Losing It at the Airport Checkpoint
TSA’s War on the Bill of Rights
By RALPH NADER | June 25, 2010
If you are planning to fly over the 4th of July holiday, be aware of your rights at airport security checkpoints.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has mandated that passengers can opt out of going through a whole body scanning machine in favor of a physical pat down. Unfortunately, opting for the pat down requires passengers to be assertive since TSA screeners do not tell travelers about their right to refuse a scan. Harried passengers must spot the TSA signs posted at hectic security checkpoints to inform themselves of their rights before they move to a body scanning security line.
Since the failed Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight by a passenger hiding explosives in his underwear, TSA has accelerated its program of deploying whole body scanning machines, including x-ray scanners, at airport security checkpoints throughout the United States. Scanning machines peak beneath passengers’ clothing looking for concealed weapons and explosives that can elude airport metal detectors. So far, TSA has placed 111 scanners at 32 airports. They expect to have 450 scanners deployed by the end of the year at an estimated cost of $170,000 each.
Privacy, civil rights and religious groups object to whole body scanning machines as uniquely intrusive. Naked images of passengers’ bodies are captured by these machines that can reveal very personal medical conditions such as prosthetics, colostomy bags and mastectomy scars. The TSA responded by setting the scanners to blur the facial features of travelers, placing TSA employees who view the images in a separate room and assuring the public that the images are deleted after initial viewing.
Yet, a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) uncovered documents showing that the scanning machines’ procurement specifications include the ability to store, record and transfer revealing digital images of passengers. The specifications allow TSA to disable any privacy filters permitting the exporting of raw images, contrary to TSA assurances.
It begs logic that the TSA would not retain their ability to store images particularly in the event of a terrorist getting through the scan and later attacking an aircraft. One of the first searches by the TSA would be to review images taken by the scanners to identify the attacker.
The Amsterdam airport is using a less intrusive security device called “auto detection” scanning which generates stick figures instead of the real image of the person and avoids exposing passengers to radiation. Three United States Senators recently wrote to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano urging her to consider these devices.
More pointedly, security experts, such as Edward Luttwak from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have come forward questioning the effectiveness of whole body scanners since they can be defeated by hiding explosives in body cavities. The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, has stated that it is unclear whether scanners would have spotted the kind of explosives carried by the “Christmas Day” bomber.
About one-half of these body scanning machines use low dose x-rays to scan passengers. Last May, a group of esteemed scientists from the University of California, San Francisco wrote to John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, voicing their concerns about the rapid roll out of scanners without a rigorous safety review by an impartial panel of experts. The scientists caution that the TSA has miscalculated the radiation dose to the skin from scanners and that there is “good reason to believe that these scanners will increase the risk of cancer to children and other vulnerable populations.”
David Brenner, director of Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research, has also voiced caution about x-raying millions of air travelers. He was a member of the government committee that set the safety guidelines for the x-ray scanners, and he now says he would not have signed onto the report had he known that TSA wanted to scan almost every air traveler.
Passenger complaints to TSA and newspaper accounts of passenger experiences with scanners contradict TSA assurances that checkpoint signs provide adequate notice to travelers about the scanning procedure and the pat down option. Travelers, who reported that they were not fully aware what the scanning procedure involved, said they were not made aware of alternative search options.
Many travelers complained about their privacy, and their families’ privacy, being invaded. Some were concerned about the radiation risk, particularly to pregnant women and children. Some travelers felt bullied by rude TSA screeners. The Wall Street Journal reported that one woman who refused to go through the body scanner was called “unpatriotic” by the TSA screener.
Expensive state-of-the-art security technology that poses potentially serious health risks to vulnerable passengers, invades privacy, and provides questionable security is neither smart nor safe. For the White House it is a political embarrassment waiting to happen.
President Obama should suspend the body scanning program and appoint an independent panel of experts to review the issues of privacy, health and effectiveness. After such a review, should the DHS and TSA still want to deploy body scanners at airports, they should initiate a public rulemaking, which they have refused thus far, so that the public can have their say in the matter.
If you experience any push-back from TSA screeners when you assert your right to refuse to go through a whole body scanner and request a pat down security search instead, please write to info@csrl.org.
To neutralize
Unlike in the case of their Jewish counterparts, when it comes to offending Arab drivers, the Israeli Border Police would rather kill than arrest.
