Hamas MPs: Migron demolitions aimed at misleading public opinion
Palestine Information Center – 05/09/2011
RAMALLAH — The demolition of three homes in the Jewish Migron settlement north of Jerusalem was designed to mislead world public opinion, Palestinian MPs from the Hamas party said in a joint statement.
Israeli forces dismantled three homes in the settlement outpost built over Palestinian Mukhamas village east of Ramallah city under orders of the Israeli Supreme Court. Settlers responded to the demolition by setting fire to a mosque in Qusra village south of Nablus.
The Hamas MPs in Ramallah downplayed the settlement evacuation, saying the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the removal of the entire outpost a while back and not just a few buildings that would be restored after a short period.
What is required is to evacuate all of the settlements and the departure of Israel from all Palestinian localities in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and occupied Jerusalem, and the territories occupied in 1948, the statement says.
Let us Honor Our Own
By Joharah Baker for MIFTAH – August 29, 2011
It’s a never ending struggle, this uphill battle with Israel’s mighty propaganda machine. But as they say, no rest for the weary.
Over the past few months, Israel has been sullying the reputation of yet another aspect of Palestinian governance. In late May, the Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli watchdog organization that tracks Palestinian media for incitement against Israel released a report claiming that the Palestinian Authority is paying salaries to Palestinian prisoners in accordance with a newly published law.
The PMW spread the news as quickly and with as much venom as possible. “In other words, all Palestinians in Israeli prisons for terror crimes officially join the PA payroll. According to the definition in the PA law, Palestinian car thieves in Israeli prisons will not receive a salary, but Hamas and Fatah terrorist murderers will,” the report read.
“The PA also gives a salary to Israeli Arabs convicted of terror crimes against Israel – the country of which they are citizens. PA benefits to Israeli Arab terrorists, in fact, are greater than the ones extended to Palestinian terrorists.”
Since then, the slandering has taken hold, especially since the PMW called on donor countries to cut aid to the PA altogether since, according to their logic, the money will go to “terrorists” and their families.
This is not the first time the Palestinians have been accused of supporting terrorism and incitement towards Israel. After the PA came to power in 2004 and devised its own school curriculum, Israel immediately began tearing the books apart, page at a time and claiming they were full of anti-Israeli sentiments. An excellent article published earlier this month by The Guardian notes that Israeli textbooks, which are rarely in the spotlight, are far more inciting and racist than that of the Palestinians. The article points out that the word “Palestinians” is only used when in reference to “terrorists.” Otherwise, Palestinians are referred to as Arabs – uneducated, deviant, camel riders.
Claims of incitement are not limited to schoolbooks, unfortunately. When Palestinians named a square after Dalal Al Mughrabi, a Palestinian fighter who was killed during a military operation against Israel in 1978, Israel was up in arms, claiming the Palestinians should not be allowed to name streets or squares after “terrorists.” Israeli watchdog groups and the Israeli government play on the fact that Palestinians have named streets after Abu Jihad (Khalil Al Wazir) and Yehya Ayash. The prisoner stipends are just the latest episode in the drama.
What Israelis should know is that any country in the world with a welfare system is responsible for its citizens, including the families of prisoners. There is nothing out of the ordinary in this. Actually, the PA has been doing it for years. The United States does not punish the family of a murderer nor would Israel cut government benefits from the family of Yigal Amir. Neither should the Palestinians abandon their own people.
Additionally, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are a whole other ballgame. These men and women are not imprisoned for stealing cars, or for selling drugs. They are there because they are resisting a belligerent military occupation of their land, which has oppressed them and their people for decades. The PA’s allocations to prisoners and their families is in no way an endorsement of “terrorism and violence” but rather a means of helping mostly young men and women and their families to resume a life that has been interrupted by an occupying authority. Any other country would have done the same.
Besides, countries should not interfere in the internal affairs of others. If the Palestinians want to name a street after one of their national heroes, regardless of how this person is perceived by Israel, that is their business. The Palestinians have never objected to the fact that Israel named its international airport after David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father and a man who advocated the transfer of Palestinians after the 1948 war. “We should prevent Arab return at any cost,” he said in June, a month after Israel’s declaration of independence and 800,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes virtually overnight.
For the Palestinians, Ben Gurion is no hero. The thousands of political prisoners in Israeli jails, on the other hand, certainly are.
~
Joharah Baker is Director of the Media and Information Department at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She can be contacted at mid@miftah.org.
Why the Palmer-Uribe report on Israel’s flotilla attack is worthless
By Ali Abunimah – The Electronic Intifada – 09/02/2011
Turkey has imposed sanctions on Israel following Turkey’s rejection of a UN report on Israel’s attack on the Gaza flotilla last year.
In the latest developments on Friday morning, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu rejected the findings of the report and announced unprecedented sanctions on Israel saying “it’s time for Israel to pay a price.”
From 7 September, diplomatic ties will be reduced to the lowest level, all Turkish-Israeli military agreements will be canceled, and Turkey will support victims of the Israeli attack on the flotilla to pursue justice through legal cases.
