Mid-East Realitieswww.middleeast.org

WITH THE HELP OF U.S. ARMS MANUFACTURERS, THE CIA, CONGRESS, AND THE PENTAGON

August 8, 2001

MID-EAST REALITIES © - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 8/08/2001: The Israelis are controlling, repressing, dispossessing, and assassinating the Palestinians not on their own. They are doing so with the constant and considerable help of American arms manufacturers, the CIA, and of course the U.S. Congress (which of course is supposed to represent the will of the American people) which constantly appropriates billions yearly for Israel and sanctions (or the threat thereof) against Israel's foes. Yasser Arafat and his regime have played right into this scam -- encouraged on by the neighboring U.S.-sponsored Arab "client regimes" -- helping make it appear that the Americans are something other than totally complicitous with the Israelis, and actually encouraging the CIA (for reasons of its own) to gain a major foothold right there in their own areas of "administration". There are even those who believe that the American-educated de facto Palestinian Prime Minister, Nabil Sha'ath, has a special secret relationship with the Americans and the CIA. Sha'ath in fact graduated from and taught at the famous Wharton School in Pennsylvania and some believe there is now a long trail of at least circumstantial evidence that leads to the conclusion Sha'ath has been at least fronting for the Americans ever since. Bottom line: don't believe the carefully crafted often-times soothing words that come out of Washington in so far as what the Americans are really up to; do believe the long historical record of actions and deceptions. And oh yes, of course, and maybe most of all, follow the money...and the guns and technology that flow therewith.
WAS HAMAS ACTIVIST BETRAYED BY A BORROWED CAR?
By Robert Fisk

[The Independent, UK - Tulkarem, West Bank -7 August 2001] "If you turn right, walk 300 metres, then turn left,'' the Israeli soldier told me, "You'll find the son of a bitch at the checkpoint.'' But the son of the bitch wasn't there. The Palestinian policeman at the Tulkarem junction didn't want to die in the kind of "mistaken" Israeli ambush his colleagues suffered in Ramallah and the road was just a hot, midday pageant of burnt tyres, stones, empty Israeli cartridges and rotting sandbags. A torn Palestinian flag hung over the empty checkpoint. Not far beyond lay anger as hot as the sun.

They were preparing to bury Amr Hassan Khudeiri and they were looking for the man who betrayed him.

Amr Khudeiri, it may be remembered, was the young Hamas "activist" – for which read "guerrilla/terrorist/extremist/militant", dependng on your point of view – who was burnt alive on Sunday afternoon when an Israeli pilot in an American-made Apache helicopter maintained Israel's policy of state murder by firing three US-made missiles into Mr Khudeiri's car. The manufacturer of the missile is scarcely in doubt. But was it Mr Khudeiri's car? The Fatah security man standing outside the row of Ottoman-built shops was more interested in the car than the missile.

"There was nothing left of him – atomised, burnt alive," he said of the "martyr" Amr Khudeiri. "He was just ashes. But we have the information that there was some kind of strange paint on the roof of the car.'' He said this with his eyebrows raised, as if it was a question rather than a small but critical piece of intelligence. But what about the missile, I asked? The Fatah man opened his car door, took something from the back seat and handed me a hunk of iron – perhaps six inches long – with two metal tubes attached to it and a code number which read: 18876-13411923-14064. I had seen this same shaped missile engine part and numeral configuration in Lebanon. Always it belongs to AGM-114 air-to-ground missiles, fired from Apache and manufactured by the American Aeronautics firm of Lockheed-Douglas. So Lockheed, it seemed, also had a role in Amr Khudeiri's death.

But that wasn't what interested the Fatah man. "Khudeiri wasn't driving his own car,'' he said. "He had borrowed it. And the owner took the car to Israel last week. He is missing now. We are trying to find him. The helicopter came over the bridge outside the town and fired the three missiles. We think there was some infra-red paint on the roof.''

The message was easy to understand: Fatah thought Mr Khudeiri had been betrayed by a collaborator, probably the owner of the car, who had allowed the Israelis to splash some infra-red on the roof to guide the missile. "Or maybe there was a 'bleeper' of some kind, a computer code,'' the man said.

