‘Greece being forced to buy arms’
Press TV – May 8, 2010
A leading European parliamentarian has accused France and Germany of forcing Greece to buy billions of euros in arms in exchange for their bailout money.
France and Germany, while publicly urging Greece to make harsh public spending cuts, bullied its government to confirm billions of euros in arms deals, Franco-German lawmaker Daniel Cohn-Bendit alleged on Friday.
The accusation drew a stern denial from the French government.
Cohn-Bendit said he had met last week in Athens with Papandreou, a long-time friend of his, and accused German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy of blackmailing the Greek leader.
Cohn-Bendit accused France and Germany of making their contributions to an IMF-led rescue package for the debt-ridden Greek economy contingent on Athens honoring massive arms deals signed by Papandreou’s predecessor.
“Mr. Fillon and Mr. Sarkozy told Mr. Papandreou: ‘We’re going to raise the money to help you, but you are going to have to continue to pay the arms contracts that we have with you,'” Cohn-Bendit said.
On Friday, eurozone leaders approved a 110-billion-euro Greek aid package in an emergency summit in Brussels. The meeting was held in an effort to restore confidence in the euro after the Greek crisis rattled financial markets worldwide.
What I learned in Afghanistan – About the United States
By Dana Visalli | May 6, 2010
I was surprised on my recent trip to Afghanistan that I learned so much…about the United States. I was in Afghanistan for two weeks in March of this year, meeting with a large number of Afghans working in humanitarian endeavors – the principal of a girls’ school, the director of a school for street children, the Afghan Human Rights Commission, a group working on environmental issues. The one thing that all of these groups that we met with had in common was, they were penniless. They all survived on rather tenuous donations made by philanthropic foundations in Europe.
I had read that the United States had spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan since the invasion and occupation of that country ten years ago, so I naturally became curious where this tremendous quantity of money and resources had gone. Many Americans had said to me that we were in Afghanistan “to help Afghan women,” and yet we were told by the director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and we read in the recent UN report titled “Silence is Violence,” that the situation for women there was growing more violent and oppressive each year. So I decide to do some research.
95% of the $300 billion that the U.S. has spent on its Afghanistan operation since we invaded the country in 2001 has gone to our military operations there. Several reports indicate that it costs one million dollars to keep one American soldier in that country for one year. We will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, which will cost a neat $100 billion a year.
US soldiers in Afghanistan spend almost all of their time on one of our 300 bases in that country, so there is nothing they can do to help the Afghan people, whose physical infrastructure has been destroyed by the “30-year war” there, and who are themselves mostly jobless in a society in which there is almost no economy and no work.
Some effort is made to see that the remaining 5% of the $300 billion spent to date in Afghanistan does help Afghan society, but there is so much corruption and general lawlessness that the endeavor is largely futile. We were told by a female member of the Afghan parliament of one symbolic incident in which a container of medical equipment that was purchased in the US with US government funds for a clinic in Ghawr province, west of Kabul. It was shipped from the US, but by the time it arrived in Ghawr it was just an empty shell; all the equipment had been pilfered along the way.
Violence against women is increasing in Afghanistan at the present time, not decreasing. The Director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission told us of a recent case in which a ten-year-old girl was picked up by an Afghan Army commander in his military vehicle, taken to the nearby base and raped. He brought her back to her home semiconscious and bleeding, after conveying to her that if she told what had happened he would kill her entire family. The human rights commissioner ended the tale by saying to us the he could tell us “a thousand stories like this.” There has been a rapid rise in the number of self-immolations – women burning themselves to death – in Afghanistan in the past three years, to escape the violence that pervades many women’s lives – under the nine-year US occupation.
Armed conflict and insecurity, along with criminality and lawlessness, are on the rise in Afghanistan. In this respect, the country mirrors experience elsewhere which indicates a near universal co-relation between heightened conflict, insecurity, and violence against women.
