Alright, y'all welcome to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio on ChaosRadioAustin.org, LRN.
FM, AnomalyRadio.com, AntiWar.com, slash radio, and who knows where else, I don't know, some FM's here and there from what I heard.
Also on KECR in Riverside.
And soon enough I'll have my own show on KPFK, you just hold your horses.
Alright, we're going straight to our first guest on the show today, Cindy Corey.
She is, well, I guess I'll say she runs the Rachel Corey Foundation at RachelCoreyFoundation.org, that's C-O-R-R-I-E for Corey, RachelCoreyFoundation.org.
And she's the mother of young Rachel Corey, murdered by an Israeli commando in 2003.
Welcome back to the show, Cindy, how are you?
Thank you for having me.
Well, I'm doing fairly well.
I'm in the U.S. at the moment for a very short time, so I'm a little bit jet-lagged.
I came from Israel just a few days ago, actually, and I'm headed back there.
So, it's a challenging time for our family, but an important time.
Now, you guys have filed a civil lawsuit against the IDF, is that right?
That's true.
The lawsuit is actually against the State of Israel and the Ministry of Defense in Israel, which is the IDF, basically, the Israeli military.
And now, pardon me, but I'm sure you're more upset about it than me, so I guess it's all right, but it seemed like a joke, I thought, perhaps, when I read the AP story, which described the circumstances in which the driver of the bulldozer was made to testify, and the access that y'all had to his testimony.
Can you tell us about that?
A couple of days before an earlier witness in October testified, one of the soldiers...
There were two bulldozers at the site the day that Rachel was killed, and they each had two people inside of them, a driver and then a commander of the bulldozer, who is charged with being a second set of eyes, seeing what's going on and actually directing the driver.
There was also an APC vehicle there.
The commander of the second bulldozer testified earlier in October, on October 7th, I believe was the date.
And immediately, or just within 48 hours of his testimony, we received word through our attorney that the state had requested of the court that this particular witness and other witnesses who were on the ground that day be allowed to be behind a screen in the court and to testify from behind the screen.
Even though the case has been going on now for months and months and months, this was the first time that they brought up the possibility of a screen.
They based their request on something called a security certificate, which was signed in 2008 by Ehud Barak, the Minister of Defense in Israel.
It was specifically for our case, although it's based on some old law that I understand goes back, I think, as far back maybe as 1948, but that indicates that for security reasons, they can place limitations both on the information that we get, but also on the contact with the people that were involved.
So, we objected, of course, to the screen.
I think for each of our family members, it's a bit different for each one of us, but in varying degrees, it was very important for us to be able to see the people directly, to hear their testimony, but also to be able to just try to see who these people were, to be able to judge them as whole, complete human beings, you know, to see their body language, to see their face.
I think we all use all of that kind of information in the judgments that we make about any person that we encounter, so that was, of course, important to us.
The court, the judge, there's one judge who hears the case, there's not a jury, but there's one judge, and he listened to arguments for a short time, but then ruled in favor of the state.
There were two witnesses who have had some public exposure.
One is the commander of the armored personnel carrier that was at the site that day, and he was actually the commander of the unit on the ground, and he has appeared on Israeli television soon after Rachel was killed.
And also, my understanding is that it's the commander of the bulldozer that ran over Rachel also has some public exposure, and so the judge ruled that those two people would not rule or would not testify from behind a screen, but that other witnesses would.
At that point, our attorneys requested that our family members, my husband Craig, my daughter Sarah, and myself would be able to see the witnesses.
There's a place in the courtroom where we would be able to sit and see the witnesses, but others in the courtroom, media, and other people that would come to observe would not be able to see.
Our attorneys are able to see the witnesses, so they hope to extend that to our family members as well.
That was denied.
The state said they couldn't take responsibility, and they're saying that it's for security reasons.
We appealed that.
We actually took an appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court, but one judge at the Supreme Court looked at that request and declined for the Supreme Court, as I understand it, to really hear the case.
They decided that the judge was within his power to make that decision.