Crucially, Davutoğlu affirmed that Turkey does not recognize the blockade of Gaza which the Palmer report attempted to justify, and which a UN Human Rights Council official fact-finding mission had already ruled to be illegal. Turkey will also challenge the Israeli siege of Gaza through international legal channels.
Palmer report attempts to whitewash attack on flotilla, justify Israeli siege
A leaked copy of the Palmer report into Israel’s attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May 2010 was published by the New York Times on Thursday, a day before its expected official release by the UN Secretary General.
On 31 May 2010, Israel attacked the largest ship in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the Mavi Marmara, killing 9 people on board.
Publication of the report had been delayed several times as Turkey and Israel attempted to negotiate a settlement. Turkey demanded an apology for the attack, compensation for victims and an end to the siege of Gaza. In his statement today Davutoğlu said Israel had passed up many opportunities to resolve the issue.
The four-member committee that wrote the Palmer report was appointed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and was chaired by former New Zealand prime minister Geoffrey Palmer and vice-chaired by former president of Colombia Alvaro Uribe.
This panel is in addition to an official UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission which reported last September that Israel’s attack on the ships was illegal.
According to the The New York Times article on the Palmer report, the Palmer panel:
has found that Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is both legal and appropriate. But it said that the way Israeli forces boarded the vessels trying to break that blockade 15 months ago was excessive and unreasonable.
The report, expected to be released Friday, also found that when Israeli commandos boarded the main ship, they faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection. But the report called the force “excessive and unreasonable,” saying that the loss of life was unacceptable and that the Israeli military’s later treatment of passengers was abusive.
An initial examination of the report indicates that these many of findings are not credible on their face for a number of reasons including the composition of the panel, its reliance on Israel which has controlled and withheld most of the evidence, and a skewed and politicized perspective which ignores the realities of Israel’s decades-long violent occupation of Gaza.
Palmer panel was stacked for Israel and includes notorious human rights abuser
As Jose Antonio Gutierrez and David Landy explained on The Electronic Intifada in August 2010, the panel was selected almost entirely according to Israel’s dictates:
The commission is composed of four persons, one chosen by Turkey, one chosen by Israel and two chosen from a list provided by Israel. The latter two are former Prime Minister of New Zealand Geoffrey Palmer, who will be the chair, and Uribe, who will serve as vice-chair. While Palmer, an expert in international law, is an uncontroversial choice, the appointment of Uribe is as perplexing as it is shocking. It appears that “balance” in this commission involves balance between someone versed in international and human rights law and someone who is adamantly opposed to it. This notion of balance fatally weakens this commission even before it has started, and tarnishes the process of international law.
Uribe himself has a long and notorious history of violating human rights on a massive scale, attacking human rights defenders and organizations, and expressing contempt for any notion of law that restrains states from engaging in almost any kind of violence they desire.
Gutierrez and Landy on Uribe’s record in Colombia:
In June 2010 an international human rights mission investigated the biggest mass grave in the western hemisphere — containing some 2,000 execution victims who had been dumped there since 2004 — which had just been discovered in the Colombian town of La Macarena. At the same time Uribe travelled to that very locality but not to pay his condolences to the victims’ families, or guarantee that an investigation would determine what happened there. Instead, he went to visit the local military base — exactly the same people that, according to victims’ reports, filled that mass grave with its grisly contents — to praise them for their work.
On Uribe’s attacks on human rights defenders, Gutierrez and Landy write:
Uribe’s scorn for human right defenders is notorious. According to Human Rights First, “President Uribe and other administration officials have branded [human rights defenders] as terrorist sympathizers and have insinuated that illicit connections exist between human rights NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and illegal armed groups. Irresponsible comments by government officials in Colombia put the lives of human rights defenders at even greater risk and threaten to undermine the value and credibility of their work” (“Human Rights Defencers in Colombia”).
In September 2009 Colombia was visited by Margaret Sekaggya, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders from the UN Human Rights Commission. Sekaggya found that constant problems faced by human rights defenders in Colombia include “Stigmatization [of human rights defenders] by public officials and non-State actors; their illegal surveillance by State intelligence services; their arbitrary arrest and detention, and their judicial harassment; and raids of nongovernmental organizations’ (NGOs) premises and theft of information” (“Report of the Special Rapporteur …,” 4 March 2010, pp. 13-18 [PDF]). Public officials in Colombia constantly attack human rights defenders and members of the political and social opposition as aides of “terrorists,” that is, left-wing guerrillas.
Uribe has led these attacks, calling human rights defenders “rent-a-mobs at terrorism’s service who cowardly wave the human rights flag,” “human rights traffickers,” “charlatans of human rights,” “bandits’ [ie. guerrillas] colleagues,” “intellectual front of the FARC [the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia]” and he has stated that “Every time terrorists and their supporters feel they will be defeated, they resort to denouncing human rights violations.”
This is just a small selection of Uribe’s verbal attacks on human rights organizations in his own country, but he has also referred to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as “rats.”