Once one understands that the US military presence in Afghanistan is not actually helping the Afghan people, the question of the effectiveness or goodwill of other major US military interventions in recent history arises. In Vietnam, for example, the country had been a colony of France for the 80 years prior to WW II, at which point the Japanese invaded and took over. When the Japanese surrendered, the Vietnamese declared their independence, on September 2, 1945. In their preamble they directly quoted the US Declaration of Independence (“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness….”).
The United States responded first by supporting the French in their efforts to recapture their lost colony, and when that failed, the US dropped 10 million tons of bombs on Vietnam – more than were dropped in all of World War II – sprayed 29 million gallons of the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange on the country, and dropped 400,000 tons of napalm, killing a total 3.4 million people. This is an appreciable level of savagery, and it would be reasonable to ask why the United States responded in this way to the Vietnamese simply declaring their inalienable rights.
There was a sideshow to the Vietnam war, and that is that the United States conducted massive bombing campaigns against Vietnam’s two western neighbors, Laos and Cambodia. From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped more than two million tons of ordnance over Laos in a operation consisting of 580,000 bombing missions – equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. This unprecedented, secret bombing campaign was conducted without authorization from the US Congress and without the knowledge of the American people.
The ten-year bombing exercise killed an estimated 1 million Laotians. Despite questions surrounding the legality of the bombings and the large toll of innocent lives that were taken, the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs at the time, Alexis Johnson, stated, “The Laos operation is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there . . . is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective.”
One Laotian female refugee recalled the years of bombing in this way: “Our lives became like those of animals desperately trying to escape their hunters . . . Human beings, whose parents brought them into the world and carefully raised them with overflowing love despite so many difficulties, these human beings would die from a single blast as explosions burst, lying still without moving again at all. And who then thinks of the blood, flesh, sweat and strength of their parents, and who will have charity and pity for them? In reality, whatever happens, it is only the innocent who suffer.”
In Cambodia, the United States was concerned that the North Vietnamese might have established a military base in the country. In response, The US dropped three million tons of ordnance in 230,000 sorties on 113,000 sites between 1964 and 1975. 10% of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8000 sites having no target listed at all. About a million Cambodians were killed (there was no one counting), and the destruction to society wrought by the indiscriminate, long-term destruction is widely thought to have given rise to the Khmer Rouge, who proceeded, in their hatred for all things Western, to kill another 2 million people.
Four days after Vietnam declared its independence on September 2, 1945, “Southern Korea” also declared independence (on September 6), with a primary goal of reuniting the country – which had been split into north and south by the United States only seven months before. Two days later, on September 8, 1945, the US military arrived with the first of 72,000 troops, dissolved the newly formed South Korean government, and flew in their own chosen leader, Syngman Rhee, who had spent the previous 40 years in Washington D.C. There was considerable opposition to the US control of the country, so much that 250,000 and 500,000 people were killed between 1945 and 1950 resisting the American occupation, before the actual Korean War even started.
The Korean War, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, was an asymmetrical war, in which the highly industrialized and mechanized US pulverized the comparatively primitive North Korean nation. One third of the population of North Korea was killed in the war, a total of three million people (along with one million Chinese and 58,000 Americans). Every city, every sizable town, every factory, every bridge, every road in North Korea was destroyed. General Curtis LeMay remarked at one point that the US had “turned every city into rubble,” and now was returning to “turn the rubble into dust.” A British reporter described one of the thousands of obliterated villages as “a low, wide mound of violet ashes.” General William Dean, who was captured after the battle of Taejon in July 1950 and taken to the North, later said that most of the towns and villages he saw were just “rubble or snowy open spaces.”
More napalm was dropped on Korea than on Vietnam, 600,000 tons compared to 400,000 tons in Vietnam. One report notes that, “By late August, 1950, B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North. Much of it was pure napalm. Vietnam veteran Brian Wilson asks in this regard, “What it is like to pulverize ancient cultures into small pebbles, and not feel anything?”
