Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

The CIA’s Killing Spree in Lahore

By MIKE WHITNEY | CounterPunch | February 24, 2011

When CIA-agent Raymond Davis gunned down two Pakistani civilians in broad daylight on a crowded street in Lahore, he probably never imagined that the entire Washington establishment would spring to his defense. But that’s precisely what happened. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mike Mullen, John Kerry, Leon Panetta and a number of other US bigwigs have all made appeals on Davis’s behalf. None of these stalwart defenders of “the rule of law” have shown a speck of interest in justice for the victims or of even allowing the investigation to go forward so they could know what really happened. Oh, no. What Clinton and the rest want, is to see their man Davis packed onto the next plane to Langley so he can play shoot-’em-up someplace else in the world.

Does Clinton know that after Davis shot his victims 5 times in the back, he calmly strode back to his car, grabbed his camera, and photographed the dead bodies? Does she know that the two so-called “diplomats” who came to his rescue in a Land Rover (which killed a passerby) have been secretly spirited out of the country so they won’t have to appear in court? Does she know that the families of the victims are now being threatened and attacked to keep them from testifying against Davis? Here’s a clip from Thursday’s edition of The Nation:

“Three armed men forcibly gave poisonous pills to Muhammad Sarwar, the uncle of Shumaila Kanwal, the widow of Fahim shot dead by Raymond Davis, after barging into his house in Rasool Nagar, Chak Jhumra.

Sarwar was rushed to Allied Hospital in critical condition where doctors were trying to save his life till early Thursday morning. The brother of Muhammad Sarwar told The Nation that three armed men forced their entry into the house after breaking the windowpane of one of the rooms. When they broke the glass, Muhammad Sarwar came out. The outlaws started beating him up.

The other family members, including women and children, coming out for his rescue, were taken hostage and beaten up. The three outlaws then took everyone hostage at gunpoint and forced poisonous pills down Sarwar’s throat.” (“Shumaila’s uncle forced to take poisonous pills”, The Nation)

Good show, Hillary. We’re all about the rule of law in the good old USA.

But why all the intrigue and arm-twisting? Why has the State Department invoked the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to make its case that Davis is entitled to diplomatic immunity? If Davis is innocent, then he has nothing to worry about, right? Why not let the trial go forward and stop reinforcing the widely-held belief that Davis is a vital cog in the US’s clandestine operations in Pakistan?

The truth is that Davis had been photographing sensitive installations and madrassas for some time, the kind of intelligence gathering that spies do when scouting-out prospective targets. Also, he’d been in close contact with members of terrorist organizations, which suggests a link between the CIA and terrorist incidents in Pakistan. Here’s an excerpt from Wednesday’s The Express Tribune:

“His cell phone has revealed contacts with two ancillaries of al Qaeda in Pakistan, Tehreek-e-Taliban of Pakistan (TTP) and sectarian Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), which has led to the public conclusion that he was behind terrorism committed against Pakistan’s security personnel and its people ….This will strike people as America in cahoots with the Taliban and al Qaeda against the state of Pakistan targeting, as one official opined, Pakistan’s nuclear installations.” (“Raymond Davis: The plot thickens, The Express Tribune)

“Al Qaeda”? The CIA is working with “ancillaries of al Qaeda in Pakistan”? No wonder the US media has been keeping a wrap on this story for so long.

Naturally, most Pakistanis now believe that the US is colluding with terrorists to spread instability, weaken the state, and increase its power in the region. But isn’t that America’s M.O. everywhere?

Also, many people noticed that US drone attacks suddenly stopped as soon as Davis was arrested. Was that a coincidence? Not likely. Davis was probably getting coordinates from his new buddies in the tribal hinterland and then passing them along to the Pentagon. The drone bombings are extremely unpopular in Pakistan. More then 1400 people have been killed since August 2008, and most of them have been civilians.

And, there’s more. This is from (Pakistan’s) The Nation:

“A local lawyer has moved a petition in the court of Additional District and Sessions … contending that the accused (Davis)… was preparing a map of sensitive places in Pakistan through the GPS system installed in his car. He added that mobile phone sims, lethal weapons, and videos camera were recovered from the murder accused on January 27, 2011.” (“Davis mapped Pakistan targets court told”, The Nation)

So, Davis’s GPS chip was being used to identify targets for drone attacks in the tribal region. Most likely, he was being assisted on the other end by recruits or members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban.

A lot of extravagant claims have been made about what Davis was up to, much of which is probably just speculation. One report which appeared on ANI news service is particularly dire, but produces little evidence to support its claims. Here’s an excerpt:

“Double murder-accused US official Raymond Davis has been found in possession of top-secret CIA documents, which point to him or the feared American Task Force 373 (TF373) operating in the region, providing Al-Qaeda terrorists with “nuclear fissile material” and “biological agents,” according to a report.

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is warning that the situation on the sub-continent has turned “grave” as it appears that open warfare is about to break out between Pakistan and the United States, The European Union Times reports…..The most ominous point in this SVR report is “Pakistan’s ISI stating that top-secret CIA documents found in Davis’s possession point to his, and/or TF373, providing to al Qaeda terrorists “nuclear fissile material” and “biological agents”, which they claim are to be used against the United States itself in order to ignite an all-out war in order to re-establish the West’s hegemony over a Global economy that is warned is just months away from collapse,” the paper added. (“CIA Spy Davis was giving nuclear bomb material to Al Qaeda, says report”, ANI)

Although there’s no way to prove that this is false, it seems like a bit of a stretch. But that doesn’t mean that what Davis was up to shouldn’t be taken seriously. Quite the contrary. If Davis was working with Tehreek-e-Taliban, (as alleged in many reports) then we can assume that the war on terror is basically a ruse to advance a broader imperial agenda. According to Sify News, the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, believes this to be the case. Here’s an excerpt:

“Zalmay Khalilzad, the former US envoy to Afghanistan, once brushed off Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s claim, that the US was “arranging” the (suicide) attacks by Pakistani Taliban inside his country, as ‘madness’, and was of the view that both Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who believed in this US conspiracy theory, were “dysfunctional” leaders.

The account of Zardari’s claim about the US’ hand in the attacks has been elaborately reproduced by US journalist Bob Woodward, on Page 116 of his famous book ‘Obama’s Wars,’ The News reported.

Woodward’s account goes like this: “One evening during the trilateral summit (in Washington, between Obama, Karzai and Zardari) Zardari had dinner with Zalmay Khalilzad, the 58-year-old former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the UN, during the Bush presidency.

