Major defense contractors Raytheon, Oshkosh, and Lockheed Martin assured investors at a Credit Suisse conference in West Palm Beach this week that they stand to gain from the escalating conflicts in the Middle East.
Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President Bruce Tanner told the conference his company will see “indirect benefits” from the war in Syria, citing the Turkish military’s recent decision to shoot down a Russian warplane.
The incident, Tanner said, heightens the risk for U.S. military operations in the region, providing “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that environment and our products in theater.” He also stressed that the Russian intervention would highlight the need for Lockheed Martin-made F-22s and the new F-35 jets.
And for “expendable” products, such as a rockets, Tanner added that there is increased demand, including from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia because of the war in Yemen.
Listen to Tanner’s remarks to the Third Annual Industrials Conference below:
Wilson Jones, the president of the defense manufacturer Oshkosh, told the conference that “with the ISIS threat growing,” there are more countries interested in buying Oshkosh-made M-ATV armored vehicles. Speaking about a recent business trip to the Middle East, Jones said countries there “want to mechanize their infantry corps.”
Raytheon Chief Executive Tom Kennedy made similar remarks, telling the conference that he is seeing “a significant uptick” for “defense solutions across the board in multiple countries in the Middle East.” Noting that he had met with King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Kennedy said, “It’s all the turmoil they have going on, whether the turmoil’s occurring in Yemen, whether it’s with the Houthis, whether it’s occurring in Syria or Iraq, with ISIS.”
The last bit of good news for the contractors is the latest budget deal in Congress. After years of cuts following the budget sequester, the deal authorizes $607 billion in defense spending, just $5 billion down from the Pentagon’s request, which DefenseNews called a “treat” for the industry.
“Our programs are well supported [in the budget],” said Lockheed’s Tanner at the conference. “We think we did fare very well.”
De terreuraanslagen in Parijs hebben ons diep geraakt. Meer dan honderd burgers zijn koelbloedig vermoord.
Terwijl een internationale coalitie zich opmaakt om de terreurorganisatie die deze wandaden heeft opgeëist te verslaan, deinst de Israëlische premier Netanyahu er niet voor terug de aanslagen voor politiek gewin te misbruiken. Anderhalve dag na de aanslagen zei hij:
“In Israel, as in France, terrorism is terrorism and standing behind it is radical Islam and its desire to destroy its victims. The time has come for the world to wake up and unite in order to defeat terrorism. The time has come for countries to condemn terrorism against us to the same degree that they condemn terrorism everywhere else in the world.”
Wat Netanyahu beoogt is duidelijk: de Palestijnen als fundamentalistische terroristen stigmatiseren en internationale steun verwerven om hen met militaire middelen te breken.
Ik vertrouw erop dat de wereld door deze manipulatie heen prikt en onderkent dat de context van het Israëlisch-Palestijnse conflict er een is waarin een heel volk al bijna 50 jaar bezet en gekoloniseerd wordt en met grootschalig geweld onderdrukt.
Straffeloosheid van Israëlische geweldplegers
De Palestijnen gaan niet alleen gebukt onder extreme rechteloosheid, maar moeten dagelijks aanzien dat Israëlische plegers van oorlogsmisdaden en aanslagen vrijuit gaan.
Op 31 juli pleegden extremistische kolonisten in het Palestijnse dorp Duma een brandaanslag op een Palestijns gezin. De vader en zijn zoontje van 18 maanden stierven in de vlammenzee; de moeder overleed in het ziekenhuis.
PALESTIJNSE PEUTER DIE BIJ ISRAËLISCHE AANSLAG LEVEND VERBRANDDE; DE DADERS LOPEN VRIJ ROND
Palestijnse geweldplegers worden zonder scrupule doodgeschoten, ook in situaties waarin zij geen acuut gevaar (meer) zijn. Met speciale legereenheden en de bekwaamste inlichtingendiensten organiseert Israël klopjachten op Palestijnse verdachten. Maar de kolonisten die op 31 juli een Palestijns gezin levend verbrandden, lopen vier maanden na hun moordaanslag nog vrij rond.