In Iraq, Saddam Hussein came to power through a U.S.-CIA engineered coup in 1966 that overthrew the socialist government and installed Saddam’s Baath Party. Later conflict with Saddam let to the first and second Gulf Wars, and to thirteen years of severe U.S.-imposed economic sanctions on Iraq between the two wars, which taken together completely obliterated the Iraqi economy. An estimated one million people were killed in the two Gulf wars, and the United Nations estimates that the economic sanctions, in combination with the destruction of the social and economic infrastructure in the First Gulf War, killed another million Iraqis. Today both the economy and the political structure of Iraq are in ruins.
This trail of blood, tears and death smeared across the pages of recent history is the reason that Martin Luther King said in his famous Vietnam Speech that the United States is “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Vietnam veteran Mike Hastie expanded the observation when he said in April of this year (2010) that, “The United States Government is a nonstop killing machine. The worst experience I had in Vietnam was experiencing the absolute truth of Martin Luther King’s statement. America is in absolute psychiatric denial of its genocidal maniacal nature.”
A further issue is that “war destroys the earth.” Not only does, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1960, “Every rocket fired signify a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” but every rocket that is fired reduces the life-sustaining capacity of the biosphere. In an ultimate sense it could be argued that those who wage war and those who pay for and support war, in reality bear some hidden hatred for life and some hidden desire to put and end to it.
What are our options? The short answer is, grow up. Grow up into the inherent depth of your own existence. After all, you are a “child of the universe, no less than the trees and stars, you have a right be here.” There is no viable, universally inscribed law that compels you to do as you are told to do by the multitude of dysfunctional and destructive authority figures that would demand your compliance, if you acquiesce.
“If we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature,” wrote French author La Boétie in his book The Politics of Obedience,” we should be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody.” La Boétie wrote this in the year 1552, but people today remain slaves to external authority. “Our problem,” said historian Howard Zinn, “is not civil disobedience; our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.”
Do you want to spend your life paying for the death of people (executed by the US military) that you would probably have loved if you have met them? Do you want to spend your life paying for the arsenal of hydrogen bombs that could very well destroy most of the life on the planet? If not, if you want another kind of life, then as author James Howard Kunstler often suggests, ‘You will have to make other arrangements.” You will have to arrange to live according to your own deepest ethical standards, rather than living in fear of the nefarious authority figures that currently demand your obedience and threaten to punish you if you do not obey their demands on your one precious chance at life.
“We must know how the first ruler came by his authority.” ~ John Locke
“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
Dana Visalli [send him mail] is an ecologist, botanist and organic farmer living in Twisp, Washington.
Copyright © 2010 Dana Visalli
States back nuclear test ban, right to civilian nuclear
By J.T. Nguyen | DPA | May 4, 2010
New York – More governments attending the United Nations nuclear review conference Tuesday called for an effective ban on nuclear tests and defended their right to possess nuclear energy for peaceful uses.
Indonesia announced it has begun the lengthy national process of ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). If it ratifies the treaty, just eight countries, including the United States and China, would need to ratify it for the treaty to enter into force.
Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa, who was attending the UN review conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in New York, told reporters the eight remaining countries should follow Jakarta’s example. Those countries are China, North Korea, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and the United States.
The treaty bans nuclear tests in the atmosphere to prevent radioactive fallout on the earth. But some countries called for a ban on all forms of nuclear explosions.
During the NTP debate, Nigeria’s Foreign Minister Odein Ajumogobia, representing African states, said the CTBT should enter into force as early as possible and it should be a total ban.
Australia’s Foreign Minister Stephen Smith, who was speaking on behalf of the Pacific Islands Forum, and others joined him in demanding the treaty enter into force.
CTBT has been signed by 182 countries, of which 151 have ratified it by adopting national laws to implement the treaty. But the treaty demands that the world’s 44 countries with nuclear technology must all ratify before it enters into force.
Many government envoys called for their inalienable right to have nuclear energy for peaceful uses, as the dispute over Iran’s nuclear activities focused on whether that country has plans to produce nuclear weapons rather than civilian energy as Tehran claims. Western government have accused Iran of diverting its advanced uranium enrichment programme to weapons.
