The International Criminal Court at The Hague is a pariah in the world of Justice and International Law; those who work for it are traitors to their cause, the Institution itself is an insult to every fibre of civilisation and a knife in the back of the notion that the law prevails and is applied without bias.
It is patently clear nowadays that the ICC is a tool in the hands of NATO – a cynical tool which bases itself on the pseudo-precept that it follows the law, a manipulative organism which twists legal principles and applies them with two weights and measures. What is amazing, is that those behind the ICC and NATO think that the public will believe them.
NATO has committed war crimes in Kosovo, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. NATO has committed terrorist attacks occasioning murder in all three theatres of war. Nothing happened, the ICC remained silent. Arrest warrants have been served for David Cameron and Barack Obama in police stations near their places of work and residence for the murder of Colonel Gaddafi’s three grandchildren and other civilians in Libya. Monitoring the situation, we see that nothing has yet happened.
NATO’s violation of the law
NATO’s remit in Libya were UNSC Resolutions 1970 and 1973 (2011) which, summarized, concentrated on no boots on the ground in Libya among NATO forces and this is not the case:
– violation 1; the enforcement of a no-fly zone, which does not include strafing civilian structures
– violation 2; measures to protect civilians from being attacked does not mean attacking government forces fighting hundreds of heavily armed terrorists
– violation 3; Under the UN Charter it is illegal to take sides in an internal conflict
– violation 4; it is illegal to murder or attempt to murder government officials
– violation 5; with no formal declaration of war, with no remit from the Military Committee of the UNSC, any action occasioning murder is illegal
– violation 10; Under the Geneva Conventions it is illegal to attack civilian structures with military hardware
– violation 11; it is also illegal to deploy in theatres of conflict munitions and weaponry which will have an affect after such conflict. The alleged use of cluster bombs by NATO and of Depleted Uranium (there are several precedents) could provide violation 12.
At least eleven, possibly 12, violations of international law in Libya, countless others in other operations, and the ICC says nothing. The judges of the ICC receive their instructions and insult their academic area, the fundamental principles of law and their professional class with barefaced arrogance. I challenge Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo to investigate the above charges and to pronounce himself.
The joke which is the ICC
Two international lawyers have exposed the joke which the ICC is. Within just a few hours, lawyers Themba Langa (South Africa – Counsel to Muammar al-Qathafi, Saif al-Islam al-Qathafi and Abdullah al-Senussi) and Fabio Maria Galiani (Italy – Legal advisor and member of the defence team) uncovered no less than eight points of law proving that the ICC is a kangaroo court without one iota of legal validity, yet again proved in this case. Their points are summarized as follows, my observations in brackets.
They point out that for a start the Court has no jurisdiction in Libya because it was never ratified there, that anyway notwithstanding this, under international customary law a Head of State has immunity (did they take Saddam Hussein to The Hague? Indeed the ICC has no jurisdiction in the USA, so why should it have any in Libya?)
Secondly they point out that the referral to the ICC by the UN Security Council is a violation of jurisdiction, independence and impartiality because it instructs the Court to exclude prosecution for certain persons and in following this directive, the ICC itself is in violation of its own constituent Statutes; thirdly the UNSC does not have the power to dictate terms over Libya to the ICC and anyway under international customary law, the ruling yesterday by the ICC is invalid in countries not signatories to the Rome Treaty which set up the Court.
Fourthly, if in the following instances, the Prosecutor has still not decided whether to open a case on Georgia (because the evidence is being considered) since 2008 (three years); on Guinea since 2009 (two years), on Colombia since 2006 (five years) why then was all the evidence on Libya read, digested and treated legally within just three days when the investigation was opened? (Where is the case against Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi? Where are the cases against the Islamist terrorists who massacred Black Libyans and children? Where is the case against NATO, against Obama, against Cameron, against Sarkozy, against Berlusconi?)
Fifthly the ICC did not even notice that the referral by the UNSC violated the Court’s Statute; sixthly, if NATO respects the Court and its deliberation, (why is it continuing to perpetrate 100 terrorist attacks a day protecting terrorists?) then the defendants should have the right to defence themselves. Seventh, NATO is accountable for murder, destruction of property and injury to civilians (acts of terrorism) and eighth, the entire campaign has been based on manipulation through the media (rendering the legal tenets void under any normal court of law. But then again, the ICC is no court of law, is it?)
Next, on the impartiality of this “Court”, the lawyers mentioned above claim in their statement:
“One of the judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber I, Mr. Cuno Tarfusser, recently made statements to the Italian media on the situation in Libya which indicated that the ICC is not impartial.”
One last question, why do the USA, UK and France prohibit the delivery of baby food to Libyan children? Isn’t it enough for Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy to murder them by bombing? If they enjoy murdering children, why don’t they start at home? When they look at their children, do they hear the screams of Colonel Gaddafi’s grandchildren as they fried in their own blood?
So, Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo, what, as a judge and a lawyer, do you have to say to THAT? Nothing, of course, because we know who and what you are.
From the beginning the official Israeli narrative has followed a very simple script: A homeless and persecuted people, the victims of pogroms and genocide, asked for and were granted a homeland in the land that was taken from them nearly two thousand years ago.
Promising that it would “ensure [the] complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; … guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; … safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and … [would] be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations” (source: The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948), it was a narrative that most people supported and most people believed. After all, the Israeli leadership sounded sincere, so why wouldn’t they be?
What was buried in the narrative was a sinister narrative of age old persecution: their new Jewish homeland, they are the victims of a vicious attack by Israel’s Arab residents and neighbors. They, the Israelis, are innocent. How could these evil people treat them so badly when they want only peace and grant their Arab residents the same civil rights as they grant their Jewish residents?
Did many people believe this narrative? Most of them did, and I was one of them. Problem is, none of it was true. Israel’s Knesset danced around it by maintaining that the declaration is neither a law nor an ordinary legal document. And since Israel has never had a Constitution, the Knesset and all of Israel’s institutions have ignored it. Israel’s laws openly discriminate against all non-Jews, in open violation of UN standards. And as the truth about Israel’s chronic violence and violation of its legal responsibilities, its leaders defend their behavior, increase their attack of anyone they consider “guilty” of “persecuting” them, and seem, at least to me, progressively deranged.
In a recent article, jazz musician, philosopher and writer Gilad Atzmon made the following very perceptive comment: “Jewish identity politics is shaped by a totally unique psychological disorder. I call it Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (as opposed to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome). Jewish reality is shaped by an imaginary fictional future threat. … Yet, the lack of capacity to differentiate between reality and imagination leads to the inevitable emergence of the most tragic possible scenarios” (source: “Gaza Flotilla versus Diaspora Jewry”, 1 July 2011).
“Operation Cast Lead”, the attack against the Mavi Marmara, the seek out, sabotage and if necessary destroy Hasbara mission against people and organizations accused of “delegitimizing” Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu’s “build more settlements” response to the P.A. taking a nationhood petition to the UN, and the demented destruction of ancient Muslin burial grounds are signs of a leadership that has gone seriously off the rails. More and more, Israel’s leadership looks like a suicidal train crew driving its speeding train off the edge of a precipice.
Sadly, it didn’t have to be this way.
Had David Ben-Gurion and the others approached the whole Israeli enterprise actually treating Palestine’s Arab population as equal partners in a nation that assured all its citizens and residents equal treatment under the law, and had they chosen to partner with Palestine’s skeptical Arabs (who had every good reason to be skeptical of Jewish actions), then none of this would have happened.
But that wouldn’t have fit the persecution element in Israel’s mythic history. People who are attached to the idea of persecution swing wildly between the poles of hopelessness and resentment. Since they expect persecution, their resentment causes them to set up the conditions that bring such persecution about. To resentful victims, everyone who disagrees with them is an enemy that their resentment impels them to attack. The result is a descending spiral of hopelessness and self-destructive acts that I see as openly suicidal.
Where will this end for Israel? I wish I knew. I’d like to see my own country begin to take a stand, but with most members of Congress in hock to AIPAC, I don’t see that happening anytime soon, if at all. I’d also like to see a much less self-destructive leadership in Israel, but I don’t see that happening either. Perhaps other nations will develop the backbone to stand up to the U.S. and force the issue with Palestinian Statehood. Or perhaps one day all of Palestine will be a land in which Jew and Gentile live in peaceful harmony. That, after all, is the only thing that really works in life. All the rest is just a repeat of mankind’s very violent history.