By Amira Hass| Haaretz | June 23, 2010
If a policeman had witnessed the hit-and-run accident that took the life of cyclist Shneor Cheshin on Friday, would he have killed the driver after catching him? Of course not. But on Friday, June 11, in broad daylight in the middle of a residential neighborhood, a policeman killed a driver who ran into – but did not kill – pedestrians: police officers on foot.
The killing was buried immediately in the giant cemetery called “of no interest to the Israeli public.” Why? Because all this happened in a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem (Wadi Joz ), and because the driver’s name was Ziad Jilani.
Until his case is decided in court, Tal Mor is rightfully deemed “the suspect in Cheshin’s killing.” But Jilani was treated to a lightning trial: He was convicted on the spot of intending to carry out a terror attack because the people hurt by his car were Israeli policemen. They chased him as one chases someone defined as a terrorist, while shooting (first in the air, but then in a way that endangered passersby. In fact, a 5-year-old girl sitting in a parked car was injured ).
And then, when he was lying on the ground shot, according to witnesses, he also took two bullets to the head. That is, between the second the man was indicted for intending to run people over in a terror attack, and until the moment a gun was allegedly pressed right up to his head and the trigger pulled, the Border Police on the scene were victims, witnesses, prosecutors, judges and executioners.
The Border Police spokesperson wrote to Haaretz: “Citizens have been killed and dozens injured by vehicle terror attacks that occurred in Jerusalem from 2008 to 2009. The lives of other innocent citizens were saved thanks to the intervention of police, Border Police combatants and civilians who neutralized the perpetrators and prevented more killing. The latest running-over incident … only by a miracle ended without combatant fatalities. In this case as well, the perpetrator was neutralized after he tried to flee the scene against the law.”
When Jilani fled his vehicle into a dead-end alley, did he endanger the lives of civilians? Did the police fear that the Palestinian (after all, they were certain he was not Jewish ) would harm Palestinians in the heart of that Palestinian neighborhood, so they had to “neutralize” him? Who knows, maybe so. Perhaps that was the reason they fired at him when he got out of his car and they chased him, lest he pull a pistol or an assault rifle out of his pants and attack innocent passersby, Palestinians like him.
Down the alley, near his uncle’s house, there were no police at the time who could be endangered by a potential weapon or an explosives belt. When he was already lying prone on the ground, apparently injured in his leg, back and arm, were the approaching police still afraid he would draw a rifle and kill them? So that’s why they did not bother handcuffing him?
They call the Border Police “combatants,” going around the streets of East Jerusalem with their long rifles and helmets. Against whom and why are they doing combat there, between a butcher shop, two vegetable stores, a laundry, a car-repair shop and a sidewalk that serves as a playground?
Israeli police, whatever they are called, are sent to the streets of East Jerusalem as enforcers of government and municipal policy. It is that same policy of intentional discrimination that has brought 65 percent of the 303,429 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem below the poverty line (double the number of poor Jews in the city ) and 74 percent of Palestinian children below that line.
The police serve the government that since 1967 has expropriated 24,000 dunams (8,000 acres ) of land from Palestinians and over the years has built more than 50,000 housing units on it – for Jews only. Police accompany the bulldozers that demolish homes built, for lack of choice, without permits.
It should come as no shock that police feel hostility toward them in the occupied city. Perhaps that is the reason they did not stop and think: It might have been a brake malfunction, the man might have lost his senses or not have been aware of police and border police procedures for opening fire. The reasons Jilani ran into the police could have been brought to light in court.
But they chose, allegedly, to return him to his family with his face imploded after being hit by two bullets, apparently fired into his right cheek. The bullets did not even have a place to come out because, lying there, his left cheek was on the asphalt. Neutralize means eliminate.
International agencies fund Venezuelan opposition with $40-50 million annually
By Eva Golinger | June 21, 2010
A revealing report published in May 2010 by the FRIDE Institute, a Spanish think tank, prepared with funding from the World Movement for Democracy (a project of the National Endowment for Democracy-NED), has disclosed that international agencies are funding the Venezuelan opposition with a whopping US$40-50 million annually.
This exorbitant amount of financing well exceeds the approximately $15 million previously believed to have been channelled to Venezuelan opposition groups via the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the NED.
According to the FRIDE report, which analyzes the impact of this funding in Venezuela, and concludes that more donations are necessary to support the “democratic opposition” to President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, the multi-million dollar funds are exclusively directed towards political activities in the polarized South American nation. A large majority of the $40-50 million donated by US and European agencies and foundations is given to the right wing opposition political parties, Primero Justicia (First Justice), Un Nuevo Tiempo (A New Time) and COPEI (Christian Democrat ultra-conservative party), as well as to a dozen or so NGOs, student groups and media organizations.
