"If there's an attack on Iran by Israel and the US, there's no way to prevent it from becoming a nuclear war…''
-Fidel Castro; 13th July, 2010.
''United States and Israel had decided to attack at least two countries in the region in the next three months…”
-Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; 26th July, 2010.
Few days later of Fidel's predictive warning, Ahmadinejad's speech came out as a realization of a nightmare from which the whole community was reeling for years; since WWII. The fear of Nuclear War or WWIII! The Cuban Revolution leader's address to the Cuban parliament summoned for an extraordinary session in Havana, due to the urgency of mobilizing the world, faced with the danger of a nuclear war that would be triggered by a US-Israeli led aggression on Iran. The great revolutionary claimed "Simultaneously, the war would break out in the Near and Far East and across Eurasia," said Fidel. "Otherwise, if the war breaks out, the current social order will abruptly vanish and the price will be much higher," he warned. Just few days later Ahmadinejad came out with another polemic statement regarding US invasion in two states within next three months. Was there any link between these two statements? Experts on diplomacy can give a prudent answer to this question. I want to share that Hugo Chavez may have played a crucial role by provoking Fidel, a veteran leader who have won the hearts of millions in all over the world, to give such an speech which may help to build a global opinion in support of stopping US-Israel aggression on Iran. On the other hand, Ahmadinejad's prediction on war within three months in fact makes the war at least three months late if it ever happens in future at all! But still there are lot of realities behind all these iteration and reiterations. The fear of nuclear war can't be undermined with these arguments and counter arguments.
A thought-provoking article by Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian emeritus professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, was published on 13th August 2010. Chossudovsky claims that attack on Iran is not a particular decision from the US relating it with question of Israeli existence rather it is their plan since 2003 to take Iran just after Iraq. He says that the stockpiling and deployment of advanced weapons systems directed against Iran started in the immediate wake of the 2003 bombing and invasion of Iraq. From the outset, these war plans were led by the US, in liaison with NATO and Israel. The US planners named the plan with a code- TIRANNT, 'Theatre Iran Near Term' and it was initiated in May, 2003. According to some rare information revealed by some ex-security and military personnel it is clear that the US viewed Iran as a part of succession of military operations. Former NATO commander General Wesley Clark (1997-2000) said the Pentagon's military road-map consisted of a sequence of countries: beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan- a five year plan.
The whole strategy is directed and controlled by the United Strategy Commend (USSTRATCOM), which is again under the US Department of Defense (DoD). USSTRATCOM is one of 10 U.S. unified commands under the DoD. The missions of USSTRATCOM are to deter attacks on U.S. vital interests; to ensure U.S. freedom of action in space and cyberspace in support of U.S. Joint Force Commander Operations; to synchronize global missile defense plans and to synchronize regional combating of weapons of mass destruction plans. Under its new mandate, USSTRATCOM has a responsibility for overseeing a global strike plan consisting of both conventional and nuclear weapons. The decision to target Iran under TIRANNT is a part of the broader processes of USSTRATCOM.
Read more...
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Fresh claims US is running secret prison in Afghanistan
Prisoners are being abused at a "secret jail" in the main American military base in Afghanistan, according to a report from a US policy think tank.
Ex-detainees said they were deprived of sleep and held in cold isolation cells in the site at Bagram, says New York-based Open Society Foundations.
A BBC investigation in April uncovered similar allegations of prisoner abuse at a hidden facility in Bagram airbase.
The US military repeated its denial that it was operating a secret jail.
'Very troubling pattern'
Open Society Foundations, which is funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, says 18 detainees claim they were held at a secret site, dubbed the "black jail", during 2009 and 2010.
The inmates said they were exposed to excessive cold and light, not given enough food or blankets, deprived of sleep, stripped naked for medical examinations and not allowed to practise their religion.
"Given the consistency of the accounts, the Open Society Foundations believes these are genuine areas of concern, and not outliers, that run counter to US rules on detainee treatment," the report says.
"We're not talking about being threatened to death in interrogation with drills to their head, we're talking about run-of-the-mill detention conditions that when seen as a whole create a very troubling pattern," report author Jonathan Horowitz said.
The US military said its detention centres complied with US and international laws.
"The Department of Defence does not operate any secret prisons," Capt Pamela Kunze, a spokeswoman for the US military task force overseeing detentions in Afghanistan, told Associated Press news agency.
In April, the BBC spoke to nine former detainees who said they had been held at a secret jail.
The prisoners said that they had been prevented from sleeping and that a light had been kept on in their small, cold concrete cells so they could not tell if it was night or day.
In June last year, the BBC spoke to a number of other former detainees who had been held at Bagram airbase, and they claimed they had been beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs.
Source
Ex-detainees said they were deprived of sleep and held in cold isolation cells in the site at Bagram, says New York-based Open Society Foundations.
A BBC investigation in April uncovered similar allegations of prisoner abuse at a hidden facility in Bagram airbase.
The US military repeated its denial that it was operating a secret jail.
'Very troubling pattern'
Open Society Foundations, which is funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, says 18 detainees claim they were held at a secret site, dubbed the "black jail", during 2009 and 2010.
The inmates said they were exposed to excessive cold and light, not given enough food or blankets, deprived of sleep, stripped naked for medical examinations and not allowed to practise their religion.
"Given the consistency of the accounts, the Open Society Foundations believes these are genuine areas of concern, and not outliers, that run counter to US rules on detainee treatment," the report says.
"We're not talking about being threatened to death in interrogation with drills to their head, we're talking about run-of-the-mill detention conditions that when seen as a whole create a very troubling pattern," report author Jonathan Horowitz said.
The US military said its detention centres complied with US and international laws.
"The Department of Defence does not operate any secret prisons," Capt Pamela Kunze, a spokeswoman for the US military task force overseeing detentions in Afghanistan, told Associated Press news agency.
In April, the BBC spoke to nine former detainees who said they had been held at a secret jail.
The prisoners said that they had been prevented from sleeping and that a light had been kept on in their small, cold concrete cells so they could not tell if it was night or day.
In June last year, the BBC spoke to a number of other former detainees who had been held at Bagram airbase, and they claimed they had been beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs.
Source
Friday, October 15, 2010
Clinton aide's idea: Let Iraq shoot down U.S. plane
By Justin Elliott
Salon, October 15, 2010
General Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during parts of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, has a new memoir out that contains this significant-seeming story: Back in the late 1990s, Shelton says a member of Clinton's cabinet asked him to allow Saddam Hussein to shoot down an American plane over Iraq as a pretext for starting a war. The way Shelton tells the story, this was a serious request.
Remember, the context here is the Clinton Administration's years of trying to overthrow Saddam -- including in a little-remembered 1996 CIA coup attempt. In December 1998 (most likely after the request was made to Shelton), Clinton bombed Iraq for four days in Operation Desert Fox, which Clinton said was a response to Saddam's lack of cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors.
Here's what happened shortly after Shelton became Joint Chiefs chair in October 1997, according to his book:
The way Shelton writes the story, the unnamed cabinet official could not have been Berger or Cohen. That leaves Albright and the other cabinet members as possible candidates.
Source
Salon, October 15, 2010
General Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during parts of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, has a new memoir out that contains this significant-seeming story: Back in the late 1990s, Shelton says a member of Clinton's cabinet asked him to allow Saddam Hussein to shoot down an American plane over Iraq as a pretext for starting a war. The way Shelton tells the story, this was a serious request.
Remember, the context here is the Clinton Administration's years of trying to overthrow Saddam -- including in a little-remembered 1996 CIA coup attempt. In December 1998 (most likely after the request was made to Shelton), Clinton bombed Iraq for four days in Operation Desert Fox, which Clinton said was a response to Saddam's lack of cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors.
Here's what happened shortly after Shelton became Joint Chiefs chair in October 1997, according to his book:
Early on in my days as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we had small, weekly White House breakfasts in National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s office that included me, Sandy, Bill Cohen (Secretary of Defense), Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State), George Tenet (head of the CIA), Leon Firth (VP chief of staff for security), Bill Richardson (ambassador to the U.N.), and a few other senior administration officials. These were informal sessions where we would gather around Berger’s table and talk about concerns over coffee and breakfast served by the White House dining facility. It was a comfortable setting that encouraged brainstorming of potential options on a variety of issues of the day.
During that time we had U-2 aircraft on reconnaissance sorties over Iraq. These planes were designed to fly at extremely high speeds and altitudes (over seventy thousand feet) both for pilot safety and to avoid detection.
At one of my very first breakfasts, while Berger and Cohen were engaged in a sidebar discussion down at one end of the table and Tenet and Richardson were preoccupied in another, one of the Cabinet members present leaned over to me and said, "Hugh, I know I shouldn’t even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event — something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough — and slow enough — so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?"
The hair on the back of my neck bristled, my teeth clenched, and my fists tightened. I was so mad I was about to explode. I looked across the table, thinking about the pilot in the U-2 and responded, "Of course we can ..." which prompted a big smile on the official’s face.
"You can?" was the excited reply.
"Why, of course we can," I countered. "Just as soon as we get your ass qualified to fly it, I will have it flown just as low and slow as you want to go."
The official reeled back and immediately the smile disappeared. "I knew I should not have asked that...."
"No, you should not have," I strongly agreed, still shocked at the disrespect and sheer audacity of the question. "Remember, there is one of our great Americans flying that U-2, and you are asking me to intentionally send him or her to their death for an opportunity to kick Saddam. The last time I checked, we don’t operate like that here in America."
The way Shelton writes the story, the unnamed cabinet official could not have been Berger or Cohen. That leaves Albright and the other cabinet members as possible candidates.
Source
Doc who ‘inspired’ torture program gets $31 million Army contract
A psychologist whose research was used in constructing the US's program to torture terrorism suspects has been granted a $31-million no-bid Army contract to provide "resilience training" to US soldiers.
Mark Benjamin at Salon.com reports that University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman's research "formed the psychological underpinnings of the Bush administration's torture program."
In a 2009 article, the New York Times described Seligman's small but crucial role in the establishment of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on terrorism suspects before the techniques were suspended in 2008.
Read more...
Mark Benjamin at Salon.com reports that University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman's research "formed the psychological underpinnings of the Bush administration's torture program."
The Army awarded the "sole source" contract in February to the University of Pennsylvania for resilience training, or teaching soldiers to better cope with the psychological strain of multiple combat tours. The university's Positive Psychology Center, directed by famed psychologist Martin Seligman, is conducting the resilience training.
Army contracting documents show that nobody else was allowed to bid on the resilience-training contract because "there is only one responsible source due to a unique capability provided, and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements." And yet, Salon was able to identify resilience training experts at other institutions around the country, including the University of Maryland and the Mayo Clinic. In fact, in 2008 the Marine Corps launched a project with UCLA to conduct resilience training for Marines and their families at nine military bases across the United States and in Okinawa, Japan.
In a 2009 article, the New York Times described Seligman's small but crucial role in the establishment of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on terrorism suspects before the techniques were suspended in 2008.
Read more...
Tattooed Bankers with a Case of Cosmic Red Ass.
Dog Poet Transmitting…….
One of the things I like to say, because history has proven it over and over is, ‘when the tables are turned the same people are still sitting there’. The names may change and the faces may change but they are the same people, which is the definition of an empty suit.
The reason the same people are sitting there is because they are financed by the same people who financed their predecessors. This is the reason that all governments are corrupted into the same bent system, whether it is composed of an original establishment, or the reformers who followed it, or some gaggle of revolutionaries who took power through the inevitable unrest, caused by extreme inequities, that eventually hit the middle class.
It all comes back to the banks. It is the banks who finance every change in the governments and who pull the strings from behind the scenes. David Rockefeller is a good example of this and so is the Rothschild Satanic Dynasty. Apparently the Rothschilds keep an empty chair and a place setting at their dining table for their horned master. It’s a family tradition like this one.
Materialism is not just a condition. It’s a force. The power of the force lies in the symbolism of the currency which represents what we collectively agree upon as having value in exchange for goods and services. We didn’t actually collectively agree on anything. We just let the loudest and most persuasive voices speak for us out of our hearing and they were all financed by bankers. The first thing anyone should be aware of is the general character of anyone who wants to go into politics in the first place.
The mind is a tremendous power. It has manifested everything we see around us. These structures and conditions are more enduring that any normal human life. It can be reasonably supposed that there is a conscious force that has come into being as the expression of aggregate public belief in the existence of what we see. It’s not a reach to assume that something like what we call the devil would have come into being one way or another, simply because so many people have believed for so long in all of the things that compose what we call evil. Evil and good change places all the time and that explains why one of the characteristics of the devil is as a source of confusion. Not knowing what is really good or evil puts us in the position of having it defined for us for the profit of those confusing us.
Read more...
One of the things I like to say, because history has proven it over and over is, ‘when the tables are turned the same people are still sitting there’. The names may change and the faces may change but they are the same people, which is the definition of an empty suit.
The reason the same people are sitting there is because they are financed by the same people who financed their predecessors. This is the reason that all governments are corrupted into the same bent system, whether it is composed of an original establishment, or the reformers who followed it, or some gaggle of revolutionaries who took power through the inevitable unrest, caused by extreme inequities, that eventually hit the middle class.
It all comes back to the banks. It is the banks who finance every change in the governments and who pull the strings from behind the scenes. David Rockefeller is a good example of this and so is the Rothschild Satanic Dynasty. Apparently the Rothschilds keep an empty chair and a place setting at their dining table for their horned master. It’s a family tradition like this one.
Materialism is not just a condition. It’s a force. The power of the force lies in the symbolism of the currency which represents what we collectively agree upon as having value in exchange for goods and services. We didn’t actually collectively agree on anything. We just let the loudest and most persuasive voices speak for us out of our hearing and they were all financed by bankers. The first thing anyone should be aware of is the general character of anyone who wants to go into politics in the first place.
The mind is a tremendous power. It has manifested everything we see around us. These structures and conditions are more enduring that any normal human life. It can be reasonably supposed that there is a conscious force that has come into being as the expression of aggregate public belief in the existence of what we see. It’s not a reach to assume that something like what we call the devil would have come into being one way or another, simply because so many people have believed for so long in all of the things that compose what we call evil. Evil and good change places all the time and that explains why one of the characteristics of the devil is as a source of confusion. Not knowing what is really good or evil puts us in the position of having it defined for us for the profit of those confusing us.
Read more...
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Brazen apartheid
by Khaled Amayreh
In an audacious move, Netanyahu's government has approved a law that erases the right of return for Palestinian refugees and makes Arabs in Israel second-class citizens, writes Khaled Amayreh
October 14, 2010
The Israeli government on 10 October approved a controversial bill requiring non-Jews aspiring to obtain Israeli citizenship to pledge an oath of allegiance to Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state". The move is being seen as a provocation to Israel's Arab community that amounts to nearly 25 per cent of the population. It is also meant to forestall demands for the repatriation of millions of Palestinian refugees, uprooted and ethnically cleansed from their homes in what is now Israel when it was established in 1948.
The new law doesn't just seem racist; it is racist, as Yediot Aharonot columnist Nahum Barnea argues, since it compels non-Jews to declare their loyalty to the Jewish state while not demanding the same thing of Jews, many of whom don't recognise the legitimacy of Israel for religious and theological reasons. Moreover, "Jewish and democratic" is an oxymoron since Israel can't be Talmudic and democratic at the same time.
Realising that the approval of the new amendment would portray Israel as a state with a racist and face, Israeli leaders hastened to invoke the mantra that Israel was still a democratic state and that non-Jews aspiring to obtain Israeli citizenship had nothing to worry about as their rights and privileges would not be undermined in any way. But this is PR rhetoric at best, since Israeli law is applied selectively and treats citizens or would-be citizens according to their religion.
No Israeli officials or spokesmen have dared explain to reporters or foreign audiences what would happen in case of a clash between the "Jewish" and "democratic" dimensions of the state. For example, which would come first, and which would override the other? The real answer to the question comes from people like David Rotem, a member of the quasi- fascist Yisrael Beiteinu Party, a senior partner in the current Israeli government, who has declared that Israel must first be a Jewish state "and only afterwards a democracy".
"I want to keep Israel a Jewish state, and if that contradicts democracy, then democracy comes second, period," Rotem was quoted as saying by Prakilim magazine.
For all intents and purposes, the new law is telling the estimated 1.5-2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens that they should come to terms with their inherently inferior status as non-Jews; this despite the fact that 99 per cent of Arabs in Israel have been living in the country for hundreds of years before the arrival of Jewish immigrants.
Arab Knesset member Ahmed Teibi reacted to the new law saying that Israel is democratic for Jews but Jewish for Arabs. "There is no country in the world that forces its citizens, or those naturalising, to swear their loyalty to ideology or a sectarian obligation."
Another Arab Knesset member, Talab Al-Sanea, pointed out that the timing of the law was not accidental. "The Israeli government did this at this time for two reasons: first, the troubled negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organisation; and second, as a direct response to the dictates of Israel's internal coalition politics."
