First Draft: So Now WE Are Using Human Shields?
Israeli and US forces are embedding within civilian populations, a man accused of 'anger issues' will now lead DHS, and Trump is sending ICE agents to airports to 'help' TSA agents he won't pay.
On this day in 1942, the US government began moving Americans of Japanese ancestry into internment camps. Some 84 years later, the Department of Homeland Security is keeping thousands of people in disturbingly parallel conditions, despite increasing public disgust.
Good morning! Prem here. Thinking about contingency. Would the Iraq War have unfolded how it did if the chads weren’t hanging in Florida in 2000? Where would we be if Kamala Harris had said literally anything other than “not a thing comes to mind” when asked if she’d do anything differently than Joe Biden? What would the world look like if someone had given Donald Trump a reality show he stuck with, instead of a political Napoleon complex? And what coin-flips will we look back on with horror, if we don’t see them now?
In today’s ‘First Draft’, I pose to you: are Israeli and US forces using human shields? Plus, Trump is sending ICE agents to airports to “help” the TSA agents he is refusing to pay (a dry run of sending them to the polls in seven months) – and speaking of, the Supreme Court is considering a decision that would stop certain mail-in ballots from being counted.
Here we go…
Human Shield of Lies
For two and a half years, the US and Israeli governments and their media allies all justified the Israeli military’s horrific bombing of hospitals, schools, and homes in Gaza on the grounds that Hamas was hiding its fighters and military infrastructure in civilian areas and, therefore, using Palestinians as “human shields.”
Now, as the US and Israel continue their illegal war on Iran, one could question who is actually using “human shields.”
Months before the war, the US evacuated hundreds of troops from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, moving some to hotels in the region. A US official and another source familiar told NBC News this was in order to keep them out of harm’s way. If Palestinian fighters or Iranian soldiers had been moved in such a fashion, you could imagine the US or Israel contending that civilians had actually been put in harm’s way.
In the days leading up to the war, the US was placing refueling tanker airplanes at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport – the country’s busiest, serving thousands of civilians every day. During the war, it has been used for refueling.
Iranian airstrikes have killed US service members in a “makeshift operations center” at a civilian port in Kuwait and injured US personnel at a hotel in Bahrain. Inside Israel, apartment buildings were destroyed when Iran targeted an Israeli nuclear research center in retaliation for Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear sites.
It’s unclear why Israeli officials placed nuclear infrastructure near residential homes, or why US officials have positioned US military assets in and around civilian infrastructure.
“We started by attacking their military bases. They have evacuated their military bases and gone to the hotels and made human shields for themselves,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi said, shortly after the US and Israel began the war.
In Israel’s case, it’s structural. As CNN’s Jim Sciutto described two years ago, the headquarters of Mossad, Israel’s international intelligence agency, is in “a densely-populated area” within Tel Aviv, “with civilians around it.”