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Media Uncritical of Justifications for Shooting Escaped Convict

By Matt Pepe | Just The Facts | June 29, 2015

After nearly a month on the run after breaking out of a maximum-security prison in Upstate New York, convicted murderer David Sweat was shot on Sunday by a New York State trooper and apprehended. Two days earlier fellow convicted murderer and escapee Richard Matt was shot dead by a federal agent nearby. While Governor Andrew Cuomo was quick to label Sergeant Jay Cook, who shot and captured Sweat, a “hero” – a claim that was repeated by CNN, the Daily News, Time and many other outlets – there was no serious analysis about whether Cook’s use of lethal force was legally justified.

The Associated Press published “Trooper had law on his side when he shot unarmed escapee” (6/29/15), which was widely reprinted nationally and internationally. The article makes the case appear definitively open and shut.

“A state trooper had the law on his side when he shot unarmed prison escapee David Sweat, apparently in the back, as the convicted killer ran toward a forest near the Canadian border,” the AP wrote.

Their source: one legal expert. Maria Haberfeld, head of the law and police science department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told the AP : “You cannot shoot a fleeing felon, but certainly you can shoot the one who poses a real threat. There was no reason to believe this person who had killed a police officer before was not posing a real threat.”

The AP cites the 1986 Supreme Court decision Tennessee v. Garner defining the condition that deadly force may only be used if “the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The AP also notes a New York State law permits the use of deadly force against a dangerous convict escaping from a detention facility.

While the AP says that “experts” differentiated the shooting from the case of Walter Scott, who was gunned down in South Carolina after a traffic stop, only the head of the National Association of Police Organizations is quoted to make this point. He said “these prisoners … they’re not presumed to be an innocent citizen walking down the street.”

The only opinions the AP mentions countering arguments for the legality of shooting Sweat are “some people online” who “questioned the decision to fire.”

It wouldn’t have been hard to at least find sources questioning the legal basis for shooting an unarmed man clearly not posing a immediate threat to the officer or anyone else.

Ten days earlier, Amnesty International released a report titled “Deadly Force: Police Use of Lethal Force in the United States,” which found that neither U.S. Constitutional law nor a single state law meets international standards concerning the use of force by police officers.

“Amnesty International reviewed US state laws – where they exist – governing the use of lethal force by law enforcement officials and found that they all fail to comply with international law and standards. Many of them do not even meet the less stringent standard set by US constitutional law,” the report says.

So even if it were true that the shooting of David Sweat was legal according to state and/or Constitutional law, it could still be the case that it does not meet the legal justifications of international treaties to which the United States is a party.

According to Principle 9 of the United Nations Basic Principles on the use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials: “Law enforcement officials shall not use firearms against persons except in self-defence or defence of others against the imminent threat of death or serious injury, to prevent the perpetration of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life, to arrest a person presenting such a danger and resisting their authority, or to prevent his or her escape, and only when less extreme means are insufficient to achieve these objectives. In any event, intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.”

This is clearly a much more stringent standard than that established in the Garner case. Not only is an officer required to act in self-defense (or defense of a third person), but there must be an “imminent threat of death or serious injury” and the shooting must be “strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.”

The sequence of events leading to the shooting of Sweat, according to the New York Times, was that after being asked by Sergeant Cook to approach him, “instead Mr. Sweat turned and fled across a field toward the tree line.” Cook “patrolling by himself, gave chase and finally opened fire, striking Mr. Sweat twice in the torso, because he realized the fugitive was going to make it to the woods and possibly disappear.”

While Sweat had been convicted of the murder of a police officer, which would have established the justification to use lethal force against him under New York law, it would be much harder to argue he presented an “imminent threat” as he was unarmed and there was no one else nearby. He had been on the lam for more than three weeks without harming anyone. If he were to have escaped to the woods without being detained, would that have constituted an imminent threat?

There was no mention in the Associated Press article of any investigation into the shooting. As Amnesty noted: “All cases of police use of lethal force must be subject to an independent, impartial and transparent investigation and if the evidence indicates that the killing was unlawful, the police officer responsible should be criminally prosecuted.”

There are enough questions surrounding the shooting of an unarmed man to warrant an investigation, regardless of whether Sweat was a convicted murderer. Instead the officer is quickly called a hero and the media follow suit in their hero worship.

Sweat is reportedly in serious condition at Albany Medical Center. The media seems willing to ignore his rights because of the horrific crimes he was convicted of. But despite his crimes, he is legally still entitled to the right to life that every person – even the most hardened criminal – enjoys.

With the shooting of Sweat coming so soon after the Amnesty report, media organizations could have drawn attention to the higher standard for the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers under international law that the report documents, which quite likely were not met. They could have at least mentioned that relevant international law exists and is something American law enforcement are obligated to follow.

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | 2 Comments

“Just Say Anything!” – The US Responds to the UN Review of its Human Rights Record

By Janet Phelan – New Eastern Outlook – 29.06.2015

The US has a history of making inaccurate statements to international bodies in order to advance its global agenda. One need only look at the statements made on the international stage prior to the invasion of Iraq to realize that the intention to invade Iraq was not going to be hindered by a realistic assessment of its “weapons of mass destruction” program.

In recent UN convenings, we are now seeing false statements put on the record by high-ranking US officials concerning the US’s domestic agenda. As the UN has no dominion over the domestic issues within the United States, one can only view these coordinated efforts by the US officials as a studied effort at propaganda.

This past May, the UN reviewed the human rights record of the United States. Known as the UPR (Universal Periodic Review), this session in May marked the second such review, the first having taken place in 2010. Civil society was invited to submit reports and over ninety NGOs and grassroots organizations did so. In addition, over 110 UN member nations also voiced their concerns as to the US’s human rights record.

Criticisms and concerns were entered on many different issues. The failed campaign promise of President Obama to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay was mentioned repeatedly. So were the failures of the United States to ratify many human rights treaties, including the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Convention on the Rights of the Child, The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, The Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance as well as other international treaties.

Racial profiling and police killings of US citizens, many if not most being African Americans, were raised as consistent concerns. In addition, recommendations were made that the US halt its application of the death penalty and also establish a national human rights agency.

The tone of the US response was quite a bit different from the tack taken in 2010. Gone were the promises, empty as they were. Instead, the US adopted a regimented and in some cases a somewhat belligerent defense of what might be considered indefensible activities. And where belligerence might have failed to impress, outright lies were employed.