Veel van de kolonisten die aanslagen op Palestijnen plegen komen uit “buitenposten” – nederzettingen die de Israëlische regering niet geautoriseerd heeft, maar wel gedoogt en beveiligt. Over deze buitenposten publiceerde The Rights Forum met de Israëlische mensenrechtenorganisatie Yesh Din in maart van dit jaar het rapport “Under the radar”.
Om de straffeloosheid van Israëlische geweldplegers te belichten, heeft Yesh Din onderzoek gedaan naar de periode 2005-2015. De belangrijkste bevindingen hebben wij naar een webpagina vertaald:
Minder internationale aandacht voor Palestina
Ik vrees dat de Palestijnen de komende tijd nog meer overgeleverd zullen worden aan Israëls gewelddadige bezettingspolitiek. Door het conflict in Syrië, de vluchtelingencrisis in Europa en de strijd tegen IS neemt de internationale aandacht voor het Israëlisch-Palestijnse conflict snel af, ook al wakkert het voortduren van dat conflict de instabiliteit en radicalisering in het Midden-Oosten aan.
Die trend was ook zichtbaar bij de behandeling van de begroting van het ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, die op 18 en 19 november plaatsvond. Zelfs bij de partijen ter linkerzijde was geen gevoel van urgentie en geen politieke ambitie meer te bespeuren om Israëls nederzettingenbeleid, dat de twee-statenoplossing vernietigt, een halt toe te roepen.
Voor zover de kwestie Israël-Palestina aan bod kwam, ging het debat vooral over de nieuwe etiketteringsrichtlijnen voor producten uit Israëls nederzettingen. Die heeft de Europese Commissie, mede op aandringen van het kabinet, op 11 november na drie jaar voorbereidingstijd gepubliceerd.
Naast het wegvallen van internationale aandacht doet zich nog een ander probleem voor. In een wereld die steeds onveiliger wordt, gaan Westerse regeringen steeds vaker een beroep doen op militaire ervaring en expertise die Israël heeft opgedaan in de bijna vijf decennia dat het de Palestijnen bezet en onderdrukt. Palestina is voor Israël een laboratorium, de Palestijnen zijn proefkonijnen.
Halper waarschuwt ervoor dat onze toenemende afhankelijkheid van Israëls kennis en kunde op het gebied van oorlogvoering en veiligheid het nog minder waarschijnlijk maakt dat Westerse regeringen Israël zullen dwingen de bezetting van Palestina te beëindigen. Zijn hoop is daarom op “the People” gevestigd, de meerderheid – op u.
Each day, as throngs of people cross the St Michel bridge that joins Notre Dame cathedral with Paris’s bustling Latin Quarter, they pass by a nondescript stone plaque. They may not notice it, but its simple inscription is a stark reminder of one of the blackest days in modern French history - 17 October 1961.
It was the late evening and thousands of anti-war Algerian protesters had gathered at a number of Paris landmarks to stage demonstrations against a curfew imposed on them earlier in the month by the city’s police chief.
Hundreds didn’t make it home.
They were beaten, rounded up en masse and murdered by French police officers who had been assured they would be protected from prosecution. The cops were acting under the orders of their boss, Maurice Papon.
But the facts of the day are as obscure as that plaque on the bridge to many French people.
"In France, the facts surrounding October 1961, on the night of the 17th, and the continued repression of women and children are not widely known,” says Algerian-born author and professor of north African history, Benjamin Stora. “People are not aware of it, and it’s not included in the school curriculum.”
Maurice Papon in the 1940sAFP/Getty images
A massacre in central Paris would be unthinkable today. To put 1961’s events in context, they took place on the cusp of Algerian independence. It was a time of violent exchanges between the French police and the Paris wing of the guerrilla Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) movement, which was fighting to liberate Algeria from French colonial rule.
