By Robert Parry | September 6, 2010
Ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s new memoir offers the expected rationalizations for his joining in an illegal, aggressive war against Iraq, even to the point of quibbling about the death toll. But Blair does reveal how much more war was favored by Vice President Dick Cheney and the neocons.
In A Journey: My Political Life, Blair depicts Cheney as believing the United States was at war not only with Islamic terrorists but with “rogue states that supported them” and that “the only way of defeating [this threat] was head-on, with maximum American strength.”
Cheney wanted forcible “regime change” in all Middle Eastern countries that he considered hostile to U.S. interests, according to Blair.
“He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it – Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair wrote. “In other words, he [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”
Over the years, there have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s – and Israel’s – “enemies” starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.
Usually, the scheme could be found only in obscure neocon policy papers or as part of Washington scuttlebutt. After the Iraq invasion, a favorite neocon joke was whether to next head west toward Damascus or east to Tehran with the punch line, “real men go to Tehran.”
Under this neocon plan, once “regime change” was achieved in Syria and Iran, then Israel’s front-line adversaries, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, would be left impoverished and isolated. Israel could dictate settlement terms to the Palestinians and incorporate the Jewish settlements on prime West Bank land into a Greater Israel.
A Clean Break
The early outlines of this aggressive concept for remaking the Middle East predated the 9/11 attacks by half a decade, when a group of American neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, went to work for Israeli Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu during his 1996 campaign for prime minister.
The neocon strategy paper, called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” advanced the idea that only regime change in hostile Muslim countries could achieve the necessary “clean break” from the diplomatic standoff that had followed inconclusive peace negotiations.
Under the “clean break,” Israel would no longer seek peace through mutual understanding and compromise, but rather through confrontation, including the violent removal of leaders such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.
The plan called Hussein’s ouster “an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right,” but also one that would destabilize the Assad dynasty in Syria and thus topple the power dominoes into Lebanon, where Hezbollah might soon find itself without its key Syrian ally. Iran also could find itself in the cross-hairs of “regime change.”
But what the “clean break” needed was the military might of the United States, since some of the targets like Iraq were too far away and too powerful to be defeated even by Israel’s highly efficient military. The cost in Israeli lives and to Israel’s economy from such overreach would have been staggering.
In 1998, the U.S. neocon brain trust pushed the “clean break” plan another step forward with the creation of the Project for the New American Century, which urged President Bill Clinton to seek the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
However, Clinton would only go so far, maintaining a harsh embargo on Iraq and enforcing a “no-fly zone” which involved U.S. aircraft conducting periodic bombing raids. Still, with Clinton or his heir apparent, Al Gore, in the White House, a full-scale invasion appeared out of the question.
The first key political obstacle was removed when the neocons helped engineer George W. Bush’s ascension to the presidency in Election 2000. However, the path was not fully cleared until al-Qaeda terrorists attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, leaving behind a political climate across America for war and revenge.
Though Hussein had no hand in 9/11 and rejected al-Qaeda’s religious extremism, Bush and Blair clambered onboard for an invasion of Iraq. Their differences were mostly tactical, such as whether to present the WMD case to the United Nations or to simply act unilaterally with the so-called “coalition of the willing.”
According to Blair’s memoir, hardliner Cheney opposed going to the UN at all, but Blair argued that the move was politically necessary and won over Bush during a visit to Camp David on Sept. 7, 2002.
“Once George declared he was in favour of going the UN route, the visit relaxed,” Blair wrote. “Dick Cheney had been there for part of the time, and made it clear he was not for going down the UN route. He was unremittingly hard line.”
Common Ground
But Blair explained that Cheney’s aggressive attitude differed from the Bush-Blair approach only by degree, not fundamentally. In that regard, Blair said he considered Cheney as unfairly maligned by progressives and many centrists.
“To those on the left, he is, of course, an uncomplicated figure of loathing,” Blair wrote. “Even for the middle ground, they tend to reach for the garlic and crucifixes. You have to go pretty far right to find Dick’s natural constituency.
“My take on him was different from that of most people. I thought he had one central insight which was at least worth taking seriously. He believed, in essence, that the U.S. was genuinely at war. … [And his response was] we’re coming after you, so change or be changed.”
Though acknowledging that Cheney’s “attitude terrified and repelled people,” Blair expressed a degree of solidarity with the former vice president, saying:
“I did not think [Cheney’s position] was as fantastical as conventional wisdom opined. It is one struggle. Our enemy has an ideology. It does threaten us. The ultimate answer is in the spread of democracy and freedom. It is even possible to conceive of this, in different language, as being a progressive position, certainly where removing someone like Saddam was concerned.
“My problem with the way he put it and wanted to do it was that the manner of doing it was incomplete. Precisely because the war was based loosely around an ideology, the fight had to be waged and won at the level of ideas and in a way that would appeal not to us, but to those who had fallen or might fall prey to that ideology.
“In other words, it couldn’t be a hard-power strategy alone. It had to encompass more than military might. It had to engage the people out in the Middle East, in the Muslim world, and had to build alliances within that world.
“This wasn’t some namby-pamby peacenikery; it was a critical part of winning.”
In other words, Blair saw Cheney’s determination to overthrow U.S.-disliked leaders in the Middle East as more a problem of PR tactics than core strategy.
Despite the widespread impression that Cheney’s grandiose neocon scheme for remaking the Middle East through warfare represented an extreme vision, Blair indicated that he and other supposed moderates shared Cheney’s broader determination to replace anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli governments across the Middle East with more compliant regimes under the banner of “democracy.”
That, in turn, suggests the danger of a wider regional war has not fully abated.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com
By Philip Weiss on September 7, 2010
A few weeks back Juan Cole created a data point to explain the neocons:
They have more assets than is visible on the surface. They have perhaps half of America’s 400 billionaires on their side.
