“Reset” and missile defence
Valentin Zorin | The Voice of Russia | October 9, 2010
There was cause for much optimism when President Obama made the first steps towards a ‘reset’ in US-Russian relations by renouncing plans by his predecessor, George Bush, to deploy American missiles in close proximity to the Russian borders on the territory of Poland and the Czech Republic.
And it cleared the way for settling other important problems in bilateral relations. Preparations for signing a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty got off the ground at last, and the no-easy talks on the treaty eventually resulted in an agreement which was signed by Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama in Prague in May this year.
But as it became clear shortly afterward, the issue is far from simple. At the end of September Bucharest said it was getting ready to sign an agreement on the deployment of an American military base on the territory of Romania. A similar base was to be deployed on the territory of Bulgaria. As it happens, Romania will have the bases instead of Poland, and Bulgaria instead of the Czech Republic. But a change of location makes no difference as far as the end result is concerned. Given the situation, the American moves cause as much concern as before.
As he commented on them, Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said: “Russia and the US have discussed the issue of missile defense at length and agreed that there would be no anti-missiles in Poland or the Czech Republic. And all of a sudden, we learn that the missiles are being moved to other European countries. So where is the ‘reset’?”
Among other questions which are brought up in connection with the missile defense program is how long the United States is going to drag its feet over ratifying the new START Treaty. Signed in May, the treaty was supposed to be ratified by the Senate by the middle of September. Now, as the first ten days of October are coming to a close, the opponents to the treaty are preventing the ratification from going ahead by linking it to missile defense. Senator Richard Lugar said a few days ago that the treaty should be supplemented with a special resolution stating that it imposes no restrictions on American plans to develop a missile defense system.
Mighty circles in the US have been doggedly pursuing a missile defense program ever since it was launched by President Ronald Reagan 25 years ago. And the intensity with which they are doing so stays unabated, despite substantial failures and losses. One the latest failures, which cost the US 120 million dollars, was reported recently, when an interceptor missile launched from an air base in Vandenberg, California, failed to hit a hypothetical target and exploded in mid-air.
Professor Richard Garwin, one of the founders of America’s hydrogen bomb, indicated as he spoke in the Senate recently that the American missile defense system in its current shape was useless.
Auditors from a Washington-based audit agency came to an equally disappointing conclusion. They had to admit that missile defense experts had failed to achieve the results they were paid for and that a system they had built was totally ineffective.
The sums allocated for the missile defense program were huge beyond description. Experts estimate that one trillion dollars has been spent on it by now and it will require billions more if continued.
This explains why the masterminds of American missile defense have been so persevering in pursuing it regardless of common sense. Billions of dollars earmarked for missile defense have not been invested into space research as it was promised but landed in the bank accounts of those who have turned it into a gold mine. These people have a lot of weight in present-day Washington. Whether the US policy makers will fall hostage to these mighty groups remains to be seen.
Bahrain-based Saudi-financed “Islamic” bank Arcapita doing rich business with Israel military
Ali Abunimah | October 12, 2010
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This blog reported on 9 October that American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) Board Member Marwan M. Atalla and his investment firm NEST U.S.A. Inc. are shareholders in Cirrus Design Corporation, an aircraft manufacturing firm which does millions in business with Israeli military contractors closely tied to the Israeli military establishment. (See “Board member of Ziad Asali’s ATFP does millions in business with Israeli military firm” )
As the earlier post explains, Cirrus has a long history of working with Israeli companies and recently chose an Israeli military contractor called TAT Technologies to supply $10 million worth of aircraft parts. TAT Technologies is run by Israeli military officers, including a former commander of Israeli occupation forces in southern Lebanon, and its factory is built on the land of the ethnically-cleansed Palestinian village of Yasur.
Since publishing that post, I have received new information from a former employee who is also a current minority shareholder at Cirrus. According to this individual Atalla was an active board member of Cirrus until 2001, but was forced to resign along with other independent board members when another investor, the First Islamic Investment Bank of Bahrain took a majority stake in Cirrus. Atalla and his firm NEST U.S.A. Inc. remain shareholders of Cirrus as of this time, according to NEST’s own website.
In 2005, the First Islamic Investment Bank of Bahrain changed its name to Arcapita. Arcapita is financed by investors in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and is well-connected to those countries’ ruling families.
The Arcapita website states on its current corporate investments page that it acquired a stake in “Cirrus Design Corporation” in 2001, but does not say how big the stake is. A 2007 report on aviation industry website AVweb, put Arcapita’s stake at a controlling 58 percent.
