[mili]war crimes and impunity/accountability

Reprising a legendary 1985 National Geographic cover, this week's Time magazine cover girl is another beautiful young Afghan woman. But this time there is a gaping hole where her nose used to be before it was cut off under Taliban direction. A stark caption reads: "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan". A careful editorial insists that the image is not shown "either in support of the US war effort or in opposition to it". The stated intention is to counterbalance damaging the WikiLeaks revelations – 91,000 documents that, Time believes, cannot provide "emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land".

Nick Kristof observes ethnic cleansing and collective punishment first-hand: On one side of a barbed-wire fence here in the southern Hebron hills is the Bedouin village of Umm al-Kheir, where Palestinians live in ramshackle tents and huts. They aren’t allowed to connect to the electrical grid, and Israel won’t permit them to build homes, barns for their animals or even toilets. When the villagers build permanent structures, the Israeli authorities come and demolish them, according to villagers and Israeli human rights organizations.

This is getting damned strange. The Obama administration and Israel have been haggling for a week over the nature and composition of the supposedly independent commission which will investigate the Gaza flotilla disaster. We hear that the U.S. demanded that someone of judicial “stature” like a Supreme Court justice be appointed as chair. Bibi finally acquiesced and appointed Justice Yaakov Tirkel. But there’s one problem. The incoming panel chair doesn’t seem to believe in the panel.

The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies called upon the United Nations to conduct immediate investigations that would comply by international law standards in relation to the appalling attacks that Israel committed against the humanitarian aid flotilla.