In the FRIDE report, the Venezuelan government is classified as “semi-authoritarian,” which is a term used frequently by the NED and another US donor to Venezuelan opposition groups, Freedom House, to describe the Chavez administration. The report even goes so far as to indicate that in Venezuela, “Elections are the main link between democracy and dictatorship.” As a result, the international funds provided to political groups in Venezuela are destined to fight against the government of Hugo Chavez in order to “restore representative democracy” and return a more US-friendly government to power.
The authors of the revealing report recognize that “international assistance” for political groups in Venezuela did not begin until 2002, after the Chavez government began implementing a series of major reforms. “The presence of large international donors engaged in democracy promotion, particularly the donors based in the US (including the Carter Center, the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the Open Society Institute (OSI), the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF), USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and multilateral institutions (OAS and EC) is closely linked to the Chavez presidency … their political engagement began in the aftermath of the new Bolivarian Constitution, approved by popular consultation in 1999, which was the starting point of Chavez’ Revolution and Socialism of the 21st Century … many civil society organizations emerged in 2002 — the year of the attempted coup…”
According to the FRIDE document, “Foreign democracy assistance is mainly channelled through 10-12 small institutions, all of them with offices in Caracas. New political actors, such as the students’ movement or other groups, have rather sporadically been addressed by donors, mainly from the US.” In recent years, an opposition movement has emerged from the universities, backed by Washington primarily, but also by some European foundations, particularly from Spain. These student and youth groups have attempted to project a “fresh” image of the tarred traditional political parties that ruled the country throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and were largely viewed as corrupt and elitist.
But by receiving mass amounts of foreign funding and aid for their anti-Chavez political activities, the student and youth groups have demonstrated that their priorities and actions are directed by external forces, which in turn has caused for a loss of their credibility and has confirmed accusations that they are “agents” of the US government.
US: MAIN DONOR
US agencies are the principal donors to political groups in Venezuela, with annual funds of about $6 million. The FRIDE report confirms that this multi-million dollar aid is a result of US efforts to undermine the Chavez presidency. “Until very recently, the United States did not have a prominent role in democracy assistance to Venezuela. When US engagement began under the Chavez government, its political profile consisted of supporting democratic NGOs and opposition parties.”
US funds are channelled to opposition groups in Venezuela through the following organizations, Development Alternatives, Inc DAI (since 2002), the Pan-American Development Foundation PADF (since 2005), the International Republican Institute IRI (since 2002), the National Democratic Institute NDI (since 2002), Freedom House (since 2004), USAID (since 2002), NED and the Open Society Institute (since 2006).
Declassified documents obtained under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests regarding the activities of these agencies in Venezuela have revealed that their multi-million dollar funding has largely gone towards promoting anti-democratic activities, such as the April 2002 coup d’etat against the Chavez government, and subsequent strikes, destabilization attempts and economic sabotage. The foreign funding has also gone to support the opposition electoral campaigns over the past eight years, including in-kind aid to train and strengthen political parties, help design elections and communications strategies and even to develop political platforms and agendas for opposition groups. This level of support goes well beyond mere donations and evidences a direct meddling in Venezuela’s domestic affairs.
EUROPE
But, not only are US agencies providing the millions to keep the Venezuelan opposition alive and feed the political conflict in Venezuela. The FRIDE report reveals that the European Commission is channelling between 6-7 million Euros annually to opposition political parties and NGOs in the South American nation. Although some of the EC’s work is done with Venezuelan government entities on a local level (infrastructure development), the majority is going to “civil society organizations” and “human rights” NGOs.
Additionally, the FRIDE report exposes the EC for serving as a “channel” for the “triangularization” of US funding to groups in Venezuela, in order to avoid the stain of Washington on the Venezuelan organizations receiving foreign aid for political activities.
Several German foundations, including the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) and Friedrich Ebert Foundation (ILDIS-FES) are providing direct funding to political parties in Venezuela. Konrad Adenauer invests about 500,000 Euros annually in projects with the right-wing parties COPEI and Primero Justicia, and has a 70,000 Euros annual commitment to fund programs at the conservative Catholic University Andres Bello (UCAB), a hotbed of opposition student groups.
The governments of Canada and Spain are also funding political opposition groups and programs in Venezuela, though with a much lower profile, so as not to affect diplomatic relations.
