Hmm, I seem to recall US Intelligence swearing that Saddam Hussein definitely had WMDs and was definitely about to use them on his own people and we definitely needed to invade Iraq to stop him. US Intelligence is not a fact or truth seeking operation; its purpose is to further American imperial interests all else be damned.
Hasn't the IDF been in control of the hospital for like a month, and are yet to produce any evidence (those 3 rifles and the calendar don't count)?
They kidnapped the hospital director and tortured him until he confessed that he was Hamas. That's way better than video and photo evidence of the huge base they claimed was underneath the hospital.
Look at this cool video of this 3d animation the IDF made before they started attacking the hospital. That looks more realistic than real life. In fact it looks so realistic that actual video footage wouldn't do these tunnels justice. Which is why the IDF isn't providing it.
They also insisted for years that a baby formula factory was a chemical weapons plant.
They also reaffirmed and spread the hoax of the beheaded babies, even when the IDF had already denied it.
To be fair, they also said Russia was about to invade Ukraine and no one believed them.
It's hard to believe someone's telling the truth if they lied about almost everything else.
Hopefully they're giving real intel to the decision makers, but anything released to the public is intended for influence purposes. Nothing in their mission requires or even encourages telling the general public true things.
They gave the wmd 'intel' to lawmakers who were then pressured into supporting the illegal US invasion of Iraq.
Not much has changed since then. Hell, the Afghanistan Papers detailed how everyone in the intelligence community knew the war was a lost cause, but it still came as a shock to most law makers.
That's not quite on point. The IC wants the facts. What the political leadership do with those facts is a whole different thing.
One does not really need US intelligence's confirmation to undestand that the use of human shields is standard operating procedure for islamistic terrorists. It's not that they don't care about their own citizens but they simply don't see getting martyred as a bad thing. Quite the opposite.
To me it comes down to a strategic approach. In how many ways is it possible for Hamas to actually hurt Israel in a significant way? Not very many, even thousands of civilians dead doesn't genuinely weaken the country much. But they can make Israel hurt themselves, by basically making them go evil and lose their allies.
Similar to how Bin Laden very much succeeded in his goals for the Sept 11th attack, by getting us to pass the Patriot Act, invade some countries and start ripping ourselves apart imo.
Regardless, arguing this position on here is going to be like trying to swim up a waterfall. Israel has gone too far, and the hate against them is too strong because of that. The middle of a war is not the time for nuance.
edit for a qualifier
Similar to how Bin Laden very much succeeded in his goals for the Sept 11th attack, by getting us to pass the Patriot Act, invade some countries and start ripping ourselves apart.
Bin Laden's goals were to get Americans to replace their government with one that would get out of the Arabian peninsula and stop supporting Israel. He consummately failed.
Not sure why someone would believe a fighter when they say why they fight. It's not like propaganda is unique to western countries or something. It's everywhere. It's a tool that creates effects, you think he's above using it or something?
getting us to pass the Patriot Act, invade some countries and start ripping ourselves apart.
This assessment of al Qaeda's goals I have only ever heard from Western propaganda and the popular consciousness, not any serious attempt to analyse them. While bin Laden's statements could be lies (more relevant than whether they're propaganda, which can be true), I think it makes more sense to take his word for his own motivations than what amounts to nothing more than the popular Western view of his motivations, filtered through years of our own media. Of course there may be some serious analysis of his goals somewhere I haven't read - feel free to point me at it. It should come along with some reason not to believe his own explanation though.
I'm skeptical that it exists though, because this understanding of his goals essentially denies that he has any goals beyond hurting America: it's "they hate us because we are free." But bin Laden laid out perfectly clearly that his hatred of America developed from seeing Muslims killed in attacks which were enabled by American intervention - something which I see no reason to cast doubt on, and as such see no reason to doubt his explanation.
It makes zero sense though. No people on Earth would just go "oh welp, guess we better go home now."
Do we seem hesitant to kill people to you?
How does it not make sense? One way of achieving your aims is making it very costly for the people blocking those aims to continue doing so.
No people on Earth would just go “oh welp, guess we better go home now.”
Conflicts often end in a negotiated peace where neither side has been conclusively defeated, often indeed amounting to "welp, we'd better go home now." The cost to the US military in Vietnam turned public opinion against the war until it became politically unsustainable.
More broadly, this attitude inevitably leads to post-hoc cynicism, where you look at someone who failed to achieve their stated goals, conclude in hindsight that they made no sense and that they therefore couldn't ever possibly have believed sincerely in them.
If it really made zero sense, it would make zero sense to use as propaganda. The fact that it makes enough sense that you believe bin Laden even used it to convince others means you accept that people could believe it. It's not unreasonable to think that bin Laden was smarter than the people following him, but you haven't done the work to show he couldn't believe it.
Propaganda is a quantity game, it can make anywhere from no sense to complete sense, because different messages will be received differently by different people.
The Sept 11th attack was not a piece of some greater war. It was a declaration to an unsuspecting people, very few of us had any expectation that something like that would happen. I can understand when the Japanese made the mistake in 1941, but its much less understandable now. It's certainly no Vietnam, which didn't end until we had lost large numbers for many years. Comparing that to an expectation that a surprise attack on our civilians would have similar effects is simply ridiculous.
America is a box of hornets. It was still, and got kicked. No other possibility was even remotely likely to anybody that knows anything about us. He couldn't have been that totally and completely ignorant.
To the contrary, it is far more likely he was an intelligent adversary that researched and understood his opponents, and struck effectively. I simply find that far more plausible than him being a fool that wanted a quicker way to get him and his organization to heaven, and otherwise failed miserably.
edit for some sloppy wording
So, the only reason you have for not believing bin Laden's stated goals is that, you assert, it was too obviously impossible to achieve them.
You haven't presented any reason he instead must have wanted to cause the USA to sacrifice domestic freedoms as a motivation. What about all other possible motivations? Why that one? It seems like it doesn't do bin Laden any good for that to happen. Instead it seems like it's how an American, unable to understand the world through any lens except an American one, might decide bin Laden's motivations must be viewed.
