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Colleague Disputes Case Against Anthrax Suspect

By SCOTT SHANE | New York Times | April 22, 2010

WASHINGTON — A former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the F.B.I. has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001, told a National Academy of Sciences panel on Thursday that he believed it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, as the F.B.I. asserts.

Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, the microbiologist, Henry S. Heine, replied, “Absolutely not.” At the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Maryland, where Dr. Ivins and Dr. Heine worked, he said, “among the senior scientists, no one believes it.”

Dr. Heine told the 16-member panel, which is reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the investigation, that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab. Such an effort would not have escaped colleagues’ notice, he added later, and lab technicians who worked closely with Dr. Ivins have told him they saw no such work.

He told the panel that biological containment measures where Dr. Ivins worked were inadequate to prevent the spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices. “You’d have had dead animals or dead people,” he said.

The public remarks from Dr. Heine, two months after the Justice Department officially closed the case, represent a major public challenge to its conclusion in one of the largest, most politically delicate and scientifically complex cases in F.B.I. history.

The F.B.I. declined to comment on Dr. Heine’s remarks on Thursday. In its written summation of the case in February, the bureau said Dr. Ivins’s lab technicians grew anthrax spores that the technicians incorrectly believed were added to Dr. Ivins’s main supply flask. But the summary said the spores were never added to the flask, suggesting that surplus spores might have been diverted by Dr. Ivins for the letters.

Some scientists and members of Congress protested in February when the Justice Department closed the case, saying it should have waited for the academy panel’s conclusions. The F.B.I. asked the panel last year to review the bureau’s scientific work on the case, though not its conclusion on the perpetrator’s identity.

Members of the panel, whose chairwoman is Alice P. Gast, a chemical engineer and president of Lehigh University, declined to comment on Dr. Heine’s testimony or his remarks to reporters. The panel is expected to complete its report this fall.

Since shortly after Dr. Ivins took a lethal dose of Tylenol in July 2008 and the Justice Department first named him as the anthrax mailer, some former colleagues have rejected the F.B.I.’s conclusion and said they thought he was innocent. They have acknowledged, as Dr. Heine did on Thursday, that they wanted to clear the name of their friend and defend their laboratory, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Dr. Heine said he had been treated as a suspect himself at one point and understood the pressure Dr. Ivins was under.

Asked why he was speaking out now, Dr. Heine noted that Army officials had prohibited comment on the case, silencing him until he left the government laboratory in late February. He now works for Ordway Research Institute in Albany.

Dr. Heine said he did not dispute that there was a genetic link between the spores in the letters and the anthrax in Dr. Ivins’s flask — a link that led the F.B.I. to conclude that Dr. Ivins had grown the spores from a sample taken from the flask. But samples from the flask were widely shared, Dr. Heine said. Accusing Dr. Ivins of the attacks, he said, was like tracing a murder to the clerk at the sporting goods shop who sold the bullets.

“Whoever did this is still running around out there,” Dr. Heine said. “I truly believe that.”

April 23, 2010 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism | Leave a comment

ZOA lobbies Congress on Iran, PA

JTA | April 22, 2010

WASHINGTON — Activists for the Zionist Organization of America lobbied Congress to consider military action against Iran.

In more than 100 meetings with members of Congress on Wednesday, the ZOA said hundreds of its activists also asked the lawmakers to defund the Palestinian Authority, press the U.S. embassy issue and enshrine anti-Jewish discrimination safeguards in education legislation.

Thirty lawmakers addressed the group’s luncheon, the ZOA said.

The activists “urged the necessity of military action should peaceful, diplomatic measures fail to stop Iran’s drive to obtain a nuclear weapons capability,” a ZOA statement said, and called for a suspension of assistance for the Palestinian Authority until it ends incitement, outlaws terrorist groups and confiscates illegal weapons.

The statement also called for new legislation that would remove the presidential waiver from existing legislation requiring the United States to move its Israel embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Such a removal would likely have little effect; successive presidents have cited broader waivers to assert executive primacy in foreign policy.