Uribe’s alliance with Israel
During Uribe’s term, Colombia, which is one of the top three recipients of US military aid along with Israel and Egypt, developed a close military alliance with Israel, as Gutierrez and Landy explain:
In recent years, according to news reports, Israel has become Colombia’s number one weapon supplier, with arms worth tens of millions of dollars, “including Kfir aircraft, drones, weapons and intelligence systems” being used against opponents of the Colombian regime (“Report: Israelis fighting guerillas in Colombia,” Ynet, 10 August 2007). According to a senior Israeli defense official, “Israel’s methods of fighting terror have been duplicated in Colombia” (“Colombia’s FM: We share your resilience,” 30 April 2010).
There is a reason that Latin Americans often refer to Colombia as the “Israel of Latin America,” and indeed why Colombian President-elect Juan Manuel Santos, ex-Minister of Defence and right hand of Uribe, expressed his pride at such a comparison (“Santos, orgulloso de que a Colombia lo comparen con Israel,” El Espectador, 6 June 2010).
As Gutierrez and Landy also point out, top officials in Uribe’s administration, including the president himself, frequently expressed full support for Israel’s fight against what it terms “terrorism.”
Israel withheld and manipulated evidence
The Palmer panel cannot be described in any sense as an independent investigation. As the report states:
The Panel received and reviewed reports of the detailed national investigations conducted by both Turkey and Israel. Turkey established a National Commission of Inquiry to examine the facts of the incident and its legal consequences, which provided an interim and final report to the Panel along with annexes and related material. Israel provided the report of the independent Public Commission that it had established to review whether the actions taken by the State of Israel had been compatible with international law.
The Panel reviewed these reports and further information and clarifications it received in written form and through direct meetings with Points of Contact appointed by each government.
The report adds:
In particular, the Panel’s means of obtaining information were through diplomatic channels. The Panel enjoyed no coercive powers to compel witnesses to provide evidence. It could not conduct criminal investigations. The Panel was required to obtain its information from the two nations primarily involved in its inquiry, Turkey and Israel, and other affected States.
The panel therefore interviewed no survivors or witnesses. Only Israel controlled most key physical evidence – the ship itself and the belongings and recordings of all the passengers and the weapons Israel used in carrying out the attack. The panel did not have uncensored access to the massive amounts of evidence in the form of photo and video from passengers on board that Israel has stolen, hidden and refused to release or return. As a consequence, of these crippling limitations, the report states:
It means that the Panel cannot make definitive findings either of fact or law. But it can give its view.
The panel also implies that its own independence is further in question because:
It will be clear from the above that the essential logic of the Panel’s inquiry is that it is dependent upon the investigations conducted by Israel and Turkey.
In contrast, the UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission report published last September went much beyond merely commenting on information provided by governments. That fact-finding mission:
conducted interviews with more than 100 witnesses in Geneva, London, Istanbul and Amman.
And in addition to information provided by governments, the Human Rights Council also relied on information
including the evidence of eyewitnesses, forensic reports and interviews with medical and forensic personnel in Turkey, as well as written statements, video film footage and other photographic material relating to the incident.
Perhaps because of its thoroughness, Israel refused to cooperate with the Human Rights Council fact-finding mission, just as it refused to cooperate with the Goldstone report.
Accusations of “violent resistance”
The Palmer panel report claims:
Israeli Defense Forces personnel faced significant, organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers when they boarded the Mavi Marmara requiring them to use force for their own protection. Three soldiers were captured, mistreated, and placed at risk by those passengers. Several others were wounded.
Given the fact that Palmer panel did not gather any evidence of its own, its conclusion that the Israeli military attackers who boarded the Mavi Marmara under cover of dark in international waters, faced “organized and violent resistance” can be given no more credibility than any common or garden Israeli military press release.
While Israel has repeatedly made such claims, it never produced independent evidence of it and – as noted – is still concealing evidence.
Nevertheless, the video footage that did escape Israeli confiscation showed:
- Indiscriminate live fire by the Israeli attackers
- A working journalist who appears to have been executed
- Evidence of targeted assassination of at least one passenger
Even the deeply flawed Palmer report is forced to admit:
The loss of life and injuries resulting from the use of force by Israeli forces during the take-over of the Mavi Marmara was unacceptable. Nine passengers were killed and many others seriously wounded by Israeli forces. No satisfactory explanation has been provided to the Panel by Israel for any of the nine deaths. Forensic evidence showing that most of the deceased were shot multiple times, including in the back, or at close range has not been adequately accounted for in the material presented by Israel.
Moreover, the propagandistic Israeli claims that their soldiers were mistreated were belied by photographs that showed passengers giving aid and protection to Israeli attackers who had been disarmed.
It is possible of course that passengers defended themselves against a terrifying Israeli assault in dead of night with a full military arsenal that included assault helicopters and elite commandos against a civilian ship.
Indeed, footage shows terrified passengers hiding and attempting to fend off indiscriminate fire with sticks in a blood-stained stairwell. But to equate any of this to “organized and violent resistance” that could in any way justify Israel’s execution-style killings is completely absurd.
The blockade is “legal”
The Palmer report’s assertion that the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza is legal and necessary for “security” echoes the other aspects of the report that accept Israeli military propaganda as given.
