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Death and Birth in Gaza: A Story of a Shepherd

By Mahmoud El-Yousseph | Palestine Chronicle | January 19, 2011

When you do not distinguish between combatants and unarmed civilians during war, then you deserve to be named a ‘terrorist.’ It makes no difference what your religion is!

That is exactly what happened thousands of miles away and two days before last Christmas, when Israeli troops shot dead a Palestinian shepherd in the back and injured two others. A 14 year old suffered a serious head injury and another 19 year old was injured in his hand.

The shooting took place in the Northern part of Gaza near the town of Beit Lahia. Israel considered the area a war zone, Palestinians called it home.

An Israeli army spokeswoman confirmed the shooting, adding “The soldiers fired warning shot and aimed at the lower body.” Not only was that unprovoked and cold blooded murder, but rather a naked lie by the Israeli spin machine.

It took a quick search on the story to find out what the so-called “most moral army” actually did to the 22 year old Palestinian shepherd, Salamah Abu Hashish. My search reveals shocking and inhumane details. After the Palestinian medics arrived at the scene, they were denied permission by the Israeli soldiers to aid or remove the victims.

A nearby metal scrapper was able to move Abu Hashish on the back of his donkey into the Kamal Udwan Hospital in Gaza where he died. Hospital officials said, one bullet went through his kidney.

The sad fact is Abu Hashish’s wife gave birth to their first child the night before, and the couple have not even chosen a name to their child.

He was the 13th Gazan to be killed by Israeli soldiers since last November and the 35 to suffer injuries near the border.

The shooting was condemned by Robert Serry, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process. Mr. Serry urged Israel to show “maximum restriant,” adding “I am distressed that incidents such as these continue in the perimeter area of Gaza, and deplore the killing of one apparently unarmed Palestinian civilian and the injuring of a number of others by Israel.”

Despite the UN official appeal, 48 hours later, Israeli troops once again shot a 26-year-old Gaza fisherman twice, once in each foot. He was identified as AZ, and his injures were described by Palestinian medical officials as light. Now you have a young lady who suddenly became a widow with an orphanage to care for and whose child will never know his/her father, a 14 year old boy with his life in the balance and a disabled fisherman who will no longer be able to stand on his feet or help feed his family.

Keep in mind, Israel was able and continues to commit these crimes with our tax-dollars and our government’s total silence. Israel knows exactly who butters her bread! Just when your children abuse their spending money, you will certainly lecture them about how to be responsible and act wisely. Not US officials, though, who are too fearful of Israel to act, even in accordance to their country’s own laws.

It is therefore vital that readers who are incensed by the aforementioned atrocities by Israeli soldiers against unarmed Palestinians express their concern to the embassy of Israel at our national capitol via email at info@washington.mfa.gov.il.

Israel should cease its war crimes against Palestinians, obey the rules that the rest of the world’s civilized nations follow and end the illegal and inhumane siege of Gaza.

– Mahmoud El-Yousseph is a retired USAF veteran.

January 19, 2011 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Adriatic Sea Ruined By NATO Weapons, Depleted Uranium, Toxic Waste

RussiaToday | January 18, 2011

Sandy beaches, gentle sea and charming tourist harbors: Italy’s Adriatic coast can be described as a paradise for sea-lovers. However, few are aware that tons of toxic waste disposed by NATO are piled up below the luminous surface.

According to investigative journalist Gianni Lannes, waters splashing against the coast of the southern Italian region of Puglia hide real hazards.

“An enormous amount of weaponry and toxic waste is present in these waters: US bombs from the 40s, and NATO weapons used in the 1999 war against Serbia, including depleted uranium ammunition,” he said. “These weapons often contain toxic substances, such as sulfur, mustard gas and phosphorous.”

Local fishermen say the presence of NATO weapons is seriously affecting their lives, and posing a threat to the local ecosystem.

“There are areas where these bombs keep ending up in our nets,” said local fisherman Vitantonio Tedesco. “We try to avoid them.”

“Following the war in 1999, the fish have practically disappeared from our waters,” he added. “The chemicals have affected our health, too, causing skin rashes, blurred vision and so forth.”

Fishermen have had to quit their jobs because of the scarcity of fish. The fishing cooperative in the seaside town of Molfetta was once comprised of almost 200 members, now there are just five.

Although NATO says there are six contaminated areas along the Adriatic coast, Lannes claims that is just the tip of the iceberg.

“NATO is lying, 24 areas are affected, not six,” he said. “The location of these areas have not even been made public. The population is being kept in the dark.”

Lannes’ repeated attempts to raise the issue with Italy’s Defense Minister have led to nothing. US military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian claims the US Army does its best to remove all dangerous weaponry after its military campaigns.