The ZOA activists also sought congressional action “to make clear that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which protects against racial and ethnic discrimination — encompasses anti-Jewish incidents and protects Jewish students from anti-Semitic harassment and intimidation.”

This has been a thorny issue, as successive administrations and congresses have sought to include such protections while also protecting church-state separation. Bush administration appointees, for instance, were concerned that such language would inhibit proselytization.

April 23, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News | Leave a comment

Sanctioning Iran Is an Act of War

By Rep. Ron Paul | April 23, 2010

Before the US House of Representatives, April 22, 2010, Statement on Motion to Instruct Conferees on HR 2194, Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act.

I rise in opposition to this motion to instruct House conferees on HR 2194, the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act, and I rise in strong opposition again to the underlying bill and to its Senate version as well. I object to this entire push for war on Iran, however it is disguised. Listening to the debate on the Floor on this motion and the underlying bill it feels as if we are back in 2002 all over again: the same falsehoods and distortions used to push the United States into a disastrous and unnecessary one-trillion-dollar war on Iraq are being trotted out again to lead us to what will likely be an even more disastrous and costly war on Iran. The parallels are astonishing.

We hear war advocates today on the Floor scare-mongering about reports that in one year Iran will have missiles that can hit the United States. Where have we heard this bombast before? Anyone remember the claims that Iraqi drones were going to fly over the United States and attack us? These “drones” ended up being pure propaganda – the UN chief weapons inspector concluded in 2004 that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had ever developed unpiloted drones for use on enemy targets. Of course by then the propagandists had gotten their war so the truth did not matter much.

We hear war advocates on the floor today arguing that we cannot afford to sit around and wait for Iran to detonate a nuclear weapon. Where have we heard this before? Anyone remember then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s oft-repeated quip about Iraq, that we cannot wait for the smoking gun to appear as a mushroom cloud?

We need to see all this for what it is: Propaganda to speed us to war against Iran for the benefit of special interests.

Let us remember a few important things. Iran, a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has never been found in violation of that treaty. Iran is not capable of enriching uranium to the necessary level to manufacture nuclear weapons. According to the entire US Intelligence Community, Iran is not currently working on a nuclear weapons program. These are facts, and to point them out does not make one a supporter or fan of the Iranian regime. Those pushing war on Iran will ignore or distort these facts to serve their agenda, though, so it is important and necessary to point them out.

Some of my well-intentioned colleagues may be tempted to vote for sanctions on Iran because they view this as a way to avoid war on Iran. I will ask them whether the sanctions on Iraq satisfied those pushing for war at that time. Or whether the application of ever-stronger sanctions in fact helped war advocates make their case for war on Iraq: as each round of new sanctions failed to “work” – to change the regime – war became the only remaining regime-change option.

This legislation, whether the House or Senate version, will lead us to war on Iran. The sanctions in this bill, and the blockade of Iran necessary to fully enforce them, are in themselves acts of war according to international law. A vote for sanctions on Iran is a vote for war against Iran. I urge my colleagues in the strongest terms to turn back from this unnecessary and counterproductive march to war.

April 23, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Guardian Continues To Spread Misinformation About Eyjafjallajokull

By Steven Goddard | 21 04 2010

Yesterday WUWT reported on the inaccurate #1 environmental story at Guardian.

The Guardian article originally read:

The volcanic eruption has released carbon dioxide, but the amount is dwarfed by
the savings. Based on readings taken by scientists during the first phase of
Eyjafjallajokull activity last month, the website Information is Beautiful
calculated the volcano has emitted about 15,000 tonnes of CO2 each day.

After their article was written, more accurate information spread across the web – The Guardian numbers were off by more than an order of magnitude :

Experts said on Monday that the volcano in Iceland is emitting 150,000 to 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per day, a figure comparable to emissions released from a small industrial nation.