Smith said the group of Pacific nations “fully support the rights of non-nuclear-weapon states to enjoy the benefit of peaceful nuclear energy within the framework that reduces proliferation risk and adheres to the highest international standards of safeguards and security.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna said more than 60 countries are considering building nuclear power plants for civilian uses and between 20 and 30 of them would have completed the projects by 2030.
The second day of NPT debate in the UN General Assembly in New York was welcomed by some countries that suffered the Cold War nuclear weapon expansion of the former Soviet Union.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Gryshchenko, whose country still bears an “open wound” of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in 1986, said civilian nuclear energy has become a rising international issue.
“We underscore the vital need of peaceful nuclear technology for sustainable development of nations, provided that nuclear activities are subject to full scope safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Gryshchenko said.
Gryshchenko said his country, Russia and Belarus will convene an international conference in April 2011, to mark the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl and discuss progress in returning to normal life in countries and regions affected by the radioactive fallout.
Obama Administration Gives Priority to Bioweapons Research
By Sherwood Ross | BLACKLISTED NEWS | 05-01-2010
The priorities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the area of bacteriology have been “catastrophically re-ordered” by emphasizing bioweapons research over non-bioweapons research, a prominent authority states.
Giving priority to bioweapons research at NIH, started under the Bush Administration and continuing under President Obama, “diverts resources from critical public-health and scientific objectives,” says Richard Ebright, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.
“The negative impact has been most severe in bacteriology, in which NIH research priorities have been catastrophically re-ordered—with research on bacterial bioweapons receiving more support than research on the top five bacterial causes of death combined—and in which non-bioweapons research has suffered catastrophic losses in resources and personnel,” Ebright said.
Ebright cited the examples of research into two bacterial pathogens: “Streptococcus pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus, which claim 40,000 and 20,000 U.S. lives each year, respectively. Each kills more Americans than HIV-AIDS (15,000 U.S. lives) “but neither of these bacterial pathogens is on the list of NIAID Priority Pathogens,” Ebright pointed out. (NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the subdivision of NIH responsible for infectious-disease research.)
“These two killer bacterial pathogens are not in NIAID’s ‘Category A’, with the anthrax bacterium and the smallpox virus, or even in NIAID’s ‘Category B’ or ‘Category C,’” Ebright says. “Something is wrong—very wrong—when NIAID fails to prioritize the top infectious cause of U.S. death,” he said in an email to this reporter.
Other top bacterial causes of U.S. deaths include Enterococcus faecium/faecalis, Clostridium difficile, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. “Of these, only the last is on the NIAID Priority Pathogens list and this pathogen is only in Category C,” Ebright said.
Asked “What is the mood of the scientific life sciences community at this time toward the Administration?” Ebright responded, “Hopeful expectation” but “growing concern that, thus far, there has been more continuity [from the Bush Administration] than change.”
The scope of the government’s involvement in bioweapons research, may be gauged from its estimated expenditure of $70 billion since 9/11 and the fact that, according to Ebright, more than 400 U.S. institutions are engaged in such work.
Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, said that in constant dollars the $70 billion “is twice what they spent on the Manhattan Project to develop the A-bomb—ergo, this is a weapons program.”
Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 for the U.S., said President Bush “turned the NIH into a front organization for biowarfare work,” and “(President) Obama is simply continuing the Bush policies” and is “now even exporting biowarfare capabilities to Third World Countries.”
Asked about the scope of the nation’s biowarfare activities, Boyle estimated there are “about 13,000 death scientists involved…(so) Dr. (Josef) Mengele has arrived on American campuses all over and the universities’ Institutional Review Boards (to review biowarfare research programs) are a joke and a fraud, too.” (Mengele was a German SS officer and physician who, during WWII, performed diabolical experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.)
Boyle said, “There is so much money involved that universities simply are not going to turn down these proposals no matter how reprehensible they might read…”
At his own University of Illinois, Boyle said, previous biowarfare research and development contracts with the Pentagon clearly stated: “We have selected pigs (to gas with biowarfare agents) because they have a circulatory system and a respiratory system similar to human beings.”
