This report is legally problematic in a number of ways.Firstly and most fundamentally, the IAEA simply has no legal mandate to produce such a report on activities being carried on within an IAEA member state concerning items and technologies that may be related to the development of a nuclear explosive device, but that are not directly related to fissionable materials or associated facilities.
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Since the IAEA is acting outside of its legal authority in this section of the report, it does not have a legal standard to apply to its conclusions regarding possible nuclear weapons related activities not involving fissile material. […] In short, as the ancient legal maxim states, there can be no illegality where there is no law. The IAEA is simply “concerned.”
Why they are concerned is itself a matter of curiosity. There is no knowledge or technical ability related to nuclear weapons detailed in this report, and allegedly possessed by Iran, which other technologically advanced non-nuclear-weapon states like Japan or Germany do not possess. These are specialized bodies of knowledge and technical capabilities, to be sure, but they are well within the knowledge base and technical abilities of these advanced industrial states.
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Since there is no evidence presented in this new report by the IAEA Director General that Iran has physically constructed a nuclear explosive device or any of its components, one can conclude that the Director General’s concern expressed in this report cannot be justified as being based upon a breach of a rule of international law prohibiting the activities outlined in the IAEA report. Such a rule exists neither in Iran’s safeguards agreement with the IAEA, or in the NPT. Rather, the reason for the IAEA’s and the UN Security Council’s attention to Iran can only be based on other factors, primarily including the determination of the US and other states that Iran is a threat to Israel, the region and international peace and security generally.
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[The IAEA’s] track record in devoting so much critical attention to Iran over the past nine years, and not to other non-nuclear-weapon states who have for decades engaged in precisely the same production of knowledge and capabilities, through the same processes, has convinced both Iran and the other members of the Non-Aligned Movement (comprising the vast majority of states in the world) that the IAEA has thereby undermined its independence and objectivity as a technical monitoring and verification body. Instead, they believe, it has become a politicized instrument of the foreign policy goals of the US and other Western states. The agency’s overreaching in its new report is simply the most recent evidence of this fact.
With regard to “to other non-nuclear-weapon states who have for decades engaged in precisely the same production of knowledge and capabilities, through the same processes” Joyner mentions, let us just point to two of them (there are many more).
Many of Japan’s political and intellectual leaders remain committed to nuclear power even as Japanese public opinion has turned sharply against it. One argument in favor rarely gets a public airing: Japan needs to maintain its technical ability to make nuclear bombs.
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“I don’t think Japan needs to possess nuclear weapons, but it’s important to maintain our commercial reactors because it would allow us to produce a nuclear warhead in a short amount of time,” Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister, said in an interview in a recent edition of Sapio, a right-leaning twice-monthly magazine.”It’s a tacit nuclear deterrent,” added Mr. Ishiba, an influential parliament member who made similar remarks on a prime time television news show in August while serving as policy chief of Japan’s main opposition party.
Jose Alencar, who also served as defense minister from 2004 to 2006, said in an interview with journalists from several Brazilian news media that his country does not have a program to develop nuclear weapons, but should: “We have to advance on that.”
Like Iran Brazil has not signed the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty plus it has several nuclear activities that awake at least suspicion with regards to possible nuclear weapon manufacturing including an HEU production facility for highly enriched Uranium at Resende that is only partially under IAEA watch. Brazil seems, in total, much more determined and active working towards nuclear weapon capability than Iran.
Joyner is quite right in pointing out that the IAEA is far off its legal basis and highly partisan with regards to Iran. He also caught the reason why this is so quite well.
Belgian journalist and filmmaker Chris den Hond has released a brief documentary about the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. The video explains the justifications for consumer and academic boycott and features stunning footage of non-violent confrontational actions taken by French solidarity activists. It also discusses the repression activists face in France for their activities and the government’s efforts to criminalize Palestine solidarity.
Comments: Ramin Mazaheri
Production: Chris Den Hond
Israel is trying to exploit the international community’s uncertainty about how to respond to this week’s report by the UN nuclear watchdog (IAEA) on Iran’s nuclear program to justify a possible military strike against Iran. The IAEA’s report indicated Iran has secretly worked for years on developing a nuclear warhead and might still be doing so.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report is certain to lead to demands by the US and Europe for stiffer sanctions on the Iranian regime. Russia and China, meanwhile, have urged dialogue and cooperation with Iran.
Amid the divisions, British government officials said this week that Israel was preparing to launch a military attack on Iran’s suspected nuclear sites within the next two months, probably with logistical support from the United States.
An unnamed senior official at the Foreign Office told the Daily Mail newspaper: “We’re expecting something as early as Christmas, or very early in the new year.”
Similarly anonymous US military officials have been ringing alarm bells in the US media that Israel might launch an attack. The Pentagon, CNN reported, was “increasingly vigilant” for military activity between Israel and Iran.
The warnings followed a fortnight of reports in the Israeli media of bitter feuds within the Israeli government, as well as with Israel’s security chiefs, about plans to initiate such a strike.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, are said to be strongly in favour of an attack. The balance in the inner cabinet apparently tipped in their favour last week when they recruited the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, to their cause.
Further reports suggest that Netanyahu and Barak have recently moved from discussing a strike to the stage of “implementation.” In what looked like an additional intimidatory move, Israel test-launched last week the Jericho III, a long-range missile capable of reaching Iran.
Lined up against Netanyahu and Barak, according to the Israeli media, are both the current and recently retired heads of all the main military and intelligence services. They appear to be using the country’s military affairs correspondents to pass on dire warnings of the folly being prepared by Netanyahu.
The only one who has gone public so far is Meir Dagan, who departed as head of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, nearly a year ago. He incurred Netanyahu’s wrath early this year by stating that an attack on Iran was the “stupidest thing I have ever heard.”
He undermined Netanyahu’s public position again last month, arguing that Iran could not develop a nuclear bomb for at least another three years and, apparently contradicting the IAEA report, suggested there was no evidence Tehran has yet decided to develop military uses.
That position accords with the 2007 estimate of 16 US intelligence agencies, which found no evidence of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons programme. An updated estimate this year has so far been kept under wraps by the White House, apparently because it confirms the earlier assessment.
Iran has long claimed it is only seeking to establish a civilian nuclear energy programme, as it is entitled to do as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has been receiving help chiefly from Russia.
However, some experts believe Iran is also secretly trying to become a “nuclear threshold state”: that is, to get close to developing a warhead so that, should Tehran be threatened – possibly with a US invasion, as happened to neighboring Iraq – it can quickly produce a nuclear bomb as a deterrence.
