Video coming -- please sign up at husseini.substack.com to get it. [Partial video here.]
On Monday I asked about Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians at the State Department, including if the US government is trying to stop Abbas from invoking the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice — also known as the World Court — in the Hague. I also asked if State Department personal may face prosecution.
International law professor Francis Boyle notes that the US Genocide Convention Implementation Act stipulates:
d)Attempt and Conspiracy.—
Any person who attempts or conspires to commit an offense under this section shall be punished in the same manner as a person who completes the offense.
AFP reports: “Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas decried Sunday Israel's "genocide" in the Gaza Strip amid its war on Hamas militants there, in remarks to visiting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.” But Abbas has not tried to invoke the Genocide Convention.
In response to my question, State Department representative Vedant Patel claimed that the US government has not been pressuring the Palestinian Authority to not invoke the Genocide Convention or any other legal mechanism. In fact, international law professor John Quigley states: “Of course, the US has been pressuring Abbas for several years not to go to the International Criminal Court or International Court of Justice for anything.”
The record backs up Quigley. The Times of Israel reported in 2021 “Biden officials privately pushed Abbas to shelve ICC probe against Israel” and Axios reported in 2022: “Abbas rejects U.S. request to not push for UN court opinion on Israeli occupation,” quoting a State Department spokesperson: “We believe it is critical for Israel and the Palestinian Authority to refrain from unilateral steps that exacerbate tensions and undercut efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution.”
Regardless of US pressure, the question to Abbas is, why has he not invoked the Genocide Convention? Moreover, it is quite possible that other countries are wanting to invoke the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice (also known as the World Court), but Abbas is holding them back.
That is what Francis Boyle has been recommending as I noted in my questioning, below. Such a maneuver, Boyle argues, may be the strongest legal avenue since the International Criminal Court “is rigged and has done nothing for the Palestinians.”
Patel claimed the State Department has a “rigorous process for evaluating whether something constitutes genocide.”
Boyle charged in an email to me that the “Internal State Department Review on Genocide is always political. For example, after I won my first Order at the World Court for Bosnia to the Yugoslavians to cease and desist from committing all acts of Genocide, [then Secretary of State] Warren Christopher started a propaganda campaign by State to detract and undercut its significance.”
Boyle added: “‘Diplomacy’ by the Biden administration and Blinken in particular is in fact just their international stage-managing of the Zionist genocide against the Palestinians.”
Patel repeated the US establishment mantra backing “Israel's right to defend itself against these terrorist attacks by Hamas” but legal scholar Richard Falk emailed me: “Gaza remains from the perspective of international law and the UN an 'Occupied Palestine Territory' subject to the Forth Geneva Convention. This means that Israel as Occupying Power has a primary obligation to safeguard the safety of the civilian population. It is entitled to take reasonable lawful means to restore its security in the aftermath of such an attack. As such, it has no international legal right of self-defense; even if it had a right of self-defense it would have no legal or moral basis for engaging in a genocidal assault, the character of which has been strongly confirmed by Israel's top leaders, Netanyahu, Gallant, and to a more indirect sense, Herzog. … I do not share the view that Hamas can be written off as 'terrorist' while Israel remains a legitimate state despite its record of state terrorism.” See Falk’s recent piece “Israel-Palestine war: Israel's endgame is much more sinister than restoring 'security'“.
Transcript of exchange at State Department:
HUSSEINI: President Lula of Brazil recently joined a growing list of world leaders [Colombia, South Africa, Pakistan] condemning Israel not just simply for war crimes, not just simply for crimes against humanity, but for genocide. The late president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza which killed 2,000 Palestinians, advocated that the Genocide Convention be invoked in that case against Israel, saying that legally, for genocide, quote, “You don’t need to kill all of them. You just need to have the mental intent to kill part of them.”
Craig Mokhiber, who just resigned as director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, noted that intent, usually the hardest part of genocide to prove, isn’t in this case. He wrote in his resignation letter, quote, “Explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli Government and military" leave “no room for doubt or debate.”
Finally, Francis Boyle, who successfully prosecuted – or who successfully represented Bosnia and Herzegovina in their genocide case against Yugoslavia before the International Court of Justice, has similarly argued that the Palestinians, or any other signer to the Genocide Convention, should immediately instigate a – initiate an emergency legal process invoking the Convention at the International Court of Justice, yet no government has done so.