"Netanyahu believes this is his opportunity to impose the Jewish identity of the state on the Palestinian people, the Arab states, and the international community. His long-term goal is to abrogate the right of the Palestinian refugees to return. When Israel becomes the state of the Jews, on what basis will the refugees be able to exercise their right of return? This explains the timing of the law; to pre-empt the return of the refugees."
Read more...
In an audacious move, Netanyahu's government has approved a law that erases the right of return for Palestinian refugees and makes Arabs in Israel second-class citizens, writes Khaled Amayreh
October 14, 2010
The Israeli government on 10 October approved a controversial bill requiring non-Jews aspiring to obtain Israeli citizenship to pledge an oath of allegiance to Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state". The move is being seen as a provocation to Israel's Arab community that amounts to nearly 25 per cent of the population. It is also meant to forestall demands for the repatriation of millions of Palestinian refugees, uprooted and ethnically cleansed from their homes in what is now Israel when it was established in 1948.
The new law doesn't just seem racist; it is racist, as Yediot Aharonot columnist Nahum Barnea argues, since it compels non-Jews to declare their loyalty to the Jewish state while not demanding the same thing of Jews, many of whom don't recognise the legitimacy of Israel for religious and theological reasons. Moreover, "Jewish and democratic" is an oxymoron since Israel can't be Talmudic and democratic at the same time.
Realising that the approval of the new amendment would portray Israel as a state with a racist and face, Israeli leaders hastened to invoke the mantra that Israel was still a democratic state and that non-Jews aspiring to obtain Israeli citizenship had nothing to worry about as their rights and privileges would not be undermined in any way. But this is PR rhetoric at best, since Israeli law is applied selectively and treats citizens or would-be citizens according to their religion.
No Israeli officials or spokesmen have dared explain to reporters or foreign audiences what would happen in case of a clash between the "Jewish" and "democratic" dimensions of the state. For example, which would come first, and which would override the other? The real answer to the question comes from people like David Rotem, a member of the quasi- fascist Yisrael Beiteinu Party, a senior partner in the current Israeli government, who has declared that Israel must first be a Jewish state "and only afterwards a democracy".
"I want to keep Israel a Jewish state, and if that contradicts democracy, then democracy comes second, period," Rotem was quoted as saying by Prakilim magazine.
For all intents and purposes, the new law is telling the estimated 1.5-2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens that they should come to terms with their inherently inferior status as non-Jews; this despite the fact that 99 per cent of Arabs in Israel have been living in the country for hundreds of years before the arrival of Jewish immigrants.
Arab Knesset member Ahmed Teibi reacted to the new law saying that Israel is democratic for Jews but Jewish for Arabs. "There is no country in the world that forces its citizens, or those naturalising, to swear their loyalty to ideology or a sectarian obligation."
Another Arab Knesset member, Talab Al-Sanea, pointed out that the timing of the law was not accidental. "The Israeli government did this at this time for two reasons: first, the troubled negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organisation; and second, as a direct response to the dictates of Israel's internal coalition politics."
"Netanyahu believes this is his opportunity to impose the Jewish identity of the state on the Palestinian people, the Arab states, and the international community. His long-term goal is to abrogate the right of the Palestinian refugees to return. When Israel becomes the state of the Jews, on what basis will the refugees be able to exercise their right of return? This explains the timing of the law; to pre-empt the return of the refugees."
Read more...
Israel Raid on Gaza Flotilla: US Failure to Condemn Despite UN Findings
By Marjorie Cohn
On May 31, the Israeli military attacked a flotilla of ships in International waters. The vessels were carrying humanitarian supplies to the people in the Gaza Strip, who suffer under a punishing blockade by Israel. The stated aims of the flotilla were to draw international attention to the situation in Gaza and the effect of the blockade; to break the blockade; and to deliver humanitarian assistance and supplies to Gaza.
During the attack, Israeli soldiers killed 9 people, seriously wounded more than 50, and detained 750. They also confiscated or destroyed equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The United Nations Human Rights Council sent an independent fact finding mission to investigate violations of international law resulting from the Israeli attacks on the flotilla. The Mission, with Judge Karl T. Hudson-Philips, Q.C., retired Judge of the International Criminal Court presiding, interviewed 112 witnesses and examined forensic and other evidence, assisted by experts in forensic pathology, military issues, and firearms. Israel refused to cooperate with the independent investigation.
In a 56-page draft report [PDF], released on September 21, the Mission concluded that the Israeli military "demonstrated levels of totally unnecessary and incredible violence. It betrayed an unacceptable level of brutality. Such conduct," the report added, "cannot be justified or condoned on security or any others grounds. It constituted grave violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law."
The Mission made the following findings:
Passengers on the vessels and their luggage were subjected to "security checks similar to those found in airports before boarding, including body searches," to ensure that they were not carrying weapons. "At no stage was a request made by the Israeli Navy for the cargo to be inspected."
The Israelis fired live ammunition from an Israeli helicopter onto the top deck of the Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara, before soldiers boarded the vessel by descending from the aircraft. Although some of the passengers used chairs, sticks, a box of plates and other objects to
resist the soldiers, there was "no evidence to suggest that any of the passengers used firearms or that any firearms were taken on board the ship."
During the operation to secure control of the top deck, the Israeli forces landed soldiers from three helicopters in a 15-minute period. The use of live ammunition resulted in fatal injuries to four passengers and injuries to at least 19 others, 14 with gunshot wounds.
Israeli soldiers continued shooting at passengers who were already wounded, with live ammunition, soft baton charges and plastic bullets. "There was considerable live fire from Israeli soldiers on the top deck and a number of passengers were injured or killed whilst trying to take refuge inside the door or assisting others to do so."
Furkan Dogan, a 19-year old with dual Turkish and U.S. citizenship, was one of the people killed by the Israeli forces. He was hit with live fire while filming with a small video camera on the top deck. He received five bullet wounds. "All of the entry wounds were on the back of his body, except for the face wound, which was delivered at point blank range while he was lying on the ground on his back."
Many people were forced to kneel on the outer deck in harsh conditions for many hours and people were subjected to physical mistreatment and verbal abuse, unnecessarily tight handcuffing, and the denial of access to toilets and food.
Israeli authorities confiscated, withheld, and in some cases destroyed the private property of many hundreds of passengers on board the vessels.
There is a "severe humanitarian situation in Gaza, the destruction of the economy and the prevention of reconstruction." Israel's blockade was "inflicting disproportionate damage upon the civilian population" in Gaza, and is therefore illegal. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment of civilians under occupation. One of the principal motives behind Israel's imposition of the blockade was "a desire to punish the people of the Gaza Strip for having elected Hamas" in the 2005 election. There is "no doubt that Israel's actions and policies amount to collective punishment." In this conclusion, the Mission explicitly supported the findings of Richard Falk, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, as well as those of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The firing of rockets and other munitions of war into Israeli territory from Gaza "constitutes serious violations of international and international humanitarian law. But action in response which constitutes collective punishment of the civilian population of Gaza is not lawful in the present or in any circumstances."
Israel has continuously occupied Gaza despite its unilateral withdrawal of military forces in 2005. Since then, "abject poverty" among refugees has tripled. Israel determines the conditions of life within Gaza. Israel controls the border crossings and the territorial sea adjacent to Gaza, and it has declared a virtual blockade and limits to the fishing zone, thereby regulating economic activity in that zone. Israel maintains complete control of the airspace above Gaza through continuous surveillance, and it makes military incursions and from time to time hits targets within the Gaza Strip. Moreover, Israel regulates the local monetary market of Gaza based on the Israeli currency and controls taxes and customs duties.
The flotilla presented "no imminent threat but the interception was motivated by concerns about the possible propaganda victory that might be claimed by the organizers of the flotilla." There was no reasonable suspicion that the flotilla posed any military risk, and as a result "no case could be made to intercept the vessels in the exercise of belligerent rights or [UN Charter] Article 51 self-defence."
Not only was the Israeli interception of the flotilla unlawful, "the use of force by the Israeli forces in seizing control of the Mavi Marmara and other vessels was also prima facie unlawful since there was no legal basis for the Israeli forces to conduct an assault and interception in international waters."
Much of the force used by the Israeli soldiers onboard the Mavi Marmara and from the helicopters was "unnecessary, disproportionate, excessive and inappropriate and resulted in the wholly avoidable killing and maiming of a large number of civilian passengers." At least six of the killings, including that of Dogan, can be characterized as "extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions," which amounted to violations of the right to life and to physical integrity under articles 6 and 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
During the period of detention on board the Mavi Marmara, the passengers were subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment, which "did not respect the inherent dignity of persons who have been deprived of their liberty."
The Israeli military's treatment of the passengers on board the Mavi Marmara and in certain instances on board the Challenger 1 amounted to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment, in violation of articles 7 and 10 of the ICCPR. The willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment and willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health violated article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Other violations included the arbitrary or illegal arrests or detentions, in violation of article 9 of the ICCPR and the parading of detainees at the quayside carrying "the hallmarks of a 'triumph'" which amounted to a "humiliating spectacle" in violation of article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention.
Serious incidents of physical violence perpetrated by the Israeli military and/or police officers at the Ben Gurion International Airport "clearly constituted grave violations" of the right to security of the person and to human dignity, in violation of article 9 of the ICCPR. In some instances, the treatment amounted to torture.
The confiscation of a large amount of video and photographic footage recorded on electronic and other media by passengers "represents a deliberate attempt by the Israeli authorities to suppress or destroy evidence and other information."
The ICCPR guarantees the victims judicial remedies and reparations proportionate to the gravity of the violations. Torture victims should be afforded medical and psychological care, and article 9 provides for a specific right to compensation.
"The perpetrators of the more serious crimes being masked cannot be identified without the assistance of the Israeli authorities," the Mission concluded, and urged the Israeli government to assist in their identification.
Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the UN Human Rights Council a biased commission because it issued the Goldstone Report [PDF] , a 575-page document under the direction of noted Zionist Richard Goldstone, which found Israel guilty of international law violations in its December 2008 - January 2009 war on Gaza. During that war, 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
Israel conducted its own investigation of the flotilla attack, known as the Turkel Commission. It refused to take testimony from any of the victims on the vessels.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also commissioned an investigation, which undertook no primary witness investigation, largely relying on evidence from Israeli officers.
There is no evidence that the United States played any direct role in the attack on the flotilla. However, U.S.-made and U.S.-financed Apache and Blackhawk helicopters, which Israel often employs, were likely used in the assault. Any use of those weapons would violate the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibits any recipient of U.S. arms exports from using U.S. weapons except for security within its own borders or for self-defense.
Israel could not maintain its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories without the support of the United States. Three weeks after Israel's deadly attack on the flotilla, 329 out of 435 members of the House of Representatives and 87 out of 100 senators wrote letters to President Barack Obama supporting what they called Israel's right to "self-defense."
Obama has failed to condemn Israel's actions on May 31, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence of its illegality. If Iran had attacked a humanitarian flotilla in international waters and killed 9 people, there would be certain retaliation from Washington.
Until our government stands up to the powerful Israel lobby in the United States, the Palestinian people, and our own humanity, will continue to be held hostage.
Source
On May 31, the Israeli military attacked a flotilla of ships in International waters. The vessels were carrying humanitarian supplies to the people in the Gaza Strip, who suffer under a punishing blockade by Israel. The stated aims of the flotilla were to draw international attention to the situation in Gaza and the effect of the blockade; to break the blockade; and to deliver humanitarian assistance and supplies to Gaza.
During the attack, Israeli soldiers killed 9 people, seriously wounded more than 50, and detained 750. They also confiscated or destroyed equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The United Nations Human Rights Council sent an independent fact finding mission to investigate violations of international law resulting from the Israeli attacks on the flotilla. The Mission, with Judge Karl T. Hudson-Philips, Q.C., retired Judge of the International Criminal Court presiding, interviewed 112 witnesses and examined forensic and other evidence, assisted by experts in forensic pathology, military issues, and firearms. Israel refused to cooperate with the independent investigation.
In a 56-page draft report [PDF], released on September 21, the Mission concluded that the Israeli military "demonstrated levels of totally unnecessary and incredible violence. It betrayed an unacceptable level of brutality. Such conduct," the report added, "cannot be justified or condoned on security or any others grounds. It constituted grave violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law."
The Mission made the following findings:
Passengers on the vessels and their luggage were subjected to "security checks similar to those found in airports before boarding, including body searches," to ensure that they were not carrying weapons. "At no stage was a request made by the Israeli Navy for the cargo to be inspected."
The Israelis fired live ammunition from an Israeli helicopter onto the top deck of the Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara, before soldiers boarded the vessel by descending from the aircraft. Although some of the passengers used chairs, sticks, a box of plates and other objects to
resist the soldiers, there was "no evidence to suggest that any of the passengers used firearms or that any firearms were taken on board the ship."
During the operation to secure control of the top deck, the Israeli forces landed soldiers from three helicopters in a 15-minute period. The use of live ammunition resulted in fatal injuries to four passengers and injuries to at least 19 others, 14 with gunshot wounds.
Israeli soldiers continued shooting at passengers who were already wounded, with live ammunition, soft baton charges and plastic bullets. "There was considerable live fire from Israeli soldiers on the top deck and a number of passengers were injured or killed whilst trying to take refuge inside the door or assisting others to do so."
Furkan Dogan, a 19-year old with dual Turkish and U.S. citizenship, was one of the people killed by the Israeli forces. He was hit with live fire while filming with a small video camera on the top deck. He received five bullet wounds. "All of the entry wounds were on the back of his body, except for the face wound, which was delivered at point blank range while he was lying on the ground on his back."
Many people were forced to kneel on the outer deck in harsh conditions for many hours and people were subjected to physical mistreatment and verbal abuse, unnecessarily tight handcuffing, and the denial of access to toilets and food.
Israeli authorities confiscated, withheld, and in some cases destroyed the private property of many hundreds of passengers on board the vessels.
There is a "severe humanitarian situation in Gaza, the destruction of the economy and the prevention of reconstruction." Israel's blockade was "inflicting disproportionate damage upon the civilian population" in Gaza, and is therefore illegal. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment of civilians under occupation. One of the principal motives behind Israel's imposition of the blockade was "a desire to punish the people of the Gaza Strip for having elected Hamas" in the 2005 election. There is "no doubt that Israel's actions and policies amount to collective punishment." In this conclusion, the Mission explicitly supported the findings of Richard Falk, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, as well as those of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The firing of rockets and other munitions of war into Israeli territory from Gaza "constitutes serious violations of international and international humanitarian law. But action in response which constitutes collective punishment of the civilian population of Gaza is not lawful in the present or in any circumstances."
Israel has continuously occupied Gaza despite its unilateral withdrawal of military forces in 2005. Since then, "abject poverty" among refugees has tripled. Israel determines the conditions of life within Gaza. Israel controls the border crossings and the territorial sea adjacent to Gaza, and it has declared a virtual blockade and limits to the fishing zone, thereby regulating economic activity in that zone. Israel maintains complete control of the airspace above Gaza through continuous surveillance, and it makes military incursions and from time to time hits targets within the Gaza Strip. Moreover, Israel regulates the local monetary market of Gaza based on the Israeli currency and controls taxes and customs duties.
The flotilla presented "no imminent threat but the interception was motivated by concerns about the possible propaganda victory that might be claimed by the organizers of the flotilla." There was no reasonable suspicion that the flotilla posed any military risk, and as a result "no case could be made to intercept the vessels in the exercise of belligerent rights or [UN Charter] Article 51 self-defence."
Not only was the Israeli interception of the flotilla unlawful, "the use of force by the Israeli forces in seizing control of the Mavi Marmara and other vessels was also prima facie unlawful since there was no legal basis for the Israeli forces to conduct an assault and interception in international waters."
Much of the force used by the Israeli soldiers onboard the Mavi Marmara and from the helicopters was "unnecessary, disproportionate, excessive and inappropriate and resulted in the wholly avoidable killing and maiming of a large number of civilian passengers." At least six of the killings, including that of Dogan, can be characterized as "extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions," which amounted to violations of the right to life and to physical integrity under articles 6 and 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
During the period of detention on board the Mavi Marmara, the passengers were subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment, which "did not respect the inherent dignity of persons who have been deprived of their liberty."
The Israeli military's treatment of the passengers on board the Mavi Marmara and in certain instances on board the Challenger 1 amounted to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment, in violation of articles 7 and 10 of the ICCPR. The willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment and willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health violated article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Other violations included the arbitrary or illegal arrests or detentions, in violation of article 9 of the ICCPR and the parading of detainees at the quayside carrying "the hallmarks of a 'triumph'" which amounted to a "humiliating spectacle" in violation of article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention.