I have at no time asserted it was impossible to drive the US from the Middle East. To the contrary, sowing domestic strife and global overreaction was an excellent first step towards accomplishing that in the long run.
All I'm granting him is an assumption of rationality and long term thinking. I'm not claiming any truth or facts or anything, I cannot read a dead man's mind. But I can look at what happened and draw conclusions with the aid of hindsight, and strongly prefer that over simply trusting his word.
Are you unable to see how we have harmed ourselves since then? How about how Israel is harming themselves right now?
Are you unable to see how we have harmed ourselves since then? How about how Israel is harming themselves right now?
This is just an invitation to commit the post-hoc fallacy.
I’m not claiming any truth or facts or anything
But you said:
Similar to how Bin Laden very much succeeded in his goals
That's an assertion/claim as to what those goals in fact were. And you still haven't found any reason that they included "make the US pass laws which restricted its own civil liberties" other than the fact that that's what eventually happened.
It was literally his manifesto and single demand for two decades.
I don't disagree. Just disagree that his method was as simple and straightforward as people here seem to think, just believing what he's spoon feeding them 100%. He was sophisticated, a leader. Not some simpleton.
As if Americans would just give him what he wants for knocking down a couple skyscrapers. Have you even seen our culture? We shoot each other in our own streets, much less foreign attackers. How people think we could just forego a chance at revenge is just utterly, hilariously wrong in every way.
He believed we would leave because he grew up in a world of Western countries being driven out by anti colonial violence. It's not that complicated. He wasn't a political science guy, or an anthropologist. He was a radicalized construction engineer.
I don't think you need to be an anthropologist to figure out that attacking someone's civilians nearly guarantees counterattack. We still needed the oil out of the region back then to boot.
Shockingly it doesn't. You're also not taking into account his radicalization. Which allows for a lot of irrational beliefs.
That is actually a fair criticism. I simply don't think it's as strong an influence over strategic thinking. In any decent thinker anyway.
To me it comes down to a strategic approach. In how many ways is it possible for Hamas to actually hurt Israel in a significant way?
Perhaps they should have focused on governance instead of martyrdom.
It's a jihadist group. It's not about this life, it's about the next. When you're dealing with a zealot, everything becomes a tool to get to heaven, no matter how evil other people see it.
Look at our evangelicals bending over backwards to support Trump, who is not very Christ-like. If the Prince of Peace came down from heaven today, he would be very angry with his "followers". Might even take his belt off and start swinging, and he didn't get violent very often.
I understand that Gazans made a mistake in 2007, the same way Gazans knew they made a mistake once Hamas canceled elections forever and started torturing dissidents.
There's no reason for people today to copy that mistake by supporting Hamas now.
Well the Palestinians have two options: support Hamas and be bombed by Israel or support Fatah and lose your homes to Israeli settlers.
Israel's clear objective is to genocide all the Palestinians either by killing them all or driving them out of their homes.
Hospitals being a forbidden target is important, civilians dying is not, because they don't care about civilians.
It's sad to see how something intended to become a Jewish nation after 2k years and so on became a dumbed down pidgin version of 1950s' late European colonialism.
To defend that israel does not commit war crimes, I have seen zionists claim that if civilians are used for military purposes (involuntary human shield), they become valid military targets ._.
Could that same argument be applied to army reservists in a country with mandatory military service?
I'd say that arguement is stronger because they had their whole life to prepare not to serve a genocidal army, instead of being made to participiate in war with no choice or warning. If we evaluate both using the metric of Free and Prior Informed Consent we see one is measurably worse.
It's because of the Geneva Convention (origin of the modern concept of war crimes.)
It's designed to be applied mutually, if only one side does then it's basically non-functioning.
Absolutely not. We already had this argument in regards to Iraq and Afghanistan. War crimes are war crimes. You can get away with some of the more esoteric ones for not fighting a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, but slaughtering civilians en masse is a crime full stop.
I understand that many of the humanitarian safeguards and international law can be disadvantageous when only one side gets things right.
But those are important guarantees, they are even used to differentiate the supposedly "good and civilized", if they are discarded every time they are inconvenient, aren't they just dead letter?
Yup. I think there's a difference between the factual claim of whether Hamas has operations on the hospital grounds vs the justification for the type of military action taken against the hospital. I think it is possible to accept there is truth to the Hamas operations center being located there and still condemn the military tactics used against the hospital due to civilian casualties and harm it caused. Unfortunately those 2 things seem to be conflates that acknowledgement of Hamas being there is implicitly condoning Israel's actions.
Saddam’s WMDs were also hidden in the still to appear gigantic, impossible to avoid command centre tunnel network under the hospital.
Would you like a slice of yellow cake?
AP have the most comprehensive coverage of the document, which is not publicly available. Two sections in jump out to me:
“The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident in its judgment on this topic and has independently corroborated information on HAMAS and PIJ’s use of the hospital complex for a variety of purposes related to its campaign against Israel,” the assessment states. It continues that it believes the groups “used the al-Shifa hospital complex and sites beneath it to house command infrastructure, exercise certain command and control activities, store some weapons, and hold at least a few hostages.”
And
The U.S. believes that Hamas members evacuated days before Israel raided the complex on Nov. 15 and that they destroyed sensitive documents and electronics before Israeli troops entered the facility.
And the source of the intelligence is probably Israel itself?
Of course
From the AP article:
U.S. officials had previously pointed to classified intelligence, obtained independently from the Israelis, to offer support for Israel’s raid.
The US and UK (possibly more, I lost track at some point) have been running surveillance flights over Gaza for pretty much the entire duration of the war. There are plenty of eyes on Israel's military operations and ways to gather intelligence inside Gaza.
NYT themselves came to the conclusion that al-Shifa was used for military purposes based on Hamas' own propaganda. It's always been a question of how central it was to Hamas' operations.
