including coal, gems like emeralds and metals like copper and iron,” and that U.S. Geological Survey scientists “have worked with Afghan scientists to map and develop the country’s resources for nearly 40 years.”

Forget that way back in 2000, the USGS noted that Afghanistan has “additional economic potential because of its strategic geographical position as a transit route for Central Asian hydrocarbons to the Arabian Sea.”

And forget that Afghanistan’s heroin production was banned by Taliban leader Mohammed Omar in July of 2000, which cut production by 91%.  And never mind that production has increased by approximately an assload (from 7,606 hectares in 2001, to 193,000 hectares in 2007) since the U.S. invasion in 2001 deposed the Taliban and installed a puppet regime.

And whatever you do, never think for a minute about the possibility that the U.S. could be protecting Afghanistan’s heroin production, or that the CIA could be involved in any way.  After all, that would be illegal.

And for fuck’s sake, please don’t tell anybody that Osama Bin Laden and the Mujaheddin (which became Al Qaeda) were trained and funded by western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, in the 80s and 90s.

Nope, forget about all of that, and just keep repeating to yourself that Afghanistan is the good war™, they hate us for our freedom™, and we’re fighting them there so that we don’t have to fight them here™.

UPDATE:

The reason for China’s exorbitant loans to the U.S. just became clear to me.  The U.S. isn’t the Policeman of the World.  No, that’s just a smokescreen for it’s real role as the Resource Procurement Agency of the world.

It must be far cheaper to loan money to an existing military super power than to become one yourself, and hey, why should they send Chinese boys off to die in Afghanistan when the U.S. government is more than willing to send Americans?

What, you thought China was loaning us hundreds of billions of dollars and expected nothing in return?

China’s thirst for copper could hold key to Afghanistan’s future

By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

March 8, 2009

JALREZ VALLEY, Afghanistan — In this Taliban stronghold in the mountains south of Kabul, the U.S. Army is providing the security that will enable China to exploit one of the world’s largest unexploited deposits of copper, earn tens of billions of dollars and feed its voracious appetite for raw materials.

U.S. troops set up bases last month along a dirt track that a Chinese firm is paving as part of a $3 billion project to gain access to the Aynak copper reserves. Some troops made camp outside a compound built for the Chinese road crews, who are about to return from winter break. American forces also have expanded their presence in neighboring Logar province, where the Aynak deposit is.

The U.S. deployment wasn’t intended to protect the Chinese investment — the largest in Afghanistan’s history — but to strangle Taliban infiltration into the capital of Kabul. But if the mission provides the security that a project to revive Afghanistan’s economy needs, the synergy will be welcome.

“When you have men who don’t have jobs, you can’t bring peace,” said Abdel Rahman Ashraf, a German-trained geology professor who’s Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s chief mining and energy adviser.

“When we take money and invest it in a project like Aynak, we give jobs to the people.” Indeed, the project could inject hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties and taxes into Afghanistan’s meager coffers and create thousands of desperately needed jobs.

Beijing faces enormous challenges in completing the project and gaining access to the estimated 240 million tons of copper ore that are accessible through surface mining. Taliban-led insurgents operate in large parts of Logar and Wardak; the area is sown with mines; and China must complete an ambitious set of infrastructure projects, including Afghanistan’s first national railway, as part of the deal.

China’s willingness to gamble so much in one of the world’s poorest and riskiest nations testifies to its determination to acquire the commodities it needs to maintain its economic growth and social stability.

In Mt. Toromocho in the Peruvian Andes, for example, the only copper deposit said to be larger than Aynak, China is relocating a town and its inhabitants to get at a mountain of copper ore.

“Why the Chinese? Because they have money, they have lots of money,” Ashraf said. “One day, when there is no more copper elsewhere in the world, the Chinese will have copper.”

“If they (Chinese leaders) don’t feed their immense industrial complex, their populace could become disruptive,” said a Western official, who asked not to be further identified so he could speak freely. “We expect to see more such competitions” over Afghanistan’s huge untapped reserves of natural resources.

Although China is contributing a much smaller share of the more than $25 billion in international assistance that’s been pledged to Afghanistan since 2001 than the U.S. is, the Obama administration isn’t complaining. China’s investment in Aynak dovetails with the administration’s emerging strategy for ending the war in part by delivering on unfulfilled vows to better the lives of the poor Afghans who constitute the vast majority of the Taliban’s foot soldiers.

“The problem of security, the problem of the Taliban, we cannot solve these problems with the military,” Ashraf said.

Site preparation work has begun. But it’ll be some years before state-owned China Metallurgical Construction Corp. can begin the projected 15 to 20 years of production at the site 30 miles south of Kabul.