The FRIDE report, which admits that a majority of the NGO’s receiving the multi-million dollar funding are actually “virtual organizations with no offices or staff,” also reveals that the international funders are evading and violating Venezuelan laws.
Because Venezuela has currency controls, so as to prevent large amounts of capital flight, there are restrictions on the flow of foreign currency in and out of the country. Additionally, the Venezuelan currency, the Bolívar has a fixed rate set by the State, although a large parallel, or “black market” exists for illegal trading.
The FRIDE report confirms that several international agencies, particularly those from the US, are exchanging currency on the illegal market, in clear violation of Venezuelan law.
“…An additional problem for civil society organizations has been the ‘double currency’: even after the devaluation of the Bolívar, the unofficial exchange rate is higher than the official one…Some donors have solved this problem by paying in hard currency, by using foreign bank accounts, or by applying a semi-official exchange rate…”
The FRIDE report, titled, “Assessing Democracy Assistance: Venezuela,” is part of a series of studies conducted in 14 nations where international agencies are actively involved in funding political groups favorable to US policies.
In addition to Venezuela, other case studies were conducted in Belarus, China, Georgia, Egypt, Ukraine, Nigeria, Bosnia, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Mysteriously, the report on Venezuela, and any evidence of its existence, disappeared from the FRIDE website after this author referred to it in a prior Spanish-language article.
Canadian officials under sway: Spy chief
Press TV – June 24, 2010
Canada’s top intelligence official has revealed that some cabinet ministers from two provinces are being influenced by foreign governments.
While it’s not common for intelligence and spy officials to speak to media, Richard Fadden, the Director of Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) has revealed some details about the service in an interview with CBC on Tuesday.
In the interview, he expressed his concerns over close relationships that have been established between some political figures of a few provinces — including British Colombia — and foreign countries.
Fadden said that these officials who are also in critical positions make decisions that do not serve the interest of Canada and but are based on priorities of other nations.
These remarks come at a time when Canada is preparing for the G8 and G20 summits that are to be held in the country on 25-27 June.
National security expert Wesley Wark expressed shock that Fadden made these allegations public. He said that such remarks can dangerously put CSIS in the front line of a critical and sensitive political issue.
Wark, who is a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, however called Fadden’s remarks serious allegations from a credible source that should raise concerns among the Canadian public.
Fadden has announced that the officials who have been spying for foreign governments have concealed their relationships with them but he added there are evidences that show they have changed their public policies attempting to cooperate with foreign governments.
‘The wall ruined my life, separated my family’
Ma’an – 24/06/2010
Bethlehem – The demolition of a Palestinian man’s home on Monday was his final lost battle in a string of defeats going back to the 1990s, the Beit Jala man told Ma’an.
In 1992, Israel confiscated several hundred dunums of land belonging to the family, where the tunnels system was created to connect the illegal Israeli settlements of Gilo and Bettar Illit with Jerusalem. What was left undeveloped on the far side of the tunnel road was confiscated, and the farming family was left to find a different source of livelihood.
In 1997, Anton married a Jerusalemite woman, and the two decided to settle in the holy city, where Anton could work. After some effort, they successfully registered him as a Jerusalem resident, and they had two daughters who were also accorded Jerusalem residency status. Anton was able to find work and the family started anew.
In 2004, however, as the final route of the separation wall was set, his family was handed a home demolition targeting ancestral buildings in Wadi Ahmed, on the lands that remained in their possession.
Worried that more of his family land and property would be confiscated, Anton moved back to the home, in an attempt to protect the area from further Israeli encroachment. He said he was worried that the land would be declared abandoned, and his family would lose all that remained.
On the property were two homes, one ancient and one modern. The older building was said to have been several hundred years old, and was used by his family as a Qasr, or an agricultural building where relatives would stay during the harvest season. The building traditionally stored tools and food for the family for the summer and early fall.
“They began asking me questions in 2006,” Anton told Ma’an, “they found that my ‘center of life’ was no longer Jerusalem so in 2007 they stripped me of my Jerusalem residency card.”
Without the card, Anton, like all other West Bank Palestinians was no longer permitted to enter Jerusalem. “I could no longer see my wife, my daughters,” he said.
Anton remained in his Beit Jala home, and his wife and daughter would visit him on weekends and evenings when they could. Then on 25 May 2010, Anton was handed an demolition order for his home and the agricultural building nearby.
The demolitions were carried out on Monday, as the path of Israel’s separation wall continued to wind southward.