“We do everything we can, first of all, to comply with environmental law when we conduct operations and exercises,” he said. “Following the jettison operations during the Kosovo campaign we conducted those clearing operations and did everything we could to remove the hazards.”

However, Gianni Lannes believes NATO has not yet owned up to its responsibilities.

“There should be an economic compensation for those affected,” he said. “Europe, NATO and, above all, the United States must be held accountable.”

January 19, 2011 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Iran’s crude reserves up by 9 percent

Press TV – January 19, 2011

Iranian OPEC Governor Mohammad Ali Khatibi has announced that the crude oil reserves of the country have increased more than 9 percent to 150 billion barrels.

Khatibi said on Tuesday that considering the new oil and gas discoveries, Iran’s crude oil reserves have risen to 150 billion barrels of oil, Iran’s oil ministry’s official website Shana reported.

The Iranian official noted that the figure represents a 9.5 percent increase from the previous reserve level of 137 billion barrels of crude oil estimated to exist in Iran’s basin.

Khatibi further pointed out that Iran will maintain a daily oil production level of around 4.2 million barrels, so the proven reserves of the country will last at least another 98 years.

Iran took over at the rotating presidency of OPEC this year for the first time in the past 36 years. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is a permanent intergovernmental organization of 12 oil-exporting developing nations also including Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.

Earlier on Sunday, Iranian Oil Minister Massoud Mirkazemi announced that a new gas field worth more than $50 billion with in-place reserves of 260 billion cubic meters of natural gas was discovered in eastern part of the port city of Assaluyeh in southern Iran.

Khayyam gas field also has some proven reserves of 220 million barrels of gas condensates, the minister added.

Iran discovered 13 new oil and gas fields with in-place reserves of 14 billion barrels of oil and 45 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from August 2009 to August 2010, a report published by Iran’s Oil Ministry said in August 2010.

Iran is ranked third in terms of proven oil reserves and is OPEC’s second-largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia. In 2009, Iran’s crude production stood approximately at 3.8 million barrels per day. The Persian Gulf country sits on the world’s second largest gas reserves after Russia.

January 19, 2011 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Israel finances military helicopter deal for South Sudan

Middle East Monitor | 18 January 2011

Reports from Sudan claim that senior Israeli officials have been advising the secessionist Council of Ministers of the Government of the South [Sudan] on matters relating to the “final details” of the expected “independence” from Khartoum and military support. Arab diplomatic sources called a meeting held in Israel in mid-December “important” and “extraordinary”.

According to the Sudanese Centre for Press Services, the meeting put the final touches to the expected changes in international relations and attitudes following the recent referendum, which is expected to call for secession. Egypt is one country which is concerned about the conditions in the region after January 15.

It is claimed that the meeting agreed that Israel would finance a deal to provide attack helicopters for the new army in Southern Sudan, thus “completing” the arming of the South; previous support has included weapons, ammunition, rocket-propelled and anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft guns, tanks and general vehicles. The reports added that Israel is making “arrangements” to find and equip the new state’s embassies and persuade other countries to assist in this process.

Commentators have pointed out recently that Israel has played a major part in sustaining the armed rebellion in Southern Sudan since the 1950s as part of the Zionist state’s strategy to keep Arab states divided and diverted by internal disputes.

January 18, 2011 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Avi Shlaim on the Neoconservative Middle East War Agenda

“The influence of the Likud and of its friends in Washington could be detected across the entire spectrum of American policy towards the Middle East,” writes Shlaim.

By Stephen Sniegoski | My Catbird Seat | January 17, 2011

A friend, Phil Collier, an avid student of and sometime writer on Middle East affairs (and  a National Master in chess), recently  informed  me that Avi Shlaim, in his recent book, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations, had one chapter, “Palestine and Iraq,” that presents a thesis almost identical to what I have written in The Transparent Cabal. This naturally encouraged me to obtain the book, and Collier’s description turns out to be correct.

Now this similarity is quite significant since what I have written on the neocons regarding their strong influence on U. S. Middle East policy and their connection to Israel is taboo in the American mainstream, with even numerous antiwar individuals (especially those with higher status) and publications shying away from my work. But unlike me, Shlaim, a professor of international relations at Oxford, is a recognized scholar, with such notable books on Israel and its neighbors as The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2001).  And he is also Jewish and an Israeli citizen, who served in the Israeli Defense Forces (possessing dual British and Israeli citizenship), which shelters him from charges of anti-Semitism.   Undoubtedly because of his credentials, his works cannot be ignored, and this book was honored as a Kirkus Best Book for 2009.