And Papon, better known for his role as a Nazi collaborator, was in the frontline. Following the killing of some 20 Parisian police officers in the three months preceding the massacre, Papon was livid. He was determined to hunt down the FLN members responsible and disable the group for good.
Part of his strategy was an 8.30pm to 5.30am curfew on Algerians in the greater Paris region. A separate ploy was the systematic raiding of Algerian communities in search of the perpetrators. Five Algerians, reported to have had nothing to do with the FLN, were executed.
Papon even publicly warned that French police would respond with “10 blows to every Algerian blow”.
It was these measures that spurred Paris’s Algerian community into action. So when the FLN called families into the streets, in defiance of the curfew, about 30,000, many of whom were French citizens, answered the call.
Why me? Why am I the scapegoat? ... They've made no effort to find the people responsible for these operations ... Why am I the one who has been picked out?
Men, women and children converged on the boulevards of central Paris, in places such as Saint Germain-des-Prés, Opéra, the Grands Boulevards, Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Elysées and even in the north-west at La Défense and beyond to Neuilly.
They were met by the brute force of 1,658 armed police and security personnel.
Thousands were rounded up, crammed into waiting buses and dispatched to holding centres. Following the massacre, the mutilated and disfigured bodies of Algerians were found dumped in the river Seine.
In 1998, police officer Raoul Letard gave a harrowing eyewitness account of the night’s events to France’s Institute for Studies on National Defence. He told of how, on 17 October, his unit crossed the Pont de Neuilly, into the suburbs of Colombes, where from about 11pm they engaged in a murderous two-hour search.
Simone de Beauvoir (R) and Jean-Paul SartreThe men “hunted and shot at anything that moved”, only leaving when there was no one left to shoot.
“We were waging war, and our adversary had been named as the Algerians,” Letard recounted.
Official FLN figures say that as many as 300 Algerians were massacred that night. So, with so much obvious bloodshed, how could such a crime have come to pass? Did ordinary French people turn a blind eye?
It is important to take into account the atmosphere at the time, according to Professor Martin Evans, who with John Phillips co-authored Algeria, Anger of the Dispossessed.
“There had been a lot of tit-for-tat violence between the FLN and French police, so certainly in Paris there was an air of violence,” Evans says. “Algerians were seen by large numbers of French as a threat, and as an enemy. Algerian areas of Paris, in the outskirts particularly, in the shantytowns, were places to be avoided.
“However, afterwards there was a reaction by intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Bourdet on the left, protesting against the repression of Algerians.”
Indeed Sartre’s companion, feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in her memoirs Force of Circumstance, singled out Papon’s role as Paris police chief and condemned the massacre.
“The police waited for the Algerians to come up out of the métro stations, made them stand still with their hands above their heads, then hit them with truncheons,” de Beauvoir wrote.
“Corpses were found hanging in the Bois de Boulogne, and others, disfigured and mutilated, in the Seine. Ten-thousand Algerians had been herded into the Vél d’Hiv [stadium], like the Jews in Drancy once before.
“Again I loathed it all - this country, myself, the whole world.”
French authorities have been reluctant to investigate events the events of 17 October and it was only in 2001 that the state actually recognised that a massacre occurred.
As late as 1998, it seems, France was going to great lengths to let sleeping dogs lie.
According to Reporters Sans Frontières copies of the 17 October edition of the Algerian newspaper Liberté were confiscated by police when they arrived at Lyon airport.
Why? Contained in their pages was an article by Algerian journalist Hakim Sadek entitled When the Seine was full of bodies.
The campaign against Algerians in France is something that has, to a large extent, been rubbed from the collective French consciousness, historian Benjamin Stora believes.
"The Algerian war is a sequence of history that that French society has never come to terms with,” he says. “It’s a sequence which is almost hidden, but which is slowly returning to the surface of our memory largely through cinema.”
Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 Bataille d’Alger is perhaps the best-known film on the war. This year Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors-la-loi (Outlaw) sparked demonstrations because it dealt with massacres by French troops in Algeria.