Vermont Yankee confirms cracks in cooling pipes
By Susan Smallheer | Rutland Herald | June 23, 2010
BRATTLEBORO — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed Tuesday evening that a large fiberglass pipe in the recently rebuilt cooling towers at Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor had developed an 18-inch crack and was leaking water.
Another crack developed in a joint in another location along the same pipe, a spokeswoman for the NRC said.
The disclosure of the cracks in the large distribution or header pipe in the east cooling tower comes after Entergy recently completed rebuilding the infrastructure of the two cooling towers over the past three years, after the western tower partially collapsed in August 2007.
Samuel Collins, Region One administrator for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Donald Jackson, another NRC official, comfirmed the cracks in the cooling tower pipe during a public meeting over the annual assessment of the plant’s operation and condition held at Brattleboro Union High School. There are cracks in cell 1-5 and cell 1-8 in the east tower, which is closest to the Connecticut River.
Until the issue was brought up by Raymond Shadis, senior technical advisor to the nuclear watchdog group The New England Coalition, about two hours into the meeting, neither Entergy nor NRC officials had mentioned the problem, which was discovered Thursday by Entergy. The leaks have already undergone a temporary repair, according to Entergy spokesman Larry Smith.
Smith said the two leaks were spilling about 10 gallons a minute, where the large pipe had tapered to 30 inches in diameter. The pipe, which is 36 inches in diameter at it largest spot, carries 90,000 gallons a minute.
The cracks, which were discovered in fiberplastic pipe that is original to the cooling towers, have been reinforced by strapping, he said.
Unlike the cooling tower collapse in 2007, which also involved the header or distribution pipe, which runs along the top of the cooling tower, the structure under the pipe did not collapse, Smith said.
“It was not a structural issue,” he said. In 2007, the cause of the collapse was traced back to rotted wood in the west tower.
Diane Screnci said after the public meeting Entergy will have to determine what caused the pipe to crack in two different locations.
The NRC and Entergy were busy Tuesday discussing Vermont Yankee in a variety of forums. Earlier in the day, Entergy Nuclear held a press conference in Vernon to discuss the status of the radioactive tritium leak at the plant.
Earlier in the day, Entergy Nuclear officials said insulation left behind by construction workers in 1978 had plugged a key drain, and was directly responsible for the radioactive tritium leak at Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor, which so far has cost the company $10 million in cleanup costs.
Michael Colomb, site vice president for Vermont Yankee, told a gathering of press and community leaders Tuesday that progress was being made cleaning up the radioactive contamination at the site, although months of extracting tritium-contaminated groundwater remained.
The company released its own investigation into the radioactive leak Tuesday and said a design flaw, a lack of monitoring and a lack of corporate will were all to blame for the leak.
The plugged drain, which under normal conditions would have allowed leaking radioactive water from other pipes to drain out to a collection system and treatment, instead allowed water to pool in the tunnel and leak out to the environment through a faulty seam. A variety of radioactive isotopes, not just tritium, but strontium-90, cobalt-60, cesium-127 and others, have been found in the soil.
Colomb said the company had identified 111 “piping runs” that contained radioactive isotopes that were either underground, buried or inaccessible. He said Entergy had determined only five of those 111 pipes needed to be replaced with above-ground pipes.
Vermont legislative leaders and the Department of Health have urged Entergy to replace all underground pipes carrying radioactivity with above-ground systems, which are much easier to monitor to avoid a similar radioactive leak.
So far Entergy has removed 240 cubic feet of radioactive soil from an excavation pit surrounding an underground concrete tunnel, which carried drain lines from the advanced off-gas system, plant officials said.
Additionally, about 130,000 gallons of tritium-contaminated groundwater has been pulled out of a new well, and the company says it plans on extracting 300,000 gallons of radioactive water from the ground near the leak.
With many Entergy employees sporting what appeared to be a new “VY4VT” logo, Colomb said the company remained committed to continuing to operate another 20 years beyond 2012, when its original federal operating license expires.
The site vice president said the costs of the cleanup and continuing costs of increased monitoring are proof the company was serious about turning around public opinion and getting legislative approval for continued operation.
The Vermont Senate voted 26-4 against the plant’s license extension, casting serious doubt on the plant’s future.
But company officials said the vote came at a particularly troubled time during the tritium leak, and that it was confident it would prove to Vermonters the company and the reactor could be counted on for 20 more years.
After the session, William Irwin, radiological health chief for the Department of Health, said he wanted the company to come up with a new method of sampling the contaminated groundwater as it reached the Connecticut River.