While the AVweb report mentions that Arcapita was seeking to divest from Cirrus, in fact it has become more deeply involved. An April 2009 press release from Cirrus stated that Arcapita had pumped even more money into the company during the global financial crisis.
As an Islamic investment bank, all of Arcapita’s investments are screened by its Shariah Supervisory Board which currently includes a religious scholar and former judge from the Supreme Court in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, as well as religious scholars from Pakistan and Bahrain. Such advisory boards are supposed to screen investments to make sure they comply with Islamic banking standards — typically avoiding interest, or investments in alcohol or pornography.
But for Arcapita, at least, there seems to be nothing un-Islamic about profiting from deals with the Israeli military establishment — the same military that has slaughtered more than nine thousand Muslims, Christians and others and injured and permanently maimed tens of thousands more in Palestine and Lebanon in the past decade alone in what numerous international investigations have termed war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Needless to say, Arcapita-controlled Cirrus’ business with the Israeli military establishment is a gross violation of the Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on Israel.
U.S. Threat to Attack Iran with Nukes is “Criminal”
By Sherwood Ross | Global Research | October 12, 2010
The U.S. today is threatening to attack Iran “under the completely bogus pretext” that it might have a nuclear weapon, a distinguished American international legal authority says.
When Obama administration officials, like those of the Bush regime before it, say “all options are on the table,” they are threatening nuclear war and that is prohibited by international law, says Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois at Champaign.
Not only has the International Atomic Energy Commission said this charge against Iran “is simply not true,” Boyle pointed out, but threatening Iran with nuclear war in itself constitutes an international crime.
“If we don’t act now, Obama and his people could very well set off a Third World War over Iran that has already been threatened publicly by (President George W.) Bush Jr.,” he asserted.
In a speech on nuclear deterrence to the 18th conference on “Direct Democracy” in Feldkirch, Austria, Boyle said it has been estimated an attack on Iran with tactical nuclear weapons by the U.S. and Israel could kill nearly 3-million people.
(Boyle charges the U.S. has already committed “acts of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and has authorized, armed, equipped, and supplied Israel to commit…outright genocide against Lebanon and Palestine.”)
Nuclear weapons and “nuclear deterrence” have “never been legitimate instruments of state policy but have always constituted instrumentalities of internationally lawless and criminal behavior,” Boyle said.
Thus, the governments of all the nuclear weapons states are “criminal” for threatening to exterminate humanity. Boyle named the U.S., Russia, France, Britain, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. He reminded that “If mass extermination of human beings is a crime, the threat to commit mass extermination is also a crime.”
“The whole (George W.) Bush Doctrine of preventive warfare, which is yet to be officially repealed by Obama now after 18 months, was made by the Nazi lawyers for the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, and it was rejected,” Boyle said.
He noted Article 2 of the UN Charter “prohibits both the threat and the use of force except in cases of legitimate self-defense” and the U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, “do not qualify under that definition.” He adds the U.S. today is engaged in “ongoing international criminal activity” for “planning, preparation, solicitation, and conspiracy to commit Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.”
What’s more, “the design, research, testing, production, manufacture, fabrication, transportation, deployment, installation, storing, stockpile, sale, and purchase and the threat to use nuclear weapons are criminal under well-recognized principles of international law,” Boyle said.
And the leaders of NATO states that go along with U.S. nuclear policies “are all accomplices as well,” Boyle said, noting that pressure is mounting within Germany for the removal of U.S. nuclear warheads and that public opinion in much of Europe favors the elimination of nuclear arsenals.
The expansion of NATO, Boyle says, has now drawn in “almost all of Europe” and that even Sweden, Austria, and Finland have basically abandoned their neutrality. “Even Ireland,” Boyle says, has been compelled to join the so-called Partnership For Peace and send troops to Afghanistan. “The only state in Europe still holding out is Switzerland,” Boyle says, and because it refuses to commit troops to the wars in the Middle East it has been subjected to much pressure by the U.S. “including an attack on its banking and financial system.”
The nonpartisan Arms Control Association of Washington, meanwhile, has published an article in the October issue of “Arms Control Today” calling for NATO ministers at their forthcoming October 14th session “to initiate a comprehensive review of outdated NATO nuclear policy” to “reduce the role and salience of nuclear weapons and support reductions of U.S. and Russian tactical nuclear bombs.”
Co-authors Oliver Meier and Paul Ingram point out that NATO’s 28 states “remain divided” over key issues, including “the future role of nuclear weapons in NATO’s defense posture.” What’s more, they say, in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands “there now exists broad parliamentary and popular support for a withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from their territories.”
