Again, the interpretation could very well be valid. It is still and interpretation, though.
everything legal is based on interpretation. decisions are not always concrete black and white. decisions are always scrutinized and are always analyzed interpreted by the public.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Of course, that's true. My point is that the article was presented (or presented itself) as a factual recounting of the court proceedings (as opposed to an opinion piece), such that the subjective opinions that were mixed into the article were not highlighted as such. If anyone missed the distinction they could be liable to accept the opinion as fact. In this case if one believes it to be a fact that the court is accepting an "overbroad" argument, that will inevitably color one's assessment of the court's actions. Given that, I merely wanted to point out the relevant distinction and allow others to make up their own minds.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Of course, that's true. My point is that the article was presented (or presented itself) as a factual recounting of the court proceedings (as opposed to an opinion piece), such that the subjective opinions that were mixed into the article were not highlighted as such. If anyone missed the distinction they could be liable to accept the opinion as fact. In this case if one believes it to be a fact that the court is accepting an "overbroad" argument, that will inevitably color one's assessment of the court's actions. Given that, I merely wanted to point out the relevant distinction and allow others to make up their own minds.
it sounds to me like you are being an apologist. can you find a source that says that the court's ruling was justified? if those standards do not apply to all witnesses, then that is preferential treatment and can be contstrued as "overbroad".
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
"While Rachel stood in front of a wall to protect the two families huddled behind it, the state is now making the soldiers hide behind a wall that denies us the opportunity to see them. The state of Israel has been hiding for over seven years. Where is the justice?"
Of course, that's true. My point is that the article was presented (or presented itself) as a factual recounting of the court proceedings (as opposed to an opinion piece), such that the subjective opinions that were mixed into the article were not highlighted as such. If anyone missed the distinction they could be liable to accept the opinion as fact. In this case if one believes it to be a fact that the court is accepting an "overbroad" argument, that will inevitably color one's assessment of the court's actions. Given that, I merely wanted to point out the relevant distinction and allow others to make up their own minds.
here is an article NOT from the corrie foundation...
Rachel Corrie case: Israeli soldier to testify anonymously
Family criticises decision to allow soldier who drove bulldozer that killed daughter to give evidence from behind screen
The Israeli soldier at the controls of a bulldozer that crushed to death 23-year-old Rachel Corrie in Gaza in March 2003 is due to give evidence tomorrow in the civil lawsuit brought by the American activist's family.
However the judge hearing the case in Haifa has ruled that, for security reasons, the soldier can testify anonymously from behind a screen, denying Cindy and Craig Corrie the opportunity to face the man who directly caused their daughter's death.
Israel's supreme court refused to hear an appeal by the family challenging the judge's ruling. However, the unit commander in charge that day will testify in full view of the court as his identity is already known.
"I'll be grateful at least to be able to hear [the bulldozer driver's] words but I won't get the complete picture and I'll be disappointed by that," Cindy Corrie said in an interview in Jerusalem last week.
"They've said it's the security of the witnesses they are trying to protect. I can understand it would be uncomfortable for the soldiers to have to see us, but I can't understand how our family is a threat to their security."
Corrie, from Olympia, Washington state, was killed while attempting to protect the home of a Palestinian family in the Rafah area of Gaza from being demolished by Israeli troops seven and a half years ago. A posthumous book and play based on the graphic and moving emails she wrote to friends and family made her an iconic figure.
An internal Israeli military investigation, which was never published nor released to the US government or the Corries, concluded that the bulldozer driver had not seen Rachel and that no charges would be brought. The case was closed.
The family brought a civil case – "absolutely our last resort" – against the state of Israel, which opened in March this year and is expected to conclude early next year. Among the early witnesses was a fellow activist, Briton Richard Purssell, who described how Corrie disappeared from view under the advancing bulldozer.
The driver's evidence will be a key moment in the case but the Corrie family has been careful not to invest too much in his evidence. "While the driver is very important, to me he is not the only person who has responsibility," said Cindy Corrie. "Responsibility is shared with a lot of people. My focus isn't entirely on the driver."
Sarah Corrie Simpson, Rachel's older sister, said: "Ultimately the individual had the ability to stop that act. However if you only hold responsible the individual, you're losing the broader context of what's going on. You have to look at the chain of command and what sort of orders were being given at that time."
The family, while wanting an acceptable end to their battle for justice, was wary of the concept of closure. "It's hard to conceive of that," said Craig Corrie. "People talk about it, but it's real hard to define what closure would be when you've lost a child, lost a little sister."
Corrie Simpson said closure was difficult to define: "I'm not sure how you ever get to a place where you even feel close to that when you know there are people out there on the other end of what happened to Rachel, and you've never even been able to see their faces. Mum talks about being able to see the humanity of the person that was on the other end – and now the majority of soldiers will get to testify behind a screen, and that takes that away from us."
At the very least, the family hoped their legal battle would shine a light on the Israeli Defence Force's (IDF) investigative process.
Cindy Corrie said if the IDF were, as it claimed, the most moral army in the world, "they should be willing to look at a system that is much more transparent than what exists right now".
Last month, a colonel responsible for writing operating manuals for military bulldozers, testified that there were no civilians in a war zone.
Cindy Corrie said: "It's a window, hearing that coming from these people, a real window into the mindset – and it's very, very concerning. And I think every Israeli should be really concerned."
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
sounds like a cover up to me. no remorse, contradicting other witnesses and even his own prior statements...how the hell can you not remember events and details of an incident where you killed someone? how can you not remember if the protesters were armed or not?? and he did not call an ambulance because it was not in his level of command...pass the buck there.... :roll:
it is a sham and a cover up!! :twisted: :twisted:
Rachel Corrie case: Israeli soldier in bulldozer 'did not see her'
Driver of machine that crushed 23-year-old American to death in Gaza in 2003 tells court he only saw her after the incident
The Israeli soldier at the controls of the bulldozer that crushed the pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie told a court today that the first time he saw her was when fellow protesters were already tending to her dying body in the dirt.
Giving evidence for more than four hours in the civil case brought by Corrie's family against the state of Israel, the former soldier repeatedly insisted that had not seen the 23-year-old American standing in front of his 66-tonne Caterpillar bulldozer before she was fatally hit.
"I didn't see her before the incident," he told the court in Haifa. "I saw people pulling the body out from under the earth."
The soldier, named only as YB, gave evidence from behind a screen after a ruling by the judge for "security reasons". A gagging order was imposed on identifying details, although it was disclosed in court that YB is a 38-year-old Russian immigrant who learned Hebrew after arriving in Israel at the age of 23 and now works for a food processing company.
The Corrie family had requested that they be given dispensation to see YB give evidence, which was refused. "I do feel that the state of Israel is saying [we] are security risks and I am affronted by that," Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother, said after the hearing. "I wanted to be able to see the whole person, not just hear the words."
Rachel Corrie was protesting against the demolition by the Israeli military of Palestinian houses in Gaza when she was crushed to death in March 2003. An internal military investigation concluded that no charges should be brought and the case was closed.
YB, who was in communication with his unit command and a second bulldozer on the scene, told the court that he was told through his headphones that he had hit someone. "I reversed … There was this thought that something wasn't right … It looked like I hit someone. I didn't understand what had happened."
In evidence that frequently contradicted his own earlier affidavits, YB said he reversed the bulldozer 25-30 metres. "After I reversed I saw they took out a body." He was "absolutely certain" Corrie's body was between the bulldozer and a mound of earth he had been ordered to flatten, contradicting earlier evidence given by two other military witnesses.
Asked if anyone from his unit went to the aid of the fatally injured protester, YB said: "No, we weren't allowed to leave [the vehicle]." Asked why he didn't call a military ambulance over his radio, he said: "That's not my level of command."
He recalled being warned that morning that there were civilian protesters in the area, and some might be armed. "Did you see any of them armed?" asked Hussein Abu Hussein, the family's lawyer. "I can't answer that, I don't remember," said YB.
Later Abu Hussein asked: "Did they carry anything that made them look like terrorists?" YB said: "They carried a loudspeaker and a sign."
"Did you suspect they were dangerous?" YB said: "I suspect everyone."
YB had offered no explanations, said Abu Hussein. "You continued driving forward, you pushed the dirt and you buried her. You didn't see anyone. You have no explanation of how [Corrie] was killed."
After the hearing, the lawyer told reporters: "The more we hear the more the impression is that someone tried to whitewash what happened."
Cindy Corrie said she was "glad to get this day behind me". Although the driver was a key witness, she said, "my sense is that there are other people on the ground and in the rear who also have responsibility and were giving orders, and allowed these things to happen to Rachel and continue to happen".
She had brought the book of her daughter's writing to court, she said. "I wanted to keep Rachel's humility and compassion for everyone in my heart today, but it was very hard as I did not hear one word of remorse from this witness today. That saddens me."
Rachel Corrie's parents, Craig and Cynthia, stand next to a photograph of their daughter at the start of their civil case against the state of Israel earlier this year.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Rachel Corrie's family claim Israeli military withheld vital video evidence
American activist's father says incomplete footage was given to court hearing into his daughter's death in Gaza
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
Guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 July 2011
The family of Rachel Corrie, the US activist killed in Gaza while protesting against house demolitions in 2003, on Monday claimed the Israeli military authorities withheld video evidence during the Corries' civil lawsuit and misled US officials on crucial details.
Craig Corrie, Rachel's father, told a press conference in Jerusalem that the footage from a surveillance camera near the scene of his daughter's death submitted to the court was "incomplete". Additional video material obtained by the family showed Rachel's body in a different spot to the place identified by some military commanders, he said.
He also alleged that the Israeli military had misled US officials on the position of Rachel's body when she was killed.
Rachel, from Olympia, Washington state, was killed while attempting to protect the home of a Palestinian family in the Rafah area of Gaza from being demolished by Israeli troops in March 2003. Her family and other activists who witnessed the incident say she was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer.
Following Rachel's death the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, promised US president George W Bush a "thorough, credible and transparent" investigation.
An internal Israeli military investigation, which was never published nor released to the US government nor the Corries, concluded that the two soldiers who operated the bulldozer had not seen Rachel and that no charges would be brought. The case was closed.
In March last year the Corrie family launched a civil case, accusing the military of either unlawfully or intentionally killing Rachel or of gross negligence. Hearings in the case ended on Sunday and a verdict is due to be delivered next April.
"After more than a year of hearings, we are at this moment in much the same place as we were when they began – up against a wall of Israeli officials determined to protect the state at all costs, including at the expense of truth," said Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother.
"We came seeking accountability. We demand justice," said Craig Corrie.
The final witness in the case, Colonel Pinhas Zuaretz, told the court in Haifa that Rafah was a war zone in 2003 and "reasonable people would not be there unless they had aims of attacking our forces". Members of the International Solidarity Movement, such as Rachel Corrie, were aiding "Palestinian terrorists", he said.
In arguing that the case should be dismissed, the Israeli government claimed Rachel was responsible for her own death. Both sides have 90 days to submit closing arguments in writing.
Rachel Corrie's family claim Israeli military withheld vital video evidence
American activist's father says incomplete footage was given to court hearing into his daughter's death in Gaza
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
Guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 July 2011
The family of Rachel Corrie, the US activist killed in Gaza while protesting against house demolitions in 2003, on Monday claimed the Israeli military authorities withheld video evidence during the Corries' civil lawsuit and misled US officials on crucial details.
Craig Corrie, Rachel's father, told a press conference in Jerusalem that the footage from a surveillance camera near the scene of his daughter's death submitted to the court was "incomplete". Additional video material obtained by the family showed Rachel's body in a different spot to the place identified by some military commanders, he said.