My question to you --
PATEL: Do you have a question soon?
HUSSEINI: My question to you is: Has the US Government pressured or bribed or threatened in any way, shape, or form Abbas, the people around him, institutions around him, from invoking this or any other legal mechanisms against Israel to stop its attack?
PATEL: I don’t even know where to start there, Sam. No, the US has not been involved in pressuring or anything like that to any officials within the Palestinian Authority. What I will just say again in the context of this conflict: We have been incredibly clear that as Israel defends itself and defends its security that it is imperative that it continues to make a distinction between Hamas terrorists and Palestinian civilians, and that’s something we’ll continue to raise directly with Israeli counterparts.
I will also note that we, within the US Government, have a rigorous process for evaluating whether something constitutes genocide, and we have not made that assessment in this case. And it’s really important to remember that Hamas bears responsibility for sparking this war and they brought this tragic war to Gaza. They have compounded and perpetuated the suffering of the Palestinian people at every step of this crisis. And as I said, we continue to support Israel's right to defend itself against these terrorist attacks by Hamas.
HUSSEINI: You claim – excuse me. You claim that you want Israel to make the distinction, but you don't seem to be — making the distinction.
PATEL: We absolutely make this distinction, Sam.
HUSSEINI: If I might – I didn't interrupt you. I didn't interrupt you. The Center for Constitutional Rights just put out a statement: "Legal Organizations Put Members of Congress on Notice for Complicity on Genocide." Quote: "Please take note” — this is a letter that they sent to members of Congress. Center for Constitutional Rights: "Please take notice that should you vote in favor of that package," the Biden package for Israel, "you risk facing criminal and civil liabilities for aiding and abetting genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity under international law, and may face investigation and prosecution." Do members of the State Department face similar possibilities?
PATEL: Again, Sam, as I said, we have – the US Government has a rigorous process in place for evaluating whether something constitutes genocide, and we have not made that assessment in this case.
HUSSEINI: But you continue to pretend —
PATEL: I'm going to – I've taken —
QUESTION: — that the bombing of hospital after hospital, bakery after bakery, university after university – and somehow you keep pretending that, oh, they're just after military people of Hamas.
PATEL: I appreciate – I appreciate your questions, Sam. I've taken two of them. Now I'm going to work the room a little bit.
Full video and transcript according to the State Department is here.
Note: This is the first time I was called on at a State Department briefing since Israel started its current bombing campaign against Palestinians in Gaza. This despite having gone to most of the briefings with my hand raised at virtually every opportunity. (I did inject myself into the Oct. 10 news conference but was never actually properly called on.)
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And now on the Passionate Eye - Who was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States?
Montage: “He's dead. And they can close the case and he can't defend himself.”
“The lone gunman theory fits the needs of the FBI.”
The investigation spans the globe, uncovering the deadly world of germ warfare.
Montage: “It was about killing people and not being able to be found out. Designing assassination weapons, classic spy stuff.”
Are we on the verge of the unthinkable?
Montage: “They could launch biowarfare by means of anthrax anywhere in the world today.”
]]>October 13, 2000
JOHN GIBSON, GUEST HOST: Hi, everybody. I'm John Gibson filling in for Bill O'Reilly, who's on assignment. Thanks for watching us tonight.
We've got a packed program for you. The political Hollywood film "The Contender" is released today and the producer and one of the stars say the studio chiefs reedited it to present a pro-Gore agenda. Much ado about now much or Hollywood liberals at it again?
Plus, the presidential race is in a statistical dead heat, but the violence in the Middle East could affect who wins in November. We'll find out how the stakes have changed. And the crisis in the Mideast is our top story tonight. Here are the latest developments.
One Palestinian is dead and 12 injured in clashes today in Hebron. Ninety-eight people have been killed in 16 days of violence. President Clinton is calling for calm while many say the peace process is dead. What will it take to resolve this and have the Palestinians been treated unfairly?
Joining me now from Washington, D.C. is the former media director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Sam Husseini.
Sam, what is the case for the notion that Palestinians have been treated unfairly?
SAM HUSSEINI, INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC ACCURACY: Well, going back to the beginning of the Oslo Accords, if you take a look at it, as the group that I'm currently with, the Institute for Public Accuracy, has been doing, you find that the Oslo Accords were tremendously unfair to the Palestinians and the agreements that they have gone through since then, since the big handshake, the big photo-ops and so on.
They hide the fact that Israel continues to perpetuate its occupation over the Palestinians.
GIBSON: But Sam…
HUSSEINI: All the Israelis have done is withdrawn from some population areas.
GIBSON: Sam, I'm confused. Didn't the Palestinians agree to the Oslo Accords? So who was unfair to who?
HUSSEINI: Well, it was either agree or get nothing. Basically the Palestinians were put a gun to their head saying agree to this piece of paper or you get nothing or you get bombed or you, you know, just stay out of the picture or you get absolutely nothing at all because Israel's got all the weapons.
There's a tremendous disparity -- Israel's got one of the biggest, most powerful militaries in the world. They've got 200 nuclear weapons. And what they are at war, some people are saying against, is a civilian population…
GIBSON: But Sam…
HUSSEINI: … that's unarmed, that all they've got is rocks.
GIBSON: But Sam…
HUSSEINI: So it's an incredibly…
GIBSON: Israel is not going to bomb Gaza with nuclear weapons. That wouldn't…
HUSSEINI: No, but they can bomb other people in the region.
GIBSON: Well, sure, but -- all right, Sam, look…
HUSSEINI: They can determine their dominance of the region.
GIBSON: … how do you expect the American people at large to develop some empathy for the Palestinians when we see in the last couple of days mobs killing a couple of guys…
HUSSEINI: Well, you know, John…
GIBSON: … guys waving their bloody hands out a window in triumph?
HUSSEINI: Right, exactly. Exactly.
GIBSON: How does that build any empathy?
HUSSEINI: Yeah, what doesn't build empathy and I hear the music and I guess they'll show the clips that are getting played, I want to see the clips that haven't gotten played. There have been almost 100 Palestinian civilians, not soldiers -- I'm sorry about those soldiers, those Israeli soldiers getting killed. But what were they doing there? They're occupying soldiers.
GIBSON: They were…
HUSSEINI: They're occupying…
GIBSON: They were there by mistake.
HUSSEINI: They weren't in uniform, John.
GIBSON: They ran to the Palestinian police station for protection.
HUSSEINI: They weren't in uniform, John. You know, they're undercover units, OK? It's not a secret.
GIBSON: Well, Sam, I know that's in dispute. But I mean one picture…
HUSSEINI: So, let's see the pictures…
GIBSON: At least one picture today…
HUSSEINI: Let's see the pictures that we're not seeing…
GIBSON: … showed the guy in uniform being…
HUSSEINI: … of our -- John.
GIBSON: … shoved to the ground.
HUSSEINI: John, the other pictures of our, of American made helicopter gunships hitting civilian targets, of Palestinian children being shot. Neither one of the presidential candidates had the guts to say I condemn Israel's killing almost 100 Palestinian civilians.
Independent Science News just published my piece "Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance Has Hidden Almost $40 Million In Pentagon Funding And Militarized Pandemic Science." Prior pieces on this subject are here.
]]>See piece in Salon: "Joe Biden won't tell the truth about his Iraq war record — and he hasn't for years."
See January 2007 questioning of Biden and Tony Blinken.
]]>Similarly CNN (4/6/20) mocked the notion of a lab leak when re-assessing the source of the pandemic, describing one possibility being that: "It leaked -- like a genie out of a bottle -- from a lab in an accident."
But even a cursory look at the record shows that these labs, where ever they exist, have a lot of accidents -- just from 2019, the New York Times (8/5/19) reported: "Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns" regarding Fort Detrick in Maryland: "Problems with disposal of dangerous materials led the government to suspend research at the military’s leading biodefense center." (The local paper, the Frederick News-Post has provided some coverage, including publishing letters by local activist Barry Kissin who has focused on the issue.)
USA Today had a reporter on this beat, Alison Young, but she left the paper. A sampling of her work:
While much of the media and political establishment have minimized the threat from such lab work, some hawks on the American right like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., have singled out Chinese biodefense researchers as uniquely dangerous.
But there is every indication that U.S. lab work is every bit as threatening as that in Chinese labs. American labs also operate in secret, and are also known to be accident-prone.