Muted belligerence was clearly in evidence in the statements made by Brigadier General Richard Gross, legal counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who addressed concerns about Guantanamo Bay and the detainees. “The detainees are detained lawfully,” he declared. According to Gross, there were 242 detainees at the beginning of the Obama administration and 116 have been transferred out since then. He stated that 122 remain. As these figures omit four individuals, it is assumed that they have died.

Alarmingly, Gross made the following revelations: Of the remaining 122, he told us, 57 are designated for transfer. Out of the 65 others, 10 are currently facing charges or have been convicted. The remaining 55, he stated, will be reviewed by the periodic review board. In other words, 55 individuals have been detained for years without being charged. This is hardly in accordance with US law, which guarantees a speedy trial, among other legal considerations.

And it is US law which pertains to the detainees. Supreme Court decisions have granted the detainees protections under US law, including the right of habeas corpus. Over 200 writs of habeas corpus have been filed by Guantanamo Bay detainees. Not one has been granted.

Police abuse is of grave concern to many different sectors. The US attempted to assuage these concerns with outright lies. Indeed, the US continued on with its hooey about the non-existent “hundreds of federal prosecutions” for police abuse that it tried to front a few months back at the Convention Against Torture meeting in Geneva. As discussed in this article, the actual numbers of federal prosecutions for police abuse could be counted on the fingers of one hand. 

Rather than correct the previous misstatements, the US officials amplified the bogus figures, and cited a total of 400 such prosecutions. The Big Lie is always the best, and for those who gagged on the overblown figure of 330 such prosecutions stated at the CAT by Assistant Attorney General David Bitkower a few months back, the new figure of 400 such prosecutions provides an even bigger loogey to swallow.

For students of effective propaganda, it might be of interest to note that the US did not use David Bitkower, a white man, as the mouthpiece for this lie on the occasion of the UPR. As previously noted, most of the police killings involve a black victim, and accordingly, the US used one of its black DOJ officials, James Cadogan, to deliver this line of horse puckey. Cadogan is Senior Counselor to the Assistant Attorney General.

Well, using the facade of race to convince the naïve population that it was getting something other than more of the same worked in the 2008 election, did it not?

It looks like the US, seemingly on a roll of grandiose pronouncements as to its diligent protection of human rights, did not stop with this false figure. Other declarations were made at the UPR which were similarly suspect. For example, according to Kevin Washburn, with the Department of the Interior, the US has restored about a million acres to Indian tribes under this administration. Well, that sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it?

The problem arises in verifying Washburn’s “million acre” pronouncement. As it turns out, Washburn also testified before a Congressional subcommittee just a scant three days after he made the “million acre” declaration to the UN. In his testimony in front of the Subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs, US House of Representatives on May 14, Washburn testified that the Obama administration had restored “approximately 300,000 acres to tribes.” 

That constitutes a rather serious difference in figures. In accordance with the Uncle Tomism seen in using African American Cadogan to speak on police abuse, Washburn, who is the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs at the Department of the Interior, also claims to be a member of the Chickasaw Nation, an Oklahoma tribe.

At the 2010 UPR, the US promised to ratify the Convention On the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In fact, Congress voted against ratification in 2012. In the US report to the UPR for the 2015 review, the US stated that “The United States has robust protections to prevent discrimination against persons with disabilities and has actively enforced these protections since our last report.” In fact, multiple ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) complaints have been filed with the Department of Justice, stating profound violations of rights affecting the elderly and disabled by state courts. According to recent statements made by an ADA employee to this reporter, not one of these complaints has been pursued by the DOJ.

Another red flag appeared in the US’s statements about the number of federal hate crimes prosecutions. The US claimed that over 200 individuals had been convicted under federal hate crime laws, including the Shepard/Byrd Act, in the past five years.

This reporter contacted the DOJ press office as well as the FBI and was refused details on hate crime convictions. A dedicated internet search, including DOJ and FBI websites as well as newspaper reports, turned up a total of 72 convictions for federal hate crimes since 2009. Sixteen of these convictions—for the infamous Amish beard cutting defendants– were subsequently reversed in 2014, leaving a grand total of 56.

Parenthetically, as the press office at the US DOJ refused to supply factual documentation (such as case numbers and names), this reporter filed a Freedom of Information Request for this information. It is possible that the fulfillment of this request will provide a different perspective. For the edification of the readers, the last FOIA request by this reporter was filed in 2009. I am still awaiting the response.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on the lack of transparency in the Obama administration and cited multiple problems with FOIA. According to the article, “Most Administrations play games with FOIA, but the Obama White House has turned stonewalling into an art form.” 

The WSJ article goes on to discuss the following ploys being utilized to evade replies to FOIA requests– imposing sky high fees, failing to process requests within the legal time limit, destroying information and excessively redacting information.

Access to accurate information is a fundamental part of a democracy. If the citizenry is kept in the dark about the nature of its governance, it will not be able to make appropriate decisions. Those in power who play a shell game with the facts of their activities do so in accordance with the dedicated purpose of any liar–fear of exposure and avoidance of accountability.

Janet C. Phelan, investigative journalist and human rights defender that has traveled pretty extensively over the Asian region, an author of a tell-all book EXILE.

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

The Tunisia Massacre and the Irish-ISIS Connection

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | June 30, 2015

“The murder of three Irish citizens at a tourist resort in north Africa has brought Islamic terrorism much closer to home,” Cormac O’Keefe observes in the Irish Examiner. “Until now we have looked on in shock, and revulsion, at terror attacks targeting other Europeans, either across the Middle East and North Africa, or on European soil. However, with the slaughter on the beaches of Tunisia of Lorna Carty, and Laurence and Martina Hayes, this is a landmark moment for this country.”

The report continues:

Martina’s brother Billy Kelly told the media: “We feel bitter. Irish people have nothing to do with these terrorists. The people who did this are evil rats.”

He said the couple’s daughter, Sinead, had lost two parents in an instant: “The sadness is terrible. It’s a nightmare.”

“Ireland has now been dragged into a terrible reality, one that much of Europe — Spain, Britain, and France among them — has had to live with for more than a decade,” O’Keefe adds.

Although the Irish Examiner reporter appears to be merely stating the obvious, Ireland had been close to Islamic terrorism long before the Tunisia massacre. And contrary to the bereaved Mr. Kelly’s sincere belief that the Irish have nothing to do with these evil rats, some Irish people have had quite a lot to do with these terrorists.