The Guardian responded by updating their article with better numbers, but failed to update their conclusions:

The volcanic eruption has released carbon dioxide, but the amount is dwarfed by the savings. Based on readings taken by scientists during the first phase of Eyjafjallajokull activity last month, the website Information is Beautiful calculated the volcano has emitted about 150,000 tonnes of CO2 each day. Worldwide, the US Geological Survey says volcanoes produce about 200m tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.
• This article was changed on 21 April. It originally said the volcano has emitted about 15,000 tonnes of CO2 each day. Information is Beautiful has since corrected this figure to 150,000; we have updated our article to reflect this.

So what is wrong with their correction?  Lots of things.

  1. Their source of information now claims that the numbers are 206,465 tons saved vs. 150,000 tons emitted by the volcano.  Those two numbers are well within the margin of error of the volcano estimates, and are the very low end of what scientists are claiming.  If we use the average scientific estimate of 225,000 – the volcano was actually producing more CO2 per day than the savings from grounded aircraft.  Yet the Guardian story still claims that emissions are dwarfed by the savings.
  2. The Guardian story claims that there have been 2.8 million tons of savings, and the math doesn’t work out.  At the time the story was written there had been six days of grounded flights.  206,465 tons/day X  6 days = 1.2 million tons, not 2.8 million tons.
  3. The Guardian failed to research the actual volcano estimates, and again published the very low end numbers from an apparently unreliable source.
  4. They failed to consider that the eruption has been going on for more than a month, while the flight ban has lasted only six days.  Total volcano emissions actually dwarf the savings from the aircraft.
  5. They failed to consider Anthony’s point that people stranded by grounded aircraft seek other means of transportation, including cars, trains and battleships, etc.  The BBC estimated that these other modes of transport generate as much CO2 as the planes would have.
  6. They failed to consider that the airlines will eventually run extra flights in order to catch up.

The evidence indicates that the net balance from the volcano is a large increase in CO2 emissions.  The Guardian article was just Plane Stupid.

Furthermore, we know that plants, soil and the oceans generate 30 times as much CO2 as all fossil fuel burning combined.  That is 200,000,000,000 tons of CO2 per year from natural sources, compared with The Guardian’s inaccurate claim of 2,800,000 tons in savings from aircraft grounded.  In other words, even their exaggerated claimed savings are less than 0.0014% of all natural emissions of CO2.

https://i0.wp.com/www.whrc.org/carbon/images/GlobalCarbonCycle.gif

Numbers  from Woods Hole Institute


April 22, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

End Israel lobbies’ pervasive and damaging influence in US politics

Support for Israel is not only tragic and immoral, it is also extremely damaging to Americans.

By Debbie Menon | Salem News | 1 April 2010

In a recent article in the journal Foreign Policy entitled “Petraeus wasn’t the first”, Mark Perry describes succinctly the opposition to US support for Israel, the rationale for this support and how American publishers cover it up.

The article is extremely valuable reading, recommends Alison Weir, the executive director of the website If Americans Knew. “It corrects misconceptions that so many Americans have on the causation of US support for Israel, including even some who are otherwise well informed on Palestine,” she asserts.

Mark Perry is correct in all respects. He quotes Joe Hoar, who remind him that it’s all old history. “What’s the news here? Hasn’t this been said before?” and hasn’t it all been done before?

Indeed, have humans ever learned from history? I think it says something about the nature of our species when you reflect that Albert Einstein once said that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Key elements of the US government have always opposed the concept of a Zionist Israel, ever since the state and defence departments advised President Harry Truman not to sign up to the Zionist project, which he nevertheless did but with reservations, qualifications and conditions that were immediately ignored.

But none of these key elements of governance has influence over the Zionist-controlled US corporate press, entertainment, academic and public (mis)information media (and the corporate and business advertising budgets that drive them) where the roots of American public opinion are planted and from which the blissfully ignorant American masses take the cues for their views and feelings. Nor do they control the free-spending lobbies that buy and sell legislators and politicians on Capitol Hill with the same ease with which they trade banks and corporations on the stock market.

While this is well documented, the sad thing is that today many editors, journalists, analysts and publishers, even in the so-called progressive American media, either still do not know these facts or have chosen not to inform the public about them.