In a related development, the Associated Press reported October 9, “From the 1950s’ Pentagon to today’s Obama administration, the United States has repeatedly pondered, planned and threatened use of nuclear weapons against North Korea, according to declassified and other U.S. government documents released in this 60th-anniversary year of the Korean War.”
“Just this past April,” AP writers Charles Hanley and Randy Herschaft said, “issuing a U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said “all options are on the table” for dealing with Pyongyang—meaning U.S. nuclear strikes are not ruled out.”
During the Korean War (1950-53), U.S. Air Force bombers flew nuclear rehearsal runs over North Korea’s capital and on August 20, 1953, after the fighting ended, the Strategic Air Command sent Air Force headquarters a plan for “an air atomic offensive against China, Manchuria, and North Korea” if the Communists resumed hostilities. Called OpPlan 8-53, it advocated use of “large numbers of atomic weapons.
President Jimmy Carter scaled back the U.S. nuclear arsenal in South Korea and its complete withdrawal was announced in 1991, “although the North Koreans at times accuse the U.S. of maintaining a secret nuclear stockpile,” AP says. Korea specialists generally accept Pyongyang’s stated rationale that it sought its own bomb for defensive reasons in response to U.S. positioning of nuclear weapons in South Korea, AP reported.
Professor Boyle is the author of “The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence” and “Destroying World Order,” both published by Clarity Press.
Sherwood Ross is director of the Anti-War News Service, of Coral Gables, Florida. To comment on this article or contribute to the news service, reach him at Sherwoodross10@gmail.com. Ross worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and contributed weekly columns for many years to several wire services.
British aid worker killed by Americans, not by Afghan “suicide bomber”
Poseidon’s Blog | October 12, 2010
According to the original story, British aid worker Linda Norgrove was killed by one of her Afghan captors, who detonated an explosive vest seconds before US forces got to her in a bungled rescue attempt. For example, the BBC reported on October 10:
US troops in Afghanistan were seconds from rescuing a UK hostage when she was killed by a vest bomb held or worn by a kidnapper, the BBC understands.
They reached the building where Linda Norgrove, 36, was held and were “very, very close” to her, the BBC was told.
It is understood tribal elders negotiating her release asked Nato not to intervene so they had more time.
David Cameron has said it was right for the special forces to try to rescue the aid worker, from Lewis, Western Isles.
The prime minister said: “Decisions on operations to free hostages are always difficult, but where a British life is in such danger, and where we and our allies can act, I believe it is right to try.”
‘Grave danger’
BBC correspondent Nicholas Witchell said officials had confirmed Ms Norgrove was killed by an explosion, almost certainly a suicide vest, detonated by one of her captors.
Source
So David Cameron thinks “it was right”, rather like Tony Blair thinks “it was right” to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dead Muslims, thousands of troops dead and tens of thousands injured, and a cost to the U.S. alone of well over a trillion dollars when all is taken into account. What would be “right”, would be to get the $&!% out of there, and quit screwing around with other people’s countries.
It subsequently emerged that the “explosive vest” story was a lie, eagerly propagated by a compliant media.
The death of British aid worker Linda Norgrove was caught on helmet-mounted cameras worn by the officers who mistakenly killed her with a grenade, it has emerged.
It comes as Miss Norgrove’s parents last night demanded to know how the elite U.S. troops sent in to rescue her apparently ended up killing their daughter in the botched Afghanistan rescue bid.
The U.S. yesterday issued an extraordinary apology to Britain over the doomed mission to free the aid worker from the clutches of the Taliban.
American officials initially claimed Miss Norgrove had been killed when one of her captors detonated a suicide vest. But a review of footage taken by helmet cameras raised suspicions that in fact, it was a U.S. grenade which killed Miss Norgrove.
An ashen-faced David Cameron yesterday revealed the tragedy a few hours after General David Petraeus, the American commander of the Nato-led force in Afghanistan, telephoned Downing Street to express ‘deep regret’ about the operation.
But last night urgent questions were already being raised about the true independence of an inquiry into 36-year-old Miss Norgrove’s killing.
It had been billed as a joint U.S.-UK investigation, but will be run by U.S. Central Command ‘in close co-operation with UK authorities’.
Which is rather like having Henry Kissinger or Philip Zelikow in charge of the 9/11 Commission.
Military sources raised particular concern about the training the team had for hostage situations.
There were also questions over why they used lethal fragmentation grenades in a rescue bid – and why they used helicopters which would be heard and alert the gunmen.