“Zardari dropped his diplomatic guard. He suggested that one of the two countries was arranging the attacks by the Pakistani Taliban inside his country: India or the US. Zardari didn’t think India could be that clever, but the US could. Karzai had told him the US was behind the attacks, confirming the claims made by the Pakistani ISI.”

“Mr President,” Khalilzad said, “what would we gain from doing this? You explain the logic to me.”

“This was a plot to destabilize Pakistan, Zardari hypothesized, so that the US could invade and seize its nuclear weapons. He could not explain the rapid expansion in violence otherwise. And the CIA had not pursued the leaders of the Pakistani Taliban, a group known as Tehreek-e-Taliban or TTP that had attacked the government. TTP was also blamed for the assassination of Zardari’s wife, Benazir Bhutto.” (“Pakistan President says CIA Involved in Plot to Destabilize Country and Seize Nukes”, Sify News)

Zardari’s claim will sound familiar to those who followed events in Iraq. Many people are convinced that the only rational explanation for the wave of bombings directed at civilians, was that the violence was caused by those groups who stood to gain from a civil war.

And who might that be?

Despite the Obama administration’s efforts to derail the investigation, the case against Davis is going forward. Whether he is punished or not is irrelevant. This isn’t about Davis anyway. It’s a question of whether the US is working hand-in-hand with the very organizations that it publicly condemns in order to advance its global agenda. If that’s the case, then the war on terror is a fraud.

~

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state and  can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com

February 24, 2011 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

The Attack on Social Security

The Power of Incompetence

By DEAN BAKER | CounterPunch | February 23, 2011

The folks insisting on cuts to Social Security and Medicare have revved themselves up and are now in high gear. They see their final victory on the horizon with the possibility of a bipartisan deal involving substantial cuts to both programs. They argue that the large deficits facing the country make it imperative that we address the long-term budget problem, meaning the cost of these programs, immediately.

Before anyone prepares to surrender it is worth remembering once again how we got into the current situation. Before the downturn the budget deficits were relatively modest. Even with the cost of fighting two wars, the Bush tax cuts and a poorly designed Medicare drug benefit the deficit was just over 1.0 percent of GDP in 2007, the last year before the downturn. This was arguably bigger than desired, but a deficit of this size certainly posed no imminent danger to the economy.

Then the economy ran off the track. The reason was the collapse of an $8 trillion housing bubble. This bubble was easy to see for people who knew basic economics and third-grade arithmetic. It was also easy to see that the collapse of this bubble would derail the economy and lead to a serious downturn. That is why some of us were warning about the bubble as early as 2002.

But where were the current group of anti-deficit crusaders back in 2002-2006, when it might still have been possible to do something to stem the growth of the housing bubble before it reached such dangerous levels? Well, they were crusading against the budget deficit of course.

Peter Peterson, the Wall Street investment banker who is the patron saint and financier of much of the deficit crusade was paying for the “Fiscal Wake-Up Tour,” which was supposed to alert people to the dangers of the country’s budget deficit. This traveling road show of policy wonks and economists had nothing to say about the growing housing bubble that was about to explode and sink the economy.

Then we have the Washington Post, which is continuously setting new records for imbalance on this issue, for example by running six different columns by deficit hawks on the same day. As the bubble grew to ever more dangerous levels the Post had no room for those warning of the risks it posed. In fact, its main source for information on the housing market was David Lereah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors and the author of the book, “Why the Housing Boom Will Not Bust and How You Can Profit From It.”

The same story can be told about National Public Radio, the major news networks and all the politicians now leading the charge to cut Social Security and Medicare. When the country actually did face a real economic disaster, these people were nowhere in sight. They were diverting attention to other issues and dismissing those of us who tried to warn of the real danger.

Now that we are experiencing an economic disaster – 25 million people unemployed or underemployed, millions of people facing the loss of their homes, more than ten million underwater in their mortgages — as a direct result of their incompetence, these same people are telling us again about the urgent need to cut Social Security and Medicare. The deficit hawks somehow think that their case is more compelling because of the damage done by their incompetence.

It should not work this way. In most lines of work incompetence is not a credential, it should not be one in designing economic policy either. Anyone who cares to tell us about the urgent need to deal with the deficit should first be expected to tell us how they managed to overlook the growth of an $8 trillion housing bubble. They should also be expected to tell us why they have a better understanding of the economy now than they did before the collapse of the housing bubble.

Social Security and Medicare provide essential supports to tens of millions of retirees and disabled workers. The projections are clear. The financing of Social Security poses no major problem – it is projected to be fully solvent for almost 30 years with no changes whatsoever. Medicare poses a problem only because the private health care system is broken.

Honest people talk about the need to fix the health care system. Less-honest people scream about the need to reform “entitlements.” And, they think that the public somehow should listen to them because of their record of incompetence.

Supposedly responsible news organizations, like the Washington Post and National Public Radio, have gotten in the habit of telling their audiences that we have to cut Social Security and Medicare. The need for cuts in these programs is often put forward as an unquestioned fact, not just in editorials and opinion pieces, but in supposedly objective news stories.

~

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy and False Profits: Recoverying From the Bubble Economy.

This column was originally published by The Guardian.

February 23, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Iran Opposition Protests: Popular Unrest Or Media Generated Mirage?

By Rixon Stewart | TruthSeeker | February 21, 2011

As widespread popular protests swept the Middle East observers have watched Iran this past week to see if discontent would spill over there too.

The corporate media has certainly been working hard to drum up expectations, even if it wasn’t actually happening on the ground.

Just over a week ago London’s Financial Times reported demonstrations in Tehran attended by “hundreds of thousands” of protestors, or so it claimed.


Photo from Fox News showing the “hundreds of thousands” protesting in Tehran

It sounded impressive enough except that the Financial Times didn’t provide any photographic coverage to support those claims.

Moreover, the only photographic reports on demonstrations in Tehran at that time showed no more than a few hundred protestors, not the “vast numbers” the FT had claimed.

Still, what the FT report lacked in substansive evidence it made up for with confident hyperbole. Claiming that the protest “crowd – whose size far exceeded the predictions of most analysts – assembled despite threats by the Revolutionary Guard.”

Again, there was no photographic evidence to back those claims and the witnesses quoted remained unnamed.

Unlike the recent crackdowns in Bahrain and Libya, where despite stringent restrictions hard proof had been provided – with cell phone videos, named eyewitnesses and accounts from doctors who were treating the injured on the ground – the FT report could easily have been concocted by a journalist with little more than an active imagination.