And that we can no longer afford if we want to survive as a species on a livable planet.
Hillary Clinton could hardly have given her latest hypocritical pro-Arab Spring speech at a more appropriate venue. Attending the inauguration of a human rights institute in Budapest honouring the late Congressman Tom Lantos of California, the U.S. Secretary of State urged “emerging democracies” to “show solidarity with those in the streets of Belarus, in Libya and around the world.”
Until his death in 2008, Congressman Lantos was, as one former U.S. diplomat put it, “the Hungarian-American guardian of Israel’s interests in Congress.” As co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, Lantos knowingly deceived his co-chairman and the public about the identity of “Nayirah,” whose incubator atrocity story helped justify American intervention in the 1991 Gulf War. Lantos is said to have “shared a common drive for promoting democracy and human rights” with his close friend and fellow Hungarian Holocaust survivor George Soros.
Update I: In her speech, Hillary Clinton noted that Tom Lantos’ grandson, Tomica Tillemann, is her Senior Advisor for Civil Society and Emerging Democracies. Speaking in Budapest in April, Tilleman gave some very revealing insights into how the State Department is “creating change in a changing world.”
Update II: Chairing the Lantos Foundation’s illustrious Advisory Board is another staunch supporter of the so-called “Arab awakening” — Israeli President Shimon Peres.
Many years ago I read a fascinating discussion of the “tactics of mistake.” This essentially entailed using a target’s prejudices and preconceptions to mislead them as to the origin and intent of the attack, entrapping them in a tactical situation that later worked to the attacker’s strategic advantage.
This is what unfolded in the 9/11 attacks that led us into the matrix of wars and conflicts, present (Afghanistan and Iraq), planned (Iran and Syria) and projected (Jordan and Egypt), that benefit Israel and no other country — although I concede that many private contractors and politicians are doing very well for themselves out of the death and misery of others.
I am also absolutely certain as a strategic analyst that 9/11 itself, from which all else flows, was a classic Mossad-orchestrated operation. But Mossad did not do it alone. They needed local help within America (and perhaps elsewhere) and they had it, principally from some alumni of PNAC (the misnamed Project for a New American Century) and their affiliates within and outside of the US Government (USG), who in the 9/11 attacks got the “catalytic event” they needed and craved to take the US to war on Israel’s behalf, only eight months after coming into office.
Genesis of the Deception
That was not how it seemed at first, of course. Lists of names and associations of the alleged hijackers quickly surfaced in official US accounts and mainstream media (MSM) reports, pointing to Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda group, then largely in Afghanistan. Bin Laden denied responsibility, saying in effect that while he thanked Allah that the attacks had occurred, he had not done it, but the US demanded that the Taliban governing Afghanistan turn him over to the US. The Taliban response was reasonable: “Show us the evidence he did it and we’ll give him to you.” But the US brushed it off and attacked. Why? Because it had no convincing evidence, and never would — even on the eve of his public death in 2011, the FBI did not include 9/11 on his internet-based “Most Wanted” charge sheet.
As the war in Afghanistan for very dubious reasons extended into a war in Iraq for even more specious ones, the essential USG view of 9/11 became embedded in the public ethos. The 9/11 Commission Report, despite being handicapped when it was prepared and later revealed to have been deeply flawed, still appeared as the basic reference work on the attacks. Details may have been compromised, but the prevailing view was that 19 Arab hijackers had flown four planes into three buildings and one crash site, and that was the end of it. This was the position taken by the Bush Administration in 2001, and reaffirmed a decade later by the Obama Administration. Politicians of every stripe, most pundits and rafts of mainly Protestant pastors and evangelists added their endorsements.
Neither I nor most Americans had any particular reason to doubt the veracity of these claims, then or later. Nonetheless, I had strong suspicions that something was very wrong with the official US account of the tragedy only weeks after the incident, while responding to a request from a local journalist for background information. Too much made no sense whatsoever: warnings after the fact when there should have been no warnings, bizarre misbehavior by the alleged hijackers that ran counter to both the mission and their faith, skills required that far exceeded any skills the named hijackers themselves could ever have possessed for the mission, and especially the total absence of any recognition for what they had done from anyone except their supposed victims – something without precedent for actions of the sort that supposedly happened on 9/11. These and similar discontinuities reinforced my suspicion that something in the entire exercise was rotten to the core.
Potentially far more significant than individual musings was the gradual appearance of dissent that eventually crystallized in the so-called “9/11 Truth” movement, which rapidly proliferated into scores of major and many minor organizations and websites dissecting the attacks, the Commission report, the motivations and agendas of assorted elected and appointed officials, and alternatives to the orthodox view. But “9/11 Truthers” have been doing their version of the Maoist “Hundred Flowers” Campaign, throwing out so many different assessments of so many different aspects of so many different issues that the core message has been lost. Nor is it a matter of too little evidence invalidating the USG position on 9/11 being available, but too much to permit a clear focus on what happened (so many trees no one can really see the forest).
Mind you, it isn’t that what has been presented is irrelevant or even necessarily wrong, although some pretty bizarre theses have been tossed around along with a good deal of thoughtful and balanced work. A substantial segment also have resisted closure under any circumstances – especially when Israel came into the equation in any way – thus keeping the rhetorical pot boiling inconclusively, more than a few for reasons that could not withstand close scrutiny as to their affiliation and motivation.
Critiquing the 9/11 Critique
The real difficulty with much, but not all, of the effort to critique and question the official US position on 9/11 is that the “9/11 Truth” proponents have been unable to communicate their concerns – much less any conclusions – to the general public in any significant way. So much of the discussion is only partially comprehensible to some within the movement, largely unknown to the general US public, and so complicated in all its dimensions to those who do become aware of it that they fail to follow up on the arguments. It is as if critics of the official position on 9/11 have been attempting to try the case in court before they have even gotten an indictment – the analytical equivalent of putting the argumentative cart before the public horse of the need to rethink the issue, thereby creating an evidentiary Gordian Knot of sorts.
This analogy has long struck me as an appropriate way of rethinking our approach to the 9/11 controversy. It is not that the issue isn’t complex – it is, in ever so many ways, and that complexity would have to be addressed at some point, but there is no need to confuse the public with its complexity at the very beginning.
Remember that at least in the US, the evidence and voting requirements are very different in a grand jury which can issue an indictment, than they are in a petit jury that actually tries the case. The latter needs proof of guilt; but the former only needs sufficient indication that a specific crime may have been committed, and that the accused may have done it. That is where we need to go, and where I will take this argument: to focus on those essentials necessary for an indictment in a way that will be understandable and credible to a reasonably intelligent person without requiring them to have the skills of (e.g.) a civil engineer or an aviator.
Peeling Away the Layered Details
There are so many flaws in the official US Government’s position on 9/11 that it is sometimes difficult to know just where to start. For example, the miraculous survival of a passport, used to identify one of the hijackers, which somehow worked its way through the aircraft’s impact, explosion, fire, and an 800-plus foot free-fall to be found by a well-dressed man and given to a New York City police detective at the base of the twin towers is a standout. The superstar-like ability of named pilots to go from the controls of a single-engine propeller-driven light plane to the cockpit of a passenger airliner and do anything except put it into the ground within a minute of turning off the autopilot is another – who would ever have thought that the Microsoft Flight Simulator program was so superlative? And the explanations given for the multiple failures of NORAD (the North American Air Defense Command) to have fighters on all four planes within minutes of their straying off course are individually dubious and collectively preposterous – only in Hollywood would they have any credence, perhaps because that is where they originated.
The debate on these and many other points, and the implications thereof, has been extensive and sometimes ferocious, even if not particularly effective. What is not open to debate, however, is that WTC-7 — the third tower to collapse that day, and the only one not hit by a plane — absolutely was brought down by a controlled demolition, as anyone not trying to shield the attackers knows from a real-time video of its collapse. That is, WTC-7 went straight down into its own footprint in seconds without any visible catastrophic external trauma, which means only some catastrophic internal trauma could have brought it down. And if it had been wired for a controlled demolition, then so were the other towers (WTC-1 and WTC-2) that collapsed. That gives the plane impacts a gruesome cosmetic role, designed explicitly to conceal the true cause of the collapse of the buildings, while shocking the public into something akin to numbness.