Now, in his ten-page  chapter on this subject, Shlaim could only present a much-abbreviated version of the major themes that I elaborate on at length in my 447 page book.   The following are some poignant examples from Shlaim’s work, with my commentary drawing comparisons to The Transparent Cabal.

“The basic premise behind George W. Bush’s policy towards the Middle East reflected this strong pro-Israeli bias,” Shlaim opines. “The premise was that the key issue in Middle East politics was not Palestine, but Iraq.” (p. 297)    This is the essence of my thesis, but it is something many establishment people, including those who have been antiwar, ardently deny when they claim that the elimination of Saddam not only harmed  Israeli interests by empowering Iran, but that this result  was clearly foreseen by  Israelis and supporters of Israel prior to the attack on Iraq and that the government of Israel thus allegedly opposed the war.  The Transparent Cabal, of course, shows that the entire neocon war agenda in the Middle East was directed to advancing Israel’s security by weakening its enemies and that Israeli leaders did, in fact, promote the war on Iraq.   Of course, in the United States, any claim that American Jews promote Israeli interests, no matter how well adduced, invariably elicits accusations of anti-Semitism.

“American proponents of the war on Iraq promised that action against Iraq would form part of a broader engagement with the problems of the Middle East,” Shlaim notes.  “The road to Jerusalem, they argued, went through Baghdad.  Cutting off Saddam Hussein’s support for Palestinian terrorism was, according to them, an essential first step in the quest for a settlement.” (p. 297)  Later he observes:  “One of the main arguments for regime change in Baghdad was to put an end to Iraqi support for Palestinian militants and for what was seen as Palestinian intransigence in the peace process with Israel.” (p. 300)

As I point out in The Transparent Cabal, the neocons maintained that it was the removal of not only Saddam, but most “non-democratic” regimes in the Middle East, which was necessary to bring about a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian issue.  However, the “peace” the neocons had in mind was one dictated by Israel. Elimination of the Middle Eastern “non-democratic” regimes would facilitate this development because it was just these regimes  that provided moral and material support to the Palestinian resistance, portrayed by the neocons as “Palestinian intransigence.”  Without outside support, the isolated and dispirited Palestinians would ultimately be forced to accede to whatever type of peaceful solution Israel offered, which would create nothing like a viable, Palestinian state, but which would serve to remove Israel’s Palestinian problem and thus help to secure the Jewish nature of the state of Israel.

“The influence of the Likud and of its friends in Washington could be detected across the entire spectrum of American policy towards the Middle East,” writes Shlaim.  “Particularly striking was the ideological convergence between some of the leading neoconservatives in the Bush Administration – such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith—and the hardliners in Ariel Sharon’s inner circle.” (p. 298)

I go to great lengths in The Transparent Cabal to highlight the link between the neocons and the hardline Likudniks. In fact, I show that the neocons’ very plan to reconfigure the Middle East paralleled the Likudnik goal of destabilizing and fragmenting Israel’s enemies, which was best articulated by Oded Yinon in the early 1980s.

In illustrating the neocons’ identification with Israeli interests, Shlaim underscores the significance of the neocons’ “A Clean Break” paper, writing: “In 1996, a group of six Jewish Americans, led by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, wrote a paper for incoming Israeli prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu.  Entitled ‘A Clean Break’, the paper proposed, in essence, an abrupt reversal of the foreign policies of the Clinton Administration towards the Middle East.” (p. 298)  After mentioning the major goals  of the plan, including the removal of Saddam’s regime, Shlaim declares: “Thus, five years before the attack on the twin towers, the idea of regime change in Baghdad was already on the agenda of some of Israel’s most fervent Republican supporters in Washington.” (p. 299)  Regarding the connection of that policy to actual American interests,  Shlaim opines that “While the authors’ devotion to Israel’s interests was crystal-clear, their implicit identification of those interests with American interests was much more open to question.” (p. 299) Shlaim accepts the obvious  fact that the neocons were influential in shaping Bush policy: “The Bush Administration’s entire policy towards the Middle East was similarly supportive of Israel’s short-term strategic interests.” (p. 299)

It should be noted here that Shlaim, in accord with what I write in  The Transparent Cabal,  makes three taboo points that often lead to charges of anti-Semitism when he observes that the neocons are Jewish, that they are devoted to Israel, and that they were influential enough to shape U. S. Middle East  policy in the interests of Israel.

Shlaim correctly points out  that the neocons’ Middle East war  agenda transcended Iraq: “While Iraq was the main target, the neocons also advocated that America exert relentless pressure on Syria and on Iran.” (p. 300)  In The Transparent Cabal, I show that the neocons only regarded Iraq as the momentary “main target”—it was to be the first step in their plan to reconfigure the Middle East.