Recent “hate speech” legislation in the US Congress has already eviscerated the freedom of speech guarantees of the First Amendment. Try to persuade me that abuse and vilification of Islam and Christianity will get you the same treatment in the courts that open and objective political criticism of Israel will. The fact that it will almost certainly not is a perfect example of the power of lobbies in controlling the law of, and restricting free speech in, the USA.

The recent 300-36 vote by the US House Representatives rejecting the UN-sponsored Goldstone Report, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)-initiated letter “Reaffirming the US-Israel Alliance”, which was signed by 76 senators and pressed the US president not to put pressure on Israel – and repeated the “unbreakable bond” mantra – is the best evidence of who controls US Middle East policy and how powerless the US president is to serve his own country’s interest. Barack Obama would do well to heed George Washington’s advise, when he warned in his farewell address against “passionate attachment” to an ally. (Also see Anthony Lawson’s video, “Treason by Members of the United States Congress”.)

Yes, it is about this ally’s powerful lobbying and its pervasive influence on American politics, policy and institutions that these and other writers have long written valuable books, revealing facts about the extent of the stranglehold of the Israel lobby over the US Congress and the US administration.

It’s long past time to end one of the most damaging and pervasive cover-ups in the US today, and time for people and institutions to confront Israel’s lobbies.

Paul Findley They Dare to Speak Out

Edgar Tivnan The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy

Donald Neff Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy Towards Palestine and Israel Since 1945

George W. Ball and Douglas B. Ball The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present

John Mulhall America and the Founding of Israel: An Investigation of the Morality of America’s Role

James Petras The Power of Israel in the United States

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

Jeff Gates Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War (2008) his first release in the Criminal State series.

Debbie Menon is a freelance writer based in Dubai. Her articles have been published widely in print and online. She can be reached at debbiemenon@gmail.com.  For more of her work, visit My Catbird Seat.

April 22, 2010 Posted by | Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Israel First: More on Dr. Lani Kass

By Philip Giraldi | April 22, 2010

My recent account of the career of Dr. Lani Kass was based on what has appeared about her in the public record and media, including her own comments regarding national defense and security policy.  To recapitulate, Kass was born, raised, and educated in Israel.  She has a PhD in Russian studies and is fluent in Russian and Hebrew in addition to English.  Kass reportedly reached the rank of major in the Israeli air force before moving to the United States and working her way up through the US defense establishment.  She is currently the most senior civilian adviser to Air Force Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz and is believed to have access to most American defense secrets.  Kass is best known to the public for her role in promoting Air Force cyberwarfare, but she also appears to have been a major player in counter-terrorism policy and in war preparations directed against Iran even though she has no actual substantive background in those areas.  She believes that the US is engaged in a long war against Islamo-radicalism and that “winning” against Iran is necessary but the American people must be willing to pay the price to succeed.

My concern regarding Dr. Kass is based on the potential conflict of interest and divided loyalty that is normal in anyone who is born in one country and moves to another.  She comes from a country that has a history of large scale and highly aggressive espionage directed against the United States and she appears to continue to have close ties to her birthplace.  Dr. Kass has become a naturalized American while apparently retaining her Israeli citizenship and her three children were reportedly born in Israel, not the United States.  The information she has access to would be extremely valuable to Israel and potentially damaging to US interests, particularly as she likely knows what the US Air Force response to a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran would be.

The issue of Israel aside, one might reasonably argue in any event that a senior officer in any foreign country’s military establishment should be considered an undesirable candidate for a top post in the Pentagon on security grounds.  If Dr. Kass were a dentist it would make absolutely no difference where she came from and what her political views might be, but a person’s ultimate loyalty is not just an abstraction for someone who has relatively free access to the Defense Department’s most highly classified information and is probably also able to influence policy.

I continue to question to what extent Kass has been properly security vetted for her position, to include rigorous inquiry into whether or not she still has ties to the Israeli government. I also can only speculate at the type of advice that Kass is providing to her Pentagon associates as she appears to embrace particularly hard line views about Muslims and about the desirability of going to war with Iran, positions that are rather similar to those promoted by the Israeli government.