He also alleged that the Israeli military had misled US officials on the position of Rachel's body when she was killed.
Rachel, from Olympia, Washington state, was killed while attempting to protect the home of a Palestinian family in the Rafah area of Gaza from being demolished by Israeli troops in March 2003. Her family and other activists who witnessed the incident say she was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer.
Following Rachel's death the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, promised US president George W Bush a "thorough, credible and transparent" investigation.
An internal Israeli military investigation, which was never published nor released to the US government nor the Corries, concluded that the two soldiers who operated the bulldozer had not seen Rachel and that no charges would be brought. The case was closed.
In March last year the Corrie family launched a civil case, accusing the military of either unlawfully or intentionally killing Rachel or of gross negligence. Hearings in the case ended on Sunday and a verdict is due to be delivered next April.
"After more than a year of hearings, we are at this moment in much the same place as we were when they began – up against a wall of Israeli officials determined to protect the state at all costs, including at the expense of truth," said Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother.
"We came seeking accountability. We demand justice," said Craig Corrie.
The final witness in the case, Colonel Pinhas Zuaretz, told the court in Haifa that Rafah was a war zone in 2003 and "reasonable people would not be there unless they had aims of attacking our forces". Members of the International Solidarity Movement, such as Rachel Corrie, were aiding "Palestinian terrorists", he said.
In arguing that the case should be dismissed, the Israeli government claimed Rachel was responsible for her own death. Both sides have 90 days to submit closing arguments in writing.
i wish i could say that i am surprised, but nothing surprises me relating to this case anymore. :evil: :(
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Rachel Corrie death: struggle for justice culminates in Israeli court
Nine years after she was killed protesting in the Gaza Strip, the verdict in a lawsuit brought by her family is about to be heard
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 August 2012
Her blonde hair, megaphone and orange fluorescent jacket with reflective stripes made 23-year-old Rachel Corrie easily identifiable as an international activist on the overcast spring afternoon in 2003 when she tried to stop an advancing Israeli military bulldozer.
The young American's intention was to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah refugee camp, close to the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Scores of homes had already been crushed; Corrie was one of eight American and British volunteers acting as human shields for local families.
"She was standing on top of a pile of earth," said fellow activist and eyewitness Richard Purssell, from Brighton, at the time. "The driver cannot have failed to see her. As the blade pushed the pile, the earth rose up. Rachel slid down the pile. It looks as if her foot got caught. The driver didn't slow down; he just ran over her. Then he reversed the bulldozer back over her again."
The question of whether the driver of the Caterpillar D9R bulldozer saw the young woman in the orange jacket, and drove deliberately at and over her, has been at the centre of the Corrie family's decade-long battle for accountability and justice.
On Tuesday that struggle is set to culminate when an Israeli court gives its verdict in a civil lawsuit that the family have brought against the state of Israel.
An Israeli Defence Forces investigation has already found that its forces were not to blame and that the bulldozer driver had not seen the activist. No charges were brought and the case was closed. The IDF report concluded: "Rachel Corrie was not run over by an engineering vehicle but rather was struck by a hard object, most probably a slab of concrete which was moved or slid down while the mound of earth which she was standing behind was moved." Corrie and other International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activists were accused by the investigators of "illegal, irresponsible and dangerous" behaviour.
But witness accounts gathered in Rafah in the aftermath of Corrie's death on 16 March 2003 suggest little doubt as to what happened. According to Tom Dale, from Lichfield in Staffordshire: "the bulldozer went towards her very slowly, she was fully in clear view, straight in front of them".
Corrie tried to scramble on top of the earth being pushed into a mound by the bulldozer blades. "Unfortunately she couldn't keep her grip there and she started to slip down. You could see she was in serious trouble, there was panic in her face as she was turning around. All the activists there were screaming, running towards the bulldozer, trying to get them to stop. But they just kept on going," Dale said. The incident lasted around six or seven seconds.
Corrie was taken by a Red Crescent ambulance to the Najar hospital, arriving at the emergency room at 5.05pm. She was still alive – just. At 5.20pm she was declared dead. It was, the Israeli military said later that day, a "very regrettable accident".
Rachel Corrie had arrived in the Holy Land on January 22, a young woman brimming with idealism, anger at injustice, and a determination to make a difference, however small.
She had volunteered for the ISM, an organisation of pro-Palestinian activists who engage in direct action against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
After two days of training workshops, Corrie headed for Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. In early 2003, Israeli troops, tanks and armoured vehicles were a daily presence in Rafah and other cities. Snipers were stationed in watchtowers; helicopters and military planes buzzed in the skies.
The second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, had begun more than two years before, and suicide bombers were being regularly despatched from Gaza and the West Bank to cause death and destruction in Israel.
Death and destruction was also a feature of life in Gaza. Corrie was shocked by what she saw. "No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just cannot imagine it unless you see it," she wrote in one of her many emails to family and friends at home in Olympia, Washington state, on 7 February.
Three weeks later, she told her mother, Cindy, in an email: "I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it's a good idea for all of us to drop everything and devote our lives to making it stop... Disbelief and horror is what I feel."
Corrie and other ISM activists in Rafah were mainly engaged in trying to obstruct house demolitions being carried out by the IDF, which said the targeted homes were suspected of sheltering militants or concealing the entrances to tunnels dug under the border with Egypt to facilitate the smuggling of weapons and explosives. The activists said the demolitions were collective punishment for the actions of a minority of militants.
The presence of international activists was a nuisance for the IDF, but the military was not to be deterred. "During war there are no civilians," an IDF training officer later told Haifa district court during a hearing into the Corrie family's civil lawsuit, implying that militants, Palestinian civilians and international activists were all legitimate targets.
A Israeli military spokesman described ISM activists as "a group of protesters who were acting very irresponsibly, putting everyone in danger — the Palestinians, themselves and our forces — by intentionally placing themselves in a combat zone."
But Corrie's death caused an outcry far greater than that of any Palestinian. According to the Observer, nine Palestinians, including a girl, 4, and 90-year-old man, were killed on the same day. But inevitably the death of young American woman made headlines around the world and caused serious diplomatic reverberations.
The next day, Israel's then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, promised US president George W Bush that Israel would conduct a "thorough, credible and transparent" investigation into the incident.
Corrie's body was taken by the Israeli authorities to the National Centre of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, where an autopsy was conducted. No report was published but, according to Human Rights Watch, the conclusion was that death was caused by "pressure on the chest ... with fractures of the ribs and vertebrae ... and tear wounds in the right lung with haemorrhaging of the pleural cavities".
The Corrie family was not satisfied with the IDF report. Seven years after their daughter's death, in March 2010, they launched a civil case against the state of Israel, accusing its military of either unlawfully or intentionally killing Corrie or of gross negligence. It was, said the family, "absolutely our last resort".
Sporadic hearings dragged on for 18 months. The court heard testimony from four ISM activists who witnessed the incident, but a Gaza doctor who examined Corrie's wounds was refused an entry permit to Israel to give evidence.
The driver of the bulldozer, whose identity has not been made public, testified from behind a screen for "security reasons". He repeatedly insisted that the first time he saw the activist was when she was already dying: "I didn't see her before the incident. I saw people pulling the body out from under the earth."
When the hearings ended in July last year, Corrie's mother Cindy said the family was "at this moment in much the same place as we were when they began – up against a wall of Israeli officials determined to protect the state at all costs, including at the expense of truth."
Last week, back in Israel for the verdict in the civil lawsuit, Cindy told the Guardian the ruling would be "a milestone" in the family's long battle for justice and accountability. "The lawsuit is only one part of what we've done. There has still been no 'thorough, credible and transparent' investigation into Rachel's death. Whatever happens, this is not the end."
Rachel Corrie's mother: 'I know this won't be the end'
Cindy Corrie has battled Israel for justice ever since her activist daughter Rachel was killed in Gaza in 2003. On the eve of a lawsuit verdict, she says her fight will carry on
Harriet Sherwood
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 August 2012
The news that would turn Cindy Corrie's life inside out came around noon on a Sunday in March 2003. She was at home, then in Charlotte, North Carolina, when the phone rang.
"The apartment was kind of a mess, there were papers all over the place, and Craig [her husband] was doing the laundry," she recalls in a soft, hesitant voice. On the line was her son-in-law Kelly Simpson, but Cindy could hear her elder daughter Sarah "crying, just hysterical" in the background. They had bad news, Kelly said.
"At that point Sarah got on the phone and said: 'It's Rachel.' The first words that came out of my mouth were: 'Is she dead?' I guess I just had to articulate the worst possibility. And Sarah said: 'We think so.'"
Sarah and Kelly had picked up a phone message from a neighbour in the family's home town of Olympia, Washington State, conveying sympathy after hearing about "the tragedy" on television. They turned on their TV set to find, scrolling across the bottom of the screen, the words: "Olympia activist killed in Gaza Strip."
"Sarah thought: if it's Rachel, why haven't Mum and Dad called me? Then she thought: they don't know." Still holding the phone, Cindy walked across a car park to where her husband was, in the apartment block's laundry room. "You can't soften something like that. I said: 'It's Sarah and Kelly, and they say Rachel's dead.'"
Rachel Corrie, 23, had been crushed under an Israeli military bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah, at the southernmost end of the Gaza Strip. According to witnesses, the bulldozer's driver had driven straight at her, then reversed over her, even though she was clearly in his line of vision.
Rachel was a volunteer for the pro-Palestinian direct action organisation the International Solidarity Movement and the youngest of the Corrie's three children. Her death propelled her family into an almost decade-long battle for accountability and justice. What Cindy describes as "a milestone" in that fight will come on Tuesday, when a court in Haifa hands down its verdict in a two-and-a-half year civil lawsuit brought by the Corries against the state of Israel.
"If you had told me 10 years ago that this would happen to us, and I'd do any of the things I have done since that time, that any of us would, I'd say you're crazy – I won't even breathe again," says Cindy. "Always for parents there's that dread of something happening to a child. I don't even know how to describe how we got through those first minutes and hours."
Rachel Corrie Rachel Corrie died trying to stop an Israeli army bulldozer from destroying Palestinian houses in Rafah in 2003. Photograph: Denny Sternstein/AP
Rachel was born on 10 April 1979, five years younger than her sister Sarah, and seven years younger than her brother Chris. Asked what Rachel was like, Cindy pauses. "It's kind of a sad question. You try to hold on to all the memories, but you realise there are things that you lose. Sometimes it's hard to remember."
But these are some of the ways she describes her daughter: inquisitive, with a rich inner life; creative; an intense observer; an artist; a sympathetic listener; expressive; a constant doodler; able to connect with different people; a poet. "I always thought that when she came through the front door as an adult, you just knew it was going to be interesting."
The Corries lived in Olympia, a small community centred round the progressive liberal Evergreen State College, which Rachel later attended. Cindy describes the town as "politically and environmentally aware", much like the Corries themselves. "As a family we were certainly always politically interested, with a lot of discussion going on, but we were not activists, not protesters."
Cindy, now 64, the oldest of six siblings, grew up in a "very conservative Lutheran" household, but describes her own immediate family as "spiritual" rather than church-going. They were "middle-income – we lived really quite modestly, we were pretty frugal people". Cindy had rarely been outside the US, certainly never to Europe or the Middle East.
By early 2003, Craig Corrie had taken a job in North Carolina, and the couple moved to Charlotte, although always with the intention of returning to their home base in Olympia. "Like a lot of families, we had just been trying to get our kids through college, and finally we were free of that responsibility. It was like when we were first married – we could decide what to do with our time."