But one would need to turn to a much keener Irish examiner of terrorism to know these things. In a Facebook post three days earlier, Al Lonergan connected the dots:

The following image provides information regarding an Irish citizen’s connection to an alleged leader of ISIS in North Africa and a terror funder in Syria. However it is unlikely that the Irish media will want to mention this fact as they promoted this guy as a “freedom fighter” while he was serving the NATO agenda in destroying Libya and Syria, but the chickens are coming home to roost.

Mahdi al-Harati Montage

Moreover, not only did Mahdi al-Harati serve the NATO agenda in Libya and Syria, an Irish tabloid in 2011 had outed “the gentle Irishman” as an asset of American intelligence. According to a “you couldn’t make this up” Sunday World report,

A gang of Irish traveller thieves are in the middle of a holy war – after liberating €200,000 cash destined for Libyan rebels. In a tale worthy of the John le Carre thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the scam artists from Rathkeale in Co Limerick hit the jackpot when they robbed a home in Dublin’s Firhouse.

As well as a haul of family jewels, they stumbled upon €200,000 in €500 bills hidden in the hot press. But the homeowner was well-known Irish Libyan freedom fighter Mahdi al-Harati, who was one of the leaders of the bloody revolt against Gaddafi.

He has told cops that the cash was a gift from US secret agents to aid the war effort in Libya. Now the money trail has led to the traveller strongholds in Rathkeale, where €500 notes have been popping up all over the place.

A gang of rogue Irish travellers is in the frame for the bizarre robbery of €200,000 in cash donated by US spies to Libyan freedom fighters. In an astonishing tale worthy of the John le Carre novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the cash that was destined for rebels fighting Colonel Gaddafi’s forces was stolen from a hot press in a Dublin house.

Gardai are now investigating the extraordinary robbery which is being blamed on a traveller gang from the Limerick town of Rathkeale. An Irish freedom fighter who helped bring down Gaddafi’s hated regime in Libya has claimed that €200,000 cash stolen from his Dublin home was given to him by an American intelligence agency.

The Sunday World can reveal that gardai are investigating the robbery of two envelopes containing €200,000 in €500 notes from the home of Mahdi al-Harati in Firhouse, south Dublin, and that the money trail is leading to the Rathkealers. Al-Harati was in Libya following the successful campaign that toppled Gaddafi when the rebel’s house was broken into on October 6.

The incredible curriculum vitae of the “soft-spoken Libyan-born Irish citizen” doesn’t end there either. Four days later, Indymedia Ireland reported:

Mahdi al-Harati has been well-known in antiwar and Palestine solidarity circles in Dublin over the years . He had been a passenger in the Challenger 1 ship last year when it attempted to break the seige of Gaza as part of the Free Gaza Flotilla . He was the last Irish member of the flotilla to arrive home after the Israeli raid and was given a hero’s reception at Dublin Airport by members of the IPSC and the IAWM [Irish Anti-War Movement]. According to an Indymedia comment from last year written by Kev from the IPSC :

“Freda Hughes of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign welcomed his safe return and saluted his bravery: “Al Mahdi, like all of the Freedom Flotilla participants, is deserving of our praise for his courage in attempting to break the illegal siege of Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged people there. We are all relieved that he is safely back in Ireland. We hope that his family, who we know were extremely worried about his health, can rest easy now and celebrate his return..”

It appears that at least on this occasion Israel’s propaganda was right in claiming that some of those on board the Free Gaza Flotilla had ties to terrorism networks. They just forgot to mention that at least one of them was on the payroll of U.S. intelligence.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely-published writer and political analyst. He is also the creator and editor of the Passionate Attachment blog, which focuses primarily on the US-Israeli relationship.

June 30, 2015 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Utah police introduce programs to ‘reeducate’ civilians

By Justin King • The Fifth Column • June 16, 2015

Salt Lake City – The Utah Fraternal Order of Police hosted an event for more than 70 law enforcement agencies. The local media dutifully touted it as a way to reduce violence and some form of community outreach, apparently they didn’t examine the message very closely. The propaganda effort is, unsurprisingly, being conducted in a state where cops kill more people than drug dealers or gang bangers. It’s being conducted in a city that had a DA elected after promises of holding police to account for their actions. There has not been a single conviction.

The premise behind the program is as Stalinesque as they come. The advertising for the program paints it as something that helps officers and the community step into each other’s shoes. However, rather than address the fact that officers consistently use excessive force, it’s designed as a mobile reeducation center to convince people to “play the yes sir, no sir game” when dealing with officers. In other words, comply or die. For officers, the training revolves around attempting to alter the community’s perception of excessive force, rather than actually stopping it. During the class in Utah, officers were advised to go to neighbors after they bust down a door to execute a search warrant to explain why it was done. Nothing says “safe community” like terrorizing one family with a no-knock raid and then going and knocking on all the doors in the neighborhood to confront those families and scare them as well. More importantly, what are the officers going to say? It’s doubtful they will act with a presumption of innocence and therefore open the department up to a lawsuit.

The speaker at the event said, “Who is going to re-educate people who have been educated in a negative way? You!” Yes, it really is designed as a reeducation program.

The name of the organization is “Why’d You Stop Me.” There’s a 17-minute commercial available on YouTube that showcases some of the advice they are giving to kids who endure the reeducation program. Even in the video designed to make the organization look as if it is something other than a propaganda effort, the one-sided message provided by the organization that incorporates “the thin blue line” into its logo is apparent.

The video starts by displaying a badge wrapped with the “thin blue line,” which has become synonymous with police cover-ups, brutality, and misconduct. It then shows a series of clips of officers being beaten or shot. Then after endorsements from a bunch of members of the thin blue line, it displays: “121 Police Officers died in 2014 while protecting the communities they serve.”

With all of the images of violence, the message is clear: 121 cops were killed by criminals last year alone. Of course, that isn’t anywhere near the truth. According to the ODMP (the cited source in the video), the actual number of line of duty deaths was 134. However, they weren’t all beat to death or gunned down by merciless criminals. 2 were killed by other cops, 19 had heart attacks, 7 died from a “9/11 related illness,” 41 were killed in car accidents of some sort, and so on. Less than half of that number were actually killed by the actions of criminals. There’s no telling how many were killed during excessive force scenarios they provoked or by conducting no-knock raids against people that would have otherwise been nonviolent.  It makes no mention of the number of unarmed civilians killed by cops during the same year. It makes no mention of the number of people killed by cops at all. That number is 1104. Seems like it would be worth mentioning that cops are killing civilians at a ratio of 20:1.

