Sitting on the Evidence: Obama Administration Silent on IDF Murder of 19-Year-Old American
01 October 2010By Dave Lindorff
Murder is murder, and terror is terror, you might
think. But when terror is committed against an
American citizen by the state of Israel the response
from the US government is not protest, and it is
surely not to demand justice, much less seek
vengeance. It is silence.
In 1985, when terrorists from the Palestine Liberation
Front, in an act of piracy on the high seas in the
Mediterranean, took control of the Achille Lauro, an
Italian cruise ship, and executed the Jewish American
Leon Klinghoffer, shooting him in the forehead and
then pushing the wheelchair-bound 69-year-old
overboard, the US responded with dramatic action. To
rescue the passengers, Italian negotiators had worked
out a deal granting safe passage to Tunisia to the
pirates, in return for the freeing of the ship and its
other passengers. But President Ronald Reagan
dispatched a US fighter plane to intercept the plane
carrying the PLF pirates to safety, and forced it to
land at a US airbase in Italy, where they were turned
over to Italian authorities for prosecution.
Compare this to another more recent act of piracy, the
violent assault and high-seas boarding of the Turkish
cruise ship Mavi Marmara and a flotilla of smaller
ships bound from Turkey to Gaza by troops from the
Israeli Defense Force, who commandeered the vessels,
killing eight Turkish and one young Turkish-American
passenger. The US failed to condemn this latter act of
piracy, and as for the American who was slain, 19-year
old Furkan Dogan, there was not a word of protest.
Furkan Dogan, executed by Israeli soldiers in the raid
on the Mavi Marmara, ignored by Washington and the US
media
Worse yet, we learn only now that in July, two months
after the May 31 IDF attack, the Turkish government
supplied the Obama Administration with the result of
the Turkish Council of Forensic Medicine's autopsy of
young Dogan, which showed clearly that he had been
murdered by two shots to the face fired by Israeli
commandos at point blank range while he lay, gravely
injured, on the deck of the ship.
Dogan's other wounds, according to the autopsy,
included a shot to the back, leg and foot. He was said
to have been writhing in a conscious or
semi-consciousness state on the deck "for some time"
when he was executed.
Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States, says it sent
the autopsy report to the US via the US Embassy in
Turkey, as soon as it was completed, assuming the US
would want to prosecute Israel for his death. Instead,
the Obama administration and the US Justice Department
sat and continue to sit on the information, saying
nothing. A request by ThisCantBeHappening for
information from the Justice Department about the
autopsy elicited only a brief "We have no comment for
you," from DOJ spokesman Dean Boyd.
Meanwhile, while Israel has been claiming that its
boarding party on the Mavi Marmara only used their
guns and killed people after they were attacked by
passengers and crew on the ship, the truth appears to
be that they came aboard guns blazing, and intent on
causing harm. A fact-finding mission of the Office of
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)
says it has concluded that Dogan, for example, was not
resisting the boarding, but rather, was filming it,
using a small hand-held video camera from his position
on the boat's top deck.
He would not be the only videographer or photographer
shot. IDF troops made a concerted effort to stop all
photographers and videographers from recording their
actions, not only shooting at those who were filming
them, but also confiscating or destroying hundreds of
cameras, memory cards and other recording equipment.
Turkish medical examiners concluded that five others
of the nine killed, in addition to Dogan, were slain
execution-style by IDF troops in the assault on the
Mavi Marmara.
Although the conclusions of the Human Rights
Commissioner's report and of the Turkish medical
examiners has been big news in Turkey for the past
week, the US media has maintained a news blackout,
even though one of the murdered victims was an
American. It's a sad commentary on the extent to which
the US corporate media have become propagandists for
the US and Israeli governments.
The UN fact-finding mission, which interviewed 112
witnesses to the attack, was chaired by Judge Karl T.
Hudson-Phillips, Q.C., retired judge of the
International Criminal Court and former attorney
general of Trinidad and Tobago. Other members included
Sir Desmond de Silva, Q.C. of the United Kingdom,
former chief prosecutor of the United Nations-backed
Special Court for Sierra Leone, and Ms. Mary Shanthi
Dairiam of Malaysia, founding member of the board of
directors of the International Women's Rights Action
Watch Asia Pacific.
Scroll down to the bottom of the news artices on the
home page for a video clip smuggled off of the Mavi
Marmara, which appears to show two IDF soldiers
viciously kicking the prone Dogan, and then executing
him on the deck at their feet. Alternatively, you may
Click Here and go to Youtube to see it.
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