ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu and Galant is a landmark decision

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. You can read the ruling here.

Jeremy Scahill amd Murtaza Hussain report that this is the first time that a leader favored by the US and western powers has been held to account.

In its ruling, the court explicitly rejected arguments made by Israel and the U.S. that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over Israel. “The acceptance by Israel of the Court’s jurisdiction is not required, as the Court can exercise its jurisdiction on the basis of the territorial jurisdiction of Palestine,” the court said.

“This is a watershed event in the history of international justice. The ICC has never, in over 21 years, indicted a pro-Western official. Indeed, no international court since World War II has done so,” said human rights attorney and war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody. “Up until now, the instruments of international justice have been used almost exclusively to address crimes by defeated adversaries as in the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, powerless outcasts, or opponents of the West such as Vladimir Putin or Slobodan Milošević.”
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Gaetz quits

Trump’s controversial nominee for attorney general has withdrawn his name for the position. This took me by surprise since just this morning the House ethics committee was deadlocked on whether to release their report on the various allegations of sexual misconduct, some involving minors, that have plagued him for years. I thought that move would clear the way for his nomination to go through.

In his statement, Gaetz gave the usual ‘for the good of the country’ pablum.

After meeting with senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Gaetz determined that his nomination was “becoming a distraction to the critical work” of the new Trump administration, he explained on X.

“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s [justice department] must be in place and ready on Day 1,” Gaetz said.
…

The announcement comes one day after the House ethics committee deadlocked over releasing its report on allegations that Gaetz engaged in sexual relations with a 17-year-old girl. The justice department launched its own inquiry of the allegations but declined to bring charges, and Gaetz has consistently denied the claims.

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This should be good. The Onion wants to buy Infowars

Infowars was the site where Alex Jones promoted all his conspiracy theories. Probably the most hateful one was where he claimed that the massacre of 20 first grade children and six teachers at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 never happened but that all the family members and friends and colleagues seen grieving were ‘crisis actors’, advancing the cause of gun control. Not only did this cause those families great pain, but Jones’s lunatic followers took it upon themselves to seek out and harass them, with some of them having to move repeatedly to escape them.

They sued Jones and won $1.5 billion in damages that required Jones to sell off his assets. He tried to declare bankruptcy to evade it but the courts ruled that this maneuver was not allowed.
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And so it begins …

I wrote earlier that when Sarah McBride was elected as a member of the House of Representatives, that her taking office on January 3rd would upset the bigots in Congress because she is a trans woman. I forgot that new members actually arrive on Capitol Hill much earlier than that so that they can go through orientation, set up their offices and staff, etc.

Already, the anti-transgender publicity hogs in the GOP like Nancy Mace and Margery Taylor Greene have decided to take action to prevent McBride from using the women’s bathrooms.

After Delaware elected the first ever openly transgender member of Congress earlier this month, a Republican introduced a bill to ban her from using the bathroom that corresponds with her gender identity.

The South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace introduced the bill, which comes a little less than two months before Sarah McBride is due to be sworn in as the first openly transgender member of Congress. The measure would charge the House sergeant at arms with enforcing the bill, though it is unclear exactly how, according to the Hill.

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man,” Mace told reporters on Monday, according to CNN. She added that Mace “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, period, full stop”.

McBride has responded to this tantrum like a adult.
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Joe Biden: Craven on Israel to the very end

Joe Biden has been cravenly subservient to whatever the Israeli government does. Nowhere has this been more apparent that his non-response to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and their additional brutal assault on Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank and their attacks on Lebanon. Kamala Harris’s failure to distance herself from those policies and refusing to even allow a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic convention hurt her with many Arab-American voters and also those who are outraged at what is going there, though whether it was decisive in her defeat is unclear.

The one tiny step that Biden took was to say in October that he would cut off military aid to Israel if they did not increase the supply of food, water, medicine, and other essential items to Gaza where they have been deliberately starving the population, a war crime of staggering proportions. The target that Israel had to meet to prevent this cut off was very modest, just an increase from the almost zero that was going in at the time of the ultimatum. Biden also conveniently put the deadline to be after the election.

Well, that deadline finally arrived with Israel not doing anything close to meeting the targets and, to no one’s surprise, Biden decided not to carry out his threat.

