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After a U-turn by President Obama, it would seem we (yes, I sometimes use the U.S. we) have reached the point of actually contemplating criminal responsibility for systematically authorizing torture of “War on Terror” detainees. It would seem that once again the flawed-but-awesome Freedom of Information Act, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the bizarre nature of the state, which must both record everything and make up completely implausible justifications along the way, all deserve part of the credit. The camel’s-back-breaking straw seems to be this footnote in the May 30, 2005 memo:
The CIA used the waterboard “at least 83 times during August 2002″ in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of K[halid] S[haikh] M[ohammed], see id. at 91. (May 30, 2005 memo available from the ACLU)
More details are available from the blogger who first publicized it, Marcy Wheeler of emptywheel.
As the paper trail is taken out from under a Bush administration coverup, we’re going to have to rewrite the entire narrative. In the process, we seem to be undergoing a moral transformation as well. As British reporter Phillippe Sands narrates it:
With a wide-ranging Spanish criminal investigation into torture at Guantánamo threatening to embarrass the US, Barack Obama decided to declassify legal memos sent under the Bush administration in the hope the country would move on. The opposite has happened. Ever more documents set out in meticulous detail the full extent of the cruelty: who was abused by whom, how they did it and what was done. The truth has been revealed in stark detail, from the number of times waterboarding was used to the legal deliberations that led to it. By Tuesday, President Obama had raised the possibility of US war crimes trials and far-reaching inquiries, developments that were unthinkable a month ago. (The Observer)
I’m not as hopeful that we’re really at a turning point on torture, as revealed by the unimpressive and unmoving poll results this week.
Currently, nearly half say the use of torture ["in order to gain important information"] is often (15%) or sometimes (34%) justified; about the same proportion believes that the torture of suspected terrorists is rarely (22%) or never (25%) justified.
However, public exposure of the realities of Guantanamo, Bagram, the CIA Black Sites, and Clinton-initiated extraordinary rendition, can only be useful in transforming Americans into the morally aware creatures we have the capacity to be. [Homework assignment in that direction: listen to Maher Arar, the Canadian computer programmer "we" rendered to Syria describe his detention, torture, and its effect on his life. The compare "cramped confinement" as authorized in the 2002 and 2005 memos.] We might emerge with a bit less fear of the rest of the world and a lot less confidence in our (and our government’s) righteousness. If only the moral transformation would extend to the torture in our regular prisons and immigration detention centers…
Sober, well-paid lawyers provided excuses and qualifications for our government to torture its “high-value detainees.” Key techniques summary and the full memos from the New York Times.
What happened when these techniques were applied. The Red Cross asked them and produced this confidential report. Summary and reaction by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books.
The December-January war in Gaza came and went too fast for people in the United States who weren’t already convinced to come to a moral reckoning with what was being done in our name, and with the money and weapons we provided. Unlike the Iraq war, advertised for over a year before, this one took place in the shadow of a U.S. national election campaign that was generally unconcerned with Israel and Palestine.
But there should be no mistake for United States residents that this war was ours. The United States government was nearly unique in providing unqualified support to the Israeli assualt, which left over 1300 people dead. Near-unanimous votes in both houses of the U.S. Congress backed the Israeli position, nearly word for word. The unprecedented demand that the Palestinian side renounce violence per se as a condition of negotiations was included in that endorsement. The new president, Barack Obama, maintained a strategic silence but made clear that “Israel’s security” is “sacrosanct” in the campaign.
The depth of this support cannot be pinned entirely on the pro-Israel lobby, athough its operation is a part of the way Washington works, with clear parallels to the Indonesia lobby that maintained a flow of arms during more than two decades of the occupation of East Timor. But US support is also an issue of popular mentality, of the minds and perspectives in our community. It combines Christianity and Fundamentalist apocalyptic viewpoints with a common self-perception of our societies as divinely blessed cities on a hill in a hostile wilderness. This perspective is the ideology that was needed by our shared histories as a settler colonial states, reinforced over the past forty years by anti-Arab racism. It’s about resonance, a shared politics that makes it possible to endorse one another’s crimes. Smart analyses of these political affinities has come from both right (see Walter Russell Mead writing in Foreign Affairs last summer) and left (see chapter 4 of Retort collectives’ Afflicted Powers).