When we finally did hear from the driver in the bulldozer, he was, in fact, behind a makeshift screen.
We could hear his voice, and at least one reporter saw his feet beneath the screen, but where we were sitting, we didn't even have that option.
As I said, our attorneys were able to see the witness, but we were not.
For me personally, and for all of our family, it was a difficult day, of course, but I think I can talk more about just the kind of limitation.
It felt like we were being pushed away from the process.
For the state of Israel, for the Israeli government, to say that for our family members specifically not be able to see, for security reasons, seemed like an insult to all of us.
But I think in terms of even for the witness himself, I think the fact that we were not able to see him, and to see the whole human being, made it harder, I think, to certainly make a judgment, a complete judgment about what he had to offer, what he had to say, and about who he was.
But in some real sense, I feel like I never encountered him.
I did hear the words, but I didn't have a chance to see the human being.
You were cheated out of your lawsuit.
I wouldn't go that far at all, because I feel like the lawsuit has achieved a lot of important things already.
The information that we're gaining by being able to hear from all of the witnesses that are testifying is extremely important.
This particular witness, I know, was key for our family, and I know that there was a great deal of media interest in the driver coming and so forth.
I know for a lot of people, that's the story.
I personally think the story is much, much bigger than that, and there are many other people that hold responsibility, and we will have still a chance to hear from some of those people.
There are eight witnesses from the state remaining.
One is the commander of the bulldozer that killed Rachel.
The other is the commander of the unit on the ground, the APC person that I mentioned.
I'm sorry.
Hold it right there, Cindy.
We've got to take this break.
We're talking with Cindy Corey.
She's Rachel Corey's mother.
The website is RachelCoreyFoundation.org, the foundation for peace and justice there.
She's suing the Israeli military.
We'll be back to talk about more of this story.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Cindy Corey.
She's suing the Israeli government, the Israeli military, for murdering her daughter in the Gaza Strip back in 2003.
And now, you were in the middle of telling us how much more there is to this story than just you being cheated out of getting to face the actual bulldozer drivers and commanders.
But I wanted to just read this one quote from the AP on that subject.
The state's lawyer, Erit Kalman, said the driver was behind a screen because, quote, we want soldiers to feel free to give a real testimony.
So, the other option, he said, would have been to just close the door entirely.
I guess they don't have a perjury statute over there in Israel.
A sworn testimony isn't to be considered evidence unless the witnesses are allowed to be anonymous.
So, that's a lot of fun, I guess.
If you have a comment about that, go ahead.
Otherwise, please tell us what you think is important so far and what you expect to happen here.
Well, I think you picked up exactly on what we all felt about the state's attorney's comment.
We had assumed that the witnesses that we were hearing who were testifying, since they testified under oath, that they would be compelled to tell the truth.
And the state's attorney seems to imply that it does require anonymity, a screen, or even a completely closed course in order for that to happen.
And that, of course, is very concerning.
In terms of where we're headed now, and I think for your audience to know, this has been a very long process, certainly over the course of years and years for us to get to this point.
But the trial itself started in March, on March 10th.
We had naively assumed that it would probably wind up there.
The system in March or April, the system in Israel is very different from in the U.S.
I think because there are non-juries, trials stretch out for a very long time.
And so we did hear, though, from four international eyewitnesses.
We heard from several witnesses that were technically state's witnesses in the spring.
We've heard a total now of, I think, seven state witnesses who have submitted affidavits and that we've been able to cross-examine in court.
And there are still, as I said, eight remaining.
And these include some very significant people who were on the ground on March 16th, 2003, when Rachel was killed, but also people who were in command positions back at headquarters.
A deputy battalion commander, the battalion commander, is listed as someone who will testify.
So there's still a fairly long way to go.
We anticipate meeting at least four more days, maybe more, in court.
You're quoted in the AP as saying that you sense no remorse whatsoever in the voice that you were allowed to hear, if not the face of the man doing the speaking.
I think that was the most difficult thing for me, was what I sensed was really indifference.
I don't know if I interpreted that accurately.
I had his voice to listen to.
He was speaking in Hebrew.