Serious incidents of physical violence perpetrated by the Israeli military and/or police officers at the Ben Gurion International Airport "clearly constituted grave violations" of the right to security of the person and to human dignity, in violation of article 9 of the ICCPR. In some instances, the treatment amounted to torture.
The confiscation of a large amount of video and photographic footage recorded on electronic and other media by passengers "represents a deliberate attempt by the Israeli authorities to suppress or destroy evidence and other information."
The ICCPR guarantees the victims judicial remedies and reparations proportionate to the gravity of the violations. Torture victims should be afforded medical and psychological care, and article 9 provides for a specific right to compensation.
"The perpetrators of the more serious crimes being masked cannot be identified without the assistance of the Israeli authorities," the Mission concluded, and urged the Israeli government to assist in their identification.
Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the UN Human Rights Council a biased commission because it issued the Goldstone Report [PDF] , a 575-page document under the direction of noted Zionist Richard Goldstone, which found Israel guilty of international law violations in its December 2008 - January 2009 war on Gaza. During that war, 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
Israel conducted its own investigation of the flotilla attack, known as the Turkel Commission. It refused to take testimony from any of the victims on the vessels.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also commissioned an investigation, which undertook no primary witness investigation, largely relying on evidence from Israeli officers.
There is no evidence that the United States played any direct role in the attack on the flotilla. However, U.S.-made and U.S.-financed Apache and Blackhawk helicopters, which Israel often employs, were likely used in the assault. Any use of those weapons would violate the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibits any recipient of U.S. arms exports from using U.S. weapons except for security within its own borders or for self-defense.
Israel could not maintain its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories without the support of the United States. Three weeks after Israel's deadly attack on the flotilla, 329 out of 435 members of the House of Representatives and 87 out of 100 senators wrote letters to President Barack Obama supporting what they called Israel's right to "self-defense."
Obama has failed to condemn Israel's actions on May 31, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence of its illegality. If Iran had attacked a humanitarian flotilla in international waters and killed 9 people, there would be certain retaliation from Washington.
Until our government stands up to the powerful Israel lobby in the United States, the Palestinian people, and our own humanity, will continue to be held hostage.
Source
The Vampire Bankers host the Invisible Siren Chorus.
Dog Poet Transmitting…….
♫Row, row, row your boat, gently down the streeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream♫
I haven’t been in the US since 2003 and that was on the island of Maui, HI. I haven’t been on the mainland US since 1996. I don’t have a sense of the place. I know it’s not like the parts of Europe that I live in where I seldom even see a police car and where the police are uniformly (heh heh) polite. The places that I am weren’t even much affected by World War 2. They weren’t and aren’t strategic for any reason, except for growing food.
My objectivity narrows and widens, depending on my state of mind and degree of awake/aware. At times, when I look at the world around me, through the vari-colored lenses of the media; Zionist owned, Zionist influenced, Zionist threatened and Zionist-free, I get the impression that the whole world is on a dreamboat that is sailing for the rocks, while the Invisible Siren Chorus sings from a promontory. The lighthouse is actually a holographic projection machine that presents the impression that white sand beaches and naked volleyball games await. It’s apparent that BP had been in the night before, with dump trucks filled with sand.
We approach that November whirlpool by the day. Pundits and prophets from the various realms of industry and random mountaintops have all indicated that November is bringing that critical straw for the camel’s back. Chiropractors in three piece suits are standing by; not because they care one way or the other about the camel but because someone has to stand around and speculate and look busy, while the people responsible for the state of things sneak out of town.
The primary, flesh-based enemy of humanity is the bankers and chief among them is the central banks. There are various other consortiums like the IMF which are dedicated to world wide economic slavery of anyone and everyone but themselves. They are joined by those who operate and feed upon the fantasy football game at Wall Street; wherever Wall Street may be in whatever urban location it feeds in. The politicians are a secondary concern. They serve the will of the bankers. The bankers serve the King of Hell through the proxy of their own self interest. The bankers create the wars for profit. They create them any time and anywhere that profit can be realized and they fund both sides of the conflict in order to own the economy on either side at the war’s end.
The chief weapon of the bankers is usury. They print non-existent money and then loan it out so that more is paid back in interest over time than the actual principle of the loan. They manipulate the markets to inflate and deflate the value of homes and they run foreclosure mills to steal these homes whenever they get around to doing it.
When times of crisis appear, they manufacture political movements that give the impression of necessary revolution that returns the power of political choice to the individual voter but it’s just another scam for the same reptiles to stay in control of the system until it has been entirely looted. Linking to Media Matters is not an endorsement of the site. I don’t doubt that they also work for the bankers.
Humanity has to throw off the yoke of the bankers and destroy forever the power and proliferation of fiat currency and fractal banking. The war on Islam has as much to do with non-interest bearing loans as it has to do with anything else. Whatever solution humanity may come up with concerning the bankers it has to be done and done soon. I do not favor the guillotine anymore than I do exile to a desert island. Either of these solutions is fine and any other solution that removes these psychopathic predators from the embedded state in the rank and file of the human race is also fine, so long as it is comprehensive and irrevocable.
Read more...
♫Row, row, row your boat, gently down the streeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream♫
I haven’t been in the US since 2003 and that was on the island of Maui, HI. I haven’t been on the mainland US since 1996. I don’t have a sense of the place. I know it’s not like the parts of Europe that I live in where I seldom even see a police car and where the police are uniformly (heh heh) polite. The places that I am weren’t even much affected by World War 2. They weren’t and aren’t strategic for any reason, except for growing food.
My objectivity narrows and widens, depending on my state of mind and degree of awake/aware. At times, when I look at the world around me, through the vari-colored lenses of the media; Zionist owned, Zionist influenced, Zionist threatened and Zionist-free, I get the impression that the whole world is on a dreamboat that is sailing for the rocks, while the Invisible Siren Chorus sings from a promontory. The lighthouse is actually a holographic projection machine that presents the impression that white sand beaches and naked volleyball games await. It’s apparent that BP had been in the night before, with dump trucks filled with sand.
We approach that November whirlpool by the day. Pundits and prophets from the various realms of industry and random mountaintops have all indicated that November is bringing that critical straw for the camel’s back. Chiropractors in three piece suits are standing by; not because they care one way or the other about the camel but because someone has to stand around and speculate and look busy, while the people responsible for the state of things sneak out of town.
The primary, flesh-based enemy of humanity is the bankers and chief among them is the central banks. There are various other consortiums like the IMF which are dedicated to world wide economic slavery of anyone and everyone but themselves. They are joined by those who operate and feed upon the fantasy football game at Wall Street; wherever Wall Street may be in whatever urban location it feeds in. The politicians are a secondary concern. They serve the will of the bankers. The bankers serve the King of Hell through the proxy of their own self interest. The bankers create the wars for profit. They create them any time and anywhere that profit can be realized and they fund both sides of the conflict in order to own the economy on either side at the war’s end.
The chief weapon of the bankers is usury. They print non-existent money and then loan it out so that more is paid back in interest over time than the actual principle of the loan. They manipulate the markets to inflate and deflate the value of homes and they run foreclosure mills to steal these homes whenever they get around to doing it.
When times of crisis appear, they manufacture political movements that give the impression of necessary revolution that returns the power of political choice to the individual voter but it’s just another scam for the same reptiles to stay in control of the system until it has been entirely looted. Linking to Media Matters is not an endorsement of the site. I don’t doubt that they also work for the bankers.
Humanity has to throw off the yoke of the bankers and destroy forever the power and proliferation of fiat currency and fractal banking. The war on Islam has as much to do with non-interest bearing loans as it has to do with anything else. Whatever solution humanity may come up with concerning the bankers it has to be done and done soon. I do not favor the guillotine anymore than I do exile to a desert island. Either of these solutions is fine and any other solution that removes these psychopathic predators from the embedded state in the rank and file of the human race is also fine, so long as it is comprehensive and irrevocable.
Read more...
THE CIA, KKK, & USA
By Sherwood Ross
By assigning covert action roles to the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA), it is as if the White House and Congress had legitimized the Ku Klux Klan to operate globally. That's because the CIA today resembles nothing so much as the “Invisible Empire” of the KKK that once spread terror across the South and Midwest. Fiery crosses aside, this is what the CIA is doing globally.
The CIA today is committing many of the same sort of gruesome crimes against foreigners that the KKK once inflicted on Americans of color. The principal difference is that the KKK consisted of self-appointed vigilantes who regarded themselves as both outside and above the law when they perpetrated their crimes. By contrast, the CIA acts as the agent of the American government, often at the highest levels, and at times at the direction of the White House. Its crimes typically are committed in contravention of the highest established international law such as the Charter of the United Nations as well as the U.S. Constitution. What's more, the “Agency,” as it is known, derives its funding largely from an imperialist-minded Congress; additionally, it has no qualms about fattening its budget from drug money and other illegal sources. It is a mirror-image of the lawless entity the U.S. has become since achieving superpower status. And it is incredible that the White House grants license to this violent Agency to commit its crimes with no accountability. The Ku Klux Klan was founded shortly after the end of the U.S. Civil War. Klansman concealed their identities behind flowing white robes and white hoods as they terrorized the newly emancipated blacks to keep them from voting or to drive them from their property.
Allowing it to operate in secret literally gives the CIA the mythical Ring of Gyges. In Plato's Republic, the owner of the ring had the power to become invisible at will. As Wikipedia puts it, Plato “discusses whether a typical person would be moral if he did not have to fear the consequences of his actions.” The ancient Greeks made the argument, Wikipedia says, that “No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.” The CIA, like Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD before it, has provided modern man the answer to this question. Its actions illuminate why all criminal entities, from rapists and bank robbers, to Ponzi scheme swindlers and murderers, cloak themselves in secrecy.
There are innumerable examples of how American presidents have authorized criminal acts without public discussion that the preponderant majority of Americans would find reprehensible. Example: it was President Lyndon Johnson who ordered the CIA to meddle in Chile's election to help Eduardo Frei become president. If they had known, U.S. taxpayers might have objected to such a use of their hard-earned money to influence the outcome of another country's elections. But the public is rarely let in on such illegal foreign policy decisions. Where the KKK after the Civil War terrorized blacks to keep them from voting, the CIA has worked to influence the outcome of elections all over the world through bribery and vote-buying, dirty tricks, and worse. According to investigative reporter William Blum in “Rogue State”(Common Courage Press), the CIA has perverted elections in Italy, Lebanon, Indonesia, The Philippines, Japan, Nepal, Laos, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Portugal, Australia, Jamaica, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, among other countries. If they had known, taxpayers might also object to the CIA's numerous overthrows of foreign governments by force and violence---such as was done in Iran in 1953 by President Eisenhower and Chile in 1973 by President Nixon. Both overthrows precipitated bloodbaths that cost tens of thousands of innocent civilians their lives. Blum also lists the countries the CIA has attempted to overthrow or has actually overthrown. His list includes Greece, The Philippines, East Germany, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iraq, Viet Nam, Laos, Ecuador, The Congo, France, Cuba, Ghana, Chile, South Africa, Bolivia, Portugal, and Nicaragua, to cite a few. As I write, today, October 11th, 2010, Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina called on President Obama to revise U.S. (imperialist)policies toward Latin America. He questioned why the U.S. continues to plant its military bases across the region. That's an excellent question. If the U.S. is a peace-loving nation, why does it need 800 bases the world over in addition to 1,000 on its own soil? Americans might recoil in disgust if they knew of the CIA's numerous assassinations of the elected officials of other nations. Is it any wonder Americans so often ask the question, “Why do they hate us?” As historian Arnold Toynbee wrote in 1961, “America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number.”
The CIA's protective secrecy resembles nothing so much as the KKK, which proudly proclaimed itself “the Invisible Empire” and whose thugs killed citizens having the courage to identify hooded Klansmen to law enforcement officials. Today, it is our highest public officials that protect this criminal force, said to number about 25,000 employees. It is actually a Federal offense to reveal the identity of a CIA undercover agent---unless, of course, you happen to be I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and are employed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame to punish her husband Joseph Wilson for publishing a report that undercut the White House lie that Saddam Hussein had purchased “yellowcake” from Niger to fuel WMD. Today, high public officials direct the CIA's criminal policies and protect its agents' identities the better to enable them to commit their crimes.
According to journalist Fred Cook in his book “Ku Klux Klan: America's Recurring Nightmare”(Messner), “The Klan was inherently a vigilante organization. It could commit the most atrocious acts under the guise of high principle and perpetrators of those acts would be hidden behind white masks and protected by Klan secrecy... (The Klan) set itself up as judge, jury and executioner”---a policy adopted by the CIA today. CIA spies have conducted their criminal operations masquerading as officials of U.S. aid programs, business executives, or journalists. Example: The San Diego-based Copley News Service's staff of foreign correspondents allegedly was created to provide cover to CIA spies, compromising legitimate American journalists trying to do their jobs. While the murders committed by the KKK likely ran into the many thousands, the CIA has killed on a far grander scale and managed to keep its role largely secret. As Tim Weiner, who covered the CIA for the New York Times noted in his book “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” (Anchor): “In Guatemala, 200,000 civilians had died during forty years of struggle following the agency's(CIA) 1954 coup against an elected president.” Weiner adds, “the CIA's officers in Guatemala still went to great lengths to conceal the nature of their close relations with the military and to suppress reports that Guatemalan officers on its payroll were murderers, torturers, and thieves.” When it comes to murder, the CIA makes the KKK look like Boy Scouts.
Like the KKK, CIA terrorists operate above the law. KKK members committed thousands of lynchings yet rarely were its members punished for them. In 2009 at a speech at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, President Obama revealed he was not intent on punishing CIA agents for their crimes but would rather “look forward.” This seemingly charitable philosophy may be driven by the fact that Obama worked for Business International Corporation, a CIA front, at least in 1983 and perhaps longer, and allegedly is the son of a mother and father both of whom also worked for the CIA, as did Obama's grandmother! I could find none of this in Obama's biography when he ran for the presidency, when a gullible American public elected a CIA “mole” to the White House. Consider this, too: an agency President Truman feared would become “an American Gestapo” when he signed the enabling legislation into law in 1947 has become just that, and it casts a lengthy shadow over the White House. Ominously, it has in Barack Obama one of its own former employees sitting in the Oval Office---a man who, according to news reports, has vastly expanded the frequency of the CIA's assassinations by drone aircraft in Pakistan and who illegally claims the “right” to assassinate any American citizen abroad as well. What's more, from 1989 to 1993 George Bush Sr., the CIA's own former Director, sat in the White House. Additionally, from 2001 to 2009, the CIA had that Director's son, George W. Bush, in the Oval Office giving the CIA a blank check after the 9/11 massacre. Bush Jr., according to The New York Times, in the summer of 1974 worked for Alaska International Industries, which did contract work for the CIA. The Times noted that this job did not appear in his biography when he ran for the White House in 2000, terming it “The Missing Chapter in the Bush Bio.” Thus, two presidential candidates with CIA ties---Bush Jr. and Obama---both neglected to mention them. And in Bill Clinton, who presided from 1993 to 2001, the CIA had a go-along president who satisfied the Agency's blood-lust when he authorized the first illegal “rendition,” a euphemism for what KKK thugs once knew as kidnapping and torture. Is there any question that the Agency has not played an influential, behind-the-scenes or even a direct role in the operations of the U.S. government at its highest level? It may indeed be a stretch to argue that the CIA is running the country but it is no stretch to say that year after year our presidents reflect the criminal philosophy of the Agency.
Other parallels with the KKK are striking. As Richmond Flowers, the Attorney General of Alabama stated in 1966, “I've found the Klan more than just another secret society... It resembles a shadow government, making its own laws, manipulating local politics, burrowing into some of our local law-enforcement agencies...When a pitiable misfit puts on his $15 sheet, society can no longer ignore him.” Yet the descendants of those misfits have moved up today where they feel comfortable as operatives in the shadow government run by the White House. One of the CIA's illicit duties has been to serve as a conduit for funneling U.S. taxpayer dollars to corrupt dictators and strongmen bent on suppressing the popular will of their citizenry. As Noam Chomsky wrote in “Failed States”(Metropolitan/Owl), in Honduras, “military officers in charge of the battalion (3-16) were on the CIA payroll.” This elite unit, he says, “organized and trained by the United States and Argentine neo-Nazis,” was “the most barbaric of the Latin American killers that Washington had been supporting.”
