Human Rights Watch Criticizes Israel, Roth at Harvard

HRW Condemns Israel
Executive Director Roth at Harvard

On Thursday Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report that strongly condemned the actions of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) during the Israeli attack on Lebanon last year.

Below is the story that the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) distributed. It downplays the magnitude and nature of IDF violations of jus in bello.

On April 27, Karin Friedemann covered an appearance of HRW executive director Kenneth Roth at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government for The Muslim Observer. Her article follows the JTA report. I was the unnamed audience member that posed the question about the State of Israel.

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/104018.html

Israel censured over Lebanese civilian toll

Published: 09/06/2007

Israel, not Hezbollah, was to blame for most civilian deaths during last year's Lebanon war, Human Rights Watch said.

In a scathing report issued Thursday, the New York-based watchdog said its investigators had determined that Israeli air force and artillery shelling caused most of some 900 Lebanese civilian deaths during the July-August conflict. It rejected Israel's argument that Hezbollah invited the heavy toll by operating among non-combatants and thus turning them into "human shields".

Hezbollah made efforts to avoid populated areas, Human Rights Watch said, although it noted several occasions of guerrillas "endangering" civilians by firing rockets from, or storing weapons in, Lebanese towns and villages. The report further faulted Israel for attack[ing the] political and charitable arms of the Iranian-backed Shi'ite militia.

"Hezbollah fighters often didn't carry their weapons in the open or regularly wear military uniforms, which made them a hard target to identify," Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said. "But this doesn't justify the Israel Defence Forces' failure to distinguish between civilians and combatants, and if in doubt to treat a person as a civilian, as the laws of war require."

Israel disputed the report's findings, reiterating that its armed forces abided by rules of war. A Foreign Ministry spokesman noted that during the 34-day conflict a U.N. official censured Hezbollah for shielding among civilians.

Human Rights Watch has also condemned Hezbollah's wartime launch of 4,000 rockets into Israel.

http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=981

Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch addresses Kennedy School of Government
by Karin Friedemann (karima4483@aol.com)

On Friday April 27, 2007, the Carr Center for Human Rights presented a talk by Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth on "Human Rights at Home" at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Carr Center Director Sarah Sewall introduced Roth as someone deeply devoted to issues of justice and accountability.

In his address, Roth argued that the framework of criminal law provides a much more effective approach to combating terrorism than the Bush administration's panicked war response, which consists of detentions, prosecutions, placing people in the category of enemy, and torture.

The enemy combatant category arises from the lack of ability to prosecute detainees for crimes, he said.

The Bush administration, he said, appears afraid that legal criminal prosecution would lead to the release of suspects that have been tortured.

He noted that the Bush administration is still transferring prisoners from secret facilities to Guantanamo even though the secret facilities were supposed to have closed months ago.

Roth claimed that CIA interrogators are worried about future prosecutions and the Army rewrote their manual to get out of the torture business. Criticism of organizations like HRW seems to have had some effect.

As he explained, an effective counter-terrorism policy would prevent, punish, incapacitate, and deter terrorists. He argued that the Bush policy has ruined the US legal system and enraged people throughout the world. Useful information cannot be obtained via torture, as there is no way to know whether the information obtained is valid.

Statistics on preventing terrorism show that only 10% of terrorism is prevented by interrogations, while 90% is prevented by walk-in voluntary testimony, but nowadays, no one is willing to report anything for fear of being detained themselves.

Roth, who served as a federal prosecutor for the Iran-Contra investigation, believes that a criminal law framework would make it possible to build non-testimonial prosecutions that would not depend on torture testimony. Britain prosecutes terrorism suspects via standard criminal deterrence techniques. This approach would rebuild respect for the US as a source of justice. At present, other nations are circumventing the US to create their own international legal regime to deal with terrorism that does not depend on the US.

One audience member mentioned the insanity of US discourse over Israel. Roth agreed and referred to Dershowitz's¹ irrational attacks on HRW, but he avoided giving further details because he felt it was a topic for a lecture in itself.

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¹ Roth meant Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who frequently lies in defense of the State of Israel. Dershowitz' mendacity includes denial of the genocide of the native Palestinian population

• that ethnic Ashkenazi Zionists plotted at the end of the 19th century,
• that Central and Eastern European Zionist colonists put into execution in 1947-48, and
• that continues to this day before our eyes with the strong support of the Bush administration.

The murder of Arab Palestine and the genocide of the native population is the Holoexaleipsis or Great Erasure. It is the archetypal genocide and spans three centuries. The Arabic term is Nakba. Dershowitz also justifies the Neocon-inspired Israelization of the USA with regard to the use of torture.

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