In the same year as the massacre, Papon, who would years later be tried for signing the orders that sent thousands of French Jews to their deaths in Auchwitz, earned France's highest accolade: he was personally awarded the Legion of Honour by then-president Charles de Gaulle.
How could that happen? Evans says this is a very difficult question to answer.
“Certainly, from de Gaulle’s point of view, he was very interested in maintaining law and order and he wanted to recognise the work that had been done by Papon - both in France and Algeria,” Evans says.
“It’s important to remember his [Papon’s] history already in Algeria, where he had been involved in counter-insurgency work in the eastern part of the country in 1956 and 1957. In many respects, this was a laboratory for the way in which he dealt with the FLN in Paris in 1961.”
Two French novels touch on the massacre. Both have been made into films.
Claire Etcherelli'sElise ou la vraie vie(1967) tells the story of a French girl who falls in love with an FLN cadre who disappears during a police crackdown.
Didier Daennickx'sMeurtres pour mémoire (1988) is a crime novel which links a 1980s murder to a death during the 1961 massacre.
And what of the parallel drawn by de Beauvoir to many French officials’ collaboration with the Nazi persecution of the Jews?
Thousands of Algerians were detained in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, known as the Vél d’Hiv, a cycle-racing stadium in Paris’s 15th district, close to the Eiffel Tower. As de Beauvoir remarked, some 16 years earlier French Jews were interned in the same venue.
“In terms of the arithmetic there is a connection,” says Evans. “But I think the connection is really about the repressive systems that were put in place by the French in terms of policing populations that they considered to be either alien or a threat to the nation state.
“This meant there was always a pattern which they followed through, and this was the rounding up and the use of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, which was ideal to put together and intern a large number of people.”
Nobody has been prosecuted for atrocities committed during the Algerian War of Independence and Stora says that, although there have been reports and inquiries, there are no legal avenues in France for bringing the perpetrators of such crimes to account.
“The massacre has gone unpunished like everything that happened in the Algerian War,” Stora says.
“A law was adopted in France in 1962 - at the time of independence - that gave an amnesty to all the acts relating to the Algerian War. So everything that was done, all that was committed during the war between 1954 and 1962, was given amnesty.”
Despite this, on the 40th anniversary of the massacre, an official, if controversial, reminder was unveiled on the Pont St Michel by Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë.
The plaque simply reads, “In memory of the numerous Algerians killed during the bloody suppression of the peaceful demonstration on 17 October 1961.”
Members of the right-wing opposition on the Paris City Council – including what was to become President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP - boycotted the unveiling ceremony, saying that reviving the issue would whip up tensions between the various communities in France. Police unions tried to stop it.
“There are parts of Paris’s history which are painful, but which have to be talked about and which have to be accompanied by acts,” Delanoë said after the ceremony.
“It is an act that I wanted to carry out soberly, but clearly and in a spirit of unity and fraternity.”
Obama's drone war a 'recruitment tool' for Isis, say US air force whistleblowers
Four former service members – including three sensor operators – issue plea to rethink current airstrike strategy that has ‘fueled feelings of hatred’ toward US
Boys gather near the wreckage of car destroyed by a US drone airstrike targeting suspected al-Qaida militants in Azan, Yemen, in 2013. Photograph: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
Four former US air force service members, with more than 20 years of experience between them operating military drones, have written an open letter to Barack Obama warning that the program of targeted killings by unmanned aircraft has become a major driving force for Isis and other terrorist groups.
The group of servicemen have issued an impassioned plea to the Obama administration, calling for a rethink of a military tactic that they say has “fueled the feelings of hatred that ignited terrorism and groups like Isis, while also serving as a fundamental recruitment tool similar to Guantánamo Bay”.
In particular, they argue, the killing of innocent civilians in drone airstrikes has acted as one of the most “devastating driving forces for terrorism and destabilization around the world”.