They hiked in the Appalachian mountains, took driving trips, saw movies. Cindy learned French and played the flute. "I'm really grateful for that time. It was a quiet time before this really intense period that came after. We spent a lot of time thinking about how we were going to spend the years ahead. It was a pleasant interlude."
Back in Olympia, following 9/11, their younger daughter was becoming drawn into the burgeoning peace movement and beginning to explore the reasons behind the atrocity. "That drew her to Israel and Palestine as at least part of the problem," says Cindy.
As for her parents, "it wasn't that we weren't interested [in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict], but I think we were just very distanced from it. We knew about it in the way that most Americans did, by listening to news reports. Our sympathies were very much with the Israeli Jewish narrative, because that's what we knew. I read The Diary of Anne Frank to my kids when they were growing up, and that was the narrative we connected with – and the Palestinian narrative really didn't exist for us."
But Rachel decided to volunteer as an activist for the Palestinian cause. At the time, the second intifada (uprising) against the Israeli occupation was under way, with an escalating cycle of violence from both sides: frequent suicide bombings carried out by Palestinian militants, and incursions, shootings, shellings and demolitions by the Israeli military.
"It felt a little unnerving," says Cindy. "At first we hoped it wouldn't happen. But Rachel was 23 years old, and was very much making her own decisions, as we thought she should. We had always supported our kids in whatever steps they wanted to take. Some people say: 'Why did you let her go?' That was not ever something I felt was my role."
Cindy began learning about the Middle East: reading, watching films, discussing the issues with her daughter. Once Rachel had arrived in the Gaza Strip, her frequent emails home, describing what she was seeing and experiencing, illuminated what had been a distant conflict. "They brought us a view, a perspective, that we had never seen before," says Cindy.
The couple were anxious, but not unduly so. Rachel called soon after arriving in Rafah, asking her parents if they could hear the sound of shelling in the background. "I could hear her voice trembling. Craig and I carried our anxiety with us." Cindy spoke to her daughter again, six days before her death. "She sounded really happy."
Then, on 16 March 2003, came that terrible phone call, "the worst moment of my life". Cindy "stumbled through" the following hours, days and weeks, feeling physically ill. "I couldn't sleep. I would drift off, then feel jolts of pain through my arms. And then there was that thing of going to sleep and then waking up and finding that it is a nightmare but it's real and it's always there every day."
Rachel Corrie in front of an Israeli army bulldozer at Rafah, 16 March 2003 Rachel in front of an Israeli army bulldozer at Rafah on 16 March 2003, the day she was killed. Photograph: Getty Images
Immediately, intuitively, Cindy "knew we had to get her words out. I knew how important that was to her, and I knew what the impact had been on family and friends. She wanted to find ways for people to hear about what she was seeing."
The family released Rachel's emails to the media. "It was the Guardian that picked them up very quickly, and it was huge, very significant. All kinds of things came from that." Rachel's powerful writing was adapted into an acclaimed stage play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, performed in at least 10 countries, including Israel. It was also published in book form, Let Me Stand Alone.
Meanwhile, the day after Rachel's death, then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon promised then US president George W Bush a "thorough, credible and transparent" investigation into Rachel's death. Less than a month later, an internal inquiry by the Israeli military concluded that its forces were not to blame. The driver of the bulldozer had not seen Rachel before she was crushed beneath the vehicle, it said. No charges were brought and the case was closed.
The Corries' battle for justice has dominated their lives for close to a decade. They found themselves "up against a wall of Israeli officials determined to protect the state at all costs, including at the expense of truth", as they said in a statement last summer.
They learned how to campaign, deal with the media, assess legal documents, challenge authority and harness the support of their government whenever possible. Eventually – their "absolutely last resort" – in March 2010 they sued the state of Israel over Rachel's death, accusing its military of either unlawfully or intentionally killing her, or of gross negligence. "The demands of the lawsuit have been huge," says Cindy. "In some ways, we were naive, coming from the United States, where it's unusual for a trial not to be over within a few weeks."
In the past two and a half years, the Corries have spent a total of eight months in Israel, broken into short visits to coincide with the sporadic hearings. Now, Cindy says, "I'm just relieved to be at this point and, no matter what happens, we'll be at the other side.
"It's very unpredictable. We believe we know what should happen, but we also know what the state [of Israel] has to say. We'll have a verdict, and then we'll determine how to respond. But we know this won't be the end."
Apart from justice for Rachel, the Corries are also committed to justice for the Palestinians. Six months after Rachel's death, Cindy and Craig finally visited Gaza, and the house their daughter was trying to protect from demolition. There have been subsequent visits to Gaza, and Cindy hopes there will be more in the future. The family have made many friends from Gaza, including the occupants of the house, the Nasrallah family, whose home was finally razed in the spring of 2004. Cindy says she now has a "deeper sense of what injustice means".
"Craig and I have been so blessed because Rachel gave us this opportunity to focus here. There's no end to the work that can be done around this issue, and other peace and justice issues. If, miraculously, the Israeli-Palestinian situation could be fixed, there'll be something else that could command and deserve attention."
But, she adds: "I know realistically I have to find a way to get more balance in my life than I have now. I look at the weeds in my yard and I think about how much I'd love to go out and work there for an hour every day. I hardly cook any more. I'd like to make some time for those kinds of things."
The verdict in the lawsuit, she says, is part of a process, "one piece of what we've done. In terms of what happened to Rachel and the accountability that we're seeking, the process has shown there are huge problems here [in Israel] in investigations and the legal system. There continue to be things that need to be discussed, exposed and addressed."
"Closure" is not something Cindy is expecting. "Closure isn't the right word. In my mind, it suggests that there's an end to something, and I just don't see that happening.
"The loss, the void, is permanent. You feel it every day of your life," she says slowly, hesitantly. "What happened to Rachel will never be OK, but I feel pretty at peace with where I am. All you ever do is take the next breath and the next step. I'm still just taking the next step, but you get to the point where it's OK to do that."
HAIFA, Israel (AP) — An Israeli court ruled Tuesday that the military was not at fault for killing a U.S. activist crushed by an army bulldozer during a 2003 demonstration, rejecting a lawsuit filed by her parents.
The bulldozer driver has said he didn't see 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist who was trying to block the vehicle's path during a demonstration in the Gaza Strip against the military's demolition of Palestinian homes.
The military deemed her March 2003 death an accident, but Corrie's parents said the driver acted recklessly and filed a civil lawsuit two years later.
Explaining the district court's ruling, Judge Oded Gershon said Corrie "put herself in a dangerous situation" and called her death "the result of an accident she brought upon herself." He said the military conducted a proper investigation and rejected the Corrie family's request for a symbolic $1 in damages and legal expenses.
Corrie's family, who flew in from the U.S. for the verdict, lamented the court's ruling.
"We are of course, deeply saddened and deeply troubled by what we heard today," said her mother, Cindy Corrie of Olympia, Washington. "I believe this was a bad day. Not only for our family but for human rights, the rule of law, and also for the country of Israel."
The family said it was strongly considering an appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court, but wanted to read the full verdict before making a final decision.
Corrie's sister, Sarah, held up a picture of her sister lying lifeless in bulldozer tracks. The family's lawyer, Hussein Abu Hussein pointed at it: "How did the bulldozer not see her?" he asked. To say that the driver did not see her "is lies to the living and also lies to the dead."
Following the verdict, the Israeli state prosecutor's office called Corrie's death a "tragic accident" but noted the court exonerated the military of "any blame for negligence." It said it had presented three investigations that found the driver could not have seen Corrie, and noted that the driver acted in a "a military action in the course of war."
"The work was done while exercising maximum caution and prudence and without the ability to foresee harming anyone," it said.
The home demolitions were part of an unsuccessful campaign to halt thousands of attacks on soldiers and Jewish settlers in southern Gaza, along the border with Egypt, in the preceding 3 ½ years. On the day Rachel Corrie died, she and other activists had entered a closed military zone to protest the demolition policy.
According to the U.N. agency handling Palestinian refugees, the military had left more than 17,000 Gazans homeless in the four years after a Palestinian uprising against Israel erupted in September 2000. The demolitions drew international condemnation at the time.
In her death, Corrie became the embodiment of what Palestinian activists say is Israel's harsh repression of nonviolent protest to occupation. Israel says by entering conflict zones to try to interfere with military activities, activists recklessly choose to risk their lives.
Her parents have relentlessly pursued her case since going to court in 2005 after a military investigation cleared the driver.
They say they have spent $200,000 to fly in witnesses, attend 15 hearings and translate more than 2,000 pages of court transcripts.
At the news conference, Cindy Corrie read a passage from one of her daughter's letters, biting her lip as her husband, grim-faced, held a microphone for her.
"Life is very difficult. Human beings can be kind, brave and strong, even in the most difficult of circumstances," Rachel Corrie wrote. "Thank you for existing, for showing how good people can be, despite great hardship."
The Corrie case was the first civil lawsuit of a foreigner harmed by Israel's military to conclude in a full civilian trial. Others have resulted in out-of-court settlements.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Israel has failed to carry out the "thorough, credible and transparent investigation" it had promised into the death of American activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza nine years ago, the US ambassador in Tel Aviv has reiterated to her family.
How the US and Israeli justice systems whitewash state crimes
Courts are supposed to check the abuse of executive power, not cravenly serve it. But in the US and Israel, that is now the case
Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 August 2012
A YouTube video still showing US marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan.
The US military announced on Monday that no criminal charges would be brought against the US marines in Afghanistan who videotaped themselves urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. Nor, the military announced, would any criminal charges be filed against the US troops who "tried to burn about 500 copies of the Qur'an as part of a badly bungled security sweep at an Afghan prison in February, despite repeated warnings from Afghan soldiers that they were making a colossal mistake".
In doing so, the US military, as usual, brushed aside demands of Afghan officials for legal accountability for the destructive acts of foreign soldiers in their country. The US instead imposed "disciplinary measures" in both cases, ones that "could include letters of reprimand, a reduction in rank, forfeit of some pay, physical restriction to a military base, extra duties or some combination of those measures". Both incidents triggered intense protests and rioting that left dozens dead, back in February this year.
Parallel to that, an Israeli judge Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit against the Israeli government brought by the family of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American student and pro-Palestinian activist who was killed by a military bulldozer in 2003 as she protested the demolition of a house in Gaza whose family she had come to befriend. Upon learning of the suit's dismissal, Corrie's mother, Cindy, said:
"I believe this was a bad day, not only for our family, but for human rights, humanity, the rule of law and also for the country of Israel."
Despite Corrie's wearing a bright orange vest, Judge Oded Gershon, in a 62-page decision, ruled that the bulldozer driver did not see her and her death was thus an accident. He went on to heap blame on Corrie for her own killing, arguing that, contrary to what "any reasonable person would have done", she "chose to put herself in danger" by trying to impede "a military activity meant to prevent terrorist activity".
The commonality in all three of these episodes is self-evident: the perversion of the justice system and rule of law as nothing more than a weapon to legitimize even the most destructive state actions, while severely punishing those who oppose them. The US and its loyal thinktank scholars have long demanded that other states maintain an "independent judiciary" as one of the key ingredients for living under the rule of law. But these latest episodes demonstrate, yet again, that the judiciary in the US, along with the one in its prime Middle East client state, is anything but "independent": its primary function is to shield government actors from accountability.
The US military has continuously imposed pitifully light "punishments" on its soldiers even for the most heinous atrocities. The wanton slaughter of two dozen civilians in Haditha, Iraq and the severe and even lethal torture of Afghan detainees generated, at worst, shockingly short jail time for the killers and, usually, little more than letters of reprimand.