I am deeply grateful to Cole for that assertion. Even if it’s imprecise, even if it’s off, it’s obviously based on knowledge of how the discourse works and it’s got a large truth in it: it explains the fiendish persistence inside the political establishment of neoconservatism. I wish Chris Matthews would have Cole on and ask him why he believes this, ask him who gives money to Yale and why Yale wouldn’t have Cole but Yale would have a conference that attacked Palestinian identity formation and “self-hating Jews.”
Long preamble. Politico follows the money on the Islamic center opposition campaign, though it buries the neoconservative angle, the juicy one, deep in the story, who’s funding the opposition:
there’s also big money behind the mosque opposition, as highlighted by the relationship between Horowitz’s Los Angeles-based nonprofit, Jihad Watch — the website run by Spencer “dedicated to bringing public attention to the role that jihad theology and ideology play in the modern world” — and Joyce Chernick, the wife of a wealthy California tech company founder.
Though it was not listed on the public tax reports filed by Horowitz’s Freedom Center, POLITICO has confirmed that the lion’s share of the $920,000 it provided over the past three years to Jihad Watch came from Chernick, whose husband, Aubrey Chernick, has a net worth of $750 million, as a result of his 2004 sale to IBM of a software company he created, and a security consulting firm he now owns.
A onetime trustee of the hawkish Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Aubrey Chernick led the effort to pull together $3.5 million in venture capital to start Pajamas Media, a conservative blog network that made its name partly with hawkish pro-Israel commentary and of late has kept up a steady stream of anti-mosque postings, including one rebutting attacks by CAIR against Spencer — who Pajamas CEO Roger Simon called “one of the ideological point men in the global war on terror.”..
The David Horowitz Freedom Center had a budget of $4.5 million last year, according to its tax filings, of which $290,000 came from the conservative Bradley Foundation, which also gave $75,000 to the Center for Security Policy last year. Horowitz has received an average of $461,000 a year in salary and benefits over the past three years, while Spencer has pulled in an average of $140,000, according to the center’s IRS filings.
To its credit, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency then followed up that report:
Aubrey and Joyce Chernick, Politico reported, have over the years contributed to, among other groups, the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles; the Anti-Defamation League; the Zionist Organization of America; MEMRI, a group that distributes translations of inflammatory Arabic language material; the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a group that tracks what it depicts as the threat of radical Islam; the American Jewish Congress; CAMERA, a group that tracks what it says is anti-Israel bias in the media; the Central Fund for Israel, a clearinghouse for moneys directed to pro-settler groups; and a number of conservative think tanks.
Aubrey Chernick, additionally, was at one time a trustee of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Finally, Laura Rozen also follows up on it, showing the Chernicks’ links to the Hudson Institute, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and…. inevitably… the Central Fund of Israel, which funds settlers in the West Bank, including their “urgent security needs,” and is administered by a 6th Avenue fabric store. Read Rozen’s list of Chernick contributions for her delicious twist on religiosity and secularism:
Similar donations in 2007 and 2006, including $190k in 2007 to the Hudson Institute; $200k in 2006 to the Zionist Organization of America, and $250k to ZOA in 2005; $60k in 2005 to the Central Fund of Israel, a U.S. nonprofit that funds settler security and other programs in Israel, and on whose board (listed in 2008 as vice president) is Itamar Marcus, who heads Palestinian Media Watch; $25k in 2005 to fund projects by Tariq Ismail at the Council for Secular Humanism (the funding for Islamic secularism contrasting with the foundation’s generous funding of Jewish religiosity, including Aish HaTorah of Los Angeles); $120k in 2005 to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, on whose board Chernick’s wife Joyce Chernick served.
Notice that Richard Silverstein has described Aubrey Chernick’s funding for StandWithUs, the Israel lobby group, and the neoconservative website Pajamas Media ($7 million, slightly more than the seed funding for this website) and pointing out that Jim Koshland of the Levi Strauss family was in on the deal– Silverstein speculates so that Koshland could get into the good business graces of the dynamic Chernick. Oh and Alex Kane posts on the Chernicks here.
The Economic Collapse – 07 September 2010
The Rich Are Getting Richer
1 – As of 2007, the top 1 percent of all Americans was taking home 24 percent of the national income. This was a level that had not been seen since the days of the Great Depression.
2 – Incomes have been growing in the United States, but those at the very top of the pyramid have been gobbling up almost all of the income growth. According to Harvard Magazine, 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
3 – Even official government figures bear out the fact that the rich are getting richer. An analysis of income-tax data by the Congressional Budget Office a few years ago found that the top 1% of all American households own nearly twice as much of the corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
4– Most Americans have suffered during the last few years, but not the boys and girls down on Wall Street. New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli says that Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
5 – Even as the number of Americans living in poverty skyrockets, the number of millionaires just keeps growing. In fact, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million during 2009.
6 – The amount of money some of these Wall Street hotshots are making is incredible. Back in 2005, the top 25 hedge fund managers earned a total of 9 billion dollars. That would be bad enough, but even in these hard economic times the rich just keep getting richer. One year after the recent financial collapse the top 25 hedge fund managers earned a total of approximately $25 billion. That breaks down to an average of $1 billion each. The truth is that the United States has been experiencing uneven prosperity for quite some time and things just seem to get worse with each passing year.
The Poor Are Getting Poorer
7 – Government anti-poverty programs are exploding in size in response to the recent economic difficulties. USA Today is reporting that a record one in six Americans are now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.
8 – Over 50 million Americans are on now Medicaid. That figure is up more than 17 percent since the beginning of the recession.
9 – The number of Americans in the food stamp program rose to a new all-time record of 40.8 million in May. That number is up almost 50 percent since the beginning of the recession.
10 – The number of Americans who cannot afford even the basic necessities is absolutely staggering. A whopping 50 million Americans could not afford to buy enough food in order to stay healthy at some point over the last year.
11 – Compared to other industrialized nations, the United States is doing very poorly. The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
12 – The saddest part of this is what we are doing to our children. According to one recent study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010.
13 – But the American people cannot provide for their families if they don’t have jobs. Today there are not nearly enough jobs for everyone. In 2010, it takes the average unemployed American worker over 8 months to find a job.