Like the KKK, the CIA kidnaps many of its victims with no thought ever of legal procedure. It exhibits utter disdain for the rights of those individuals, the sovereignty of foreign nations, or respect for international law. At least hundreds of foreigners, mostly from the Middle East, have been the victims of “renditions” just as the KKK kidnapped and flogged and lynched blacks, labor leaders, Catholics, Jews, or wayward wives whom it felt to be morally lacking. In September, 1921, The New York World ran a series exposing the KKK. It pointed out that, among other things, the KKK was violating the Bill of Rights wholesale. This included the Fourth amendment against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” the Fifth and the Sixth amendments, guaranteeing that no one may be held without a grand jury indictment or punished without a fair trial. And these rights today are similarly trampled by the CIA against American citizens, not just foreigners. Apparently, only foreign courts care to rein in the CIA. The 23 CIA agents that it took to render one “suspect” in Italy are wanted there by the magistrates. (The spooks, by the way, ran up some fabulous bills in luxury hotels on taxpayers' dollars in that escapade.) Former President Jimmy Carter wrote in his book “Our Endangered Values”(Simon & Schuster), the CIA transferred some of those it kidnapped to countries that included Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Jordan, and Uzbekistan where “the techniques of torture are almost indescribably terrible, including, as a U.S. ambassador to one of the recipient countries reported, 'partial boiling of a hand or an arm,' with at least two prisoners boiled to death.” The KKK's methods of punishment were often as ugly: the brutal flogging of blacks in front of vicious crowds, followed by castration and burning their victims alive, and then lynching of the corpses. As for the CIA, “Why?” asks investigative reporter William Blum, “are these men rendered in the first place if not to be tortured? Does the United States not have any speakers in foreign languages to conduct interrogations?”
That the CIA is a terrorist organization was upheld in the famous “CIA On Trial” case in Northampton, Mass., in 1987, when a jury acquitted 14 protestors who tried to stop CIA recruitment on campus, according to Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois international law authority who defended the group. The defense charged the CIA was “an organized criminal conspiracy like the SS and the Gestapo.” Boyle said, “You would not let the SS or the Gestapo recruit on campus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, so you would not permit the CIA to recruit on campus either.”
Another shared characteristic of the KKK and CIA is greed, the desire to loot the hard-earned wealth of others. Often, Klansmen terrorized African-Americans who had amassed property to frighten them off their land. Law-abiding black citizens who had pulled themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps were cheated out of their homes and acreage by the night riders. Similarly, the CIA across Latin America has aligned itself with the well-to-do ruling class at every opportunity. It has cooperated with the elite to punish and murder labor leaders and clergy who espoused economic opportunity for the poor. The notion that allowing the poor to enrich themselves fairly will also create more wealth for an entire society generally, including the rich, has not permeated CIA thinking. I emphasize what historian Toynbee noted: “America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for.”(Italics added.)
In sum, by adopting the terrorist philosophy of the KKK and elevating it to the operations of government at the highest level, the imperial Obama administration, like its predecessors, is showing the world the worst possible face of America. Foreigners do not see the goodness inherent in the American people---most of whom only want a good day's pay for a good day's work and to educate their children and live at peace with the world. Every adult American has a solemn obligation to demand that its government live up to international law, punish the CIA criminals in its midst, and become a respected citizen of the world. This will not come to pass until Congress abolishes the CIA, putting an end to its KKK-style terrorism which threatens Americans as well as humankind everywhere..
(Sherwood Ross is an American who has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, a columnist for wire services and as the News Director of a national civil rights organization. He currently operates the Anti-War News Service from Miami, Florida. To contribute to his work or reach him, email sherwoodross10@gmail.com)
By assigning covert action roles to the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA), it is as if the White House and Congress had legitimized the Ku Klux Klan to operate globally. That's because the CIA today resembles nothing so much as the “Invisible Empire” of the KKK that once spread terror across the South and Midwest. Fiery crosses aside, this is what the CIA is doing globally.
The CIA today is committing many of the same sort of gruesome crimes against foreigners that the KKK once inflicted on Americans of color. The principal difference is that the KKK consisted of self-appointed vigilantes who regarded themselves as both outside and above the law when they perpetrated their crimes. By contrast, the CIA acts as the agent of the American government, often at the highest levels, and at times at the direction of the White House. Its crimes typically are committed in contravention of the highest established international law such as the Charter of the United Nations as well as the U.S. Constitution. What's more, the “Agency,” as it is known, derives its funding largely from an imperialist-minded Congress; additionally, it has no qualms about fattening its budget from drug money and other illegal sources. It is a mirror-image of the lawless entity the U.S. has become since achieving superpower status. And it is incredible that the White House grants license to this violent Agency to commit its crimes with no accountability. The Ku Klux Klan was founded shortly after the end of the U.S. Civil War. Klansman concealed their identities behind flowing white robes and white hoods as they terrorized the newly emancipated blacks to keep them from voting or to drive them from their property.
Allowing it to operate in secret literally gives the CIA the mythical Ring of Gyges. In Plato's Republic, the owner of the ring had the power to become invisible at will. As Wikipedia puts it, Plato “discusses whether a typical person would be moral if he did not have to fear the consequences of his actions.” The ancient Greeks made the argument, Wikipedia says, that “No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.” The CIA, like Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD before it, has provided modern man the answer to this question. Its actions illuminate why all criminal entities, from rapists and bank robbers, to Ponzi scheme swindlers and murderers, cloak themselves in secrecy.
There are innumerable examples of how American presidents have authorized criminal acts without public discussion that the preponderant majority of Americans would find reprehensible. Example: it was President Lyndon Johnson who ordered the CIA to meddle in Chile's election to help Eduardo Frei become president. If they had known, U.S. taxpayers might have objected to such a use of their hard-earned money to influence the outcome of another country's elections. But the public is rarely let in on such illegal foreign policy decisions. Where the KKK after the Civil War terrorized blacks to keep them from voting, the CIA has worked to influence the outcome of elections all over the world through bribery and vote-buying, dirty tricks, and worse. According to investigative reporter William Blum in “Rogue State”(Common Courage Press), the CIA has perverted elections in Italy, Lebanon, Indonesia, The Philippines, Japan, Nepal, Laos, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Portugal, Australia, Jamaica, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, among other countries. If they had known, taxpayers might also object to the CIA's numerous overthrows of foreign governments by force and violence---such as was done in Iran in 1953 by President Eisenhower and Chile in 1973 by President Nixon. Both overthrows precipitated bloodbaths that cost tens of thousands of innocent civilians their lives. Blum also lists the countries the CIA has attempted to overthrow or has actually overthrown. His list includes Greece, The Philippines, East Germany, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iraq, Viet Nam, Laos, Ecuador, The Congo, France, Cuba, Ghana, Chile, South Africa, Bolivia, Portugal, and Nicaragua, to cite a few. As I write, today, October 11th, 2010, Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina called on President Obama to revise U.S. (imperialist)policies toward Latin America. He questioned why the U.S. continues to plant its military bases across the region. That's an excellent question. If the U.S. is a peace-loving nation, why does it need 800 bases the world over in addition to 1,000 on its own soil? Americans might recoil in disgust if they knew of the CIA's numerous assassinations of the elected officials of other nations. Is it any wonder Americans so often ask the question, “Why do they hate us?” As historian Arnold Toynbee wrote in 1961, “America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number.”
The CIA's protective secrecy resembles nothing so much as the KKK, which proudly proclaimed itself “the Invisible Empire” and whose thugs killed citizens having the courage to identify hooded Klansmen to law enforcement officials. Today, it is our highest public officials that protect this criminal force, said to number about 25,000 employees. It is actually a Federal offense to reveal the identity of a CIA undercover agent---unless, of course, you happen to be I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and are employed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame to punish her husband Joseph Wilson for publishing a report that undercut the White House lie that Saddam Hussein had purchased “yellowcake” from Niger to fuel WMD. Today, high public officials direct the CIA's criminal policies and protect its agents' identities the better to enable them to commit their crimes.
According to journalist Fred Cook in his book “Ku Klux Klan: America's Recurring Nightmare”(Messner), “The Klan was inherently a vigilante organization. It could commit the most atrocious acts under the guise of high principle and perpetrators of those acts would be hidden behind white masks and protected by Klan secrecy... (The Klan) set itself up as judge, jury and executioner”---a policy adopted by the CIA today. CIA spies have conducted their criminal operations masquerading as officials of U.S. aid programs, business executives, or journalists. Example: The San Diego-based Copley News Service's staff of foreign correspondents allegedly was created to provide cover to CIA spies, compromising legitimate American journalists trying to do their jobs. While the murders committed by the KKK likely ran into the many thousands, the CIA has killed on a far grander scale and managed to keep its role largely secret. As Tim Weiner, who covered the CIA for the New York Times noted in his book “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” (Anchor): “In Guatemala, 200,000 civilians had died during forty years of struggle following the agency's(CIA) 1954 coup against an elected president.” Weiner adds, “the CIA's officers in Guatemala still went to great lengths to conceal the nature of their close relations with the military and to suppress reports that Guatemalan officers on its payroll were murderers, torturers, and thieves.” When it comes to murder, the CIA makes the KKK look like Boy Scouts.
Like the KKK, CIA terrorists operate above the law. KKK members committed thousands of lynchings yet rarely were its members punished for them. In 2009 at a speech at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, President Obama revealed he was not intent on punishing CIA agents for their crimes but would rather “look forward.” This seemingly charitable philosophy may be driven by the fact that Obama worked for Business International Corporation, a CIA front, at least in 1983 and perhaps longer, and allegedly is the son of a mother and father both of whom also worked for the CIA, as did Obama's grandmother! I could find none of this in Obama's biography when he ran for the presidency, when a gullible American public elected a CIA “mole” to the White House. Consider this, too: an agency President Truman feared would become “an American Gestapo” when he signed the enabling legislation into law in 1947 has become just that, and it casts a lengthy shadow over the White House. Ominously, it has in Barack Obama one of its own former employees sitting in the Oval Office---a man who, according to news reports, has vastly expanded the frequency of the CIA's assassinations by drone aircraft in Pakistan and who illegally claims the “right” to assassinate any American citizen abroad as well. What's more, from 1989 to 1993 George Bush Sr., the CIA's own former Director, sat in the White House. Additionally, from 2001 to 2009, the CIA had that Director's son, George W. Bush, in the Oval Office giving the CIA a blank check after the 9/11 massacre. Bush Jr., according to The New York Times, in the summer of 1974 worked for Alaska International Industries, which did contract work for the CIA. The Times noted that this job did not appear in his biography when he ran for the White House in 2000, terming it “The Missing Chapter in the Bush Bio.” Thus, two presidential candidates with CIA ties---Bush Jr. and Obama---both neglected to mention them. And in Bill Clinton, who presided from 1993 to 2001, the CIA had a go-along president who satisfied the Agency's blood-lust when he authorized the first illegal “rendition,” a euphemism for what KKK thugs once knew as kidnapping and torture. Is there any question that the Agency has not played an influential, behind-the-scenes or even a direct role in the operations of the U.S. government at its highest level? It may indeed be a stretch to argue that the CIA is running the country but it is no stretch to say that year after year our presidents reflect the criminal philosophy of the Agency.
Other parallels with the KKK are striking. As Richmond Flowers, the Attorney General of Alabama stated in 1966, “I've found the Klan more than just another secret society... It resembles a shadow government, making its own laws, manipulating local politics, burrowing into some of our local law-enforcement agencies...When a pitiable misfit puts on his $15 sheet, society can no longer ignore him.” Yet the descendants of those misfits have moved up today where they feel comfortable as operatives in the shadow government run by the White House. One of the CIA's illicit duties has been to serve as a conduit for funneling U.S. taxpayer dollars to corrupt dictators and strongmen bent on suppressing the popular will of their citizenry. As Noam Chomsky wrote in “Failed States”(Metropolitan/Owl), in Honduras, “military officers in charge of the battalion (3-16) were on the CIA payroll.” This elite unit, he says, “organized and trained by the United States and Argentine neo-Nazis,” was “the most barbaric of the Latin American killers that Washington had been supporting.”
Like the KKK, the CIA kidnaps many of its victims with no thought ever of legal procedure. It exhibits utter disdain for the rights of those individuals, the sovereignty of foreign nations, or respect for international law. At least hundreds of foreigners, mostly from the Middle East, have been the victims of “renditions” just as the KKK kidnapped and flogged and lynched blacks, labor leaders, Catholics, Jews, or wayward wives whom it felt to be morally lacking. In September, 1921, The New York World ran a series exposing the KKK. It pointed out that, among other things, the KKK was violating the Bill of Rights wholesale. This included the Fourth amendment against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” the Fifth and the Sixth amendments, guaranteeing that no one may be held without a grand jury indictment or punished without a fair trial. And these rights today are similarly trampled by the CIA against American citizens, not just foreigners. Apparently, only foreign courts care to rein in the CIA. The 23 CIA agents that it took to render one “suspect” in Italy are wanted there by the magistrates. (The spooks, by the way, ran up some fabulous bills in luxury hotels on taxpayers' dollars in that escapade.) Former President Jimmy Carter wrote in his book “Our Endangered Values”(Simon & Schuster), the CIA transferred some of those it kidnapped to countries that included Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Jordan, and Uzbekistan where “the techniques of torture are almost indescribably terrible, including, as a U.S. ambassador to one of the recipient countries reported, 'partial boiling of a hand or an arm,' with at least two prisoners boiled to death.” The KKK's methods of punishment were often as ugly: the brutal flogging of blacks in front of vicious crowds, followed by castration and burning their victims alive, and then lynching of the corpses. As for the CIA, “Why?” asks investigative reporter William Blum, “are these men rendered in the first place if not to be tortured? Does the United States not have any speakers in foreign languages to conduct interrogations?”
That the CIA is a terrorist organization was upheld in the famous “CIA On Trial” case in Northampton, Mass., in 1987, when a jury acquitted 14 protestors who tried to stop CIA recruitment on campus, according to Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois international law authority who defended the group. The defense charged the CIA was “an organized criminal conspiracy like the SS and the Gestapo.” Boyle said, “You would not let the SS or the Gestapo recruit on campus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, so you would not permit the CIA to recruit on campus either.”
Another shared characteristic of the KKK and CIA is greed, the desire to loot the hard-earned wealth of others. Often, Klansmen terrorized African-Americans who had amassed property to frighten them off their land. Law-abiding black citizens who had pulled themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps were cheated out of their homes and acreage by the night riders. Similarly, the CIA across Latin America has aligned itself with the well-to-do ruling class at every opportunity. It has cooperated with the elite to punish and murder labor leaders and clergy who espoused economic opportunity for the poor. The notion that allowing the poor to enrich themselves fairly will also create more wealth for an entire society generally, including the rich, has not permeated CIA thinking. I emphasize what historian Toynbee noted: “America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for.”(Italics added.)
In sum, by adopting the terrorist philosophy of the KKK and elevating it to the operations of government at the highest level, the imperial Obama administration, like its predecessors, is showing the world the worst possible face of America. Foreigners do not see the goodness inherent in the American people---most of whom only want a good day's pay for a good day's work and to educate their children and live at peace with the world. Every adult American has a solemn obligation to demand that its government live up to international law, punish the CIA criminals in its midst, and become a respected citizen of the world. This will not come to pass until Congress abolishes the CIA, putting an end to its KKK-style terrorism which threatens Americans as well as humankind everywhere..
(Sherwood Ross is an American who has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, a columnist for wire services and as the News Director of a national civil rights organization. He currently operates the Anti-War News Service from Miami, Florida. To contribute to his work or reach him, email sherwoodross10@gmail.com)
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
USS LIBERTY Issue Proves to Be the Silver Bullet as Powerful Zionist Group Runs For Cover
Like “Bruiser”, the bully who has been challenged to a fight after school but who turns out to be a no-show upon realizing he’s about to be turned into hamburger, one of the most powerful Zionist organizations in the world–the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith–has completely expunged all references to Israel’s deliberate attack on the USS LIBERTY from its internationally-read website. The ADL–contacted for this piece, gave no reasons for their decision.
Lest some think this decision on the part of the Mossad-affiliated ADL is minor in its scope, it should be noted that the website section dealing with Israel’s attack on the USS LIBERTY (leaving 34 American servicemen dead and almost 200 seriously wounded) was not just a simple 1-page belly-dance of Zionist disinformation. In the interests of intellectually-tranquilizing otherwise-interested persons wanting to know more about the infamous event that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., the ADL had compiled years’ worth of citations and notations and with regular relevant updates as they occurred. Extensive in its disinformation and done in the interests of painting the deliberate act of war against America as a case of “mistaken identity” the section dealing with the LIBERTY was possibly as much as a half-dozen pages in length and brazen in its deception. The person(s) responsible for providing new information for the page’s updates noted what was written by so-and-so LIBERTY survivor in what article on what day, as well as regular updates concerning what Phil Tourney–clearly the most outspoken of all the LIBERTY survivors–would say on the various radio programs where he appeared as either host or guest.
Assuming that the removal of the entire LIBERTY section was not the result of a spilled cup of coffee on a computer keyboard but rather a conscious decision on the part of ADL’s strategists and planners, all those who note this development must scratch their heads in curiosity over why such actions would be taken.