Boyle said, “I am sure similar type biowarfare contracts that are clearly anti-human, anti-ethical, illegal and criminal on their face alone have been approved all over (at) American universities by now. Money talks. Ethics walks.”
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Sherwood Ross formerly worked for the Chicago Daily News and contributed regular columns to Reuters and UPI. His articles on biowarfare have been published in The Humanist and other magazines. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
Japan premier approval rating drops
Press TV – April 26, 2010
Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s approval rating has dropped sharply as a row over the US military presence heats up in the country. More than two-thirds of the respondents to an opinion poll published by the Nikkei newspaper have disapproved of Hatoyama’s policies. The survey shows that public disapproval of Hatoyama’s performance has jumped by more than ten percent in just a month.
The survey comes a day after tens of thousands of protesters rallied on the southern island of Okinawa. They gathered to call on Tokyo to move an unpopular US airbase off the island. The protesters lambasted the primier for failing to keep his campaign promise of moving the base to another location or even outside the country.
Hatoyama is facing growing criticism over his failure to settle the row over the base. The Japanese premier has promised to resolve the matter before the end of May. Fifty-seven percent say Hatoyama should resign if he does not meet his deadline to resolve the dispute.
Some 47,000 US troops are based in Japan, with more than half of the soldiers stationed in Okinawa. The issue has threatened the political future of Hatoyama with both Washington and his political allies putting him under pressure to find a solution to the deadlock.
Germans form anti-nuclear human chain
Press TV – 24 April 2010
Protestors urge govt. to change nuclear policy.
Tens of thousands of Germans have created a human chain as they expressed opposition to the use of nuclear energy.
Around 100,000 people participated in the event on Saturday to form the human chain, measuring at 120 kilometers (75 miles) along the Elbe River between the northern towns of Brunsbuettel and Kruemmel that passed through the city of Hamburg.
“The chain is almost complete,” a police spokeswoman in the northern German region of Schleswig-Holstein told AFP.
Organizers of the peaceful demonstration dubbed “Chain reaction — Stop nuclear energy” also urged the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel to alter its nuclear policy.
“Today will spark a countrywide chain reaction of protests and resistance if the government does not reverse its atomic policy,” organizers said in a statement, according to Reuters.
The German government has offered delay on the closing of the country’s 17 nuclear power plants beyond a 2020 target date.
The protests come just days before Monday’s 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
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Germans call for arms embargo against Israel
BDS Day of Action | March 30, 2010
On Tuesday, 30th of March 2010 activists of different peace groups gathered close to the Berlin office of Germany’s biggest steel and arms industry company Thyssen Krupp in the centre of Berlin close to the sqare called Gendarmenmarkt to protest against the export of German Dolphin Submarines and warships to Israel.
(The text on the foto reads: “No submarines and warships to Israel!”)
The protest was part of the second Global BDS Day of Action in solidarity with the Palestinian people and for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.
ThyssenKrupp is the owner of the North-German shipyard HDW (Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft GmbH). HDW already fabricated/produced 5 submarines of the Dolphin type for Israel. A further ship of this kind is planned to be sent to Israel. It is widely believed among experts that the Israeli government wants to add atomic warheads to the submarines.Later the avtivists turned to a Natural Food Store. They distributed leaflets informing the public about the fact that Israel is one of most important producer of Natural Food products. In the text of the leaflet with the headline “Off One’s Oats” (“Appetit vergangen”) it is stressed that “the Israeli organic agriculture is part of a regime of permanent human rights violations, of the destruction of the environment and violence/disregard of International Law.”
The activists are members of a group where different organisations work together – among them the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East/EJJP Germany, the Middle East Committee of Berlin Peace Coordination and the Workshop Middle East Berlin.
US to maintain tactical nukes in Europe
Press TV – April 24, 2010
The US says it will keep its nuclear arms in Europe, arguing that any cut in the arsenal would require Russia to take a similar step.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has ruled out a withdrawal of its 200 tactical weapons stationed in several European countries, saying Washington is going to be committed to its military alliance in the continent.