Somehow these ideological limitations seem to distort American perceptions more than Israeli ones when it comes to Israeli actions. No doubt this combines real and legitimate guilt and remorse over antisemitism (though rarely does that come with a real self-examination about antisemitism in American history) with the World War II-centered story of American nationalism. The fact that defeating Nazi antisemitism is at the center of the last war most Americans can be proud of has made many reluctant to criticize the Jewish state that emerged in the years that followed.
But not keeping our eyes open gets us into big trouble. Fortunately, the Israeli media some times offers an up-close view that is sadly lacking in our own. So too, of course, do the Arab and international media. Right now, the Gaza war is being examined in a big way. Take a look…
- Amos Harel, “IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement“
- Harel, ‘Shooting and crying’
- Harel, Probe into Gaza op allegations comes too late
- Uri Blau on the t-shirts Israeli army units make to psych themselves up for war.
- Democracy Now!, “Israel Promises Internal Probe After Soldiers Describe Civilian Killings, Lax Rules of Engagement in Gaza Attack“
It’s 19° here in DC this morning, where I will be joining some six or seven digit number of people outside for the inauguration. Washington is an old hometown to me, but it does have a different feel when it’s claimed as a front yard by people from across the country. Walking around last night, I saw more people on the street than I ever have, black folks selling “I was there” sweatshirts, and other black folks dressed to the nines out partying, a big time reception or three in different night spots, people dressed to be dropped off in limos (and clearly used to that too) walking through the cold because of the security perimeter, and a cleared out and brightly lit Pennsylvania Ave. surrounded by security fencing but nonetheless open to the public.
And in the past month, I’ve seen a disastrous war, bought, paid for, armed, and endorsed by my country but carried out in Gaza. I’ve called my black, Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn, Ed Towns, only to hear the exact Israeli line from his legislative aide, calling the deadliest assault in Palestine in three decades an act of “self defense.” Now over 1300 people are dead, and 50,000 are homeless.
I’ve also seen on video a black man shot in the back in Oakland, while waiting to be cuffed by BART police. And Oakland was my city, and New Year’s is my holiday in the Bay, and I had helped break up a fight earlier in the week, so I can sure imagine being swept up when the cops arrived. Oscar Grant could have been me.
These causes for despair can be healed, but it will be us, our actions that heal them by standing up and challenging injustice. I’m proud of so many people for standing up to these two in recent weeks (on Gaza | on Oscar Grant). They are what I have to celebrate today.
A couple months ago, I signed on to a call for a Bloc to be present at today’s inauguration called “Celebrate People’s History, Build Popular Power.” Given today’s mega-concert like feel, it might not be the action with the greatest impact. But I’m grateful for a way to set myself a bit apart today, to say the words “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” in a way that can never be the same as listening to the same words. To make the future we want, we all need to produce rather than consume our politics. See you in the streets, celebrating and fighting.
[Yes, more of an overview update is coming soon; there's been big news in the past two months. The bailout has morphed into something bigger, with both interesting and scandalous implications (some times at the same time); we have a new president; anti-authoritarians have some interesting things to think through around grassroots political campaigning, public works projects and an economic crisis, etc. Plus, Thai mass direct action just brought down a government. But everything starts somewhere, so let's start with a new kind of protest..]
In Chicago, the economic crisis hit the road in the form of worker suddenly cut off from their jobs at Republic Windows and Doors (company website here). Republic’s (apparently one and only) factory closed Friday, three days after its 260 workers were notified. Standard notice is sixty days. Severance and unused vacation for the workers have not been paid. In response:
Members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, which represents 260 workers at the company’s Goose Island plant, have taken shifts at a sit-in at the plant, 1333 N. Hickory Ave., since Friday. (Chicago Tribune)
Scores of workers laid off from a factory here that makes windows and doors have refused to leave, deciding to stage a “peaceful occupation” of the plant around the clock this weekend as they demand pay they say is owed them.
[...]
The workers, many of whom were sitting on fold-up chairs on the factory floor Saturday afternoon, said they would not leave.