The case of WTC-7 has long been known to critics of the US government position on 9/11. What does not seem to have been fully appreciated, at least at first (this is changing somewhat now), is that it is not merely “an” issue, but the single issue that can be used simply, directly to the American public, and effectively to discredit the US Government’s case, and thus its rationale for so many fallacies and misdeeds: not only needless foreign wars (Afghanistan being a “pump-priming” conflict to get the US into war in the region, and to lay the groundwork for later wars), but a substantial infringement of American civil liberties under the misbegotten “Patriot Act,” the unbelievably widespread acceptance of torture (including a technique openly named “Palestinian Hanging,” which assuredly did not originate in Boston and says something about Israeli habits), and the creation of known and secret prisons and detention centers in various countries.
Second only to the actual controlled demolition of WTC-7, and supplementing the thesis that with or without impacting aircraft the buildings were brought down by other means, is extensive audio-visual evidence on 9/11 while the Twin Towers were still standing from what became “Ground Zero.” This evidence includes real-time clips of secondary explosions at ground level in both WTC-1 and WTC-2 (you can hear the detonations and see smoke and debris billowing out), reports on many networks of those explosions and of strange vans inside and around those buildings prior to the secondary explosions, reports from EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) of the same thing and of people inside and around the lobbies of those buildings who were not emergency personal and were not fleeing the disaster – all of this on 9/11 and widely reported as it happened that same day.
And a third element, building on the above and adding its own dimension, is the presence of a number of (mostly white) vans owned – as far as can be determined, given the extent to which information on them and the people with them has disappeared from the public record – by an Israeli company (or rather a company owned by an Israeli, to be precise) in New Jersey. Some of these vans were regularly around the World Trade Center itself. But two stand out, and need to be examined in some detail for their significance to be appreciated.
First, Bergen, NJ residents saw five people on a white van filming the attacks and visibly celebrating. They had set up their cameras before the first plane hit. Police arrested them. All were Israelis (now referred to as the “dancing Israelis”). Bomb-sniffing dogs reacted as if they had detected explosives, although officers were unable to find anything. The FBI seized the van for further testing. All five were later released at the instigation of Israeli & American Jewish leaders, some in the US Government. Details are still classified. This incident quickly disappeared from the mainstream media, following a brief mention in the New York Times three days after the attacks, that was not followed up.
A second van was stopped on the approaches to the George Washington Bridge. As CBS’s Dan Rather said in his live report:
Two suspects are in FBI custody after a truckload of explosives were discovered around the George Washington Bridge. That bridge links New York to New Jersey over the Hudson River. Whether the discovery of those explosives had anything to do with other events today is unclear, but the FBI, has two suspects in hand, said the truckload of explosives, enough explosives were in the truck to do great damage to the George Washington Bridge…
[The final police report differs from the initial media account] Those suspects –also Israelis — and the incident then seem to have disappeared from the public record and mainstream media “examinations” of 9/11, just like discussions of the first van, the secondary explosions at ground level within WTC-1 and WTC-2, and the precipitous collapse into its own footprint of WTC-7.
The combined impact of these and many other factors is both chilling and compelling. Think of it: Secondary explosions at ground level where there should be no secondary explosions. The catastrophic collapse of the 47-story WTC-7 into its own footprint in seconds, without any significant external trauma, where by rights there should have been no collapse. Vans with targeting maps, explosives or traces thereof, cameras pre-positioned to film the World Trade Center, and especially Israelis with those vans where there should have been no Israelis present with any of those things in those places at that time.
Any of these matters ought to have been sufficient to stimulate a searching re-examination of the official USG interpretation of 9/11, and especially of the actual or putative role of Al-Qaeda in it. The vans alone pointed away from Al-Qaeda, unless one assumed that Al-Qaeda was an Israeli front, or that Mossad at a minimum had run a parallel and more murderous operation to whatever Al-Qaeda may have done. What is fascinating is how little impact it has had on public awareness of the details of 9/11, much less official US policy based on it. A “cloak of silence” had descended over any official or mainstream media discussions of 9/11 that did not conform to the official interpretation, thereby keeping such dissonance from the general public.
The Cloak of Silence Over 9/11
There have been three elements to the “cloak of silence” covering efforts to expose the failings of the official US position on 9/11 to the public. One is within the Executive Branch. Another is within the Congress. And the third is the mainstream media (MSM).
The first is not at all surprising, as so many of its key members (and especially its so-called “neo-conservatives”) were the authors of the “19 named Arabs in 4 planes” thesis, and its de facto apologists on the professional staff of the 9/11 Commission. Indeed, many of them had a vested personal and professional interest in maintaining the validity of the official position.
A surprising number had been on the strongly pro-Israel Project for a New American Century (PNAC) when it published a report asserting that some “catalytic event” akin to the Pearl Harbor would be needed to move the US in the direction they desired (and which would be of enormous benefit to Israel). The 9/11 attacks gave them their catalytic event, and they visibly capitalized on that opportunity. Many were Jewish, often with dual US-Israeli citizenship and a controlling commitment to Israel. All were Israeli partisans. And it took no great inferential leap to understand that a US consumed with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rage would inevitably and inexorably do things that would directly or indirectly benefit Israel – which, of course, is precisely what has happened over the past decade.
Overtly more surprising was Congressional acceptance of the official explanation, or rather the lack of searching inquiries into it and the events of 9/11, at least by the Democrats. But, in reality, that wasn’t at all surprising. It was not just that Administration officials were essentially “speaking with one voice” on this issue, or that the Republicans in the Senate at least could have kept Democrats from holding hearings, at least in the beginning. It is that while many (especially Democrats) came to question later the war in Iraq, and some more belatedly the war in Afghanistan, there was, and remains, no discernable legislative effort to delve into the details of 9/11 – and especially the numerous contradictions, inconsistencies and unbelievable aspects in the official explanation. This is a predictable outcome of a substantial lobbying effort by AIPAC (the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) here, “encouraging” Senators and Representatives of both parties to do in this matter what they do best – nothing – and punishing the handful who balked by marginalizing their efforts while in office, and working successfully for their electoral defeat later.
Overlapping these two branches, and a critical element in the Zionist control of the US Government that is sometimes overlooked, is their domination of the political appointment and confirmation process. The White House Personnel Office has been largely dominated by them at least since 1980, and perhaps before, thereby reducing the likelihood that people unfriendly to Israel or unsupportive of its “ways and means” will be nominated in the first place. The vetting of nominees by key organized Jewish groups in the US before they go before the US Senate for their confirmation hearings has also been a fixture of this process for decades, as Ha’aretz (an Israeli newspaper) among many others has pointed out, and forces otherwise excellent nominees to withdraw if said Jewish groups find them to be unsuitable. And the leverage of AIPAC in the US Senate is in this respect crucial: anyone AIPAC wants confirmed will be confirmed, and anyone who manages to reach that point and is not acceptable to AIPAC doesn’t stand a chance.
This is why under both Republicans and Democrats, the staffs in and around the President and the Vice-President, the National Security Council, the State Department and the Defense Department (among others) look the way they do. Many are Jewish and actively Zionist, often with dual US-Israeli citizenship (not that the absence of an Israeli passport matters all that much to the others). Some are Christian Zionists who need no persuading to take the pro-Israel positions they do – I can only shudder to think of the type of a staff and appointments that would come from a president like Michele Bachmann or Mike Huckabee. Others are what the communists used to call “useful idiots,” frequently intelligent people like Condoleeza Rice or John Bolton who have made their own Faustian bargain in the furtherance of their own careers. And the rest of us live with the consequences of all of them, not least of which was 9/11 and the ensuing wars.
But it is the role of the largely Zionist-owned mainstream media (MSM) in allowing the official US government view of 9/11 to go virtually unchallenged that is most fascinating, and has been most effective in letting any possible public debate on 9/11 largely lie fallow. This was contrary to its entire post-Vietnam (and especially post-Pentagon Papers/post-Watergate) ethos, which put investigative journalism on a pedestal and made a fetish of investigating and exposing corporate and government wrong-doing, both for profits and for professional advancement. Remember, that at least since the publication of the so-called “Pentagon Papers” during the Vietnam War, the normal instinct of the MSM is to investigate and to reveal, unless that discloses Israeli misconduct or reflects negatively on Israel, in which case its virtually primeval instinct is to conceal and to protect.