While sampling has yet to reveal any measurable levels of tritium, Irwin said he believed the highest concentration of tritium contamination wouldn’t reach the river until later this year, probably in the winter.
So far, while the tritium has shown up in about 20 monitoring wells at the plant, it hasn’t showed up in any private drinking water wells.
Irwin said he was pleased with Entergy’s level of activity and dedication to solving the problem, but he said that hadn’t always been the case.
The past couple of years has been marked with problems, he said.
“The work of the past six months needs to be done on a routine basis,” he said. “It’s not what we had prior to this.”
© 2010 Rutland Herald
Flotilla organizers: We’ll take Israel to The Hague
Ma’an – 24/06/2010
Bethlehem – The Free Gaza Movement says it will take the State of Israel to the International Criminal Court over last month’s raid on an aid ship that left nine civilians dead.
Twelve lawyers from countries whose citizens took part in the voyage are collecting evidence and testimonies from passengers, human rights lawyer Audrey Bomse told Ma’an.
The lawyers have asked governments of citizens on board, including the US and UK, to pressure Israel to return passengers’ property taken by Israeli soldiers during the raid on 31 May.
In a statement, the organizers said the seized cameras, camcorders, and mobile phones contain vital evidence of “willful killing, inhuman treatment, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health and unlawful deportation or transfer.”
As Israel is the occupying power in Gaza, these alleged crimes would constitute a contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Bomse told Ma’an, “We intend to hold Israel responsible for its criminal behavior. As this was done by a state, it amounts to piracy and state terrorism.”
The organizers also claimed that Israeli military personnel used credit cards stolen from passengers.
Two soldiers were indicted last year for using a credit card in Israel which they had stolen from a Palestinian during Israel’s assault on Gaza that began in December 2008.
Right-Wing Israel Lobby Riding High in Election Run-Up
By Jim Lobe* – IPS – June 23, 2010
WASHINGTON – Despite the growing international condemnation and isolation incurred by the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the right-wing leadership of the so-called “Israel Lobby” here is riding high in the U.S. Congress.
So far this week, it has chalked up a key victory on Capitol Hill in its longstanding effort to impose “crippling sanctions” against Iran.
It also succeeded in getting a large majority of U.S. lawmakers to fire a shot across the bow of the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has led the international chorus of criticism against the Jewish state since the deadly Israeli seizure in international waters of a Turkish vessel carrying humanitarian supplies to Gaza.
While privately critical – often scathingly so – of Israel’s recent behaviour, especially the May 31 commando raid, top officials of the administration of President Barack Obama are increasingly reluctant to air their complaints in public lest they harm Democratic prospects for retaining control of both houses of Congress after the mid-term elections in November.
Indeed, Obama will himself host Netanyahu at the White House in what is being billed as a “kiss-and-make-up” session Jul. 6 designed to reassure Jewish voters, in particular, that the two leaders’ contretemps over Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem earlier this spring has been put behind them.
Obama, according to some reports circulating here, hopes to receive a return invitation from his guest to visit Israel in October, a month before the November elections here.
Despite their relatively small number – about two percent of the total U.S. population and about three percent of voters in most elections, Jewish Americans are major donors to political campaigns, accounting for as much as 25 percent of all financial contributions to national campaigns and as much as 40 percent of all contributions to Democratic candidates, in particular.
They are also widely – if often mistakenly – seen by political candidates as virtually unconditional supporters of Israel prepared to reward or punish candidates based on their positions on the Jewish state.
“Every Democrat assumes that the biggest discernible group that contributes to their campaign is Jews,” according to M.J. Rosenberg, a Middle East analyst who worked for the most powerful Lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), in the 1980s.
“…(I)f a donor has a Jewish name, or is known to be Jewish, the assumption is that he or she is pro-Israel and will be offended by any deviation from the [Lobby’s] line,” he said.
At the same time, harsh criticism of Israel by the administration risks mobilising the Christian Right, a major constituency of the Republican Party, whose support for Israel’s ruling Likud Party and Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the occupied territories is based primarily on its theological views.
Thus, with the mid-term elections less than five months away and a succession of polls predicting major gains for Republicans in both houses, Obama and senior Democrats appear eager to avoid clashing with Israel, an impression that AIPAC and its allies are using to maximum advantage on Capitol Hill.
Under pressure from the Lobby, the Democratic leadership in Congress Monday approved sweeping sanctions legislation aimed at third-country companies that do business with Iran without granting Obama the kind of flexibility in implementing the sanctions – particularly as they apply to Russia and China – that he had sought.