The most likely explanation for this noteworthy development is the fact that in the last 2 years (and due almost entirely to the efforts of aforementioned USS LIBERTY survivor Phil Tourney) public awareness of and interest in what took place on June 8 1967 has taken on renewed vim and vigor by a sizable number of persons around the world. First with the radio program “The Liberty Hour” (appearing for nearly 2 years on the Republic Broadcasting Network before being suddenly cancelled for reasons unclear) then with the publication of Tourney’s book What I Saw That Day…Israel’s June 8 1967 Holocaust of US Servicemen Aboard the USS LIBERTY and its Aftermath the LIBERTY issue–for years smoldering and barely alive–has now suddenly burst into flames, providing light for many who want to know exactly why the U.S. finds itself in the kind of mess it’s in these days viz-a-viz the Middle East quagmire and corruption of her politics.
Read more...
Lest some think this decision on the part of the Mossad-affiliated ADL is minor in its scope, it should be noted that the website section dealing with Israel’s attack on the USS LIBERTY (leaving 34 American servicemen dead and almost 200 seriously wounded) was not just a simple 1-page belly-dance of Zionist disinformation. In the interests of intellectually-tranquilizing otherwise-interested persons wanting to know more about the infamous event that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., the ADL had compiled years’ worth of citations and notations and with regular relevant updates as they occurred. Extensive in its disinformation and done in the interests of painting the deliberate act of war against America as a case of “mistaken identity” the section dealing with the LIBERTY was possibly as much as a half-dozen pages in length and brazen in its deception. The person(s) responsible for providing new information for the page’s updates noted what was written by so-and-so LIBERTY survivor in what article on what day, as well as regular updates concerning what Phil Tourney–clearly the most outspoken of all the LIBERTY survivors–would say on the various radio programs where he appeared as either host or guest.
Assuming that the removal of the entire LIBERTY section was not the result of a spilled cup of coffee on a computer keyboard but rather a conscious decision on the part of ADL’s strategists and planners, all those who note this development must scratch their heads in curiosity over why such actions would be taken.
The most likely explanation for this noteworthy development is the fact that in the last 2 years (and due almost entirely to the efforts of aforementioned USS LIBERTY survivor Phil Tourney) public awareness of and interest in what took place on June 8 1967 has taken on renewed vim and vigor by a sizable number of persons around the world. First with the radio program “The Liberty Hour” (appearing for nearly 2 years on the Republic Broadcasting Network before being suddenly cancelled for reasons unclear) then with the publication of Tourney’s book What I Saw That Day…Israel’s June 8 1967 Holocaust of US Servicemen Aboard the USS LIBERTY and its Aftermath the LIBERTY issue–for years smoldering and barely alive–has now suddenly burst into flames, providing light for many who want to know exactly why the U.S. finds itself in the kind of mess it’s in these days viz-a-viz the Middle East quagmire and corruption of her politics.
Read more...
There’s Money in That Old Quilt; Then and Now, The Difference in American Leadership
By J. Speer-Williams
“No thief will ever guess that we have $10,000 sewn into Grandma’s old quilt,” said Mrs. Donner to her three girls and husband, after dinner, one cold night, while in their warm and comfortable living room.
In early 1846, the wealthy Illinois family of George and Tamsen Donner, with their three daughters, were about to become American pioneers to California. And 10,000 dollars – equal to about 150,000 to 200,000 dollars, today – would go a long way in ensuring their success in California. But why go?
Many pioneers believed in Manifest Destiny, an idea that the land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans belonged to America , and Americans had not only the right, but the duty to settle those lands.
And, they – like many Americans of that day – were robust, brave, and instilled with the pioneer spirit, a spirit so lacking in many of us, today.
There would be no fast, warm, comfortable vehicle to quickly transport them over smooth highways, with restaurants, motels, and gas-filling stations along the way. Instead, they’d be driving a team of oxen, that pulled all of their most important and vital possessions, in a wagon covered with canvas.
Their covered wagon would not be averaging 60 mph, but two miles per hour … if everything went right.
In the 1840s, most Americans lived East of the Mississippi River. West of the Mississippi, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, lay a vast, untapped, unsettled wilderness.
But with plows on the rear tailboards of their covered wagons, those of the pioneer spirit went west, some all the way to California, by way of the Oregon Trail. These vanguards of conquest were intent on turning the Western wilderness into a living land.
The Oregon Trail, as the route to the West Coast was called, was no more than wagon ruts, that cut a dim path across our great continent, across our great deserts and over the mighty Rockies.
In the Spring of 1846, the Donner party of nine wagons and 32 people left Independence, Missouri bound for Fort Sutter, California. Within a week of their departure, 50 wagons joined the Donners, making a total of 87 men, women, and children headed west, as a group.
The New World, however, bared access to her bounty with stifling heat, deadly cold, and driving storms. Our pioneer forefathers and mothers were met with hardships, danger, and possible death with every turn of their wagon wheels.
Soon the heavily laden wagons of the Donner train of wagons were hit and slowed by daily soaking thunderstorms, causing deep muddy bogs, which reduced their travel speed from two mph to two miles a day.
The wagon journey to California, which usually took between four to six months, had to be very carefully planned, so as to be out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains before snow fell, otherwise food and water supplies would not last.
Some time before July of 1846, the Donner party finally reached Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming.
There George Donner was warned not to try to make up lost time, by taking what was known as the Hastings Cutoff, that reportedly could cut 400 miles, or more off the trip.
Read more...
“No thief will ever guess that we have $10,000 sewn into Grandma’s old quilt,” said Mrs. Donner to her three girls and husband, after dinner, one cold night, while in their warm and comfortable living room.
In early 1846, the wealthy Illinois family of George and Tamsen Donner, with their three daughters, were about to become American pioneers to California. And 10,000 dollars – equal to about 150,000 to 200,000 dollars, today – would go a long way in ensuring their success in California. But why go?
Many pioneers believed in Manifest Destiny, an idea that the land between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans belonged to America , and Americans had not only the right, but the duty to settle those lands.
And, they – like many Americans of that day – were robust, brave, and instilled with the pioneer spirit, a spirit so lacking in many of us, today.
There would be no fast, warm, comfortable vehicle to quickly transport them over smooth highways, with restaurants, motels, and gas-filling stations along the way. Instead, they’d be driving a team of oxen, that pulled all of their most important and vital possessions, in a wagon covered with canvas.
Their covered wagon would not be averaging 60 mph, but two miles per hour … if everything went right.
In the 1840s, most Americans lived East of the Mississippi River. West of the Mississippi, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, lay a vast, untapped, unsettled wilderness.
But with plows on the rear tailboards of their covered wagons, those of the pioneer spirit went west, some all the way to California, by way of the Oregon Trail. These vanguards of conquest were intent on turning the Western wilderness into a living land.
The Oregon Trail, as the route to the West Coast was called, was no more than wagon ruts, that cut a dim path across our great continent, across our great deserts and over the mighty Rockies.
In the Spring of 1846, the Donner party of nine wagons and 32 people left Independence, Missouri bound for Fort Sutter, California. Within a week of their departure, 50 wagons joined the Donners, making a total of 87 men, women, and children headed west, as a group.
The New World, however, bared access to her bounty with stifling heat, deadly cold, and driving storms. Our pioneer forefathers and mothers were met with hardships, danger, and possible death with every turn of their wagon wheels.
Soon the heavily laden wagons of the Donner train of wagons were hit and slowed by daily soaking thunderstorms, causing deep muddy bogs, which reduced their travel speed from two mph to two miles a day.
The wagon journey to California, which usually took between four to six months, had to be very carefully planned, so as to be out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains before snow fell, otherwise food and water supplies would not last.
Some time before July of 1846, the Donner party finally reached Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming.
There George Donner was warned not to try to make up lost time, by taking what was known as the Hastings Cutoff, that reportedly could cut 400 miles, or more off the trip.
Read more...
Commentary: Incarceration's impact on society is shameful
By Bob Ray Sanders
You won't need a calculator, but get ready to decipher a bunch of numbers — data that ought to make Americans feel both sadness and shame.
For those of us who've kept up with our criminal justice system the past three decades, these numbers I'm about to share are neither surprising nor shocking, but they do paint a startling picture of the impact our high incarceration rate is having on individuals, families and our society as a whole.
In a report issued last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts, researchers document the scale of incarceration in the United States and its direct effect on the earning power of former inmates and their children.
Collateral Costs: Incarceration's Effect on Economic Mobility, a collaborative effort between Pew's Economic Mobility Project and its Public Safety Performance Project, also breaks down the impact imprisonment has on those of different races. Again, while that news isn't amazing unto itself, it should sound an alarm that will awaken us from our deep sleep of complacency.
The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with 2.3 million Americans behind bars, a 300 percent increase since 1980, the report states. This country has more inmates than the top 35 European countries combined.
While the costs of housing prisoners -- $50 billion annually for state correctional costs alone -- should be enough to cause us to rethink our way of doing things, the overall societal and human costs should be even more convincing.
The study shows that "One in 87 working-aged white men is in prison or jail, compared with 1 in 36 Hispanic men and 1 in 12 African-American men. More young (20-34) African-American men without a high school diploma or GED are currently behind bars (37 percent) than employed (26 percent)."
Perhaps most disturbing is the 2.7 million American children who have a parent behind bars, a massive increase from 25 years ago when 1 in 125 kids had an incarcerated parent compared to 1 in 28 today. And, "two-thirds of these children's parents were incarcerated for non-violent offenses," the report says.
"One in 9 African-American children (11.4 percent), 1 in 28 Hispanic children (3.5 percent) and 1 in 57 white children (1.8 percent) have an incarcerated parent," according to Collateral Costs.
We've known for some time that imprisonment makes it tough for an individual to get a job or find housing once he or she is released.
The report notes that "serving time reduces hourly wages for men by approximately 11 percent, annual employment by 9 weeks and annual earnings by 40 percent." The typical former inmate, by age 48, will have earned $179,000 less than if he had never been incarcerated.
Before being imprisoned, more than two-thirds of male inmates had jobs and more than half were the primary source of financial support for their children, the study shows. When a released inmate can't take care of his family, guess who bears the costs?
According to the study, "Children with fathers who have been incarcerated are significantly more likely than other children to be expelled or suspended from school (23 percent compared with 4 percent).
And noting that education and parental income are strong indicators of children's future economic mobility, the report points out: "Family income averaged over the years a father is incarcerated is 22 percent lower than family income was the year before a father is incarcerated. Even in the year after the father is released, family income remains 15 percent lower than it was the year before incarceration."
The study didn't just talk about the problems, but offered solutions, such as: proactively reconnecting former inmates to the labor market; helping the person's economic condition by capping the percent of offenders' income subject to deductions for court-ordered fines, fees, etc.; screening and sorting convicted people by the risks they pose to society; and shorten prison stays by the use of earned-time credits.
As a society we must come up with an alternative to lifetime punishment for those who make mistakes. Otherwise, we're dooming a large number of offenders and their children to a lifetime of failure.
Source
You won't need a calculator, but get ready to decipher a bunch of numbers — data that ought to make Americans feel both sadness and shame.
For those of us who've kept up with our criminal justice system the past three decades, these numbers I'm about to share are neither surprising nor shocking, but they do paint a startling picture of the impact our high incarceration rate is having on individuals, families and our society as a whole.
In a report issued last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts, researchers document the scale of incarceration in the United States and its direct effect on the earning power of former inmates and their children.
Collateral Costs: Incarceration's Effect on Economic Mobility, a collaborative effort between Pew's Economic Mobility Project and its Public Safety Performance Project, also breaks down the impact imprisonment has on those of different races. Again, while that news isn't amazing unto itself, it should sound an alarm that will awaken us from our deep sleep of complacency.
The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with 2.3 million Americans behind bars, a 300 percent increase since 1980, the report states. This country has more inmates than the top 35 European countries combined.
While the costs of housing prisoners -- $50 billion annually for state correctional costs alone -- should be enough to cause us to rethink our way of doing things, the overall societal and human costs should be even more convincing.
The study shows that "One in 87 working-aged white men is in prison or jail, compared with 1 in 36 Hispanic men and 1 in 12 African-American men. More young (20-34) African-American men without a high school diploma or GED are currently behind bars (37 percent) than employed (26 percent)."
Perhaps most disturbing is the 2.7 million American children who have a parent behind bars, a massive increase from 25 years ago when 1 in 125 kids had an incarcerated parent compared to 1 in 28 today. And, "two-thirds of these children's parents were incarcerated for non-violent offenses," the report says.
"One in 9 African-American children (11.4 percent), 1 in 28 Hispanic children (3.5 percent) and 1 in 57 white children (1.8 percent) have an incarcerated parent," according to Collateral Costs.
We've known for some time that imprisonment makes it tough for an individual to get a job or find housing once he or she is released.
The report notes that "serving time reduces hourly wages for men by approximately 11 percent, annual employment by 9 weeks and annual earnings by 40 percent." The typical former inmate, by age 48, will have earned $179,000 less than if he had never been incarcerated.
Before being imprisoned, more than two-thirds of male inmates had jobs and more than half were the primary source of financial support for their children, the study shows. When a released inmate can't take care of his family, guess who bears the costs?
According to the study, "Children with fathers who have been incarcerated are significantly more likely than other children to be expelled or suspended from school (23 percent compared with 4 percent).
And noting that education and parental income are strong indicators of children's future economic mobility, the report points out: "Family income averaged over the years a father is incarcerated is 22 percent lower than family income was the year before a father is incarcerated. Even in the year after the father is released, family income remains 15 percent lower than it was the year before incarceration."
The study didn't just talk about the problems, but offered solutions, such as: proactively reconnecting former inmates to the labor market; helping the person's economic condition by capping the percent of offenders' income subject to deductions for court-ordered fines, fees, etc.; screening and sorting convicted people by the risks they pose to society; and shorten prison stays by the use of earned-time credits.
As a society we must come up with an alternative to lifetime punishment for those who make mistakes. Otherwise, we're dooming a large number of offenders and their children to a lifetime of failure.
Source
More FBI dirty tricks on MN human rights defenders
By Deborah Dupré
Amidst widespread Cointelpro rampage on human rights defenders and peace workers this season, in Minneapolis, MN, FBI agents continued their campaign against anti-war activists in the Twin Cities on Oct. 8. Because more people have become self-learned about the suppressed history of Cointelpro, the old "dirty tricks" may not be working for them.
"FBI agents came to my work and wanted to talk to me about activists in the anti-war movement," said Jennie Eisert, an Anti-War Committee member according to Fight Back News.
Eisert shed light on the same tactic Targeted Individuals consistently report: Black operatives or their organized vigilantes sneaking meetings or communications with family and friends to turn them away from the target. This tactic is successful, all too often leaving the target isolated and thus vulnerable for attacks.
Eisert did not fall for the FBI's dirty trick.
"I was called away from my desk and when I refused to talk to them, they tried to turn me against my friends and fellow activists," said Eisert.
"They said that Jess Sundin, Meredith Aby and Mick Kelly had manipulated me and others in the anti-war movement. The only ones trying to manipulate me are these FBI agents."
Fight Back News staff reports that "Sundin, Aby and Kelly were among those who had their homes raided and were served with grand jury subpoenas when the FBI moved against anti-war and international solidarity activists on Sept. 24."
"It is insulting that federal agents would try to make me talk to them by attacking the personal and political relationships that I've had with Jess and the others for more than ten years," Eisert said. "To do this while I'm at work is harassment, plain and simple. These attempts to divide us will not work personally and it will not work in the movement."
Cointelpro has always used tricks to divide and thus dissolve peace groups, as the young human rights defenders are seeing first-hand.
Jess Sundin stated, "The FBI is clearly trying to carry out a smear campaign in order to divide the movement."
"If that's their aim, it's going to blow up in their faces. We are people's neighbors, co-workers and friends . A few lies by FBI agents cannot undo the years that we have invested in our community. Instead, it will make people all the more sure that this investigation is nothing more than a fishing expedition."
Fight Back News reports that "two other individuals in Minneapolis were also targeted by the FBI for visits earlier in the week and that local activists have continued reminding the community that they are not required to speak to FBI agents.
"They added that the FBI has tried using smear campaigns to damage movements in the past."
Fight Back News says that exposing these standard operating tactics to the light of day is the best defense.
Source
Amidst widespread Cointelpro rampage on human rights defenders and peace workers this season, in Minneapolis, MN, FBI agents continued their campaign against anti-war activists in the Twin Cities on Oct. 8. Because more people have become self-learned about the suppressed history of Cointelpro, the old "dirty tricks" may not be working for them.
"FBI agents came to my work and wanted to talk to me about activists in the anti-war movement," said Jennie Eisert, an Anti-War Committee member according to Fight Back News.
Eisert shed light on the same tactic Targeted Individuals consistently report: Black operatives or their organized vigilantes sneaking meetings or communications with family and friends to turn them away from the target. This tactic is successful, all too often leaving the target isolated and thus vulnerable for attacks.