The MSM’s normal inquisitorial impulse was not in evidence in the case of 9/11. This is because critical inquiries into 9/11 have been largely ignored or repressed by the MSM — which would not do that if its largely Zionist ownership did not know, suspect or fear that an exposed evidentiary trail would lead, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly to Israel. Indeed, if the evidentiary trail had seemed to lead to (e.g.) Iran instead of Israel, or if its provenance was even moderately uncertain, the MSM would have vociferously shredded the USG case long ago, and the “9/11 Truth” movement would find its views presented on the front pages of major newspapers and highlighted in favorable TV/radio broadcasts.
That this did not happen quickly becomes clear as one examines the MSM’s approach to 9/11. Its role has been threefold: : (a) disinformation – to affirm, or at least not openly question, the USG case; (b) distraction – to direct attention away from Israel and the PNAC/neo-cons; and (c) doubt – to ignore or ridicule those who question the official US case. What people choose to conceal speaks volumes about the dynamics of the situation, and the end result of MSM actions has been the fabrication of an aura of disbelief and doubt where there should be none.
This process began almost immediately. Dramatic and revealing real-time reports about the details of the attacks appeared on 9/11, including many that did not directly involve the hijacked airliners. Over the next few days, some local papers and stations in the area still were reporting dissonant events (e.g., the van with the “dancing Israelis”). But within a week, most dissonance was gone or relegated to inside pages and their electronic equivalents, especially anything pertaining to WTC-7, whose collapse became a non-event, or the presence of Israelis in the vans and elsewhere, as the US Government’s propaganda machine – aided actively by most of the MSM – went into high gear first against Al-Qaeda and then in support of the invasion of Afghanistan.
The Path to 9/11
The provenance of the 9/11 attacks becomes even clearer once they are examined as a classic exercise in covert operations. Generally speaking, there are three requirements for evaluating the origin and prospects for success of all covert intelligence operations: (a) motivation, (b) expertise, and (c) local support for access to the target and post-attack evasion and escape.
Let us look first at motivation. It is a bitter commentary on how far the US has gone from its strategic requirements and its own principles that so many movements and governments around the world not only dislike and distrust the US, but hate it with a passion and with better cause than I care to think about. I recently came across a remark by a Jesuit priest to the effect that “Every time I hear that Israel is America’s only friend in the Middle East, I remember that before Israel, America had no enemies in the Middle East” – a point well worth remembering.
But the interesting thing about the assorted movements and governments that might have an actual or perceived reason to do harm to the US, is that all but one has had a negative incentive to do that: to punish the US for some actual or assumed failings or misdeeds. The one exception is Israel. It has no negative incentives at all (I exclude some real fringe fanatics), simply because without US aid and diplomatic support, it would find itself in even worse straits than did apartheid-era South Africa, and with better cause. But it is the one state with a positive incentive, if it believed it could get away with it, which is to enrage the American public against Muslims generally and Arabs in particular, and to make the US an active belligerent in the region – spending American lives and treasure in the service of Israel’s interests.
Expertise is different and more diffuse. There are many intelligence and special operations forces in the world with the expertise to wire large urban structures for a controlled demolition. There are many combat engineer units in many countries that could do the same thing. And there are many private firms that specialize in them as well. Yet neither Al-Qaeda as an organization, nor any of its known affiliates – much less the 19 named Arabs supposedly on those four planes – possessed that expertise, or anything even remotely close to it; had they done so, the Green Zone in Baghdad would have been a pile of rubble.
But it is local support that is the crucial determinant. All well-crafted covert operations require some measure of local support, official or unofficial, unless the target area is so irredeemably hostile that none is available. Any domestic or foreign intelligence agency targeting the WTC would absolutely have required it, and Mossad would be better placed than any other to access such support for entry, access, execution and escape.
This is especially true, given the security company overseeing the WTC. CIA and/or Defense Department personnel (which is not the same as the CIA or the Defense Department as organizations) could have had access, but only if that had Israeli endorsement – one does not casually cut open walls, implant explosives, run cables and wire everything together in buildings with state-of-the-art electronic surveillance and 24/7 on-site security. Mossad would have no such need for those niceties, given the ownership of the WTC and the management of the company overseeing its security. Remember that we are not talking about large numbers of people in any case: given time to prepare the three buildings and protection from detection, as few as a dozen could have sufficed, a number small enough to be effectively unnoticed in a large organization.
Retrospect and Prospect
So let us recapitulate the basic conclusions of this analysis. First, the core official US Government position on 9/11 is that any and all aspects of it are directly attributable to 19 named Arabs on 4 planes, conducting a terrorist operation planned and executed by Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. This position is at best incomplete, and at worst a complete fabrication engineered by those directly or indirectly responsible for what happened on 9/11, and the wars afterward.
Second, Al-Qaeda and many different countries and groups had negative reasons, real or contrived, to want to harm the US. But only Israel and its neoconservative wing in the US had a positive incentive to do so, which was to enrage Americans and make the US an active belligerent against Muslim countries, thereby cementing its bonding to Israel and Israel’s interests.
Third, there is no doubt that fully-loaded civilian airliners, especially with nearly-full fuel loads, impacting the Twin Towers (WTC-1 and WTC-2) would do great damage to those buildings, and might under a chain of extraordinary circumstances precipitate a chain of events leading to their collapse. But there is absolutely no way that those airliners impacting 800-1000 feet above the ground could have produced visible and audible secondary explosions in those buildings at ground level, nor precipitated the collapse of a third building (WTC-7)which was not hit by any aircraft and had no massive external trauma from debris produced by the Twin Towers.
Fourth, Al-Qaeda – and perhaps other groups as well – had the theoretical capability to carry out a simultaneous four-plane hijacking, perhaps flying the aircraft to Cuba (the four 9/11 aircraft should have been able to make a one-way flight there at the beginning of their operational day without difficulty, depending on their actual loads), which would have been spectacular in itself. But neither Al-Qaeda nor any of their affiliates had the expertise and local support necessary to allow them the needed access to any of the buildings at the World Trade Center, cut open the walls and wire them for controlled demolition, and then to escape and evade afterward.
Fifth and finally, in addition to being unique in having a positive incentive to make the 9/11 attacks, only Israel had the essential expertise and local support required to bring down the three World Trade Center buildings with controlled demolitions, and the leverage within and around the US Government to let their operatives evade detection, to be released without fanfare if apprehended unexpectedly, and to cloak their actions from public scrutiny – all of which happened on and after 9/11.
People often ask about some new evidence or proof tying 9/11, in whole or in part, to Israel. Now I understand that there can never be absolute proof for some people barring a public confession from one of the Israeli planners or their American supporters, and that, I suspect, we will never obtain – although some of the statements made later in Israel by three of the Israelis arrested in Bergen, NJ filming the burning Twin Towers comes very close to that: One stated categorically that “our purpose was to document the event,” which should leave little doubt that they knew in advance of the attacks, whether or not they themselves personally had any further role in them.
But it is not necessary to have such a confession, any more than it is necessary to have a confession in a criminal court to convict a person of murder, if the other evidence is sufficiently compelling. Here there is a mountain of physical, technical, analytical and circumstantial evidence, far more than any unprejudiced person needs to understand far beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever, that (1) the USG case is fatally flawed, and (2) this was a Mossad-directed operation orchestrated at the highest levels of the Israeli government (because of the target) with local support within the US and elements of the US Government itself.
Given the pervasiveness of Zionist influence in the US government and its intelligence and security agencies (including, of course, the Defense Department), two broad scenarios are possible. One is that the neo-cons and their cohorts were in the driver’s seat with Israel in the passenger seat with a map and the baggage. The second sees Israel driving with the neo-cons and others handling the map and baggage. But they were both in the same car on the road to and from 9/11. Both were embedded in aspects of the planning and execution of the catastrophe, the wars it spawned and the wars its architects now want us to wage in Israel’s name, linking treason and treachery in tandem no matter where the emphasis is placed.
Unraveling that issue is something to be left for a future investigation, interrogations and trials, followed by punishments appropriate to the magnitude of the crimes for all of the participants. Bringing an awareness of these events to the American public and others abroad in a practical and actionable way is the subject of the final piece in this series: Riposte Against Zionism: Go Tell It To The People.
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Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is a writer and consultant specializing in national and international security affairs. In December 1988, he received the Superior Civilian Service Award after more than five years of service at the U.S. Army War College as Director of Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, and holder of the General of the Army Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research. He can be reached at: docbrosk@comcast.net.