“As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance,” Clinton said in remarks prepared for delivery to NATO foreign ministers, according to a Washington Post report on Thursday.
“As a nuclear alliance, sharing nuclear risks and responsibilities is fundamental,” she said in remarks released by the State Department.
Clinton said that any reduction should be tied to a negotiated nuclear withdrawal by Russia. Moscow, however, says it will not pull out its tactical arms unless Washington removes its bombs from Europe.
Moscow and Washington signed a treaty earlier this month which requires a reduction in their nuclear arsenals by about one-third. The treaty, however, is not observed by any international organization.
The US and Russia currently possess 95-percent of the world’s nuclear weapons.
US Rules Out Removing Its Nukes From Europe
By Jason Ditz | April 22, 2010
Despite increased calls from European officials to remove them, the United States today ruled out moving its hundreds of “battlefield nukes” from Europe, insisting that they must remain to ensure that Europe shares the “nuclear risks and responsibilities.”
The comments came in response to an open letter from a number of high ranking European officials, who said that the nukes were a Cold War relic with no practical value and were just a constant danger. They are also in conflict with President Obama’s ostensible hope for nuclear disarmament.
NATO Chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen defended the US position, saying the nukes remain “essential” as a deterrent. What the nations of Europe are supposed to need hundreds of nuclear weapons as a deterrent against, however, is unclear.
German FM Guido Westerwelle says that the withdrawal of the weapons would be a “peace dividend,” while his Polish counterpark Radek Sikorski added that there were “far too many” nuclear weapons in Europe.
Germany set to sell Israel submarines
Press TV – April 22, 2010
New reports say Israel is planning to establish a deep-sea navy and is negotiating with Germany over the purchase warships and submarines.
According to a report published by United Press International, Germany will supply Israel with three more Dolphin class attack submarines, several warships, and possibly two MEKO A-100 corvettes.
The MEKO variant sought by the Tel Aviv regime costs an estimated $300 million.
The warship, with a range of 4,635 miles, can carry one medium-size helicopter and 24 weapons systems — 16 ship-to-shore and eight anti-ship missile launchers adapted to US weapons as well as air-defense missiles and automatic cannon.
Citing an unnamed Israeli source, the UPI report said that the Israeli navy would like even more Dolphins.
“Our ideal number would be nine — enough to ensure we have the necessary assets at sea to cover all relevant threats and targets,” UPI quoted the source as saying.
Israel had begun the negotiations over the program in October 2007 when the Israel Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi visited Berlin.
The expansion program, which will transform the regime’s navy into a deep-water navy, has provoked outrage among German opposition parties, including the Social Democrats, who say weapons should not be sent to “crisis zones.”
However, Germany has provided special discounts on arms sales to Israel in the past. The Tel Aviv regime’s 2006 order for two Dolphin class submarines was approved despite the Social Democrats’ opposition to the deal.
Firm Run by Ex-Israeli Special Forces Soldier Wants US Security Contracts in Jerusalem, Iraq, Afghanistan
By Jeremy Scahill | Rebel Reports | April 21, 2010
The Obama administration has continued the Bush-era reliance on private contractors to sustain the US occupation of Iraq and the US operations in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Obama has surpassed Bush’s reliance on contractors with current contractor levels surpassing 100,000 Defense Department contractors deployed. In Iraq, Obama has maintained the long-standing ratio of one contractor to every US soldier. […]
… The solicitation indicates that the work will include “a static guard and emergency response team requirement in Baghdad, Iraq, a static guard and emergency response team requirement in Kabul, Afghanistan, and a personal protective security service requirement in Jerusalem.”
Among the companies listed as “interested vendors” to bid on the contracts are the predictable list of industry giants: L-3 Services, SAIC, USIS, Northrop Grumman, and DynCorp. Two lesser-known firms in particular that have expressed interest in the contracts jump out: Instinctive Shooting International and Evergreen International Aviation.