Shlaim refers to  Israeli support for the broader neocon Middle East war agenda, which would also primarily benefit that country, not the United States:   “Washington’s policy of confrontation and regime change was fervently supported in Tel Aviv.  Here too the benefit to Israel is much more evident than the benefit to America.   And here too, the US agenda towards the region appears to incorporate a right-wing Likud agenda.” (p. 300)

While fundamentally similar, Shlaim’s analysis does differ with The Transparent Cabal in a few respects.   For example, he depicts the noted Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis as a crucial influence on the neocons, maintaining that he provided “the intellectual underpinning for this policy [the neocon plan of democratizing the Middle East by war].” (P. 299)  While aware that Lewis expressed this Middle East democratization argument, I am not aware that the neocons actually derived this view from him.  To obtain expert opinion on this issue, I contacted Paul Gottfried, probably the foremost historian of neoconservatism, and he also was not aware of any evidence for Shlaim’s claim. Since Lewis is a well-known scholar, some neocons undoubtedly believed that publicizing their connection to him would enhance the credibility of their democratization argument, but whether they actually derived this view from him needs to be proven.

A more significant difference between Shlaim’s argument and that of The Transparent Cabal revolves around an assessment of the results of the neocon policy. While Shlaim holds that the  neocons were attuned to the views of the hardline Likudniks and sought to advance what they considered to be Israel’s security interests,  he seems to drift away from this position in looking at the policy’s results.  Instead, he seems to take the neocon rhetoric on democracy at face value and judges the results by both this standard and how the results affected Israel’s security, as he (a left-wing Zionist, not a hardline Likudnik) sees  it.  “The war on Iraq has not gone according to plan,” Shlaim asserts. “Saddam Hussein and his henchman have been removed from power but the goals of democracy, security and stability have proved persistently elusive. Today the shadow of civil war hangs over Iraq.” (p. 305)

In contrast to Shlaim’s view of Israel’s security, the neocons explicitly sought regional instability to allegedly achieve democracy, as I show in The Transparent Cabal.  And the hardline Likudnik position was to destabilize and fragment Israel’s enemies to enhance Israeli security.  The neocons similarly advocated such an approach in their “Clean Break” agenda, which did not emphasize  democratization.  In short, from the perspective of the neocons and the hardline Likudniks, the instability and the “shadow of civil war” resulting from the US invasion of Iraq were neither surprising nor unwelcome.  Thus the neocons’ plans failed only to the extent that the US has not, or at least not yet, moved on to attack and destabilize Iran and other enemies of Israel.

It is certainly pleasing to see themes that I present emerging  in the mainstream, but I am miffed that my much longer account remains largely ignored.  It would be great if  books such as Shlaim’s would serve to open the door to wider publicity for The Transparent Cabal, which would not simply be of personal benefit but would also provide mainstream readers with the most complete account currently existing of the neoconservative involvement in the war on Iraq and overall U. S. Middle East policy,  and thus serve as a guide to analyzing current U.S.  policy.  However, since Shlaim’s theme is buried among 29 other short chapters, its impact will likely be negligible.  And the overall blackout of these crucial themes will likely continue.

Stephen J. Sniegoski, Ph.D. earned his 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”. Read more articles by Stephen J. Sniegoski. http://home.comcast.net/~transparentcabal/

January 17, 2011 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Iran to file complaint against Israel

Press TV – January 17, 2011

Iran’s Foreign Ministry caretaker Ali Akbar Salehi says the country will lodge a complaint with international bodies against Israel in connection with the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist.

In July 2010, Iranian nuclear physics scientist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi was killed when a remote-controlled bomb detonated near his house in the north of the Iranian capital, Tehran.

“Iran’s complaint against the Zionist regime (Israel) will be submitted to international bodies soon,” IRNA quoted Salehi as saying on Monday as he pointed to the role of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, in the assassination of Ali-Mohammadi, a lecturer at the University of Tehran.

Salehi added that Iran’s Foreign Ministry has collected all documents on Israel’s role in the killing of the Iranian scientist.

On January 11, Iranian Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi said the Islamic Republic has succeeded in overcoming the so-called strong Mossad supported by the US and Western states by managing to penetrate into the depth of the Mossad information system and dismantling its different networks.

His comments came a day after Iran’s Intelligence Ministry said it had dismantled an Israeli spy network and arrested the main perpetrators in connection with the assassination of Ali-Mohammadi.

One of the detained terrorists, Majid Jamali-Fash, confessed that he had received training in a military base outside Tel Aviv.