Yesterday by a unanimous vote the Senate said that the Palestinians should not seek a state in the United Nations. This as the world moves to recognize just such a move.
The following note was sent out by AIPAC yesterday.
Following up on today’s news about the passage of the Cardin-Collins resolution, I wanted to pass along this statement from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid…Kind regards, Ari [Goldberg, director of media relations]
REID: PASSAGE OF CARDIN-COLLINS RESOLUTION REAFFIRMS U.S. DEDICATION TO ISRAEL
Washington, D.C.– Nevada Senator Harry Reid issued the following statement today following passage of the Cardin-Collins resolution:
“I am pleased that the Senate unanimously passed Senators Cardin and Collins’ resolution, supported by 88 bipartisan cosponsors, which says a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should come through direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. If peace talks are to be fruitful, the Palestinians cannot bring to the negotiating table a terrorist organization that rejects Israel’s right to exist. A fair beginning to good-faith talks also means the Palestinians cannot simply stop by the negotiating table on their way to the United Nations to seek recognition as a state.
“The United States of America will not give money to terrorists bent on the destruction of the State of Israel. America’s willingness to continue our current aid program will depend on the Palestinian government’s insistence that Hamas recognize Israel’s right to exist, that it renounce violence and that it honor the commitments made by prior Palestinian Authority governments.”
It is difficult to imagine what might produce a longing for the good old days of George W. Bush, but the Obama Administration is certainly approaching that tip point. First there was National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair spelling out a policy of assassination of American citizens overseas based on suspicion and secret evidence and then there was last week’s revelation that the Justice Department guidelines for the FBI now permit relatively free searches of all sorts of personal information that once was regarded as private. The searches are without judicial oversight and there does not have to be any evidence that the suspect has committed a crime.
Now we have Hillary Clinton and company opening up the latest free fire zone against other American citizens who have done nothing wrong. The State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, who is married to one of the ubiquitous Kagans, announced that “Groups that seek to break Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza are taking irresponsible and provocative actions that risk the safety of their passengers.” Please note: per Nuland/Clinton the passengers on the unarmed vessels in international waters, all of whom have signed a pledge of non-violence, are risking their own safety if they get shot by the Israeli military.
Nuland added that Gaza is governed by Hamas, “a designated foreign terrorist organization,” and that aiding such a group “could violate U.S. civil and criminal statutes and could lead to fines and incarceration.” This means that giving a loaf of bread to a child in Gaza is indictable as support of a terrorist organization, since the government is run by Hamas.
Once upon a time the Secretary of State was supposed to protect Americans overseas, particularly when the Americans are not doing anything illegal. But that was before Israel and its Lobby decided what American citizens can and cannot do. A good friend of mine Ray McGovern, who is on the American vessel, is a deeply religious former CIA senior analyst. He has friends on the National Security Council who informed him last week that the US government would let the Israelis do whatever they want to the flotilla and would, in fact, approve of any action taken. In the aftermath, the State Department would do nothing to help any US citizen killed, injured, or arrested. Except possibly have them arrested a second time.
However one feels about the Israel-imposed blockade of Gaza, it is important to remember that the Americans and others involved in the flotilla are doing nothing illegal under international law. Their ships have been inspected and have only relief supplies on board. No one is armed. Their objection is to the Israeli, and American, assumption that Tel Aviv somehow has the right to punish the Gazans in perpetuity and thereby create a continuous humanitarian crisis for the local people because they elected the “wrong” party back in 2006. The Americans and other foreigners on the flotilla have a perfect right to express that view peacefully without being excoriated by Hillary before being executed by an IDF goon.
The German prosecutor conducting the United Nations investigation into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri of Lebanon said today that fresh evidence reinforced his earlier judgment that Syria’s intelligence services were behind the killing and that Syrian officials were obstructing his investigation.
Four army generals held in Lebanon over the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri could be handed over within weeks to the special tribunal in The Hague that will put them on trial, the court registrar said today.
Lebanon’s senior prosecutor has received criminal indictments for four members of the Shia militant group Hezbollah, who are accused of assassinating the country’s former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in a car bomb attack six years ago.
2015: …
Obviously they can’t make up their mind on who killed Hariri – Syria, some Lebanese generals, Hizbullah or whoever it will be convenient to indict during the next decade. The purpose of the UN kangaroo court is not to find the Hariri murder or to do justice. It is a political instrument in the hands of the USrael-Saudi alliance.
But let’s step back and take today’s indictment of Hizbullah members as an opportunity to again look at the person of Rafik Hariri. He was not the “good guy” the “western” media constructed but a neoliberal robber baron who defrauded the people of Lebanon.
Former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri used his business empire to rebuild Beirut after years of civil war.To do it, he deployed his own construction industry fortune, and a huge network of rich and powerful friends.
…
He was his country’s richest man, reckoned to be worth roughly $4bn (£2.1bn). But it is his corporate brain-child, Solidere, that best illustrates his central role in regenerating Lebanon’s economy.
Solidere bought up large chunks of central Beirut and turned the business district from a bullet-marked, rubble-strewn mess into a glitzy banking and tourist centre. Mr Hariri was its most influential shareholder.
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As prime minister, Mr Hariri’s public works and rebuilding programmes ran up debts that threatened to overwhelm the public finances.
The budget deficit climbed to 17% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2002, and debt repayments were costing the government 80% of revenue.
…
[F]or many Lebanese, the redevelopment of central Beirut meant dispossession of homes or property without adequate compensation, and the enrichment of Mr Hariri.
…
Mr Hariri’s vision for wealth creation of Lebanon was definitely of the trickle-down variety. In power, he cut social services, public sector wages and company taxes.
While Hariri ruled a law was implemented that essentially dispossessed all the property owners in central Beirut. Their land was put into Solidere, a joint stock company under Hariri’s control. Then huge amounts of public money was spent to build the new central Beirut owned by Hariri’s Solidere. Additionally to that fraud all the rebuilding was done at much too high costs by Hariri’s construction companies. It was a huge racket that made Hariri immensely rich and the Lebanese state very poor.
To indict Hariri and to get the stolen money back to the people of Lebanon and the defrauded property owners of central Beirut would be a worthy court case.
When Hariri got killed there were millions of Lebanese who had good reasons to wish the guy to be dead. Besides them many political entities, including Israel and the U.S., had plausible motives to kill Hariri if only to stick the murder to someone else. The current court case against Hizbullah is nonsense. Hariri’s real murderers will likely never be found.
On June 3, in an al-Qaeda video rather loftily titled “You Are Held Responsible Only for Thyself,” al-Qaeda’s California-born spokesman, Adam Gadahn, urged followers to commit violent acts of jihad by exploiting alleged weaknesses in U.S. gun laws and the gun background check system. “America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms,” he said. “You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle without a background check and, most likely, without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?”
Around the same time, a “hit list” of American executives, officials and companies appeared on jihadist websites. “Security analysts,” reportedFoxNews.com, “believe the two messages are related and underscore a shift in terror strategy—from top-down, mass-casualty events to smaller-scale attacks taken up, in some cases, by freelancing, lone-wolf jihadists.” According to one of Fox’s security analysts, Aaron Weisburd, the founder and director of the revealingly named Internet Haganah, the discussion originated on a password-protected, members-only site, to which he has access, known as the Shumukh forum. Describing Shumukh—which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Yiddish word for “idiot”—as “the number-one Al Qaeda-supporting website on the Internet today,” Weisburd suspiciously added that it was “most frequented by Palestinians.”
On the very same day that Gadahn’s video was released, the Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) coalition issued a press release in response. New York City Mayor and MAIG founding co-chair Michael Bloomberg said that Gadahn’s statement was “absolutely accurate,” adding that the video “may help Washington understand that weak gun laws aren’t just a crime problem, they’re a national security threat.” Helpfully pointing out that legislation had already been introduced to address the problem, Bloomberg, an uncritical supporter of Israel’s seemingly unlimited “right to defend itself,” urged Congress to pass the Fix Gun Checks Act of 2011 and the Denying Firearms and Explosives to Dangerous Terrorists Act of 2011. Then on June 16, Ben Rattray’s Change.org breathlessly alerted subscribers to its MAIG-sponsored “Stop Al-Qaeda From Exploiting Gun Law Loopholes” online petition. This was followed by a June 17 editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times entitled “Terrorists buying guns? There ought to be a law.”