[…]
‘The last thing we wanted was for her to be passed into the hands of Al Qaeda.
What “Al Qaeda”, this “Al Qaeda”? Or this guy, whose grandfather was on the board of directors of the ADL?
Despite the fierce Taliban resistance, the Seals managed to fight their way towards the Miss Norgrove’s building. And then, with six Taliban gunmen already dead, one of the Seals threw a grenade through the door.
When the Seals entered the room, they found Linda Norgrove. She was still alive, but had terrible injuries caused by the grenade blast.
To cries of ‘medic! medic!’, doctors rushed to the scene. But it was too late. She succumbed to her injuries as she was being airlifted to hospital – the third British civilian to die in Afghanistan in the last three months.
Yet, inexplicably, the U.S. and Nato both claimed that she had died at the hands of a suicide bomber, who had apparently detonated his vest as he stood beside her when the Seals were closing in.
The official statement released on Saturday by Nato, was unequivocal about the cause of death: the blast that killed Miss Norgrove occurred ‘seconds before rescuers arrived. [U.S. special forces] had entered the compound … [but] an insurgent detonated an explosive device that was attached to his person. He was in close enough proximity to Miss Norgrove. She was wounded.’
That statement, we now know, was inaccurate. For three days, the special forces failed to reveal the fact that one of them had apparently thrown a grenade that exploded close to where she was being held, bursting into razor-sharp steel shrapnel.
It was only yesterday morning when their commanding officer reviewed audio and video footage from their helmet cameras that he ‘saw an arm throw a hand grenade’ and confronted his troops.
[…]
The report that Miss Norgrove had been ‘killed by an insurgent’ who had detonated his suicide vest as the Seals closed in, was officially announced within hours of the operation taken place. The same information was relayed to Miss Norgrove’s parents – John, 60, a retired civil engineer, and her 62-year-old mother, Lorna.
But in the early hours of yesterday morning, David Petraeus, the U.S. chief of coalition forces in Afghanistan, made a personal call to Downing Street, leaving a message for Mr Cameron to phone him immediately. He had grim news. In military jargon, it was clearly a friendly fire killing.
While shocked, Mr Cameron does not believe the Americans lied. ‘It was wrong information in the fog of war,’ said a source. ‘General Petraeus cleared up the facts as soon as they became clear. It is a tragedy, but tragedies can happen.’
Source
The Tritium Deficit
Future Supply of Tritium Explosive Puts US Nuclear Arsenal in Doubt
By ROBERT ALVAREZ | CounterPunch | October 12, 2010
In a recent report to the U.S. House Armed Services Committee, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) in the Energy department is “unable to overcome technical challenges” to producing tritium (H3) in a commercial power reactor for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. As a result the ability to provide new supplies of this radioactive isotope used to enhance the explosive power of nuclear weapons “is in doubt.”
Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen and is an important part of any modern nuclear arsenal. It is why thermonuclear weapons are known as “H-bombs.” Tritium is used in modern nuclear weapons to boost the explosive power of plutonium, which in turn, creates enough heat to cause hydrogen atoms to fuse together. This releases a tremendous amount of destructive energy, in the same process that fuels the sun and stars.
Because of its half-life of 12.3 years, tritium has to be periodically replenished in weapons. From 1954 to 1988, tritium was produced in government reactors, which were closed for safety reasons. In 1993, GAO concluded that tritium supplies from nuclear arms reductions were adequate to meet warhead needs until 2012. After that year, GAO concluded that a new tritium production capability would be needed.
In response, the Department of Energy decided in the late 1990’s to produce new supplies in a commercial power reactor, using new tritium-producing burnable absorber rods (TBARs). They contain lithium-aluminate pellets lined with zirconium, and are clad into long pencil-shaped, stainless steel rods. Tritium is produced when the atoms of lithium-6 absorbs neutrons in the reactor core.
However, the rods cannot fully contain the tritium, which is permeating into the reactor cooling system, approaching safety limits set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). To meet projected tritium requirements, additional TVA reactors may be required. NNSA has not yet coordinated this with the NRC, which must approve any such reactor changes.
A reserve stockpile of tritium has yet to be tapped and its size remains classified. Nor is it clear how much more tritium is expected to come from the pending START II arms reduction agreement with Russia, now before the U.S. Senate. Nonetheless, GAO remains concerned. “If NNSA takes longer than expected to increase tritium production, even reserve quantities may be insufficient to meet requirements for an extended period of time.”
