Haaretz: Army documents suggest general cut short probe into Rachel Corrie’s death

Posted on March 25, 2010

Jack Khoury, Haaretz

The Military Police interrogation of a key suspect in the killing of American human rights activist Rachel Corrie was cut short by a direct order of then GOC Southern, Maj. Gen. Doron Almog, army documents obtained by Haaretz suggest.

The documents come from the Military Police investigation file and were submitted as evidence to the Haifa District Court when a member of the MP investigation team testified in court during the civil lawsuit case Corrie’s family has brought against the State of Israel.

The Corries’ attorney, Hussein Abu Hussein, confronted the former investigator with a protocol of his questioning of the commander of the D9 Caterpillar bulldozer that drove over the activist. The officer’s record states his interrogation of the bulldozer commander came to an unusual end. “It’s now 18:12. Maj (res.) K entered the interrogation room and told the witness he must not say anything or write anything, by a direct order from GOC Southern Command. I confirm this occurred and I sign this in my hand,” the officer wrote, adding his signature. There the interrogation concluded.

Prior to the intervention the soldier was describing the moment he understood Rachel Corrie had been hurt, insisting he could not see her from the driver’s cabin.

Although the bulldozer commander later gave further testimony, Abu Hussein said the Corrie family took the interference of such a senior officer very seriously. “This makes it absolutely clear there was at least an attempt, no matter how effective, to intervene in the investigation,” he told Haaretz. “The documents proves it, black on white, that there was an attempt to prevent the bulldozer driver from giving a full testimony on the circumstances in which the deceased was killed.”

Abu Hussein also said that this violated a promise by then prime minister Ariel Sharon to then American president George W. Bush to carry out a thorough, in-depth investigation.

Claims about attempts by Almog to influence the investigation were also made at a hearing in the Rishon Letzion Magistrate’s Court on March 18, 2003. Military Police approached the court to obtain an autopsy order for Corrie’s body, to determine whether she was indeed crushed by the bulldozer or killed by hand-grenades soldiers were alleged to have thrown during the incident.

The court record states that one of the investigating officers said the Military Police had been delayed “by an argument between GOC Southern Command and the military advocate general about whether to investigate and on what charges.”

Corrie, 23, whose hometown is Olympia, Washington, was killed in Rafah on March 16, 2003, while standing in front of a bulldozer that was demolishing structures along the Philadelphi route. The IDF claims the 65-ton bulldozer never touched Corrie, while eyewitnesses insist it crushed her deliberately.

Maj. Gen. (res.) Doron Almog told Haaretz that he had no knowledge of the claims and no intention to comment. He said he had no idea what documents were in question or how reliable they were, as seven years have passed since the event. Almog noted that while he did not wish to discuss the details of this particular event, he had never covered up any investigation and a full internal investigation was carried out in his command at the time and submitted to the chief of staff. The IDF spokesperson was not available for comment.

Haaretz: Corrie’s sister to Haaretz: U.S. encouraged family to sue Israel

Posted on March 11, 2010

Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz

This is Sarah Corrie Simpson’s first visit to Israel. Her younger sister, Rachel Corrie, was killed by an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, at the age of 23. Now, the family is suing the state in the Haifa District Court.

“I’m glad the day is finally here, that the eyewitnesses are having a chance to talk in a court of law,” she said in an interview with Haaretz yesterday. “It’s been seven long years.”

The witnesses, who include Rachel’s colleagues in the left-wing International Solidarity Movement, say Rachel climbed atop a mount of dirt to be sure the driver could see her, Simpson said. When he nevertheless kept coming at her, she tried to flee, but tripped and fell. “The bulldozer driver kept driving with the blade down, pushing the dirt over Rachel, and stopped when her body was under the cab.”

“My father served in the military in Vietnam and was responsible for bulldozer operations,” Simpson added. “He said there is no way that what happened to Rachel would have happened on his watch.”