That's an editorial. And the bullet list of "evidence" is outdated or irrelevant. The existence of a tunnel means nothing. Every modern hospital in existence has tunnels or basement levels. What was happening a decade or more ago is irrelevant. To strike a protected target you must have timely, well backed, intelligence. Basically you don't do it without a smoking gun like radio direction finding their command frequency to that location, tracking movements of runners, or corroborating stories from prisoners.
Just shrugging and pointing to the terrorist label doesn't meet the requirement.
Lol, it's declassified, but not public. Do words mean nothing anymore?
Did they use the part of the hospital Israel built to be a bunker as their command center?
Are we considering armed guards at hospitals to be war crimes now, because Israel built that bunker and definitely stations armed guards at all of its hospitals.
But Hamas... exists.
That's good enough to genocide Palestine, right guys?
U.S. Intelligence Says
The actual news here is the declassified document. Which according to the article is just a note saying we believe the IDF.
Yup totally confidence inspiring.
While the spy agencies provided no visual evidence, a U.S. official said they were confident in their assessment because it was based on information collected by Israel and America’s own intelligence, gathered independently.
Anybody find those WMDs yet?
I have nothing but respect for the analysts in the intelligence community. But I've seen what leadership does with their reports.
Bombed UN facilities in Gaza was used by Hamas as counterfeit olive oil factories, U.S. Intelligence Says
This "news" only really serves as justification for the blowing up of hospitals and civilians
Please, they've been parrotting Israeli propaganda since day one. Their words mean nothing.
The evidence was a chair and a rope on the floor in a bombed portion of the hospital.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
U.S. spy agencies believe that Hamas and another Palestinian group fighting Israel used Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza to command forces and hold some hostages, according to new American intelligence declassified on Tuesday.
The hospital was the focus of a large Israel Defense Forces effort in November to take control of the facility, an operation that came under intense international scrutiny and criticism.
But critics said the military operation effectively cut off and shut down a crucial part of Gaza’s medical network with little evidence that Hamas was using the hospital as a command post.
A senior U.S. intelligence official said on Tuesday that the American government continued to believe that Hamas used the hospital complex and sites beneath it to exercise command and control activities, store weapons and hold “at least a few hostages.”
A humanitarian team lead by the World Health Organization, which visited Al-Shifa immediately after Israeli forces stormed the hospital, called it a “death zone.”
While the spy agencies provided no visual evidence, a U.S. official said they were confident in their assessment because it was based on information collected by Israel and America’s own intelligence, gathered independently.
The original article contains 469 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 59%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
US Intelligence Propagandists
It's sad the New York Times has fully turned into a Zionist propaganda outlet the last few days.
Well they go back and forth. They have demanded better evidence before and here they do point out that this isn't that evidence. It's just a declassified document saying we officially believe the IDF. Which isn't really new.
Why they need to justify something we all know is a lie?
I find it more remarkable to think that this is a valid justification.
Lol what does this matter?
Israel committed so much more heinous atrocities I honestly give no fuck that an oppressed people have a terrorist group lashing out using a hospital as a base.
Israel lied about the sexual assault and baby mutilations, they are ar performing genocide and they've oppressed these people for generations.
Fuck Israel
honestly give no fuck that an oppressed people have a terrorist group lashing out using a hospital as a base.
You're rooting for terrorists operating from hospitals.
I am in shock that you think this is defensible.
You're rooting for terrorists performing genocide
If my two options are terrorists doing a genocide and terrorists doing a war crime (because of you know the genocide they're facing and decades of oppression)
It easily makes sense why.
You’re rooting for terrorists performing genocide
I don't support Hamas, the only group actively and openly pursuing genocide in this conflict.
Then you don't know history of this conflict at all and should probably learn.
The irony of this comment is palpable.
Do you believe that Israel needs to be violently destroyed? Because it kinda sounds like that's your position.
Bibi and his gang sure definitely and all of the fucking Israelis who support him, because a lot of them do.
Go on call me antisemitic
I'll just call you genocidal. You're advocating the violent death of a large group of people based on their national origin and political belief.
Where? I clearly said Bibi and his goons and those that support him. Are you unable to read?
all of the fucking Israelis who support him, because a lot of them do
I can read just fine. you're just coming off murdery.
Just how many people do you want to kill? The 120 on Likud's parliamentary list? Their 100k registered members? The 1,115,049 voters who voted for them in the last election? Or just the 15% of Israelis who think Bibi should stay as Prime Minister after the war is over?
The total number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 7 now stands at 22,185, while at least 57,000 have been injured, the Ministry of Health said on Tuesday.
Those who contribute to this.
But go on call me the genocider for wanting punishment for crimes against humanity.
Maybe you can ask those Nazi's to stop genociding people peacefully. You seem to be great friends with them.
So you don't think there's any possible peaceful solution? Only the violent destruction of Israel?
Ask the Palestinians in the West Bank how well their peaceful solution with Zionist Nazis is going.
The entire premise of israel is ethnic cleansing and constant expansion of their Lebensraum. They have even tried to steal Lebanon in the past before getting beaten and driven out by Hezbollah there.
A peaceful solution can be reached Palestinians but clearly not with israel.
You make it sound like Hezbollah are good guys. They're terrorists.
Palestinians rejected every offer of peace they've been given and made up excuses along the way to perpetrate terrorist attacks. If they truly wanted peace they could have had it a dozen times over by now. But Palestinian suffering is a convenient excuse for antisemitism - using antizionism as a shield ("I only hate those jews over there, and anyone who happens to support their ongoing existence")
what a dumb thing to say.
You saying the invading, genocide causing Israelis are good guys then?
Bibi and his bitches are terrorists you fuckin idiot lol
Imagine thinking Putin or Kim aren't terrorists because they run a country. Just go be stupid somewhere else
You make it sound like israel are the good guys they are Nazis.
They're not rooting for the terrorists. When is rooting the same as not giving a fuck?
I think they're saying that Israel has gone so far overboard that they can't find a good enough excuse to justify their actions.
It matters because one of the charges leveled against Israel is that they bombed a hospital just to genocide Palestinian babies. Clearly, Hamas was using said babies as human shields, which is a war crime. Now the shoe is on the other foot and Hamas apologists don't like it, so now you just say it doesn't matter, lol.