He had a great deal of difficulty testifying.
He was there for about four hours.
Sometimes the attorney would ask questions and there was nothing.
And we were told he was kind of staring into the wall.
He contradicted his testimony over and over again.
He said he didn't see Rachel, but he also said things like he thought he had testified one time to the military police, when in fact in 2003 he had testified three times.
He forgot that he had said, I apparently forgot, that in 2003, just a couple days after Rachel was killed, he said the blind spot in front of the bulldozer was about three meters.
In court, he said it was about maybe 30 meters, 20 to 30 meters, ten times the distance that he had mentioned in 2003.
He seemed to just have a difficult time.
One of the most shocking things to me was that he couldn't remember the time of day, whether it was early afternoon or whether it was towards evening.
I think in the beginning that was most troubling to me because I just feel like if I had killed someone, I would remember the time of day when that happened.
He seemed to even have trouble with her name, with Rachel's name.
The testimony was being translated to me, but in the words that he said that were quoted to me, and in the tone of those words, I couldn't say that I detected any remorse.
I hope that I'm wrong about that, but sadly that's what I took away from that day in court.
Cindy, part of this story that I hadn't realized until I talked with you and your husband on this show one time before was that Rachel had jumped in front of that bulldozer, or maybe not jumped in front, but stood fast in front of that bulldozer because there were two children in the house that that bulldozer was heading to tear down.
There were actually five children in the house.
Five children.
Right, because there were two families, two brothers.
It was a two-story house before it was ultimately demolished.
Khaled and his family, he was an accountant at the time, lived on the second floor.
He had two little preschool aides, like two and three-year-old girls, and on the bottom floor was Dr. Samir.
He was a pharmacist.
His family with three children, two young girls, and Kareem, their boy, I think was probably 12, 11 or 12 years old at the time, and they were all behind that wall, and they were watching as the bulldozer approached the house.
They had all come down to the garden, to the outside, because they were fearful that the bulldozer could continue and demolish the house.
Rachel had spent time.
She had slept with this family.
She had made phone calls to our house from theirs.
She slept in a pile of blankets at the foot of the parents' bed with the kids, because the kids' bedroom was the one that was most exposed, and they couldn't sleep there at night, because that's when so much of the shooting from tanks and so forth would come into their walls.
That house stood for a short time after Rachel was killed, and Craig and I visited it in September of 2003, and the kids took us and showed us the bullet holes into their wall.
That had come from tanks, and about just a short time after we were there in October, the house was made completely unlivable.
It was really the only house left out there on that border strip when we visited, and it was completely demolished in the spring of 2004.
All right.
Now, jeez, I don't know.
There's a lot of different things to ask, I guess, but I think it's worth pointing out, at least to the audience, that they know, at least according to AP's story here, that the lawsuit is for $1, the symbolism of getting some kind of process done, and then plus the travel expenses for your family and your witnesses.
So, you know, I know people oftentimes, whenever they hear about a dollar sign, they put that as some kind of motive or want to interpret the worst.
So $1 in 2010 dollars is worth about 25 cents, and so I thought that was worth bringing up.
You know, Scott, I don't know if there's time, but I would really like to explain that.
Go ahead.
It's not completely accurate, and there's been a lot of miscommunication about it in the media.
This is a civil trial.
We didn't have the opportunity for a criminal trial once the military police investigated and found no responsibility at all.
This was the only choice that we were left with, and the position of the U.S. government continues to be that there has not been adequate investigation into Rachel's case, and that their questions to the Israeli government go ignored or unanswered.
There are representatives from the U.S. Embassy in the court every day, often two people there, and the Consul General has been there at times.
So it's not just our family that says there hasn't been accountability here.
It's our U.S. government as well.
But in terms of the damages, there's a lot of confusion.
Civil trial, it's true.
If fault is found, they result in damages, and that's just the nature of the animal.
But this suit on our family's behalf has always been about finding information and accountability, and that has been a seven-year journey for us in different ways.
Normally, damages would not be discussed at this portion of the trial, but there are three different kinds of damages in a case like this, as it's been explained to me.