She rejects the IDF’s claim that the area was an active combat zone. The witnesses claim no shots were being fired, she said, so the army could have stopped the operation and removed the demonstrators. But in any case, she added, international law requires soldiers to try to protect civilians even in a war zone.

What brought Rachel, a girl from a good family in Washington state, to the town of Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border?

According to Simpson, the September 11, 2001 terror attacks pushed Rachel into political activism. She wanted “to find out what was going on in the world, especially in the Middle East.” She studied Arabic and began meeting with peace activists, including former Israeli soldiers. She wanted to understand America’s role in the Middle East.

Rachel was a pacifist and a pluralist, Simpson added, her views informed by growing up in a Christian family with Jewish, Sikh, Hindu and Muslim in-laws.

After Rachel’s death, Simpson said, “our lives changed instantly.” Her father quit his job, and she herself has devoted herself fully to the political and legal effort to force the IDF to take responsibility for Rachel’s death. Her goal, she said, is to ensure “that something like this will never happen again to any civilian … whether Israeli, Palestinian or internationals.”

Though the Military Police investigated Rachel’s death, neither the family nor the American authorities consider the probe credible.

“There are pieces of evidence we have never been given,” Simpson said. For instance, out of about six hours of video, in color, with complete audio, the family received “14 minutes of tape, a grainy black copy, with incomplete audio.”

Would you want to meet the bulldozer driver?

“Yes, I would. Ultimately, in order to have any kind of restorative healing process occur, I need to be able to hear directly from him what happened that day and how he feels about it. As well, I hope he would be able to hear and somehow understand the impact this has had on my life and the life of my family. A credible investigation is important … but in the end, it is also important that my family and the man who killed Rachel look each other in the eyes. This would be the most difficult and painful thing I can imagine doing, but it’s something I feel is extremely important. But I have no control over this, the Israeli government won’t release his name.”

Asked whether the family was getting support from the U.S. government, Simpson said it was a U.S. government official who first encouraged them to sue the Israeli government.

The family has met with many senior American officials, she added, and more than 70 congressmen signed a letter demanding a serious investigation.

Haaretz: Biden and the bulldozer

Posted on March 8, 2010

Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz

Vice President Joe Biden / Courtesy The White House

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who arrived in Israel yesterday, didn’t look for camels among the cars on the road from Ben-Gurion International Airport to Jerusalem. In a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing held two years ago for the United States Ambassador to Israel, James Cunningham, Biden heard that the Israelis even know how to ride bulldozers.

Then a senator from Delaware, who chaired the committee, Biden asked for a detailed report on the affair of American peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was run over and killed by the treads of an Israeli bulldozer.

If Biden schedules a meeting with Corrie’s parents here, the Israeli Information and Diaspora Ministry will have to work overtime. The parents, who arrived in advance of the scheduled deliberations on their suit against the state of Israel, will tell him that his hosts are continuing to deny any responsibility for their daughter’s death.

Rachel was a 23-year-old student run over by a 64-ton bulldozer in March, 2003, when she and others from the International Solidarity Movement tried to use their bodies to stop the demolition of a house in Rafah.

At the Senate hearing, Cunningham spoke about the Israel authorities’ refusal to open a thorough investigation into the affair and not rest content with an internal report.

Cunningham detailed numerous written and oral requests to top people in the Israeli government by senior people in the American administration and his predecessor at the embassy. In reply to Biden’s question, Cunningham undertook to stand by the Corrie family in the demand for a credible investigation of the tragic event. Tomorrow the witness stage in the Corrie family’s suit will open at the Haifa District Court. Facing the family and friends will be representatives of the state who are demanding the suit be withdrawn. They claim Corrie was killed in “an act of war,” during the course of an armed conflict in a closed military zone. Therefore, even if it is proved there was use of excessive force as well as gross negligence – the state is totally exempt from liability. The defense is giving legal cover to the bulldozer operator and the soldiers who secured him, on the grounds it was a sovereign “act of state.” In other words: Corrie was responsible for her own death.