However a week after the FT “story”, similar reports appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

“For a second time in a week, Iran’s opposition drew tens of thousands of supporters to the streets across the nation on Sunday calling for the end to the Islamic Republic’s rule”, the WSJ reported. But as with the Financial Times the week before, the WSJ carried little else to substantiate those claims.

No photographs, no video links, no links of any kind and the only first hand accounts came from unnamed “eyewitnesses”. And these could just as easily have come from intelligence operatives with their own agenda to fulfill.

Remember, we’ve been down this path before with Iraq and Saddam Hussein and his fabled ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. It’s a familiar routine with the same unnamed sources, the same lack of evidence and the same unspoken, implied suggestions.

I’ve just seen a BBC report from Bahrain, which illustrates this perfectly; with Caroline Hawley reporting on the unrest sweeping the Middle East, where she said: “we’ve just heard similar reports from Tehran”.

She made no attempt to question the veracity of the report from Tehran or whether she was just repeating disinformation. Instead, she just lumped it together with other reports of protests in Libya, Bahrain and Yemen.

Reports on unrest at these locations have been confirmed. So by reporting Iran together with them confirmation is implied, if only by association.

Intelligence chiefs must love the likes of Caroline Hawley. Even if they don’t pay her she does their dirty work for them, under the guise of “balanced journalism”.

Meanwhile Voice of America reported the latest protests in Tehran. Quoting “opposition websites”, the VOA said, “protests were under way in a number of squares and streets in Tehran”.

Again, no direct links were provided and all the eyewitnesses quoted remained unnamed.

Not to be left out the FT also reported on the latest protests in Iran:

“Eyewitnesses” said the FT, “could not estimate the number of protesters because they were scattered across the capital city.”

Again the FT doesn’t name its “eyewitnesses”, although this time around it’s a little more cautious in estimating the numbers involved.

So maybe “100,000″ were not involved but maybe more like one thousand?

While we have no doubt that there have been some protests against the regime in Iran, they are as nothing compared to the unrest elsewhere in the Middle East, such as Libya where more than 200 are estimated to have died in less than a week.

More significantly however, we suspect the involvement of covert agencies – the CIA, Mossad and British Intelligence – in fomenting dissent in Iran and trying through their media lackeys to exploit it for their own purposes.

Finally, the authorities in Iran say Tehran saw no anti-government rallies on Sunday.

We reserve judgement on that. The protests may have simply been nipped in the bud through a combination of strong police presence and lack of support.

February 21, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

WikiLeaks and Latin America

By Nil Nikandrov | Tiwy.com | December 13, 2010

The collection of US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks includes some 20,000 documents pertaining to Latin America. Roughly 13,000 of them came to the US Department of State from the US embassies in Mexico, Brasilia, Buenos Aires, Lima, Santiago de Chile, and Bogota, while the remaining 7,000 originated from Caracas, Quito, La Paz, and Managua. Dates on the majority of the documents fit into the last decade.

It is hard to say at the moment what led WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to dump the archive to Spain’s notoriously rightist El País, chances being that the decision was not entirely up to him. El País is a part of Grupo Prisa, a media holding with close business links to the right and conservative US and Latin American media. It is an open secret that El País is heavily influenced by the Miami-based anti-Castro mafia and its satellites from the ranks of the radical immigrants from Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. El País permanently floats media campaigns aimed at destabilizing the political regimes in the above countries, and the materials contributed by WikiLeaks will likely be put to use accordingly.

Currently the WikiLeaks information is disseminated in a redacted form via the channels operated by El País and other Western media companies. They carefully avoid calling into question the reliability of the reporting by the US embassies and the Department of State regardless of the methods employed by the US agencies. Some of the cables do mention the financial support provided by various US foundations to NGOs, human rights groups, and political opposition which also happen to be the sources from which the US typically draws information on the corresponding countries. Effectively, this is the same as buying information.

US ambassador to Nicaragua Paul A. Trivelli resorted to the assistance of anti-Sandinista political forces to collect information for his reports alleging that president Daniel Ortega regularly sent his government’s ministers to solicit petro-dollars from Chavez. According to Trivelli’s accounts, roughly half a billion dollars were delivered in suitcases from Caracas to Managua to be spent on bribing the Nicaraguan constituency. The mythical suitcases then served as evidence of Chavez’s plan to turn Nicaragua into a country run by a “Cuban-style dictatorship”.

Trivelli’s successor Robert Callahan supplies the US Department of State with similarly generated data. He seems to enjoy alarming Washington by churning out reports that – in breach of the Nicaraguan constitution – Ortega is going to seek reelection in 2011 and therefore takes a keen interest in Chavez’s experience of the kind. Callahan’s reports are also saturated with claims that Iran is gaining ever stronger positions in Managua and using Nicaragua as the starting point for its subversive expansion across Central America and for reaching the US territory via Mexico. Clearly under the impression left by one of Callahan’s papers, H. Clinton expressed concern in May, 2009 that Iran was building the single largest embassy in Nicaragua, as if the embassy could pose a threat like some missile launchpad. Truly speaking, the single largest embassy in Nicaragua is the US one, which is a heavily fortified compound built to survive anything short of a nuclear strike and overloaded with advanced surveillance devices. Such fortress-style embassies were built by the US over the past decade in the majority of Latin American countries, leaving the impression that Washington is bracing for a global catastrophe. Shall we assume the perceived threat is the end of the world which the Mayan priests anticipate in 2012?

US diplomats in Latin America seem convinced that constant invocations of the Iranian theme are the best way to demonstrate their awareness of what is going on in the intelligence field. The vigilant watchers spotted Iranians on the Caribbean islands and in the region’s every part from Mexico to the south of Chile. The materials which saw the light of day thanks to WikiLeaks reflect the US paranoid worries that Iran struck a secret deal with Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales and is already mining uranium in Venezuela and Bolivia. The lie has been broadcast by the US propaganda machine over the recent years. For example, the US diplomats attempted to portray an Iranian bicycle factory built in Venezuela as a secret uranium facility. In response, Chavez appeared in a TV program riding a bike and promised to present “a nuclear bike” to G. Bush, adding that the device was at least equipped with brakes.

One of the US Department of State documents exposed by WikiLeaks happens to be H. Clinton’s request sent to the US embassy in Buenos Aires containing questions about president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s way of fighting stress and the medications she was taking. Implicitly, the cable cast doubts over the Argentinian leader’s mental health. US department of State cables also describe Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her husband Nestor Kirchner as individuals obsessed with lust for power, an unpleasant couple, and talentless politicians. The explanation behind the view is that both never bowed to the US pressure and befriended Chavez. Eventually, H. Clinton was forced to apologize, but her sincerity is hard to trust.

