by Dave Lindorff and Linn Washington
M
urder 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.
Furkan Dogan, executed by Israeli soldiers in the raid on the Mavi Marmara, ignored by Washington and the US media
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.
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.