Additional information has come to light on Kass that heightens my concern about her high position in the United States government’s defense and security establishment.  Her first job in Washington was with the Advanced International Studies Institute (AISI), a Washington DC area based think tank.  After being recommended by someone at the Pentagon, she was hired for her Russian language skills in an unclassified program funded by the Department of Defense called Soviet Watch.  Her fellow employees understood that she was a former major in Israeli intelligence.  A few months later she moved on to beltway bandit Booz Allen Hamilton.  Some months after she departed AISI, one of her colleagues received a call from a personnel manager at the Industrial War College asking to confirm Kass’s employment with AISI.  The Industrial War College was, as the name implies, an institute set up to coordinate industrial production with Defense Department needs.  Some of its work was classified.  Kass’s colleague told the caller that Kass was an intelligence officer who thought of herself as an Israeli and added that putting her in any position of influence would be a bad idea.

From there and then to here and now has taken more than twenty years, proceeding through a number of Defense Department positions with ever-increasing responsibility and access.  It would not be out of place to observe that if the report that Kass was truly an intelligence officer for the Israeli Defense Forces is correct the Department of Defense security screeners should have erred on the side of caution based on the supposition that she was still in touch with her former employers. She should never have been given a security clearance and provided access to United States classified information in the first place, which again raises the issue of just if and how thoroughly her background was actually investigated.

More information has also been developed regarding Kass’s current role.  According to a highly reliable source, Dr. Lani Kass is now the principal adviser to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen regarding the Middle East. She recently was involved in a very important meeting, one that concerned Israel.

The meeting took place because of concerns that the United States has been losing the “war of ideas” in the Muslim world.  At the end of last year, General David Petraeus sent a special emissary out on a fact finding mission to meet with the heads of state and top military officers in all of the Muslim countries considered to be friends or allies of the US for a frank exchange of views.  The emissary, an Arabic speaker, learned that no country any longer trusts the United States because it is widely believed that all American policies in the Near East region are subject to veto by Israel.  It was also commonly observed that Washington is complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians because of its failure to do anything to restrain Israel, making it extremely difficult to rally popular support in any Muslim country for US policies.

Petraeus was surprised by the unanimity and emotion of the views that were confidentially expressed and thought the issue to be important enough to move it up the chain of command.  In February, he met with Admiral Mullen and briefed him on his findings.  Mullen was accompanied only by Dr. Lani Kass, who was described to Petraeus as his special assistant for the Middle East.  Mullen expressed some dismay at the implications of the findings while Kass disputed Petraeus’ conclusions and said that the concerns being expressed were greatly exaggerated.  Petraeus nevertheless presented his report to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 17th together with his judgment that the failure to address the Palestinian issue was putting US soldiers in danger because it was inflaming anti-American sentiment and giving groups like al-Qaeda an unnecessary propaganda victory.

One might argue that Dr. Lani Kass is just another Israel firster who has risen to high office in the US government, not really unlike Dennis Ross, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and Douglas Feith.  And that might well be true.  But at the same time one must challenge the judgment of those who enabled her rise to a position of great responsibility and power and there should be serious questions about whether her bellicose and racially tinged viewpoint comes from objective and honest analysis of the genuine challenges confronting the United States or from her loyalty to her country of birth.

April 22, 2010 Posted by | Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Watching the invasion unfold

By Eva Bartlett | In Gaza | April 22, 2010

It was an early morning, farmers relieved to have harvested the 6 dunam (1 dunam is roughly 1000 square metres) field of lentils planted 5 months ago in Al Faraheen borderlands.  The village, east of Khan Younis, includes land cut off to farmers by the Israeli-imposed “buffer zone”.  That technically 300 metre no-go zone stretching south to north along Gaza’s border with Israel actually extends far beyond the few hundred metres, up to 2 km in some areas where Palestinian civilians have been shot, injured or killed, by Israeli soldiers while on their land.

Abu Qater Tabbash has 100 dunams of land he can no longer access, he says, because it lies in the buffer zone. The land he worked today, along with 5 women from his family, is rented land.  Their crop will not pay off, but it will provide lentils for the family and hay for their animals.