Tritium production alternatives include building a new government production reactor or the development of linear accelerators. Both are likely to cost billions of dollars and take several years to bring on line.
However, expanding the production of tritium for nuclear weapons in commercial nuclear power plants further undermines the long-standing barrier between military and civilian nuclear energy applications – a key element of U.S. nuclear non-proliferation policy.
This is a situation where public debate and greater transparency by the U.S. nuclear weapons program is sorely needed.
Robert Alvarez, an Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar, served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary from 1993 to 1999. www.ips-dc.org
In the jungles of northern Okinawa, protests against planned US helipads reach a crisis point
By Jon Mitchell · IPS · October 5, 2010
The residents of Takae, a small village in the hills of northern Okinawa, are no strangers to the American military. Since 1957, they’ve been living next to the world’s largest jungle warfare training center – and many of them are old enough to remember the days when the U.S. Marine Corps hired locals to dress up as Vietcong for its war games.
The 1996 Special Action Committee on Okinawa was supposed to reduce the U.S. presence in the area. Convened to quell public fury over the rape of a 12-year old girl, it pledged to return large swathes of military land to Okinawan residents – including over half of the jungle training center. As the months passed, however, the promise failed to materialize. Even when a Marine helicopter crashed near Takae’s elementary school in 1999, the daily bombing runs and roof-high helicopter sorties continued unabated.
Then, in 2006, the U.S. military made an announcement. Before returning the territory, it first wanted to build six new helipads on the land it was retaining on the outskirts of the village. The residents repeatedly lodged complaints with the prefectural and national governments, but they were ignored. In 2007, construction crews from the Okinawa Defense Bureau arrived to start laying the foundations for the 250-foot helipads. Takae’s villagers were waiting for them. They linked arms to block the gates to the worksite, they surrounded the trucks and appealed to the builders to stop their work. When they refused to listen, the protesters sat in the way of their heavy machinery. But the crews continued to unload bags of cement over their heads. Only when the police arrived did construction stop out of concern for public safety.
Since that day, over 10,000 locals, mainland Japanese, and foreign nationals have participated in a non-stop sit-in outside the planned helipad sites. So far, they’ve managed to thwart any further construction attempts. At small marquee tents, the villagers greet visitors with cups of tea and talk them through their campaign, highlighting their message with hand-written leaflets and water-stained maps.
“We’re just ordinary people wanting to lead ordinary lives,” explains Takae resident, Isa Ikuko. In a quiet voice almost drowned out by the click and whir of late summer insects, she talks of the area’s 180 species of endangered wildlife and her pride in its broccoli-shaped trees, the nearby rivers that supply the island with most of its drinking water, and the recent disclosure that the U.S. military tested Agent Orange here in the 1960s. “But what particularly scares me is the Marine Corps plan to bring in the Ospreys,” says Isa, holding up a U.S. military image of the accident-prone aircraft flying over a river suspiciously similar to one near the village.
Equally frightening are the recent tactics deployed by the Tokyo government. In November 2008, it filed an injunction against 15 of the protesters, accusing them of obstructing traffic in the area. Hoping that the three-hour road trips to the capital’s courthouse would wear down the villagers’ resolve, it also included an 8-year old child on the roster of defendants to intimidate other potential participants. The ploy backfired and the ensuing public outcry forced prosecutors to drop 13 of the cases. Two still remain, though, and with the next hearing scheduled for later in the year, a dangerous precedent is at stake. If the government wins, it will open the door for suits against similar protests – including in nearby Henoko bay where for the past six-and-a-half years, sit-in protesters have successfully prevented construction of an on-sea air base.
As long as the cases meander through the courts, the Okinawa Defense Bureau crews stay away from Takae. But with verdicts due soon, Isa and her fellow protesters are steeling themselves for the showdown sure to come to this little-known corner of northern Okinawa.
US to fund sale of F-35 jets to Israel
Press TV – October 8, 2010
Israel has signed a contract to ‘purchase’ 20 US-built and -funded F-35 stealth fighter jets, a deal the Tel Aviv regime boasts as “an event of great strategic and historic significance.”
Tel Aviv’s Defense Ministry Director General Udi Shani signed the agreement, worth nearly $3 billion, during a ceremony in New York on Thursday, Israeli daily Haaretz reports, noting that “the entire deal will be funded by the American military.”
According to the deal, Israel will receive the attack aircraft between 2015 and 2017, at a price of $96 million per plane, together with simulators and spare parts, with a total price tag of $2.75 billion. The deal also grants the Israeli regime the option of ordering 75 more jets.