Eisert did not fall for the FBI's dirty trick.
"I was called away from my desk and when I refused to talk to them, they tried to turn me against my friends and fellow activists," said Eisert.
"They said that Jess Sundin, Meredith Aby and Mick Kelly had manipulated me and others in the anti-war movement. The only ones trying to manipulate me are these FBI agents."
Fight Back News staff reports that "Sundin, Aby and Kelly were among those who had their homes raided and were served with grand jury subpoenas when the FBI moved against anti-war and international solidarity activists on Sept. 24."
"It is insulting that federal agents would try to make me talk to them by attacking the personal and political relationships that I've had with Jess and the others for more than ten years," Eisert said. "To do this while I'm at work is harassment, plain and simple. These attempts to divide us will not work personally and it will not work in the movement."
Cointelpro has always used tricks to divide and thus dissolve peace groups, as the young human rights defenders are seeing first-hand.
Jess Sundin stated, "The FBI is clearly trying to carry out a smear campaign in order to divide the movement."
"If that's their aim, it's going to blow up in their faces. We are people's neighbors, co-workers and friends . A few lies by FBI agents cannot undo the years that we have invested in our community. Instead, it will make people all the more sure that this investigation is nothing more than a fishing expedition."
Fight Back News reports that "two other individuals in Minneapolis were also targeted by the FBI for visits earlier in the week and that local activists have continued reminding the community that they are not required to speak to FBI agents.
"They added that the FBI has tried using smear campaigns to damage movements in the past."
Fight Back News says that exposing these standard operating tactics to the light of day is the best defense.
Source
The Ecuadorian Coup: Its Larger Meaning
By James Petras
Global Research, October 10, 2010
The abortive military-police coup in Ecuador, which took place on September 30, has raised numerous questions about the role of the US and its allies among the traditional oligarchy and the leftist social movements, Indian organizations and their political parties.
While President Correa and all governments in Latin America, and significant sectors of the Ecuadorian public described the violent actions as a coup, the principle organ of Wall Street – The Wall Street Journal – described it as a “police protest”. Spoke persons for Goldman Sachs and the Council of Foreign Relations referred to the police and military power grab against the democratically elected government as a self-induced “political crises” of the President. While the coup was underway the “Indian” movement CONAIE, launched a manifesto condemning the government, while the “Indian” party Pachakutik supported the ouster of the President and backed the police coup as a “just act of public servants”.
In summary, the imperial backers of the coup , sectors of the Ecuadorian elite and Indian movement downplayed the violent police uprising as a coup in order to justify their support for it as just another “legitimate economic protest”. In other words, the victim of the elite coup was converted into the repressor of the peoples’ will. The factual question of whether their was a coup or not, is central to deciding whether the government was justified in repressing the police uprising and whether in fact the democratic system was endangered.
The Facts about the Coup
The police did not simply “protest” against economic polices, they seized the National Assembly and attempted to occupy public buildings and media outlets. The air force – or at least those sectors collaborating with the police – seized the airport in Quito, concerted actions seizing and blocked strategic transport networks.. President Correa was assaulted and seized and kept hostage under police guard by scores of heavily armed police, who violently resisted the Special Forces who eventually freed the president resulting in scores of wounded and ten deaths. Clearly the leaders of the police uprising had more in mind that a simple “protest” over cancelled bonuses – they sought to overthrow the president and were willing to use their firepower to carry it off. The initial economic demands of public sector employees were used by the coup leaders as a springboard to oust the regime.
The fact that the coup failed is, in part, a result of the President’s vigorous and dramatic appeal to the people to take to the streets to defend democracy - an appeal, which resonated with thousands of supporters and denied the coup makers public support in the streets.
The facts on the ground all point to a violent attempt by the police and sectors of the military to seize power and depose the president – by any definition a coup. And so it was immediately understood by all Latin American governments, from right to left, some of whom immediately closed their frontiers and threatened to break relations if the coup leaders succeeded. The only exception was Washington – whose first response was not to join in the condemnation but to wait and see what would be the outcome or as presidential spokesperson Philip Crowley announced “we are monitoring events”, referring to the uprising as a “protest” challenging the government. When Washington realized that the coup was actively opposed by the Ecuadorian public, all the Latin American governments, the bulk of the armed forces and doomed to failure, Secretary of State Clinton called Correa to announce US “backing” for his government, referring to the coup as merely an “interruption of the democratic order”.
In the run-up to the restoration of democracy, the trade unions were by and large passive observers, certainly no general strikes were discussed or even active mobilizations. The response of top military officials in the army were by and large opposed to the coup, except perhaps in the air force which seized the principle airport in Quito, before handing it over to anti-drug units of the police force. The anti narcotic police were in the forefront of the coup and not surprisingly were under intense US training and indoctrination for the past five years.
Explanation for the Varied Responses to the Coup
The responses to and interpretations of the coup varied according to different sets of objective interests and subjective perceptions. Latin American regimes unanimously rejected the coup fearing a coup multiplier effect in the region, in which other successful coups (after last year’s in Honduras) would encourage the military and police to act in their countries. The memories of the recent past in which the military dismantled all representative institutions and jailed, tortured, killed and exiled political leaders was a key factor in shaping Latin America’s resounding rejection. Secondly, the existing political order benefits the capitalist class, in almost all of Latin America and provides the bases for political stability and elite prosperity. No powerful mass movements threaten capitalist socio-economic hegemony, which might require the economic elite to back a coup.
Correa supporters were in the streets, though not in the numbers of his previous calls to action ousting ex-President Lucio Gutierrez, .They were mainly party loyalists. Others supported his “anti-imperialist” measures (expelling the US military base from Manta) or were defending democratic institutions even as they have become critical of his recent policies.
The US vacillation, shifting from an initial refusal to condemn to later denouncing the failed coup, was based on longstanding ties to the military but especially the police. Between 2006-2011 US military and police aid will have totaled $94 million, of which $89 million was channeled to the “war on drugs”. From 2006-2008, Ecuadorian military and police trainees numbered 931, 526 of whom were incorporated in the “counter-drugs programs”. It was precisely the anti-drug sector of the police which played a major role in seizing the airports in Quito during the abortive coup. The US certainly had plenty of motives for the coup. Correa came to power by ousting pro-US client Lucio Gutierrez and decimating the oligarchical parties who were responsible for dollarizing the economy and embracing Washington’s free market doctrine. Correa called into question the foreign debt, declining to pay debts incurred under fraudulent circumstances. Most of all Correa was an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a member of ALBA and a strong opponent of Colombia, Washington’s main ally in the region. Ecuador’s policy weakened Washington’s strategy of “encircling Venezuela” with hostile regimes. Having already backed the successful coup against Honduras President Zelaya, an ally of Chavez, Washington had everything to gain from a military coup which ousted another member of ALBA. Washington is pursuing a “triple strategy” of 1/diplomacy, offering to improve relations,2/ subversion by building subversive capacity by financing the police and military and3/ financing via AID, NED, World Bank and NGO’s sectors of the Indian movement especially Pachacutik and dissident groups linked Lucio Gutierrez.
The leadership of the Indian movement varied in its response to the coup. The most extreme position adopted by the near moribund electoral party Pachacutik (US aid recipient) actually endorsed the police coup and call on the masses to form a “united front”, a call which fell on deaf ears. The bulk of the Indian movement (CONAIE) adopted a complex position of denying that a coup was taking place, yet rejecting the police violence and setting forth a series of demands and criticisms of Correa’s policies and methods of governance. No effort was made to either oppose the coup or to support it. In other words, in contrast to its militant anti dictatorial past, CONAIE was virtually a marginal actor.
The passivity of CONAIE and most of the trade unions has its roots in profound policy disagreements with the Correa regime.
Correa’s Self-Induced Vulnerability: His Right Turn
During the emerging citizens-movement five years ago, Rafael Correa played an important role in deposing the authoritarian, corrupt and pro-imperialist regime of Lucio Gutierrez. Once elected President, he put in practice some of his major electoral promises: evicting the US from its military base in Manta; rejecting foreign debt payments based on illicit accounts; raising salaries, the minimum wage, providing low interest loans and credit to small business. He also promised to consult with and take account of the urban social and Indian movements, in the lead up to the election of a constitutional assembly to write up a new constitution. In 2007 Correa’s list running with his new party Alianza Pais (the country alliance) won a two thirds majority in the legislature. However facing declining revenues due to the world recession, Correa made a sharp turn to right. He signed lucrative contracts with multi-national mining companies granting them exploitation rights on lands claimed by indigenous communities without consulting the latter, despite a past history of catastrophic contamination of Indian lands, water and habitat. When local communities acted to block the agreements, Correa sent in the army and harshly repressed the protestors. In subsequent efforts to negotiate, Correa only heard his own voice and dismissed the Indian leaders as a “bunch of bandits”, and “backward elements” who were blocking the “modernization of the country”.
Subsequently, Correa went on the offensive against the public employees, pushing legislation reducing salaries, bonuses and promotions, repudiating settlements based on agreements between unions and legislators. In the same way Correa imposed new laws on university governance, which alienated the professoriate, administration and students. Equally damaging to Correa’s popularity among the organized sectors of the wage and middle classes, was his authoritarian style in pushing his agenda, the pejorative language he used to label his interlocutors and his insistence that negotiations were only a means to discredit his counterparts.
Contrary to Correa’s claim to be a pathfinder for “21st century socialism”, he was, instead, the organizer of a highly personal strategy for 21st century capitalism, one based on a dollarized economy, large scale foreign investments in mining, petroleum and financial services and social austerity.
Correa’s ‘right turn’, however; also depended on political and financial support from Venezuela and its Cuban and Bolivian allies. As a result Correa fell between two chairs: he lost support from the social left because of “pro-extractive” foreign economic policies and austere domestic programs and did not secure support from the US, because of his ties to Chavez and Cuba.
As a result, Correa so alienated the unions and the Indian and social movements that he was only able to secure very limited amount of “street power” in closing down the economy to thwart the coup. Equally important, the US and its collaborators saw in his declining organized support and the growth of social protest, an opportunity to test the waters for a possible coup, via their most dependable collaborators in the police and to a lesser degree in the air force. The police uprising was a test run, encouraged to proceed, without any overt, commitment, pending its success or failure. If the police coup secured sufficient military support, Washington and its civilian political oligarchs could intervene, call for a “negotiated outcome” which would either oust Correa or “turn him” into a “pragmatic” client. In other words, a “successful” coup would eliminate another Chavez ally, but even a failed coup would put Correa on notice for the future.
Final Reflections in the Way of a Conclusion
The unfolding of the police coup turned into a farce: the coup makers miscalculated their support within the military as well as among the protesting Indians and unions. They stood alone without glory or success. Lacking national leaders, or even a coherent strategy, they were put down in a matter of hours. They misjudged the willingness of the US to commit, once it became clear that the coup makers lacked any resonance among the military elite and were totally inept. What may have started as a coup ended as a comic opera with a brief shoot-out with the military at a police hospital.
On the other side, the fact that Correa, in the end could only rely on his elite special forces, to free him from police hostage, reveals the tragedy of a popular leader. One who started with immense popular backing, promising to finally fulfill the demand of the campesinos for land reform, the Indians demand for sovereignty to negotiate over mineral riches and urban labors’ demands for just remuneration, and ended returning to the Presidential Palace protected by military armored carriers.
The failed coup in Ecuador raises a larger political question: Does the near demise of Correa spell the end of the experiment of the ‘new center-left regimes’ which attempt to “balance” vigorous export-based growth with moderate social payoffs? The entire success of the center-left regimes has been based on their ability to subsidize and promote agro-mineral foreign and domestic capital while increasing employment, wages and subsistence payments (anti-poverty programs). This ‘political formula’ has been underwritten by the boom in demand from Asia and other world markets and by historically high commodity prices. When the crises of 2008 broke, Ecuador was the weakest link in Latin America, as it was tied to the dollar and was unable to ‘stimulate’ growth or cushion the economy. Under conditions of crises, Correa resorted to repression of the social movements and trade unions and greater efforts to secure support from petro-mining multi-nationals. Moreover, Ecuador’s police and military was much more vulnerable to infiltration by US agencies because of large scale funding and training programs unlike Bolivia and Venezuela which had expelled these agencies of subversion. Unlike Argentina and Brazil, Correa lacked a capacity to “conciliate” diverse sectors of social movements through negotiations and concessions. Of course, the penetration of the Indian communities by imperial funded NGO’s promoting “separatism” and identity’ politics did not make conciliation easy.
Nevertheless, despite the particularities of Ecuador, the failed coup underlines the relative importance of resolving basic socio-economic grievances, if the center-left macro-economic projects are to succeed. Apart from Venezuela, none of the center-left regimes are carrying out structural reforms (land reform) nationalizations of strategic sectors, income redistribution .Even the Chavez regime in Venezuela has lost a great deal of popular support because of neglect of essential services (public safety, garbage collection, delivery of water, electrical power and food delivery) because of corruption and incompetence. Over time, the center-left can no longer depend on “charismatic” leaders to compensate for the lack of structural changes. The regimes must sustain the improvement of wages and salaries and delivery of basic services in an ambience of ‘social dialogue’. The absence of continuous social reforms, while agro-mining elites prosper, opens the door for the return of the right and provokes divisions in the social coalitions supporting the center-left regimes. Most important the implosion of the center-left provides an opportunity for Washington to subvert and overthrow the regimes, reverse their relatively independent foreign policy and reassert its hegemony.
The institutional foundations of the center-left are fragile everywhere, especially the police and army, because officialdom is still engaged in government programs with US military, narco-police and intelligence agencies. The center-left regimes – except Venezuela – have continued to participate in all joint military programs. The center-left has not transformed the state. Equally important it has promoted the economic bases of the pro-US Right via its agro-mineral export strategy. It has ignored the fact that political stability is temporary and based on a balance of social power resulting from the popular rebellions of the 2000-2005 period .The center-left ignores the reality that as the capitalist class prospers, as a result of center-left agro-mineral export strategies, so does the political right. And as the wealth and political power of the export elites increase and as the center-left turns to the Right, as has been the case with Correa, there will be greater social conflict and a new cycle of political upheavals, if not by the ballot box then via the bullet – via coups or via popular uprisings.
The successful coup in Honduras (2009) and the recent failed coup in Ecuador are symptomatic of the deepening crises of “post-neo-liberal” politics. The absence of a socialist alternative, the fragmentation of the social movements, the embrace of “identity politics”, have severely weakened an effective organized alternative when and if the center-left regimes go into crises. For the moment most “critical intellectuals” cling to the center-left in hopes of a “left turn”, of a political rectification, rather than taking the difficult but necessary road of rebuilding an independent class based socialist movement.
Source
Global Research, October 10, 2010
The abortive military-police coup in Ecuador, which took place on September 30, has raised numerous questions about the role of the US and its allies among the traditional oligarchy and the leftist social movements, Indian organizations and their political parties.
While President Correa and all governments in Latin America, and significant sectors of the Ecuadorian public described the violent actions as a coup, the principle organ of Wall Street – The Wall Street Journal – described it as a “police protest”. Spoke persons for Goldman Sachs and the Council of Foreign Relations referred to the police and military power grab against the democratically elected government as a self-induced “political crises” of the President. While the coup was underway the “Indian” movement CONAIE, launched a manifesto condemning the government, while the “Indian” party Pachakutik supported the ouster of the President and backed the police coup as a “just act of public servants”.
In summary, the imperial backers of the coup , sectors of the Ecuadorian elite and Indian movement downplayed the violent police uprising as a coup in order to justify their support for it as just another “legitimate economic protest”. In other words, the victim of the elite coup was converted into the repressor of the peoples’ will. The factual question of whether their was a coup or not, is central to deciding whether the government was justified in repressing the police uprising and whether in fact the democratic system was endangered.
The Facts about the Coup
The police did not simply “protest” against economic polices, they seized the National Assembly and attempted to occupy public buildings and media outlets. The air force – or at least those sectors collaborating with the police – seized the airport in Quito, concerted actions seizing and blocked strategic transport networks.. President Correa was assaulted and seized and kept hostage under police guard by scores of heavily armed police, who violently resisted the Special Forces who eventually freed the president resulting in scores of wounded and ten deaths. Clearly the leaders of the police uprising had more in mind that a simple “protest” over cancelled bonuses – they sought to overthrow the president and were willing to use their firepower to carry it off. The initial economic demands of public sector employees were used by the coup leaders as a springboard to oust the regime.
The fact that the coup failed is, in part, a result of the President’s vigorous and dramatic appeal to the people to take to the streets to defend democracy - an appeal, which resonated with thousands of supporters and denied the coup makers public support in the streets.