Overall, US diplomats never seem to stop monitoring the health condition of Latin American leaders. Predictably, the focus is on Chavez. US diplomats arrived at the conclusion that he acted inadequately and spread a markedly provocative psychological portrait of the Venezuelan leader put together by CIA psychiatrists which depicted him as an insane, primitive, and uncontrollable individual. The US Department of State was excited to learn from the US embassy in Brazil that Evo Morales was diagnosed with a tumor and seriously disappointed later when it became known that he underwent a successful surgery. When the electoral campaign in Paraguay was in process, the US Department of State asked for information on the health condition of all of the country’s presidential candidates. The incumbent Fernando Lugo’s cancer for which he had to endure exhausting chemotherapy could be a logical consequence of the request.

Simply browsing the WikiLeaks publications is enough to realize that in many cases they are identical to propaganda pieces featured by various newspapers and journals. Allegations are made that Mexican president Felipe Calderon’s popularity is evaporating and that he is losing the war against drug cartels, that Cuban intelligence operatives have direct access to Chavez and enjoy full freedom of activity in the Venezuelan army, and that in Nicaragua the rating of president Ortega sank so low that even elderly nuns pray for his being killed the sooner the better.

Notably, WikiLeaks released nothing about the Mission of the US Interests Section in Havana, the torture experiments staged in Guantanamo, or the creation of US bases in Costa Rica and Columbia. The Wikileaks materials shed light in minimal quantities on the preparations for the coup in Honduras and the police mutiny in Ecuador. Nor does WikiLeaks find much to tell about the US intelligence activity in Latin America. Such omissions add up to a fairly long list.

Currently efforts are made to replicate the WikiLeaks success. The OpenLeaks outlet is being put on track to widen the audience of shocking revelations. Will it go so far as to bring to the surface the operational materials of the CIA, the US Defense Intelligence Agency, etc.?

February 18, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Curveball and the Trucks

By Malcom Lagauche | February 17, 2011

The recent news that the person nicknamed “Curveball” lied to German authorities before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq is making headlines. The media make this sound like it is Earth-shattering. Even some CIA officials expressed shock and dismay at his current confession. How disingenuous. At the time of his revelations, even a nitwit could tell he was lying. Here is a chapter from my book The Mother of All Battles: The Endless U.S.-Iraq War that was released in October 2008. Currently, Powell is on a speaking tour of the US in which he tells how to become successful and rich. If one uses his formula, it is quite uncomplicated: lie and kill a few million people.

A couple of 15-year-old vehicles made world headlines in 2002. At first, the U.S. and British administrations heralded them as conclusive proof of Iraq concealing biological weapons. We all heard of the Iraqi “mobile germ factories” that traveled the highways of the country to keep from getting discovered. Dick Cheney said that inside these vehicles the most devastating germs were being manufactured and the Iraqis were going to pelt the east coast of the U.S. with a deadly brew that would kill millions. Cheney maintained that these germ weapons would be carried by secret drone aircraft that Iraq was developing.

Actually, there were a few drones being manufactured in Iraq and the Iraqis showed them to the world. They were made of balsa wood, had a range of about 25 miles and were used for mapping purposes. The east coast of the U.S. was a few thousand miles out of their range.

The actual importance of the two vehicles, alleged to be biological weapons factories, is minuscule, but their use for propaganda and the subsequent discovery that they were only used to pump hydrogen into weather balloons, put them on center-stage in world affairs.

The April 12, 2006 edition of the Washington Post ran a feature article, “Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War,” that brought back the subject the administration would rather the world forget. According to the article:

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.

The administration wasted no time in turning the issue around. At a hastily-called press conference, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan accused the media of unfair reporting. He did not answer questions about whether Bush knew of the results of the team of experts. If Bush did not know the information, McClellan would have quickly come forth with a reply. In this instance, silence seemed to be damning.

In addition to not being forthright with the issue, McClellan demanded an apology from the press for running the article. According to the Associated Press article “White House Defends Stand on Iraqi Trailers:”

McClellan dismissed the Post article and a report based on it that aired on ABC News Wednesday morning as irresponsible. He said ABC News should apologize and took issue with the way the Post story was written.

In 2002, these trucks took on a life of their own. They became dastardly vehicles to be used to cause a cataclysmic event in the U.S. that would be unprecedented in history. During this time, the Iraqi government had publicly stated that the trucks were used to fill weather balloons with hydrogen, but the U.S. public was told that you can’t trust the Iraqis because they lie and the U.S. doesn’t.

By November 2002, reports of these trucks, fueled by White House propaganda, began appearing in newspapers and magazines. Even the UCLA School of Public Health jumped on the bandwagon to create paranoia. On November 17, 2002, it ran an article from the Los Angeles Times called “Inspectors to Scour Iraq for Mobile Weapons Labs.” It was published in the “Bioterrorism” section of its website. Here are a few gems from the article:

* Rumbling along Iraq’s highways or threading their way through crowded streets, these mobile weapons labs may look like ice cream trucks, motor homes or 18-wheeler tractor trailer trucks, officials and experts say. But their cargo is believed to be germ agents such as anthrax, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin that theoretically could kill hundreds of thousands in an attack.

* Dubbed “Winnebagos of death,” the anonymous vehicles are hard to locate, even with sophisticated sensors.

* If the labs evade detection, U.S. intelligence analysts fear, the officers or scientists who operate them might try to use germ agents in a desperate counterattack or spirit the materials away to sell to terrorists or foreign governments.

* If such materials fall into the hands of a group such as Al Qaeda, that would turn the military campaign into what “could be the greatest proliferation disaster in history,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council official and co-author of The Age of Secret Terror.

* The British and German governments, and the CIA and Pentagon, have all asserted the existence of the mobile labs in separate reports this year.

Here’s what Colin Powell said of the two trucks in his infamous deluge of lies he told the world in February 2003 at the U.N.:

* Iraq’s mobile BW program began in the mid-1990s — this is reportedly when the units were being designed.

* The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities.

* Iraq manufactured mobile trailers and railcars to produce biological agents, which were designed to evade U.N. weapons inspectors. Agent production reportedly occurred Thursday night through Friday when the U.N. did not conduct inspections in observance of the Moslem holy day.

* An accident occurred in 1998 during a production run, which killed 12 technicians — an indication that Iraq was producing a BW agent at that time.