Hiring Instinctive Shooting International for any type of armed contract in a Muslim country, particularly to operate in Jerusalem with a stamp of US government legitimacy, should be cause for serious concern and Congressional inquiry. Instinctive Shooting International (ISI) was founded by Hanan Yadin, a former member of the Israel National Counter-Terrorism Agency and a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces. According to his bio [PDF], Hanan “received advanced training at the Israeli Anti-Terror Academy and served as an instructor at the Israeli Military Intelligence Academy. As part of a Special Ops unit he executed high-risk missions against terrorist’s cells. Hanan is an expert marksman and has completed advanced training in crisis response, Krav Maga (the Israeli unarmed fighting system), urban warfare and tactical operations.”
I encountered ISI operatives, all former Israeli soldiers, manning an armed check-point in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At the time, in 2005, its website described ISI’s personnel as “veterans of the Israeli special task forces from the following Israeli government bodies: Israel Defense Force (IDF), Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, Instructors of Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, General Security Service (GSS or ‘Shin Beit’), Other restricted intelligence agencies.”
Today the website has changed dramatically. Its main graphic is of US soldiers wearing 
American flag patches, wielding automatic weapons in what appears to be Iraq. “After 9/11, ISI was able to bring to bear all of its resources, expertise and experience to work with U.S. military and government agencies in gaining a deeper understanding of radical Islam and provide proven tactical techniques to improve counter-terror operations,” according to the website. This would hardly be ISI’s first US government contract. It has received many training and security contracts since its founding in 1993. According to the company, it is currently under a five-year contract with the US Army that began in November 2009.
Evergreen has had long-standing ties to the CIA. “In 1980 an Evergreen plane flew the recently deposed Shah of Iran from Panama to Egypt, hours before the Panamanian government was due to receive an extradition request from the new government in Tehran,” according to SourceWatch. “Giving rides to dictators is something of a specialty for the company – it also allowed El Salvador’s President Duarte to use its helicopter, which was officially in the country to help repair power lines. And according to a series of articles in The Oregonian in 1988, Evergreen’s owner and founder Delford M. Smith ‘…acknowledged one agreement under which his companies provide occasional jobs and cover to foreign nationals the CIA wants taken out of other countries or brought into the United States.’”
Evergreen is perhaps best known more recently for offering—unsolicited—its security services to Oregon county clerks ahead of the 2008 elections. “During this crucial election Evergreen Defense and Security Services has recognized the potential conflict that could occur on November 4,” an email from company president Evergreen president Tom Wiggins to election officials stated. “Never has there been a more heated battle in the race for president and voters seem more involved and determined to achieve their respective goals. EDSS proposes to post sentries at each voting center on November 4 to assure that disputes among citizens do not get out of control. All guards will be unarmed but capable of stopping any violence that may occur, and detaining troublemakers until law enforcement help arrives.” The offer was suspect on several fronts, not the least of which being that Oregon has no polling places and votes by mail.
According to State Department documents, among the projects up for bidding are:
—Private security teams in Jerusalem. The solicitation calls for 46 personnel, including 36 “security specialists” and team/shift leaders for armed details.
—Embassy guards and an Emergency Response Team in Kabul. The solicitation calls for 219 personnel, including a 142-member embassy guard force and 49 “emergency response” personnel.
—Embassy guards and an Emergency Response Team in Baghdad, Iraq. The solicitation calls for 551 personnel, including 357 “armed guards” and an Emergency Response Team consisting of 30 protective security specialists and four “designated defense marksmen.”
The US embassy in Iraq, according to the documents, requires the greatest number of contractors. This is likely because the embassy there is the largest of any embassy of any nation in history.
The State Department has a conference for prospective bidders scheduled for April 27-28 in Arlington, Virginia. Attendance is mandatory for interested companies.
Barak: “The Only Way out of Iran Crises is a Bold Israeli Move”
Al-Manar TV – 19/04/2010
Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on Monday that the only way out of the current “stalemate” with Iran is a bold Israeli move, adding that he felt that Iran did not pose an “immediate existential threat” to Israel.