“I knew they were going to do something today,” says Jaber Abu Rjila.  “I saw the bulldozers line up at the border yesterday and knew today there’d be a party,” making light of his dangerous reality.

Rjila is an old hand at Israeli invasions, even prior to the one which destroyed his farm and livelihood.  Being shot at and having his and neighbouring land churned to waste by Israeli bulldozers is so normal that he continues sorting garlic and harvesting lettuce, to give to his guests, as the tanks line up at the gate before entering and nearing within 200 metres of his home.

But when the bulldozers and tanks begin to thunder in through the Israeli-controlled gate nearest Rjila’s land, he, Leila and a few neighbours are the only ones who stay.

“All of Faraheen will be in Khan Younis after a while,” says Jaber, referring to the proximity of the town and the fact that Israeli invasions have repeatedly harassed the citizens of his town, destroyed their houses, shot up their walls and terrified their children.

One of Rjila’s young daughters has never gotten over the experience of being in a house surrounded by and being shot at by Israeli tanks and soldiers as military bulldozers destroyed their land.  The girl, just 7 or 8 years old, is slight and shows signs of malnourishment, despite her parents best efforts and the comparative health of her siblings.

“She was traumatized,’ Leila says, explaining that of her siblings, the girl was the most terrified during the 2008 Israeli invasion, which including shelling and gunfire on her home.

The tanks enter the gate some 500 metres from the house we are at and seem to be bee-lining for the Rjila home. When they are roughly 100 metres away, we leave our vantage point, not wanting to bring further wrath on the home by the provocation of documenting Israel’s invasion.

Continuing to film from a different spot still near the home and the convoy of tanks, we hear  their rumble as they tear up the earth.

*the area, tranquil, before the invasion

*this land will have all been torn up in the invasion

Related:

April 22, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Video: Chicago hearing looks at the effect of US military aid to Israel

By Adam Horowitz on April 21, 2010

Videos from last weekend’s mock Congressional Hearing in Chicago about US policy toward Israel/Palestine have been posted.  Below are two of the most powerful. The first featuers Amr Shurrab from Khan Younis who lost two of his brothers on the same day during the Israeli attack on Gaza in January, 2009. The second features Cindy Corrie who recounts the death of her daughter Rachel and her search for answers and accountability.

Chicago Hearing Part 6

Chicago Hearing Part 7

April 22, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Erekat: Israel incites settler violence

Press TV – April 22, 2010

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat has blasted Tel Aviv for inciting a new wave of Israeli settler violence as part of a culture of vandalism and extremism.

“Settler violence and the wanton destruction of Palestinian property replicate what is being done on a much larger scale by Israel as it pushes ahead with illegal settlement construction across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem (al-Quds),” Erekat said in a statement on Wednesday.

“They bring into full view the violence that underpins Israel’s policy of illegal settlement construction and the cost to Palestinians,” he added.

The Palestinian official described Israeli settlers as the direct beneficiaries of Tel Aviv’s policy which encourages occupying Palestinians’ land and demolishing their houses to further expand its “apartheid system that promotes settlements by stripping Palestinians of their basic rights and freedoms.”

“The result is a culture of violence, hatred and extremism in which Israeli settlers, often accompanied by Israeli soldiers, run riot across the West Bank,” Erekat noted.

The remarks come a day after a group of residents from the Israeli settlement of Givat Hayovel uprooted 250 olive tree seedlings planted by Palestinian farmers in the village of Qaryut to mark Earth Day.

On Monday, settlers attacked the General Union of Palestinian Workers’ housing complex in Ein Sinyia, north of Ramallah, destroying water tanks and nearby property.

Israeli settlers also vandalized a mosque in the village of Huwwara last week and painted racist slogans on its walls. They also torched two cars and damaged more than 300 olive trees.

Erekat charged Israeli officials with encouraging extremists “to intimidate and destroy at will, armed with the absurd notion that they have a divine right to steal, to vandalize and to persecute another people.”

He reiterated his criticism of Israel’s refusal to halt expansion of illegal West Bank settlements as “the major obstacle to peace and the greatest threat to the two-state solution.”