“This is a significant day for maintaining Israel’s military superiority in the region, which will help us cope with challenges both near and far,” Shani said, quoted by the Israeli-based Ynet news website, after a signing ceremony.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also hailed the so-called ‘purchase’, saying it would significantly strengthen Israel’s military.
Israeli Knesset (parliament) and security establishment also gave their approval for the agreement despite “opposition” from a number of senior defense officials over the “high cost” of the deal.
The signing comes less than a month after Washington announced plans to sell Saudi Arabia 60 billion dollars’ worth of weapons and hardware, including 84 F-15 fighters.
US officials, ordinarily, obtain approval by the powerful Israeli lobby in Washington before signing any weapons deals with any Arab country. Despite apparent Israeli protests, all US arms sales to Arab nations are, in fact, preapproved by the Israelis.
Israel Threatens Holocaust in Damascus
Israel Releases 1973 War Minutes To Send Syria, Hezbollah, “Strong Warning”
Al-Manar – 07/10/2010
The Israeli intelligence Website Debkafile quoted “military and intelligence sources” as saying that PM Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Ehud Barak have decided to release the minutes of the deliberations on an air blitz against Damascus – held in Jerusalem before and during the 1973 war – “as a strong warning” to Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“Then, a decision to take out Damascus to halt the Syrian offensive was overruled. This time could be different: Bashar Assad regime’s own centers of power could be at risk if Syria and Hizballah go through with their plan to overpower Beirut and topple Saad Hariri’s sovereign government,” the sources told Debkafile.
The Website said that in the hours leading up to Oct. 6, 1973, Lt. Gen. David Elazar told PM Golda Meir that the Israeli forces can wipe out the entire Syrian air force by noon that day, and that they need another 30 hours to destroy Syrian missiles.
“Then, if they go on the offensive at 5 pm, our air force will be free to strike the Syrian army. To me, this operational option is attractive.” Three days later, on Oct. 9, catastrophe stared Israel in the face: The IDF was in a bad way and taking casualties in the realm of hundreds dead and thousands injured; their defense lines in Sinai and the Golan had fallen and there was nothing in the way of the Syrian army going all the way to the Sea of Galilee and Tiberias.
In a closed meeting with Golda Meir, the iconic defense minister Moshe Dayan asked for permission to bomb Damascus. “Inside the city?” she asked. “Inside the city and its environs,” he replied. “We have to break the Syrians,” Dayan explained that he proposed to strike the Syrian General Command and infrastructure in Damascus. “We’ve done enough going around the fields (a reference to targets outside the Syrian capital). There are no more key targets left. Damascus is the only one. We can’t promise the population won’t be hurt,” Debkafile reported.
It added that “Golda’s permission was withheld.”
The Israeli military and intelligence sources told Debkafile that the decision to release the documents and the section relating to Syria was taken in Jerusalem “after the Obama administration failed to prevent the two-day state visit to Lebanon by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad taking place on Oct. 13.”
According to the Israeli site, the message “goes beyond uncovering secret operational and intelligence decision-making and is unusually wide-ranging.”
Reasoning Against Peace
Too Heavy a Price for Israeli Elites?
By JONATHAN COOK | Counterpunch | September 28, 2010
With the resumption of settlement construction in the West Bank yesterday, Israel’s powerful settler movement hopes that it has scuttled peace talks with the Palestinians.
It would be misleading, however, to assume that the only major obstacle to the success of the negotiations is the right-wing political ideology the settler movement represents. Equally important are deeply entrenched economic interests shared across Israeli society.
These interests took root more than six decades ago with Israel’s establishment and have flourished at an ever-accelerating pace since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the 1967 war.
Even many Israeli Jews living within the recognised borders of Israel privately acknowledge that they are the beneficiaries of the seizure of another people’s lands, homes, businesses and bank accounts in 1948. Most Israelis profit directly from the continuing dispossession of millions of Palestinian refugees.
Israeli officials assume that the international community will bear the burden of restitution for the refugees. The problem for Israel’s Jewish population is that the refugees now living in exile were not the only ones dispossessed.
The fifth of Israel’s citizens who are Palestinian but survived the expulsions of 1948 found themselves either transformed into internally displaced people or the victims of a later land-nationalisation programme that stripped them of their ancestral property.
Even if Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, signed away the rights of the refugees, he would have no power to do the same for Israel’s Palestinian citizens, the so-called Israeli Arabs. Peace, as many Israelis understand, would open a Pandora’s box of historic land claims from Palestinian citizens at the expense of Israel’s Jewish citizens.