Nope the shoe literally cannot be on the other foot.
Israel funded Hamas.
Israel has developed this culture in Gaza because of the treatment of Palestinians.
Israel has far more money and resources.
So the instigator with more money/power in the situation causing a genocide after decades of racial abuse gets no pass that shoe cannot go anywhere else
All of Hamas' actions are only happening because of Israel. Sorry
It's probably true that Netanyahu funded Hamas for cynical reasons. The Israeli right-wing coalition definitely needs to go. But you can't justify Hamas terrorism againsr civilians because the Palestinian people are angry and oppressed. Hamas has agency. They aren't some inexorable force of history. They choose to be terrorists. Hamas was already a radical terrorist organization in its own right, and was duly elected by the people of Gaza as such. Fuck those raping terrorists.
All this back-and-forth revenge is, of course, just a vicious cycle and shouldn't continue. But I am a little tired of this faulty reasoning that Israel is the bad guy just because they are more powerful. Palestinians and Israelis have both done things to provoke violence and both sides have, at various times, rejected peace and compromise. But Hamas is unambiguously a terrorist group that stokes division and whose sole purpose is to eliminate Israel. Hamas is a barrier to peace and will get no sympathy from me.
Israel is the bad guy because they are more powerful.
You refer to Hamas as rapists but not the IDF? You don't mention the bold land grabs and settling of Palestinian land.
Israel is a terrorist group. They aren't treated as such because they are a Nation, they're only a nation because that isn't their land other people lived there first.
You literally touch on every reason why Israel is the first to blame yet refuse to commit to blaming them. When Israel faces consequences then we can talk about Hamas until then it is their fault.
This is not a zero tolerance bullshit school fight. Israel punched first and second and third and forth while having more money and resources and legal power over Palestinians. Hamas wouldn't exist in this way without Israel.
No. Absolutely no to everything you said. When Bibi swings from the gallows we can tear apart Hamas all we want. Until then you play into the bully's hand.
they're only a nation because that isn't their land other people lived there first.
That is true of every nation. Literally everyone lives on land that was occupied by some other tribe in the past. The really ironic thing about saying that the Palestinians were there "first" is that the UN used precisely that originalist doctrine to justify creating Israel for the Jews in the first place!
So you understand then why Israel is fully to blame?
Everyone does live on some other tribes land. But Israel, America, Canada are different than British and Chinese history in that way.
This is modern day. Those things are still felt. Hell the Irish still feel how the British treated them.
Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say. How are Israel, Canada and America different from Britain and China? And how do the Irish fit into it?
Imperialism
WTF? Dude, time to go back to school and take some history courses. You literally made me laugh out loud.
Oh I'd love to hear what you have to say. Go on then.
I'm not the one that made the strange claim and I'm not your history professor. But if I was, I think you'd be struggling on the midterm right now.
Nice ignoring of the point that the Jewish were there first being the rational for creating Jewish settlements there to begin with.
For the inevitable downvoters, regardless of who is to blame it's important that those of us discussing this attempt to understand the point the other is making even if we disagree with it.
From what I see in this conversation there's one person putting their points across reasonably and there's another throwing whatever cards they have randomly at the board.
Nice ignoring of the point that the Jewish were there first being the rational for creating Jewish settlements there to begin with.
THERE'S A GENOCIDE HAPPENING BOB.
Nothing else fucking matters beyond that. Once that fucking stops we can play these games. Otherwise you're just pearl clutching and arguing semantics
So funny seeing people here react to any news regarding Israel and Gaza. Bomb falls in parking lot of a hospital, Hamas says 20 minutes later 500 dead, everyone believes the and it takes weeks to disprove their claim and bunch of sources to analyze and report on their findings. Any non-Hamas source says terrorists are using terrorist tactics... entire lemmy goes: fake, discredited, Israel ally is lying for them, etc.
And down-votes that are coming on this comment just go to prove how big of a supported to terrorism people here are.
"Terrorists" is the 21st century equivalent to "savages" to justify imperialism and genocide. US propagandists can stfu.
Call it what you like. The fact is they hid behind civilians, kidnapped other civilians and tortured them. Or is cutting off womb of a pregnant woman with baby still moving in her now not savage because we don't want to identify with US?
Got other made up stories? Time and time again has shown that every single thing that comes out of the mouths of US and Israeli politicians is a lie unless proven otherwise.
You have one downvote. From me. And yeah if you're going to bomb a protected target we're going to want to see the evidence. You don't just get to shrug and mumble something about terrorists.
Protected by whom? International rules of war which were never respected in the first place?
So far, you've characterised support for a group that's being genocided as supporting terrorists, and made it clear you don't care about warcrimes. You've implied you care about hospitals being bombed, but that doesn't seem to apply when the bombing is done by the group bombing the majority of the hospitals.
You need to stop and ask yourself if you're backing the bad guys, my guy.
You are conflicting yourself in the first place. You claim protected target is being bombed, but it's protected by the same rules which state taking shelter in hospitals and taking hostages is a crime. You either condemn all who break the rule or none at all, but not selectively.
I do condemn those things, but keep in mind that they were funded by Israel, who are also committing more warcrimes and killing more civilians.
Why do you work so hard to gloss over Israel's objectively far worse actions to whine about Hamas?
entire lemmy
Different people are saying different things. Stop clumping everyone together. Lemmy isn't a monolith.
My issue is that on the (?second) day of the war, a group of Western reporters were presented with "evidence" of the planning that had gone into the attack, and I found the "evidence" to be laughably bad - the evidence itself, the supposed circumstances it was found under, the condition of the evidence - all were bad. And if you present such incredibly poor "evidence" at one point, I'm going to automatically be much more suspicious of any other "evidence" you present later.
My issue is more with people supporting a genocide because Hamas exists.
Few people have a problem condemning Hamas, but when Israel is clearly killing far more civilians and bombing more hospitals than Israel, obsessing about the lesser problem (who were Israel-funded in any case) is deeply suspicious.