While the White House indicated Tuesday that it still hopes to work out some changes in the bill before Obama agrees to sign it, the fact that the administration’s own lobbying efforts had failed to bring along top Democratic leaders on the issue marked a major victory for AIPAC and its allies.
“AIPAC applauds toughest Iran sanctions ever proposed,” crowed the group’s press release after the joint announcement by the leaders of the “conference committee” that was charged with reconciling the differing – and weaker – versions of the sanctions bill that were passed earlier this year by the Senate and the House of Representatives.
“It provides the best hope that political and economic measures can peaceably persuade Iran to end its illicit nuclear programme before it is too late,” the statement added.
In what many observers saw as a similarly impressive display of the Lobby’s strength, 87 of the 100 senators signed an AIPAC-backed letter to Obama that not only supported Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza, but also defended Israel’s efforts to enforce it, specifically its attack on the Turkish vessel.
Nine Turkish activists, including one who was also a U.S. citizen, were killed after Israeli commandos opened fire when they encountered resistance to their attempt to board the ship during the night.
“Late last month when Israel learned that groups operating in Turkey wanted to challenge its blockade of Gaza, Israel made every effort to ensure that all humanitarian aid reached Gaza without needlessly precipitating a confrontation,” according to the letter that was jointly circulated by both the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, and the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell.
“Israeli forces were able to safely divert five of the six ships challenging the blockade. However, video footage shows that the Israeli commandos who arrived on the sixth ship, which was owned by the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (the IHH), were brutally attacked with iron rods, knives, and broken glass,” according to the letter, which uncritically recited the version of events propagated by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). “They were forced to respond to that attack and we regret the loss of life that resulted.”
The letter went on to “recommend” that the administration “consider” adding the IHH to the list of “foreign terrorist organisations” and noted that the signers “have additional questions about Turkey and any connections to Hamas”.
Indeed, some lawmakers most closely associated with the Lobby have since called for the administration to suspend military ties with Turkey or to seek its expulsion from NATO.
The letter also “deplore(d)” a resolution approved by the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that called for “an independent international fact-finding mission” to investigate the incident, adding that Israel, which announced its own investigation, “has the right to determine how (it) is conducted”.
“AIPAC strongly applauds the U.S. Senate’s overwhelming statement of support for Israel’s right to self-defence in the wake of the Gaza flotilla incident and its call on President Obama to continue standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel at the United Nations, as Democratic and Republican presidents have done since the birth of the modern Jewish state,” the lobby group said in a release Thursday that also commended a companion letter circulated by the House leadership and signed by more than 315 of the chamber’s 435 members.
“Addressed to President Obama, both letters state emphatically that the United States must continue to stand with Israel in every international forum because it is in America’s ‘national security interest’,” according to AIPAC which stressed the importance of conducting an investigation into “the Turkish terrorist-linked ‘charity’ that led the flotilla”.
*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
Right-wing self-delusion
By Glenn Greenwald | June 23, 2010
National Review‘s Jay Nordlinger cites a truly repellent (and false) comment made this week by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “A million and a half people are living in Gaza, but only one of them is really in need of humanitarian aid,” Barak said. Nordlinger points out that Barak was referring to Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held hostage for years by Hamas, which refuses to permit the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to him. After observing that neither “the Cuban dictatorship or Chinese dictatorship permit the Red Cross to see prisoners,” Nordlinger then claims — with the needy victimization that typifies the Right — that “there’d be mass demonstrations in [Shalit’s] behalf all over Europe, and on American streets, too” if “Shalit were other than Israeli.” In other words, Nordlinger believes that the Western World would never tolerate the denial of ICRC access to detainees except when the detainee is Israeli.
I’m asking this literally: is Nordlinger ignorant of the fact that the United States of America denied ICRC access to non-Israeli prisoners for years during the prior administration?
The US has admitted for the first time that it has not given the Red Cross access to all detainees in its custody.
The state department’s top legal adviser, John Bellinger, made the admission but gave no details about where such prisoners were held. . . . He stated that the group International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had access to “absolutely everybody” at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which holds suspects detained during the US war on terror. When asked by journalists if the organisation had access to everybody held in similar circumstances elsewhere, he said: “No”.
That happened because, among other reasons, the U.S. maintained a network of CIA secret prisons — black sites — where detainees were barred from any and all contact with the outside world for months and even years, including international monitoring groups such as the ICRC. Maybe Nordlinger has heard of someone named Dana Priest, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for revealing, in The Washington Post, the existence of those secret American prisons:
It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.