In fact, it was Mayor Bloomberg’s coalition that had initially proposed the legislation to fix gun background checks. On February 23, Bloomberg and his New York Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly, had joined Israel’s self-described “guardian” in the Senate, Charles Schumer, to announce the introduction of legislation that would provide greater reporting to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for individuals with mental illness, domestic violence records, and drug abusers, by increasing the penalties for states that fail to adequately turn over records for those who are prohibited from owning a gun. The legislation would also require that all gun sales, including those by private sellers, be subject to a background check, effectively ending the so-called “gun show loophole.”
On May 12, the 550-member Mayors Against Illegal Guns—more than three-quarters of whom come from California, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York—issued a statement decrying the House Judiciary Committee’s vote that day against an amendment to close the “Terror Gap” by giving the Justice Department discretion to deny gun and explosive sales to terrorists. “Hopefully, last night’s arrest in New York City of two terrorists plotting an attack using guns and explosives,” Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement, “will help convince Congress that this is a national security issue and they need to do the right thing and pass this legislation.”
On that same day, at a high-profile City Hall news conference, the New York Mayor and his steadfast NYPD Commissioneraccused Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh of “planning to blow up the largest synagogue in Manhattan and to kill as many Jews as possible.” The FBI, however, had their doubts about the police undercover who investigated the two alleged “lone wolf” terrorists and refused to get involved in the case. Those doubts were confirmed on June 15 when a grand jury rejected the top terrorism charge against the two Muslim immigrants from North Africa. “This is a political case, brought by political people, for their own political purposes,” Elizabeth Fink, a lawyer for Ferhani, said outside court.“You will see that this case is bogus.… It’s total entrapment.” She added that Ferhani had a history of mental illness and had been institutionalized up to 30 times, and that the police were aware of this because of 911 calls his mother had made to subdue him.
The grand jury’s rejection of the NYPD’s exaggerated claims of a dastardly anti-Semitic plot came just days after the White House announcement of the Jewish Federations’ new partnership with the Department of Homeland Security (a post 9/11 goldmine for the Israeli security industry) “dedicated mainly to the state of threats posed to American Jewish institutions.” Notwithstanding the strong evidence pointing to FBI entrapment as the source of earlier media-hyped “synagogue terror” plots, Michael Gelman, chair of the Executive Committee of the Board of The Jewish Federations of North America, said: “The American Jewish community and the places we gather are, unfortunately, often targets for terrorists. This new partnership with the Department of Homeland Security will empower us to counter this threat as we become more actively involved in our own protection.”
And given Mayor Bloomberg’s support for legislation to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns, it’s also worth noting that the “Manhattan synagogue” plot is far from being the only instance in which the NYPD has used people suffering from mental illness to make terrorism cases. In 2004, police arrested a Pakistani immigrant, Shahawar Matin Siraj, and charged him with plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station on the eve of the Republican National Convention at nearby Madison Square Garden. After paying an informant $100,000 to spend more than a year encouraging Siraj in the plot, the police persuaded his schizophrenic co-defendant, James Elshafay, to testify against Siraj. Despite being described by acquaintances as “borderline retarded,” Siraj was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
In spite of the fact—or perhaps because of it—that investigators couldn’t find a connection between Siraj and Elshafay and any terrorist organization, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen, later described the mentally ill pair as “lone wolves” who were “homegrown, but inspired globally.” After a brief2001 stint at insurance giant AIG (a $40 billion beneficiary of the increased demand for bonds in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks), Cohen had been tapped for the newly created position at the beginning of 2002. Despite his extreme unpopularity and a less than reassuring record in a 35-year career at the CIA—he once wrote a report, later dismissed by an internal CIA review, blaming the Soviet Union for the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II—Cohen’s appointment was warmly endorsed by Mayor Bloomberg. Describing his role as chief of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, Cohen later said, “It’s like starting the CIA over in the post-9/11 world.”
Indeed, it seems that Cohen set about starting over not only the CIA but the FBI as well—the latter’s investigations on occasions being frustrated by his Intelligence Division’s “Lone Cowboy behaviour.” But cowed by post-9/11 criticism from Congress and the media, the Feds passively watched the creation of a troublesome rival. Early on, Cohen suggested to Commissioner Kelly that New York police officers be assigned overseas. By 2005, NYPD Intelligence had seven detectives deployed in cities around the world, including London, Singapore and Tel Aviv, which perhaps predictably received the NYPD’s first foreign liaison. While Cohen’s man in Tel Aviv, Mordecai Dzikansky, had virtually no contact with his American counterpart from the FBI, which opposed the creation of the post, the Orthodox Jew and former IDF volunteer enjoyed close relations with his Israeli hosts. A few months before her 2005 “resignation,” Judith Millerwrote in the New York Times: “[A]s the New York detective walks through the corridors of police headquarters in Jerusalem, home to Israel’s 27,000 police officers, he is invariably greeted as Morty, in the Hebrew he now speaks fluently, with a quip and a smile.”
Although most liberals would be inclined to support calls for tighter gun control, the source of those calls should give them pause for thought. It’s more than a little ironic that the most ardent advocates of gun control for Americans such as the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League are the very same people who demand that American taxpayers continue to lavish Israelis with as much weaponry as they desire “to defend themselves,” i.e. by slaughtering Palestinian and Lebanese civilians with impunity. Leaving aside arguments over the relative legitimacy of state terrorism versus non-state terrorism, one can hardly imagine the likes of Bloomberg and Schumer advocating background checks as passionately for Israeli settlers to prevent a Jewish extremist like Baruch Goldstein from acquiring a gun to massacre Palestinian civilians.
Jury selection began June 22 in what observers have called the most important trial New Orleans has seen in a generation. It concerns a shocking case of police brutality that has already redefined this city’s relationship to its police department, and radically rewritten the official narrative of what happened in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina. Five police officers are facing charges of shooting unarmed African-Americans in cold blood, killing two and wounding four, and then conspiring to hide evidence. Five officers who participated in the conspiracy have already pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against their fellow officers.
The shootings occurred on September 4, 2005, as two families were fleeing Katrina’s floodwaters, crossing New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge to get to dry land. Officers, who apparently heard a radio report about shootings in the area, drove up, leapt out of their vehicle and began firing. Ronald Madison, a mentally challenged man, was shot in the back at least six times, then reportedly stomped and kicked by an officer until he was dead. His brother Lance Madison was arrested on false charges. James Brissette, a high school student, was shot seven times and died at the scene. Susan Bartholomew, 38, was wounded so badly her arm was shot off of her body. Jose Holmes Jr. was shot several times, then, as he lay bleeding, an officer stood over him and fired point blank at his stomach. Two other relatives of Bartholomew were also badly wounded.
Danziger is one of at least nine recent incidents involving the New Orleans Police Department being investigated by the US Justice Department, several of which took place in the days after the city was flooded. Officers have recently been convicted by federal prosecutors in two other high-profile trials. In April, two officers were found guilty in the beating of death of Raymond Robair, a handyman from the Treme neighborhood. In December, a jury convicted three officers and acquitted two in killing Henry Glover, a 31-year-old from New Orleans’ West Bank neighborhood, and burning his body.
From Survivors to Looters
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, people around the world felt sympathy for New Orleans. They saw images of residents trapped on rooftops by floodwaters, needing rescue by boat and helicopter. But then stories began to come out about looters and gangs among the survivors and the official response shifted from humanitarian aid to military operation. Then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco sent in National Guard troops, announcing. “They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will.” Warren Riley – at that time the second in charge of the police department – reportedly ordered officers to “take the city back and shoot looters.”
In the following days, several civilians – almost all of them African-American – were killed under suspicious circumstances in incidents involving police and white vigilantes. For years, family members and advocates called for official investigations and were rebuffed. “Right after the hurricane there were individuals and organizations trying to talk about what happened on Danziger,” says Dana Kaplan, executive director of Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), a legal and advocacy organization based in New Orleans. “But their voices were marginalized.”
There is evidence that local media could have done a better job. Alex Brandon, a photographer for New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper, who later went on to work for Associated Press, testified in the Glover trial that he knew details about the police killings that he didn’t reveal. “He saw things and heard things that proved to be useful in a criminal investigation. He didn’t report them as news,” wrote Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry after the Glover trial concluded.