Contrast this tepid, reluctant wrist-slapping for the brutal crimes of occupying soldiers with what a UN investigation found was the US government's "cruel and inhuman treatment" of Bradley Manning before he was convicted of anything. Manning has been imprisoned for more than two years now without having been found guilty of any crimes – already longer than any of the perpetrators of these fatal abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. He faces life in prison at the age of 23 for the alleged "crime" of disclosing to the world overwhelming evidence of corruption, deceit and illegality on the part of the world's most powerful factions: disclosures that helped thwart the Obama administration's efforts to keep US troops in Iraq, and which, as even WikiLeaks' harshest critics acknowledge, played some substantial role in helping to spark the Arab spring.
Notably, the first disclosure for which Manning was allegedly responsible – the videotape of an Apache helicopter gunning down unarmed Reuters journalists and then the rescuers who came to help the wounded, including two young children – resulted in zero accountability: the US military exonerated everyone involved. Instead, it is Manning, the person accused of exposing these crimes, who is punished as the real criminal.
And herein lies the real function of the American justice system, clearly revealed time and again. It is to protect high-level actors from accountability even for the most egregious of crimes, while severely punishing those who reveal or take a stand against those crimes, thus deterring and intimidating any future opposition.
That is the mentality that has led the Obama department of justice to aggressively shield all Bush officials from any and all accountability for their torture and surveillance crimes, while launching an unprecedented persecution campaign against whistleblowers. As always in US justice, the "real" criminals are those who alert the world to high-level crimes, not those who commit them. That is why the only person to suffer any repercussions from the Bush NSA eavesdropping scandal was Thomas Tamm: the mid-level DOJ lawyer who learned of the illegal program and alerted the New York Times about it. Those who authorized those crimes have been fully shielded from any form of punishment.
It is this same mentality that has led the US federal judiciary to produce the most disgraceful political fact of the last decade. Not a single victim of America's "war on terror" abuses – even those now acknowledged by the US government to have been completely innocent – have been allowed even to have their cases heard in an American court on the merits. They've all had the courthouse doors slammed shut in the faces by courts that have accepted the US government's claims that its own secrecy powers and immunity rights bar any such justice. Crimes committed by the state or in advancement of its agenda are simply immune from the rule of law in the US.
The same exploitation of the justice system is glaringly evident in the Rachel Corrie travesty. As the Guardian's former Israel (and now Washington) correspondent Chris McGreal writes, the dismissal of this suit is simply a by-product of the "virtual impunity for Israeli troops no matter who they killed or in what circumstances". That's because Israeli courts, like American courts, have submissively accepted the supreme fiction of both governments: anyone impeding government actions is a terrorist or terrorist-enabler who gets what they deserve, while the actions of the state, no matter how savage, can never be anything other than legitimate.
Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother, said after the verdict that Israel "employed a 'well-heeled system' to protect its soldiers and provide them with immunity". Indeed, the Israeli "investigation" into Corrie's death has been such a laughable whitewash that even the US ambassador to Israel last week told the Corrie family that he "did not believe the Israeli military investigation had been 'thorough, credible and transparent', as had been promised by Israel." All of this, writes McGreal, shows how "covering up the truth about the killings of innocents, including Corrie, became an important part of the survival strategy because of the damage the truth could do to the military's standing, not only in the rest of the world but also among Israelis."
As I noted on Sunday, it is expected, inevitable, that those who wield political power will abuse it for corrupt and self-serving ends. That is why there are institutions designed to check and combat that abuse. The rule of law, and an independent judiciary applying it, is ostensibly one of those institutions. But – like establishment media outlets and most academics – this justice system now does the opposite: it is merely another weapon used to legitimize crimes by the powerful and crush those who oppose them.
All three of this week's travesties, in the US and in Israel, are hardly surprising. To the contrary, they are the inevitable by-products of societies that recruit every institution in service of defending even the most wanton abuses by the state.
The Corries sued for 1 dollar. All they wanted was justice for their daughter, no monetary gain, just an admission of wrong doing. Unfortunately through this horrifying ordeal, the Corries have learned what the Palestinians have known all along, that non-Israeli blood is worth nothing. Which recalls the article that Byrnzie posted about Palestinian children soiling themselves when coming into contact with the idf, it is because they know that this person with a gun or a bulldozer does not see him as human and will have no reservations treating him as such. Corrie did a brave thing, and maybe she believed as an American that the idf soldier wouldn't risk running over a citizen of an "ally" nation. However, she was in Gaza in solidarity and to the idf that made her just as disposable as a Palestinian. The verdict today proved once again the blatant disregard for non-Israeli life.
I usually stay away from these kinds of events because I believe people should respect the laws of any country to which they are a visitor. That being said, GAZA is not recognized as anything more than a strip of land, they have no voice and those who try to give them a voice or be their voice are silenced via threats, violence, and death from Israel.
The fact that the world and our so called voices can praise the Pussy Riot and have to ask who is Rachel Corrie is a damning reflection of how our value system works. How long does the WORLD have to do penance for the Holocaust? Didn’t Rachel have the right to exist?
SIN EATERS--We take the moral excrement we find in this equation and we bury it down deep inside of us so that the rest of our case can stay pure. That is the job. We are morally indefensible and absolutely necessary.
I usually stay away from these kinds of events because I believe people should respect the laws of any country to which they are a visitor. That being said, GAZA is not recognized as anything more than a strip of land, they have no voice and those who try to give them a voice or be their voice are silenced via threats, violence, and death from Israel.
The fact that the world and our so called voices can praise the Pussy Riot and have to ask who is Rachel Corrie is a damning reflection of how our value system works. How long does the WORLD have to do penance for the Holocaust? Didn’t Rachel have the right to exist?
the world is going to have to do penance for the holocaust for a long time. until the world decides to stop doing penance. other countries walk on eggshells when dealing with israel because of the holocaust. they do not want to offend their government. if the holocaust had not happened i am quite sure that most european countries would have no problem telling the israeli government where to go.... but since it did, these countries have to cater to the whims of the israeli government and its policies.
it is ironic that the people who know what it is like to be persecuted have the audacity to do it to another ethnic group. it's quite sad actually. i would think they would know better than that.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
'The administrative punishments -- which could include things like reduce rank or forfeiture of pay -- fell short of criminal prosecution, and it was unclear whether they would satisfy Afghan demands for justice.'
Rachel Corrie verdict exposes Israeli military mindset
Corrie's parents have not received justice, but their quest reveals the lie of the IDF's claim to be the world's 'most moral army'
Chris McGreal
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 August 2012
Reporters covering Israel are routinely confronted with the question: why not call Hamas a terrorist organisation? It's a fair point. How else to describe blowing up families on buses but terrorism?
But the difficulty lies in what then to call the Israeli army when it, too, at particular times and places, has used indiscriminate killing and terror as a means of breaking Palestinian civilians. One of those places was Rafah, in the southern tip of the Gaza strip, where Rachel Corrie was crushed by a military bulldozer nine years ago as she tried to stop the Israeli army going about its routine destruction of Palestinian homes.
An Israeli judge on Tuesday perpetuated the fiction that Corrie's death was a terrible accident and upheld the results of the military's own investigation, widely regarded as such a whitewash that even the US ambassador to Israel described it as neither thorough nor credible. Corrie's parents may have failed in their attempt to see some justice for their daughter, but in their struggle they forced a court case that established that her death was not arbitrary but one of a pattern of killings as the Israeli army pursued a daily routine of attacks intended to terrorise the Palestinian population of southern Gaza into submission.
The case laid bare the state of the collective Israeli military mind, which cast the definition of enemies so widely that children walking down the street were legitimate targets if they crossed a red line that was invisible to everyone but the soldiers looking at it on their maps. The military gave itself a blanket protection by declaring southern Gaza a war zone, even though it was heavily populated by ordinary Palestinians, and set rules of engagement so broad that just about anyone was a target.
With that went virtual impunity for Israeli troops no matter who they killed or in what circumstances – an impunity reinforced by Tuesday's verdict in Haifa.
The Israeli military commander in southern Gaza at the time was Colonel Pinhas "Pinky" Zuaretz. A few weeks after Corrie's death, I (as the Guardian's correspondent in Israel) spoke to him about how it was that so many children were shot by Israeli soldiers at times when there was no combat. His explanation was chilling.
At that point, three years into the second intifada, more than 400 children had been killed by the Israeli army. Nearly half were in Rafah and neighbouring Khan Yunis. One in four were under the age of 12.
I focused on the deaths of six children in a 10-week period, all in circumstances far from combat. The dead included a 12-year-old girl, Haneen Abu Sitta, killed in Rafah as she walked home from school near a security fence around one of the fortified Jewish settlements in Gaza at the time. The army made up an explanation by falsely claiming Haneen was killed during a gun battle between Israeli forces and Palestinians.
Zuaretz conceded to me that there was no battle and that the girl was shot by a soldier who had no business opening fire. It was the same with the killings of some of the other children. The colonel was fleetingly remorseful.
"Every name of a child here, it makes me feel bad because it's the fault of my soldiers. I need to learn and see the mistakes of my troops," he said. But Zuaretz was not going to do anything about it; and by the end of the interview, he was casting the killings as an unfortunate part of the struggle for Israel's very survival.
"I remember the Holocaust. We have a choice, to fight the terrorists or to face being consumed by the flames again," he said.
In court, Zuaretz said the whole of southern Gaza was a combat zone and anyone who entered parts of it had made themselves a target. But those parts included houses where Palestinians built walls within walls in their homes to protect themselves from Israeli bullets.
In that context, covering up the truth about the killings of innocents, including Corrie, became an important part of the survival strategy because of the damage the truth could do to the military's standing, not only in the rest of the world but also among Israelis.
The death of Khalil al-Mughrabi two years before Corrie died was telling. The 11-year-old boy was playing football when he was shot dead in Rafah by an Israeli soldier. The respected Israeli human rights organisations, B'Tselem, wrote to the army demanding an investigation. Several months later, the judge advocate general's office wrote back saying that Khalil was killed by soldiers who had acted with "restraint and control" to disperse a riot in the area.
But the judge advocate general's office made the mistake of attaching a copy of its own confidential investigation, which came to a very different conclusion: that the riot had been much earlier in the day and the soldiers who shot the child should not have opened fire. In the report, the chief military prosecutor, Colonel Einat Ron, then spelled out alternative false scenarios that should be offered to B'Tselem. The official account was a lie and the army knew it.
The message to ordinary soldiers was clear: you have a free hand because the military will protect you to protect itself. It is that immunity from accountability that was the road to Corrie's death.
She wasn't the only foreign victim at about that time. In the following months, Israeli soldiers shot dead James Miller, a British television documentary journalist, and Tom Hurndall, a British photographer and pro-Palestinian activist. In November 2002, an Israeli sniper had killed a British United Nations worker, Iain Hook, in Jenin in the West Bank.
British inquests returned verdicts of unlawful killings in all three deaths, but Israel rejected calls for the soldiers who killed Miller and Hook to be held to account. The Israeli military initially whitewashed Hurndall's killing but after an outcry led by his parents, and British government pressure, the sniper who shot him was sentenced to eight years in prison for manslaughter.
That sentence apparently did nothing to erode a military mindset that sees only enemies.
Three years after Corrie's death, an Israeli army officer who emptied the magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl, Iman al-Hams, and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was cleared by a military court.
Iman was shot and wounded after crossing the invisible red line around an Israeli military base in Rafah, but she was never any closer than 100 yards. The officer then left the base in order to "confirm the kill" by pumping the wounded girl full of bullets. An Israeli military investigation concluded he had acted properly.