At 8:21 in the video the speaker states: “If you guys act respectfully, you get through that contact alive.” Seems to me that simply being unarmed should be enough to get through the contact alive. Just like World War II propaganda films, it shows successful conversions of people that didn’t respect police officers, who now say they do. They must be very proud to be able to trick a child from an underfunded inner-city school by feeding them lies and half-truths, but what is going to happen when that child sees a cop beat someone to death because they weren’t acting respectfully?

The primary speaker is obviously some form of social worker, anthropologist, or psychologist, right? Nope. He’s a cop. He works for Long Beach Police Department. He’s a member of the thin blue line. Why should we have expected anything else?

Why does Utah need some form of propaganda effort to reeducate the population? It probably has something to do with the fact that becoming a homicide victim at the hands of police is the most likely way of becoming a homicide victim in the state except for domestic violence, but we don’t have the numbers to determine how many domestic violence victims were killed by partners who are law enforcement. A cursory search found at least 4.

One Utah incident that has made headlines recently because the cop taunted the family of the unarmed man he killed is the case of Joey Tucker. Tucker was in some form of medical or emotional distress when an officer shot him three times. Even though the video clearly shows the officer’s statements to be false, and the new DA, Sim Gill, campaigned on holding police accountable and once wrote a paper lamenting the law enforcement community’s practice of not properly investigating crimes, no charges have been filed. Two videos of Tucker’s execution and screenshots of the Facebook conversation in which the cop says the son’s life was only worth $100,000 are available here.

Welcome to a society that will allow the population to be reeducated to accept brutality and violence, rather than ending it. We are headed to a hellish future where the security services of the United States are permitted to behave as judge, jury, and executioner while the public is expected to cheer at their own executions.

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | | 1 Comment

Baltimore Police Called Out For Making Up ‘Gang Violence’ Stories To Scare Public

By Reagan Ali and S. Wooten | Counter Current News | June 27, 2015

Remember when the Baltimore Police Department was telling all of these stories about “Bloods” and “Crips” uniting to “destroy” the city and its “heroic” police force?

Now city leaders are coming forward and calling out the police for these claims. Last Thursday several leaders publicly questioned the Baltimore Police Department as to why they issued a public warning the morning of Freddie Gray’s funeral. That warning claimed that police officers were being targeted by a united Blood-Crip alliance that would not rest until every Baltimore officer was dead.

Instead of allowing the community to mourn the untimely death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore City Police hijacked the attention and painted themselves as the victims.

Now, months later, it is coming out that the whole thing was invented. The police made it all up. They didn’t have a shred of credible evidence to support the claims they were making.

In fact, much the opposite was true. Bloods, Crips and other gangs were uniting to protect the community, to stop looting and violence and pledging to end fighting between their circles.

Instead of praising this cessation of violence between these gangs, the police announced on April 27 that a “credible threat” from the Bloods, Crips and Black Guerrilla Family had made it clear that these “criminal” forces had united to target officers.

According to documentation and supporting interviews obtained by The Baltimore Sun, the police made it all up.

“I knew all along it was a bunch of baloney,” City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young told the Sun. “They owe the council and the public an explanation for why they put this false information out there.”

The Sun reports that “the police warning was circulated in a news release at 11:27 a.m. on the day of Gray’s funeral, two days after protests over his death turned violent.”

As well, police were busy spreading rumors of teenagers engaging in a “purge”. That referred to the widespread, chaotic violence in the movie by the same name.

It was only after police spread these rumors far and wide that the violence actually started, according to the Sun.

“Within hours, the city descended into a night of rioting and looting.”

The police are standing by their claims, saying that there was a real “threat” that was “imminent and consistent with previous threats.” They just don’t have any proof or documentation of the source of these “credible threats.”

City Councilman Brandon Scott told police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts as well as other leaders in the department, that the FBI has discredited these “threats.”

He wrote in an email Thursday that “it is extremely unacceptable and put the lives of citizens, officers and others in danger.”

“Falsifying a threat of this magnitude during a highly tense time should result in the strongest penalty possible,” Scott added. “If we are going to repair our city, this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.”

Shayne Buchwald, a spokeswoman for the FBI added that agents interviewed their gang sources and they could not come up with a single source that corroborated what the Baltimore police claimed.

City Councilman Nick Mosby said that the Police Department’s warning about this alleged “threat” was “problematic at best.”

“When you put out incendiary statements like that, and you don’t have credible information, that’s a problem,” Mosby explained. “The lack of communication, and communication that was not factual, are really the variables of a disaster.”

Mosby said the police were playing on and manipulating the public’s fears. He said that “police need to come out and communicate why they thought it was a credible threat.”

“Folks in my area, as soon as it came out, they didn’t believe it one bit,” he added. “It’s unfortunate to find it wasn’t credible.”

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Deception | | Leave a comment

SWAT Raids Wrong Home, Breaks Windows, then Issues Family Citation for Broken Windows

This case gives a new and an even more despicable meaning to the term, “Broken Windows Policing”

SWAT-Team-Raids-Wrong-Home-Breaks-Windows-on-Home-Issue-Citation-for-Broken-Windows

By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | June 30, 2015

St. Louis, MO — Leon Walker and his family were settling down for dinner last week when they were violently interrupted as flashbang grenades came flying into their house and began exploding.

The front door was kicked down, and armed assailants rushed in with AR-15 rifles drawn and pointed Walker and his family. These armed and incredibly incompetent and dangerous assailants were members of the St. Louis Police Department’s SWAT team.

The SWAT team was looking for an evil man who allegedly committed the ‘crime’ of selling a substance to willing customers. This man’s name was Darron Ford, and he lived two doors down from the Walker family.

The fact that the man they were looking for lived two doors down was of no consequence to these thugs in uniform as they went along with the raid, in full. For two hours, police, who knew they were at the wrong address, tore the home of Leon Walker apart in search of a non-existent reason to justify their idiocy.

Never let a botched SWAT raid go to waste.

Had Walker tried to defend his home against the armed invaders, he would have been killed, and the world would have never known about it. The blurb on the nightly news would have been that police kill an armed man who fired on them.

“Obviously they think they’re being invaded,” family attorney Bevis Schock said. “The hope is that they won’t fight back but that they’ll cower in fear – the flight response rather than the fight response.”

Schock says that police should have stopped their madness once they realized they were at the wrong home. However, they were on an apparent mission to destroy and intimidate.

After the life-threatening home invasion and subsequent destruction of their home, the St. Louis Police Department sent out a building inspector. In turn, the inspector issued the Walker family a citation for a window the SWAT team broke during the raid!

“In this case the insult was to have the building inspector cite them for the window that had been broken by the police an hour earlier as part of the entry, and that’s outrageous,” Schock said.

The Walker family could have been killed by these barbarians as they followed their controller’s orders to seek out illicit substances. Instead of an apology for threatening all their lives and ransacking their home, the Walkers were extorted!

The Walker family has since filed a lawsuit against the city of St. Louis. The taxpayers will now foot the bill for the belligerent idiocy of the St. Louis SWAT team.

The Walker’s situation is hardly an isolated one either. Also this month, and in the same town, another family was wrongfully raided by St. Louis SWAT. Angela Zorich and family were subject to a massive military-style raid during which their house was destroyed, their beloved dog killed, and their mother kidnapped. The reason for this war-like assault on a family — Zorich was on hard times and was temporarily unable to pay her gas bill.

Sadly, many Americans are still unable to see the horrors of the massive and brutally negligent police state that has exploded in this country. The apologists sit back and tell people that if they don’t do anything wrong, they don’t have anything to worry about.

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

After 15 Years of Killing Journalists Pentagon Writes It Into Manual

Having liberally assassinated journalists in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya Pentagon has done the logical next step and openly wrote the practice into its code of conduct

By Marko Marjanović | Russia Insider | June 26, 2015

Four weeks into NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia American bombs slammed into Belgrade’s main television station massacring 16 employees of Serbia’s state television broadcaster (RTS).

All killed were civilians but these were the 1990s. Sloban Milošević was “Adolph Hitler” and Serbs were “his willing executioners”.* Serbian civilian deaths didn’t matter. Thus BOOM! Program director dead, security guard dead, electrician dead, cameraman dead, sound technician dead, make up lady dead…

Tony Blair and a host of NATO spokespeople appeared before cameras to explain these people deserved to die – they were part of Milošević’s “machinery of hate”. No bombs hit them in turn.

RTS had been covering Serbia’s civilian deaths caused by NATO but this wasn’t the reason it was hit – as said nobody really cared and besides RTS had been taken off satellite by NATO and could no longer broadcast beyond Yugoslavia. However, NATO’s strategy in the war had been to make the life of Serbian civilians so miserable they would beg Milošević to capitulate – and RTS’ mix of airing patriotic music videos and reports of NATO carnage was doing a decent job of propping up Serb morale and resolve.

RTS was interfering with NATO’s strategy – it was giving the Serbian populace a measure of comfort and strength – this made it a top target of those who needed it broken.

Stretchering a victim of RTS bombing, April 23, 1999

Next stop Iraq. April 8th 2003 American tanks finally smashed into downtown Baghdad – Iraq had been conquered. Americans marked the occasion by opening fire on journalists in three separate locations in the city.

Offices of Qatar’s Al-Jazeera were hit by an air strike. Offices of United Arab Emirates Abu Dhabi satellite channel likewise. Finally a US tank fired into the Palestine Hotel – Bagdad’s more well-known hotel and a well-known base for foreign journalists. In all Americans’ attacks on journalists that day killed three and wounded four.

This was just the beginning. Iraq became a veritable killing ground for journalists including due to attacks by American occupiers. In the first two years of the occupation alone 13 journalists are known to have been killed by American fire.

Most famously in 2007 a US helicopter crew deliberately gunned down two Iraqi reporters for Reuters along with a dozen other civilians – this was the so called “collateral murder” incident later brought to light and made famous by WikiLeaks.

Throughout the Iraq occupation US bitterly complained about reporting done by Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyah. It accused them of inflaming the Arab street against the US and helping to fuel the Sunni resistance in Iraq.

The two were repeatedly banned from reporting from Iraq by the US-installed government in Baghdad. Likewise in 2004 the US launched the Al-Hurra Arab-language satellite channel to try to rival the two.

Finally, during the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya the alliance repeated its performance during the bombing of Yugoslavia and deliberately took out a Libyan TV compound slaying three journalists.

It may be the case that US military has only now produced a “law of war manual” explaining its policy of killing journalists, but it is the case it has been at it for at least 15 years.

The thing to understand is that Pentagon has convinced itself that media has dealt it its greatest defeat in history – the hugely traumatic loss in the Vietnam War. In Pentagon’s retelling of the Vietnam debacle journalists delivered a fatal stab in the back of a war effort that was on the cusp of turning things around.

The problem according to US military wasn’t so much US atrocities and real strategic setbacks, but the fact the knowledge of these was spread by journalists to the people at home.

Vietnam – the high tide of American war reporting

That is to say the main lesson Pentagon drew from the Vietnam War was the need to control information coming out from the war zone. Military thinkers spent the next two decades thinking about the ways to accomplish this and eventually perfected it into an art form.

Thus the highly managed and highly favorable coverage of US military invasion of Iraq – served up by embeded journalists assigned to this or that unit of the US military. But if embedding journalists showed to just what degree they may be tamed it also served to highlight how unfriendly and dangerous (at least in the Pentagon’s imagination) the remaining independent journalists were by comparison.

In Pentagon’s thinking an independent journalist threatens its control of information coming out of the war zone and therefore threatens “the mission” – that above all is what really makes him a “legitimate” target.

The rest, the nonsense about “unprivileged belligerents” and what not – that’s just sophistry and mumbo jumbo to obscure the fact that US military – the armed force of the “land of the free and the home of the brave” believes in murdering civilian non-combatants.

* Serbs had been so thoroughly collectively demonized in the west that the neocon Charles Krauthammer could openly complain from the pages of Washington Post that the bombing wasn’t killing enough Serbian civilians and the liberal interventionist Thomas Friedman could call from the pages of The New York Times for Serbia to be bombed back into the Middle Ages and spark no mainstream outrage whatsoever. Link

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

UK trade unionists, blacklisted activists demand police spying inquiry

RT | June 30, 2015

Trade unionists are demanding a full inquiry into ‘very troubling allegations’ of police spying on activists and blacklisted workers.

Home Secretary Theresa May has already set up an inquiry headed by Lord Justice Pitchford into allegations of police surveillance operations against activists, but its full remit is not yet known.

The inquiry has come about in response to allegations by police whistleblower Peter Francis, formerly of the Special Demonstration Squad, that during his four years working as an infiltrator of political groups he spied on member of five unions, including the Fire Brigades Union (FBU).

“Trade unions are the largest democratic, mass-membership organizations in the UK,” FBU General Secretary Matt Wrack told the Guardian.

“Trade unionists have legitimate concerns about police operations that may have undermined our decisions, interfered with industrial relations and led to the victimization of our elected officials.”

Wrack said an inquiry into allegations of police spying on causes such as environmentalism, the Stephen Lawrence murder case and trade unionism was “long overdue.”

Another group affected are those blacklisted by employers. Blacklist Support Group (BSG) secretary Dave Smith made an official submission to Pitchford last week regarding allegations of “collusion” between police and businesses.

“Trade unions are a perfectly legal part of civil society,” he told the Guardian.

“Why are we being infiltrated by undercover police units and why is the state sharing intelligence with big business?

“It is only because we were prepared to kick up a stink that the evidence about police collusion has slowly come to light.”

In March it was reported police spying had also been extended to Labour MPs. Francis revealed 10 Labour MPs were tailed and spied upon by British police. Those affected demanded the release of secret files kept on them.

The surveillance was carried out as recently as the 1990s when the politicians had been democratically elected to parliament.

Among the MPs targeted were prominent left-wingers and serving ministers Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Dennis Skinner. The late Tony Benn, a lifelong socialist and anti-war campaigner, was also tailed by British police.

The highest-ranking MP to have been surveilled was Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman. Speaking to Penning, she said: “I would like you to assure me that you, the government, will let me see a full copy of my file.

“I was campaigning for the rights of women, for the rights of workers and the right to demonstrate — none of that was against the law, none of that was undermining our democracy.”

Read more: Labour witch-hunt: Spied-on MPs demand release of undercover police files

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Egypt president to change law to permit speedy executions

Reprieve | June 30, 2015

Egypt’s President, General Abdel-Fattah al Sisi, has said he wants to change the law to allow for quicker executions in the country.

In remarks at the funeral of Egypt’s Attorney-General Hisham Barakat, who died after a car bomb attack on Monday, Sisi is reported to have said: “The arm of justice is chained by the law. We’re not going to wait for this. We’re going to amend the law to allow us to implement justice as soon as possible”. He added: “If there is a death sentence, a death sentence shall be enforced.”

The decision to expedite executions for those sentenced to death raises fears for scores of people arrested in the military’s 2013 breakup of protests. Many face possible death sentences in mass trials that fail to meet international standards; including juveniles such as Irish teenager Ibrahim Halawa, who is being tried as an adult alongside 493 other people. Ibrahim, a student from Dublin, was 17 and visiting family in Cairo when he was arrested in August 2013. Now 19, he has reported torture and mistreatment throughout his two years of pre-trial detention.

Commenting, Maya Foa, the head of Reprieve’s death penalty team, said: “In Egypt we’ve already seen scores of innocent people – including juveniles such as Ibrahim Halawa – arrested for the mere ‘crime’ of being at or near a protest. Thousands still face torture, ‘mass trials’, and the threat of hanging. It is sickening that President Sisi now wants to dismantle what little checks remain to prevent wrongful executions. This wave of repression has done nothing to restore law and order in Egypt – Sisi must urgently change course, before any more lives are lost.”

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , | Leave a comment

Spin Becomes “Fact” in NY Times Gaza Flotilla Story

Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp |June 30, 2015

Now, with the seizure of a Swedish boat in international waters, The New York Times can no longer ignore Flotilla III, the latest attempt to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza. So we find a story today that ends the paper’s silence on this weeks-long saga that began in Gothenburg last month.

Times readers learned nothing of the Marianne and her three companion vessels as the international organizers of the flotilla announced their plans and gathered crews throughout the spring. Even when one of the boats was sabotaged last week or when a Palestinian member of the Knesset announced that he was joining the group, none of these events appeared in the Times.

Those who checked out The Washington Post, Newsweek, CBS News or Israeli media would have known that Flotilla III was on its way to Gaza, with the Swedish vessel approaching the strip and the others far behind. The Times, however, avoided any mention of the effort until today, when the Israeli navy announced that it had seized the Marianne and was taking her to the port of Ashdod. (The other vessels by then had turned back toward Europe.)

Now the Times has published an article by Diaa Hadid on the seizure, and her piece gives precedence to Israeli spin, allowing official excuses for the brutal siege of Gaza to stand as fact. Thus, she writes that Israel maintains a naval blockade of the strip “because militants have tried to smuggle in weapons and attack Israel by sea.”

Hadid repeats this formula in the subsequent paragraph where she states that Israel allows only “small amounts” of construction materials into Gaza “because Hamas has used building materials to construct tunnels to attack Israel.”

United Nations investigations have provided very different takes on these two issues: A 2010 fact-finding mission, for instance, declared that Israel has imposed the blockade (by land and sea) out of “a desire to punish the people of the Gaza Strip for having elected Hamas. The combination of this motive and the effect of the restrictions on the Gaza Strip leave no doubt that Israel’s actions amount to collective punishment as defined by international law.”

Where Hadid’s piece implies that tunnels have been used for random “terror” attacks on Israel, a recent UN report on the 2014 conflict found that the tunnels had been used only for legitimate means, to engage with Israeli troops during the fighting this past summer. Neither the Times nor any other media outlet has named a single Israeli civilian who was harmed because of these tunnels. (See TimesWarp 6-22-15.)

Unfortunately, Hadid fails to mention either of these findings and repeats Israeli spin as accepted fact. She fails to make even a minimal attempt at attribution, and so we have no “according to” or “Israel claims” here—just the bald, assertive “because.”

Her story ends with a poignant quote that begs for explanation. As fishermen gathered in Gaza to protest the seizure of the Marianne, one of them spoke to a Times representative. “We hope that other activists come to Gaza to help us break the naval siege,” he said, “so that we can sail again without fear.”

The article leaves us with an unanswered question: Why are the fishermen living in fear? Times readers, however, never learn the answer: Israeli naval boats routinely open fire on fishermen as they sail within the 6-mile limit imposed by the blockade. At least one died this year, several have been injured, and several have lost their boats and equipment because of the Israeli attacks.

The Times ignores this ongoing breach of the August 2014 truce, which stated that the fishing limit would expand to 12 miles. (This in itself is still far short of the 20-mile boundary set by the Oslo accords.) The paper also ignores Israel’s military incursions into Gaza, which are further breaches of the ceasefire.