The CIA issued a report on May 28, 2003, without the knowledge of the secret team’s assessment of the truth behind the trucks, that smacked of the same preposterous allegations made by almost every pro-war reporter or politician in the Western world. Here is the overview of the report titled “Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants:”

Coalition forces have uncovered the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.

The design, equipment, and layout of the trailer found in late April is strikingly similar to descriptions provided by a source who was a chemical engineer that managed one of the mobile plants. Secretary of State Powell’s description of the mobile plants in his speech in February 2003 to the United Nations was based primarily on reporting from this source.

Both Powell and the CIA cite an Iraqi chemical engineer who supposedly worked on the trucks and also told of 12 deaths. This source was discredited long before either Powell or the CIA used his bogus testimony.

An Iraqi who defected to Germany in 1999 was the originator of these falsehoods. His given nickname was “Curveball,” a designation of his slippery and swerving testimony. After the Germans heard the lies, they contacted the CIA with the information, but told the U.S. intelligence organization that he could not be trusted and said they would not give any credence to his information. The Germans described Curveball as a person not living in Iraq and as an “out of control” and mentally deranged alcoholic. One CIA report stated that Curveball was “a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq.” This description was not seen by many because the neocon Office of Special Plans overrode CIA information when it deemed it necessary to keep the war plans on schedule.

Curveball was a drunken liar who was paid to say things that the U.S. wanted to hear. He gained an easy payday for a while and then was taken off the payroll when it was discovered he was a fraud. The U.S. failed to listen to the Germans about Curveball’s dubious character.

On June 15, 2003, British newspapers wrote the truth about the two trucks and caused great embarrassment to Tony Blair because he went along with the U.S. script on the use of the vehicles. According to the Observer, in an article titled “Iraqi Mobile Labs Nothing To Do With Germ Warfare, Report Finds:”

An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis continued to insist.

A British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told the Observer last week, “They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were — facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.”

Never have two old beaten up trucks gained the mythical status of the two Iraqi vehicles used for producing hydrogen. Millions and millions of dollars were spent on propaganda that elevated their standing to that of world-threatening devices that could kill millions of people instantly. An unknown Iraqi drunkard had his 15 minutes of fame and improved his finances immensely because of the trucks. More than a million Iraqi lives were lost because of the lies used to describe them.

On March 13, 2007, ABC News ran a story about Curveball. Despite people knowing of his real identity and calling for caution in 2003 about his testimony, the ABC report shocked much of the U.S. population because they had never heard of Curveball.

Powell got much mileage from Curveball’s lies at the U.N. in February 2003 when he told the world of the dastardly Iraqi mobile biological weapons factories. During the March 13, 2007 ABC News report, the commentator mentioned Powell’s assessment of the old story turned new. According to ABC News, “Powell said he is furious with what happened and his former chief of staff says he feels deceived.”

The perpetrator became the victim. Powell could have refused to bring up the mobile biological weapons factories (years later, he said he was not convinced with the information), but he put on an Academy Award performance in front of the world. That presentation led to the destruction of a country and the deaths of more than a million Iraqis and thousands of U.S. military personnel. These facts did not bother him as he worried only about his image and legacy.

While speaking to the U.N. in February 2003, Colin Powell told the world that Iraq’s mobile BW program began in the mid-1990s and that was the time the trucks were being designed. In reality, they were sold to the Iraqi army by the British firm Marconi Command and Control in 1987 as trucks to carry and fill weather balloons.

Depiction of Iraqi mobile biological weapons trucks as described by Colin Powell in February 2003.

According to his testimony, each truck had two accompanying vehicles to help produce the lethal agents.

February 18, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Obama’s 2012 Budget, A Tool for Class War

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | CounterPunch | February 18, 2011

Obama’s new budget is a continuation of Wall Street’s class war against the poor and middle class.  Wall Street wasn’t through with us when the banksters sold their fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds, wrecked Americans’ job prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700 billion bailout at taxpayers’ expense while foreclosing on the homes of millions of Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet with several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for newly created money to shore up the banks’ balance sheets.  The effect of the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” on inflation, interest rates, and the dollar’s foreign exchange value are yet to hit.  When they do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.

Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again, this time through the federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge military/security budget.  It is as large as the budgets of the rest of the world combined. The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets account for the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama administration forecasts for fiscal year 2012. This massive deficit spending serves only one purpose–the enrichment of the private companies that serve the military/security complex. These companies, along with those on Wall Street, are who elect the U.S. government.

The U.S. has no enemies except those that the U.S. creates by bombing and invading other countries and by overthrowing foreign leaders and installing American puppets in their place.

China does not conduct naval exercises off the California coast, but the U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off China’s coast. Russia does not mass troops on Europe’s borders, but the U.S. places missiles on Russia’s borders. The U.S. is determined to create as many enemies as possible in order to continue its bleeding of the American population to feed the ravenous military/security complex.

The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a year, that is, $56,000 million, in order that American air travelers can be porno-scanned and sexually groped so that firms represented by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large profits selling the scanning equipment.

With a perpetual budget deficit driven by the military/security complex’s desire for profits, the real cause of America’s enormous budget deficit is off-limits for discussion.

The U.S. Secretary of War-Mongering, Robert Gates, declared: “We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril.” The military brass warns of cutting any of the billions of aid to Israel and Egypt, two functionaries for its Middle East “policy.”

But what are “our” global security responsibilities?  Where did they come from?  Why would America be at peril if America stopped bombing and invading other countries and interfering in their internal affairs?  The perils America faces are all self-created.

The answer to this question used to be that otherwise we would be murdered in our beds by “the worldwide communist conspiracy.”  Today the answer is that we will be murdered in our airplanes, train stations, and shopping centers by “Muslim terrorists” and by a newly created imaginary threat–”domestic extremists,” that is, war protesters and environmentalists.

The U.S. military/security complex is capable of creating any number of false flag events in order to make these threats seem real to a public whose intelligence is limited to TV, shopping mall experiences, and football games.

So Americans are stuck with enormous budget deficits that the Federal Reserve must finance by printing new money, money that sooner or later will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar and its role as world reserve currency.  When the dollar goes, American power goes.

For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to save their power.

Their answer is: make the people pay.

And that is what their latest puppet, President Obama, is doing.

With the U.S. in the worst recession since the Great Depression, a great recession that John Williams and Gerald Celente, along with myself, have said is deepening, the “Obama budget” takes aim at support programs for the poor and out-of-work.  The American elites are transforming themselves into idiots as they seek to replicate in America the conditions that have led to the overthrows of similarly corrupt elites in Tunisia and Egypt and mounting challenges to U.S. puppet governments elsewhere.

