Alright y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest is Peter Hart.
He's the activism director at FAIR.
That's fairness and accuracy in Reporting.
Yeah, right not North America pal He writes for FAIR's magazine extra and is also co-host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show counter spin He's the author of the oh really factor unspinning Fox News channels Bill O'Reilly From 2003 welcome the show Peter.
How are you?
Good?
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good by the way, I really like y'all's website and the things that you do I I'd be lying if I said I keep up with it all the time, but don't lie you guys have Many times I've used you guys as footnotes Proving my case about you know what the real truth was You know beneath the narrative as As push and you seem to stay good on the most important issues no matter who's in power and that kind of thing, too So I really like it.
Well, thank you.
All right.
So this piece is called.
Is there really a Goldstone?retraction and You know, I think probably a lot of people don't know anything about the Goldstone report or this that whether it's retracted or not Or anything else.
So once you give us a little bit of background here Well, this is an investigation that was a UN fact-finding mission headed by Richard Goldstone who was a retired South African and They concluded Based on their investigation that there were an array of crimes war crimes potential war crimes crimes against humanity in the Gaza Assault in late 2008 2009 It was very difficult for them to do their report because the Israelis would not speak to them and Tried to bar them from getting into Gaza.
They had to get in through Egypt it's been hugely controversial since it was released because it amounts to a pretty compelling indictment of the way Israel conducted that war and there's been enormous pressure on Goldstone since The report was released to to recant somehow the findings of the report So on Sunday in the Washington Post he writes this op-ed that Soon, you know, I think it was released on the internet on Friday and soon was flashing around the internet as you know This is Goldstone's retraction And that's how it was greeted in most of the press the New York Times had a headline about Israel grappling with this retraction USA Today USA Today Report reversal and you read the op-ed three or four times like I did trying to figure out what it is Retracted It comes up considerably short He doesn't have much in the way of detail and the most you can say about it.
Is that he's retracting the Idea that there was a high-level policy among Israeli war planners and military officials to deliberately target civilians the intentionality argument and It leaves untouched all of the other conclusions in the report 500 pages about deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure Disproportionate warfare all of these things that amount to potential crimes What Goldstone is saying is that he doesn't think there was a policy in place to deliberately kill civilians Which is a very difficult thing to prove and even some supporters of the report often said They would have a hard time making that case in a court of law, so we have this Scenario now where Goldstone has issued this partial walk back of one part of the report He's not empowered to do this.
Of course.
It was a report conducted investigation conducted by several people He's one of them.
He has his name happens to be closely associated with it because he let it the other people who conducted the investigation do not share his His walk back, whatever you make of it, but we are at a risk in kind of a propaganda system of Seeing this now as the report that was debunked by its author Right.
Well, and that's kind of the thing about it being called the Goldstone report in the first place.
Yeah here he retracts somewhat half of a Assertion in a Washington Post column and and you're right.
I mean that's in the narrative now.
It's been Retracted at least so far it seems like The pro-israel types are getting away with saying that but now on the question, you know at issue here I mean, it sounds like what you're telling me is that because the Israelis would not cooperate with the investigation Goldstone said and in and the other investigators said alright Well, we're looking at example XY and Z of civilians being killed there and we're thinking without any information from the Israelis There's hardly any other explanation but that they were deliberately targeting these people now more information has come out because of sort of the Internal Israeli quote-unquote investigation that has made him say.
Oh, well, okay Apparently the policy was just so reckless that all these civilians got killed.
It wasn't a deliberate thing But now it seems like we're arguing semantics or maybe even we're arguing about Deliberate on the part of who right?
So like if a captain in the field says blow up that house That's not deliberate as long as that's not what a hood Olmert said to do or a who Barack said to do Is that kind of thing right?
All right.
I'm confused.
Honestly, I think that I think that's correct You know And again, you have this this problem in that the Israelis did not participate in this investigation at all did not speak to the investigators the investigation was intended to Pose questions about how Hamas conducted itself out of different Palestinian armed groups conducted themselves and how Israel conducted themselves Obviously the death toll was wildly disproportionate to 1,300 People in Gaza die.
I think 13 Israelis so you do you are going to end up with an investigation that is that is more focused on Israeli actions because The the the war was so disproportionate I think the Israelis would tell you that and Israeli supporters would say well It's unfair because it's not balanced.
Well, the war wasn't balanced either The Colton report does go out of its way to to point out that Hamas by firing rockets that has no control over essentially Committed violations of the laws of war and should be those violations should be prosecuted The Israeli violations were far more numerous and far more deadly.