“They’re staying because the fact is that these workers feel they have nothing to lose at this point,” said Leah Fried, an organizer for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America Local 1110, who said groups of 30 were occupying the plant in shifts. “Telling them they have three days before they are out on the street, penniless, is outrageous.” (NYT)
Clearly, this is the face of the overall downturn: we saw 533,000 lost jobs in November, bringing the total ot 1.9 million in the current recession. It’s also the front end of the bailout: Bank of America, backed up by our bailout, is Republic Windows and Doors’ creditor, and is accused by workers of not releasing the funds for the company to meet its obligations. Bank of America, by the way now includes ABN AMRO North America, FleetBoston, LaSalle Bank, NationsBank, predatory lender Countrywide Financial, Merrill Lynch, credit card giant MBNA. As of July, after taking on Countrywide, the company controlled between 20 to 25 percent of the home loan market. As Jobs with Justice reminds us, “Bank of America has received $25 billion in bailout funds, ostensibly in order to extend credit to companies that need it.”
You can back up their protest with letters to Bank of America here.
Writing in the SF Chronicle (“The changing face of America poses risks”), Californians for Population Stabilization cites recent Census projections on US racial demographics to expose his, the group’s and allegedly white America’s fears about losing control of the country.
the increasingly rapid erosion of the white population in America raises the stakes considerably no matter who wins the White House. The question transcends what the occupant of the Oval Office looks like and becomes whether whites are ready for the accelerating changes that will result in an America that no longer looks like them, sounds like them or necessarily embraces their cultural tastes.
The author, Mark Cromer is a “senior writing fellow” for CPS, a group spun off from Zero Population Growth, and descended from the efforts to use the Sierra Club to oppose immigration to the United States on ecological grounds. Perhaps the Earth isn’t exactly their top priority. With current projections showing the U.S. will no longer have a non-Hispanic white majority in my generation’s lifetime, Cromer is focused on so-called stability of racial divides:
In just over 300 of [3100 U.S. counties], ethnic minorities are now the majority population. The effect has often been the real-world elimination of hard-won racial balances, with traditional working and middle-class black and white communities effectively disappearing. In many places throughout Southern California, the white flight that marked the efforts at integration in the 1960s and early 1970s struck again in the 1990s, turning into a middle-class Anglo exodus from the state in the face of massive immigration from Mexico, helping create the first minority-majority state in the union.
In essence, he’s saying those whites who agreed to “tolerate” a certain level of black faces are not okay with black and brown people together outnumbering. The result he predicts is this…
This demographic upheaval has spawned another phenomena among the white middle class that has become iconic: the gated community.
Knowing the white folks in my own family who fled for the far suburbs when their neighborhood became “too ethnic,” I’m hesitant to dismiss this explanation. Such frankness on the anti-brown-immigrant, pro-white-flight side is very rare. But when it comes to policymaking, Cromer is calling for a racial compromise that means racial planning of immigration policy:
to begin any new round of negotiation on immigration reform with an understanding that any effort to legalize the status of millions of illegal immigrants will be matched with a commensurate reduction in legal immigration into the United States, spread out over years. This would go far in ameliorating the pervasive sense among whites that America is being overrun.
Read that again. More legalization of brown people must be offset less legal immigration of brown people. The presence of people of color feels like “America” is “being overrun.” Of course not all people have this racist perspective, but important thing is to compromise between other values and racism:
Failure to seize the opportunity to build a real national consensus – one that can only be obtained through what surely will be a hard-fought compromise – is to risk further alienating a white majority that will ultimately insist on having its voice heard on these issues, one way or the other.
The question is: do racist fears deserve a seat at the table in planning our cities and policing our borders, or should we act beyond racism and let our neighbors be whoever moves into the houses and apartments next door? Fortunately the answers will come with the free decisions and political lives of my generation. I want to ask my white peers whether this represents you, your friends, or your cousins. I’m really curious, and will strive not to be judgmental:
it’s not the end result that most white Americans probably find troubling today, but rather the factors that are fueling those projections [of a white non-majority], namely unrestrained immigration and the increasingly bitter sense that they’ve had little to no say about this matter.