14 – Approximately 10 million Americans are currently receiving unemployment insurance, which is a number that is nearly four times higher than what it was at back in 2007.
15 – The truth is that we are creating a permanent underclass of Americans that cannot get jobs. The number of Americans receiving long-term unemployment benefits has increased over 60 percent in just the past year.
16 – Increasingly, the wealth of the United States is being held in fewer and fewer hands. One study found that as of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
17 – It is not a good time to be living in “the bottom half” in America. The size of “the pie” being divided up among those at the low end of the wage scale is becoming really, really small. In fact, the bottom 40 percent of all income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
The Middle Class Is Being Destroyed
18 – Even those Americans that still do have decent jobs are seeing their wealth fade rapidly. For example, U.S. families have $6 trillion less in housing wealth than they did just three years ago.
19 – Home ownership used to be a sign that one had arrived in the middle class, but in 2010 an increasing number of Americans are finding out that they simply can’t afford their homes anymore. One out of every seven mortgages were either delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter of 2010.
20 – The reality is that incomes have just not kept up with housing costs. This has put an incredible amount of pressure on the middle class. Just how much pressure? Well, only the top 5 percent of all U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
21 – The debt binge middle class Americans have been on over the past couple of decades has drained many of them completely dry, and now more Americans than ever have bad credit scores. Over 25 percent of Americans now have a credit score below 599, which means that they are a very bad credit risk.
22 – A rapidly rising number of Americans are actually choosing bankruptcy as a way out of their financial problems. Nationwide, bankruptcy filings rose 20 percent in the 12 month period ending this past June 30th.
23 – The middle class manufacturing jobs that once defined so many American cities are rapidly disappearing. Despite the fact that the U.S. population has dramatically increased, less Americans are employed in manufacturing today than in 1950.
24 – These days it seems like almost everyone is looking for a good job, but very few people are finding them. According to one recent survey, 28% of all U.S. households have at least one member that is looking for a full-time job.
25 – Even many of those Americans that still have decent jobs have been hit hard by this economic downturn. A recent Pew Research survey found that 55 percent of the U.S. labor force has experienced either unemployment, a pay decrease, a reduction in hours or an involuntary move to part-time work since the recession began.
26 – The number of jobs that are evaporating is absolutely stunning. According to one analysis, the United States has lost a total of 10.5 million jobs since 2007.
27 – So where are the jobs going? It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. China’s trade surplus (much of it with the United States) climbed 140 percent in June compared to a year earlier.
28 – The truth is that “globalism” and “free trade” have put middle class American workers in direct competition with the cheapest labor in the world. This is what middle class American workers must now compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
29 – Due to these difficult economic conditions, the middle class is being squeezed as never before. According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
30 – So what kind of future do our young people have in front of them? Unfortunately, things don’t look pretty. Many fresh college graduates can’t even get a job that will allow them to be independent. One recent survey of last year’s college graduates discovered that 80 percent moved right back home with their parents after graduation. That was up significantly from 63 percent in 2006.
Palestine Information Center – 03/09/2010
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — The Israeli occupation authorities has decided to build a war dead memorial on lands that belong to Palestinian citizens in Sheikh Jarrah suburb in the occupied city of Jerusalem, well-informed Hebrew sources revealed Thursday.
According to the sources, the Israeli administration of Jerusalem municipality wants to build the memorial to remember Israelis who were “killed at the hands of Palestinian aggressors”.
It added that members of the municipal council were set to ratify the decision during a municipal session two week from now, pointing out that the place was “the most suitable location for the memorial”.
The sources estimated the confiscated Palestinian land to be 6,500 sq meters, but Palestinians believe that the Israeli step was only part of the Israeli occupation authority policy to expand the settlement activities and to distort Arab identity in occupied Jerusalem.
“We found the place as the most suitable site for such crucial civil needs, and we found no reason to hinder the use of those lands for Israeli public needs and for matters we view as of Jewish and national values”, said Yaer Jabay, the member of the Jewish municipal council.
The Israeli decision to confiscate the land came on the eve of the kicking-off of the US-sponsored direct Israeli-Fatah negotiations, which the great majority of the Palestinian people oppose.
By James Petras – September 1, 2010
Introduction
Any serious effort to understand the extraordinary influence of the Zionist power configuration over US foreign policy must examine the presence of key operatives in strategic positions in the government and local Zionist organizations affiliated with mainstream Jewish organizations and religious orders. There are at least 52 major American Jewish organizations actively engaged in promoting Israel’s foreign policy, economic and technological agenda in the US (see the appendix).
The grassroots membership ranges from several hundred thousand militants in the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) to one hundred thousand wealthy contributors, activists and power brokers in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In addition scores of propaganda mills, dubbed think tanks, have been established by million dollar grants from billionaire Zionists including the Brookings Institute (Haim Saban) and the Hudson Institute among others. Scores of Zionist funded political action committees (PAC) have intervened in all national and regional elections, controlling nominations and influencing election outcomes. Publishing houses, including university presses have been literally taken over by Zionist zealots, the most egregious example being Yale University, which publishes the most unbalanced tracts parroting Zionist parodies of Jewish history (Financial Times book review section August 28/29 2010). New heavily funded Zionist projects designed to capture young Jews and turn them into instruments of Israeli foreign policy includes “Taglit-Birthright” which has spent over $250 million dollars over the past decade sending over a quarter-million Jews (between 18-26) to Israel for 10 days of intense brainwashing (Boston Globe August 26, 2010). Jewish billionaires and the Israeli state foot the bill. The students are subject to a heavy dose of Israeli style militarism as they are accompanied by Israeli soldiers as part of their indoctrination; at no point do they visit the West Bank, Gaza or East Jerusalem (Boston Globe August 26, 2010). They are urged to become dual citizens and even encouraged to serve in the Israeli armed forces. In summary the 52 member organizations of the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations which we discuss are only the tip of the iceberg of the Zionist Power Configuration: taken together with the PACs, the propaganda mills, the commercial and University presses and mass media we have a matrix of power for understanding the tremendous influence they have on US foreign and domestic policy as it affects Israel and US Zionism.