Dagan and other Israeli security officials are reported to believe that an Israeli attack on Iran would be futile and dangerous. It would fail to disable most of the nuclear production sites, which are dispersed and hidden underground, and would only intensify the pressure on Tehran to develop the technology.
Israel’s security establishment also fears that a strike would lead to severe retaliation not only from Iran but also potentially from Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas; rally Iranians behind their regime; threaten reprisals against the US in Iraq; and bring international condemnation on Israel’s head.
Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, underlined that point today when he said any attack by either Israel or the US would provoke “regional war.”
Similarly, Iranian leaders have warned that, if attacked, they would hit back against both Israel and the US. “We would make them regret such a mistake and would severely punish them,” said Hassan Firouzabadi, the Iranian chief of staff, this month.
Nonetheless, the Israeli public appears to be supportive of an attack. In May, 71 percent of Israelis backed the US launching a strike against Iran. A poll this month showed 41 behind a lone Israeli operation, with a further 20 percent undecided. Support among Israeli Jews is almost certainly higher, as the survey included the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian and are generally opposed to military action.
The very public display of division in Israel’s political and military establishments on a matter of such importance to national security is almost unprecedented, leading Dan Meridor, a deputy prime minister, to call the debate “insane” and a “scandal.”
Israel is believed to have twice launched attacks on Arab states to prevent what it claims were secret efforts towards making a nuclear warhead. In 1981 it bombed Iraq’s Osirak experimental reactor, while it was under construction; and Israel is widely assumed to have been responsible for a strike in 2007 on a suspected nuclear site in Syria.
Both attacks were carried out without warning.
Israel’s true intentions in this case are hard to decipher.
Israel has been warning of the dangers of an Iranian bomb for nearly two decades, regularly claiming over that period that Tehran is only years or months from building a warhead.
However, in recent years Israel has won backing in the form of a series of increasingly stringent sanctions on Iran, imposed by the UN Security Council, to dissuade it from pursuing even a nuclear energy programme.
But most in the Israeli leadership are known to be skeptical that sanctions alone can stop Tehran from getting the bomb. They argue that a nuclear-armed Iran would be a threat to world peace and suggest that Israel would be first to be targeted.
Netanyahu has been especially vociferous in promoting this threat, calling Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the “new Hitler” and warning that Israel faces a “Holocaust from the ayatollahs” – comparing Israel’s position to that of the Jewish community in Germany in 1938.
Israel’s real concerns, however, are rather different from the doomsday rhetoric.
In fact, the leadership is chiefly fearful of the domestic and geo-political implications of Tehran developing a warhead, believing it would severely weaken both Israel’s regional superpower status and its tight alliance with Washington.
Israel has its own nuclear arsenal – estimated at between 200 and 400 warheads – which it developed secretly with assistance from Britain and France, and against US wishes, in the late 1960s.
Commentators have noted that one of Israel’s chief aims in developing a warhead was to blackmail the US and force it into a military alliance for fear that otherwise Israel might use the bomb in a confrontation with a neighboring state.
Francis Perrin, head of the French Atomic Energy Agency during the period when France helped Israel to develop a nuclear weapon, said: “We thought the Israeli bomb was aimed against the Americans… to say ‘if you don’t want to help us in a critical situation we will require you to help us, otherwise we will use our nuclear bomb.”
Just such a moment occurred a few years later, in 1973, when the US was forced massively to rearm Israel as it faced defeat at the hands of neighboring Arab states.
At the regional level, Israel’s current fear is that an Iranian bomb would unravel these gains. Israeli analysts were clear on this point as far back as the early 1990s, when Iran was trying to get European oversight for a nuclear energy programme.
Aluf Benn, an analyst for Haaretz, wrote in 1994, for example, that Israel regarded Iran as the number one military priority because it “could aspire to regional hegemony and ruin the peace process by virtue of having nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.”
In this assessment, were Tehran to become a military rival to Israel, it would be able to bolster its position with the Arab states, force Israel to make major concessions to the Palestinians and compete for influence in Washington.
None of these prospects is easy for Israel to live with.
In addition, there are also fears that a nuclear Iran would pose a “demographic threat” domestically for Israel, making Israeli Jews consider emigrating and Jews in the diaspora unwilling to immigrate. Given Israel’s desire to ensure the Jewish population outnumbers the Palestinians at all times, such issues are taken seriously.
In 2006 Ephraim Sneh, at the time the deputy defense minister to Barak, revealed that Israel was not primarily concerned that Iran might fire a nuclear missile.
The danger of an Iranian bomb, he warned, was that “most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who can live abroad will.” He added: “I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist dream without pushing a button. That’s why we must prevent this regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs.”
But while there is no doubt these threats are taken extremely seriously by Israel’s security establishment, there is much less clarity about what action can feasibly be taken.
Dagan is credited with a series of exploits – including assassinating Iranian scientists, introducing computer viruses into the software being used in Iran’s nuclear programme, and setting up shell companies to sell faulty equipment to Tehran – that are believed to have slowed Iranian progress.
According to a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks last year, Dagan told US officials that covert action, including helping minority groups topple the regime, could contain Iran’s nuclear programme for the forseeable future.
There has been fevered speculation about why Israeli officials have gone public with their dispute about military action.
The disagreement has made Israel look weak and indecisive, fuelling fears that Netanyahu and Barak are sincere about wanting a military strike, even if they have to go against US wishes.
More likely, however, Dagan and others in the intelligence establishment are concerned that, while Netanyahu’s belligerent posturing towards Iran is a bluff, it might escalate into a dangerous confrontation. Haaretz’s military correspondent, Amos Harel, said there was a danger in Netanyahu’s behaviour of “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
That concern is shared by Russia. Its foreign minister, Dmitry Medvedev, said today that Israel was using “dangerous rhetoric” that could lead to “a major war.”
Certainly, there is little evidence that Netanyahu’s threats are likely to dissuade Tehran from developing a weapon, if that is what Ahmedinejad’s regime is really trying to do. In fact, menacing Iran may simply firm up its resolve to protect itself by building a warhead.
The real audience of Netanyahu’s threat of military action, it seems, is the White House and the international community.
According to Israeli analysts, the US alone has the military muscle to take out Iran’s nuclear sites. Netanyahu appears to hope that Washington can be goaded into carrying out a strike of its own to avoid the threat of an unsuccessful Israeli operation.
At the very least, he may hope, Obama will be assisted in trying to win over China and Russia to “crippling sanctions,” as Lieberman demanded this week.