All we need is a few million more Americans with nothing to lose in order to bring the disturbances in the Middle East home to America. With the U.S. military bogged down in wars abroad, an American revolution would have the best chance of success.

American politicians have to fund Israel as the money returns in campaign contributions.

The U.S. government must fund the Egyptian military if there is to be any hope of turning the next Egyptian government into another American puppet that will serve Israel by continuing the blockade of the Palestinians herded into the Gaza ghetto.

These goals are far more important to the American elite than Pell Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an education, or clean water, or community block grants, or the low income energy assistance program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers are forced to give to Israel).

There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and other health programs over the next five years.

Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit, these sums are a pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury financing needs.  They will put no brakes on the Federal Reserve’s need to print money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.

These cuts serve one purpose: to further the Republican Party’s myth that America is in economic trouble because of the poor:  The poor are shiftless. They won’t work. The only reason unemployment is high is that the poor had rather be on welfare.

A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent middle class college graduates won’t take the jobs offered them, because their parents have too much money, and the kids like living at home without having to do anything. A spoiled generation, they come out of university refusing any job that doesn’t start out as CEO of a Fortune 500 company.  The reason that engineering graduates do not get job interviews is that they do not want them.

What all this leads to is an assault on “entitlements”, which means Social Security and Medicare. The elites have programmed, through their control of the media, a large part of the population, especially those who think of themselves as conservatives, to conflate  “entitlements” with welfare.  America is going to hell not because of foreign wars that serve no American purpose, but because people, who have paid 15 per cent  of their payroll all their lives for old age pensions and medical care, want “handouts” in their retirement years. Why do these selfish people think that working Americans should be forced through payroll taxes to pay for the pensions and medical care of the retirees?  Why didn’t the retirees consume less and prepare for their own retirement?

The elite’s line, and that of their hired spokespersons in “think tanks” and universities, is that America is in trouble because of its retirees.

Too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that America is in trouble because of its poor and its retirees.  America is not in trouble because it coerces a dwindling number of taxpayers to support the military/security complex’s enormous profits, American puppet governments abroad, and Israel.

The American elite’s solution for America’s problems is not merely to foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs were sent offshore, but to add to the numbers of distressed Americans with nothing to lose the sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the university graduates who cannot find jobs that have been sent to Chine and India.

Of all the countries in the world, none need a revolution as bad as the United States, a country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime.

~

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.  His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

February 18, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

EU’s “magic wand” diplomacy

The desperate race to cobble together a Palestinian state

By Stuart Littlewood | Redress | 17 February 2011

“The government are a friend to both Israelis and Palestinians,” UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, a dedicated Israel fan, told Parliament this week.

We are calling for both sides to show the visionary boldness to return to talks and make genuine compromises. Talks need to take place on the basis of clear parameters. In our view, the entire international community, including the United States, should now support 1967 borders as the basis for resumed negotiations…

Being St Valentine’s Day, he must have been feeling a sudden and unaccustomed upsurge of romantic love for our Palestinian brothers and sisters.

The next day European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said that the international community is still seeking to achieve a peace deal and a Palestinian state by September, despite the revolutionary turmoil in the region and pathetic whining from the delinquent Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, that the Iranian problem must be solved first.

There is of course no Iranian problem. There is no Palestinian problem. There is only the Israel problem. It’s been festering for 63 years. That’s what has to be solved.

Unless they’ve undergone a dramatic conversion to justice and Ashton and Hague start banging the table about enforcing international law and implementing long overdue EU sanctions against Israeli trade, such as the scrapping of the EU Association Agreement (the terms of which Israel is in permanent breach), what on earth do they think a Palestinian state cobbled together from lopsided “negotiations” is going to look like?

In particular, how are they going to transform the present shredded and impoverished remnants of Palestinian sovereignty, shockingly revealed in the clever map by Julien Boussac dubbed “Eastern Palestine Archipelago” (Atlas Du Monde Diplomatique, 2009), into the internationally recognized pre-1967 “green line” boundaries Hague says he supports?

And all this by September? “It’s a time frame that everybody has signed up to,” says Ashton, adding that a deal is still reachable in spite of the deadlock in the peace talks.

Abracadabra… Zzzz-zzzz… Just like that!

Hamas, which has a legitimate say in the future whether Hague and Ashton like it or not, and which feels Palestinian interests are not served by “negotiations” in the present unbalanced circumstances, must be watching bemused.

If any talking is to take place, it should first be disciplinary dressing-down from the United Nations to its rogue member, Israel.

February 17, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Three fishermen shot dead in northern Gaza

Ma’an – 17/02/2011

GAZA CITY — Three Palestinians were shot dead in the northern Gaza Strip on Wednesday, Israeli military officials informed Gaza authorities.

The three were said to have been killed near the evacuated Doget settlement, north of Beit Lahiya. A Palestinian official in Gaza said he was informed that the men were shot allegedly sneaking into Israel.

Medics were alerted and permitted by Israeli forces occupying the border region to enter the “no-go zone” to retrieve the bodies, spokesman of the higher committee of ambulance and emergency services Adham Abu Salmiya told Ma’an.

The same official told AFP that no weapons were found near the bodies of the men.

Beit Lahiya residents said they heard a helicopter flying and shots fired at approximately 2:15 a.m.

The retrieved bodies were transferred to the Kamal Odwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, where medics identified the slain as Jihad Fathi Khalaf, 20, Tal’at Ar-Ruwagh, 25, and Ashraf Eqtefan, 29.

Initial inquiries revealed that at least two of the men were fishermen. Relatives later confirmed that all three worked on the sea.

The Israeli military spokesperson’s office released a statement late Thursday morning, saying the military had “thwart[ed a] terror attempt.”

The statement said a “number of Palestinian militants approaching the security fence in the northern Gaza Strip,” were identified by soldiers occupying the area, adding that the men were apparently trying to plant explosives.

“Thwarting the attempt, the force fired at the militants, hitting three of them,” the statement continued.

Workers shot, injured

Two additional incidents, medics said Israeli forces fired on two workers from the cement factory in Gaza City, injuring both in the legs as they collected stone aggregates separately east of Gaza City on Thursday.

Medics said both were taken to the Ash-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City with moderate injuries.