While all their activity is dedicated first and foremost in ensuring that US Middle East policy serves Israel’s colonial expansion in Palestine and war aims in the Middle East, what B’nai B’rth euphemistically calls a “focus on Israel and its place in the world”, many groups ‘specialize’ in different spheres of activity. For example, the “Friends of the Israel Defense Force” is primarily concerned in their own words “to look after the IDF”, in other words provide financial resources and promote US volunteers for a foreign army (an illegal activity except when it involves Israel). Hillel is the student arm of the Zionist power configuration claiming a presence in 500 colleges and universities, all affiliates defending each and every human rights abuse of the Israeli state and organizing all expenses paid junkets for Jewish student recruits to travel to Israel where they are heavily propagandized and encouraged to ‘migrate’ or become ‘dual citizens’.
Method: Studying Zionist Power:
There are several approaches for measuring the power of the combined Zionist organizations and influential occupants of strategic positions in government and the economy. These include (a) reputational approach (b) self claims (c) decision-making analysis (d) structural inferences. Most of these approaches provide some clues about Zionist potential power. For example, newspaper pundits and journalists frequently rely on Washington insiders, congressional staff and notables to conclude that AIPAC has the reputation for being one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. This approach points to the need to empirically examine the operations of AIPAC in influencing Congressional votes, nomination of candidates, defeating incumbents who do not unconditionally support the Israeli line. In other words analyzing the Congressional and Executive decision- making process is one key to measuring Zionist power. But it is not the only one. Zionist power is a product of a historical context, where media ownership and wealth concentration and other institutional levers of power come into play and shape the current decision-making framework. Cumulative power over time and across institutions creates a heavy bias in the political outcomes favorable to Israel’s organized agents in America. Once again the mere presence of Jews or Zionists in positions of economic, cultural and political power does not tell us how they will use their resources and whether they will have the desired effect. Structural analysis, the location of Zionists in the class structure, is necessary but not sufficient for understanding Zionist power. One has to proceed and analyze the content of decisions made and not made regarding the agenda of Israel’s backers operating in the USA. The 52 major Zionists organizations are very open about their claims to power, their pursuit of Israel’s agenda and their subservience to each and every Israeli regime.
Those who deny Zionist power over US Mid East foreign policy are left-Zionists namely Noam Chomsky and his acolytes. They never analyze the legislative process, executive decision-making, the structures and activity of the million member Zionist grassroots and the appointments and background of key policy makers deciding strategic policies in the Middle East. Instead they resort to superficial generalizations and political demagogy, imputing policy to “Big Oil” and the “military-industrial complex” or “US imperialism”, devoid of empirical content and historical context about real existing policy making regarding the Middle East.
The Making of Zionist Power in the US Government
To understand US submission to Israeli war policies in the Middle East one has to look beyond the role of lobbies pressuring Congress and the role of political action committees and wealthy Zionist campaign contributions. A much neglected but absolutely essential building block of Zionist power over US foreign economic, diplomatic and military policy is the Zionist presence in key policy positions, including the Departments of Treasury and State, the Pentagon, the National Security Council and the White House.
Operating within the top policy-making positions, Zionist officials have consistently pursued policies in line with Israel’s militarist policies, aimed at undermining and eliminating any country critical of the Jewish States’ colonial occupation of Palestine, its regional nuclear monopoly, its expansion of Jews only settlements and above all its strident efforts to remain the dominant power in the Arab East. The Zionist policymakers in Government are in constant consultation with the Israeli state, ensuring coordination with the Israeli military (IDF) command, its Foreign Office and secret police (MOSSAD) and compliance with the Jewish State’s political line. Over the past 24 months not a single Zionist policymaker has voiced any criticism of Israel’s most heinous crimes, ranging from the savaging of Gaza to the massacre of the humanitarian flotilla and the expansion of new settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. A record of loyalty to a foreign power which even exceeds the subservience of the Stalinist and Nazi fellow travelers in Washington during the 1930’s and 1940’s.
Zionist policymakers in strategic positions depend on the political backing and work closely with their counterparts in the “lobbies” (AIPAC) in Congress and in the national and local Jewish Zionist organizations. Many of the leading Zionist policymakers rose to power through a deliberate strategy of infiltrating the government to shape policy promoting Israel’s interest over and above the interests of the US populace. While a degree of cohesion resulting from a common allegiance to Tel Aviv can account for suspected nepotism and selection, it is also the case that the powerful Jewish lobbies can play a role in creating key positions in Government and ensuring that one of their own will occupy that position and pursue Israel’s agenda.
Stuart Levey: Israel’s Foremost Operative in the US Government
In 2004, AIPAC successfully pressured the Bush Administration to create the office of Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (UTFI) and to name its protégé Princeton graduate Stuart Levey to that position. Before, but especially after his appointment, Levey was in close collaboration with the Israeli state and was known as an over the top Zionist zealot with unbounded energy and blind worship of the Israeli state.
Levey coordinates his campaign with Zionist leaders in Congress. He secures sanctions legislation in line with his campaigns. His policies clearly violate international law and national sovereignty, pressing the limits of extra territorial enforcement of his administrative fiats against a civilian economy. His violation of economic sovereignty parallels Obama’s announcement that US Special Forces would operate in violation of political sovereignty on four continents. For all intents and purposes, Levey makes US policy toward Iran. At each point he designs the escalation of sanctions, and then passes it on to the White House, which shoves it down the throats of the Security Council. Once new sanctions approved by Levey and staff are in place they are there to enforce them: identifying violators and implementing penalties. Treasury has become an outpost of Tel Aviv. Not a single leftist, liberal or social democratic publication highlights the role of Levey or even the terrible economic pain this Old Testament fanatic is inflicting on 75 million Iranian civilian workers and consumers. Indeed like Israel’s Judeo-fascist rabbis who preach a “final solution” for Israel’s enemies, Levey announces new and harsher “punishment” against the Iranian people (Stuart Levey, “Iran’s New Deceptions at Sea Must be Punished” FT 8/16/2010, p. 9). Perhaps at the appropriate moment the Jewish State will name a major avenue through the West Bank for his extraordinary services to this most unholy racist state.