The settlements “are a black hole in which hopes of peace are fast disappearing,” he warned.

April 22, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Beit Ummar vineyard flooded with settlement sewage

Ma’an – 22/04/2010

Hebron – Israeli settlers opened a sewage pipe running toward the Hebron-area town of Beit Ummar on Wednesday night, flooding a Palestinian vineyard with wastewater, local officials said.

By opening the sewage pipe, residents of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc destroyed some 70,000 square meters of the vineyard belonging to the Sabarneh family, experts visiting the site said.

The land, in the Wad Shakhat area of northern Beit Ummar, was ruined by the flood of sewage, along with the crop after it was contaminated by the untreated wastewater, land experts who arrived at the scene along with the village mayor said.

An Israeli Civil Administration representative confirmed the incident, saying a pump from the Kfar Etzion settlement stopped working due to a power malfunction and sewage overflowed from the network. The official said the matter was a mistake, and as soon as the Beit Ummar governor notified officials of the issue the problem was rectified.

Military officials said compensation for the mistake would likely have to be sought in court.

Residents of Beit Ummar said the mayor informed Israel’s Civil Administration office of the incident, and that he asked Israeli police to investigate what was behind the disaster.

“As far as I know, the mayor of Kfar Etzion called and apologized,” the Civil Administration representative said.

April 22, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

NPR & Trust in Government

Robert Shetterly | 19 Apr 2010

I was just sitting down in my kitchen this morning — Sunday, April 18th, 2010 — to a bowl of oatmeal topped with walnuts, some pieces of ginger, and a little brown sugar when I heard the host of NPR’s Sunday Weekend Edition program, Liane Hansen, say that the next segment would begin a series of programs focusing on Trust in Government. She said, as we all know, that cynicism about our political leadership has metastasized. The new series would look at how it got this way and how it could be different.

I thought, great! I hoped — and expected — that the discussion would hone in on governmental hypocrisy and lying. Nothing builds cynicism and destroys trust like hypocrisy and lying.

But what to my wondering ears should appear but a first guest by the name of Philip Zelikow. Ms. Hansen introduced Mr. Zelikow as a professor of history at the University of Virginia and just the person to frame the discussion.

What surprised me was what Ms. Hansen, and thus NPR, did not tell us about Mr. Zelikow. He was a neocon who worked very closely with Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Carl Rove in the Bush administration. He was one of the primary authors of what has been called the Bush Doctrine — the right of our country to make preemptive war on other countries in contradiction of international law and our own Constitution. During the Bush administration Zelikow defended the many lies that they told about the reasons for attacking Iraq. And he was put in charge of the 9/11 Commission, the committee that was supposed to tell the world what really happened on 9/11. He ran that committee so that the official version of events could not be questioned. He did not allow witnesses to testify who had seen and heard things that cast the official version into doubt. The commission totally ignored facts that made the official version untenable and it neglected to even mention that World Trade Center tower #7, not struck by an airplane, also mysteriously collapsed that day.

In other words, to kick off a program about cynicism and trust in government, NPR was inviting an expert to diagnose the problem — and what better expert than one of the people who has done more than most to cause it! NPR knows intimately Mr. Zelikow’s history and they chose to expunge it, hide it from their listeners.

Mr. Zelikow failed to mention during the interview that citizens lose respect for their government and become cynical when the government lies. Nor did he mention that when those leaders who lie make sure there is no accountability, the cynicism grows.

And Ms. Hansen neglected to mention that when the media does not identify the history and bias of a guest, it appears that they may be trying to manipulate their audience. It demonstrates a lack of respect for that audience and is a prime cause of cynicism. Such behavior makes a mockery of trust. It makes cynicism and distrust a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I would like to remind NPR that the problems of trust and cynicism would not be rampant in this country if the media fulfilled its obligation in a democracy to expose the lies of government. The only antidote to these problems is an honest media. (One can never expect the government to be honest.) When the media obscures the truth, they show the same contempt for democracy that the politicians do.

And then they wring their hands and ask why the people don’t trust government.

My oatmeal is cold now.

April 22, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

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