Even intensified sanctions might be used to try to bring Iran to its knees, as occurred in Iraq. That is the fear of Russia. Its deputy foreign minister, Genady Gatilov, warned this week that more sanctions would be seen as “an instrument of regime change in Tehran”.
The question is how Obama responds to the pressure. He is facing a presidential election year, and can expect to come under enormous arm-twisting not only from Israel but also from its supporters in the Congress and among Washington’s lobby groups.
How credible the report is is already open to doubt. Yaacov Katz, a Jerusalem Post analyst, noted that Israeli intelligence had provided “critical information used in the report.” That may have included information that Iran had recruited a Russian scientist, Vyacheslav Danilenko, to help in developing its nuclear programme. Almost immediately, evidence surfaced indicating that Danilenko had no nuclear expertise.
In a sign that the White House might fight a rearguard action to try to stop Israel cornering it into military action, US defence secretary Leon Panetta warned today that such an attack should be a “last resort,” and would make little impact on an Iranian programme but would have unintended consequences, including for US forces in the region.
On November 8, the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies jointly issued a discussion paper that outlines “policy options for the United States and like-minded nations to further assist the anti-regime Syrian opposition.” Entitled “Towards a Post-Assad Syria,” the paper advocates imposing “crippling sanctions” on the Assad government, providing assistance to Syrian opposition groups, and imposing no-fly/no-go zones in Syria.
Founded in 2009, the Foreign Policy Initiative is the successor organisation to the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative advocacy group that relentlessly pushed for war with Iraq from its inception in 1997. FPI’s board of directors consists of PNAC co-founders, Robert Kagan and William Kristol; Dan Senor, a former intern at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; and Eric Edelman, a Paul Wolfowitz protégé at the Pentagon who, thanks to support from Richard Perle, succeeded the scandal-ridden Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith in 2005. In a 2004 article entitled “Serving Two Flags,” Stephen Green named Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith as “the principals” in a pro-Israel neocon network who had “demonstrated, in their previous government service, a willingness to sacrifice U.S. national security interests for those of another country.”
Established shortly after the 9/11 attacks to advocate for an aggressive “war on terror,” the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has also demonstrated a preeminent concern for Israel’s security interests. Among its more notable funders are Edgar M. Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress from 1979 to 2007; Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt, co-founders of Taglit Birthright which offers free trips to Israel for young Jewish adults as an inducement to go on its pro-Israel indoctrination programme; media mogul Haim Saban, who pledged $13 million to the Brookings Institution in 2002 to found the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in order to influence U.S. politics in a pro-Israel direction; Jennifer Mizrahi, director of The Israel Project; and Dalck Feith, father of the aforementioned “security risk” Douglas Feith. “With the disclosure of its donor rolls,” Eli Clifton wrote in a July 19 report, “it becomes increasingly apparent that FDD’s advocacy of U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, its hawkish stance against Iran, and its defense of right-wing Israeli policy is consistent with its donors’ interests in ‘pro-Israel’ advocacy.”
While Israel’s longstanding interest in destabilising Syria goes unmentioned, the FPI/FDD discussion paper stresses two of the groups’ well-worn themes: fighting terrorism and protecting human rights. “Long a sponsor of terrorism beyond its borders,” the paper asserts, “the Syrian government is now waging an internal war against its own people.”
Acknowledging that the U.N. Security Council is “unlikely to act anytime soon” due to what they decry as “gridlock” imposed by Russia and China, the FPI and FDD take it upon themselves to propose what options they think the United States has for responding to “the Assad regime’s provocations.” Citing a paper by Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, which suggests the “military options” of an air campaign, a maritime operation to enforce strong sanctions, a no-fly and no-go zone, and even an invasion to carry out regime change, they propose keeping those options “on the table” while exploring some additional “intermediate steps.”
Critical of the Obama administration’s slow response to the Syrian crisis, the FPI/FDD paper urges the President and Congress to “work to quickly pass legislation for harsher U.S. sanctions on Syria.” As examples of relevant pending bills, the paper cites the Syria Sanctions Act of 2011, originally introduced by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Joe Lieberman and Mark Kirk; and the Syria Freedom Support Act, originally introduced by Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Eliot Engel. While few members of Congress can afford to cross the Israel lobby, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to lobby-watchers to hear that Gillibrand, Lieberman, Kirk, Ros-Lehtinen and Engel were the ones to “introduce” what was almost certainly AIPAC-crafted legislation.
To bolster their case for no-fly and no-go zones in Syria, FPI and FDD point out that “leading lawmakers are now discussing the possibility.” Senator Joe Lieberman, they note, “first suggested looking at military options to protect Syrian civilians in March 2011, and returned to the idea of no-fly and no-go zones in October 2011.” They also refer to Senator John McCain’s October 23 speech before a World Economic Forum meeting in Jordan, when he ventured, “Now that military operations in Libya are ending, there will be renewed focus on what practical military operations might be considered to protect civilian lives in Syria.” As those familiar with the careers of Lieberman and McCain well know, they are certainly “leading lawmakers” when it comes to putting Israel’s interests ahead of America’s.
If the “humanitarians” at the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies succeed in getting the Obama administration to adopt their “options” to assist the anti-regime Syrian opposition, Bill Kristol will soon be celebrating the sixth “war of Muslim liberation” that he and his pro-Israel cronies have induced the United States to wage — with little thought for all the “shed blood and expended treasure.” Unless the Syrian people want their country to be added to Kristol’s dubious roster of “the liberated” — Kuwait, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya — they had better make it loud and clear that they have no desire whatsoever for the kind of “assistance” offered by pro-Israel groups.
Dennis Ross– the man who personifies the failed peace process over five administrations, the man dubbed “Israel’s lawyer” and, by Abe Foxman, an “advocate” for Israel, the former chairman of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute– is reported to be packing his bags. From the Times, tweeted and at the site: “Dennis B. Ross, Envoy to Hot Spots, Will Leave Administration in December, Official Says.”
Dennis B. Ross, a seasoned diplomat who has been one of President Obama’s most influential advisers on Iran, the Middle East peace process and the political upheaval in the Arab world, will leave the White House in December, a senior administration official said on Thursday.
Mr. Ross, who announced his departure at a lunch with Jewish leaders, told White House officials that he promised his wife he would leave the government after two years.
Dennis, like myself, had an inherent tendency to see the world of Arab-Israeli politics first from Israel’s vantage point rather than that of the Palestinians… his own strong Jewish identity and his commitment to Israel’s security combined with something else: a deep conviction that if you couldn’t gain Israel’s confidence, you had zero chance of erecting any kind of peace process. And to Dennis, achieving this goal required a degree of coordination with the Israelis…
Huh. No wonder there’s no Palestinian state! … Full article
The report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published by a Washington think tank Tuesday repeated the sensational claim previously reported by news media all over the world that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.