Within the confines of his Zionist ideological blinders, Levey applied his intelligence to the singular task of turning his office into the major foreign policy venue for setting US policy toward Iran. Levey more than any other appointed official in government or elected legislator, formulates and implements policies which profoundly influence US, European Union and UN economic relations with Iran. Levey elaborated the sanctions policies, which Washington imposed on the EU and the Security Council. Levey, organizes the entire staff under his control at Treasury to investigate trade and investment policies of all the world’s major manufacturing, banking, shipping, petroleum and trading corporations. He then criss-crosses the US and successfully pressures pension funds, investment houses, oil companies and economic institutions to disinvest from any companies dealing with Iran’s civilian economy. He has gone global, threatening sanctions and blackballing dissident companies in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America which refuse to surrender economic opportunities. They all understood Levey operated at the behest of Israel, services Levey has proudly performed.
The Strategic Role of Local Power
The Israel Lobby Archive recently released declassified documents of the American Zionist Council (AZC) subpoenaed during a US Senate investigation between 1962-63. The documents reveal how the Israeli state through its American Jewish conduits – the mainstream Zionist organizations – penetrated the US mass media and propagated its political line, unbeknown to the American public. Stories written by a host of Jewish Zionist journalists and academics were solicited and planted in national media such as The Readers Digest, The Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post among others, including regional and local newspapers and radio stations (Israel Lobby Archive, August 18, 2010). While the national Zionist organizations procured the journalists and academic writers and editors, it was the local affiliates who carried the message and implemented the line. The level of infiltration the Senate subpoenaed Zionist documents in the 1960’s reveal has multiplied a hundred fold over the past 50 years in terms of financing, paid functionaries and committed militants and above all in structural power and coercive capability.
While the national leaders in close consultation with Israeli officials receive instructions on which issues are of high priority, the implementation follows a vertical route to regional and local leaders, politicians, and notables who in turn target the local media and religious, academic and other opinion leaders. When national leaders ensure publication of pro Israeli propaganda, the locals reproduce and circulate it to local media and non-Zionist influentials on their “periphery”. Letter campaigns orchestrated at the top are implemented by thousands of militant Zionist doctors, lawyers and businesspeople. They praise pro-Israel scribes and attack critics; they pressure newspapers , publishing houses and magazines not to publish dissidents. The national and local leaders promote hostile reviews of books not promoting the Israeli line, influence library decisions to pack their shelves with pro Israeli books and censor and exclude more balanced or critical histories. Local militants in co-ordination with Israeli consuls saturate the public with thousands of public meetings and speakers targeting Christian churches, academic audiences and civic groups; at the same time local Zionist militants and, especially millionaire influentials, pressure local venues (university administrators, church authorities and civic associations) to dis-invite any critic of Israel and their supporters from speaking. In the last resort, local Zionists demand that a pro-Israel propagandist be given equal time, something unheard of when an Israel apologist is scheduled to speak.
Local Zionist organizations make yeoman efforts to recruit mayors, governors, local celebrities, publishers, church people and promising young ethnic and minority leaders by offering them all expenses paid propaganda junkets to Israel and then to write or give interviews parroting what they were fed by Israeli officials. Local leaders mobilize thousands of militant activist Zionists to attack anti-Zionist Jews in public and private. They demand they be excluded from any media roundtables on the Middle East.
Local Zionist functionaries form rapid response committees to visit and threaten any local publisher and editorial staff publishing editorials or articles questioning the Israeli party line. Local leaders police (“monitor”) all local meetings, speaker invitations, as well as the speeches of public commentators, religious leaders and academics to detect any “anti-Zionist overtones’ (which they label “covert anti-Semitism”). Most of the major Jewish religious orders are lined up as the clerical backbone of local Israeli fund-raising, including the financing of new “Jews only” settlements in the Palestinian West Bank.
Local functionaries are in the forefront of campaigns to deny independent Middle East specialists and public policy academics, appointments, tenure or promotion, independently of the quality of their scholarship. On the other hand, academic hacks who toe the pro-Israel line, by publishing books with blanket attacks on Israeli critics among Christians and Muslims and countries like Turkey, Iran or whoever is a target of Israeli policy, are promoted, lauded and put on the best seller list. Any book or writer critical of Zionist Power or Israel is put on a local and national ‘index’ and subject to an inquisition by slander from a stable of Jewish Torquemadas.
Conclusion
The power of Israel in the US does not reside only in the influence and leadership of powerful Washington based “pro-Israel lobbies”, like AIPAC. Without the hundreds of thousands of militant locally based dentists, podiatrists, stockbrokers, real estate brokers, professors and others, the “lobby” would be unable to sustain and implement its policy among hundreds of millions of Americans outside the major metropolises. As we have seen from the Senate declassified documents, over a half-century ago, local Zionist organizations began a systematic campaign of penetration, control and intimidation that has reached its pinnacle in the first decade of the 21st century. It is no accident or mere coincidence that University officials in Northern Minnesota or upstate New York are targeted to exclude speakers or fire faculty members critical of Israel. Local Zionists have computerized data banks operating with an index of prohibited speakers, as the Zionists themselves admit and flaunt in contrast to “liberal” Zionists who are prone to label as “anti-Semitic” or “conspiracy theorists” writers who cite official Zionist documents demonstrating their systematic perversion of our democratic freedoms.
Over the decades, the distinction between Zionist power exercised by a “lobby” outside the government and operatives “inside” the government has virtually vanished. As we have seen, in our case study, AIPAC secured the undersecretary position in Treasury, dictated the appointment of a key Zionist operative (Stuart Levey) and accompanies his global crusade to sanction Iran into starvation and destitution. The planting of operatives within key Middle East positions in government is not the simple result of individual career choices. The ascent of so many pro-Israel Zionists to government posts is part of their mission to serve Israel’s interest at least for a few years of their careers. Their presence in government precludes any Senate or Congressional investigations of Zionist organizations acting as agents of a foreign power as took place in the 1960’s.