Tuesday's court verdict in Haifa will have done nothing to end that climate of impunity. Nor anything that would have us believe that Israel's repeated proclamation that it has the "most moral army in the world" is any more true than its explanation of so many Palestinian deaths.
Argue against the fact that people who kill shouldn't get the death penalty. And then say that somebody, dumb enough to step into the line of a moving bulldozer is in the right. Wow!
The poison from the poison stream caught up to you ELEVEN years ago and you floated out of here. Sept. 14, 08
Argue against the fact that people who kill shouldn't get the death penalty. And then say that somebody, dumb enough to step into the line of a moving bulldozer is in the right. Wow!
Are you drunk? Your post makes no sense. I suggest you sober up and in the morning you can try and comprehend the gibberish you just posted.
Argue against the fact that people who kill shouldn't get the death penalty. And then say that somebody, dumb enough to step into the line of a moving bulldozer is in the right. Wow!
Wow, really dude? Fuck, what, you have no compassion?? Compassion, something you can never question when it comes to rachel. I don't give a fuck about what religion any of you are, this woman gave her life for a people who just want to be recognized as a human race. Period.
The Corries sued for 1 dollar. All they wanted was justice for their daughter, no monetary gain, just an admission of wrong doing. Unfortunately through this horrifying ordeal, the Corries have learned what the Palestinians have known all along, that non-Israeli blood is worth nothing. Which recalls the article that Byrnzie posted about Palestinian children soiling themselves when coming into contact with the idf, it is because they know that this person with a gun or a bulldozer does not see him as human and will have no reservations treating him as such. Corrie did a brave thing, and maybe she believed as an American that the idf soldier wouldn't risk running over a citizen of an "ally" nation. However, she was in Gaza in solidarity and to the idf that made her just as disposable as a Palestinian. The verdict today proved once again the blatant disregard for non-Israeli life.
this is a great post.
they should have known that they were not going to get an admission of wrongdoing. the court system is stacked against them.
where was the trial held? does anyone know?
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
All of the above posts expressing anger over the court"s decision make the assumption that the court clearly came to the wrong conclusion. How do any of you know that to be the case? The fact that you are all so sure that the court is wrong (without, I assume, having yourselves had access to any of the evidence) suggests to me that you all don't really have very much respect for how the legal system works, i.e. we don't pre-judge guilt.
As for the court system whitewashing government action, the Israeli Supreme Court (which is not the deciding court in this case, but it goes to the point) actually has a pretty impressive history of opposing government action, much more so than American courts, which have a history of treating national security issues as the exclusive purview of the executive and the legislature, and therefore an area to be avoided (I'm in law school at the moment, and actually studying how courts deal with national security cases). The Israeli Supreme Court, in contrast, especially under Chief Justice Barak, was very assertive in addressing such cases, and very often ruled against the government (for example, ruling against the government in a case that banned physical means of interrogation, even in "ticking bomb" scenarios, or refusing to give the government a blanket ruling that targeted killings were in all cases legal).
In terms of the court "blaming" Corrie for her own death, I read the court's decision a little differently. The court was faced with a legal question having to do with liability in tort law. The court's discussion of Corrie's actions, I think, are therefore about a negligence/recklessness/contributory-negligence analysis, which is a legal, not a moral, analysis. In essence what I think the court is saying is that without passing judgment on Corrie's ethical and moral character (which I personally think was pretty high) her actions, in knowingly entering a closed military zone, were reckless (in a strictly legal sense).
Ok, sorry for sidetracking all the righteous anger. Carry on...
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Comments
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
-Cindy Corrie
Did Alan Dershowitz teach you this?
Rachel Corrie case: Israeli soldier to testify anonymously
Family criticises decision to allow soldier who drove bulldozer that killed daughter to give evidence from behind screen
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oc ... -anonymous
The Israeli soldier at the controls of a bulldozer that crushed to death 23-year-old Rachel Corrie in Gaza in March 2003 is due to give evidence tomorrow in the civil lawsuit brought by the American activist's family.
However the judge hearing the case in Haifa has ruled that, for security reasons, the soldier can testify anonymously from behind a screen, denying Cindy and Craig Corrie the opportunity to face the man who directly caused their daughter's death.
Israel's supreme court refused to hear an appeal by the family challenging the judge's ruling. However, the unit commander in charge that day will testify in full view of the court as his identity is already known.
"I'll be grateful at least to be able to hear [the bulldozer driver's] words but I won't get the complete picture and I'll be disappointed by that," Cindy Corrie said in an interview in Jerusalem last week.
"They've said it's the security of the witnesses they are trying to protect. I can understand it would be uncomfortable for the soldiers to have to see us, but I can't understand how our family is a threat to their security."
Corrie, from Olympia, Washington state, was killed while attempting to protect the home of a Palestinian family in the Rafah area of Gaza from being demolished by Israeli troops seven and a half years ago. A posthumous book and play based on the graphic and moving emails she wrote to friends and family made her an iconic figure.
An internal Israeli military investigation, which was never published nor released to the US government or the Corries, concluded that the bulldozer driver had not seen Rachel and that no charges would be brought. The case was closed.
The family brought a civil case – "absolutely our last resort" – against the state of Israel, which opened in March this year and is expected to conclude early next year. Among the early witnesses was a fellow activist, Briton Richard Purssell, who described how Corrie disappeared from view under the advancing bulldozer.
The driver's evidence will be a key moment in the case but the Corrie family has been careful not to invest too much in his evidence. "While the driver is very important, to me he is not the only person who has responsibility," said Cindy Corrie. "Responsibility is shared with a lot of people. My focus isn't entirely on the driver."
Sarah Corrie Simpson, Rachel's older sister, said: "Ultimately the individual had the ability to stop that act. However if you only hold responsible the individual, you're losing the broader context of what's going on. You have to look at the chain of command and what sort of orders were being given at that time."
The family, while wanting an acceptable end to their battle for justice, was wary of the concept of closure. "It's hard to conceive of that," said Craig Corrie. "People talk about it, but it's real hard to define what closure would be when you've lost a child, lost a little sister."
Corrie Simpson said closure was difficult to define: "I'm not sure how you ever get to a place where you even feel close to that when you know there are people out there on the other end of what happened to Rachel, and you've never even been able to see their faces. Mum talks about being able to see the humanity of the person that was on the other end – and now the majority of soldiers will get to testify behind a screen, and that takes that away from us."
At the very least, the family hoped their legal battle would shine a light on the Israeli Defence Force's (IDF) investigative process.
Cindy Corrie said if the IDF were, as it claimed, the most moral army in the world, "they should be willing to look at a system that is much more transparent than what exists right now".
Last month, a colonel responsible for writing operating manuals for military bulldozers, testified that there were no civilians in a war zone.
Cindy Corrie said: "It's a window, hearing that coming from these people, a real window into the mindset – and it's very, very concerning. And I think every Israeli should be really concerned."
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
it is a sham and a cover up!! :twisted: :twisted:
Rachel Corrie case: Israeli soldier in bulldozer 'did not see her'
Driver of machine that crushed 23-year-old American to death in Gaza in 2003 tells court he only saw her after the incident
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oc ... iver-court
The Israeli soldier at the controls of the bulldozer that crushed the pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie told a court today that the first time he saw her was when fellow protesters were already tending to her dying body in the dirt.
Giving evidence for more than four hours in the civil case brought by Corrie's family against the state of Israel, the former soldier repeatedly insisted that had not seen the 23-year-old American standing in front of his 66-tonne Caterpillar bulldozer before she was fatally hit.
"I didn't see her before the incident," he told the court in Haifa. "I saw people pulling the body out from under the earth."
The soldier, named only as YB, gave evidence from behind a screen after a ruling by the judge for "security reasons". A gagging order was imposed on identifying details, although it was disclosed in court that YB is a 38-year-old Russian immigrant who learned Hebrew after arriving in Israel at the age of 23 and now works for a food processing company.
The Corrie family had requested that they be given dispensation to see YB give evidence, which was refused. "I do feel that the state of Israel is saying [we] are security risks and I am affronted by that," Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother, said after the hearing. "I wanted to be able to see the whole person, not just hear the words."
Rachel Corrie was protesting against the demolition by the Israeli military of Palestinian houses in Gaza when she was crushed to death in March 2003. An internal military investigation concluded that no charges should be brought and the case was closed.
YB, who was in communication with his unit command and a second bulldozer on the scene, told the court that he was told through his headphones that he had hit someone. "I reversed … There was this thought that something wasn't right … It looked like I hit someone. I didn't understand what had happened."
In evidence that frequently contradicted his own earlier affidavits, YB said he reversed the bulldozer 25-30 metres. "After I reversed I saw they took out a body." He was "absolutely certain" Corrie's body was between the bulldozer and a mound of earth he had been ordered to flatten, contradicting earlier evidence given by two other military witnesses.
Asked if anyone from his unit went to the aid of the fatally injured protester, YB said: "No, we weren't allowed to leave [the vehicle]." Asked why he didn't call a military ambulance over his radio, he said: "That's not my level of command."
He recalled being warned that morning that there were civilian protesters in the area, and some might be armed. "Did you see any of them armed?" asked Hussein Abu Hussein, the family's lawyer. "I can't answer that, I don't remember," said YB.
Later Abu Hussein asked: "Did they carry anything that made them look like terrorists?" YB said: "They carried a loudspeaker and a sign."
"Did you suspect they were dangerous?" YB said: "I suspect everyone."
YB had offered no explanations, said Abu Hussein. "You continued driving forward, you pushed the dirt and you buried her. You didn't see anyone. You have no explanation of how [Corrie] was killed."
After the hearing, the lawyer told reporters: "The more we hear the more the impression is that someone tried to whitewash what happened."
Cindy Corrie said she was "glad to get this day behind me". Although the driver was a key witness, she said, "my sense is that there are other people on the ground and in the rear who also have responsibility and were giving orders, and allowed these things to happen to Rachel and continue to happen".
She had brought the book of her daughter's writing to court, she said. "I wanted to keep Rachel's humility and compassion for everyone in my heart today, but it was very hard as I did not hear one word of remorse from this witness today. That saddens me."
Rachel Corrie's parents, Craig and Cynthia, stand next to a photograph of their daughter at the start of their civil case against the state of Israel earlier this year.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Former IDF Spokesperson and Southern Brigade Commander to Testify in Corrie Civil Trial
May 22 to be Final Court Hearing
http://rachelcorriefoundation.org/blog/ ... ivil-trial
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Rachel Corrie's family claim Israeli military withheld vital video evidence
American activist's father says incomplete footage was given to court hearing into his daughter's death in Gaza
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
Guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 July 2011
The family of Rachel Corrie, the US activist killed in Gaza while protesting against house demolitions in 2003, on Monday claimed the Israeli military authorities withheld video evidence during the Corries' civil lawsuit and misled US officials on crucial details.
Craig Corrie, Rachel's father, told a press conference in Jerusalem that the footage from a surveillance camera near the scene of his daughter's death submitted to the court was "incomplete". Additional video material obtained by the family showed Rachel's body in a different spot to the place identified by some military commanders, he said.
He also alleged that the Israeli military had misled US officials on the position of Rachel's body when she was killed.
Rachel, from Olympia, Washington state, was killed while attempting to protect the home of a Palestinian family in the Rafah area of Gaza from being demolished by Israeli troops in March 2003. Her family and other activists who witnessed the incident say she was crushed by an Israeli army bulldozer.
Following Rachel's death the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, promised US president George W Bush a "thorough, credible and transparent" investigation.
An internal Israeli military investigation, which was never published nor released to the US government nor the Corries, concluded that the two soldiers who operated the bulldozer had not seen Rachel and that no charges would be brought. The case was closed.