There are the kind of expenditures that have come as a result of Rachel's killing, and I think that would include our expenses for the trial.
There's also something that's more like what we would call pain and suffering in the United States, and then there are punitive damages.
And in the March phase of the trial, we were forced into a position of naming an amount for the punitive damages, because those are damages that are applied sort of above and beyond by the court, above these other two kinds of damages.
And at the time, there was a witness.
He was the doctor who did the autopsy on Rachel's body, was testifying, and he testified to violating an Israeli court order that said there had to be a representative of the U.S. government present before Rachel's body could be autopsied.
And the judge was actually going to sort of stop the line of questioning, because he said it didn't really apply to what happened to Rachel.
But we are charging that there was evidentiary damage done by this doctor who violated his own country's court order.
And at the point that we asked that, or our attorneys did, we had to name...
The judge gave us five minutes to decide on an amount for punitive damages.
And it was at that point, that for that portion of the damages, we decided to say $1.
There are some other sort of complicated reasons for why we did that, having to do with how much money we would have had to give to the court if we made a claim for anything higher.
But that was the nature of it.
So I just want people to be clear, this is just not the phase where damages are dealt with.
Before that would ever happen, the judge would have to rule in our favor, and so forth.
And that's not going to happen for some time.
I mean, a decision won't come for some time.
But I'm concerned that there's a lot of misunderstanding around it.
Well, that often happens when we read the Associated Press.
So I'm glad that you had a chance to clear that up.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity.
And I just want to reiterate that for us, it's always been about accountability and information, trying to figure out what happened here and having some accountability for it.
Really not only for Rachel, but because there's so little accountability for what happens for everybody who is damaged in this region.
Well, you know, I guess looking at what happened to poor Furkan Dogan, you guys are relatively, or comparatively lucky that the U.S. government has taken an interest in your case at all.
I mean, I guess if they really wanted to make demands, then they could, you know, at different levels of strength.
But apparently in the case of this young American citizen shot at point-blank range on the high seas during the Gaza flotilla massacre last spring, the U.S. government had not one word to say about it whatsoever.
Well, I can tell you that I don't think that's exactly the case because our family has actually had conversations with people at the State Department and also with Vice President Biden's national security staff specifically about the flotilla and about Furkan Dogan.
I know that he is on their minds.
We talked to them because we were very concerned about the U.S. position that Israel could investigate itself about what happened with the flotilla and our history and what the State Department has told us about their view of the investigation that happened in Rachel's case is that it was not a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation.
And so we had problems with the U.S. saying that Israel could do such an investigation with the flotilla and we expressed that to people at high levels of the U.S. government.
And they assured us mostly what was happening with the Israeli investigation.
They said that Rachel's, what had happened in Rachel's case, had come under consideration while they were deciding how to address it.
Now I share the same concerns that you do and I think that many of your listeners do about what's happened and I think we have to continue to put pressure on officials in our government to make sure that Furkan Dogan's situation is addressed.
I have no doubt that behind the scenes there is some attention to it but it does take a lot of persistence, I think, that we're all going to have to work to make sure that and hope that someday there's some accountability for what happened there.
Well, I mean, to me, I guess what I never used to do when I was a little kid was walk around and walk a mile in the other man's shoes, that kind of thing, and so I like to ask people how would they think that this would have played out if it had been the Iranian government that had murdered your daughter or Furkan Dogan.
What would the reaction of Hillary Clinton and the State Department have been then?
Well, I think our experience tells us that there's no question that if it was some other country other than Israel that the response from the U.S. government would probably have been very different and one of our, one of the sad things I think that we felt early on was that if the response from the U.S. government, even though I think behind the scenes it was fairly strong in Rachel's case, if it had been stronger, if there had been the outreach I think that was called for and maybe others who were other internationals who were very quickly killed on that border after Rachel was, Tom Herndon, James Miller, that maybe things would have slowed down there a little bit and would have saved those lives.
Maybe some of the Palestinian lives that were lost in Gaza would have been saved as well.