As the major Zionist organizations and influentials have accumulated power and abused the exercise of power on behalf of an increasingly bloody racist state, which flaunts its dominance over US institutions, public opposition is growing. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign is gaining strength even in the US (see Harvard divestment in Israeli companies). US public support for Israel, by all measures, has dropped below 50%, while polls in Western Europe show a marked increase in hostility to Israel’s ultra-rightist regime. Anti-Zionist Jews are growing in influence especially among young Jews who are appalled by the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and assault on the humanitarian flotilla. Equally important the presence of anti-Zionist Jews on panels and forums has given courage to many otherwise intimidated non-Jews who heretofore were fearful of being labeled “anti-Semitic”.
The Zionist power configuration rests on a declining population base: most young Jews marry outside the confines of the ethno-religious Jewish-Israeli nexus and many of them are not likely to form the bases for rabid campaigns on behalf of a racist state. The Zionist leadership’s high intensity and heavily endowed effort to fence in young people of Jewish ancestry via private schools, subsidized “summer programs” in Israel etc. are as much out of fear and recognition of the drift away from clerical chauvinism as it is an attempt to recruit a new generation of Israel First militants.
The danger is that the US Zionist support for the ultra-rightist and racist regime in Israel is leading them to join forces with the far right in the US. Today Jewish and Christian Manhattan rednecks are fomenting mass Islamic hatred (the so called “Mosque controversy”) as a distraction from the economic crises and rising unemployment. Zionist promotion of mass Islamophobia, so near to Wall Street, where many of their fat cats who profit from plundering the assets of America operate, is a dangerous game. If the same enraged masses turn their eyes upward toward the wealthy and powerful instead of downward to blacks and Muslims, some unpleasant and unanticipated surprises might rebound against, not only Israel’s operatives, but all those wrongly identified as related to a misconstrued Jewish Motherland.
Appendix
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations
Member Organizations
Press TV – August 29, 2010
An Aboriginal man has been elected to Australia’s House of Representatives, pledging an all-out battle against racism in the pacific nation. The 58-year-old Liberal, Ken Wyatt, won the seat of Hasluck in West Australia.
The Liberal Party says Wyatt has won by a wider margin over sitting Labor member Sharryn Jackson.
Wyatt has been receiving racist hate mail since his victory.
“I have had that all my life, growing up as an Aboriginal in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s,” he said of the discrimination he had faced.
“I have come from a life of poverty and through my own individual efforts, I stand now within the national arena,” DPA quoted Wyatt as saying.
Around 500,000 of Australia’s 22 million-strong population claim Aboriginal heritage and cultural values.
Human rights group Amnesty International has recently criticized Australia for what it described as racially discriminatory policies toward Aborigines. Indigenous communities are considered as the most disadvantaged in Australia and they suffer higher rates of imprisonment, unemployment, illness and child mortality.
Neither Labor nor the Liberal National coalition has won the majority of Australia’s August 21st election. This will lead to a hung parliament in the country for the first time in seventy years.
IMEMC – August 26, 2010
Several months ago, a religious school in the illegal Israeli settlement of Immanuel was criticized for segregating white Jewish students from non-white Jewish students in classes.
Originally, the school was fined for this policy of racial segregation, because the school was state funded. Now, the Israeli education ministry has agreed with the white parents’ request to allow the school to continue with its racial discrimination under private funding.
There is no law preventing racial discrimination by private organizations, even schools, in Israel.
The Israeli court has interpreted these laws to also apply to illegal West bank settlements, like Immanuel, which are located in areas that are supposed to be under Palestinian control. The Palestinian Authority does not allow racial discrimination, but due to the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian Territories, it has no authority over the area in question.
74 white girls who have been studying in a building next to the school will now be allowed to study in whites-only classrooms that are privately funded, as their parents claim they do not want their girls to study in racially-mixed classrooms.
See also:
Education Ministry approves new private school in West Bank settlement
Ammon News | August 25, 2010
AMMAN // Jordan’s civilian nuclear programme is gaining momentum, even as negotiations with Washington stall over a nuclear agreement that would allow US firms to transfer nuclear know-how, equipment and fuel to this nation of 6.4 million people.
The main impetus driving Jordan’s civilian nuclear programme is the growing demand for energy. Jordanian officials say nuclear power would reduce Jordan’s dependence on imported oil and serve as a long-term alternative for electricity generation, water desalination and energy security. It could also allow Jordan to export electricity to neighbouring countries.
Three years ago, Jordan imported 96 per cent of its energy at a cost of US$3.2 billion (Dh11.75bn), or 24 per cent of imports and 20 per cent of GDP. In the first half of 2009, the cost of crude-oil imports increased by 132 per cent, and by the end of the year they were costing the country US$4 bn. Last year, despite a drop in oil prices, energy costs consumed 11.8 per cent of Jordan’s GDP, according to the ministry of energy.
Jordanian officials say they cannot afford to pause efforts to meet the country’s energy needs. Preparations are under way for a plant set to be located 11 kilometres east of the Aqaba coastline along the Red Sea in southern Jordan and expected to generate 750 to 1,100 megawatts of electricity starting in 2019.
“We are pressing ahead with our programme. The commission has entered into a competitive dialogue with three technology providers we have short-listed as the most preferred bidders to build the country’s first power plant in 2013,” Khalid Touqan, chairman of the Jordan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC), said. “We will eventually decide on the most preferred technology by the end of March next year.”
Companies from Canada and Russia, as well as a Franco-Japanese consortium, are bidding to oversee construction of as many as four nuclear power plants in Jordan in the next three decades, Mr Touqan said.