But the threat to the economic privileges of Israeli Jews would not end with a reckoning over the injustices caused by the state’s creation. The occupation of the Palestinian territories after 1967 spawned many other powerful economic interests opposed to peace.
The most visible constituency are the settlers, who have benefited hugely from government subsidies and tax breaks designed to encourage Israelis to relocate to the West Bank. Peace Now estimates that such benefits alone are worth more than $550 million a year.
Far from being a fringe element, the half a million settlers constitute nearly a tenth of Israel’s Jewish population and include such prominent figures as foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman.
Hundreds of businesses serving the settlers are booming in the 60 per cent of the West Bank, the so-called Area C, that falls under Israel’s full control. The real estate and construction industries, in particular, benefit from cut-price land — and increased profits — made available by theft from Palestinian owners.
Other businesses, meanwhile, have moved into Israel’s West Bank industrial zones, benefiting from cheap Palestinian labour and from discounted land, tax perks and lax enforcement of environmental protections.
Much of the tourism industry also depends on Israel’s hold over the holy sites located in occupied East Jerusalem.
This web of interests depends on what Akiva Eldar, of the Haaretz newspaper, terms “land-laundering” overseen by government ministries, state institutions and Zionist organisations. These murky transactions create ample opportunities for corruption that have become a staple for Israel’s rich and powerful, including, it seems, its prime ministers.
But the benefits of occupation are not restricted to the civilian population. The most potent pressure group in Israel — the military — has much to lose from a peace agreement, too.
The ranks of Israel’s career soldiers, and associated security services such as the Shin Bet secret police, have ballooned during the occupation.
The demands of controlling another people around the clock justifies huge budgets, the latest weaponry (much of it paid for by the United States) and the creation of a powerful class of military bureaucrat.
While teenage conscripts do the dangerous jobs, the army’s senior ranks retire in their early forties on full pensions, with lengthy second careers ahead in business or politics. Many also go on to profit from the burgeoning “homeland security” industries in which Israel excels. Small specialist companies led by former generals offer a home to retired soldiers drawing on years of experience running the occupation.
Those who spent their service in the West Bank and Gaza Strip quickly learn how to apply and refine new technologies for surveillance, crowd control and urban warfare that find ready markets overseas. In 2006 Israel’s defence exports reached $3.4bn, making the country the fourth largest arms dealer in the world.
These groups fear that a peace agreement and Palestinian statehood would turn Israel overnight into an insignificant Middle Eastern state, one that would soon be starved of its enormous US subsidies. In addition, Israel would be forced to right a historic wrong and redirect the region’s plundered resources, including its land and water, back to Palestinians, depriving Jews of their established entitlements.
A cost-benefit calculus suggests to most Israeli Jews — including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — that a real solution to their conflict with the Palestinians might come at too heavy a price to their own pockets.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest book is “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press). His website is www.jkcook.net.
Our Next Wars: Yemen and Somalia
By Philip Giraldi – The American Conservative – October, 2010 Issue
There appear to be some good business opportunities in Yemen, but they may not be what they seem. Yemen is the poorest Arab nation, and one of the poorest countries in the world, with an estimated annual per capita income of $1,061. It is running out of water, and production from its few oil fields is declining. Apart from that, it produces nothing and is increasingly becoming a center for drug trafficking. It is also corrupt, ranking 164th on Transparency International’s 2009 list, just ahead of Cambodia and the Central African Republic. It is a country that is remarkably devoid of resources or of a developed middle class of consumers, and it is best known for its ongoing multidimensional civil war, pitting the central government against various tribal groups. In spite of all that, there has been a surge in investment in the country by a number of small American companies — all the more remarkable as the U.S. economy itself has been in recession. A similar pattern is observable in Kenya, with an annual income of $912 and ranked just ahead of Yemen at 146th for corruption, and in Ethiopia, with an income of $390 per capita and coming in at 120 for corruption.
So what do these countries have in common? They are frontline states in the burgeoning but still secret phase three of the Global War on Terror being planned by the Pentagon and spy agencies with the concurrence of the Barack Obama White House. Those who thought there might be some kind of peace dividend with the Democrats holding the presidency can bid those thoughts goodbye. The administration is clearly thinking beyond Afghanistan (and even Iran), anticipating the next battlefronts in Yemen and Somalia. It is assiduously gathering resources to enter the fray, including setting up business fronts that can be used by covert operatives.