By privileging the security of Israel, the occupying power, the report also ignores the rights and needs for security of the Palestinian people in Gaza who are being collectively punished and who have been subjected to decades of indiscriminate Israeli military attacks in which thousands of civilians have been killed and injured.
Yet this opinion of the Panel is, as the report states, not binding in any legal sense. But more importantly, it has no bearing at all on the assault on the Mavi Marmara, which Israel attacked in international waters as it was moving away from the Gaza Strip and the Israeli-controlled coast of Palestine.
Israel’s claim that it needs to blockade people it is violently victimizing in order to prevent them obtaining any means means whatsoever to defend themselves can only be made by wholly ignoring the context of Israel’s violent occupation of Gaza and decades of well-documented war crimes.
Israel is not in a defensive position in which it can claim a “security” need to impose a blockade. Israel is the military aggressor which for decades from 1967 until 2005 violently colonized the Gaza Strip, placing settlers there in blatant violation of international law. Since 2005, Israel has continued to occupy besiege, harass, attack and kill civilians in Gaza with almost no respite culminating in the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of civilians during the 2008-2009 “Operation Cast Lead.”
A perfect example of Israel’s wanton violence was its unprovoked series of attacks on the Gaza Strip last month which killed more than two dozen people, including children.
Human Rights Council fact-finding mission and legality of Israeli blockade
The UN Human Rights Council had already concluded that Israel’s interception of the flotilla was illegal because the blockade was unjustified:
In evaluating the evidence submitted to the Mission, including by OCHA oPt [Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories), confirming the severe humanitarian situation in Gaza, the destruction of the economy and the prevention of reconstruction (as detailed above), the Mission is satisfied that the blockade was inflicting disproportionate damage upon the civilian population in the Gaza strip and that as such the interception could not be justified and therefore has to be considered illegal.
It also concludes:
The Mission considers that one of the principal motives behind the imposition of the blockade was 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 and policies amount to collective punishment as defined by international law.
and that:
the blockade amounts to collective punishment in violation of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law.
Palmer panel went against international consensus on blockade
Moreover, the Turkish appointee on the Palmer panel, Süleyman Özdem Sanberk, noted in a dissenting statement rejecting large parts of the report:
On the legal aspect of the blockade, Turkey and Israel have submitted two opposing arguments. International legal authorities are divided on the matter since it is unprecedented, highly complex and the legal framework lacks codification. However, the Chairmanship and its report fully associated itself with Israel and categorically dismissed the views of the other, despite the fact that the legal arguments presented by Turkey have been supported by the vast majority of the international community. Common sense and conscience dictate that the blockade is unlawful.
- Also the UN Human Rights Council concluded that the blockade was unlawful. The Report of the Human Rights Council Fact Finding Mission received widespread approval from the member states.
- Freedom and safety of navigation on the high seas is a universally accepted rule of international law. There can be no exception from this long-standing principle unless there is a universal convergence of views.
- The intentions of the participants in the international humanitarian convoy were humanitarian, reflecting the concerns of the vast majority of the international community. They came under attack in international waters. They resisted for their own protection. Nine civilians were killed and many others were injured by the Israeli soldiers. One of the victims is still in a coma. The evidence confirms that at least some of the victims had been killed deliberately.
- The wording in the report is not satisfactory in describing the actual extent of the atrocities that the victims have been subjected to. This includes the scope of the maltreatment suffered by the passengers in the hands of Israeli soldiers and officials.
After Goldstone, protecting Israel
Based on what was known before its report became public, and now that we have read the report, it is clear that the Palmer panel was no more than political exercise by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to whitewash Israel’s attack on the flotilla and protect it from any real accountability.
After Israel and the United States’s all out war on the Goldstone report detailing Israeli war crimes in Gaza, it appears that international officials are unwilling to repeat the experience.
Indeed, an exclusive report on The Electronic Intifada in June 2010 revealed intense diplomatic efforts to undermine Turkey’s push for an independent UN investigation into Israel’s flotilla attack.
The Palmer panel was stacked from the start to ensure Israeli impunity, not to provide truth for the victims and survivors of the Mavi Marmara.
COINTELPRO is alive and well
WUFYS | August 30, 2011
A recent Mother Jones article discusses how FBI personnel justify their six-figure salaries by continually hatching fake terrorist plots and sending victims to prison. When there is no crime, the FBI creates fake crime via incitement and entrapment.
The Mother Jones article cites some interesting figures.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI’s victims were civil rights groups and anti-war demonstrators (COINTELPRO).
In the 1980s the victims came from the “war on drugs.”
In the 1990s the target became the Militia movement.
Since 9-11 the victims have been Muslims.
This FBI scam now consumes $3.3 billion tax dollars per year.
The article says the FBI had 1,500 informants in 1975. By 1980 it was 2,800. By 1981 it was 6,000. Today there are 15,000 officially listed in the FBI’s records, plus 45,000 not officially listed.
All are tasked with infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States, and inciting them to commit terrorist acts with fake bombs.