Already, Jordan has signed nuclear co-operation deals with eight countries – including France, the UK, China and Russia – and is aiming to sign similar deals with Japan, the Czech Republic and Romania by the end of the year, Mr Touqan said. These agreements involve technical exchange, employee training, nuclear-fuel disposal, nuclear safety, public education and advice on regulatory frameworks.
Last month, South Korea also loaned $70 million for the construction of a $130m, five-megawatt research reactor at the Jordan University of Science and Technology.
Ironically, what has complicated Jordan’s drive for nuclear energy and its close ties with Washington are major deposits of uranium discovered on its soil.
Officials here now believe the country has the potential to fuel nuclear power plants using its own resources, as well as export uranium ore, following the discovery of 65,000 tonnes of uranium in central Jordan. Uranium extracted from phosphate deposits could boost that total to 110,000 tonnes, representing nearly two per cent of the global total, according the World Nuclear Association.
Jordan has signed an exploration agreement with the French company Areva. The commission, along with the Chinese mining company Sino Uranium and the British-Australian company Rio Tinto, are currently exploring uranium deposits in the northern and southern parts of Jordan, Mr Touqan said.
“We knew that we had uranium since the Eighties, but not in commercial amounts,” he added. “Field work is showing promising results.”
Washington’s concern that a nuclear-armed Iran may prompt other countries in the region to develop nuclear weapons, has prompted it to prod one of its key Mideast allies to forgo uranium enrichment altogether, much as the UAE did when it signed a pact with the US in January 2009. But resource-scarce Jordan does not want to give up its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which it signed in 1974.
It is not economically feasible for Jordan to build an enrichment plant now, but as regional demand for uranium grows, that may change, said a Jordanian official close to the negotiations.
A US State Department official, who spoke to The National on condition of anonymity, said his country supports civilian uses of nuclear energy in Jordan and elsewhere in the Middle East.
“We continue to conduct negotiations with Jordan on a possible agreement for nuclear co-operation”, the official said. “We are working with our partners to develop the infrastructure necessary to meet the highest provided international standards for safety, security, and non-proliferation of such programmes.”
But the Jordanian official, who also agreed to be quoted only on condition of anonymity, said that although Jordan has no plans to process and enrich uranium, it does not want to give up its right to do so.
“Under the NPT, we are allowed to enrich uranium by up to 20 per cent for peaceful means. We only need four per cent enrichment to power the plants,” he said.
An additional protocol the country signed with the IAEA in 1998 allows unannounced inspections of any nuclear facility in Jordan.
“This makes us not only transparent, but committed to the highest levels of the requirements of non-proliferation,” the official said.
By Suha Philip Ma’ayeh, Foreign Correspondent/ The National
By Philip Weiss on August 25, 2010
This is disturbing. A Yale University center that purports to study anti-Semitism is holding a three-day conference on “the crisis” of global anti-Semitism (ending tomorrow) that is dedicated to the idea that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.
The flotilla raid, anti-Semitic. Helen Thomas, anti-Semitic. The very idea of Palestinian identity, anti-Semitic.
That last claim–“The Central Role of Palestinian Antisemitism in Creating the Palestinian Identity”–was put forward Monday, shockingly, by Itamar Marcus, a leader of the settler movement in the occupied West Bank. Marcus has connections to the Central Fund of Israel, which raises money here for the settlers, including their “urgent security needs.”
The conference opened with a speech from an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, Aviva Raz-Schechter. And Charles Small, director of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, which is hosting the conference, said last spring that the confab was about Israel:
The largest number of papers, and therefore reflecting the greatest concern, address contemporary antisemitism and the demonization of Israel and those associated or made to be associated with Israel. There is a paper on issues of Jewish self-hatred and how some Jews, especially intellectuals, are distancing themselves from Israel.
That’s anti-Semitism? Here is the panel on “self-hatred”:
Plenary: Self Hatred and Contemporary Antisemitism • Professor Doron Ben-Atar, Fordham University: “Without Ahavath Yisrael [love for the people of Israel]: Thoughts on Radical Anti-Zionism at Brandeis” • Professor Richard Landes, Boston University: “Scourges and Their Audiences: What Drives Jews to Loathe Israel Publicly and What To Do About It?” • Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, Indiana University: “Beyond Criticism and Dissent: On Jewish Contributions to the Delegitimation of Israel”
The speakers’ list is here. Many of the speakers have Israel agendas, including Irwin Cotler, the Canadian politician who has led attacks on the Goldstone Report; Ruth Wisse, the Harvard Yiddishist who has called on young American Jews to enlist in an army of Israel defenders in the U.S.; Barak Seener, who has incited against the Palestinian citizens of Israel as a threat from within; Anne Bayefsky of the neoconservative Hudson Institute, another Goldstone attacker; Mark Dubowitz, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, whose main issue is cracking down on Iran; Anne Herzberg of the NGO Monitor, again an Israel advocacy group; Samuel Edelman of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, another Israel lobbyist; and Menahem Milson of the Elliott Abrams-linked hasbara outfit, MEMRI.
One person who alerted me to the conference, Charlotte Kates, writes: “Amazingly enough from the descriptions, this does not appear to be a conference sponsored by Hillel or other open advocacy groups, but rather by an academic center at the University. It’s particularly interesting that… an academic conference scorning the very concept of Palestinian identity and inviting presenters from NGO Monitor, ‘Palestinian Media Watch’ and MEMRI passes almost without comment at all – and the very same people who attack Palestinian scholars’ academic freedom find conferences such as this to be perfectly acceptable and legitimate.”
I don’t think it’s possible to understand this conference without understanding the prominence of Zionist donors in prestige institutional life. The other person who alerted me to the conference, Ben White, rightly focuses on the besmirching of Yale University by the presence of this festival of propaganda: “What is the role of Yale/academia in this kind of exercise?” And what a travesty, he adds, that “fighting anti-semitism – an anti-racist struggle – is being openly appropriated by far-right Zionist groupings, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, lobbyists like NGO Monitor, and Orientalist ‘Arab/anti-terror experts’.”