An Israeli military official confirmed two incidents at 10 and noon respectively, when individuals approached the border area. Both were told to retreat from the 300-meter no-go zone, a spokesman said, and when they did not pull back warning shots were fired, then fire was directed at the legs of the workers.

February 17, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Greenspan at Brookings

By DEAN BAKER | CounterPunch | February 16, 2011

The Brookings Institution stands alongside Harvard, Yale and Princeton, among the nation’s elite intellectual institutions. This is why it so striking that it chose to invite former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan to give the keynote address at a forum on reforming the home mortgage finance system last week.

It would be difficult to imagine a more disastrous failure than Alan Greenspan. Tens of millions of people are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work altogether as a direct result of Greenspan’s incompetence. Millions of families are facing the loss of their homes. More than one-quarter of mortgage holders are underwater in their mortgages.

The huge baby boom cohorts saw most of their life savings disappear when the collapse of the bubble destroyed their home equity. They are now approaching retirement with almost nothing to rely upon other than their Social Security.

This is the direct result of Alan Greenspan’s incompetence as Fed chair. He either did not recognize the $8 trillion housing bubble or somehow did not think it was a big deal. This was monumental incompetence of the highest order.

The housing bubble was really hard to miss for anyone who can read a chart and knows arithmetic. For a hundred years nationwide house prices had just tracked the overall rate of inflation. Suddenly in the mid-90s, coinciding with the stock bubble, house prices began to substantially outpace the overall rate of inflation.

By 2002, house prices had already risen by more than 30 percentage points in excess of the overall rate of inflation. At the peak of the bubble in 2006 the inflation in house prices had exceeded the overall rate of inflation by more than 70 percentage points, creating more than $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth.

There was no remotely plausible explanation for this run-up based on the fundamentals of either the demand or supply side of the housing market. Population growth and household formation were much slower during the bubble years than in prior decades. Income growth had been healthy in the late 90s, but went in reverse in the 00s. On the supply side, the country was building homes at near-record rates, so supply constraints obviously could not explain the run-up in prices.

Anyone looking for an explanation in the fundamentals would have to explain why rents were going nowhere. The fact that the vacancy rate had already hit a record high as early as 2002 should have been another really big, bright warning sign that housing was in an unsustainable bubble.

If it was impossible for a competent economist to miss the housing bubble, it should also have been impossible for them to think it could deflate harmlessly. The bubbles in residential and non-residential construction led to enormous overbuilding in both sectors. The wealth effect associated with $8 trillion of transient housing bubble wealth was generating close to $500 billion in annual consumption.

This meant that the combined drop in construction and consumption demand from the collapse off the bubble was almost certainly going to be in excess of $1 trillion. Did Greenspan think he had something in his bag of tricks as Federal Reserve Board chairman that would allow him to quickly replace more than $1 trillion in annual demand?

Absent some new source of demand (which has not appeared), it was inevitable that the collapse of the bubble would lead to a prolonged period of high unemployment. This was all 100 percent predictable; but Greenspan did not predict it…

Incredibly, in spite of this disastrous performance as Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan is still being feted in elite circles. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the people who sit in these elite circles openly celebrated Mr. Greenspan as he drove the economy off a cliff. He was declared the “Maestro” by one of the country’s top reporters. At the annual meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the leading lights of the economics profession debated whether he was the greatest central banker of all time as he prepared to leave his post.

In other words, Greenspan may have ruined the lives of tens of millions of people and cost the lives of tens of thousands (yes, people die because of inept economic policy – they kill themselves, they don’t get health care that they need, and they die from alcoholism and despair), but he does not bear the blame alone. Most of the people who hold top positions in policy and academic circles share blame for disaster – refusing to do the simple analysis that would have allowed them to see this disaster coming.

The pain and suffering caused by Alan Greenspan’s incompetence vastly exceeds the harm that our worst enemies could even dream of inflicting on the United States. Yet, he can always count on a position of honor at the Brookings Institution. Heckuva job, Alan!

~

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy and False Profits: Recoverying From the Bubble Economy.

This column was originally published by The Guardian.

February 16, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Israel Launches New PR Campaign on North American Campuses: Faces of Israel

Connie Hackbarth | Alternative Information Center | February 16, 2011

A delegation of young Israelis will embark next week on a singular public relations campaign on North American campuses. Entitled Faces of Israel, the delegation includes Arabs and Jews, representatives of the LGBT community and Ethiopian immigrants who are meant to show the “real face” of Israeli society.

Yuli Edelstein, the Minister of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs and the initiator of Faces of Israel, said that “We believe this is the appropriate answer to the campaign of delegitimisation occurring against Israel throughout the world. This campaign will bring local students face to face with Israeli students just like them. The delegation will be divided into groups and go to various universities, where they will participate in panels and direct encounters on campus.”

According to Israel’s Artuz 7 news outlet, delegation members were “carefully selected with the goal of representing Israeli society as a colourful and diverse society which protects equality and human rights, and thus refute attempts to present Israel as an apartheid state.”

During events, a memory stick with information entitled “Invented in Israel” will be distributed to participants.

Although Minister Edelstein notes that “this is a new strategy that puts the human face of Israel in the front stage…through regular people from the grassroots,” Israeli attempts to whitewash its colonial polices and occupation of the Palestinian territory are not new. Israel’s Foreign Ministry doubled its embassies’ public relations budgets for 2011 has been working for several years now on professional public relations campaigns that present Israel as a liberal, innovative and hip society and vacation destination. The packaging of Tel Aviv as a gay-friendly city, for example, is an important component of this official reality distortion.

The actual “representativeness” of this delegation, members of which underwent 40 hours of training through the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, was even questioned by the settler-affiliated Arutz 7 media outlet. Arutz 7 noted that the delegation included no (Jewish) religious, orthodox or members who live in the West Bank settlements. In response, the Ministry noted “we found it appropriate to have other representatives” and that Minister Edelstein himself resides in Neve Daniel, a settlement near Bethlehem, and that he would be accompanying the delegation.

The Alternative Information Center (AIC) is still searching for details of the delegation’s public engagements in North American universities. What is known to date is that all delegation members will meet for a “main event” in New York on Sunday 6 March that will include presentations by Edelstein on the importance of fighting the campaign against Israel; Knesset Member Dalia Itzhik (Kadima) on women’s rights in Israel; Knesset Member Majallie Whbee (Kadima), a Druze-Palestinian on equal opportunities in Israel; and Malcolm Hoenlein, the Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organisations. There will also be “Zionist hip-hop” with the Israeli group Dag Nahash.