Times editors are counting on a short shelf life for the Flotilla III story. Too much attention to such messy topics as international law, the definition of piracy, assaults on unarmed fishermen and Israeli breaches of the 2014 ceasefire might expose some inconvenient facts about Israel’s pitiless siege of Gaza, and this is not to their taste.

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

The complementary tactics of Israel and the UNHRC

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | June 30, 2015

It seems as if Israel is about to regurgitate the script which reads that it is debating whether or not to retain its membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Following the publication of the council’s inquiry report on last year’s Operation Protective Edge, which deemed that both Israel and Palestinian resistance factions may have committed war crimes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, during a closed meeting held on Monday, that a re-evaluation of Israel’s membership of the UN organisation will take place. “As a result of the report, we will consider whether to remain or to leave the council,” he was quoted by the Times of Israel.

The UNHRC report, which Israel slammed as biased, employed the usual diplomatic jargon that absolved, rather than accused, the settler-colonial state of war-crimes, despite the extensive destruction, targeted killings and massacres committed by the Israeli military in Gaza last summer (and on previous occasions).

In March 2012, former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced the decision to cut ties with the UNHRC, citing Palestinian “diplomatic terrorism” when the council announced a probe into Israel’s settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The move was supported by the US, which was the only country that had voted against the UN proposal to investigate Israel’s illegal colonial expansion. Since then, Israel has utilised the UNHRC as part of its propaganda campaign to enhance its self-victimisation; an extension of what Zionism has accomplished historically to embark upon the colonisation process in Palestine.

Last week, Netanyahu uttered ridiculous words that portray clearly the extent of Israel’s contempt even for those organisations that do everything in their power to exonerate Israel through language that is based upon hypothesis: “The report is biased. Israel is not perpetrating war crimes but rather protecting itself from an organisation that carries out war crimes.”

Israel’s fabricated state is built upon a constant litany of war crimes, necessitating violence to sustain its existence, as well as the presence of international organisations that pretend colonialism has been rendered obsolete. As for bias, one need only take note of how the UNHRC attempted to criminalise Palestinian resistance, aiming to propagate an illusion of near-parity in military power between the world’s 4th best equipped army and civilians with not a tank or aircraft to their name. The obviously asymmetric nature of the conflict resulted in a much higher death toll of Palestinian men, women and children due to Israel’s persistent bombardment of Gaza.

The report’s publication has simply confirmed all that unravelled before our eyes during last year’s colonial massacre, albeit leaving space for manipulation in order to retain Israel’s untouchable status. Israel’s pondering whether or not to remain in the council is nothing new. Rather, it should be viewed as another, integral, part of its colonial project, as well as wilful subjugation on behalf of the international community. With every sliver of condemnation, despite the absence of severe repercussions, Israel embarks upon creating hypothetical conflicts which always result in it reaping rewards for its aggression against the Palestinian people.

Whether Israel remains in the council or not is irrelevant. On the contrary, the focus should be on the failure of the UN and other organisations to act according to international law and hold Israel’s very existence accountable for the horrors it has perpetrated against the indigenous population. However, that would require the UN to unravel its disseminated myths, including its denial of the existence of Zionist colonisation, which would in turn deal a blow to an organisation thriving upon the permanence of violence and murder.

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Crunch Time with Iran Let’s push back against Israel’s friends and avoid a war

Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • June 30, 2015

It now appears that the longest drawn out negotiations in history since the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War will again be prorogued. I am, of course, referring to the P5+1 talks in Vienna seeking to come up with a peaceful resolution to the problem of Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program. Today represents the third deadline as the negotiations have already been extended twice, ostensibly to permit further discussion of details of timing for the lifting of sanctions as well as verification and inspection procedures.

I refer to a “nonexistent” program as the frequently cited intelligence suggesting that a weapon was being developed has turned out to be based on forgeries provided by the Israelis. Currently, both the CIA and Mossad agree that no such program exists though both Washington and Tel Aviv persist in suggesting that Iran might change its mind and therefore must not even be able to develop relevant technologies in the future.

In theory an agreement should have been reached long ago as the two basic elements are well understood: Iran wants an end to sanctions and the United States plus its negotiating partners want a verifiable end to existing and potential programs in Iran that could possibly produce a nuclear weapon. The devil would appear to be in the details but that is not necessarily the case as the real problem is political. The talks have in fact been subject to a relentless media campaign by Israel and its friends in the U.S. to derail any possible agreement, to include a number of appearances by none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before both the United Nations and the U.S. Congress. Netanyahu has been warning that an Iranian weapon is imminent since 1996 and he has even produced a cartoon showing a bomb with a ticking fuse to illustrate his thinking on the issue.

The intensity of the anti-Iran campaign has increased to a boiling point as the end of June deadline has approached, to include full page ads in newspapers and a rash of editorials, op-eds and letters to the editor. If you read an article about the negotiations on an unmoderated site like yahoo you will see numerous comments trashing Iran using the same misspellings and phrases, suggesting that they originate in the banks of paid students organized and directed by the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

In order to avoid constantly rehashing the same material, the well-funded and highly creative exploration of Persian perfidy has meant in practice that the media and punditry are constantly raising new issues that have nothing to do with the nuclear weapons themselves. These have included demanding that a contrite Iran confess that it once sought a weapon, addressing the state of possible missile delivery systems in the discussions, assessing Iran’s intentions as a regional power, critiquing the country’s human rights record and examining Tehran’s support of organizations that critics choose to describe as terroristic. Congress is on record calling for the prevention of Iran’s “capability” to construct a weapon, a threshold that it already has passed. Presidential wannabe Senator Marco Rubio has even demanded that Iran recognize “Israel’s right to exist.” The latest wrinkle is to insist on assurances over what might happen in ten years’ time when any agreement negotiated currently will presumably expire.

Assuming that the neocons’ other pet projects to go to war with Russia and eventually also China do not actually materialize and that we will all still be here in a decade, it has to be recognized that what is occurring in Vienna this week is already a war. On one side are the serious players, including Secretary of State John Kerry acting for the president as well as the Russians, Germans, Chinese, British and French, all of whom understand that no agreement leaves armed conflict as the only remaining option. They realize that a major explosion in the Persian Gulf would be disastrous for all parties and potentially even for the world economy. On the other side are the naysayers from Israel and its formidable amen section, deeply embedded in the media and among politicians at all levels. Many believe that, as Israel firster mega billionaire Sheldon Adelson has recommended, all Iran really needs is an admonitory nuclear strike to show the Mullahs that we are serious about the military option.