As Priest wrote, these detainees — never charged, let alone convicted, of any crime — “exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being.” Even once those black sites were revealed by Priest, the Bush administration explicitly rejected the ICRC’s request for access to those detainees (the ICRC was also long denied access to prisons in Iraq run by the Iraqi Government during the U.S. occupation). And the BBC reported in April of this year that the U.S. continues to maintain a secret prison at Bagram where prisoners are apparently abused and denied ICRC access. Could someone point me to the “mass demonstrations” that took place in Europe and the U.S. over any of these American secret prisons?
This raises an important and under-appreciated point. Many Americans defend the U.S.’s conduct not because they support it, but because they’re completely unaware of what those actions actually are. Many of the people who support what they call the “enhanced interrogation” program really believe they’re defending three instances of waterboarding rather than scores of detainee deaths, because they literally don’t know it happened. And here you have Nordlinger — a Senior Editor of National Review — claiming that denial of access to the ICRC is the hallmark of brutal tyrannies (it is), and arguing that a country could only get away with it if they do it to an Israeli, making clear that he is completely ignorant of the fact that his own Government did this for years (without, needless to say, prompting a peep of protest from his magazine), and reportedly continues to do it. That the U.S. did this systematically just doesn’t exist in his brain; he really believes it’s something only China, Cuba and Hamas do. They really do live in their own universe and just block out whatever facts they dislike while inventing the ones that make them feel good.
UPDATE: Just to convey a sense for how much National Review polemicists care about detainees being denied ICRC access (when it’s the U.S. doing the denying): the only mention found in NR‘s archives of Dana Priest’s revelation that the U.S. was maintaining a network of secret prisons with no ICRC monitoring was this one by Byron York, in which he suggested that, based on the Plame precedent, the persons responsible for the disclosure — but not the ones denying the ICRC access to detainees — should be prosecuted. So it’s not really a surprise that Nordlinger managed to remain completely ignorant of what the U.S. did for all those years, since his “political magazine” barely even mentioned it.
Sudanese Officials: Cyprus ‘arms ship’ allegation is “absurd”, contains mining explosives
Al-Manar TV – 24/06/2010
Sudanese officials on Wednesday dismisses allegations saying that the Arab country import arms on a ship intercepted in Cyprus as an “absurd”, saying that the explosives on board were for gold mining firm.
“Sudan has been importing explosives since the early 1990s to work this gold mine, and has never had any problems in the past. It’s the first time this has happened. It’s absurd,” Abdelbaqi al-Gilani, Sudan’s minister responsible for mining said.
“The ship is carrying some explosives for civil work … for quarry face blasting and mining, it has nothing to do with the military,” al-Giliani added.
On Tuesday, Cyprus said it it placed the “Santiago” anchored off the southern city of Limassol under police guard with a suspected military cargo that would contravene a 2004 UN embargo on arms sales and deliveries to Sudan. Cypriot officials examined the vessel after US authorities alerted them that it was carrying a large amount of explosives bound for Sudan.
“The ship is under guard and there are materials that are considered banned, this means either military material or explosives,” Commerce Minister Antonis Paschalides told state radio. “There is definitely military equipment which comes under a ban,” he added without elaborating.
The Sudanese mine at Hassay, 450 kilometers northeast of the capital Khartoum, is Sudan’s first — and only — gold mine.
The Ariab group working the mine is 51 percent Sudanese government owned, while 40 percent of the shares are held by holding group Cominor, created by Canada’s La Mancha and France’s Areva.
An Ariab official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, confirmed that there were explosives on board the Santiago for the firm. “There are 251 tons of explosives which are for us. I hope they get here quickly, as we need them to be able to continue operation,” the official said. “I don’t know if there is anything else on board the boat, but these explosives are definitely for us.”
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Who Rules America?
The Power Elite in the Time of Trump
By James Petras | Axis of Logic | September 6, 2017
Introduction
In the last few months, several competing political, economic and military sectors – linked to distinct ideological and ethnic groups – have clearly emerged at the centers of power.
We can identify some of the key competing and interlocking directorates of the power elite:
- Free marketers, with the ubiquitous presence of the ‘Israel First’ crowd.
- National capitalists, linked to rightwing ideologues.
- Generals, linked to the national security and the Pentagon apparatus, as well as defense industry.
- Business elites, linked to global capital.
This essay attempts to define the power wielders and evaluate their range of power and its impact. … continue
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