But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives.
In fact, Danilenko, a Ukrainian, has worked solely on nanodiamonds from the beginning of his research career and is considered one of the pioneers in the development of nanodiamond technology, as published scientific papers confirm.
It now appears that the IAEA and David Albright, the director of the International Institute for Science and Security in Washington, who was the source of the news reports about Danilenko, never bothered to check the accuracy of the original claim by an unnamed “Member State” on which the IAEA based its assertion about his nuclear weapons background.
Albright gave a “private briefing” for “intelligence professionals” last week, in which he named Danilenko as the foreign expert who had been contracted by Iran’s Physics Research Centre in the mid-1990s and identified him as a “former Soviet nuclear scientist”, according to a story by Joby Warrick of the Washington Post on Nov. 5.
The Danilenko story then went worldwide.
The IAEA report says the agency has “strong indications” that Iran’s development of a “high explosions initiation system”, which it has described as an “implosion system” for a nuclear weapon, was “assisted by the work of a foreign expert who was not only knowledgeable on these technologies, but who, a Member State has informed the Agency, worked for much of his career in the nuclear weapon program of the country of his origin.”
The report offers no other evidence of Danilenko’s involvement in the development of an initiation system.
The member state obviously learned that Danilenko had worked during the Soviet period at the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics in Snezhinsk, Russia, which was well known for its work on development of nuclear warheads and simply assumed that he had been involved in that work.
However, further research would have revealed that Danilenko worked from the beginning of his career in a part of the Institute that specialised in the synthesis of diamonds. Danilenko wrote in an account of the early work in the field published in 2006 that he was among the scientists in the “gas dynamics group” at the Institute who were “the first to start studies on diamond synthesis in 1960″.
Danilenko’s recollections of the early period of his career are in a chapter of the book, “Ultrananocrystalline Diamond: Synthesis, Properties and Applications” edited by Olga A. Shenderova and Dieter M. Gruen, published in 2006.
Another chapter in the book covering the history of Russian patents related to nanodiamonds documents the fact that Danilenko’s centre at the Institute developed key processes as early as 1963-66 that were later used at major “detonaton nanodiamond” production centres.
Danilenko left the Institute in 1989 and joined the Institute of Materials Science Problems in Ukraine, according to the authors of that chapter.
Danilenko’s major accomplishment, according to the authors, has been the development of a large-scale technology for producing ultradispersed diamonds, a particular application of nanodiamonds. The technology, which was later implemented by the “ALIT” company in Zhitomir, Ukraine, is based on an explosion chamber 100 sq metres in volume, which Danilenko designed.
Beginning in 1993, Danilenko was a principal in a company called “Nanogroup” which was established initially in the Ukraine but is now based in Prague. The company’s website boasts that it has “the strongest team of scientists” which had been involved in the “introduction of nanodiamonds in 1960 and the first commercial applications of nanodiamonds in 2000″.
The declared aim of the company is to supply worldwide demand for nanodiamonds.
Iran has an aggressive programme to develop its nanotechnology sector, and it includes as one major focus nanodiamonds, as blogger Moon of Alabama has pointed out. That blog was the first source to call attention to Danilenko’s nanodiamond background.
Danilenko clearly explained that the purpose of his work in Iran was to help the development of a nanodiamond industry in the country.
The report states that the “foreign expert” was in Iran from 1996 to about 2002, “ostensibly to assist in the development of a facility and techniques for making ultra dispersed diamonds (UDDs) or nanodiamonds…” That wording suggests that nanodiamonds were merely a cover for his real purpose in Iran.
The report says the expert “also lectured on explosive physics and its applications”, without providing any further detail about what applications were involved.
The fact that the IAEA and Albright were made aware of Danilenko’s nanodiamond work in Iran before embracing the “former Soviet nuclear weapons specialist” story makes their failure to make any independent inquiry into his background even more revealing.
The tale of a Russian nuclear weapons scientist helping construct an “implosion system” for a nuclear weapon is the most recent iteration of a theme that the IAEA introduced in its May 2008 report, which mentioned a five-page document describing experimentation with a “complex multipoint initiation system to detonate a substantial amount of high explosives in hemispherical geometry” and to monitor the detonation.
Iran acknowledged using “exploding bridge wire” detonators such as those mentioned in that document for conventional military and civilian applications. But it denounced the document, along with the others in the “alleged studies” collection purporting to be from an Iranian nuclear weapons research programme, as fakes.
Careful examination of the “alleged studies” documents has revealed inconsistencies and other anomalies that give evidence of fraud. But the IAEA, the United States and its allies in the IAEA continue to treat the documents as though there were no question about their authenticity.
The unnamed member state that informed the agency about Danilenko’s alleged experience as a Soviet nuclear weapons scientist is almost certainly Israel, which has been the source of virtually all the purported intelligence on Iranian work on nuclear weapons over the past decade.
Israel has made no secret of its determination to influence world opinion on the Iranian nuclear programme by disseminating information to governments and news media, including purported Iran government documents. Israeli foreign ministry and intelligence officials told journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins about the special unit of Mossad dedicated to that task at the very time the fraudulent documents were being produced.
In an interview in September 2008, Albright said Olli Heinonen, then deputy director for safeguards at the IAEA, had told him that a document from a member state had convinced him that the “alleged studies” documents were genuine. Albright said the state was “probably Israel”.
The Jerusalem Post’s Yaakov Katz reported Wednesday that Israeli intelligence agencies had “provided critical information used in the report”, the purpose of which was to “push through a new regime of sanctions against Tehran….”
**WINNER: BEST INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY – 2006 LOS ANGELES INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL.
**WINNER: BEST DIRECTOR for an INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY – 2006 NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.
Unrepentant documents Canada’s dirty secret – the planned genocide of aboriginal people in church-run Indian Residential Schools – and a clergyman’s efforts to document and make public these crimes. First-hand testimonies from residential school survivors are interwoven with Kevin Annett’s own story of how he faced firing, de-frocking, and the loss of his family, reputation and livelihood as a result of his efforts to help survivors and bring out the truth of the residential schools. This saga continues, as Annett continues a David and Goliath struggle to hold the government and churches of Canada accountable for crimes against humanity, and the continued theft of aboriginal land. Unrepentant took nineteen months to film, primarily in British Columbia and Alberta, and is based on Kevin Annett’s book Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust. The entire film was a self-funded, grassroots effort, which is reflected in its earthy and human quality.