It is a twilight war in the occupied territories, ruthless, murderous. And, yesterday afternoon, the Israeli police announced they had arrested a Palestinian who was preparing to be a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv. All he needed were explosives that were supposed to have been brought by ... Amr Hassan Khudeiri. Or so they said. Israeli "security" stories often turn out to be more than economical with the truth. In Tulkarem yesterday, there were quite a few truths lying around.

The first was that there was more than one body. The corpse I saw taken from the smaller mosque bound in a Palestinian flag, a cloth round its head revealing only a mouth and moustache, turned out to be not Mr Khudeiri but Mohamed Meziad, a 20-year-old Fatah man, apparently kicked and beaten to death by four Israeli soldiers late on Sunday.

I watched the mouth and moustache bobbing off between the crowds to the second mosque where the somewhat humbler remains of Amr Khudeiri were also awaiting burial. The funeral contained a ritual that is now as familiar on the West Bank as breakfast or evening prayers. There were 10,000 mourners, a loudspeaker screaming "Allahu Akbar" and ferocious bursts of automatic gunfire from young men, often shooting rifles and pistols at the same time.

The Fatah men and the Arafat cops and the Hamas members all walked together. "This isn't Fatah or Hamas,'' one of the Arafat men muttered to me. "We are one now. We are the moukawama, the resistance.'' There was more shooting at the graveside while Amr Khudeiri's father Mansour, a dignified figure with short, curly grey hair who is a senior teacher at Tulkarem College, embraced hundreds of mourners.

The body was lowered into the grave and Abbas Zeyid, the local Hamas leader, made a short but very revealing speech. "Our dear son and brother Amr loved his parents,'' he said. "Just five minutes before he left home for the last time, Amr said to them 'My dear mother and father, if I die, you must not cry for me'.'' The thousands round the grave lifted their eyes at this and murmured "Allahu Akbar" again. Prescience? Or was Amr Khudeiri on a mission from which he did not expect to return, a mission he undertook, fatally, in someone else's car?

• Palestinian leaders rejected Israel's demand to arrest seven "main terrorists" yesterday as both sides issued warnings that hinted at more bloodshed. Israel has been demanding that the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, lock up about 100 suspected Palestinian militants, but it picked out seven men that it most wanted behind bars.

ISRAEL GIVES SOLDIERS INCREASED POWERS
TO USE LIVE AMMUNITION
By Michael Rose

[The Independent, UK, 8 August 2001]: Israel relaxed its rules of engagement on Tuesday to allow its soldiers to use live ammunition "to defend themselves" against what the army claimed was increasing Palestinian violence.

The changes, set out in an army statement, give soldiers a freer hand to fire live rounds in confrontations with Palestinians. Regulations restricting the use of live rounds to cases in which Palestinian gunmen shot first were part of a truce mapped out by US CIA chief George Tenet after the ceasefire agreed on 22 May.

A senior Palestinian official said there could be no real change in Israel's army regulations as they had never stopped killing Palestinians in 10 months of bloodshed. The changes were announced hours after the Palestinian Authority appealed to the United States to intervene.

President George Bush insisted his administration remained involved and reiterated both sides must embrace a peace blueprint drawn up by a US-led panel.

At the United Nations in New York, a dispute with Israel continued over access to evidence related to the kidnapping in October last year of three Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah guerrillas on the Lebanese frontier, patrolled by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. The UN finally admitting to having video tapes.

Meanwhile, in the latest violence in the West Bank, a suspected Palestinian gunmen killed an Israeli Arab driving near the Jewish settlement of Tzofim. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli troops opened fire at stone-throwing Palestinian demonstrators. Israeli troops in the West Bank were targeted with at least two explosive devices, but no troops were injured.

In Amman a 51-year-old Israeli businessman was gunned down near his house on Monday night, raising fears the violence was spreading to other countries. However, Jordanian officials said the killing might have been criminal in nature.

In Damascus an aide to Yasser Arafat had talks with Israel's enemy Syria, which is strengthening its ties with the Palestinian leadership. Meanwhile, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa called for immediate international efforts to stop Israel's "assassination" of Palestinians.


Mid-East Realitieswww.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/8/329.htm