Apparently Israel takes responsibility for the deaths of foreign civilians only when threatened. For more than five years legal wrangling dragged on between the state and the family of British television filmmaker James Miller, who was shot and killed in Rafah. With respect to that incident too, which took place two months after Corrie was killed, the state hid behind the excuse of “an act of war.” In this case too questions arose as to the credibility of the Investigative Military Police report and the top political level in London urged the government of Israel to compensate the widow and the orphans. The case was closed (with the payment of more than 1 million pounds Sterling in compensation) after the British threatened to issue an official extradition request for the Israeli soldiers who shot the cameraman.

The American media have long ceased to follow American VIPs who come to give artificial respiration to “the peace process.” Perhaps the White House reporters who are accompanying Biden will evince interest in the Corrie case.

Haaretz: Israel grants visas to witnesses in suit over Rachel Corrie death

Posted on February 23, 2010

Akiva Eldar, Haaretz

February 23, 2010

Under pressure from the United States, Israel is to grant visas to four activists from the International Solidarity Movement so they can testify in suit brought against the government by the family of Rachel Corrie, an activist killed by an IDF bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in March 2003.

Corrie, a U.S. citizen, was 24 when she was struck and killed by a bulldozer as she and others tried to stop Israel razing homes in Rafah by using their bodies as human shields.

The Interior Ministry informed the family’s attorney, Hussein Abu Hussein, that the British and American witnesses, including a peace activist expelled from Israel in the past, would be allowed entry into to testify in the civil suit agisnt the Defense Ministry.

The case is due to open the Haifa District Court in two weeks.

However, the Defense Ministry blocked the family’s request to allow Dr. Ahmed Abu Nakira from the Al-Najar Hospital in Rafah, who treated Corrie’s injuries and later confirmed her death, to enter Israel.

A request by Abu Hussein to question the physician via video conference was also rejected because “it is difficult to identify the witness and present him with documents”.

Ahead of the court deliberations the Corrie family contacted Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for Human Rights Michael Posner, who visited Israel several weeks ago in connection with the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead.

The family told Haaretz yesterday that it is working with members of Congress and the State Department to pressure Israel so that a “thorough and transparent investigation” of the death of their daughter can be carried out, “as was promised to President Bush by Prime Minister Sharon in March 2003.”

The family says that the issue has been brought to the attention of President Barack Obama. They also noted that Vice President Joe Biden, in his former capacity as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had also raised the issue.

In the damages suit filed by the Corrie family it is stated that no thorough and objective investigation was held into the death, which the family maintains occurred either because of intent or the bulldozer driver’s negligence. The plaintiffs also maintain that the recording documenting the incident was deleted.

Haaretz: U.S.: Let four ISM activists into Israel to testify

Posted on February 22, 2010

Akiva Eldar, Haaretz

The Obama administration is pressuring the Israeli authorities to allow four activists of the International Solidarity Movement from the U.S. and Britain to enter the country so they can testify in the civil suit brought against the Defense Ministry by the family of Rachel Corrie, an activist killed by an IDF bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in March 2003.

Corrie, a U.S. citizen, was 24 when she was struck and killed by the bulldozer as she and others tried to stop the razing of homes in Rafah by using their bodies as human shields.

The Interior Ministry informed the family’s attorney, Hussein Abu Hussein, that the witnesses, including a peace activist expelled from Israel in the past, would be allowed entry into the country so they can testify during deliberations scheduled at the Haifa District Court in two weeks. However, the Defense Ministry rejected he family’s request to allow Dr. Ahmed Abu Nakira from the Al-Najar Hospital in Rafah, and who treated Corrie’s injuries and later confirmed her death, to enter Israel.

A request by Abu Hussein to question the physician via video conference was also rejected because “it is difficult to identify the witness and present him with documents.”

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