Some informants are coerced. If they help hatch terrorist plots, they can avoid prison or deportation. Typically the FBI scans the ICE database, looking for people who might have immigration problems. Patsies are sent to infiltrate Muslim communities and anti-war groups to look for other people who have immigration problems, or extramarital affairs, or anything else the FBI can use to blackmail its victims into joining a fake terrorist plot. Informants also look for desperate, homeless people who might be allured by a fake offer of cash.
An imam, for example, will know about everyone who regularly visits a mosque. Two Islamic religious leaders, Foad Farahi in Miami and Sheikh Tarek Saleh in New York City, are currently fighting deportation proceedings that began after they refused to become FBI patsies.
Once you become a coerced patsy, you are a slave for life. If you refuse to keep submitting, the FBI will send you to prison and tell all inmates that you are a snitch.
Some informants are not coerced. They are ex-felons and con men paid up to $100,000 per FBI assignment. Some informants are simply losers who fancy themselves living a James Bond life.
The Mother Jones article examined FBI scams that resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants, of which 49 defendants participated in plots led by an FBI agent provocateur. Almost all of the high-profile domestic terror plots since the 9-11 scam were FBI entrapment scams.
FBI agents provocateur record all their conversations with their patsies. Then the FBI edits the conversations so they appear more damning in court. When entire sections of dialogue vanish, the FBI claims that “technical problems” caused it. Besides, evidence is not needed when you are charged with terrorism. And since jury candidates are screened so that only morons remain, federal prosecutors enjoy a 99% conviction rate.
Two thirds of all patsies don’t go that far. They plead guilty, because the FBI threatens them. “If you force us to take you to trial, your sentence will be far worse.”
In most cases involving coerced patsies, the FBI eventually breaks its promise, and sends them to prison after all. Many patsies are poor and unemployed. Some have mental health issues. All coerced patsies are used and destroyed.
Essentially the FBI trolls the masses, selects victims from the herd, and publicly crucifies them.
In this way the FBI claims victories in the “war on terror,” so FBI personnel can keep their cushy, high-paying jobs.
Read more at:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants
Request for correction to BBC NEWS
9/11 Blogger – 08/31/2011
To: the editor of BBC NEWS Magazine online.
This letter is a request for correction regarding mistakes found in article “9/11 conspiracy theories” published August 29, 2011.
1. On point 1, quote: “the transponder, which provides the exact location of the plane, was turned off or changed”
Airplane transponder is a machine that provides ground control with some data originating from the plane, such as the altitude of the plane, its name, its bearing and other data. It doesn’t provide horizontal (map) location of the plane, which can be read by primary radar data, which originates from ground radar installations and will continue to function whatever happens to the plane transponder.
Your assertion is wrong, so you’re requested to correct and clarify it.
2. On point 2, quote: “Controlled demolition is always carried out from the bottom floors up”
As you can see in the destruction of 12-14 rue parant – glacis – Belfort on February 21, 2008 (link) controlled demolition can start from the middle floors downward.
Your assertion is wrong, so you’re requested to substitute the word “always” with “usually”.
3. Also on point 2, quote: “No evidence has ever been found of explosive charges despite the extensive hand searches”
As clearly stated by NIST in their official website FAQ (point 12), quote: [Question] “Did the NIST investigation look for evidence of the WTC towers being brought down by controlled demolition? Was the steel tested for explosives or thermite residues? The combination of thermite and sulfur (called thermate) “slices through steel like a hot knife through butter.”
[Answer] “NIST did not test for the residue of these compounds in the steel.”
Your assertion is false and misleading, so you’re requested to inform the reader that NIST admits it never looked for explosives/incendiaries residues during their official investigation (US congress H.R. 4687 gives mandate to NIST and NIST alone to investigate the collapse and provide an official explanation on the collapses causes and dynamics).
4. On point 4, quote: “the military never gave orders to the air force to shoot the commercial airliner down.”
As clearly stated in 9/11 Commission Report page 40-41 in the chapter titled “United 93 and the shootdown order”, quote: “The Vice President authorized fighter aircraft to engage the inbound plane. He told us he based this authorization on his earlier conversation with the President”
You may remind that in the United States the President is also the commander in chief of the military.
Also, in the same page we have, quote: “At approximately 10:30, the shelter started receiving reports of another hijacked plane, this time only 5 to 10 miles out. Believing they had only a minute or two, the Vice President again communicated the authorization to ‘engage’ or ‘take out’ the aircraft.”
Your assertion is two times false, so you’re requested to correct and clarify it.
5. Point 5, quote: “Some scientists, who are sceptical of the official account, have examined four dust samples from Ground Zero and claim to have found thermitic material which reacts violently when heated up”
The scientific study you refer to is “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe”, published by The Open Chemical Physics Journal. It is a peer-reviewed paper, which to date (August 29, 2011) has never been challenged by another peer-reviewed study or publication, as such the information within is considered scienfically correct until such a confutation appears.
So it’s not a mere claim by some sceptical scientists, but science’ position on the issue.
Your assertion is misleading, so you’re requested to provide credit to the study as a peer-reviewed scientific study.