Former Orleans Parish District Attorney Eddie Jordan, who led an initial investigation of the Danziger officers, believes an indifferent local media bears partial responsibility for the years of cover-up. “They were looking for heroes,” he says. “They had a cozy relationship with the police. They got tips from the police; they were in bed with the police. It was an atmosphere of tolerance for atrocities from the police. They abdicated their responsibility to be critical in their reporting. If a few people got killed that was a small price to pay.”
Family members and advocates tried to get the stories of police violence out through protests, press conferences, and other means. Peoples Hurricane Relief Fund, an organization dedicated to justice in reconstruction, held a tribunal in 2006 where they presented accusations of police violence – among other charges – to a panel of international judges, including members of Parliament from seven countries. Activists even brought charges to the United Nations, filing a shadow report in February 2008 with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva. But it was not until late 2008 that a journalist named AC Thompson did what the local media failed to do and investigated these stories in detail. “It’s unfortunate that it took a national publication to really dig to the root,” says Kaplan, referring to Thompson’s work. “In New Orleans, the criminal justice system has been so corrupt for so long, that things that should be shocking didn’t seem to be raising the kind of broad community outrage that they should have.”
In 2009, after years of pressure from activists and the national attention brought on by Thompson’s reporting, the US Justice Department decided to look into the accusations of police violence. This has led to one of the most wide-ranging investigations of a police department in recent US history. Dozens of officers are facing lengthy prison terms and corruption charges have reached to the very top of the department.
The Danziger trial is expected to last two months. Kenneth Bowen, Robert Gisevius, Anthony Villavaso and Robert Faulcon, the officers involved in the shooting, could receive life sentences if convicted. Sgt. Arthur Kaufman, who was not on the bridge, is charged only in the conspiracy and could receive a maximum of 120 years. Justice Department investigations of other incidents are continuing and it is likely that some form of federal oversight of the department will be announced in the coming months.
A number of books have come out recently dealing with the neoconservatives, which have been published by mainstream presses. It is significant that these works acknowledge some obvious truths that were denied and even largely taboo some time ago.
They admit, for example, that neoconservatives not only exist (something that was denied a few years ago, most especially by the neocons themselves), but that they have been influential in shaping American policy in the Middle East, a view that continues to be rejected even by many critics of American foreign policy—e.g., Noam Chomsky and his acolytes, who see American foreign policy shaped only by all-powerful corporate interests. What these books still conceal, however, is the fact that the neocons are motivated by their Jewish ethnicity and the interests of the state of Israel. Instead the neocons are made to appear as an ideological group loyal solely on what they believe is good for the US. Consequently, this approach, despite allowing for some elements of truth, distorts the overall picture in a serious way.
Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), by Justin Vaïsse, which I have reviewed last August, reflects this partial truth approach. The current essay will focus on another recent work of this genre, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy: A Critical Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2011), authored by Danny Cooper, who is a lecturer at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. [A subsequent review will be of Neoconservatism and the New American Century by Maria Ryan (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010)]
THE TRANSPARENT CABAL
Of the recent books on this subject, Cooper’s is one of the more revealing in that it actually acknowledges the authors who have presented these taboo views and quotes them—allowing them to speak for themselves. And I must express my delight that Cooper even refers to The Transparent Cabal. It is this segment to which I will devote most of my attention in this essay. I do this largely because I have not been able to get hold of Cooper’s book but have had to read it on Google Books where only a small section of it is available. The book’s cost, exceeding one-hundred dollars from Amazon, is beyond my limited means, and the work is not available in the public and university libraries to which I have access. While I could only look at a small portion of the book, however, the part that I could see does seem to present the work’s fundamental thesis.
In discussing claims of the neocons’ ties to Israel, Cooper writes that “Mearsheimer and Walt were not the only scholars to discuss the influence of Israel on neoconservative thinking. Stephen Sniegoski’s The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (2008) is the most detailed and exhaustive attempt to link neoconservatives with the policies of Israel’s Likud Party.” After this favorable introduction, he then implies that my “loyalties” to the Palestinians are “taken to dangerous and irresponsible extremes,” asserting that “[o]ne does not have to be a ‘Likudnik’ to find Sniegoski’s unqualified reference to the ‘Palestinian resistance’ to be morally offensive . . . ” (p. 32) Presumably, I should have qualified this non-committal reference with some disparaging remarks about the Palestinians, since I was not expressing anything positive about them in referring to their “resistance.” Criminals, for example, are said to resist arrest. Perhaps Cooper believes that nothing has been done to the Palestinians that calls for any resistance and that they are instead engaging in aggressive violence. No matter what his specific intent, Cooper’s comment would seem to indicate a pro-Israel bias.
Cooper does acknowledge that the neocons are “strong defenders of the Jewish state” and that some authored the “Clean Break” report (p. 32) , though he fails to elucidate the full significance of this work. The “Clean Break” report, which was presented to incoming Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996, advocated that Israel undertake a war policy to reconfigure the Middle East for the sole purpose of enhancing its own security. Moreover, the neocon authors of the report emphasized the need to justify these belligerent moves in terms of American ideals in order, as I stated in The Transparent Cabal “[t]o prevent the debilitating American criticism of Israeli policy that took place during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.” (TC, p. 92). And the success of Israel’s belligerent activities would have the effect of freeing it from United States pressure. As pointed out in The Transparent Cabal : “It was highly noteworthy that Americans would advise the Israeli government how to induce the United States to support Israeli interests and how to avoid having to follow the policies of the United States government.” (TC, p. 93) Since the actual policy prescription of “Clean Break” was broadly similar to what the neoconservatives would later advocate for the United States during the Bush II administration, the neocons, in this latter case, were actually having the United States pursue policies that had originally been developed to advance Israeli interests. As reiterated throughout The Transparent Cabal, the neocons look at U.S. Middle East policy through the “lens of Israel interest.” (TC, pp. 4, 5, 7, 193, 211, 365, 366). To state otherwise is to ignore Occam’s razor.
When acknowledging the neocons’ obvious link to Israel, Cooper simultaneously downplays its role in shaping their views on Middle East policy. “The affection neoconservatives have for the state of Israel cannot be dismissed,” Cooper avers. “The authors who demonstrate the degree to which many neoconservatives identify with the Jewish state make a number of thoughtful arguments. Yet what they truly reveal about the neoconservative approach to American foreign policy is a little unclear. Even authors such as Sniegoski who aim to ‘expose’ the connections between segments of the hard right in Israel and neoconservatives often acknowledge the limitations of their studies.” (p. 32)
To support his contention that I acknowledge limitations in my study, Cooper then quotes me: “To state that neoconservatives viewed American foreign policy in the Middle East through the lens of Israeli interest – and that this was the basis of the neocon Middle East war agenda is not to say that their support for Israel has been the be-all and end-all of their foreign policy ideas.” (p. 32)
Cooper leaves out my ending “which encompass the entire world” (TC, p. 7), which served to underscore what I meant. I also elaborate on this issue on the same page in my book where I write: “Lest any reader misinterpret this work, it is necessary to further explain what the book is not. Since it is not an analysis of neoconservatism per se it does not claim that neoconservatism is simply a cover for the support of Israel. Undoubtedly, the overall neoconservative viewpoint does not revolve solely around the security needs of Israel, and the same is true even of the neocons’ positions on foreign policy and national-security policy.” (TC, p. 7)
As is apparent, I explain the limits, or scope, of my subject—it is about the neocon position on the Middle East (and how they influenced US Middle East policy); it is not about neoconservative foreign policy in general. That my subject does not encompass a broader subject does not mean that I acknowledge any “limitations” in my study. All historical works (works on anything for that matter, even for those physicists who claim to have a “theory of everything”) deal with particular subjects—as opposed to everything—but to admit “limitations,” the word used by Cooper, would seem to imply that there are weaknesses in dealing with the particular subject matter of the work.
Cooper, however, makes the claim that my “admission [of ‘limitations’] raises immediate questions. If neoconservative support for Israel is not the ‘be-all and end-all of their foreign policy ideas,’ then to what extent are studies such as Sniegoski’s truly capable of illuminating the neoconservative approach to foreign policy? Is it not possible that some of these other ideas that go unexamined in The Transparent Cabal may even strongly conflict with the those of the Israeli right?”
Cooper’s logic escapes me here unless his purpose is to place me in a no-win position. Obviously, if I had stated that support for Israel (or any other factor) explained the neocons’ entire foreign policy thinking, I could be faulted for that, too. The idea that one factor might explain part of a group’s or individual’s world view, but not the totality of that world view, would seem perfectly appropriate.