In March last year the Corrie family launched a civil case, accusing the military of either unlawfully or intentionally killing Rachel or of gross negligence. Hearings in the case ended on Sunday and a verdict is due to be delivered next April.
"After more than a year of hearings, we are at this moment in much the same place as we were when they began – up against a wall of Israeli officials determined to protect the state at all costs, including at the expense of truth," said Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother.
"We came seeking accountability. We demand justice," said Craig Corrie.
The final witness in the case, Colonel Pinhas Zuaretz, told the court in Haifa that Rafah was a war zone in 2003 and "reasonable people would not be there unless they had aims of attacking our forces". Members of the International Solidarity Movement, such as Rachel Corrie, were aiding "Palestinian terrorists", he said.
In arguing that the case should be dismissed, the Israeli government claimed Rachel was responsible for her own death. Both sides have 90 days to submit closing arguments in writing.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Iran names street after Rachel Corrie
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/11/iran-street-rachel-corrie
Rachel Corrie death: struggle for justice culminates in Israeli court
Nine years after she was killed protesting in the Gaza Strip, the verdict in a lawsuit brought by her family is about to be heard
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 August 2012
Her blonde hair, megaphone and orange fluorescent jacket with reflective stripes made 23-year-old Rachel Corrie easily identifiable as an international activist on the overcast spring afternoon in 2003 when she tried to stop an advancing Israeli military bulldozer.
The young American's intention was to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah refugee camp, close to the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Scores of homes had already been crushed; Corrie was one of eight American and British volunteers acting as human shields for local families.
"She was standing on top of a pile of earth," said fellow activist and eyewitness Richard Purssell, from Brighton, at the time. "The driver cannot have failed to see her. As the blade pushed the pile, the earth rose up. Rachel slid down the pile. It looks as if her foot got caught. The driver didn't slow down; he just ran over her. Then he reversed the bulldozer back over her again."
The question of whether the driver of the Caterpillar D9R bulldozer saw the young woman in the orange jacket, and drove deliberately at and over her, has been at the centre of the Corrie family's decade-long battle for accountability and justice.
On Tuesday that struggle is set to culminate when an Israeli court gives its verdict in a civil lawsuit that the family have brought against the state of Israel.
An Israeli Defence Forces investigation has already found that its forces were not to blame and that the bulldozer driver had not seen the activist. No charges were brought and the case was closed. The IDF report concluded: "Rachel Corrie was not run over by an engineering vehicle but rather was struck by a hard object, most probably a slab of concrete which was moved or slid down while the mound of earth which she was standing behind was moved." Corrie and other International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activists were accused by the investigators of "illegal, irresponsible and dangerous" behaviour.
But witness accounts gathered in Rafah in the aftermath of Corrie's death on 16 March 2003 suggest little doubt as to what happened. According to Tom Dale, from Lichfield in Staffordshire: "the bulldozer went towards her very slowly, she was fully in clear view, straight in front of them".
Corrie tried to scramble on top of the earth being pushed into a mound by the bulldozer blades. "Unfortunately she couldn't keep her grip there and she started to slip down. You could see she was in serious trouble, there was panic in her face as she was turning around. All the activists there were screaming, running towards the bulldozer, trying to get them to stop. But they just kept on going," Dale said. The incident lasted around six or seven seconds.
Corrie was taken by a Red Crescent ambulance to the Najar hospital, arriving at the emergency room at 5.05pm. She was still alive – just. At 5.20pm she was declared dead. It was, the Israeli military said later that day, a "very regrettable accident".
Rachel Corrie had arrived in the Holy Land on January 22, a young woman brimming with idealism, anger at injustice, and a determination to make a difference, however small.
She had volunteered for the ISM, an organisation of pro-Palestinian activists who engage in direct action against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
After two days of training workshops, Corrie headed for Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. In early 2003, Israeli troops, tanks and armoured vehicles were a daily presence in Rafah and other cities. Snipers were stationed in watchtowers; helicopters and military planes buzzed in the skies.
The second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, had begun more than two years before, and suicide bombers were being regularly despatched from Gaza and the West Bank to cause death and destruction in Israel.
Death and destruction was also a feature of life in Gaza. Corrie was shocked by what she saw. "No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just cannot imagine it unless you see it," she wrote in one of her many emails to family and friends at home in Olympia, Washington state, on 7 February.
Three weeks later, she told her mother, Cindy, in an email: "I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I'm really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it's a good idea for all of us to drop everything and devote our lives to making it stop... Disbelief and horror is what I feel."
Corrie and other ISM activists in Rafah were mainly engaged in trying to obstruct house demolitions being carried out by the IDF, which said the targeted homes were suspected of sheltering militants or concealing the entrances to tunnels dug under the border with Egypt to facilitate the smuggling of weapons and explosives. The activists said the demolitions were collective punishment for the actions of a minority of militants.
The presence of international activists was a nuisance for the IDF, but the military was not to be deterred. "During war there are no civilians," an IDF training officer later told Haifa district court during a hearing into the Corrie family's civil lawsuit, implying that militants, Palestinian civilians and international activists were all legitimate targets.
A Israeli military spokesman described ISM activists as "a group of protesters who were acting very irresponsibly, putting everyone in danger — the Palestinians, themselves and our forces — by intentionally placing themselves in a combat zone."
But Corrie's death caused an outcry far greater than that of any Palestinian. According to the Observer, nine Palestinians, including a girl, 4, and 90-year-old man, were killed on the same day. But inevitably the death of young American woman made headlines around the world and caused serious diplomatic reverberations.
The next day, Israel's then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, promised US president George W Bush that Israel would conduct a "thorough, credible and transparent" investigation into the incident.
Corrie's body was taken by the Israeli authorities to the National Centre of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, where an autopsy was conducted. No report was published but, according to Human Rights Watch, the conclusion was that death was caused by "pressure on the chest ... with fractures of the ribs and vertebrae ... and tear wounds in the right lung with haemorrhaging of the pleural cavities".
The Corrie family was not satisfied with the IDF report. Seven years after their daughter's death, in March 2010, they launched a civil case against the state of Israel, accusing its military of either unlawfully or intentionally killing Corrie or of gross negligence. It was, said the family, "absolutely our last resort".
Sporadic hearings dragged on for 18 months. The court heard testimony from four ISM activists who witnessed the incident, but a Gaza doctor who examined Corrie's wounds was refused an entry permit to Israel to give evidence.
The driver of the bulldozer, whose identity has not been made public, testified from behind a screen for "security reasons". He repeatedly insisted that the first time he saw the activist was when she was already dying: "I didn't see her before the incident. I saw people pulling the body out from under the earth."
When the hearings ended in July last year, Corrie's mother Cindy said the family was "at this moment in much the same place as we were when they began – up against a wall of Israeli officials determined to protect the state at all costs, including at the expense of truth."
Last week, back in Israel for the verdict in the civil lawsuit, Cindy told the Guardian the ruling would be "a milestone" in the family's long battle for justice and accountability. "The lawsuit is only one part of what we've done. There has still been no 'thorough, credible and transparent' investigation into Rachel's death. Whatever happens, this is not the end."
Rachel Corrie's mother: 'I know this won't be the end'
Cindy Corrie has battled Israel for justice ever since her activist daughter Rachel was killed in Gaza in 2003. On the eve of a lawsuit verdict, she says her fight will carry on
Harriet Sherwood
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 August 2012
The news that would turn Cindy Corrie's life inside out came around noon on a Sunday in March 2003. She was at home, then in Charlotte, North Carolina, when the phone rang.
"The apartment was kind of a mess, there were papers all over the place, and Craig [her husband] was doing the laundry," she recalls in a soft, hesitant voice. On the line was her son-in-law Kelly Simpson, but Cindy could hear her elder daughter Sarah "crying, just hysterical" in the background. They had bad news, Kelly said.
"At that point Sarah got on the phone and said: 'It's Rachel.' The first words that came out of my mouth were: 'Is she dead?' I guess I just had to articulate the worst possibility. And Sarah said: 'We think so.'"
Sarah and Kelly had picked up a phone message from a neighbour in the family's home town of Olympia, Washington State, conveying sympathy after hearing about "the tragedy" on television. They turned on their TV set to find, scrolling across the bottom of the screen, the words: "Olympia activist killed in Gaza Strip."
"Sarah thought: if it's Rachel, why haven't Mum and Dad called me? Then she thought: they don't know." Still holding the phone, Cindy walked across a car park to where her husband was, in the apartment block's laundry room. "You can't soften something like that. I said: 'It's Sarah and Kelly, and they say Rachel's dead.'"
Rachel Corrie, 23, had been crushed under an Israeli military bulldozer while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah, at the southernmost end of the Gaza Strip. According to witnesses, the bulldozer's driver had driven straight at her, then reversed over her, even though she was clearly in his line of vision.
Rachel was a volunteer for the pro-Palestinian direct action organisation the International Solidarity Movement and the youngest of the Corrie's three children. Her death propelled her family into an almost decade-long battle for accountability and justice. What Cindy describes as "a milestone" in that fight will come on Tuesday, when a court in Haifa hands down its verdict in a two-and-a-half year civil lawsuit brought by the Corries against the state of Israel.
"If you had told me 10 years ago that this would happen to us, and I'd do any of the things I have done since that time, that any of us would, I'd say you're crazy – I won't even breathe again," says Cindy. "Always for parents there's that dread of something happening to a child. I don't even know how to describe how we got through those first minutes and hours."
Rachel Corrie Rachel Corrie died trying to stop an Israeli army bulldozer from destroying Palestinian houses in Rafah in 2003. Photograph: Denny Sternstein/AP
Rachel was born on 10 April 1979, five years younger than her sister Sarah, and seven years younger than her brother Chris. Asked what Rachel was like, Cindy pauses. "It's kind of a sad question. You try to hold on to all the memories, but you realise there are things that you lose. Sometimes it's hard to remember."
But these are some of the ways she describes her daughter: inquisitive, with a rich inner life; creative; an intense observer; an artist; a sympathetic listener; expressive; a constant doodler; able to connect with different people; a poet. "I always thought that when she came through the front door as an adult, you just knew it was going to be interesting."
The Corries lived in Olympia, a small community centred round the progressive liberal Evergreen State College, which Rachel later attended. Cindy describes the town as "politically and environmentally aware", much like the Corries themselves. "As a family we were certainly always politically interested, with a lot of discussion going on, but we were not activists, not protesters."
Cindy, now 64, the oldest of six siblings, grew up in a "very conservative Lutheran" household, but describes her own immediate family as "spiritual" rather than church-going. They were "middle-income – we lived really quite modestly, we were pretty frugal people". Cindy had rarely been outside the US, certainly never to Europe or the Middle East.
By early 2003, Craig Corrie had taken a job in North Carolina, and the couple moved to Charlotte, although always with the intention of returning to their home base in Olympia. "Like a lot of families, we had just been trying to get our kids through college, and finally we were free of that responsibility. It was like when we were first married – we could decide what to do with our time."
They hiked in the Appalachian mountains, took driving trips, saw movies. Cindy learned French and played the flute. "I'm really grateful for that time. It was a quiet time before this really intense period that came after. We spent a lot of time thinking about how we were going to spend the years ahead. It was a pleasant interlude."
Back in Olympia, following 9/11, their younger daughter was becoming drawn into the burgeoning peace movement and beginning to explore the reasons behind the atrocity. "That drew her to Israel and Palestine as at least part of the problem," says Cindy.