6. Also on point 5, quote: “Furthermore, there is an alternative explanation for the “thermitic material” the sceptical scientists found in the dust – it is just a type of primer paint”.
The study itself poses the same question and scientifically refutes it – you may look in the document itself, point 7 “Could the Red Chip Material be Ordinary Paint?” to learn the reasons why the material cannot be any type of primer paint.
Your assertion is refuted by an unchallenged, peer-reviewed scientific study, and as such you must inform the readers your opinion is not scientifically based.
I hope to see the corrections soon, in a much needed confirmation that journalism has no master but truth.
Sincerely
Riccardo Pizzirani – Sertes
Exploiting Norway’s Terror
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | August 29, 2011
In the wake of any major terrorist event, it’s generally worth noting who is especially quick off the mark to exploit the tragedy.
Within hours of planes striking the World Trade Center on 9/11, the then former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak was in the BBC’s London studios calling for a “war on terror” against “rogue states” which just happened to be enemies of Israel (none of whose agents, unlike Israel’s, were seen filming and celebrating as the twin towers collapsed into their own footprint). And soon after ICTS International, an Israeli security firm established by former intelligence officers, allowed a young Nigerian without a passport to “slip through” Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport to board Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day two years ago, former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, the son of a suspected Mossad operative, was on CNN touting one of his client’s full-body scanners as the answer to America’s airline security problems.
In the case of the July 22 twin terror attacks in Oslo and on Utøya Island, however, some of Israel’s more provocative propagandists appear to have been wrong-footed by Anders Behring Breivik’s apparent admiration for their Islamophobic rants. While the likes of Bat Ye’or, Daniel Pipes and Pamela Geller were seen scrambling to distance themselves from Breivik, Norway’s massacre has indeed been seized upon by others with their own, albeit less transparent, ties to the Jewish state.
Mr. and Mrs. Sikorski’s War on “Dangerous Emotions”
During visits to two European capitals over the following week, Poland’s staunchly pro-Israel foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, appeared to be particularly exercised by the tragedy. While in London for discussions about the Polish Presidency of the Council of the European Union and the EU’s Eastern European policy, Sikorski took a swipe at some of his critics in Poland, where he claimed “there is no lack of people who think like Behring Breivik, a man who shot at his own people in order to bring down a government he believed had lost its political and legal right to govern.” The foreign minister, one of the highest-ranking Polish leaders not on board the plane that crashed killing much of Warsaw’s political and military leadership last year, said that his country also has “groups who believe that the democratically elected president and government are traitors who have no real interest in Poland or the Polish people. These are very dangerous emotions which, if stoked, could have unpredictable consequences.” As an example of such “dangerous emotions,” Sikorski cited an ongoing court case in which he is suing a couple of Polish newspapers for failing to remove readers’ anti-Semitic comments about his wife, Anne Applebaum.
Later in Brussels, before an emergency meeting of counter-terrorism officials on how to combat attacks such as Norway’s, the Polish foreign minister repeated his allegations during a press conference with his British counterpart, William Hague. Claiming that “certain political parties had expressed their approval of the terrorist,” Sikorski went on to cite the internet as “a potentially sinister tool for those bent on propagating agendas of hate.” Referring again to the remarks made online about his wife, he described the net as a “cesspool.”
The Polish foreign minister’s legal crusade against “dangerous emotions” had already received a significant endorsement in a May 11 op-ed piece in The Economist magazine from someone writing under the pseudonym “E.L.,” who described Sikorski as “an old friend of mine.” Reproducing one such comment in Polish which was considered “simply too unpleasant to translate,” E.L. cited “another rather milder one” which “merely accuses Mr Sikorski of being the ‘husband of an orthodox Jew, an enemy of Poland controlled by his father-in-law,’ bent on the ‘the destruction and destabilisation of Poland’ and a ‘hidden, ruthless traitor.’” Having disclosed that Sikorski was an “old friend,” E.L. somehow neglected to mention that the Polish foreign minister’s wife accused of betraying Poland to foreign interests is a former editor of The Economist. As for the op-ed writer’s own identity, it may be more than a coincidence that the name of the holding company owned by Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and his wife, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, which manages its investments in The Economist Group, owner of The Economist magazine, is E.L. Rothschild.
Sikorski’s allegedly influential father-in-law, Harvey Applebaum, is a partner in Covington and Burling, an international law firm which advises multinational corporations on significant transactional, litigation, regulatory, and public policy matters. Among its more controversial clients are Chiquita, the first major U.S. corporation to be convicted of financing terrorism; and Halliburton and Xe Services (formerly Blackwater), two of the biggest beneficiaries of the “war on terror.” Its current and former attorneys include such proficient pro-Israeli warmongers as John Bolton, senior fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (a former employer of both Mr. and Mrs. Sikorski); Stuart Eizenstat, Special U.S. Envoy for Holocaust Issues during the Clinton administrations; and the aforementioned Michael Chertoff.