Oh, and if this doesn’t represent you, consider dropping a line to the writer at Mrcromer@aol.com.
Inside the Green Scare
Elle Magazine has a profile piece of “Anna”, a young woman who volunteered to be an informant for the FBI on the anarchist scene. As it turns out, she was lurking at at least a couple of gatherings I’ve been to, the late 2003 protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Miami, and the 2004 RNC protests. The presence of a an infiltrator, pretending sympathy and often acting as a street medic, honestly, makes my skin crawl. It is all the worse for those she developed seemingly long-term relationships with, and worst of all for Eric McDavid, now sentenced to some 20 years in prison for something he never actually did, but was co-planning with FBI informant/pseudo-anarchist Anna.
And of course, it only strengthens the argument for those many times when the most compelling direct action strategy relies on bringing people in, and generating the numbers to do what a few people with the option of surprise can’t.
Anyway, you can now meet the informer, in Elle’s profile article, posted on Indybay for what seem to be solid fair use reasons. It would be unfair to not let people on Eric’s side respond, as one does anonymously here. See also Friends and Family of Eric McDavid.
p.s. More from CrimethInc.
And the Black & Brown Scare
Meanwhile the Liberty City 7 case, charging seven poor men in Miami with an “aspirational rather than operational” plot to attack the Sears Tower, gets ready for a third trial.
Serious coverage on that is also available at the Black Agenda Report.
As someone who was watching the US government march to invade Iraq from the streets of San Francisco, and from countless antiwar events, giving more of an insider’s view has been both chilling and darkly fascinating. A big help is last summer’s PBS documentary, No End in Sight.
Strangely for me after watching the film last night, this morning’s New York Times covers one of the main hidden histories exposed by the documentary. Early on in the occupation, sometime in the month of May 2003, a few highly placed Defense Department officials decided to disband the Iraqi army, without so much as asking Secretary of State Powell, National Security Adviser Rice, or the U.S. Army.Plans to screen and reconstitute the force were pushed aside, and Iraqi officers offering help had to be ignored. The Army’s head of policy in Baghdad, John Hughes remebers:
Later, a battalion commander from the 101st Airborne came in—to see me, and he said, “Hey, sir, I’ve gotta talk to somebody, I’ve got a group of Iraqi generals and colonels that want to talk to somebody from ORHA.”
And they—over the course of the war, even before the war, had been removing computers and software —of personnel lists from the Ministry of Defense and storing them at their home, because they knew they were not going to win this war.
And they wanted to help reestablish the Iraqi military with the Americans.
…
Absolutely. And I took intelligence officials with me to meet with these men. And these guys were willing to—to explain or provide information on anything that they could.
They were saying to me, “Colonel Paul, Baghdad’s burning. You tell me, and I can have 10,000 military police ready for you next week.”
I took that back, nothing ever became of it.
We were also going to—take some Iraqi units and let them become the labor force for reconstructing Iraq. If you needed the rubble from a bridge cleared, they would do that. And there on the news one morning was the announcement that the Iraqi army had been disbanded and abolished by—Ambassador Bremer.
You want to talk about feeling like the ugly American, that’s what I was. You know, here I was, trying to work with these men, to help them rebuild their country, to—to bring their soldiers under some semblance of control. And instead, they’re told they’re not worth the time.
Just two months later, lines had been drawn, and another reality began to unfold:
Hussein Saber shook with fury as he lay on a dirty hospital bed last night and told the story of another day in Baghdad, a city torn apart by killings, misunderstanding and the startling failures of America’s military occupation.
Yesterday Hussein, 33, should have collected a $50 (£30) emergency payment which all Iraq’s now unemployed soldiers are due to receive. The money did not arrive and so he and hundreds of other frustrated young men poured towards the gates of the US-led authority to protest.
Within minutes he was shot in his right side by a young, nervous American soldier. Hussein survived but two other Iraqis standing next to him in the crowd were killed.