The Alternative Information Center calls on Palestinian Solidarity and other activists groups to mobilize against Faces of Israel as part of preparations for the Israel Apartheid Week in March.

February 16, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

Overcoming Israel’s attempts to discredit protest

Ismail Patel, The Electronic Intifada, 15 February 2011

In recent months, Israel’s tactics to discredit legitimate protestors have become increasingly Orwellian as it steps up its campaign against human rights activists within the country and abroad, especially in the United Kingdom.

Human rights groups in Israel will now face scrutiny following the formation of a government-approved parliamentary committee to investigate Israeli organizations which criticize Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Thus, instead of tackling legitimate human rights concerns, Israel seeks to delegitimize those leveling the charges, despite the masses of evidence to support their claims.

Israel is also promoting and consolidating the Zionist narrative in the UK, using intimidation and guilt against those challenging Israel’s occupation, human rights abuses and its expansionist aspirations.

Two leading Israeli organizations with close links to the government, the Reut Institute and the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, both warned recently that London was becoming a center for anti-Israel activity culminating, they claim, in a rise of anti-Semitism because British Muslim-led organizations are being given free rein.

Reut boasts on its website that is seeks “to provide real-time, long-term strategic decision-support to Israeli leaders and decision-makers,” hardly making it an independent observer. It published a report on London in November titled “Building a Political Firewall against the Assault on Israel’s Legitimacy,” which claimed that London is the “Mecca of Delegitimization” and a key player in all major recent “delegitimization” campaigns concerning Israel (download the full report [PDF]).

“Delegitimization” is the term coined by the Reut Institute last year to describe a whole variety of activities by Palestinian and solidarity activists who call for Israel to end its occupation, abide by international law and respect the human rights of all Palestinians wherever they are.

Reut’s report on London was followed by another from the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs which spared virtually no organization in London connected to the anti-war movement from the accusation of being “delegitimizers.”

Common to both of these reports was the labeling of British Muslim organizations as “Islamist,” drawing on their ancestral and religious links to imply they had ties with Iran, Hizballah and Hamas, and thus present an existential threat to the democratic West. By drawing such spurious links, Israel and its apologists hope to demonize British citizens, shore up political support for Israel and score easy political gains by appealing to Islamophobia and fear.

This spin has been quickly picked up by Israel’s acolytes in the UK media. On 29 December 2010, The Times reported the ludicrous and baseless accusations by the Israeli defense ministry that the London-based Palestine Return Centre was involved in “terror-related activities” and served as a front for Hamas (James Hider, “City condemned as ‘hub of hubs’“).

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph a few days earlier,
Andrew Gilligan bemoaned that the Charity Commission, the UK’s charity watchdog, has lost its bite when it concluded that it “found no evidence of irregular or improper use of the Charity’s funds” in reference to separate accusations made in the Telegraph against another British Charity — Muslim Aid.

Thus, by failing to follow Israel’s lead and implicate innocent charities like Muslim Aid in supporting terrorist networks in Palestine, Gilligan, rather like Israel, chose to demonize those who fail to toe the line. We should take pride in the fact that the Charities Commission acts independently, rather than succumbing to political pressure to withdraw charitable status.

While the fear of “Islamism” is being pumped in the veins of one arm of the nation, the other arm is being injected with the false idea that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism. That is a point contested by, among others, many British Jewish individuals and organizations who stand in solidarity with Palestinians in calling for an end to Israel’s occupation and other human rights abuses.

Resorting to accusing Israel’s critics of “anti-Semitism” is an old tactic that is being revived with new zeal in an attempt to intimidate into silence those calling for an end to Israel’s impunity and exceptionalism.

What Zionists fail to understand is that the Free Palestine movement has permeated across all sections of British society and religious affiliation is incidental. Israel’s divide-and-rule tactics have not succeeded in breaking the will of a brutalized Palestinian population, and they will not work against the solidarity movement in the UK either.

While continuing to build illegal colonies on Palestinian land; evicting Palestinians from Jerusalem; subjugating millions through routine, brutal violence and killing; and corraling Palestinians in elaborate systems of movement control, such as the illegal West Bank wall and the blockade of Gaza, Israel insists that it always be presented as peaceful, reasonable, humane, compassionate and magnanimous. These virtues are extolled and celebrated in Judaism, as in many other religions, but they are not ones that have ever been practiced by Israel toward Palestinians.

There is no doubt that at present Israel has the sympathy of the UK government. But the public is more and more aware of the realities and it is doubtful that the Zionist offensive can silence British people’s sense of justice and intimidate and blackmail us into thinking that by criticizing Israel’s practices and calling for justice for all, we are attacking Judaism.

The British sense of justice will overcome attempts by the Zionist lobby of equating anti-Semitism with illegal Zionist occupation and practices in West Bank and Gaza Strip. These tactics are intended to divide people from each other and to sow sectarianism and fear. We mustn’t allow them to succeed.

Ismail Patel is Chair of UK based NGO Friends of Al-Aqsa, and author of several books including Palestine: Beginner’s Guide and Medina to Jerusalem: Encounters with the Byzantine Empire.

February 15, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

TSA refusing to release body scanner safety reports

By Jonathon Benson | NaturalNews | February 14, 2011

Two months after lawmakers ordered the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to release safety reports about the levels of radiation being emitted by baggage X-ray machines, naked body scanners, and other airport security equipment, the agency has yet to make this information public. The reports, which remain in the hands of TSA officials, are allegedly being retained to protect “sensitive security or privacy-protected information.”

NaturalNews covered TSA’s refusal to release safety inspection reports back in December 2010 shortly after USA Today petitioned the agency to release them. TSA workers and travelers have continued to file numerous complaints about radiation exposure not only from the new machinery but also from faulty and poorly-maintained machinery. TSA responded by insisting the machines have all passed safety inspections, but it refused to provide any trace of evidence for this claim (http://www.naturalnews.com/030655_T…).

“The public has a right to know, and there isn’t something so sensitive that requires holding it back,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) who recently sponsored legislation to limit the use of full-body scanning machines.

TSA officials routinely insist that its scanning machines are all safe, and that no malfunctions have ever caused “an actual or potential additional radiation exposure.” But a 2008 report issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says that not only do TSA contractors routinely fail to properly inspect and maintain machinery, but malfunctioning machinery does indeed emit excess radiation, exposing workers and passengers to unknown levels of harm.

TSA also falsely insists that the electromagnetic wave versions of its naked body scanners are completely harmless, even though scientific tests have shown that the tetrahertz waves used in such machinery cause significant DNA damage.

February 14, 2011 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »