I once worked for a compny that subcontracted out to the government and to comanies contracting with the government. We were bidding on a job working with some company who was making sonar systems for the nuclear subs, and I was brought along to basically represent the dev team to work on the (a?) software component. I had to get a secret security clearance, which - if you haven’t been through this - is a dozen or so pages of the last decade of everything about your life: every address you’ve lived at; a list of people and contact information who’ve known you for that entire time and who will vouch for you; every job you’ve held and contact info for the companies… everything except an actual anal probe. And remember, I had to do this just to get into the building to talk to these people. I mean, maybe not normally, but they weren’t going to waste their time talking to me if I didn’t have the clearance. Then when I got there, it had the craziest security I’d ever seen: an outside badge door, so you had to call someone to get you, a little room with a security guard station, then another secure door the security guys had to open. And then there were badge doors in the building for different sections.
The job sounded fun: I was told one phase of testing required the developers to go on a test cruise, to answer questions and debug while underway; getting to ride in a nuclear sub (without having to join the Navy) might have been worth suffering my claustrophobia and massive distrust of submarines in general. But we didn’t win the bid, and I never got to use that security clearance that was such a massive PITA to get.
Anyway, it made me very conscious of just how serious the US takes submarine security. This guy, I expect, will disappear into an oubliette and never be heard from again.
His [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s] statement comes after US President Joe Biden announced Israel had proposed a three-stage plan to Hamas aimed at reaching a permanent ceasefire.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary“In Iran, the number of death sentences handed down and carried out for both political and non-political reasons rose significantly,” as Rebin Rahmani, a Kurdish activist based in Paris told DW. In 2018, Besharat’s mother penned an open letter to Javaid Rehman, the UN’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, to register her complaint against the Iranian judiciary. Amnesty International’s latest report claims that the authorities in Iran are increasingly using capital punishment as a way to terrorize citizens and cement their own power. In 2022, after conducting sham trials, Iran executed nine people in connection with the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests that rocked the country in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of police. “Without international pressure, that number would have been considerably higher,” Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based organization Iran Human Rights (IHR), told DW. In November 2023, for instance, brothers Saeed and Ismail Alizahi were executed in the city of Zahedan on drug charges without either receiving a final visit from their family. — Saved 76% of original text.
“Actively silencing discussion of Palestinian lives and the ongoing global health disaster is dehumanizing,” Smith wrote in a resignation letter to Power, “not only to the people of Gaza, but to the people of the United States who deserve to know the extent to which we are paying for and supporting crimes against Palestinians.”
“What happened to me sends a very clear signal to staff: We don’t talk about Gaza,” Smith told The Intercept.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summaryUSAID staff cited the slide and discussion of international law as potential fodder for leaks, documents and emails Smith shared with The Intercept show. “I thought it is really obscene that misinformation can go out freely out into the world [about Gaza], but I can’t talk about the reality of starving pregnant women,” said Smith, who worked as a contracted senior adviser at USAID on gender and material health. In February, he submitted an abstract for his presentation — titled “An Intersectional Gender Lens in Gaza: Ethnicity, Religion, Geography, Legal Status, and Maternal/Child Health Outcomes” — which was accepted for the small USAID conference. As The Intercept reported, USAID officials had urged Secretary of State Antony Blinken to find Israel’s commitments to international law were not credible based on its conduct in Gaza since October. When officials in USAID’s Middle East bureau reviewed Smith’s presentation days before the event, they flagged the slide on international humanitarian law, in particular. In an email with other USAID advisers, Yepsen, who did not respond to The Intercept’s inquiries, noted that “the NSM-20 report has made national news and Israel’s compliance remains an unresolved issue.” — Saved 80% of original text.
First and foremost: It is not a demand that Israel accept a ceasefire, it is a demand that Hamas accept the terms of a ceasefire. Sometimes this is a very subtle difference, but one the key elements of a ceasefire negotiation is that each side is trying to continue fighting while making their adversary look like the aggressor. So far, it looks like Biden has moved slightly, but he still is not applying pressure on Netanyahu to end the war.
Second: Continuing on that last point, there is no leverage. Biden has persistently chosen not to do anything that would actually apply pressure. He has deferred to Netanyahu’s judgement and supported him while gradually shifting in tone, but it’s become 1000% clear that Netanyahu will stop when he is forced to, and not a moment sooner.
Third: The focus is constantly on micromanaging the situation. Debating how many civilians can get killed, what fraction of the homes can be demolished, how much territory Israel can appropriate in Gaza. None of this actually addresses the foundational issues: one side is imposing apartheid with genocidal intent on a neighbor that is largely powerless, and the other side’s only real avenue for expressing itself is through terrorism. Which is bad for both sides. If these realities persist, then the cycle that has governed nearly three generations is allowed to continue. There must be a breaking point in that cycle, and referring back to point 2: it’s going to have to be imposed on the leadership in Israel. They WILL NOT accept it willingly.
In summary, this is a very welcome change in narrative for Biden, but we are far past the point of fiddling with narratives. We need policy action, and it’s incredible that he’s still dug in like this after another state department official just resigned because she said that she was being pressured to be an accomplice in breaking US law against knowingly aiding war crimes.
The new element in the proposal would come with a second phase, during which Israel and Hamas would negotiate a permanent cease-fire and complete Israeli withdrawal. Under the newly announced plan, the temporary cease-fire would continue beyond the six weeks until such a permanent plan is put in place, provided neither side violated its terms and negotiations continued.
So the second step is basically optional. Israel can pause the invasion of Rafah, get some hostages back, and then just go back to what they were doing. Netanyahu’s already said all the hostages are not enough for him to stop, he also requires the destruction of Hamas (the people who are supposed to accept the negotiated terms) and long-term security control over Gaza (i.e., reestablish the occupation), so the negotiations are probably doomed from the start. It’s really a one-phase plan for a limited hostage swap masquerading as three.
We need to come down hard on these bastards. We need to set examples because if it was one of ours doing the same in China or Russia, they’d be in a forced labour camp for 20 years. Jail the bugger, vigorously interrogate him and then trade him in a few years after he’s sampled the delights of the US prison system.
news
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.