Why go through the subterfuge? First there is the American side of the story. Given the shrinking public support for Afghanistan, the White House does not want to telegraph that it is planning escalation into yet another war or even two wars, depending on how you count them. And then there are the concerns of the always shaky Yemeni government. Yemen, as part of the Arabian Peninsula regarded as sacred soil to Muslims, is extremely sensitive to the presence of foreign soldiers in uniform, an issue that has been exploited by al-Qaeda and other militant groups in neighboring Saudi Arabia. So the solution is to create an infrastructure of ostensibly private-sector enterprises that can serve as mechanisms for having American special ops soldiers and intelligence officers inside the country to gather information and assist the local government without appearing to do so. For the intelligence officers involved, this is called, not surprisingly, business cover. It is the sort of cover Valerie Plame used against possible nuclear-proliferation targets. Business cover is expensive to set up and maintain and the officers who work under it know that they will not have the protection of diplomatic immunity if they are caught in flagrante, though it is to be assumed that there is an understanding with the local governments that intelligence and other special-status personnel operating as civilians will be protected insofar as possible. What makes it all exceedingly tricky is the fact that the American intelligence agencies normally do not reveal all of their assets to the locals, even in those cases where the government supports the effort. The potential for an embarrassing incident is very high.
In Kenya and Ethiopia, the U.S. is similarly disinclined to have too heavy a footprint, as African Union willingness to persevere in Somalia is decidedly limited and could vanish altogether if it were seen as an American operation. The U.S. military’s African command, or AFRICOM, is actually located in Stuttgart, Germany, but its principal operational component is located at the large French military base Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. The CIA runs its drone operations targeting Somalia and Yemen out of that same location and has been using its assets on the ground in those countries to help direct predator strikes against suspected terrorist targets. CIA and special ops soldiers have been busy placing sensors and electronic surveillance devices throughout the Horn of Africa and in Yemen to permit greatly expanded operations. Both CIA and Army units in Djibouti have recently been beefed up in expectation that fighting will intensify in 2011.
And what is the nature of the threat justifying major military and intelligence operations in two new countries? Well, according to the State Department’s own recently issued report on global terrorism, the only terrorist incident originating in Yemen that directly threatened U.S. interests was the unsuccessful Nigerian underwear bomber in December, an attack that was carried out in retaliation for a deadly CIA drone strike shortly before. And there have been allegations that U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi might have influenced Major Malik Nadal Hasan’s shooting rampage at Fort Hood last November. Apart from that, terrorism in Yemen is internally directed with some spillover against neighbor Saudi Arabia. In Somalia, al-Shabaab, which the State Department describes as “a disparate group of armed militias, many of whom do not adhere to the ideology of the group’s leaders,” is the target of Washington’s ire. Foggy Bottom concedes that the group is linked to al-Qaeda only by “mutually supportive rhetoric.” It has not targeted the United States at all, though some government officials have expressed concerns that Somali-Americans who travel back to their country of birth to join al-Shabaab might return to the U.S. to commit terrorist acts.
So we are again talking of secret wars conducted in places where we do not understand the local issues or players very well, all part of a massive overreaction directed against low-level troublemakers who do not actually pose any serious threat against the United States. Where it will all lead is anyone’s guess, but it should be noted that the pattern of new terrorism emerging as the response to misdirected and heavy-handed American intervention has been repeated over and over again during the past ten years.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.
Israel blasts call for denuclearization
Press TV – September 21, 2010
The Israeli nuclear agency has once again criticized efforts by Arab countries to push Tel Aviv into becoming a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
In a speech delivered on Tuesday, Israeli Atomic Energy Organization Director General Shaul Chorev blasted what he called “continuous ill-motivated efforts to single out and to condemn” Israel.
The Israeli official’s reaction came in response to a non-binding resolution, which urges Israel to join a global anti-nuclear arms treaty.
Arab states introduced the resolution at this week’s annual assembly of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The “proposed resolution is incompatible with basic principles and norms of international law,” Reuters quoted Chorev as saying in his address to the IAEA gathering.
As a staunch supporter of Tel Aviv, Washington has warned Arab countries to withdraw the draft resolution, saying it will jeopardize direct talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.
The UN nuclear watchdog has so far refused to ratify any resolutions to condemn Israel’s nuclear activities. This is while Israel is widely believed to be the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East.
IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano recently reported to the agency’s Board of Governors about the Israeli nuclear program, saying that Tel Aviv was restricting the agency from examining its nuclear potentials.
The report called on Israel to join the NPT and “place all its nuclear facilities under comprehensive IAEA safeguards,” with no enforcement measure.