As in any war it is important to know what the enemy is doing. That generally requires massive mobilization of resources to collect intelligence, but in this case we are fortunate in that our enemies write for the Washington Post, The Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal when they are not, collectively speaking, busy appearing on the Sunday morning talk shows and on Fox.

My favorite Queen of Mean among the pro-Israel shock troops is Jennifer Rubin, who writes a blog appropriately labeled “Right Turn” for the Washington Post. In previous incarnations before she found her niche with editorial page chief Fred Hiatt at the Post Jennifer wrote for neocon house organs Commentary, Human Events and Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard. Jenn has ungraciously referred to President Barack Obama as the “most anti-Israel president ever.” Ben Smith at Politico describes her as “caustic and single minded” possessing an “intense and combative interest in foreign affairs and politics in general, and in Israel in particular – the sole bumper sticker on her gray Honda Pilot reads, “JERUSALEM IS NOT A SETTLEMENT. It’s Israel’s Eternal And Undivided Capital.” A recent comment on one of her pieces observed “Science is wrong. The world revolves around Israel. Jennifer knows it to be true. Bibi told her.”

Rubin writes about Iran frequently. Between June 16th and the 26th she penned no less than seven articles attacking the Mullahs – “Obama ignores Iran’s human rights atrocities,” “The Iran missile mistake,” “Democrats, Republicans, neutral experts reject Iran sellout,” “The Iran debacle unfolds,” “Iran appeasement relies on self-delusion,” “Can these forces stop a rotten Iran deal?” and “Iran sanctions back on the table.” All of her writing on Iran beats to death the same theme, i.e. that Iranians are both evil and liars and are out to destroy Israel. Driven by her obsession with Israel, she is constantly at work finding connections and seeing things that the rest of us cannot discern, appreciating as she does that there is always an Israeli angle as well as an evil Muslim narrative hidden somewhere as long as one looks long and hard enough. One of her most recent gems “Can these forces stop a rotten Iran deal?”, which appeared on June 25th, does a good job recounting recent commentary by all her friends in the Israel Lobby who are opposing a nuclear deal, which to her mind represents objective opinion. As is always the case, I searched in vain for any real evidence that Iran in any way threatens the United States but that does not appear to be on her agenda. She does, however, quote a number of Israeli politicians.

And Rubin is far from a lonely voice crying in the wilderness. The New York Times featured a story last Wednesday revealing that “former members of President Obama’s inner circle of Iran advisers” had written a letter advising caution on the possible Iran agreement. The article describes in some detail the objections of Dennis Ross, David Petraeus, Robert Einhorn, Gary Samore, Stephen Hadley and General James E. Cartwright. The signatories, who are accepted at face value in the article, should give one pause. Ross is chairman of the Jewish People Policy Institute (which opposes intermarriage of Jews with non-Jews) and has been described as “Israel’s lawyer” while Hadley, a National Security Adviser for George W. Bush, believes that Iran is intent on dominating much of the Middle East and has a nuclear program that “…is a complex threat to international peace and stability.” Einhorn, who helped “devise and enforce the sanctions against Iran,” and Gary Samore have been persistent critics of the ongoing negotiations. Samore is a fixture at the Harvard Belfer Center, a neocon stronghold, and heads United Against Nuclear Iran. Petraeus is probably the best known of the signatories but I will leave it up to the reader to judge his integrity.

If one were looking for someone who might just entertain the thought that Iran has a legitimate point of view it would not be found in the letter nor in the Times coverage. But the most astonishing thing about the article is what the editors chose not to mention, an omission that would appear to constitute deliberate obfuscation of the letter’s intent. The Times notes towards the end of the article that the letter was commissioned by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), but it does not reveal that WINEP is a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC is an organization that is de facto opposed to any agreement with Iran that is not endorsed by Benjamin Netanyahu, which means no deal at all.

Interestingly, Israel is not mentioned even once in the letter nor in the Times coverage of it even though it certainly loomed large in the mind of Ross in particular and likely for all of the other co-authors. One might also note that the arguments against the possible agreement made by the signatories is based on the reader’s acceptance of the view that Iran is some kind of global threat, though they make no attempt to explain how that is so and they also assume that its rulers are not to be trusted without an intrusive inspection regime directed against all military facilities in the country, something that no government anywhere could possibly accept. The five signatories of the letter all claim to support a negotiated settlement with Iran but they are just not happy with what Obama has come up with, which is a characteristic line for many of those who in reality want no agreement at all.

Finally, in a completely bizarre instance of the Israel Lobby’s unwillingness to miss any opportunity in its campaign against Iran, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft traveled to Israel last week with an entourage of 20 Hall of Fame football players. They met with Prime Minister Netanyahu who lectured the players, attired in their Hall of Fame gold Jackets, all about Iran by using a football metaphor: “Iran is one yard away from the goal line. If they get nukes, the preeminent terrorist regime of our day will be armed with nuclear weapons. That’s dangerous for the United States and for Israel and for the entire world. And our effort today is to make sure that we block them and push them back.” The appreciative players gave Bibi a game jersey, a helmet and a signed football in return.

And so the enormous smear campaign against Iran goes on, though I suppose we can always hope that Obama will show a little intestinal fortitude and go ahead with an agreement. I will most certainly never watch the New England Patriots again, but I made that decision some time ago based on their win at any cost ethos. Indeed, since the Israel Lobby is very much in the game of punishing critics as it is doing with its odious website Canary Mission perhaps it is past time for a little pushback coming from Americans who would like to take their government back. Folks like myself who object to the Lobby’s overweening influence over our foreign policy might initiate personal boycotts of the products and business interests of those billionaires who are the most enthusiastic supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu and who are the enablers of Israel’s crimes against humanity. It would be partial payback for nearly seventy years of systematic abuse of America’s true interests. Don’t attend their sporting activities, don’t buy their products, don’t watch their films and don’t stay in their hotels or play in their casinos. Such a reckoning would certainly include people like Robert Kraft, Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, as well as Hollywood moguls Haim Saban and Arnon Milchan. Milchan notoriously spied against the U.S. for Israel and is still walking around free, which I don’t quite get. I won’t suggest any additional names but other over the top friends of Likudnik Israel are easily identifiable through Google. As the Mikado’s Lord High Executioner once put it, “I’ve got a little list.”

June 30, 2015 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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