On no account should any genocide be tolerated or supported. Am merely pointing out how differently people react on different kind of news. Not to mention how frequently people confuse Palestinian cause with Hamas cause.
Hmm, I seem to recall US Intelligence swearing that Saddam Hussein definitely had WMDs and was definitely about to use them on his own people and we definitely needed to invade Iraq to stop him. US Intelligence is not a fact or truth seeking operation; its purpose is to further American imperial interests all else be damned.
Hasn't the IDF been in control of the hospital for like a month, and are yet to produce any evidence (those 3 rifles and the calendar don't count)?
They kidnapped the hospital director and tortured him until he confessed that he was Hamas. That's way better than video and photo evidence of the huge base they claimed was underneath the hospital.
Look at this cool video of this 3d animation the IDF made before they started attacking the hospital. That looks more realistic than real life. In fact it looks so realistic that actual video footage wouldn't do these tunnels justice. Which is why the IDF isn't providing it.
You can trust Bidens word. Surely he would never lie about completely unverified ridiculous Zionist claims
They also insisted for years that a baby formula factory was a chemical weapons plant.
They also reaffirmed and spread the hoax of the beheaded babies, even when the IDF had already denied it.
To be fair, they also said Russia was about to invade Ukraine and no one believed them.
It's hard to believe someone's telling the truth if they lied about almost everything else.
Hopefully they're giving real intel to the decision makers, but anything released to the public is intended for influence purposes. Nothing in their mission requires or even encourages telling the general public true things.
They gave the wmd 'intel' to lawmakers who were then pressured into supporting the illegal US invasion of Iraq.
Not much has changed since then. Hell, the Afghanistan Papers detailed how everyone in the intelligence community knew the war was a lost cause, but it still came as a shock to most law makers.
That's not quite on point. The IC wants the facts. What the political leadership do with those facts is a whole different thing.
One does not really need US intelligence's confirmation to undestand that the use of human shields is standard operating procedure for islamistic terrorists. It's not that they don't care about their own citizens but they simply don't see getting martyred as a bad thing. Quite the opposite.
To me it comes down to a strategic approach. In how many ways is it possible for Hamas to actually hurt Israel in a significant way? Not very many, even thousands of civilians dead doesn't genuinely weaken the country much. But they can make Israel hurt themselves, by basically making them go evil and lose their allies.
Similar to how Bin Laden very much succeeded in his goals for the Sept 11th attack, by getting us to pass the Patriot Act, invade some countries and start ripping ourselves apart imo.
Regardless, arguing this position on here is going to be like trying to swim up a waterfall. Israel has gone too far, and the hate against them is too strong because of that. The middle of a war is not the time for nuance.
edit for a qualifier
Bin Laden's goals were to get Americans to replace their government with one that would get out of the Arabian peninsula and stop supporting Israel. He consummately failed.
Not sure why someone would believe a fighter when they say why they fight. It's not like propaganda is unique to western countries or something. It's everywhere. It's a tool that creates effects, you think he's above using it or something?
This assessment of al Qaeda's goals I have only ever heard from Western propaganda and the popular consciousness, not any serious attempt to analyse them. While bin Laden's statements could be lies (more relevant than whether they're propaganda, which can be true), I think it makes more sense to take his word for his own motivations than what amounts to nothing more than the popular Western view of his motivations, filtered through years of our own media. Of course there may be some serious analysis of his goals somewhere I haven't read - feel free to point me at it. It should come along with some reason not to believe his own explanation though.
I'm skeptical that it exists though, because this understanding of his goals essentially denies that he has any goals beyond hurting America: it's "they hate us because we are free." But bin Laden laid out perfectly clearly that his hatred of America developed from seeing Muslims killed in attacks which were enabled by American intervention - something which I see no reason to cast doubt on, and as such see no reason to doubt his explanation.
It makes zero sense though. No people on Earth would just go "oh welp, guess we better go home now."
Do we seem hesitant to kill people to you?
How does it not make sense? One way of achieving your aims is making it very costly for the people blocking those aims to continue doing so.
Conflicts often end in a negotiated peace where neither side has been conclusively defeated, often indeed amounting to "welp, we'd better go home now." The cost to the US military in Vietnam turned public opinion against the war until it became politically unsustainable.
More broadly, this attitude inevitably leads to post-hoc cynicism, where you look at someone who failed to achieve their stated goals, conclude in hindsight that they made no sense and that they therefore couldn't ever possibly have believed sincerely in them.
If it really made zero sense, it would make zero sense to use as propaganda. The fact that it makes enough sense that you believe bin Laden even used it to convince others means you accept that people could believe it. It's not unreasonable to think that bin Laden was smarter than the people following him, but you haven't done the work to show he couldn't believe it.
Propaganda is a quantity game, it can make anywhere from no sense to complete sense, because different messages will be received differently by different people.
The Sept 11th attack was not a piece of some greater war. It was a declaration to an unsuspecting people, very few of us had any expectation that something like that would happen. I can understand when the Japanese made the mistake in 1941, but its much less understandable now. It's certainly no Vietnam, which didn't end until we had lost large numbers for many years. Comparing that to an expectation that a surprise attack on our civilians would have similar effects is simply ridiculous.
America is a box of hornets. It was still, and got kicked. No other possibility was even remotely likely to anybody that knows anything about us. He couldn't have been that totally and completely ignorant.
To the contrary, it is far more likely he was an intelligent adversary that researched and understood his opponents, and struck effectively. I simply find that far more plausible than him being a fool that wanted a quicker way to get him and his organization to heaven, and otherwise failed miserably.
edit for some sloppy wording
So, the only reason you have for not believing bin Laden's stated goals is that, you assert, it was too obviously impossible to achieve them.
You haven't presented any reason he instead must have wanted to cause the USA to sacrifice domestic freedoms as a motivation. What about all other possible motivations? Why that one? It seems like it doesn't do bin Laden any good for that to happen. Instead it seems like it's how an American, unable to understand the world through any lens except an American one, might decide bin Laden's motivations must be viewed.
I have at no time asserted it was impossible to drive the US from the Middle East. To the contrary, sowing domestic strife and global overreaction was an excellent first step towards accomplishing that in the long run.
All I'm granting him is an assumption of rationality and long term thinking. I'm not claiming any truth or facts or anything, I cannot read a dead man's mind. But I can look at what happened and draw conclusions with the aid of hindsight, and strongly prefer that over simply trusting his word.
Are you unable to see how we have harmed ourselves since then? How about how Israel is harming themselves right now?
This is just an invitation to commit the post-hoc fallacy.
But you said:
That's an assertion/claim as to what those goals in fact were. And you still haven't found any reason that they included "make the US pass laws which restricted its own civil liberties" other than the fact that that's what eventually happened.
It was literally his manifesto and single demand for two decades.
I don't disagree. Just disagree that his method was as simple and straightforward as people here seem to think, just believing what he's spoon feeding them 100%. He was sophisticated, a leader. Not some simpleton.
As if Americans would just give him what he wants for knocking down a couple skyscrapers. Have you even seen our culture? We shoot each other in our own streets, much less foreign attackers. How people think we could just forego a chance at revenge is just utterly, hilariously wrong in every way.
He believed we would leave because he grew up in a world of Western countries being driven out by anti colonial violence. It's not that complicated. He wasn't a political science guy, or an anthropologist. He was a radicalized construction engineer.
I don't think you need to be an anthropologist to figure out that attacking someone's civilians nearly guarantees counterattack. We still needed the oil out of the region back then to boot.
Shockingly it doesn't. You're also not taking into account his radicalization. Which allows for a lot of irrational beliefs.
That is actually a fair criticism. I simply don't think it's as strong an influence over strategic thinking. In any decent thinker anyway.
Perhaps they should have focused on governance instead of martyrdom.
It's a jihadist group. It's not about this life, it's about the next. When you're dealing with a zealot, everything becomes a tool to get to heaven, no matter how evil other people see it.
Look at our evangelicals bending over backwards to support Trump, who is not very Christ-like. If the Prince of Peace came down from heaven today, he would be very angry with his "followers". Might even take his belt off and start swinging, and he didn't get violent very often.
I understand that Gazans made a mistake in 2007, the same way Gazans knew they made a mistake once Hamas canceled elections forever and started torturing dissidents.
There's no reason for people today to copy that mistake by supporting Hamas now.
Well the Palestinians have two options: support Hamas and be bombed by Israel or support Fatah and lose your homes to Israeli settlers.
Israel's clear objective is to genocide all the Palestinians either by killing them all or driving them out of their homes.
SOP? Sure. Actual case here where a protected target was bombed? Prove it.
Even if it did, and I wouldn't take Israels best ally as complitelly objective fact, you don't just bomb a whole hospital full of civilians
Isn't this the same hospital Israel allegedly leveled a few months back?
Edit: Nope, it was Al-Ahli Arab hospital.
The article says it's the attack from November
From the Israeli point of view yes you do.
Hospitals being a forbidden target is important, civilians dying is not, because they don't care about civilians.
It's sad to see how something intended to become a Jewish nation after 2k years and so on became a dumbed down pidgin version of 1950s' late European colonialism.
To defend that israel does not commit war crimes, I have seen zionists claim that if civilians are used for military purposes (involuntary human shield), they become valid military targets ._.
Could that same argument be applied to army reservists in a country with mandatory military service?
I'd say that arguement is stronger because they had their whole life to prepare not to serve a genocidal army, instead of being made to participiate in war with no choice or warning. If we evaluate both using the metric of Free and Prior Informed Consent we see one is measurably worse.
It's because of the Geneva Convention (origin of the modern concept of war crimes.)
It's designed to be applied mutually, if only one side does then it's basically non-functioning.
Absolutely not. We already had this argument in regards to Iraq and Afghanistan. War crimes are war crimes. You can get away with some of the more esoteric ones for not fighting a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, but slaughtering civilians en masse is a crime full stop.
I understand that many of the humanitarian safeguards and international law can be disadvantageous when only one side gets things right.
But those are important guarantees, they are even used to differentiate the supposedly "good and civilized", if they are discarded every time they are inconvenient, aren't they just dead letter?
Oh, war criminal talk. Gotcha.
Yup. I think there's a difference between the factual claim of whether Hamas has operations on the hospital grounds vs the justification for the type of military action taken against the hospital. I think it is possible to accept there is truth to the Hamas operations center being located there and still condemn the military tactics used against the hospital due to civilian casualties and harm it caused. Unfortunately those 2 things seem to be conflates that acknowledgement of Hamas being there is implicitly condoning Israel's actions.
Saddam’s WMDs were also hidden in the still to appear gigantic, impossible to avoid command centre tunnel network under the hospital.
Would you like a slice of yellow cake?
AP have the most comprehensive coverage of the document, which is not publicly available. Two sections in jump out to me:
And
And the source of the intelligence is probably Israel itself?
Of course
From the AP article:
The US and UK (possibly more, I lost track at some point) have been running surveillance flights over Gaza for pretty much the entire duration of the war. There are plenty of eyes on Israel's military operations and ways to gather intelligence inside Gaza.
NYT themselves came to the conclusion that al-Shifa was used for military purposes based on Hamas' own propaganda. It's always been a question of how central it was to Hamas' operations.
That's an editorial. And the bullet list of "evidence" is outdated or irrelevant. The existence of a tunnel means nothing. Every modern hospital in existence has tunnels or basement levels. What was happening a decade or more ago is irrelevant. To strike a protected target you must have timely, well backed, intelligence. Basically you don't do it without a smoking gun like radio direction finding their command frequency to that location, tracking movements of runners, or corroborating stories from prisoners.
Just shrugging and pointing to the terrorist label doesn't meet the requirement.
Lol, it's declassified, but not public. Do words mean nothing anymore?
Did they use the part of the hospital Israel built to be a bunker as their command center?