Having covered the demise of the Soviet Union as a Warsaw-based correspondent for The Economist during the late 1980s,
Anne Applebaum has long been one of the most prominent anti-Russian advocates of economic and political “liberalisation” in the former Soviet Bloc and beyond. In a 2004 op-ed in The Washington Post, she dismissed as “Freedom Haters” those who saw “insidious neocon plots” behind the supposedly disinterested “democracy promotion” of George Soros and what she sarcastically referred to as “the evil triumvirate” of the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House, which she praised for “diligently training judges, helping election monitors and funding human rights groups around the world for decades, much of the time without getting much attention for it.” Prefiguring her husband’s current concerns, Applebaum bemoaned “the international echo chamber that the Internet has become” in which such cynical ideas “have traction.”
In the wake of Norway’s terror, Anne Applebaum’s response was as swift as it was revealing. Within 48 hours, she had an op-ed piece in The Washington Post entitled “Norway massacre and anti-government obsession.” Sounding a similar note to Sikorski, she opined that Breivik’s obsessions “sprang from an insane conviction that his own government was illegitimate.” Applebaum, however, seemed more concerned about Americans who might think like Breivik. Coining the term “illegitimists” to describe Breivik’s supposed American analogues, she cited Birthers, who claim that Barack Obama isn’t American-born, as the contemporary right-wing manifestation. “It is not accidental,” Applebaum observed, “that the one note of sympathy for Breivik in the U.S. media came from the birtherist and illegitimist Glenn Beck, who helpfully compared the young Norwegians murdered by Breivik to Hitler youth. Presumably if they are Hitler youth, then they deserved to die?”
It is hardly accidental either that Applebaum, who has lauded Daniel Pipes as “one of the best” American analysts of the Middle East, omitted to mention that the Birther movement is spearheaded by Orly Taitz, a Soviet Jewish emigré and pro-Israel activist who had lived in Israel for years prior to her inciting Americans against their president; or that Glenn Beck — whose over-the-top exposés of influential figures such as George Soros conveniently serve to discredit more measured critiques — is engaged in a mutual love affair with the Israeli right-wing, whose backing has been crucial to his lucrative career of demagoguery.
After the Norway massacre, of course, it’s going be even harder for genuine critics of government to publicly express their displeasure. From now on, anyone who questions the bona fides of such avid “freedom lovers” as the Sikorskis and their powerful transnational associates risks being labelled a potential “Breivik” whose “dangerous emotions” need to be kept in check.
Maidhc Ó Cathail is an investigative journalist and Middle East analyst.
Murdoch Press and the Fictional Jewish Chocolatier
BDS poses a great danger for Israel. (BDS campaign graphic)
By Samah Sabawi | Palestine Chronicle | August 27, 2011
The Murdoch press in its zeal to attack the Palestinian Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign has misrepresented facts and even ran an entire article quoting a fictional character that simply does not exist. The invention of Max Brenner the Jewish chocolatier demonstrated the lack of integrity and journalistic ethics employed within the Murdoch press’s campaign against the pro-Palestinian advocacy groups who have called for a boycott of the Israeli owned Max Brenner chocolate franchise.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, senior reporter Cameron Stewart (The Australian: August 20, 2011) still referred to the protests against the Max Brenner franchise as “marching on a Jewish-owned chocolate shop” and repeated the claim that BDS aim to “harm a legal Jewish business”. This deliberate misrepresentation of the corporate Israeli franchise directly linked to the military, and of the BDS protests, is part of a larger campaign by The Australian that is carefully orchestrated to play on Jewish stereotypes and to shamelessly manipulate the emotions of the Jewish community creating an atmosphere of fear, mistrust and hostility.
Most astounding was the article’s reference to Max Brenner as “the man whose real name is Oded Brenner”. This is very revealing of the journalistic spin used to distract and misinform readers about these legitimate protests. Putting the spotlight on the man behind the name behind the corporation is a cheap tactic, a diversion meant to humanize a corporate entity for the purposes of adding to the demonization of the protestors. But wait, there is more!
The Australian pursuit of the Max Brenner story has indeed gone too far. The same reporter Cameron Stewart (August 13, 2011) tried to further humanize the franchise by running an article entitled “Targeted chocolatier Max Brenner ‘a man of peace’”. In this article Stewart wrote “it seems Max Brenner, the company’s founder, is perplexed and dismayed at finding himself as an unwitting symbol of the Palestinian-Israel conflict.” But, the missing truth from this heart wrenching story of a Jewish chocolatier trying to survive in the big anti-Semitic world is that the man doesn’t exist.
Max Brenner, the corporate entity, was founded in 1996 in Ra’anana Israel, by Max Fichtman and Oded Brenner, using a conjunction of their names. Max Fichtmann is no longer associated with the Max Brenner entity. Oded Brenner remains. Since 2001, the company has become a part of Strauss Group which supports Israel’s military. There was never a Jewish chocolatier named Max Brenner yet the Australian senior reporter Cameron Stewart dedicated an entire article about this non-existent ‘man of peace’.