Update: A friend points out the role of Richard Landes. He keeps peddling the story that the death of Muhammad al-Durra (the six-year-old Gazan boy who was killed at the start of the intifada) was staged, something that Gerald Steinberg says is now “widely accepted.” Landes even set up an entire website more or less dedicated to peddling the conspiracy theory; check out his attempt to present in an even-handed manner his ‘five different scenarios’ for the killing.
By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News – August 25, 2010
500 Israeli citizens, escorted by dozens of military vehicles, drove by bus deep into the West Bank on Wednesday in a provocative visit to a West Bank settlement. The settlement has been the home of a number of violent attackers of local Palestinians, and many incidents of violence have originated from the settlement.
The most recent incident was the burning of Palestinian olive trees in the area this past weekend, just one of dozens of arsons that no police force has investigated.
On Wednesday, dozens of buses entered the West Bank in violation of the Oslo agreement and other signed accords, in the second such incident this month. On August 5th, around 300 Israelis were escorted into the same area to visit a site known as ‘Joseph’s Tomb’.
During the incursion, Israeli military forces that had been deployed in the area implemented increased security checks on the Palestinian residents of the region, delaying some people for several hours at checkpoints in order to allow the Jewish worshipers to pass freely.
The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank was recently given the authority by Israeli military rulers to be able to refurbish the site, which is a holy place of pilgrimage to Christians, Muslims and Jews. Israeli Rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger criticized the idea of Palestinians having control over a holy site that is on their own land – despite the fact that Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy sites were all preserved and maintained during the hundreds of years of Muslim rule over the Holy Land, the Rabbis stated, “If the PA receives the right to refurbish the holy grave site, it is clear that it will end up becoming a mosque…How can we give them authority and ownership over the place that is one of the three [in addition to Jerusalem and Hevron] that our Sages teach that the Gentiles cannot claim is not ours?… Such a disgrace cannot be allowed.”
The tomb is located near Balata refugee camp in Nablus, where thousands of Palestinian refugees live after having been exiled from their homes in what is now Israel.
After the last such incident, Taleb Abu Sha’ar, the Minister of Religious Affairs in Gaza challenged the Israeli military’s decision to escort the invading civilians, calling it a violation and provocation.
Israeli intelligence steps up its activity in the U.S. — and gets away with it.
By Philip Giraldi | American Conservative | August 23, 2010
Israeli government claims that it does not spy on the United States are intended for the media and popular consumption. The reality is that Israel’s intelligence agencies target the United States intensively, particularly in pursuit of military and dual-use civilian technology. Among nations considered to be friendly to Washington, Israel leads all others in its active espionage directed against American companies and the Defense Department. It also dominates two commercial sectors that enable it to extend its reach inside America’s domestic infrastructure: airline and telecommunications security. Israel is believed to have the ability to monitor nearly all phone records originating in the United States, while numerous Israeli air-travel security companies are known to act as the local Mossad stations.
As tensions with Iran increase, sources in the counterintelligence community report that Israeli agents have become more aggressive in targeting Muslims living in the United States as well as in operating against critics. There have been a number of cases reported to the FBI about Mossad officers who have approached leaders in Arab-American communities and have falsely represented themselves as “U.S. intelligence.” Because few Muslims would assist an Israeli, this is done to increase the likelihood that the target will cooperate. It’s referred to as a “false flag” operation.
Mossad officers sought to recruit Arab-Americans as sources willing to inform on their associates and neighbors. The approaches, which took place in New York and New Jersey, were reportedly handled clumsily, making the targets of the operation suspicious. These Arab-Americans turned down the requests for cooperation, and some of the contacts were eventually reported to the FBI, which has determined that at least two of the Mossad officers are, ironically, Israeli Arabs operating out of Israel’s mission to the United Nations in New York under cover as consular assistants.
In another bizarre case, U.S.S. Liberty survivor Phil Tourney was recently accosted in Southern California by a foreigner who eventually identified himself as an Israeli government representative. Tourney was taunted, and the Israeli threatened both him and journalist Mark Glenn, who has been reporting on the Liberty story. Tourney was approached in a hotel lounge, and it is not completely clear how the Israeli was able to identify him. But he knew exactly who Tourney was, as the official referred to the Liberty, saying that the people who had been killed on board had gotten what they deserved. There were a number of witnesses to the incident, including Tourney’s wife. The threat has been reported to the FBI, which is investigating, but Tourney and Glenn believe that the incident is not being taken seriously by the bureau.
FBI sources indicate that the increase in Mossad activity is a major problem, particularly when Israelis are posing as U.S. government officials, but they also note that there is little they can do to stop it as the Justice Department refuses to initiate any punitive action or prosecutions of the Mossad officers who have been identified as involved in the illegal activity.
In another ongoing Israeli spy case, Stewart Nozette appears to be headed towards eventual freedom as his case drags on through the District of Columbia courts. Nozette, an aerospace scientist with a top secret clearance and access to highly sensitive information, offered to sell classified material to a man he believed to be a Mossad officer, but who instead turned out to be with the FBI. Nozette has been in jail since October, but he has now been granted an additional 90-day delay so his lawyers can review the documents in the government’s case, many of which are classified. If Nozette demands that sensitive information be used in his defense, his case will likely follow the pattern set in the nine-times-postponed trial of AIPAC spies Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who were ultimately acquitted in April 2009 when prosecutors determined that they could not make their case without doing significant damage to national security. A month after Rosen and Weissman were freed, Ben-Ami Kadish, who admitted to providing defense secrets to Israel while working as an engineer at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, walked out of a Manhattan court after paying a fine. He did no jail time and continues to receive his substantial Defense Department pension.
The mainstream media reported the Rosen and Weissman trial intermittently, but there was virtually no coverage of Ben-Ami Kadish, and there has been even less of Nozette. Compare that with the recent reporting on the Russian spies who, by all accounts, did almost nothing and never obtained any classified information. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that spying for Israel is consequence free.
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Philip Giraldi, a former CIA Officer, is the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest. His “Deep Background” column appears every month exclusively in The American Conservative.
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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