1. Of course he is, why the hell are you even asking? But it’s not just that his two top aides, Mark Block and Linda Hansen are long time Americans for Prosperity hacks (AfP being a Koch brothers creation). Nor is it just the current scandal involving Block and possible illegal campaign contributions. It goes much deeper than that. Enjoy the ride into the depths of the abyss.
Oh, before I get into it, I bet you wanna know what the picture above is all about and what it has to do with Herman ZioCann. Just keep reading. Sit back, grab your favorite beverage, make sure you are not near any sharp objects, and read, weep and drink.
First of all , I sure hope that the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain don’t derail his candidacy because Americans richly deserve to have such a monster become their president. Thank Allah that Cain has mastered the art of sucking up to Israel, as this link shows so clearly. “Mr. Cain is a firm supporter of Israel,” said Imri Eisner, who was just named Cain’s point man for Jewish outreach. “He’s made it well known that as president, he will know who our friends are and who our enemies are.”
And good old Imri, should know. Yeah, Cain made his hajj to Israel in August and for his own personal “Feast of the Sacrifice” he offered up Palestinians to the racist bigoted God of the Hebrew Bible.
Cain is pretty much an ignoramus on most subjects. His ignorance of exactly how much he needed to suck up to Israel caused him some problems early in his campaign to become the Israeli Vice President for American Affairs (IVPFAA). Thus when asked by Islamofacist Chris Wallace about the right of Palestinians to return to Israel – from whence they had been expelled by completely innocent peace loving Jews – Cain mumbled something about how they should have that right if Israel wanted to grant it to them. Even a statement as obsequious as that cannot be tolerated by the Z people, so Cain had to get an education about Israel. One thing he did was read a bunch of books by Alan Derwoshitz. I’m not making this up.
And he also read “Israel at Sixty: An Oral History of a Nation Reborn” written by two Jews named Israel Gerald and Deborah Strober. Who are the Strobers?
Well, have you heard of Herman Cain’s new book? It’s called “I’m totally controlled by Zionist Jews and I want to help them destroy America.” Okay, that isn’t really the title. The real title is “This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House.” Except he didn’t really write it. Gerald and Deborah Strober wrote it for him.
And it was the Strobers who told him to go to Israel, so he did.
“The Strobers, who are Jewish and live in Manhattan, suggested a trip to Israel, and in August they accompanied Cain on a four-day tour of the country, starting with an appearance at Glenn Beck’s Jerusalem rally. Cain met with Israeli political figures — most of them on the right, including Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon, Deputy Knesset Speaker Danny Danon and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat.”
Cain’s token meeting with Palestinian puppet Salaam Fayyad never took place. It was all Jews all the time for Cain. Oh, plus attending that Glenn Beck hate fest too. He learned his lessons well. “Deborah Strober added, “He’s been briefed on the right of return and has an understanding of that.”’
While in Israel, Cain also said “”This may get me in trouble, but I do not care,” he said. “I think the Israeli people is (sic) more interested in peace than the Palestinians. Look at history and the fact that you’re getting bombed on the southern border. It is clear to me that Israel is more interested in peace than those seeking to deny the peace process.”
The more I think about it, the more I like the title I proposed for his book, rather than the one the Strobers used.
Oh, by the way, J.D. Gordon, one of Cain’s main advisors, is the son of a Jewish father and has a rather interesting connection to a really juicy scandal involving pro-Israelis in the UK. As Max Blumenthal opens his article on Gordon he writes:
“Top foreign policy advisor to US Republican presidential candidate has a murky history fraught with accusations of fraud, links to alleged clandestine operations with Mossad, sexual harassment and racism.“
Man, I really want Cain to become president. Maybe J.D. Gordon will become the head of the National Security Council.
“Not only has Gordon worked as a well-paid “fellow” for the Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank at the heart of the campaign to demonize Muslim citizens of the United States, but he has also been the key Washington representative of Atlantic Bridge, a shadowy front group at the center of a major influence peddling scandal that in October brought down British Defense Minister Liam Fox.”
Note to Shas Party Members, the Center for Security Policy is wild-eyed Islamophobe Frank Gaffney’s outfit. See why we need Cain to win in 2012? I’m gonna go get me some bumper stickers. You have got to read the Blumenthal article and share it with your friends.
Oh, wait, I forgot to talk more about the Strobers.
Gerald Strober is a really cool catch for Deborah Hart, aka Deborah Strober. When they got married back in 1981 Gerald was “national director of The American Friends of Tel Aviv University in New York.” But Gerald was even luckier. Debbie’s daddy is Phillip Hochstein, former editor and publisher of New York Jewish Week and a big shot in the Newhouse gang. Her deceased brother is Joseph Hochstein who has quite a few relatives living in Israel. Philip and Joseph founded Michael Collins Piper’s favorite publication, The Washington Jewish Week. (Just kidding Mike. I think he prefers The Forward.) Joseph passed away in Israel, where he spent the last decades of his life.
Deborah and Gerald have a child who apparently lives in Israel. Read all about this wonderful couple here.
” In fact, when Herman Cain visited Israel earlier this year, the Strobers — who have an apartment, a child who made Aliyah and grandchildren in Israel — say they arranged his itinerary and traveled with him. Indeed, like the idea for the memoir, the idea for Cain to go to Israel was theirs as well, they said.”
Even the book was their idea. And apparently so was everything else in Israel.
”According to the Strobers, Block immediately picked a date, which was later modified so that Cain could attend Glenn Beck’s rally in the Jewish State. While in Israel with Cain, the Strobers arranged for the White House contender to meet Israeli government officials and opposition leaders, to stop by the land the Israeli government has set aside for a U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, to go to the West Bank settlement of Ariel and to visit Christian holy sites, among other activities.”
Hold on a sec. I have to digress. “Ariel” was the feature of this Mantiqiyyan post earlier this year. Read it to see what an illegal piece of shit it is and how it was founded by religious fanatics. It’s also supported in part through US tax-deductible donations. End of digression.
By the way, the “Block” referred to here is Cain’s chief aid, Mark Block, a Koch brothers crony as I noted above, but I digress.
And here’s the bottom line for the Strobers:
“The Strobers are confident that even though Cain may not be an expert on foreign policy, he has the fundamentals right and would certainly be better than the current administration on Israel. “
Cain has learned his lessons well.
And now he needs your vote. Vote for Cain, Americans deserve him.
2. It’s video time goys and girls. But it’s a little different this time. I don’t expect you to watch them all, though you should. But I also give you a little commentary, some of it I hope will be informative and it will also explain the picture at the top of today’s post.