…
“I hoped and I wished that when the American forces came they would bring us democracy and freedom but unfortunately we have seen the opposite,” said Hussein, a non-commissioned officer in the air force for the past 18 years. “The Americans are going to get hurt if the situation remains as it is.” (Rory McCarthy, “Just another day in Baghdad,” The Guardian, June 19, 2003)
Normally, I’m cautious about getting too deep into debates among war planners. The argument usually turns into some idea that if only more competent people were in charge, everything would go smoothly. In the context of one country ruling over another country, such an outcome seems extraordinarily unlikely. However, it is people who strive to do their very best under whatever circumstances that leave behind the archive and their regrets, both of which help us understand how an enterprise like our new colonialism could ever have happened.
This news and a lot of details in the film raise a deeper question. Aside from proving that a high tech, high corporate profit, but smaller military without the bother of too many actual American citizens on the ground, did Rumsfeld and Bremer have plans of their own? Was leaving Iraq in chaos, whatever the motive, something they were consciously pushing their colleagues and superiors aside to do?
While in Washington, I stayed just in my old neighborhood, Adams Morgan. Just blocks away, a new Metro station opened just before I moved out, and the eight years since have seen enormous investment by developers in the Columbia Heights neighborhood. Usually, the corporate media is there to celebrate moments like this, producing headlines like this one in the Washington Post: “A Rapid Renaissance in Columbia Heights: Retail-Based Renewal A Contrast to ’60s Strife.” Gray Brechin’s phenomenal history of San Francisco, , makes the point that this is rarely a coincidence, and that major newspapers have long had a financial interest and close family ties to real estate developers.
This left me walking through the box-stores, remaining affordable apartments, and new luxury condos with a friend who spent time organizing, and occupying abandoned buildings, with Homes Not Jails in the District. We were left to talk about the horrible fact that new, shiny buildings force one to cringe about who got pushed out. Now, some local organizing has meant that tenants in some buildings have gotten upgraded housing, but that’s not the whole story.
As it turned out, the very next morning the Post redeemed itself a bit and started publishing a series on how landlords have pushed out their lower middle class tenants to sell buildings as condos. Called Forced Out, it’s good reading for what displacement looks at the level of a neighborhood. In this case, the one I used to live in.
Dozens of landlords refused to make repairs, forcing families to live in filth — at times without heat, hot water or electricity. Other landlords delivered urgent letters or mass notices demanding that tenants leave.
In the past four years, landlords emptied more than 200 buildings from Columbia Heights to Southeast, most of them rent-controlled, thwarting the intent of one of the nation’s toughest tenant rights laws with the approval of the city government, a Washington Post investigation found.
It was the hidden toll of a frenzied condominium boom that turned aging neighborhoods into coveted urban communities.
In one building, what D.C. Council member Jim Graham, called an “aggressive, relentless” campaign to empty the building, was followed by a fire:
Within hours of the November 2006 fire in Adams Morgan, investigators declared arson: Inside the apartment building, they found a charred plastic container that had been filled with a mixture of gasoline and alcohol, stuffed in a plastic shopping bag. The liquid was poured in the basement near 12 electrical boxes and on the second floor, just below Begum’s apartment. Flames quickly choked the building, searing walls and melting lights.
Net result, everyone had to move. The landlords sold the property for $4 million.
On the South Side of Chicago, this was the story of the 1960s and 70s, when absentee landlords bailed out of responsibility and took the insurance money and ran. The vacant lots weren’t always vacant. In the District, the fires seem to still be burning today.
Life for one-and-a-half million people in Gaza has been getting dramatically worse in the past two years. The territory has been surrounded by walls, barbed wire, and an electrified fence. Its older residents can look across these lines towards the lands and ruined villages from which they were expelled in 1948 and 1967. Across the border, an armed conflict is asymmetrically raging. Armed Palestinian factions launch small-scale rockets at Israeli coastal cities in hopes of emulating the pressure that led to the 2002 Israeli withdrawal from occupied southern Lebanon. Meanwhile a far greater Israeli arsenal targets Gaza’s cities, and periodically pushes in with tanks, armored vehicles and soldiers who raid Palestinian homes. The most recent Israeli push—in response to the death of an Israeli student at Sapir College from rocket fire—is still in progress, although a 2-day “interval” was observed while US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the region. The impact confirmed by B’Tselem so far is:
From 27 February to the afternoon of 3 March, 106 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip. Contrary to the Chief of Staff’s contention that ninety percent were armed, at least fifty-four of the dead (twenty-five of them minors) did not take part in the hostilities. In addition, at least forty-six minors were wounded.