For Cooper to imply that my claim that the neocons’ Middle East policy position revolves around their concern for Israel is invalidated by my unwillingness to apply that same motive to their policies elsewhere—for instance, the neocons’ China policy–makes no sense. My arguments are based on inductive reasoning. I have provided extensive empirical evidence to prove the case regarding the Middle East (inductive reasoning can only lead to tentative proofs); but I have made no in-depth study of the neocons’‘ China policy so I cannot draw a comparable conclusion.
He then implies, or at least, seems to imply, that the allegation that the Israeli government backed the war on Iraq was false, citing the view of one international relations expert (Russell Walter Mead), who held that “the Israeli defense establishment was deeply skeptical of neoconservative hopes for a democratic renaissance in the Middle East following the removal of Saddam Hussein (2007).” From that he asks rhetorically: “Is it not possible, in other words, that there is something distinctly American about neoconservatism?” (p. 33)
Here Cooper describes an alleged neocon position never expressed by me, or strictly speaking, anyone one else, as far as I know. Since no one claims that the there was ever democracy in the Middle East, no one could expect a “renaissance,” which, of course, means rebirth. And it is probably true that there is no evidence that the Israeli defense establishment, or anyone else with expertise on the Middle East, actually believed that the elimination of Saddam Hussein would create democracy in Iraq. And in The Transparent Cabal, I questioned the idea that the neocons themselves actually believed that their policies would lead to democracy, as democracy is conventionally understood. But whatever their beliefs on the eventual social systems in the Middle East, the policies they prescribed dovetailed with those of the Israeli Likudniks, which were designed solely for the enhancement of the national interest of the state of Israel. And, as documented in The Transparent Cabal, the Sharon government did promote the war on Iraq. (TC, pp. 169-72)
Moreover, contrary to Cooper’s insinuation, I never denied that there was “something distinctly American about neoconservatism,” since, as I explained in the book, neoconservatism in general was not my topic. There could very well be “something distinctly American about neoconservatism” while, simultaneously, their view on Middle East policy was shaped by their identification with Israel security interests. The two beliefs are not mutually exclusive.
In an effort to counter the claim of neocon loyalty to Israel, Cooper holds that the neocons are “just as steadfast in their support for Taiwan as they are in their support for Israel.” (p. 33) This is based on an article by William Kristol and Robert Kagan stating that the US should defend Taiwan from China. Viewing this as the overall position of the neocons, Cooper attributes neocon support for Israel and Taiwan to their belief that the two countries are “endangered liberal democracies living in hostile regions.” (p. 33) Cooper next cites a general statement by Irving Kristol, that “Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from non-democratic forces, external or internal (2003).” These statements allegedly provide sufficient evidence to prove that the neocons are “driven more by feelings of ideological solidarity than ethnic identification.” (p. 33-34)
There are a number of problems with this notion of neocon support for Taiwan and other democratic nations being comparable to their support for Israel. A simple statement of support for Taiwan if threatened with attack, or in Irving Kristol’s case, a claim that the US “if possible” would “feel obliged” to defend democratic countries is obviously not equivalent to launching aggressive wars to weaken or eliminate Israel’s enemies. Furthermore, the connection of the neocons to other democratic foreign countries is not in anyway equal to the deep personal loyalty and intimate connection the neocons have with the state of Israel, which is illustrated throughout The Transparent Cabal.
Neocons present Israel as a model democracy but this is hardly the case, as liberal democracy is generally defined today. Rather, Israel is a Jewish supremacist ethno-state that favors Jews over Palestinians, going to the extent of dispossessing them of their land on the West Bank for Jewish settlements. Instead of supporting measures by Jewish leftists and liberals to allow more rights for the Palestinians in order to move Israel in the direction of a typical liberal democracy, the neocons support the Likudnik (explicitly Jewish supremacist) hard-line anti-Palestinian position, which is anything but pro-liberal democracy. Their goal is to maintain Israel as an ethnically-Jewish state instead of creating a modern liberal democracy with equal rights for all people. That the neocons see this Jewish ethno-state as a model democracy would illustrate their ethnic bias, since they find no fault with the type of ethnic discrimination that Jews have historically railed against when applied against them in gentile countries.
It would seem that the predominantly Jewish composition of the core membership of neoconservatism, the latter’s close connection to and championing of Israel, and the fact that the neocons advocated that the US take militant positions against the enemies of Israel would, taken together, provide strong prima facie evidence that Jewish ethnicity shaped the neocons Middle East policy. As pointed out in The Transparent Cabal, the Jewish orientation of neoconservatism has been acknowledged by some close students of the movement, including those who happen to be Jewish. For example, Gal Beckerman wrote in the Jewish weekly newspaper Forward in January 2006: “[I]t is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren.” In fact, Beckerman went so far as to maintain that “[i]f there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it.” (TC, p. 26) Murray Friedman wrote a favorable book about the neocons entitled The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, which stresses the significance of their Jewish ethnicity. In it he shows that the neocons explicitly mentioned their group loyalty: “A central element in [neocon godfather Norman] Podhoretz’s evolving views, which would soon become his and many of the neocons’ governing principle was the question, “Is It Good for the Jews,” the title of a February 1972 Commentary piece.” [quoted in TC, p. 27; Friedman, p. 147]
In the much reviewed The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (University of Chicago Press, 1993), noted political scientist (Johns Hopkins University) Benjamin Ginsberg writes: “One major factor that drew them [future Jewish neocons] inexorably to the right was their attachment to Israel and their growing frustration during the 1960s with a Democratic party that was becoming increasingly opposed to American military preparedness and increasingly enamored of Third World causes [e.g., Palestinian rights]. In the Reaganite right’s hard-line anti-communism, commitment to American military strength, and willingness to intervene politically and militarily in the affairs of other nations to promote democratic values (and American interests), neocons found a political movement that would guarantee Israel’s security.” (T.C., p. 26; Ginsberg, Fatal Embrace, p. 231)
The aforementioned illustrations of the neocons’ Jewish ethnicity shaping their policy positions represent cases where this issue was broached in the mainstream. However, the mainstream media has left out this ethnic reference when dealing with recent U.S. Middle East policy. For to include such a reference would imply that Jews are influential and exhibit “dual loyalty”– ideas that are taboo in the United States mainstream. It was these taboos that caused the whole idea of the neocons being the leading element for the war on Iraq to be blacked-out in mainstream presentations of the subject, a situation that recent works are only willing to change by discussing the role of the neoconservatives in a sanitized fashion, with the taboos expurgated or explained away.
However, there is nothing unusual in concluding that neocons would be motivated by ethnic loyalty to Israel. Historians and other commentators on American foreign policy have readily attributed ethnic loyalty as a fundamental factor in shaping the views of other groups – German-, Greek-, Polish-, Irish-, and Cuban-Americans. There is no reason to think that this interpretation would not also apply to the predominantly Jewish neoconservatives, especially since there is so much evidence of their close ties to the Jewish state.
That recent mainstream works on the neocons do everything possible to skirt their obviously ethnically-motivated concern for Israel represents not only a misinterpretation of a historical event, but has serious, negative ramifications for the understanding of ongoing U.S. Middle East policy. For neocons constitute only a more extreme element of the overall Israel lobby, which influences U.S. Middle East policy under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Without the willingness to recognize this major force behind America’s belligerent policy in the Middle East, it will not only be impossible to extricate the United States from the current Middle East morass, but there will be a strong possibility that the US will be involved in future wars in the region.
~
Dr. Stephen Sniegoski earned his Ph.D doctorate in American history,with a focus on American foreign policy, at the University of Maryland. His focus on the neoconservative involvement in American foreign policy antedates September 11, and his first major work on the subject, “The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel” was published February 10, 2003, more than a month before the American attack. He is the author of “The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel”.
On February 13, 1960, France carried out its first nuclear test in Algeria’s southern Reggane region. According to official statistics, 17 nuclear tests were carried out in total over the next 6 years. The area remains affected, and local scientists say that radioactive contamination has caused genetic mutations and irreversibly changed the region.
There are no official statistics on the number of victims. The only figures can be found in the records kept by the French representative of the local church, which lists 42,000 victims of nuclear tests. Three years ago, the French Ministry of Defense issued a statement, putting the number at 27,000 people. The victims include French soldiers as well as local Algerians who lived in the surrounding areas. … continue
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