First, here is Herman ZioCaine in Israel on Israeli National TV in August. He is no longer the fiesty right wing gadfly who delights in outraging others. Here he is zio-pussy-whipped into utter submission. He actually makes Obama look good. That’s no mean accomplishment.
Now here is ZioCain back in the US. It’s real short. He’s trying to talk tough, but I can still detect that pussy-whipped tone.
Okay, now below we are back in Israel and on Fox News. The questioner talks like a typical Fox News Mossad agent. He asks ZioCain at one point [start at around 1:17 in the video] a question about Obama and Israel asking “Do you sense that they [the Israelis] don’t feel like they have a loyal leader in the White House?”
That’s right, the assumption in the question is that the President of the United States has to be loyal to Israel. Cain agrees with that assumption. He replies “I not only sense it, I had a lot of people here tell me that in no uncertain terms. And it goes back to when to President Obama threw Israel under the bus or he threw Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under the bus when he was coming to the United States. The people have not forgotten that. Not only a lot of Jewish people who live here in Israel, but I have also ran (sic) into a lot of Jewish people who came over the Glenn Beck event, and they also feel as if this president has let the Jewish people down. That will not happen in a Cain presidency. Absolutely not, because as you know my doctrine is real simple, if you mess with Israel you are messing with the United States of America. That’s how strongly I feel about the relationship between the United States and Israel.”
Yup, Cain places Israel ahead of the United States. Americans really deserve this guy.
Enjoy the video.
Here is perhaps the most disgusting ZioCain video of all. It says so much, oh so much. He is speaking at the Israel Day concert. That concert was on June 5th. The picture at the start of this essay is taken from the concert’s brochure. That’s right, Herman Cain spoke at an event honoring Jonathan Pollard. Man, Americans deserve this son of a bitch. Here, watch him grovel. The web site for the Israel Concert Day is here. Their brochure in full is here. You should look at those documents and see who they bring in for this thing. It’s like having Mossad move into Central Park. The web pages don’t even look American. They look foreign, alien, weird. And that’s because they are.
Friedman sells the Iraq war as “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched” despite making subsequent assessments such as “The neocon strategy may have been necessary to trigger reform in Iraq and the wider Arab world, but it will not be sufficient unless it is followed up by what I call a ‘geo-green’ strategy.” As I point out in my book, it is difficult to determine how many true “geo-greens” would advocate for the tactical contamination of the earth’s soil with depleted uranium munitions; why not introduce a doctrine of neoconservationism?
Fernández links to Tom Friedman cheerleading the Iraq war in 2003. Wow, I forgot about his stuff! Or thankfully never read it in the first place. The question arises, Did Tom Friedman make any difference with this kind of talk? And I say of course he did, he helped convince the liberal Establishment to go along with this foolish war. Friedman and Ken Pollack and Bill Keller and David Remnick– the pen is mightier than the sword.
[T]he Baathists and Arab dictators are opposing the U.S. in Iraq because — unlike many leftists — they understand exactly what this war is about. … They understand that this is the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched — a war of choice to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. […]
Many liberals oppose this war because they can’t believe that someone as radically conservative as George W. Bush could be mounting such a radically liberal war.
It is unusual for politicians to namedrop journalists. And so it should be; our job as reporters and commentators is to expose the harm done by the powerful, not to curry favor with them. One exception I recall was during a 2003 press briefing given by James Wolfensohn, then the World Bank’s president, most of which he spent listing his influential acquaintances. Among them was Thomas Friedman, who, Wolfensohn reminded his listeners, “belongs to your profession.”
After reading The Imperial Messenger by Belén Fernández, the thought of sharing a profession with Friedman revolts me. Fernández demonstrates meticulously how The New York Times columnist seeks to make racism respectable.
That racism is directed at one ethnic group: Arabs. In 2001, Friedman even implied that Arabs are innately backward, writing: “In an age when others are making microchips, you are making potato chips (116).”
The following year, he effectively advocated the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians. Three days before Israeli troops went on their March 2002 rampage in a Jenin refugee camp, Friedman called on Israel to “deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay” (xv). Israel’s murder of 1,200 persons, mostly non-combatants, in Lebanon during 2006 was, in Friedman’s view, part of the “education of Hizballah” (142).
More Middle East than Minnesota?
Even though just one chapter is specifically focused on the “special relationship” between Israel and the US, Friedman’s commitment to Zionism is criticized throughout Fernández’s book.
While Friedman has claimed he learned he was “more Middle East than Minnesota” on his first visit to Jerusalem in 1968 (55), Fernández stresses that his refusal to analyze Zionism and its legacy from a critical perspective means that all his work on the region must be treated with circumspection (54).
In any event, his claim is a dubious one; a great deal of his travels are spent in the Westernized environments of golf clubs, luxury hotels or hamburger restaurants (Friedman’s most famous and ludicrous theory is that no two countries hosting a branch of McDonald’s have gone to war against each other (3)).
Perhaps the best thing about this book is how it highlights the shoddiness of Friedman’s research and how someone who has been lauded by Pulitzer Prize judges for his “clarity of vision” is frequently muddled and inconsistent.
Last year Friedman stated that “when widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem” (135). Yet his own copy is known to rely on sources of questionable veracity, in particular the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which, according to Friedman, offers “an invaluable service” by translating foreign-language articles written by Arabs and Muslims into English (61).
MEMRI is a somewhat shadowy neoconservative outfit, yet on its website it is candid about one of its goals: to aid the US government and military in their “war on terror.” By definition, then, the “invaluable service” is fighting a propaganda battle on behalf of American foreign policy.
Another telling example of why Friedman should not be trusted is that he concluded Yasser Arafat was a “bad man” based on a Google search, which yielded more hits when Arafat’s name was combined with “jihad” and “martyrdom” than when it was combined with “education” (106).
Meanwhile, Friedman’s view of Israeli settlements has veered from arguing their continued expansion was as irresponsible as drunk-driving (96) to dismissing them as “extraneous” to the underlying conflict (93) within the space of a seven-month period.
Vanity
A strong indication that Friedman’s ego is out of control came in his 2002 collection of essays Longitudes and Attitudes. In it, he sought credit for the Saudi plan to establish relations with Israel in return for a withdrawal from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza. Friedman has convinced himself that the genesis of this initiative was a column he wrote on transforming Saudi Arabia “from terrorist factory to peacemaker.”
Fernández derides this self-important twaddle by querying its pertinence: Friedman’s boast was pointless, given how he recognized that Ariel Sharon was always determined to reject the Saudi offer (124).