So there is Increased pressure I think on trying to establish what happened there they the Israeli investigations that are going on right now that Goldstone uses as his rationale for his column are still rather murky Themselves and that's you know The head of Bethlehem the Israeli Human Rights Group wrote a follow-up column in The Washington Post saying, you know This is not really a retraction of the report.
It's it's a it's a modification of one area of the report Which is ironic because if you're reading The Washington Post all you're getting is this impression that there is this this retraction from either from Goldstone's column or from Richard Cohen who Wrote that Goldstone had retracted his findings and he said that any deaths were inadvertent Well, that's not what Goldstone saying and that's certainly not what Goldstone said in the original report Inadvertent is one thing Deciding that you were going to wage disproportionate war that that claims civilian targets as legitimate.
It's not an inadvertent choice It would seem to be quite deliberate.
The question is whether there was a deliberate attempt to shoot and kill civilians and their Goldstone's case now is that that doesn't appear to be supported by the facts now if the Israelis had spoken to UN investigators during the Fact-finding mission perhaps the report would be different and that's really all he said is that if the Israelis had presented the evidence that they seem To have now I would have written a different report How different is sort of up for debate?
But we are you know that this this column which is murky and relies on some rather murky evidence Has now become a statement of reversal on the part of Goldstone And what I fear is that you know six months from now We'll be talking about the report on Israeli crimes that was retracted by its author Which is not exactly what happened at all but could be the way it's interpreted in a media system that I think would love to see this disappear and You know, we should underline so too with the United States government The UN ambassador was I think speaking before Congress this week saying she wished that it would just disappear They might get their wish if people decide that this thing now has no legitimacy at all, which would be I think a really tragic reversal of the truth Well as ever the New York Times As Noam Chomsky says sets the agenda for the rest of the papers And if they have retraction right there in the headline, then it that's pretty much the end of the argument still somehow I don't know how but somehow all right Well, I guess I wanted to and you really go to great pains to explain here with a few good quotes from other journalists who noticed the spin immediately in the New York Times in the Washington Post and countered it Jonathan Cook for example over at the counterpunch and such like that and and You and they seem to be making the point that there's a lot to this Goldstone report that hasn't been Retracted one bit and you've kind of been explaining about what?
Supposedly the retraction amounts to but I wonder if you can get into what still remains in there Yeah, you know it you can read an edited version of the Goldstone report There's a book edited by Philip Weiss and Lizzie Ratner called Goldstone report And it it it sort of digests the findings so that you don't have to try to plow through them But you are talking about violations of laws of war indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure attacks on schools legislative buildings attacks on police stations You know we have police officers who were I think dozens of police officers in Gaza killed based on the presumption I suppose that police officers might take up arms to try to defend the territory from Israeli invasion So they were they were all killed somewhat early in the war as a matter of fact attacks on mosques on schools Goldstone has one case and this seems to be the only case that he names where Family was killed.
I think 20 members of a family in a single attack and the reason he's he feels differently about this one was because he thinks now what happened was there was a drone image that was misread and you know in order to Fire was given and they they made a mistake and therefore this family was was all killed in one attack So he's what he's saying is you know there wasn't a an attempt to deliberately go out and target these people for killing They just happened to be killed based on a series of errors According to the Israeli military investigation of itself you can take that for what it's worth But that seems to be the only Bonafide case that he has right now.
So you do have to read this as somebody who is troubled by the political ramifications of what he's done and if you read the Israeli papers Israeli politicians and political leaders have been very proud of the Amount of pressure they've put on Goldstone writing him letters saying you'll have blood on your hands Because this will embolden terrorists and so on and so forth.
I suspect that had a real impact on him I want to make sure I understand here Peter you were saying Were you saying that that case of that family killed?
Was really the one that they did it intentionally hinged on and that now that he has this more information about how it was mistaken Drone strike that's why he's had to retract it because really this was the only thing that He was hanging his hat on that they were hanging their hats on to say that this was intentionally targeting civilians well, there were a couple of incidents and The way Goldstone says it is they had no other information to to base their conclusions on because the Israelis weren't talking to them So you had situations where?