As for her parents, "it wasn't that we weren't interested [in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict], but I think we were just very distanced from it. We knew about it in the way that most Americans did, by listening to news reports. Our sympathies were very much with the Israeli Jewish narrative, because that's what we knew. I read The Diary of Anne Frank to my kids when they were growing up, and that was the narrative we connected with – and the Palestinian narrative really didn't exist for us."
But Rachel decided to volunteer as an activist for the Palestinian cause. At the time, the second intifada (uprising) against the Israeli occupation was under way, with an escalating cycle of violence from both sides: frequent suicide bombings carried out by Palestinian militants, and incursions, shootings, shellings and demolitions by the Israeli military.
"It felt a little unnerving," says Cindy. "At first we hoped it wouldn't happen. But Rachel was 23 years old, and was very much making her own decisions, as we thought she should. We had always supported our kids in whatever steps they wanted to take. Some people say: 'Why did you let her go?' That was not ever something I felt was my role."
Cindy began learning about the Middle East: reading, watching films, discussing the issues with her daughter. Once Rachel had arrived in the Gaza Strip, her frequent emails home, describing what she was seeing and experiencing, illuminated what had been a distant conflict. "They brought us a view, a perspective, that we had never seen before," says Cindy.
The couple were anxious, but not unduly so. Rachel called soon after arriving in Rafah, asking her parents if they could hear the sound of shelling in the background. "I could hear her voice trembling. Craig and I carried our anxiety with us." Cindy spoke to her daughter again, six days before her death. "She sounded really happy."
Then, on 16 March 2003, came that terrible phone call, "the worst moment of my life". Cindy "stumbled through" the following hours, days and weeks, feeling physically ill. "I couldn't sleep. I would drift off, then feel jolts of pain through my arms. And then there was that thing of going to sleep and then waking up and finding that it is a nightmare but it's real and it's always there every day."
Rachel Corrie in front of an Israeli army bulldozer at Rafah, 16 March 2003 Rachel in front of an Israeli army bulldozer at Rafah on 16 March 2003, the day she was killed. Photograph: Getty Images
Immediately, intuitively, Cindy "knew we had to get her words out. I knew how important that was to her, and I knew what the impact had been on family and friends. She wanted to find ways for people to hear about what she was seeing."
The family released Rachel's emails to the media. "It was the Guardian that picked them up very quickly, and it was huge, very significant. All kinds of things came from that." Rachel's powerful writing was adapted into an acclaimed stage play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, performed in at least 10 countries, including Israel. It was also published in book form, Let Me Stand Alone.
Meanwhile, the day after Rachel's death, then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon promised then US president George W Bush a "thorough, credible and transparent" investigation into Rachel's death. Less than a month later, an internal inquiry by the Israeli military concluded that its forces were not to blame. The driver of the bulldozer had not seen Rachel before she was crushed beneath the vehicle, it said. No charges were brought and the case was closed.
The Corries' battle for justice has dominated their lives for close to a decade. They found themselves "up against a wall of Israeli officials determined to protect the state at all costs, including at the expense of truth", as they said in a statement last summer.
They learned how to campaign, deal with the media, assess legal documents, challenge authority and harness the support of their government whenever possible. Eventually – their "absolutely last resort" – in March 2010 they sued the state of Israel over Rachel's death, accusing its military of either unlawfully or intentionally killing her, or of gross negligence. "The demands of the lawsuit have been huge," says Cindy. "In some ways, we were naive, coming from the United States, where it's unusual for a trial not to be over within a few weeks."
In the past two and a half years, the Corries have spent a total of eight months in Israel, broken into short visits to coincide with the sporadic hearings. Now, Cindy says, "I'm just relieved to be at this point and, no matter what happens, we'll be at the other side.
"It's very unpredictable. We believe we know what should happen, but we also know what the state [of Israel] has to say. We'll have a verdict, and then we'll determine how to respond. But we know this won't be the end."
Apart from justice for Rachel, the Corries are also committed to justice for the Palestinians. Six months after Rachel's death, Cindy and Craig finally visited Gaza, and the house their daughter was trying to protect from demolition. There have been subsequent visits to Gaza, and Cindy hopes there will be more in the future. The family have made many friends from Gaza, including the occupants of the house, the Nasrallah family, whose home was finally razed in the spring of 2004. Cindy says she now has a "deeper sense of what injustice means".
"Craig and I have been so blessed because Rachel gave us this opportunity to focus here. There's no end to the work that can be done around this issue, and other peace and justice issues. If, miraculously, the Israeli-Palestinian situation could be fixed, there'll be something else that could command and deserve attention."
But, she adds: "I know realistically I have to find a way to get more balance in my life than I have now. I look at the weeds in my yard and I think about how much I'd love to go out and work there for an hour every day. I hardly cook any more. I'd like to make some time for those kinds of things."
The verdict in the lawsuit, she says, is part of a process, "one piece of what we've done. In terms of what happened to Rachel and the accountability that we're seeking, the process has shown there are huge problems here [in Israel] in investigations and the legal system. There continue to be things that need to be discussed, exposed and addressed."
"Closure" is not something Cindy is expecting. "Closure isn't the right word. In my mind, it suggests that there's an end to something, and I just don't see that happening.
"The loss, the void, is permanent. You feel it every day of your life," she says slowly, hesitantly. "What happened to Rachel will never be OK, but I feel pretty at peace with where I am. All you ever do is take the next breath and the next step. I'm still just taking the next step, but you get to the point where it's OK to do that."
Israeli court rejects US activist's family lawsuit
http://news.yahoo.com/israeli-court-rej ... 13320.html
HAIFA, Israel (AP) — An Israeli court ruled Tuesday that the military was not at fault for killing a U.S. activist crushed by an army bulldozer during a 2003 demonstration, rejecting a lawsuit filed by her parents.
The bulldozer driver has said he didn't see 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist who was trying to block the vehicle's path during a demonstration in the Gaza Strip against the military's demolition of Palestinian homes.
The military deemed her March 2003 death an accident, but Corrie's parents said the driver acted recklessly and filed a civil lawsuit two years later.
Explaining the district court's ruling, Judge Oded Gershon said Corrie "put herself in a dangerous situation" and called her death "the result of an accident she brought upon herself." He said the military conducted a proper investigation and rejected the Corrie family's request for a symbolic $1 in damages and legal expenses.
Corrie's family, who flew in from the U.S. for the verdict, lamented the court's ruling.
"We are of course, deeply saddened and deeply troubled by what we heard today," said her mother, Cindy Corrie of Olympia, Washington. "I believe this was a bad day. Not only for our family but for human rights, the rule of law, and also for the country of Israel."
The family said it was strongly considering an appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court, but wanted to read the full verdict before making a final decision.
Corrie's sister, Sarah, held up a picture of her sister lying lifeless in bulldozer tracks. The family's lawyer, Hussein Abu Hussein pointed at it: "How did the bulldozer not see her?" he asked. To say that the driver did not see her "is lies to the living and also lies to the dead."
Following the verdict, the Israeli state prosecutor's office called Corrie's death a "tragic accident" but noted the court exonerated the military of "any blame for negligence." It said it had presented three investigations that found the driver could not have seen Corrie, and noted that the driver acted in a "a military action in the course of war."
"The work was done while exercising maximum caution and prudence and without the ability to foresee harming anyone," it said.
The home demolitions were part of an unsuccessful campaign to halt thousands of attacks on soldiers and Jewish settlers in southern Gaza, along the border with Egypt, in the preceding 3 ½ years. On the day Rachel Corrie died, she and other activists had entered a closed military zone to protest the demolition policy.
According to the U.N. agency handling Palestinian refugees, the military had left more than 17,000 Gazans homeless in the four years after a Palestinian uprising against Israel erupted in September 2000. The demolitions drew international condemnation at the time.
In her death, Corrie became the embodiment of what Palestinian activists say is Israel's harsh repression of nonviolent protest to occupation. Israel says by entering conflict zones to try to interfere with military activities, activists recklessly choose to risk their lives.
Her parents have relentlessly pursued her case since going to court in 2005 after a military investigation cleared the driver.
They say they have spent $200,000 to fly in witnesses, attend 15 hearings and translate more than 2,000 pages of court transcripts.
At the news conference, Cindy Corrie read a passage from one of her daughter's letters, biting her lip as her husband, grim-faced, held a microphone for her.
"Life is very difficult. Human beings can be kind, brave and strong, even in the most difficult of circumstances," Rachel Corrie wrote. "Thank you for existing, for showing how good people can be, despite great hardship."
The Corrie case was the first civil lawsuit of a foreigner harmed by Israel's military to conclude in a full civilian trial. Others have resulted in out-of-court settlements.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Israel has failed to carry out the "thorough, credible and transparent investigation" it had promised into the death of American activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza nine years ago, the US ambassador in Tel Aviv has reiterated to her family.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ate-crimes
How the US and Israeli justice systems whitewash state crimes
Courts are supposed to check the abuse of executive power, not cravenly serve it. But in the US and Israel, that is now the case
Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 August 2012
A YouTube video still showing US marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan.
The US military announced on Monday that no criminal charges would be brought against the US marines in Afghanistan who videotaped themselves urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. Nor, the military announced, would any criminal charges be filed against the US troops who "tried to burn about 500 copies of the Qur'an as part of a badly bungled security sweep at an Afghan prison in February, despite repeated warnings from Afghan soldiers that they were making a colossal mistake".
In doing so, the US military, as usual, brushed aside demands of Afghan officials for legal accountability for the destructive acts of foreign soldiers in their country. The US instead imposed "disciplinary measures" in both cases, ones that "could include letters of reprimand, a reduction in rank, forfeit of some pay, physical restriction to a military base, extra duties or some combination of those measures". Both incidents triggered intense protests and rioting that left dozens dead, back in February this year.
Parallel to that, an Israeli judge Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit against the Israeli government brought by the family of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American student and pro-Palestinian activist who was killed by a military bulldozer in 2003 as she protested the demolition of a house in Gaza whose family she had come to befriend. Upon learning of the suit's dismissal, Corrie's mother, Cindy, said:
"I believe this was a bad day, not only for our family, but for human rights, humanity, the rule of law and also for the country of Israel."
Despite Corrie's wearing a bright orange vest, Judge Oded Gershon, in a 62-page decision, ruled that the bulldozer driver did not see her and her death was thus an accident. He went on to heap blame on Corrie for her own killing, arguing that, contrary to what "any reasonable person would have done", she "chose to put herself in danger" by trying to impede "a military activity meant to prevent terrorist activity".
The commonality in all three of these episodes is self-evident: the perversion of the justice system and rule of law as nothing more than a weapon to legitimize even the most destructive state actions, while severely punishing those who oppose them. The US and its loyal thinktank scholars have long demanded that other states maintain an "independent judiciary" as one of the key ingredients for living under the rule of law. But these latest episodes demonstrate, yet again, that the judiciary in the US, along with the one in its prime Middle East client state, is anything but "independent": its primary function is to shield government actors from accountability.
The US military has continuously imposed pitifully light "punishments" on its soldiers even for the most heinous atrocities. The wanton slaughter of two dozen civilians in Haditha, Iraq and the severe and even lethal torture of Afghan detainees generated, at worst, shockingly short jail time for the killers and, usually, little more than letters of reprimand.
Contrast this tepid, reluctant wrist-slapping for the brutal crimes of occupying soldiers with what a UN investigation found was the US government's "cruel and inhuman treatment" of Bradley Manning before he was convicted of anything. Manning has been imprisoned for more than two years now without having been found guilty of any crimes – already longer than any of the perpetrators of these fatal abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. He faces life in prison at the age of 23 for the alleged "crime" of disclosing to the world overwhelming evidence of corruption, deceit and illegality on the part of the world's most powerful factions: disclosures that helped thwart the Obama administration's efforts to keep US troops in Iraq, and which, as even WikiLeaks' harshest critics acknowledge, played some substantial role in helping to spark the Arab spring.