My only complaint with this book is that it doesn’t go into much depth in examining how Friedman is symptomatic of a wider malaise in the mainstream media. A reader unfamiliar with the American press could come away with the impression that Friedman is a singular buffoon, when, in fact, his prejudices are shared by many of his senior colleagues. But that is a tiny gripe. I fully accept that this is a brief polemic targeting Friedman and does not purport to be the definitive history of an American institution.
Few books on current affairs merit being called page-turners; because of Fernández’s witty and punchy style, this one does. Her conclusion turns to the urgent task of developing a counter-narrative to that of Friedman and other writers who pander to a corporate and political elite. The healthy growth of alternative publications on the Internet is certainly helping that task and hopefully this trend will continue.
Nonetheless, it is sobering to reflect on how Friedman remains something of a role model for aspiring journalists (at least, that is what I have gleaned from speaking to reporters younger than me). It is vital to explain that the high salary he commands is atypical of his trade and, the way newspaper sales are declining, is bound to become more so.
Even more fundamentally, it is vital to ask whether or not Friedman can really be considered a journalist. Fernández suggests that he has essentially become a copy-writer for big business, the US military and the State of Israel. Does America’s best-known columnist have trouble thinking for himself?
The Israeli Air Force fired a missile into a Beit Hanoun residential neighborhood in north Gaza early Sunday morning. The missile landed in a grove surrounded by homes, creating a crater the size of a tennis court and destroying over forty orange and olive trees. Chunks of shrapnel and oranges lay scattered about the grove.
Local children and area residents interviewed appeared to be in shock. Ayman Ismail Hamad explained that “[a]t 3 a.m. we heard a huge boom. It was so scary for the children and women here and they started to shout and cry – such a scary thing for them. When we looked out to see what happened we found everything there totally destroyed … and the windows from the houses in this area – totally nothing. The [Israeli] F-16 didn’t leave anything behind.”
The owner of the farmland, Sufyan Musa Muhammad, reported losing approximately 40 orange and olive trees, not including the uprooted trees at the periphery of the crater, valued at approximately $200 a tree. “It’s not just the price,” he added, gazing sadly at the upturned alien landscape. “It’s that there’s no more fruit.” According to Muhammad, no journalists had approached him regarding the Israeli missile attack, which went unreported.
Thirteen-year-old Amer Ayman Hamad, whose house is about 50 meters away from the impacted area said, “There was boom … I didn’t scream, I just woke up … it was during the night we didn’t hear any plane except for the sound of the drones … after that I went to the bathroom.”
Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attack which terrorized local residents. No one was injured. Palestinians in the area believe that Israel used an F-16 to bomb the residential neighborhood due to the size of the crater and the thickness of the shrapnel.
When asked if he believed Israel should compensate him for his loss Muhammad replied, ”I don’t want money from the Israelis. Whatever they do to us we are steadfast and strong and we won’t leave our land.”
The 1946 Oakland general strike began with a dispute at two downtown department stores, Hastings’ and Kahn’s, where 425 clerks (mostly women) were on strike for union recognition.
The strike, a landmark event in Northern California labor history, was also a significant, though misunderstood, episode in the strike wave of 1945-1946, the greatest strike wave in numbers in US history at the point.
The Oakland strike was very much in the spirit of the strike wave but it wasn’t a “called strike.” At the time Stan Weir was employed on the assembly line at Chevrolet’s East Oakland plant, a member of UAW local 76. He was riding a streetcar, on his way to work on Monday morning, December 3, the day Oakland was shut down.
“Shortly before 5 am, Monday, December 3, 1946, hundreds of workers passing through downtown Oakland… became witness to the police herding a fleet of scab trucks through the downtown area. The trucks contained commodities to fill the shelves of two major department stores whose clerks had long been on strike.
“The witnesses, that is, truck drivers, bus and streetcar operators and passengers, got off their vehicles and did not return. The city was filled with workers, they milled about the city’s core for several hours and then organized themselves.”
World War II ended in August, 14, 1945. V-J Day marked the end of war abroad and the beginning of rebellion at home. There had been strikes throughout the war years, often wildcat strikes in defiance of the no-strike pledge – policy demanded by the government from above, and supported by not only the unions but also radical organizations including the Communist Party.
So one result was pent-up demands. There were frustrated expectations – plus the widely held conviction that the time for sacrifice – both overseas and at home – was over. There was the belief that there had been sacrifice enough. By the end of September the number of days “lost” (won) to strikes had doubled, by the end of October it had doubled again. 200,000 coal miners struck in September; 44,000 Northwest lumber workers followed; as did 70,000 Midwest truck drivers, 40,000 machinists in San Francisco and Oakland, East Coast longshoremen, and many more – and this despite the statement from Philip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), that “no change will be made in the CIO’s no-strike policy…” and the similar pledge by American Federation of Labor (AFL) President William Green: “V-J Day will not mean an automatic ending of the restraint on strikes.”
1945 was just the prelude and US workers were not to be contained. There were more than 5000 major strikes in 1946, the largest and most sustained strike wave in US history, surpassing the strike years of 1919 and 1934. These strikes included the autoworkers who closed eighty General Motors plants in 50 cities. The steelworkers struck for 25 days, 750,000 strong, at that point the single largest strike in US history (to be surpassed by Latino May Day strikers in 2006). 400,000 coal miners struck. President Truman threatened to draft striking railroad workers.
At one point, there were 1,600,000 workers on strike. By the end of the year 4.6 million workers had been on strike. 28,500,000 work days had been lost to the employers. It was a magnificent display of working class power – it was “too big,” also too popular, to be defeated.
The trade union leadership was divided at the top – the AFL still competed with the CIO, though not for long, as they soon united to purge the left. Rank-and-file solidarity, however, was widespread. Just as in 1919 and 1934, the strike wave increased workers appetites; in 1919 there was the general strike in Seattle and in 1934 the general strike in Minneapolis.
In 1946 there were general strikes in Rochester, NY; Stamford, CT; Lancaster and Pittsburgh, PA and, of course, Oakland, CA.
“By nightfall /on the 3rd/ the strikers had instructed all stores except pharmacies and food markets to shut down, Bars were allowed to stay open, but they could serve only beer and had to put their juke boxes out on the sidewalk to play at full volume and no charge. ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama, Lay That Pistol Down’, the number one hit, echoed off all the buildings. That first 24-hour period of the 54-hour strike had a carnival spirit. A mass of couples danced in the streets. The participants were making history, knew it, and were having fun. By Tuesday morning they had cordoned off the central city and were directing traffic. Anyone could leave, but only those with passports (union cards) could get in.