The letter, addressed to Obama, defense secretary Ashton Carter and CIA chief John Brennan, links the signatories’ anxieties directly to last Friday’s terror attacks in Paris. They imply that the abuse of the drone program is causally connected to the outrages.
“We cannot sit silently by and witness tragedies like the attacks in Paris, knowing the devastating effects the drone program has overseas and at home,” they wrote.
The joint statement – from the group who have experience of operating drones over Afghanistan, Iraq and other conflict zones – represents a public outcry from what is understood to be the largest collection of drone whistleblowers in the history of the program. Three of the letter writers were sensor operators who controlled the powerful visual equipment on US Predator drones that guide Hellfire missiles to their targets.
They are Brandon Bryant, 30, who served in the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron and 3rd Special Operations Squadron from 2005 to 2011; Michael Haas, 29, who served in the same squadrons during the same period; and Stephen Lewis, 29, who was with the 3rd Special Operations Squadron between 2005 and 2010.
The fourth whistleblower, Cian Westmoreland, 28, was a technician responsible for the communications infrastructure of the drone program. He served with the 606 Air Control Squadron in Germany and the 73rd Expeditionary Air Control Squadron in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The four are represented legally by Jesselyn Radack, director of national security and human rights at the nonprofit ExposeFacts. “This is the first time we’ve had so many people speaking out together about the drone program,” she said, pointing out that the men were fully aware that they faced possible prosecution for speaking out.
In the wake of the Paris attacks, Obama has stuck firm to his determination to avoid sending large numbers of US troops to Syria, beyond the limited engagement of special forces. The natural, though unspoken, consequence of such a strategy is a deepening reliance on aerial attacks in which unmanned drones increasingly play a leading part.
From its inception, the drone program has been troubled by reports of mistaken targeting. Classified government documents leaked to the Intercept revealed that up to 90% of the people killed in drone strikes may be unintended, with the disparity glossed over by the recording of unknown victims as “enemies killed in action”.
In one of the most widely publicised errors, the US government was accused by one of its own officials of making an “outrageous mistake” in October 2011 when it killed the US citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida leader who was also a US citizen and was killed by a CIA drone two weeks previously.
The letter signatories, from left: Cian Westmoreland, Michael Haas, Brandon Bryant and Stephen Lewis. Photograph: Simon Leigh for the Guardian
One of the four drone operators who signed the letter to Obama, Brandon Bryant, was part of the team that tracked Anwar al-Awlaki by drone for 10 months shortly before he was killed. In an interview with the Guardian, Bryant said that he was not opposed to drone technology per se, which he saw as having beneficial uses.
“We just understand that in its current form the program is being abused, there’s no transparency, and we need to be open to other solutions.”
Bryant said that in his view he had been made to violate his military oath by being assigned to a mission that killed a fellow American. “We were told that al-Awlaki deserved to die, he deserved to be killed as a traitor, but article 3 of section 2 of the US constitution states that even a traitor deserves a fair trial in front of a jury of his peers.”
Two of the four drone operators have also spoken out in a film about the US program, Drone, that premieres theatrically in New York on Friday. The other two are going public for the first time, having just come forward in the past few weeks.
Obama this week made clear that he would continue to resist putting more boots on the ground in Syria following the Paris attacks. Speaking at the G20 summit in Turkey, he said “part of the reason is that every few months I go to Walter Reed [military hospital] and I see a 25-year-old kid who is paralysed or has lost his limbs, and some of those are people who I have ordered into battle”.
But the former drone operators argue that the strategy is self-defeating, as the high number of civilian casualties and the callousness of drone killings merely propagates anti-US hatred. “Right now it seems politically expedient,” said Cian Westmoreland. “But in the long term the bad side of a Hellfire missile and drones buzzing overhead is the only thing that a lot of these people know of the United States or Britain.”
Bryant accepted that there was no negotiating with extreme, violent terrorists of the type that carried out the Paris attacks. “But you have to prevent such people being created,” he said. “We validate them, we keep this cycle going. Their children are afraid to play out in the sun because that’s when the drones are coming.”