The facts on the ground all point to a violent attempt by the police and sectors of the military to seize power and depose the president – by any definition a coup. And so it was immediately understood by all Latin American governments, from right to left, some of whom immediately closed their frontiers and threatened to break relations if the coup leaders succeeded. The only exception was Washington – whose first response was not to join in the condemnation but to wait and see what would be the outcome or as presidential spokesperson Philip Crowley announced “we are monitoring events”, referring to the uprising as a “protest” challenging the government. When Washington realized that the coup was actively opposed by the Ecuadorian public, all the Latin American governments, the bulk of the armed forces and doomed to failure, Secretary of State Clinton called Correa to announce US “backing” for his government, referring to the coup as merely an “interruption of the democratic order”.
In the run-up to the restoration of democracy, the trade unions were by and large passive observers, certainly no general strikes were discussed or even active mobilizations. The response of top military officials in the army were by and large opposed to the coup, except perhaps in the air force which seized the principle airport in Quito, before handing it over to anti-drug units of the police force. The anti narcotic police were in the forefront of the coup and not surprisingly were under intense US training and indoctrination for the past five years.
Explanation for the Varied Responses to the Coup
The responses to and interpretations of the coup varied according to different sets of objective interests and subjective perceptions. Latin American regimes unanimously rejected the coup fearing a coup multiplier effect in the region, in which other successful coups (after last year’s in Honduras) would encourage the military and police to act in their countries. The memories of the recent past in which the military dismantled all representative institutions and jailed, tortured, killed and exiled political leaders was a key factor in shaping Latin America’s resounding rejection. Secondly, the existing political order benefits the capitalist class, in almost all of Latin America and provides the bases for political stability and elite prosperity. No powerful mass movements threaten capitalist socio-economic hegemony, which might require the economic elite to back a coup.
Correa supporters were in the streets, though not in the numbers of his previous calls to action ousting ex-President Lucio Gutierrez, .They were mainly party loyalists. Others supported his “anti-imperialist” measures (expelling the US military base from Manta) or were defending democratic institutions even as they have become critical of his recent policies.
The US vacillation, shifting from an initial refusal to condemn to later denouncing the failed coup, was based on longstanding ties to the military but especially the police. Between 2006-2011 US military and police aid will have totaled $94 million, of which $89 million was channeled to the “war on drugs”. From 2006-2008, Ecuadorian military and police trainees numbered 931, 526 of whom were incorporated in the “counter-drugs programs”. It was precisely the anti-drug sector of the police which played a major role in seizing the airports in Quito during the abortive coup. The US certainly had plenty of motives for the coup. Correa came to power by ousting pro-US client Lucio Gutierrez and decimating the oligarchical parties who were responsible for dollarizing the economy and embracing Washington’s free market doctrine. Correa called into question the foreign debt, declining to pay debts incurred under fraudulent circumstances. Most of all Correa was an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a member of ALBA and a strong opponent of Colombia, Washington’s main ally in the region. Ecuador’s policy weakened Washington’s strategy of “encircling Venezuela” with hostile regimes. Having already backed the successful coup against Honduras President Zelaya, an ally of Chavez, Washington had everything to gain from a military coup which ousted another member of ALBA. Washington is pursuing a “triple strategy” of 1/diplomacy, offering to improve relations,2/ subversion by building subversive capacity by financing the police and military and3/ financing via AID, NED, World Bank and NGO’s sectors of the Indian movement especially Pachacutik and dissident groups linked Lucio Gutierrez.
The leadership of the Indian movement varied in its response to the coup. The most extreme position adopted by the near moribund electoral party Pachacutik (US aid recipient) actually endorsed the police coup and call on the masses to form a “united front”, a call which fell on deaf ears. The bulk of the Indian movement (CONAIE) adopted a complex position of denying that a coup was taking place, yet rejecting the police violence and setting forth a series of demands and criticisms of Correa’s policies and methods of governance. No effort was made to either oppose the coup or to support it. In other words, in contrast to its militant anti dictatorial past, CONAIE was virtually a marginal actor.
The passivity of CONAIE and most of the trade unions has its roots in profound policy disagreements with the Correa regime.
Correa’s Self-Induced Vulnerability: His Right Turn
During the emerging citizens-movement five years ago, Rafael Correa played an important role in deposing the authoritarian, corrupt and pro-imperialist regime of Lucio Gutierrez. Once elected President, he put in practice some of his major electoral promises: evicting the US from its military base in Manta; rejecting foreign debt payments based on illicit accounts; raising salaries, the minimum wage, providing low interest loans and credit to small business. He also promised to consult with and take account of the urban social and Indian movements, in the lead up to the election of a constitutional assembly to write up a new constitution. In 2007 Correa’s list running with his new party Alianza Pais (the country alliance) won a two thirds majority in the legislature. However facing declining revenues due to the world recession, Correa made a sharp turn to right. He signed lucrative contracts with multi-national mining companies granting them exploitation rights on lands claimed by indigenous communities without consulting the latter, despite a past history of catastrophic contamination of Indian lands, water and habitat. When local communities acted to block the agreements, Correa sent in the army and harshly repressed the protestors. In subsequent efforts to negotiate, Correa only heard his own voice and dismissed the Indian leaders as a “bunch of bandits”, and “backward elements” who were blocking the “modernization of the country”.
Subsequently, Correa went on the offensive against the public employees, pushing legislation reducing salaries, bonuses and promotions, repudiating settlements based on agreements between unions and legislators. In the same way Correa imposed new laws on university governance, which alienated the professoriate, administration and students. Equally damaging to Correa’s popularity among the organized sectors of the wage and middle classes, was his authoritarian style in pushing his agenda, the pejorative language he used to label his interlocutors and his insistence that negotiations were only a means to discredit his counterparts.
Contrary to Correa’s claim to be a pathfinder for “21st century socialism”, he was, instead, the organizer of a highly personal strategy for 21st century capitalism, one based on a dollarized economy, large scale foreign investments in mining, petroleum and financial services and social austerity.
Correa’s ‘right turn’, however; also depended on political and financial support from Venezuela and its Cuban and Bolivian allies. As a result Correa fell between two chairs: he lost support from the social left because of “pro-extractive” foreign economic policies and austere domestic programs and did not secure support from the US, because of his ties to Chavez and Cuba.
As a result, Correa so alienated the unions and the Indian and social movements that he was only able to secure very limited amount of “street power” in closing down the economy to thwart the coup. Equally important, the US and its collaborators saw in his declining organized support and the growth of social protest, an opportunity to test the waters for a possible coup, via their most dependable collaborators in the police and to a lesser degree in the air force. The police uprising was a test run, encouraged to proceed, without any overt, commitment, pending its success or failure. If the police coup secured sufficient military support, Washington and its civilian political oligarchs could intervene, call for a “negotiated outcome” which would either oust Correa or “turn him” into a “pragmatic” client. In other words, a “successful” coup would eliminate another Chavez ally, but even a failed coup would put Correa on notice for the future.
Final Reflections in the Way of a Conclusion
The unfolding of the police coup turned into a farce: the coup makers miscalculated their support within the military as well as among the protesting Indians and unions. They stood alone without glory or success. Lacking national leaders, or even a coherent strategy, they were put down in a matter of hours. They misjudged the willingness of the US to commit, once it became clear that the coup makers lacked any resonance among the military elite and were totally inept. What may have started as a coup ended as a comic opera with a brief shoot-out with the military at a police hospital.
On the other side, the fact that Correa, in the end could only rely on his elite special forces, to free him from police hostage, reveals the tragedy of a popular leader. One who started with immense popular backing, promising to finally fulfill the demand of the campesinos for land reform, the Indians demand for sovereignty to negotiate over mineral riches and urban labors’ demands for just remuneration, and ended returning to the Presidential Palace protected by military armored carriers.
The failed coup in Ecuador raises a larger political question: Does the near demise of Correa spell the end of the experiment of the ‘new center-left regimes’ which attempt to “balance” vigorous export-based growth with moderate social payoffs? The entire success of the center-left regimes has been based on their ability to subsidize and promote agro-mineral foreign and domestic capital while increasing employment, wages and subsistence payments (anti-poverty programs). This ‘political formula’ has been underwritten by the boom in demand from Asia and other world markets and by historically high commodity prices. When the crises of 2008 broke, Ecuador was the weakest link in Latin America, as it was tied to the dollar and was unable to ‘stimulate’ growth or cushion the economy. Under conditions of crises, Correa resorted to repression of the social movements and trade unions and greater efforts to secure support from petro-mining multi-nationals. Moreover, Ecuador’s police and military was much more vulnerable to infiltration by US agencies because of large scale funding and training programs unlike Bolivia and Venezuela which had expelled these agencies of subversion. Unlike Argentina and Brazil, Correa lacked a capacity to “conciliate” diverse sectors of social movements through negotiations and concessions. Of course, the penetration of the Indian communities by imperial funded NGO’s promoting “separatism” and identity’ politics did not make conciliation easy.
Nevertheless, despite the particularities of Ecuador, the failed coup underlines the relative importance of resolving basic socio-economic grievances, if the center-left macro-economic projects are to succeed. Apart from Venezuela, none of the center-left regimes are carrying out structural reforms (land reform) nationalizations of strategic sectors, income redistribution .Even the Chavez regime in Venezuela has lost a great deal of popular support because of neglect of essential services (public safety, garbage collection, delivery of water, electrical power and food delivery) because of corruption and incompetence. Over time, the center-left can no longer depend on “charismatic” leaders to compensate for the lack of structural changes. The regimes must sustain the improvement of wages and salaries and delivery of basic services in an ambience of ‘social dialogue’. The absence of continuous social reforms, while agro-mining elites prosper, opens the door for the return of the right and provokes divisions in the social coalitions supporting the center-left regimes. Most important the implosion of the center-left provides an opportunity for Washington to subvert and overthrow the regimes, reverse their relatively independent foreign policy and reassert its hegemony.
The institutional foundations of the center-left are fragile everywhere, especially the police and army, because officialdom is still engaged in government programs with US military, narco-police and intelligence agencies. The center-left regimes – except Venezuela – have continued to participate in all joint military programs. The center-left has not transformed the state. Equally important it has promoted the economic bases of the pro-US Right via its agro-mineral export strategy. It has ignored the fact that political stability is temporary and based on a balance of social power resulting from the popular rebellions of the 2000-2005 period .The center-left ignores the reality that as the capitalist class prospers, as a result of center-left agro-mineral export strategies, so does the political right. And as the wealth and political power of the export elites increase and as the center-left turns to the Right, as has been the case with Correa, there will be greater social conflict and a new cycle of political upheavals, if not by the ballot box then via the bullet – via coups or via popular uprisings.
The successful coup in Honduras (2009) and the recent failed coup in Ecuador are symptomatic of the deepening crises of “post-neo-liberal” politics. The absence of a socialist alternative, the fragmentation of the social movements, the embrace of “identity politics”, have severely weakened an effective organized alternative when and if the center-left regimes go into crises. For the moment most “critical intellectuals” cling to the center-left in hopes of a “left turn”, of a political rectification, rather than taking the difficult but necessary road of rebuilding an independent class based socialist movement.
Source
Monday, October 11, 2010
Stuxnet Computer Worm–Israel’s Attempt To Silence Iran on 9/11 or Veiled Threat to the Entire World?
In mid September, news stories from mainstream media sources featuring Israel as both creator and propagator of a new doomsday computer virus named Stuxnet swept the globe. Unlike the ordinary, run-of-the-mill colds afflicting today’s computers on a regular basis, this new super-bug was unlike anything seen before, literally a weapon of mass destruction given its capabilities of doing apocalyptic damage to the “critical infrastructure”–meaning electricity, water, sewage, oil refineries, telecommunications, national defense, food production, etc–of all industrialized nations.
The reasons for Israel being fingered as the lone gunman in this crime were several. First, the bug in question–while making its way to other parts of the world, nevertheless was disproportionally concentrated in Iran, and–more importantly–targeted the nuclear facility at Natanz whose destruction is numero uno on Israel’s wish list. Next were two “fingerprints” left on the would-be murder weapon, one of them being a reference to the biblical heroine Esther whose reputed actions (celebrated yearly in the Jewish religious festival known as Purim) saved the Jews of Persia (today’s Iran) from yet another in a seemingly-endless parade of persecution of God’s chosen people.
The other was a date left hidden in the code–May 9, 1979, the day that an Iranian Jew named Habib Elghanian was executed by the newly-formed government following the overthrow of the Shah (effectively marking the end of Zionist control over that country) and leading to the flight of tens of thousands of Iranian Jews.
Those experts who were asked to give their diagnoses concerning the who, what, where, when, why and how of this super-flu were near-unanimous in their assertion that the one culprit most likely to have cooked up this technological biological weapon was Israel. Furthermore, they were also in agreement that the virus in question–although concentrated in Iran, nevertheless, was something that directly threatened the fragile systems of the entire world, in that the Stuxnet worm gave hackers command-and-control ability of all critical infrastructure mechanisms of ALL industrialized nations. All the “big heavies” in terms of mainstream news outlets carrying info on this new-and-improved electronic plague have described it as nothing short of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, the scope and scale of which are eerily-reminiscent of the entire Y2K hysteria of over a decade ago. The picture they paint is one where every facet of modern life could be exploited in such a way as to bring about cardiac arrest and subsequent organ failure to the body-politic, where in just a few days’ time otherwise-peaceful/productive metropolises are turned into war zones.
In effect, any outside party with access to such systems is tantamount to someone holding a gun to the head of a nation while making demands.
In other words, according to the news stories as written and presented to the world at large, a Jewish plot to undermine the existing world order not only passed the Censor Judaica, but were allowed to profligate–AND WITH ABSOLTELY NO PROTESTS FROM ORGANIZED JEWISH GROUPS. Remember, this in a day and age when anyone mentioning the particulars concerning who owns the lion’s share of media, banking, and financial interests in the West results in an organized campaign of screeching and howling that leaves ears ringing for months on end. All the world need remember is the manner by which the banshees were set loose in full-force in a well-coordinated “HOW DARE YOU” crusade to shout down any intelligent, reasonable discussion concerning undeniable massacres such as Operation Cast Lead and the murder of 9 civilians aboard the Mavi Marmara.
And yet, news stories theorizing that Israel was the main culprit in the development and deployment of a computer virus (for all intents and purposes just as devastating as a nuclear weapon for all the mayhem it could directly bring to industrialized countries) and not a peep of protest from the Jewish state or her supporters…“Silent as death,” as the old saying goes, as people worldwide adopt the notion that a “Jewish conspiracy” is afoot threatening total meltdown of the world as we know it with just a computer keystroke…
Which can mean only one thing, which is that it is obviously in Israel’s interest for the world to believe she was/is responsible for releasing this Angel-of Death computer virus upon mankind’s fragile systems necessary for survival…
The reasons for Jewish interests allowing such “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” to not only receive the light of day but flourish without the typical theatrics all are accustomed to seeing and hearing range from typical run-of-the-mill hypocrisy to deeper, darker motives. In the first case, Israel loves the mystique and the mystery that such theories do for her image, as hers is a culture rooted in the kind of lore where an angry, vengeful god named Yahweh brings destruction upon entire peoples who deal with his chosen people in a manner displeasing and unacceptable.
Read more...
The reasons for Israel being fingered as the lone gunman in this crime were several. First, the bug in question–while making its way to other parts of the world, nevertheless was disproportionally concentrated in Iran, and–more importantly–targeted the nuclear facility at Natanz whose destruction is numero uno on Israel’s wish list. Next were two “fingerprints” left on the would-be murder weapon, one of them being a reference to the biblical heroine Esther whose reputed actions (celebrated yearly in the Jewish religious festival known as Purim) saved the Jews of Persia (today’s Iran) from yet another in a seemingly-endless parade of persecution of God’s chosen people.
The other was a date left hidden in the code–May 9, 1979, the day that an Iranian Jew named Habib Elghanian was executed by the newly-formed government following the overthrow of the Shah (effectively marking the end of Zionist control over that country) and leading to the flight of tens of thousands of Iranian Jews.
Those experts who were asked to give their diagnoses concerning the who, what, where, when, why and how of this super-flu were near-unanimous in their assertion that the one culprit most likely to have cooked up this technological biological weapon was Israel. Furthermore, they were also in agreement that the virus in question–although concentrated in Iran, nevertheless, was something that directly threatened the fragile systems of the entire world, in that the Stuxnet worm gave hackers command-and-control ability of all critical infrastructure mechanisms of ALL industrialized nations. All the “big heavies” in terms of mainstream news outlets carrying info on this new-and-improved electronic plague have described it as nothing short of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, the scope and scale of which are eerily-reminiscent of the entire Y2K hysteria of over a decade ago. The picture they paint is one where every facet of modern life could be exploited in such a way as to bring about cardiac arrest and subsequent organ failure to the body-politic, where in just a few days’ time otherwise-peaceful/productive metropolises are turned into war zones.
In effect, any outside party with access to such systems is tantamount to someone holding a gun to the head of a nation while making demands.