“The comment made by a prominent national network newscaster, that ‘Oakland is a ghost town tonight,’ was a contribution to ignorance. Never before or since had Oakland been so alive and happy for the majority of the population. It was a town of law and order. In that city of over a quarter million, strangers passed each other on the street and did not have fear, but the opposite.”
The Oakland Strike spread from the bottom up. There was never much evidence of official union leadership in the streets. But there were streetcar operators and bus drivers and truck drivers who refused to honor police cordons, demanded an end to “scab” labor and denounced the city administration and the police.
“Before the second day of the strike was half over a large group of war veterans among the strikers formed their own squads and went through close-order drills. They then marched on the Tribune Tower, offices of the anti-labor Oakland Tribune, and from there marched on City Hall demanding the resignation of the mayor and city council. Sailor’s Union of the Pacific (SUP) crews walked off the three ships at the Oakland Army base loaded with military supplies for troops in Japan. By that night the strikers closed some grocery stores in order to conserve dwindling food supplies.
“In all general strikes the participants are very soon forced by the very nature of events to themselves run the society they have just stopped. The process in the Oakland experiment was beginning to deepen…
“The top local Teamster officials, except one, were not to be found; the exception would be fired five months later for his strike activity. International Teamster President Dave Beck wired orders ‘to break the strike’ because it was a revolutionary attempt ‘to overthrow the government’. He ordered all Teamsters who had left their jobs to return to work.
At last, the unions acted. 142 unions affiliated with the Alameda County AFL declared a “work holiday” and 100,000 workers walked off their jobs. The business of Oakland effectively came to a halt.
“A number of the secondary Oakland and Alameda County union leaders did what they could to create a semblance of straight trade-union organization. The ranks, unused to leading themselves and having no precedent for this sort of strike in their own experience, wanted the well-known labor leaders in the Bay Area to step forward with expertise, aid, and public legitimization.
“The man who was always billed as leader of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike, ILWU President Harry Bridges, who was then also State CIO President, refused to become involved, just as he did 18 years later during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement struggles. The rank-and-file longshoremen and warehouse- men who had been drawn to the street strike were out there on their own.
“No organized contingents from the hundreds available in the warehouse and longshore hiring halls were sent to help, No CIO shops were given the nod to walk out or ‘sick-out’. Only through CIO participation could significant numbers of blacks have been drawn into this mainly white strike. The ILWU and other CIO unions would honor picket lines like those around the Tribune Tower or at the Oakland Army Base, but otherwise they minded their own business.
“Bridges had recently committed himself to a nine-year extension of the wartime no-strike pledge.”
The strike ended two days later. It was “… 54 hours old at 11 a.m. on December 5. The people on the street learned of the decision from a sound truck put on the Street by the AFL Central Labor Council. It was the officials’ first really decisive act of leadership. They had consulted among themselves and decided to end the strike on the basis of the Oakland City Manager’s promise that police would not again be used to bring in scabs.
“No concessions were gained for the women retail clerks at Kahn’s and Hastings Department Stores whose strikes had triggered the General Strike; they were left free to negotiate any settlement they could get on their own. Those women and many other strikers heard the sound truck’s message with the form of anger that was close to heartbreak.
“Numbers of truckers and other workers continued to picket with the women, yelling protests at the trucks and appealing to all who could hear that they should stay out. But all strikers other than the clerks had been ordered back to work and no longer had any protection against the disciplinary actions that might be brought against them for strike-caused absences. By noon only a few score of workers were left, wandering disconsolately around the now-barren city. The CIO mass meeting that had been called for that night to discuss strike ‘unity’ was never held.”
Historians tend to argue that 1946 strikes were mostly about wages, a “wage offensive” writes one. And this was true to a degree and in this the strikes were often successful, in the short term, in two ways; first in today’s terms, workers’ average gains were about $2 an hour and, because of the way demands were formulated, low wage workers benefited most – hence the idea at the time of a “solidarity wage.” But they were also about lives and beliefs, workers aspirations and they were a rebellion against control from above.
So the 1946 strikes also reflected the legacy of the 1930s, the inheritance of confidence US workers felt along with their capacity to organize and fight, but there would not be another such uprising until the strike wave of the 1970s (1967-1981).
In a sense the Oakland strike was both an end and a beginning. The victories of the 1930s were consolidated but from on high – by the “new men of power” (Mills). There were no women on labor’s first team. These men collaborated with management and government officials to institute a corporate compact, an unwritten agreement, the so-called “The New Deal Formula” of Industrial Relations.” The unions would “deliver the goods” but this and post-war prosperity compromised, and sometimes eliminated rank-and-file participation and undermined shop floor power – wages could be increased, benefits won (for union members) by making deals at the top. McCarthyism drove the rebels to the margins. In addition, wartime patriotism, both as the result of service, but also reflecting war-time no-strike pledges and war productivity drives dampened militancy and deradicalized American workers. At the same time, the Cold War had already begun on the shop floor.
“The Oakland General Strike was related to the 1946 Strike Wave in time and spirit, and revealed an aspect of the temper of the nation’s industrial-working-class mood at war’s end. Labor historians of the immediate post-war period have failed to examine the Oakland Strike, and thus have failed to consider a major event of the period and what it reveals about the mood of that time. In developing their analyses they have focused almost entirely on the economic demands made by the unions that participated in the Strike Wave. These demands were not unimportant. But economic oppression was not the primary wound that had been experienced daily during the war years.”
One last point: overwhelmingly, the strike wave was regional in character. It was a wave of strikes in the Northeast, the Great Lakes Region (including West Virginia) and to a lesser degree California. The rest, the South in particular, remained non-union. The demand that the CIO “organize the /segregated/ south” had been abandoned. These regions, not surprisingly, led the Republicans in recapturing Congress in 1946, in turn to the Taft-Hartley in 1947 — “the slave labor act” according to the AF of L).
Organizing the unorganized, black workers, women workers, farm workers, would have to wait.
See Stan Weir, Singlejack Solidarity, George Lipsitz, ed., (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2004)
And
Stan Weir, “The 1946 Oakland General Strike,” libcom library, Nov 22, 2005. Downloaded, October 21. 2011.
Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021.
The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists. … continue
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The Israeli Air Force fired a missile into a Beit Hanoun residential neighborhood in north Gaza early Sunday morning. The missile landed in a grove surrounded by homes, creating a crater the size of a tennis court and destroying over forty orange and olive trees. Chunks of shrapnel and oranges lay scattered about the grove.
Aletho News