It seems The Australian will do what it can to paint the BDS advocates as “radical” “anti-Semitic” and “anti-Israeli bullies” while ignoring the reasons behind the boycott call – Israel’s atrocious treatment of the Palestinian people, its land and water theft, its violence and terror against the population it occupies and its system of discrimination which has been likened by leading human rights organizations and advocates to the apartheid system which once plagued South Africa.
The campaign for BDS is not “radical” unless in the view of The Australian calling for international law to be respected is a radical notion, but it is effective and perhaps this is the greater danger and the reason why the right leaning newspaper The Australian is leading the fight against it.
In demanding equality for Palestinians and Jews, BDS poses a great danger for Israel, a state that defines itself along ethnocentric lines and considers all non-Jews, including citizens of the Israeli state, a demographic threat.
It is worth mentioning that I had a lovely cup of coffee just yesterday in St. Kilda in an area surrounded by Jewish owned businesses where I enjoyed an environment that was peaceful and pleasant. The good news is that there is no call to march on Jewish-owned businesses by any group of people. But also worth knowing is that if indeed Jewish businesses were ever targeted by any group I would not be surprised to find the same human rights advocates who are marching against Israel today standing to defend the Jewish community’s right to live free of racism and intolerance. These are the values held by the BDS movement: non- violence, equality, justice for all and zero tolerance for all forms of racism and discrimination. But you would never know that, if your primary source of information is The Australian newspaper.
– Samah Sabawi is a Palestinian writer and is Public Advocate for Australians for Palestine.
CIA censors ex-FBI agent’s 9/11 book
Press TV – August 27, 2011
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has expurgated extensive parts of a book by a former FBI agent on September 11, 2001 events in a bid to rewrite the history of post-9/11 America, a report says.
The CIA will not allow the full publication of a memoir by Ali H. Soufan, the former FBI agent that spent years near the center of the battle against al-Qaeda, The New York Times reported on August 25.
Soufan argues in the book that the CIA missed a chance to derail the 2001 incident by withholding from the FBI information about two 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, the report says.
He also gives a detailed, firsthand account of the US spy agency’s move toward brutal treatment of detainees in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods were unnecessary and counterproductive.
Soufan, a counterterrorism agent that played a central role in many major terrorism investigations between 1997 and 2005, has told colleagues he believes the censored portions of his book are intended not to protect national security, but to prevent him from recounting episodes that reflect badly on the CIA.
In a letter sent on August 19 to the FBI’s general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, a lawyer for Soufan, David N. Kelley, wrote that “credible sources have told Mr. Soufan that the agency has made a decision that this book should not be published because it will prove embarrassing to the agency.”
Soufan has called the CIA’s cuts to and editing of his book “ridiculous,” but said he thought he would prevail in getting them restored for a later edition.
He said he believed that counterterrorism officers have an obligation to face squarely “where we made mistakes and let the American people down.”
The book, entitled The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda has been written with the assistance of Daniel Freedman, a colleague at Soufan’s New York security company, and is scheduled to go on sale on September 12.
US government employees who hold security clearances are required to have their books vetted for classified information before publication. However, since decisions on what should be classified can be highly subjective, the prepublication review process often becomes a battle.
Several former US spies have gone to court to fight redactions to their books, and the Defense Department spent nearly $50,000 last year to buy and destroy the entire first printing of an intelligence officer’s book, which it said contained secrets, the report adds.
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Book Review
New paperback: Butchered by “Healthcare”
Lies are Unbekoming | October 20, 2026
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
Butchered by “Healthcare” is available on Lulu now.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iran’s Next Strike May Not Explode. It Could Shut You Down /Col Doug Macgregor
- Iran: US political targets legitimate if assassinations return
- Iraq shuts key border crossing with Iran under US pressure: Report
- Undersea Internet cables could be targeted in retaliation for attacks on Iran: IRGC deputy chief
- EU sending ‘biased’ observers to interfere in Serbian election – president
- White House envoy declares kinetic action against Yemen ‘fruitless’
- Ukraine deployed thousands of microdrones in Iraqi Kurdistan: Tasnim
- Iran calls for emergency UNSC meeting over Trump’s ‘brazen’ bomb talk, Israeli threats
- Iranian sources reveal details of Russia-China Hormuz proposal
- Plan for more US-Israel integration puts our military tech at risk
- If Americans Knew
- Americans at National Conservatism Conference held in Israel this year criticize Israel
- Christiane Amanpour exits CNN with a legacy shaped by the debate over Israel
- Israel’s war on Iran is the final move in a decades-old strategy
- Israel Denies Entry to French Journalist, U.S. Researcher Amid Rise in Entry Denials
- Gaza’s hospitals are running out of life-saving fuel – Daily Update
- Mysterious bot accounts reportedly spread fake ‘man on the street’ videos for Michigan Senate candidate
- Israeli Defense Minister Katz Says Over 60 Lebanon Villages Have Been Destroyed
- Why Is Israel Running TV Ads in Iowa Ahead of the Midterms?
- Hind Rajab’s Alleged Killer Is in the United States. HRF Demands His Arrest.
- US Officials Face Fresh Pressure After Another American ‘Brutalized’ by Israeli Settlers in West Bank
- No Tricks Zone
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