Copper is used in everything from batteries and electrical wire to computers and coins. International prices were high when MCC won the 30-year lease in April 2007 — one estimate at that time put the potential earnings at $42 billion — but they’ve fallen dramatically since. Still, China and Afghanistan stand to make a healthy profit, especially if demand recovers as expected.

The site was discovered by an Afghan-Soviet team in 1974. However, in the face of armed resistance during their 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan, the Soviets were never able to develop the site or harvest the ore.

The main challenge to MCC is the Taliban, who moved into Kabul’s southern fringes after China clinched the deal, prompting the January deployment in Logar and Wardak of more than 2,000 troops from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y. On Tuesday, a roadside bomb injured three policemen protecting a crew building an access road to Aynak.

“We have stopped our work,” said Noorzaman Stanakzai, the road contractor. “The enemies of Afghanistan are preventing families from putting loaves of bread in their children’s mouths.”

Other challenges include transporting equipment and materials into the landlocked nation from Pakistan and Central Asia; Kabul’s inexperience in handling massive projects; endemic corruption — World Bank monitors, however, blessed the Aynak bidding process — lax enforcement of laws and the global economic meltdown.

Moreover, China must deliver the infrastructure projects that helped it snag the deal over six rivals, including Phelps Dodge Corp., which was acquired by Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc. in 2007.

These include an onsite copper smelter, a $500 million generating station to power the project and augment Kabul’s electricity supply, a coal mine to fuel the power station, a groundwater system, roads, new homes, hospitals and schools for mine workers and their families, and a railway line from the country’s northern border with Uzbekistan to its southeastern border with Pakistan.

The deal, Ashraf said, is structured so that by the seventh year, the entire work force will be Afghan. Beginning in 2010, 60 Afghan engineering students a year will study in China, he said, adding that Chinese language courses have begun at Kabul University.

Employment projections vary, but there’s general agreement that as many as 10,000 workers could be hired at Aynak and the coal mine in central Afghanistan, which the Jalrez Valley road project will link to the copper field. The railway will need thousands more.

Tens of thousands of indirect jobs are also projected to be created.

“The big question is whether they (China) will deliver on all that or not,” said a second Western official, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “The transparency going forward will be all important. We don’t want this great resource potential to become a great resource curse, as has happened in other countries.”

There may be some cause for concern.

A January 2008 report by Integrity Watch Afghanistan, a European research group, said that MCC extracted more copper than expected from a mine in Sandaik, Pakistan, but that the project has “had virtually no spillover effect on the local economy to date.”

The report also warned of the potential for an “environmental and social disaster” if Aynak isn’t properly managed, noting that the area is home to some 90,000 people and a source of Kabul’s water supply.

Ashraf said that the government will ensure that MCC takes rigorous precautions, including systems to store the highly toxic wastes produced by copper smelting.

“The sediment will go into a holding lake, and the water will be cleaned and then provided for agriculture,” said Ashraf, a veteran geologist who’s worked the world over, including in China.

China may hope that the Aynak deal will help it position it to compete for more projects in Afghanistan, where three tectonic plates converge. The region is thought to hold some of the world’s last major untapped deposits of iron, copper, gold, uranium, precious gems and other raw materials.

“It’s the last frontier,” said the second Western official.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that Afghanistan also has more than 1.5 billion barrels of oil — almost untapped since soldiers of Alexander the Great discovered pools of oil in the north more than 2,000 years ago — and 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Two other major copper deposits are close to Aynak, and the government is preparing to solicit bids for a lease to develop the Hajigak iron mine, which Minister of Mines Ibrahim Adil last year said contains an estimated 60 billion tons of ore.

Ashraf said that China and India have shown an interest in Hajigak.

“When we have a little security here, this will be a paradise to come and mine,” he said. “We are near the markets. Those markets are China and India. The transportation is not difficult. The difficulty is that everyone says, ‘We must have security and then we will invest.'”

Greenwald, Finkelstein, and Gunness on the Israeli terrorist pirates

Poor Israel.  Nobody understands that they have no choice but to create a walled ghetto for the Palestinians, flatten their buildings, choke off their supplies, label them as “terrorists” when they fight back, and then attack civilian ships in international waters as they attempt to deliver humanitarian aid, killing as many as…   Oh, why even bother to count?  They’re just a bunch of antisemitic radical activists anyway.  They got what they deserved, right?

</sarcasm>

Glenn Greenwald, as usual, hits all of the nails squarely on their heads.

Norman Finkelstein and Chris Gunness make a whole lot of sense in this RT interview, as well.

Orwellian Nazis, or … denying humanitarian aid to Gaza

I’ve been sick for the past two days.  Literally sick, as in ill, but also sick to fucking death of the acts of arrogance and unconscionable evil that take place every single day as the death spiral tightens on what passes for our civilization.  And as if the acts aren’t bad enough, the few among us who still remember what life was like in 1983, pre-newspeak, are being prodded by the Goebbelsian swagger stick known as the corporate media into believing that war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and last but certainly not least, that the sorry fucking excuses for human beings who run poor little Israel have a free pass to do whatever the fuck they please.