In other words, according to the news stories as written and presented to the world at large, a Jewish plot to undermine the existing world order not only passed the Censor Judaica, but were allowed to profligate–AND WITH ABSOLTELY NO PROTESTS FROM ORGANIZED JEWISH GROUPS. Remember, this in a day and age when anyone mentioning the particulars concerning who owns the lion’s share of media, banking, and financial interests in the West results in an organized campaign of screeching and howling that leaves ears ringing for months on end. All the world need remember is the manner by which the banshees were set loose in full-force in a well-coordinated “HOW DARE YOU” crusade to shout down any intelligent, reasonable discussion concerning undeniable massacres such as Operation Cast Lead and the murder of 9 civilians aboard the Mavi Marmara.
And yet, news stories theorizing that Israel was the main culprit in the development and deployment of a computer virus (for all intents and purposes just as devastating as a nuclear weapon for all the mayhem it could directly bring to industrialized countries) and not a peep of protest from the Jewish state or her supporters…“Silent as death,” as the old saying goes, as people worldwide adopt the notion that a “Jewish conspiracy” is afoot threatening total meltdown of the world as we know it with just a computer keystroke…
Which can mean only one thing, which is that it is obviously in Israel’s interest for the world to believe she was/is responsible for releasing this Angel-of Death computer virus upon mankind’s fragile systems necessary for survival…
The reasons for Jewish interests allowing such “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories” to not only receive the light of day but flourish without the typical theatrics all are accustomed to seeing and hearing range from typical run-of-the-mill hypocrisy to deeper, darker motives. In the first case, Israel loves the mystique and the mystery that such theories do for her image, as hers is a culture rooted in the kind of lore where an angry, vengeful god named Yahweh brings destruction upon entire peoples who deal with his chosen people in a manner displeasing and unacceptable.
Read more...
Talmud Encourages Jews To Deceive
By Rev. Ted Pike
What kind of religion sanctions deception and immorality for the sake of political goals? Orthodox Talmudic Judaism. The Babylonian Talmud encourages Jews to cheat and deceive Gentiles whenever necessary! In fact, "by way of deception" is the motto of Israel's spy agency Mossad. Official license to deceive and even commit sexual immorality was seen in Israel this week.
EminentOrthodox Rabbi Ari Shvat responded to a female student's question about the morality of seducing and sleeping with an enemy. " I was asked a question by a student of mine who was a religious girl that had been recruited by the Mossad. She wanted to know if a woman was allowed to do this kind of work." Shvat ruled yes and published an essay in Tehumin, an annual collection of articles on law and modernity. The Jewish World summarizes: "A new Halachic study ruled that seducing an enemy for the sake of national security is an important mitzvah" It is, in fact, an "utmost mitzvah" (legal command). Shvat's work was published by the Tzomet Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to "seamlessly merging Judaism with modern Israeli life."
In the ruling, Shvat says women can be "used to seduce enemy agents in order to cajole information out of them or see them captured." Jewish World says such women were used to capture nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu and to assassinate a senior Hamas operative in Dubai last January. Such deception, says the rabbi, is "Halacha," or binding Talmudic law. Even with homicidal intent, he writes, "sexual intercourse with a Gentile for the sake of a national cause is not only sanctioned, but is a highly important mitzvahOur Sages of Blessed Memory elevate such acts of dedication to the top of the Halacha's mitzvahs pyramid."
Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, head of Tzomet Institute and editor-in-chief of Tehumin, called the study "daring and importantAlthough it is highly unlikely that Mossad agents will seek rabbinical advice, this essay is very important and courageous. The author is versed in religious discourse and even conservative rabbis would surely agree with his thesis."
Shvat's ruling, reported by a major Jewish news agency, is presented without criticism. It reveals a disturbing, even ominous fact: Talmudic Judaism encourages Jews to ensnare and deceive Gentiles in order to advance Jews and Jewish causes, as long as they can get away with it. If they are caught and Israel is embarrassed, the "holy name of God" (synonymous with Israel's good reputation) may be blasphemed. If that is a real possibility, the Talmud tells Jews to back off. But in order to save the Jewish nation it is even morally permitted to murder and commit adultery.
God "Outlawed" the Gentiles
The Talmudic position concerning deception of Gentiles is embodied in the Halachic dictum, "It is permitted to deceive a goy (Gentile)." [1] In legal and business matters, the Talmud says Gentiles are beneath equality with Jews. As the 1905 Jewish Encyclopedia explains [2], the Gentiles were "outlawed" by God from the beginning.
The passage in Moses' farewell address: 'The Lord came form Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; he shined forth from Mount Paran'. . . indicates that the Almighty offered the Torah to the Gentile nations also, but, since they refused to accept it, He withdrew His 'shining' legal protection form them, and transferred their property rights to Israel, who observed His law. A passage in Habakkuk is quoted as confirming this claim: 'God came from Teman, and the Holy One from Mount Paran. . .He stood and measured the earth he beheld, and drove asunder ["outlawed"] the nations.' . . .the Talmud adds that He had observed how the Gentile nations steadfastly refused to obey the seven moral Noachian precepts, and hence He decided to outlaw them." (Baba Kama 38a).
The rabbis believed Gentiles demonstrated their stupidity by thinking their own laws were worthy of obeying. The Talmud denies the Gentile status as a "man," so they are also excluded from being the Jews' neighbor.
Read more...
What kind of religion sanctions deception and immorality for the sake of political goals? Orthodox Talmudic Judaism. The Babylonian Talmud encourages Jews to cheat and deceive Gentiles whenever necessary! In fact, "by way of deception" is the motto of Israel's spy agency Mossad. Official license to deceive and even commit sexual immorality was seen in Israel this week.
Eminent
In the ruling, Shvat says women can be "used to seduce enemy agents in order to cajole information out of them or see them captured." Jewish World says such women were used to capture nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu and to assassinate a senior Hamas operative in Dubai last January. Such deception, says the rabbi, is "Halacha," or binding Talmudic law. Even with homicidal intent, he writes, "sexual intercourse with a Gentile for the sake of a national cause is not only sanctioned, but is a highly important mitzvahOur Sages of Blessed Memory elevate such acts of dedication to the top of the Halacha's mitzvahs pyramid."
Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, head of Tzomet Institute and editor-in-chief of Tehumin, called the study "daring and importantAlthough it is highly unlikely that Mossad agents will seek rabbinical advice, this essay is very important and courageous. The author is versed in religious discourse and even conservative rabbis would surely agree with his thesis."
Shvat's ruling, reported by a major Jewish news agency, is presented without criticism. It reveals a disturbing, even ominous fact: Talmudic Judaism encourages Jews to ensnare and deceive Gentiles in order to advance Jews and Jewish causes, as long as they can get away with it. If they are caught and Israel is embarrassed, the "holy name of God" (synonymous with Israel's good reputation) may be blasphemed. If that is a real possibility, the Talmud tells Jews to back off. But in order to save the Jewish nation it is even morally permitted to murder and commit adultery.
God "Outlawed" the Gentiles
The Talmudic position concerning deception of Gentiles is embodied in the Halachic dictum, "It is permitted to deceive a goy (Gentile)." [1] In legal and business matters, the Talmud says Gentiles are beneath equality with Jews. As the 1905 Jewish Encyclopedia explains [2], the Gentiles were "outlawed" by God from the beginning.
The passage in Moses' farewell address: 'The Lord came form Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; he shined forth from Mount Paran'. . . indicates that the Almighty offered the Torah to the Gentile nations also, but, since they refused to accept it, He withdrew His 'shining' legal protection form them, and transferred their property rights to Israel, who observed His law. A passage in Habakkuk is quoted as confirming this claim: 'God came from Teman, and the Holy One from Mount Paran. . .He stood and measured the earth he beheld, and drove asunder ["outlawed"] the nations.' . . .the Talmud adds that He had observed how the Gentile nations steadfastly refused to obey the seven moral Noachian precepts, and hence He decided to outlaw them." (Baba Kama 38a).
The rabbis believed Gentiles demonstrated their stupidity by thinking their own laws were worthy of obeying. The Talmud denies the Gentile status as a "man," so they are also excluded from being the Jews' neighbor.
Read more...
Columbus Day? True Legacy: Cruelty and Slavery
Once again, it's time to celebrate Columbus Day. Yet, the stunning truth is: If Christopher Columbus were alive today, he would be put on trial for crimes against humanity. Columbus' reign of terror, as documented by noted historians, was so bloody, his legacy so unspeakably cruel, that Columbus makes a modern villain like Saddam Hussein look like a pale codfish.
Question: Why do we honor a man who, if he were alive today, would almost certainly be sitting on Death Row awaiting execution?
If you'd like to know the true story about Christopher Columbus, please read on. But I warn you, it's not for the faint of heart.
Here's the basics. On the second Monday in October each year, we celebrate Columbus Day (this year, it's on October 11th). We teach our school kids a cute little song that goes: "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." It's an American tradition, as American as pizza pie. Or is it? Surprisingly, the true story of Christopher Columbus has very little in common with the myth we all learned in school.
Columbus Day, as we know it in the United States, was invented by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service organization. Back in the 1930s, they were looking for a Catholic hero as a role-model their kids could look up to. In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt signed Columbus Day into law as a federal holiday to honor this courageous explorer. Or so we thought.
There are several problems with this. First of all, Columbus wasn't the first European to discover America. As we all know, the Viking, Leif Ericson probably founded a Norse village on Newfoundland some 500 years earlier. So, hat's off to Leif. But if you think about it, the whole concept of discovering America is, well, arrogant. After all, the Native Americans discovered North America about 14,000 years before Columbus was even born! Surprisingly, DNA evidence now suggests that courageous Polynesian adventurers sailed dugout canoes across the Pacific and settled in South America long before the Vikings.
Second, Columbus wasn't a hero. When he set foot on that sandy beach in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, Columbus discovered that the islands were inhabited by friendly, peaceful people called the Lucayans, Taínos and Arawaks. Writing in his diary, Columbus said they were a handsome, smart and kind people. He noted that the gentle Arawaks were remarkable for their hospitality. "They offered to share with anyone and when you ask for something, they never say no," he said. The Arawaks had no weapons; their society had neither criminals, prisons nor prisoners. They were so kind-hearted that Columbus noted in his diary that on the day the Santa Maria was shipwrecked, the Arawaks labored for hours to save his crew and cargo. The native people were so honest that not one thing was missing.
Columbus was so impressed with the hard work of these gentle islanders, that he immediately seized their land for Spain and enslaved them to work in his brutal gold mines. Within only two years, 125,000 (half of the population) of the original natives on the island were dead.
Read more...
Question: Why do we honor a man who, if he were alive today, would almost certainly be sitting on Death Row awaiting execution?
If you'd like to know the true story about Christopher Columbus, please read on. But I warn you, it's not for the faint of heart.
Here's the basics. On the second Monday in October each year, we celebrate Columbus Day (this year, it's on October 11th). We teach our school kids a cute little song that goes: "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." It's an American tradition, as American as pizza pie. Or is it? Surprisingly, the true story of Christopher Columbus has very little in common with the myth we all learned in school.
Columbus Day, as we know it in the United States, was invented by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal service organization. Back in the 1930s, they were looking for a Catholic hero as a role-model their kids could look up to. In 1934, as a result of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt signed Columbus Day into law as a federal holiday to honor this courageous explorer. Or so we thought.
There are several problems with this. First of all, Columbus wasn't the first European to discover America. As we all know, the Viking, Leif Ericson probably founded a Norse village on Newfoundland some 500 years earlier. So, hat's off to Leif. But if you think about it, the whole concept of discovering America is, well, arrogant. After all, the Native Americans discovered North America about 14,000 years before Columbus was even born! Surprisingly, DNA evidence now suggests that courageous Polynesian adventurers sailed dugout canoes across the Pacific and settled in South America long before the Vikings.
Second, Columbus wasn't a hero. When he set foot on that sandy beach in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, Columbus discovered that the islands were inhabited by friendly, peaceful people called the Lucayans, Taínos and Arawaks. Writing in his diary, Columbus said they were a handsome, smart and kind people. He noted that the gentle Arawaks were remarkable for their hospitality. "They offered to share with anyone and when you ask for something, they never say no," he said. The Arawaks had no weapons; their society had neither criminals, prisons nor prisoners. They were so kind-hearted that Columbus noted in his diary that on the day the Santa Maria was shipwrecked, the Arawaks labored for hours to save his crew and cargo. The native people were so honest that not one thing was missing.
Columbus was so impressed with the hard work of these gentle islanders, that he immediately seized their land for Spain and enslaved them to work in his brutal gold mines. Within only two years, 125,000 (half of the population) of the original natives on the island were dead.
Read more...
The Jewish Republic of Israel – Gideon Levy
Swearing an oath to a Jewish state will decide its fate. It is liable to turn the country into a theocracy like Saudi Arabia.
Remember this day. It’s the day Israel changes its character. As a result, it can also change its name to the Jewish Republic of Israel, like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Granted, the loyalty oath bill that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to have passed purportedly only deals with new citizens who are not Jewish, but it affects the fate of all of us.
From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic and racist country. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t affect him is mistaken. There is a silent majority that is accepting this with worrying apathy, as if to say: “I don’t care what country I live in.” Also anyone who thinks the world will continue to relate to Israel as a democracy after this law doesn’t understand what it is about. It’s another step that seriously harms Israel’s image.
Prime Minister Netanyahu will prove today that he is actually Yisrael Beinteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, and Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman will prove he is really a loyal member of Yisrael Beiteinu. The Labor party will prove it is nothing more than a doormat. And Israel today will prove that it doesn’t care about anything. Today the loyalty oath bill, soon the loyalty oath law. The dam will overflow today, threatening to drown the remnants of democracy until we are left perhaps with a Jewish state of a character that no one really understands, but it certainly won’t be a democracy. Those demanding this loyalty oath are the ones misappropriating loyalty to the state.
At its next session, the Knesset is to debate close to 20 other anti-democratic bills. Over the weekend, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel issued a blacklist of legislation: a loyalty law for Knesset members; a loyalty law for film production; a loyalty law for non-profits; putting the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, beyond the scope of the law; a ban on calls for a boycott; and a bill for the revocation of citizenship. It’s a dangerous McCarthyist dance on the part of ignorant legislators who haven’t begun to understand what democracy is all about. It’s dangerous even if only a portion of the bills become law, because our fate and our essence will change.
It’s not hard to understand the Netanyahu-Lieberman duo. As sworn nationalists, they are not expected to understand that democracy doesn’t only mean the rule of the majority, but rather first and foremost that minorities have rights. It’s much harder to comprehend the complacency of the masses. Town squares should have been filled today with citizens who do not wish to live in a country where the minority is oppressed by draconian laws such as the one that forces them to swear a false oath to a Jewish state, but amazingly almost no one seems to feel affected.
Read more...
Remember this day. It’s the day Israel changes its character. As a result, it can also change its name to the Jewish Republic of Israel, like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Granted, the loyalty oath bill that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to have passed purportedly only deals with new citizens who are not Jewish, but it affects the fate of all of us.
From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic and racist country. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t affect him is mistaken. There is a silent majority that is accepting this with worrying apathy, as if to say: “I don’t care what country I live in.” Also anyone who thinks the world will continue to relate to Israel as a democracy after this law doesn’t understand what it is about. It’s another step that seriously harms Israel’s image.
Prime Minister Netanyahu will prove today that he is actually Yisrael Beinteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, and Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman will prove he is really a loyal member of Yisrael Beiteinu. The Labor party will prove it is nothing more than a doormat. And Israel today will prove that it doesn’t care about anything. Today the loyalty oath bill, soon the loyalty oath law. The dam will overflow today, threatening to drown the remnants of democracy until we are left perhaps with a Jewish state of a character that no one really understands, but it certainly won’t be a democracy. Those demanding this loyalty oath are the ones misappropriating loyalty to the state.
At its next session, the Knesset is to debate close to 20 other anti-democratic bills. Over the weekend, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel issued a blacklist of legislation: a loyalty law for Knesset members; a loyalty law for film production; a loyalty law for non-profits; putting the Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba, beyond the scope of the law; a ban on calls for a boycott; and a bill for the revocation of citizenship. It’s a dangerous McCarthyist dance on the part of ignorant legislators who haven’t begun to understand what democracy is all about. It’s dangerous even if only a portion of the bills become law, because our fate and our essence will change.
It’s not hard to understand the Netanyahu-Lieberman duo. As sworn nationalists, they are not expected to understand that democracy doesn’t only mean the rule of the majority, but rather first and foremost that minorities have rights. It’s much harder to comprehend the complacency of the masses. Town squares should have been filled today with citizens who do not wish to live in a country where the minority is oppressed by draconian laws such as the one that forces them to swear a false oath to a Jewish state, but amazingly almost no one seems to feel affected.
Read more...