Are we considering armed guards at hospitals to be war crimes now, because Israel built that bunker and definitely stations armed guards at all of its hospitals.
But Hamas... exists.
That's good enough to genocide Palestine, right guys?
The actual news here is the declassified document. Which according to the article is just a note saying we believe the IDF.
Yup totally confidence inspiring.
Anybody find those WMDs yet?
I have nothing but respect for the analysts in the intelligence community. But I've seen what leadership does with their reports.
Bombed UN facilities in Gaza was used by Hamas as counterfeit olive oil factories, U.S. Intelligence Says
This "news" only really serves as justification for the blowing up of hospitals and civilians
Please, they've been parrotting Israeli propaganda since day one. Their words mean nothing.
The evidence was a chair and a rope on the floor in a bombed portion of the hospital.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
U.S. spy agencies believe that Hamas and another Palestinian group fighting Israel used Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza to command forces and hold some hostages, according to new American intelligence declassified on Tuesday.
The hospital was the focus of a large Israel Defense Forces effort in November to take control of the facility, an operation that came under intense international scrutiny and criticism.
But critics said the military operation effectively cut off and shut down a crucial part of Gaza’s medical network with little evidence that Hamas was using the hospital as a command post.
A senior U.S. intelligence official said on Tuesday that the American government continued to believe that Hamas used the hospital complex and sites beneath it to exercise command and control activities, store weapons and hold “at least a few hostages.”
A humanitarian team lead by the World Health Organization, which visited Al-Shifa immediately after Israeli forces stormed the hospital, called it a “death zone.”
While the spy agencies provided no visual evidence, a U.S. official said they were confident in their assessment because it was based on information collected by Israel and America’s own intelligence, gathered independently.
The original article contains 469 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 59%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
US
IntelligencePropagandistsIt's sad the New York Times has fully turned into a Zionist propaganda outlet the last few days.
Well they go back and forth. They have demanded better evidence before and here they do point out that this isn't that evidence. It's just a declassified document saying we officially believe the IDF. Which isn't really new.
Why they need to justify something we all know is a lie?
I find it more remarkable to think that this is a valid justification.
Lol what does this matter?
Israel committed so much more heinous atrocities I honestly give no fuck that an oppressed people have a terrorist group lashing out using a hospital as a base.
Israel lied about the sexual assault and baby mutilations, they are ar performing genocide and they've oppressed these people for generations.
Fuck Israel
You're rooting for terrorists operating from hospitals.
I am in shock that you think this is defensible.
You're rooting for terrorists performing genocide
If my two options are terrorists doing a genocide and terrorists doing a war crime (because of you know the genocide they're facing and decades of oppression)
It easily makes sense why.
I don't support Hamas, the only group actively and openly pursuing genocide in this conflict.
Then you don't know history of this conflict at all and should probably learn.
The irony of this comment is palpable.
Do you believe that Israel needs to be violently destroyed? Because it kinda sounds like that's your position.
Bibi and his gang sure definitely and all of the fucking Israelis who support him, because a lot of them do.
Go on call me antisemitic
I'll just call you genocidal. You're advocating the violent death of a large group of people based on their national origin and political belief.
Where? I clearly said Bibi and his goons and those that support him. Are you unable to read?
I can read just fine. you're just coming off murdery.
Just how many people do you want to kill? The 120 on Likud's parliamentary list? Their 100k registered members? The 1,115,049 voters who voted for them in the last election? Or just the 15% of Israelis who think Bibi should stay as Prime Minister after the war is over?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/2/israeli-bombardment-ongoing-as-death-toll-surpasses-22000
Those who contribute to this.
But go on call me the genocider for wanting punishment for crimes against humanity.
Maybe you can ask those Nazi's to stop genociding people peacefully. You seem to be great friends with them.
So you don't think there's any possible peaceful solution? Only the violent destruction of Israel?
Ask the Palestinians in the West Bank how well their peaceful solution with Zionist Nazis is going.
The entire premise of israel is ethnic cleansing and constant expansion of their Lebensraum. They have even tried to steal Lebanon in the past before getting beaten and driven out by Hezbollah there.
A peaceful solution can be reached Palestinians but clearly not with israel.
You make it sound like Hezbollah are good guys. They're terrorists.
Palestinians rejected every offer of peace they've been given and made up excuses along the way to perpetrate terrorist attacks. If they truly wanted peace they could have had it a dozen times over by now. But Palestinian suffering is a convenient excuse for antisemitism - using antizionism as a shield ("I only hate those jews over there, and anyone who happens to support their ongoing existence")
what a dumb thing to say.
You saying the invading, genocide causing Israelis are good guys then?
Bibi and his bitches are terrorists you fuckin idiot lol
Imagine thinking Putin or Kim aren't terrorists because they run a country. Just go be stupid somewhere else
You make it sound like israel are the good guys they are Nazis.
For your convenience:
https://imeu.org/article/plan-dalet
https://forward.com/news/470923/israel-land-conquest-1967-occupation-six-day-war-plans/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law#Israel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_prisoners_in_Israel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_protests
https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/12/17/born-without-civil-rights/israels-use-draconian-military-orders-repress
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupation-50-years-of-dispossession/
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Cablegram_from_the_Secretary-General_of_the_League_of_Arab_States_to_the_Secretary-General_of_the_United_Nations
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/palestinian-arab-congresses
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/israel-palestine-one-state-solution
https://mondoweiss.net/2018/01/examining-myths-israel/
https://theintercept.com/2023/11/28/israel-palestine-history-peace
They're not rooting for the terrorists. When is rooting the same as not giving a fuck?
I think they're saying that Israel has gone so far overboard that they can't find a good enough excuse to justify their actions.
It matters because one of the charges leveled against Israel is that they bombed a hospital just to genocide Palestinian babies. Clearly, Hamas was using said babies as human shields, which is a war crime. Now the shoe is on the other foot and Hamas apologists don't like it, so now you just say it doesn't matter, lol.
Nope the shoe literally cannot be on the other foot.
Israel funded Hamas.