I apologize for the hackneyed nature of my Orwellian Nazi mixed metaphor, but really, what else is there to say when a ship full of unarmed civilians, in international waters, attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the modern-day equivalent of the Warsaw ghetto, is stormed in the dead of night by commandos with automatic weapons?  Oh, and I almost forgot to add the irony of all ironies, which is that the stormtroopers work for the very people who made the humanitarian aid necessary in the first place with their theft of Palestinian land in 1948, and their apartheid policies since then leading to a population of starving people, walled-in and deprived of basic human needs, based entirely on their non-Jewishness.

It really and truly can’t get any more completely fucked up than this, right?

But wait, it does!  This is all the fault of the people attempting to bring humanitarian aid.  Israel was just defending itself, just as it was doing with Operation Cast Lead, and when peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed under an IDF bulldozer in 2003, and when 34 U.S. sailors were killed and another 173 were wounded when Israel attacked the USS Liberty in 1967.

It’s never Israel’s fault.

Oh for fuck’s sake now I’m exhausted again.  Just read Mark Steel’s piece below.

Of course, they were asking for it

by Mark Steel

Wednesday, 2 June 2010

It’s time the Israeli government’s PR team made the most of its talents, and became available for hire. Then whenever a nutcase marched into a shopping mall in somewhere like Wisconsin and gunned down a selection of passers-by, they could be on hand to tell the world’s press “The gunman regrets the loss of life but did all he could to avoid violence.” Then various governments would issue statements saying “All we know is a man went berserk with an AK 47, and next to him there’s a pile of corpses, so until we know the facts we can’t pass judgement on what took place.”

To strengthen their case the Israelis have released a photo of the weapons they found on board, (which amount to some knives and tools and wooden sticks) that the naive might think you’d expect to find on any ship, but the more astute will recognise as exactly what you’d carry if you were planning to defeat the Israeli army. It’s an armoury smaller than you’d find in the average toolshed in a garden in Cirencester, which goes to show the Israelis had better destroy Cirencester quickly as an essential act of self-defence.

It’s a shame they weren’t more imaginative, as they could have said “We also discovered a deadly barometer, a ship’s compass, which could not only be frisbeed at someone’s head but even had markings to help the assailant know which direction he was throwing it, and a set of binoculars that could easily be converted into a ray-gun.”

That would be as logical as the statement from the Israeli PM’s spokesman – “We made every possible effort to avoid this incident.” Because the one tiny thing they forgot to do to avoid this incident was not send in armed militia from helicopters in the middle of the night and shoot people. I must be a natural at this sort of technique because I often go all day without climbing off a helicopter and shooting people, and I’m not even making every possible effort. Politicians and commentators worldwide repeat a version of this line. They’re aware a nation has sent its militia to confront people carrying provisions for the desperate, in the process shooting several of them dead, and yet they angrily blame the dead ones. One typical headline yesterday read “Activists got what they wanted – confrontation.” It’s an attitude so deranged it deserves to be registered as a psychosis, something like “Reverse Slaughter Victim Confusion Syndrome”.

Israel and its supporters claim that Viva Palestina, made up of people who collect the donated food, cement and items for providing basic amenities such as toilets, and transport them to Gaza, wanted the violence all along. Because presumably they must have been thinking “Hezbollah couldn’t beat them, but that’s because unlike us they didn’t have a ballcock and several boxes of plum tomatoes”.

One article told us the flotilla was full of “Thugs spoiling for a confrontation”, and then accused them of being “Less about aid and more about PR. Indeed, on board was Swedish novelist Henning Mankell.” So were they thugs or about PR? Did they have a thugs’ section and a PR quarter, or did they all muck in, the novelist diverting the soldiers with his characterisation while the thugs attacked them with a lethal spirit level?

But some defenders of Israel are so blind to what happens in front of them there’s nothing at all they wouldn’t jump to defend. Israel could blow up a cats home and within five minutes they’d be yelling “How do we know the cats weren’t smuggling semtex in their fur for Hamas?”

If this incident had been carried about by Iran, or anyone we were trying to portray as an enemy, so much condemnation would have been spewed out it would have created a vast cloud of outrage that airlines would be unable to fly through.

But as it’s Israel, most governments offer a few diplomatic words that blame no one, but accept the deaths are “regrettable”. They might as well have picked any random word from the dictionary, so the news would tell us “William Hague described the deaths as ‘hexagonal'”, and a statement from the US senate said “It’s all very confusing. In future let’s hope they make every effort to avoid a similar incident.”