There were over 3,000 Palestinians who died between 2000 and 2008 in Gaza.
So certainly we would like to see the U.S. take a much stronger position and I guess the bottom line is that we would like to see our own laws regarding the export of arms and so forth.
We would like to see those enforced.
Arms Export Control Act, Foreign Military Financing, the Leahy Amendment, we would like to see those applied equally to Israel as they are applied to other countries.
Which reminds me, you tried to sue Caterpillar as well.
How did that work out?
They're the guys that made the bulldozer.
Right.
And there's a lot of misunderstanding about that case also.
It was, we didn't file suit against Caterpillar because they sold a machine and then something bad happened with that machine.
There are laws which say that when corporations continue to provide materials or supplies that are used for human rights violations and they knowingly continue to provide that equipment, knowingly continue to provide parts or service or whatever and they know that human rights violations are likely to occur with those, that then they share responsibility.
And so our family was dealing with Palestinian families whose family members were killed when they were inside houses that were demolished in the West Bank and in Gaza, brought this lawsuit against Caterpillar Corporation.
Ultimately, our charges were denied by the district court that heard it and then it was heard by the Ninth Court of Appeals and they upheld the decision of the lower court.
The reason, when they wrote their finding about it, the reason that they did is that eventually somebody came from the U.S. government to testify about the sales of the bulldozers and the court said that they were, there's something called political question that says that the court can't interfere in the business of the executive branch, basically.
And the court said that they were really cognizant of the fact that if they heard the case or if they ruled against Caterpillar in this situation, that they would also be implicating the U.S. government possibly in human rights violations.
And...
So it wasn't that you didn't have a case against Caterpillar, it was just that your case against Caterpillar could have spilled over.
That's right.
And it was disappointing.
It was disappointing that we weren't, to the attorneys particularly that were working on it, that we weren't able to go ahead and pursue more information in the court about how all of the sales and that kind of thing work.
But I think it's important for people to understand that this law exists really to prevent human rights violations and that much of that law actually came out of World War II and during the Holocaust and so forth when corporations that had contributed to that were held responsible.
Yeah, in part by Harry Truman.
I think you're right, but I'm not sure about that.
Yeah, they seized Averell Harriman's bank then they made him the ambassador.
Or the other way around, I forget.
I don't know about that.
I think that's actually very interesting though that these laws apply to private companies and that kind of thing.
Trading with Human Rights Abusers Act or whatever they call it.
And then for you to make your case you'd have to, obviously the implication would be that American taxpayers paid Caterpillar to ship those bulldozers over there and that the Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama administrations are just as guilty of violating this statute as Caterpillar.
That's basically what they said and for people that are interested in it there's a lot of information about the case at the Center for Constitutional Rights website.
It's CCR, Center for Constitutional Rights and if people go and Google there the Rachel Corey case all the files related to the case will come up and people don't have to take my word for it but they can read what's been written about it and so forth.
Okay, now we only have about if we're lucky a minute, a minute and a half left here.
I guess I'd just like to give you a chance to make any closing comments you want.
Tell us about Rachel a little bit if you want.
Well, you know, I work really hard to hang on to a lot of things about Rachel and that I know were important to her as we're doing some of this really hard work right now.
It's emotionally draining work and I'll admit that our family is tired but I try to keep in mind, I tried to keep in mind that day when we went into court to hear from the bulldozer driver that she had tremendous empathy and I think she also had determination and she wanted us to keep Gaza and the people there and what they were suffering in mind but she also wanted us to remember all the others that are impacted as well and I can tell you from spending a couple months now in Israel that certainly that's everyone there and all of us here are implicated in what's happening there and are impacted by it too.
So I just think that we all have to we have to insist on a solution to this somehow and an end to the tragedy.
Alright everybody, that's Cindy Corey, Rachel Corey's mother.
Google up Cindy Corey in the news and you'll see there's a lot of it about their civil case going on right now against the Israeli Ministry of Defense for murdering their daughter.
The website is RachelCoreyFoundation.org and I sincerely thank you for your time on the show today.
Thanks for having me.