I’m confident you haven’t heard the names of any of these children, nor the circumstance of their deaths. Here’s B’Tselem again:
The killing of four children – ‘Ali Dardona, age 8, Muhammad Hamudah, 9, Dardona Dardona, 12, and ‘Omer Dardona – and wounding of two others while they played soccer in the street, east of the Jabalya refugee camp on 28 February. B’Tselem’s investigation indicates that Qassam rockets may have been fired earlier about 100 meters from where the children were. However, no armed Palestinians were killed or injured in the incident.
The killing of Iyad and Jacqueline Muhammad Abu-Shabak, brother and sister, 16 and 17 years old, when they were watching the fighting from the window of their house east of Jabalya. According to testimonies by family members, the two were shot in the head and chest.
The killing of six-month-old Muhammad al-Bur’i, at the family’s home in the Rimal section of Gaza on 27 February, and the wounding of others, in the shelling of the nearby Interior Ministry building. The building is a civilian office building, and not a legitimate military target.
Current operations, of course, come with the full support of the U.S. government, and presidential hopefuls McCain, Clinton and Obama.
Unfortunately, missiles and invading soldiers may not be nearly as destructive as the policies of “economic warfare” (in the words of the Israeli government), which now extend to restricting, and at times cutting off, electricity and fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip. The result is a new humanitarian crisis. A joint report, The Gaza Strip: A humanitarian implosion, on the current depth of the crisis has been released by eight UK human rights and aid groups, including Oxfam and Amnesty International. According to Geoffrey Dennis, Chief Executive of CARE International UK:
Unemployment has soared and 80% of people in Gaza are now dependent on food aid compared to 63% in 2006. Water and sewage infrastructure is on the point of total collapse. Unless the blockade ends now, it will be impossible to pull Gaza back from the brink of this disaster and any hopes for peace in the region will be dashed.
Key facts in the report:
- 80% of families in Gaza currently rely on food aid
- 95% of Gaza’s industrial operations are suspended due to the ban on imported raw materials and the block on exports
- 18.5% of patients seeking emergency treatment in hospitals outside Gaza in 2007 were refused permits to leave
- Hospitals are currently experiencing power cuts lasting for 8-12 hours a day
- 40-50 million litres of sewage continues to pour into the sea daily
“Humanitarian crisis” means daily disasters. Here’s one father’s description from the inside.
The U.S. role in the Fatah-Hamas battles of 2007 is the subject of a new Vanity Fair exposé. David Rose reports in “The Gaza Bombshell,” that the U.S. armed Fatah to expel the popularly elected Hamas government from Gaza.
In essence, the program was simple. According to State Department officials, beginning in the latter part of 2006, Rice initiated several rounds of phone calls and personal meetings with leaders of four Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. She asked them to bolster Fatah by providing military training and by pledging funds to buy its forces lethal weapons. The money was to be paid directly into accounts controlled by President Abbas.
…
Legal or not, arms shipments soon began to take place. In late December 2006, four Egyptian trucks passed through an Israeli-controlled crossing into Gaza, where their contents were handed over to Fatah. These included 2,000 Egyptian-made automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips, and two million bullets.
This shipment, and arms and training that followed, were joined by the leak of a State Department-drafted “Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency”:
The early drafts stressed the need for bolstering Fatah’s forces in order to “deter” Hamas. The “desired outcome” was to give Abbas “the capability to take the required strategic political decisions … such as dismissing the cabinet, establishing an emergency cabinet.”
Hamas read this as a call for a coup. So did Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser, a neo-conservative by the name of David Wurmser:
Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.
Hamas seized complete control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. Outsiders like myself were left to see it as mere internecine warfare. Now we have questions to ask about how our government armed one political party to oust the other, while backing the siege that keeps Gaza’s Palestinians on the edge of survival.