Israel has developed this culture in Gaza because of the treatment of Palestinians.
Israel has far more money and resources.
So the instigator with more money/power in the situation causing a genocide after decades of racial abuse gets no pass that shoe cannot go anywhere else
All of Hamas' actions are only happening because of Israel. Sorry
It's probably true that Netanyahu funded Hamas for cynical reasons. The Israeli right-wing coalition definitely needs to go. But you can't justify Hamas terrorism againsr civilians because the Palestinian people are angry and oppressed. Hamas has agency. They aren't some inexorable force of history. They choose to be terrorists. Hamas was already a radical terrorist organization in its own right, and was duly elected by the people of Gaza as such. Fuck those raping terrorists.
All this back-and-forth revenge is, of course, just a vicious cycle and shouldn't continue. But I am a little tired of this faulty reasoning that Israel is the bad guy just because they are more powerful. Palestinians and Israelis have both done things to provoke violence and both sides have, at various times, rejected peace and compromise. But Hamas is unambiguously a terrorist group that stokes division and whose sole purpose is to eliminate Israel. Hamas is a barrier to peace and will get no sympathy from me.
Israel is the bad guy because they are more powerful.
You refer to Hamas as rapists but not the IDF? You don't mention the bold land grabs and settling of Palestinian land.
Israel is a terrorist group. They aren't treated as such because they are a Nation, they're only a nation because that isn't their land other people lived there first.
You literally touch on every reason why Israel is the first to blame yet refuse to commit to blaming them. When Israel faces consequences then we can talk about Hamas until then it is their fault.
This is not a zero tolerance bullshit school fight. Israel punched first and second and third and forth while having more money and resources and legal power over Palestinians. Hamas wouldn't exist in this way without Israel.
No. Absolutely no to everything you said. When Bibi swings from the gallows we can tear apart Hamas all we want. Until then you play into the bully's hand.
That is true of every nation. Literally everyone lives on land that was occupied by some other tribe in the past. The really ironic thing about saying that the Palestinians were there "first" is that the UN used precisely that originalist doctrine to justify creating Israel for the Jews in the first place!
So you understand then why Israel is fully to blame?
Everyone does live on some other tribes land. But Israel, America, Canada are different than British and Chinese history in that way.
This is modern day. Those things are still felt. Hell the Irish still feel how the British treated them.
Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say. How are Israel, Canada and America different from Britain and China? And how do the Irish fit into it?
Imperialism
WTF? Dude, time to go back to school and take some history courses. You literally made me laugh out loud.
Oh I'd love to hear what you have to say. Go on then.
I'm not the one that made the strange claim and I'm not your history professor. But if I was, I think you'd be struggling on the midterm right now.
Nice ignoring of the point that the Jewish were there first being the rational for creating Jewish settlements there to begin with.
For the inevitable downvoters, regardless of who is to blame it's important that those of us discussing this attempt to understand the point the other is making even if we disagree with it.
From what I see in this conversation there's one person putting their points across reasonably and there's another throwing whatever cards they have randomly at the board.
Nice ignoring of the point that
the Jewish were there first being the rational for creating Jewish settlements there to begin with.THERE'S A GENOCIDE HAPPENING BOB.
Nothing else fucking matters beyond that. Once that fucking stops we can play these games. Otherwise you're just pearl clutching and arguing semantics
So funny seeing people here react to any news regarding Israel and Gaza. Bomb falls in parking lot of a hospital, Hamas says 20 minutes later 500 dead, everyone believes the and it takes weeks to disprove their claim and bunch of sources to analyze and report on their findings. Any non-Hamas source says terrorists are using terrorist tactics... entire lemmy goes: fake, discredited, Israel ally is lying for them, etc.
And down-votes that are coming on this comment just go to prove how big of a supported to terrorism people here are.
"Terrorists" is the 21st century equivalent to "savages" to justify imperialism and genocide. US propagandists can stfu.
Call it what you like. The fact is they hid behind civilians, kidnapped other civilians and tortured them. Or is cutting off womb of a pregnant woman with baby still moving in her now not savage because we don't want to identify with US?
Got other made up stories? Time and time again has shown that every single thing that comes out of the mouths of US and Israeli politicians is a lie unless proven otherwise.
You have one downvote. From me. And yeah if you're going to bomb a protected target we're going to want to see the evidence. You don't just get to shrug and mumble something about terrorists.
Protected by whom? International rules of war which were never respected in the first place?
So far, you've characterised support for a group that's being genocided as supporting terrorists, and made it clear you don't care about warcrimes. You've implied you care about hospitals being bombed, but that doesn't seem to apply when the bombing is done by the group bombing the majority of the hospitals.
You need to stop and ask yourself if you're backing the bad guys, my guy.
You are conflicting yourself in the first place. You claim protected target is being bombed, but it's protected by the same rules which state taking shelter in hospitals and taking hostages is a crime. You either condemn all who break the rule or none at all, but not selectively.
I do condemn those things, but keep in mind that they were funded by Israel, who are also committing more warcrimes and killing more civilians.
Why do you work so hard to gloss over Israel's objectively far worse actions to whine about Hamas?
Different people are saying different things. Stop clumping everyone together. Lemmy isn't a monolith.
My issue is that on the (?second) day of the war, a group of Western reporters were presented with "evidence" of the planning that had gone into the attack, and I found the "evidence" to be laughably bad - the evidence itself, the supposed circumstances it was found under, the condition of the evidence - all were bad. And if you present such incredibly poor "evidence" at one point, I'm going to automatically be much more suspicious of any other "evidence" you present later.
My issue is more with people supporting a genocide because Hamas exists.
Few people have a problem condemning Hamas, but when Israel is clearly killing far more civilians and bombing more hospitals than Israel, obsessing about the lesser problem (who were Israel-funded in any case) is deeply suspicious.
On no account should any genocide be tolerated or supported. Am merely pointing out how differently people react on different kind of news. Not to mention how frequently people confuse Palestinian cause with Hamas cause.
Then why do you need to construct strawmen?
Again this shit?