Jonah Valdez writes about what happened.
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The complicated history of Tulsi Gabbard

Jeremy Scahill over at Drop Site reviews the history of Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, who transitioned rapidly from being antiwar and supporting Bernie Sanders, running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and then endorsing Biden that year, to becoming an ardent Trump supporter.

Scahill writes that she will be a shock to the US intelligence system but that the charges that she is an undercover agent for Vladimir Putin, or at least an apologist for him, are oversimplified.mIt is a long analysis and well worth reading in full.

Here is part of it.

If confirmed as the next Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would represent one of the most unorthodox political figures to hold such a senior national security post in U.S. history. A veteran of the war in Iraq, Gabbard was elected to Congress in 2012 and emerged as a sharp critic of the U.S. forever wars launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. She denounced U.S. regime change wars, including the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and consistently opposed U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s scorched earth war against Yemen, which extended from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. On multiple occasions, she accused Trump of being “Saudi Arabia’s bitch,” taking orders from his Saudi “masters,” and of supporting Al Qaeda. She has called for pardoning whistleblowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and fought to change U.S. laws permitting domestic surveillance of Americans.
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Why would anyone own dozens of watches?

As part of the defamation verdict against him Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to hand over his assets to pay the amount he owes to two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.

Rudy Giuliani has relinquished dozens of watches and a Mercedes once owned by movie star Lauren Bacall to two former Georgia election workers who won a $148m defamation judgment against him, his lawyer said.

Joseph Cammarata said in a letter filed late on Friday in Manhattan federal court that the trove of watches and a ring were delivered by FedEx to a bank in Atlanta, Georgia, in the morning.

The 1980 Mercedes-Benz SL 500 was turned over at an address in Hialeah, Florida, and an undisclosed amount of funds from Giuliani’s Citibank accounts were also surrendered to the two women who won the judgment, according to the letter.
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What unified government control by the GOP means

As a result of the elections, Trump and the GOP will have control of both houses of congress. So far, Republicans lead 220-213 in the House of Representatives with two races still to be called. Trump has picked three house members – Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, and Mike Waltz – to be part of his administration so special elections will have to be called to replace them but since they represent districts that have been Republican for years, those are not likely to change the balance. Gaetz has already resigned, no doubt to end the congressional ethics inquiry into allegations of his behavior towards underage women and other malfeasances. It is not clear if the report that has been compiled will be released.
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Can the US follow Sri Lanka’s new example?

I have written in the past about Sri Lanka’s deteriorating democracy, with corrupt, nepotistic family dynasties that enriched themselves while pursuing chauvinistic policies that discriminated against minorities and brutally suppressed both an insurgency and a separatist movement. Those governments also systemically undermined the institutions that underpin democracies such as an independent judiciary, police force, the media, and other non-governmental institutions, and using thugs and other means to intimidate opponents and critics. I have written that I observed the US heading in that same direction, and Trump more than anyone represented that trend towards creating a government that merely paid lip-service to democratic governance while in reality making it into a corrupt personal fiefdom.

The situation has now reversed itself.

In September, the Sri Lankan presidential elections saw Anura Kumara Dissanayake (known as AKD) get elected, defeating two candidates who belonged to the past nepotistic dynasties while AKD came from very humble origins. AKD had been a member of parliament but his party held only three seats. After his election, he dissolved parliament and in the new elections held yesterday, his party won 159 seats in the 225-seat parliament, with 62% of the vote.
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Trump sends in the clowns

Trump has started nominating people to fill his administration and so far they are startling, even considering the low expectation that I had. He seems to have decided to populate senior posts with people who have little or no experience in the areas they are supposed to be dealing with or with the kind of administration skills required to run large organizations.

The most startling is the nomination of Florida congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Gaetz was federally investigated on sex-trafficking charges for pursuing underage women and while the justice department finally declined to press charges, the congressional ethics committee is still investigating him. I suspect that Trump appointed him knowing that this would disgust many of the senior professionals in the justice department and they would resign, sparing him the trouble of firing them. He can now fill those positions with loyal hacks who will carry out whatever Trump wants them to do, and especially go after anyone who opposes him on anything. He promised revenge on his ‘enemies’ and there is no reason to think that he will not do just that, with an ‘enemy’ being defined as anyone who opposes or criticizes him.
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