Civilians are waving white flags and they were shot and killed You had attacks on on a mosque things like this that the There was no Israeli you can't to look at it sort of as a court case and the prosecution is making its case Eyewitnesses are making their case and the Israelis do not do not offer any defense of their actions so the Goldstone report looked at some of these incidents and said this does appear to be a Case of intentionality You know Ken Roth and his response in the Guardian from Human Rights Watch was saying, you know Human Rights Watch has investigated these things were troubled We're not sure their intentionality because there aren't enough of them to build a case of intentionality You have a solid case of using white phosphorus in in populated areas You have a solid case of indiscriminate attacks on civilian buildings and civilian infrastructure These are all violations of the laws of war You can make your case that way and and that all stands and Goldstone does not suggest that any of that has changed So it's a minor I think issue here that they're that they're talking about An important one legally, but it leaves the rest of the findings of the Goldstone report perfectly intact and well within You know our our judgment to look at and say You know, these things should be prosecuted there's no sense that any of that has has changed but Goldstone now Apparently based on what he's hearing from his in from Israeli investigators doesn't think that there's a case for intentionality You know, they should they should have this debate out in in in public and out in the open It doesn't seem to be happening yet.
But the Sounds to me like as far as the question of intentionality You don't accidentally use white phosphorus on people.
It seems to me like, you know this argument between You know Goldstone and whatever other factions is really beside the point to me, you know It's like a crime takes place and the cops and the prosecutors are you know doing?
Playing their role in it, but it's not doesn't necessarily reflect the truth of what really happened there And you know, I just moved to Los Angeles in January 2009 and when I got where I was going there on the TV was CNN International because it was one of those times where CNN just has to admit that they're just not up to it at all so they just flip the switch over and show the American people CNN International that we mostly don't get to see and One of the first images I saw right there was white phosphorus bombs going off right over densely populated cities you know, so a densely populated say I don't know if it was Gaza City or where exactly but Certainly densely populated area and there they are blowing up white phosphorus all over.
It's all with my own lying eyes Yeah, and you know, I remember debates over white phosphorus and whether it was even being used in Gaza And people denying that it was being used or saying that it was it was only being used in very limited quantities And now we I don't know that the Israelis have ever Challenged the Goldstone findings on white phosphorus and in fact in some of these write-ups you it's treated as a fact and you Just move on.
So it is the kind of context that you'd have to weigh when you're looking at or when you're hearing about Israeli investigations Israeli military investigating itself that There's a credibility problem here So, you know the upshot of it is really that there doesn't seem to be much retracted here if anything but Even from people like Ken Roth and some of the other human rights investigators Intentionality was always a difficult case to prove.
They find the report overwhelmingly convincing on all of these other counts We don't want to talk about that.
We want to find this isolated strip of the accusations and And suggest that Goldstone has walked back from that and therefore the whole report is in question That's what the elites in the media and in u.s Politics for for for sure want us to conclude about this and the media is helping facilitate that conclusion.
All right well, I want to Give you a chance to talk about more about what is in the rest of that report in the Goldstone report Yeah, I mean you're saying there they're trying so hard to get us to focus on this narrow thing I'm saying well, what else is in there?
Yeah, it's a pretty fascinating Document in the sense that you are seeing and hearing eyewitness accounts of what happened In in several attacks and they tried to reconstruct the attacks as best they could the particular incident so you can you can read Survivors testimony a lot of this was happening in public where in Gaza where?
The fact-finding mission would set up and they would find Surviving family members who talked about, you know An entire building being blown up these kind of doorknock Attacks where the Israeli military would drop a small bomb onto a building to scare What they thought were combatants from who were inside into coming out You have cases where people were trying to surrender civilians waving white flags and were shot you have cases of Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields making them walk in front of them as they try to Maneuver through some of the alleyways Really harrowing first-person testimony that is not contradicted is not challenged the Israeli government The Israeli military is not challenging it even now so it you know I think the the way you make any case about war crimes is based on the Survivors testimony as much as you can gather it and that's really what the Goldstone report Primarily, you know, the thing is too in the larger context.
This wasn't really a war It was like Nelson Rockefeller's attack on the Attica prison or something It's hardly some of it literally knows like a man beating his wife and you say that, you know They've decided it's a mutually amicable thing to split up Yeah, I mean if some of this was literally attacks on prisons you had situations where You know, some prisons were actually blown up and the prisoners all escaped those that were left and the prison guards died Music playing means we're all out of time.
Sorry about that, but I've really enjoyed this interview.
I really appreciate your website It's fair org fairness and accuracy and reporting Peter Hart.
Thanks very much.
Thank you Oh, yeah, and again one more time y'all the article is called.
Is there really a Goldstone retraction very useful