Notably, the first disclosure for which Manning was allegedly responsible – the videotape of an Apache helicopter gunning down unarmed Reuters journalists and then the rescuers who came to help the wounded, including two young children – resulted in zero accountability: the US military exonerated everyone involved. Instead, it is Manning, the person accused of exposing these crimes, who is punished as the real criminal.
And herein lies the real function of the American justice system, clearly revealed time and again. It is to protect high-level actors from accountability even for the most egregious of crimes, while severely punishing those who reveal or take a stand against those crimes, thus deterring and intimidating any future opposition.
That is the mentality that has led the Obama department of justice to aggressively shield all Bush officials from any and all accountability for their torture and surveillance crimes, while launching an unprecedented persecution campaign against whistleblowers. As always in US justice, the "real" criminals are those who alert the world to high-level crimes, not those who commit them. That is why the only person to suffer any repercussions from the Bush NSA eavesdropping scandal was Thomas Tamm: the mid-level DOJ lawyer who learned of the illegal program and alerted the New York Times about it. Those who authorized those crimes have been fully shielded from any form of punishment.
It is this same mentality that has led the US federal judiciary to produce the most disgraceful political fact of the last decade. Not a single victim of America's "war on terror" abuses – even those now acknowledged by the US government to have been completely innocent – have been allowed even to have their cases heard in an American court on the merits. They've all had the courthouse doors slammed shut in the faces by courts that have accepted the US government's claims that its own secrecy powers and immunity rights bar any such justice. Crimes committed by the state or in advancement of its agenda are simply immune from the rule of law in the US.
The same exploitation of the justice system is glaringly evident in the Rachel Corrie travesty. As the Guardian's former Israel (and now Washington) correspondent Chris McGreal writes, the dismissal of this suit is simply a by-product of the "virtual impunity for Israeli troops no matter who they killed or in what circumstances". That's because Israeli courts, like American courts, have submissively accepted the supreme fiction of both governments: anyone impeding government actions is a terrorist or terrorist-enabler who gets what they deserve, while the actions of the state, no matter how savage, can never be anything other than legitimate.
Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother, said after the verdict that Israel "employed a 'well-heeled system' to protect its soldiers and provide them with immunity". Indeed, the Israeli "investigation" into Corrie's death has been such a laughable whitewash that even the US ambassador to Israel last week told the Corrie family that he "did not believe the Israeli military investigation had been 'thorough, credible and transparent', as had been promised by Israel." All of this, writes McGreal, shows how "covering up the truth about the killings of innocents, including Corrie, became an important part of the survival strategy because of the damage the truth could do to the military's standing, not only in the rest of the world but also among Israelis."
As I noted on Sunday, it is expected, inevitable, that those who wield political power will abuse it for corrupt and self-serving ends. That is why there are institutions designed to check and combat that abuse. The rule of law, and an independent judiciary applying it, is ostensibly one of those institutions. But – like establishment media outlets and most academics – this justice system now does the opposite: it is merely another weapon used to legitimize crimes by the powerful and crush those who oppose them.
All three of this week's travesties, in the US and in Israel, are hardly surprising. To the contrary, they are the inevitable by-products of societies that recruit every institution in service of defending even the most wanton abuses by the state.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/27/us-usa-afghanistan-idUSBRE87Q0PP20120827
The fact that the world and our so called voices can praise the Pussy Riot and have to ask who is Rachel Corrie is a damning reflection of how our value system works. How long does the WORLD have to do penance for the Holocaust? Didn’t Rachel have the right to exist?
it is ironic that the people who know what it is like to be persecuted have the audacity to do it to another ethnic group. it's quite sad actually. i would think they would know better than that.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
'The administrative punishments -- which could include things like reduce rank or forfeiture of pay -- fell short of criminal prosecution, and it was unclear whether they would satisfy Afghan demands for justice.'
Rachel Corrie verdict exposes Israeli military mindset
Corrie's parents have not received justice, but their quest reveals the lie of the IDF's claim to be the world's 'most moral army'
Chris McGreal
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 August 2012
Reporters covering Israel are routinely confronted with the question: why not call Hamas a terrorist organisation? It's a fair point. How else to describe blowing up families on buses but terrorism?
But the difficulty lies in what then to call the Israeli army when it, too, at particular times and places, has used indiscriminate killing and terror as a means of breaking Palestinian civilians. One of those places was Rafah, in the southern tip of the Gaza strip, where Rachel Corrie was crushed by a military bulldozer nine years ago as she tried to stop the Israeli army going about its routine destruction of Palestinian homes.
An Israeli judge on Tuesday perpetuated the fiction that Corrie's death was a terrible accident and upheld the results of the military's own investigation, widely regarded as such a whitewash that even the US ambassador to Israel described it as neither thorough nor credible. Corrie's parents may have failed in their attempt to see some justice for their daughter, but in their struggle they forced a court case that established that her death was not arbitrary but one of a pattern of killings as the Israeli army pursued a daily routine of attacks intended to terrorise the Palestinian population of southern Gaza into submission.
The case laid bare the state of the collective Israeli military mind, which cast the definition of enemies so widely that children walking down the street were legitimate targets if they crossed a red line that was invisible to everyone but the soldiers looking at it on their maps. The military gave itself a blanket protection by declaring southern Gaza a war zone, even though it was heavily populated by ordinary Palestinians, and set rules of engagement so broad that just about anyone was a target.
With that went virtual impunity for Israeli troops no matter who they killed or in what circumstances – an impunity reinforced by Tuesday's verdict in Haifa.
The Israeli military commander in southern Gaza at the time was Colonel Pinhas "Pinky" Zuaretz. A few weeks after Corrie's death, I (as the Guardian's correspondent in Israel) spoke to him about how it was that so many children were shot by Israeli soldiers at times when there was no combat. His explanation was chilling.
At that point, three years into the second intifada, more than 400 children had been killed by the Israeli army. Nearly half were in Rafah and neighbouring Khan Yunis. One in four were under the age of 12.
I focused on the deaths of six children in a 10-week period, all in circumstances far from combat. The dead included a 12-year-old girl, Haneen Abu Sitta, killed in Rafah as she walked home from school near a security fence around one of the fortified Jewish settlements in Gaza at the time. The army made up an explanation by falsely claiming Haneen was killed during a gun battle between Israeli forces and Palestinians.
Zuaretz conceded to me that there was no battle and that the girl was shot by a soldier who had no business opening fire. It was the same with the killings of some of the other children. The colonel was fleetingly remorseful.
"Every name of a child here, it makes me feel bad because it's the fault of my soldiers. I need to learn and see the mistakes of my troops," he said. But Zuaretz was not going to do anything about it; and by the end of the interview, he was casting the killings as an unfortunate part of the struggle for Israel's very survival.
"I remember the Holocaust. We have a choice, to fight the terrorists or to face being consumed by the flames again," he said.
In court, Zuaretz said the whole of southern Gaza was a combat zone and anyone who entered parts of it had made themselves a target. But those parts included houses where Palestinians built walls within walls in their homes to protect themselves from Israeli bullets.
In that context, covering up the truth about the killings of innocents, including Corrie, became an important part of the survival strategy because of the damage the truth could do to the military's standing, not only in the rest of the world but also among Israelis.
The death of Khalil al-Mughrabi two years before Corrie died was telling. The 11-year-old boy was playing football when he was shot dead in Rafah by an Israeli soldier. The respected Israeli human rights organisations, B'Tselem, wrote to the army demanding an investigation. Several months later, the judge advocate general's office wrote back saying that Khalil was killed by soldiers who had acted with "restraint and control" to disperse a riot in the area.
But the judge advocate general's office made the mistake of attaching a copy of its own confidential investigation, which came to a very different conclusion: that the riot had been much earlier in the day and the soldiers who shot the child should not have opened fire. In the report, the chief military prosecutor, Colonel Einat Ron, then spelled out alternative false scenarios that should be offered to B'Tselem. The official account was a lie and the army knew it.
The message to ordinary soldiers was clear: you have a free hand because the military will protect you to protect itself. It is that immunity from accountability that was the road to Corrie's death.
She wasn't the only foreign victim at about that time. In the following months, Israeli soldiers shot dead James Miller, a British television documentary journalist, and Tom Hurndall, a British photographer and pro-Palestinian activist. In November 2002, an Israeli sniper had killed a British United Nations worker, Iain Hook, in Jenin in the West Bank.
British inquests returned verdicts of unlawful killings in all three deaths, but Israel rejected calls for the soldiers who killed Miller and Hook to be held to account. The Israeli military initially whitewashed Hurndall's killing but after an outcry led by his parents, and British government pressure, the sniper who shot him was sentenced to eight years in prison for manslaughter.
That sentence apparently did nothing to erode a military mindset that sees only enemies.
Three years after Corrie's death, an Israeli army officer who emptied the magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl, Iman al-Hams, and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was cleared by a military court.
Iman was shot and wounded after crossing the invisible red line around an Israeli military base in Rafah, but she was never any closer than 100 yards. The officer then left the base in order to "confirm the kill" by pumping the wounded girl full of bullets. An Israeli military investigation concluded he had acted properly.
Tuesday's court verdict in Haifa will have done nothing to end that climate of impunity. Nor anything that would have us believe that Israel's repeated proclamation that it has the "most moral army in the world" is any more true than its explanation of so many Palestinian deaths.
The poison from the poison stream caught up to you ELEVEN years ago and you floated out of here. Sept. 14, 08
Are you drunk? Your post makes no sense. I suggest you sober up and in the morning you can try and comprehend the gibberish you just posted.
Wow, really dude? Fuck, what, you have no compassion?? Compassion, something you can never question when it comes to rachel. I don't give a fuck about what religion any of you are, this woman gave her life for a people who just want to be recognized as a human race. Period.
they should have known that they were not going to get an admission of wrongdoing. the court system is stacked against them.
where was the trial held? does anyone know?
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Haifa, Israel.
All of the above posts expressing anger over the court"s decision make the assumption that the court clearly came to the wrong conclusion. How do any of you know that to be the case? The fact that you are all so sure that the court is wrong (without, I assume, having yourselves had access to any of the evidence) suggests to me that you all don't really have very much respect for how the legal system works, i.e. we don't pre-judge guilt.
As for the court system whitewashing government action, the Israeli Supreme Court (which is not the deciding court in this case, but it goes to the point) actually has a pretty impressive history of opposing government action, much more so than American courts, which have a history of treating national security issues as the exclusive purview of the executive and the legislature, and therefore an area to be avoided (I'm in law school at the moment, and actually studying how courts deal with national security cases). The Israeli Supreme Court, in contrast, especially under Chief Justice Barak, was very assertive in addressing such cases, and very often ruled against the government (for example, ruling against the government in a case that banned physical means of interrogation, even in "ticking bomb" scenarios, or refusing to give the government a blanket ruling that targeted killings were in all cases legal).
In terms of the court "blaming" Corrie for her own death, I read the court's decision a little differently. The court was faced with a legal question having to do with liability in tort law. The court's discussion of Corrie's actions, I think, are therefore about a negligence/recklessness/contributory-negligence analysis, which is a legal, not a moral, analysis. In essence what I think the court is saying is that without passing judgment on Corrie's ethical and moral character (which I personally think was pretty high) her actions, in knowingly entering a closed military zone, were reckless (in a strictly legal sense).
Ok, sorry for sidetracking all the righteous anger. Carry on...