The current dynamics of the biological arms race have been driven by U.S. government decisions that extend back decades. In December 2009, Reuters reported that the Obama administration was refusing even to negotiate the possible monitoring of biological weapons.
Much of the left in the U.S. now appears unwilling to scrutinize the origin of the pandemic — or the wider issue of biowarfare — perhaps because portions of the anti-Chinese right have been so vocal in making unfounded allegations.
Governments that participate in such biological weapon research generally distinguish between "biowarfare" and "biodefense," as if to paint such "defense" programs as necessary. But this is rhetorical sleight-of-hand; the two concepts are largely indistinguishable.
"Biodefense" implies tacit biowarfare, breeding more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding a way to fight them. While this work appears to have succeeded in creating deadly and infectious agents, including deadlier flu strains, such "defense" research is impotent in its ability to defend us from this pandemic.
The legal scholar who drafted the main U.S. law on the subject, Francis Boyle, warned in his 2005 book "Biowarfare and Terrorism" that an "illegal biological arms race with potentially catastrophic consequences" was underway, largely driven by the U.S. government.
For years, many scientists have raised concerns regarding bioweapons/biodefense lab work, and specifically about the fact that huge increases in funding have taken place since 9/11. This was especially true after the anthrax-by-mail attacks that killed five people in the weeks after 9/11, which the FBI ultimately blamed on a U.S. government biodefense scientist. A 2013 study found that biodefense funding since 2001 had totaled at least $78 billion, and more has surely been spent since then. This has led to a proliferation of laboratories, scientists and new organisms, effectively setting off a biological arms race.
Following the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 2014, the U.S. government paused funding for what are known as "gain-of-function" research on certain organisms. This work actually seeks to make deadly pathogens deadlier, in some cases making pathogens airborne that previously were not. With little notice outside the field, the pause on such research was lifted in late 2017.
During this pause, exceptions for funding were made for dangerous gain-of-function lab work. This included work jointly done by U.S. scientists from the University of North Carolina, Harvard and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This work — which had funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance not originally acknowledged — was published in 2015 in Nature Medicine.
A different Nature Medicine article about the origin of the current pandemic, authored by five scientists and published on March 17, has been touted by major media outlet and some officials — including current National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins — as definitively disproving a lab origin for the novel coronavirus. That journal article, titled "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2," stated unequivocally: "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus." This is a subtly misleading sentence. While the scientists state that there is no known laboratory "signature" in the SARS-Cov-2 RNA, their argument fails to take account of other lab methods that could have created coronavirus mutations without leaving such a signature.
But there's no rumor. It’s a fact: Labs work with dangerous pathogens. U.S. and China have such dual use biowarfare/biodefense programs. China has major facilities at Wuhan. There are leaks from labs. (See Preventing a Biological Arms Race, MIT Press, 1990, edited by Susan Wright -- see (partial) review in Journal of International Law (10/92).)
There are two obvious responses:Burn it Down: The impulsive thing to do would be to want to burn down the Democratic Party. It’s possible that the establishment of the Democratic Party would be OK with this — they seem to fear a President Sanders more than the fear another term of Trump. So, people would stay home or vote for a third party or independent candidate who openly states that they have virtually no chance of winning.Cave In: Others might insist that no matter how badly the Democratic Party establishment treats its voters, they need to get in line come November and vote for whoever the nominee is. This is euphemistically referred to as “hold your nose and voting.” People have done this for decades and it’s typically resulted in the corporate wing of the Democratic Party becoming more and more powerful.The first of these will be disastrous because it will help Trump.The second will be disastrous because it effectively surrenders control of the Democratic Party to the corporate wing, probably for the foreseeable future.But there is a third choice: The VotePact strategy.With the VotePact strategy, in the general election, disenchanted Democratics team up with a disenchanted Republicans. They pair up: spouses and friends and coworkers and neighbors and debating partners and ex-facebook friends. Instead of the two of them voting for candidates they don’t want, they pair up and vote for the third party or independent candidate of their choice.
(Talk by Art Laffin given on Oct. 22, 2019 at evening support gathering during the Kings Bay Plowshares 7 Trial at St. Athanasius Episcopal Church, Brunswick, Georgia. This version Includes some slight revisions. Audio is here. Laffin is member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community in Washington, D.C. He is also editor of the two-volume work Swords into Plowshares, which has a forward by the late Father Daniel Berrigan.)