Barak also responded to remarks by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said Sunday that the military options available to Barack Obama would go “a long way” to delaying Iran’s nuclear progress but may not set the country back long-term. He called a military strike his “last option” right now.
Barak told Israel Radio that the time has come for sanctions with a specific deadline “in order to facilitate what Mullen’s remarks imply.”
“I prefer to refrain from speculation about the future,” Barak added. “Right now, Iran does not pose an existential threat to Israel. If Iran becomes nuclear, it will spark an arms race in the Middle East. This region is very sensitive because of the oil flow, the region is important to the entire world. The fact that Iran is not an immediate threat, but could evolve into one, means that we can’t let ourselves fall asleep.”
On Sunday, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, releasing a statement about a secret memorandum he sent to the White House in January, said he identified “next steps in our defense planning process” that would be reviewed by decision makers in the coming weeks and months.
“There should be no confusion by our allies and adversaries that the United States is properly and energetically focused on this question and prepared to act across a broad range of contingencies in support of our interests,” Gates said in the statement, issued to refute characterizations of the memo in a New York Times report.
Tehran Summit Urges Nuclear Free World
Al-Manar | April 16, 2010
As Tehran prepares to hold an international denuclearization conference, an Iranian official said the confab aims to promote nuclear disarmament across the world. The two-day conference titled “Nuclear Energy for All, Nuclear Weapons for None” will open on Saturday this week.
Officials from more than 60 countries as well as delegates from various international and non-governmental entities will take part in the conference. Iranian authorities say the conference has been welcomed beyond their expectations.
The meeting aims to convey the message that the world and the Middle East in particular must be free from nuclear weapon. “We are making a platform where everybody could express his view. We would continue to send this very strong message from the capital of Iran, Tehran, the center of the Middle East, that nuclear weapons do not have a place at all in this very sensitive part of the world,” Mohammad Mehdi Akhoundzadeh, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, told Press TV ahead of the nuclear confab.
Akhoundzadeh, who is the secretary general of the summit, said that the conference did not mean to overshadow the nuclear summit held earlier in the US. “This is a process, this is not a project. Some may think that this is to overshadow what’s going on in Washington but we don’t look at it that way,” he reiterated. He said a large number of foreign dignitaries will attend the conference.
“The turnout seems wonderful beyond our expectation. Three Arab foreign ministers and many other foreign ministers from different regions of the world will take part in this conference,” he said. “There would be a very strong presentation of NGOs (non-governmental organizations),” he added.
The meeting comes amid Western efforts to push through a fourth round of UN sanctions on Iran over its nuclear energy program.
The US and its allies accuse Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program but Iran rejects the accusations, saying its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes.
“We were the victim of chemical weapons. We don’t want the Middle East, any body, any government, any country to have nuclear weapons. We feel this is against the humanity,” he said.
The US, which possesses one of the largest nuclear weapons arsenals in the world, is the only country which has used the nuclear bomb in warfare. The mushroom clouds from the US nuclear attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still haunt people and governments around the world.
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China names world’s ‘hacking empire’
RT | March 15, 2022
Calling the US a “hacking empire” of the world, the Chinese Foreign Ministry urged Washington to stop “malicious” cyber activities following reports that American hackers subverted a network in China to launch attacks on Russia and Belarus.
“China is gravely concerned about cyberattacks against other countries that originate from the US and use China as a springboard,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters at a press briefing on Monday.
Zhao was commenting on recent Chinese media reports that hackers, mainly from the US but also from NATO allies Germany and the Netherlands, recently hijacked a Chinese computer network for cyberattacks, 87% of which targeted Russia.
“Against the background of the Ukraine situation, such a move may produce the negative effect of misleading the international community and spreading disinformation,” Zhao said, pointing out that “a former US senior official called publicly for launching cyberattacks on Russia not long ago.”
This appeared to be a reference to Hillary Clinton, former US secretary of state and presidential candidate, who made the calls in an MSNBC interview at the end of February. … continue
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