January 17, 2011 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Leave a comment

FBI Issues Death Threat in U.S. Citizen Interrogation

By Thomas R. Eddlem | The New American | 13 January 2011

An FBI agent reportedly issued a death threat against a U.S. citizen traveling abroad, according to the January 13 New York Times. The American, 19-year-old Gulet Mohamed, also alleges beatings and sleep deprivation in his interrogations since his arrest by Kuwaiti authorities in late December.

After he was detained by Kuwaiti authorities, “Mr. Mohamed said the agents began yelling the name ‘Anwar al-Awlaki’ at him,” the Times reported, “prompting Kuwaiti officials to intervene and request that the agents end the interrogation.” New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki is an American citizen and Islamic cleric who has emigrated to Yemen and advocated jihad against America, and President Obama has reputedly put him on an assassination list of U.S. citizens for when he is found.Making a death threat against a defenseless prisoner is a crime of felony torture under the U.S. criminal code, and the jurisdiction of the crime for federal agents is anywhere in the world. The U.S. Code, Title 18, Section 2340 defines felony torture as follows: “torture means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control,” including “the threat of imminent death.”

The New York Times story added that after Gulet Mohamed’s arrest and while under FBI interrogation,

[H]e said … he was severely beaten, deprived of sleep and questioned about his travels to Yemen and Somalia…. He said the agents never presented evidence that he made contacts with militants. “They wanted me to lie about myself, and pushed me to lie about things I had done,” he said.

Although President Obama campaigned as a candidate against the use of torture, little has apparently changed in this regard since the Bush administration.

The President’s assassination list of U.S. citizens has been public since the Washington Post reported it on January 27, 2010.  While the Washington Post later corrected a few details of its original story, the existence of the assassination list was verified when John O. Brennan, White House senior adviser on counterterrorism, told the Washington Times June 24, 2010 that

To me, terrorists should not be able to hide behind their passports and their citizenship, and that includes U.S. citizens, whether they are overseas or whether they are here in the United States. What we need to do is to apply the appropriate tool and the appropriate response.

Brennan then stressed:

If an American person or citizen is in a Yemen or in a Pakistan or in Somalia or another place, and they are trying to carry out attacks against U.S. interests, they also will face the full brunt of a U.S. response. And it can take many forms.

But the difference is that Anwar al-Awlaki has not been accused of participating in actual attacks against American forces abroad. He has been accused of merely justifying and encouraging them with his words.

Thus, it’s perhaps surprising that CIA Director Leon Panetta told ABC News’ Jake Tapper back in June 2010,

Awlaki is a terrorist who has declared war on the United States. Everything he’s doing now is to try to encourage others to attack this country[.]  [T]here’s a whole stream of intelligence that goes back to Awlaki and his continuous urging of others to attack this country in some way. You can track Awlaki to the Detroit bomber. We can track him to other attacks in this country that have been urged by Awlaki or that have been influenced by Awlaki. Awlaki is a terrorist and yes, he’s a U.S. citizen, but he is first and foremost a terrorist and we’re going to treat him like a terrorist. We don’t have an assassination list, but I can tell you this. We have a terrorist list and he’s on it.

Panetta’s ludicrous statement that one person can “declare war” against a whole country (Can a single person really “declare war”?) is emblematic of the absurdity to which government officials will go to rationalize their attack on the Bill of Rights. While Panetta denied that the Obama administration has an “assassination list,” it’s more than clear that the Obama administration has one and that Panetta was just contesting which term is most descriptive of that list. U.S. policy is to kill terrorists.

When he was still a candidate for President, Obama (in an interview with the Boston Globe) denied that the President has the power under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without trial — and yet Gulet Mohamed remains detained without trial in Kuwait.

The torture and detention without trial of U.S. citizen Gulet Mohamed at the hands of the Obama administration comes at the same time that the President is lecturing in favor of “more civility in our public discourse” and against “discourse [that] has become so sharply polarized -– at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do -– it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”

But no true patriot can be civil about the blatantly unconstitutional torture (which violates the Eighth Amendment) and detention without trial (which violates the Fifth and Sixth Amendments) of his fellow citizens at the hands of an executive who defines his powers outside the limits of the U.S. Constitution.

President Obama needs to be taught that only actions such as government torture wound, not words. In fact, only very uncivil words can lead to healing of the bodily wounds inflicted upon citizens and upon the U.S. Constitution.

January 15, 2011 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

The Banality of Killing

By Jacob G. Hornberger | January 12, 2011

The standard explanations for the Arizona killings are now being set forth, such as widespread violence in America and right-wing extremism. I’d like to weigh in with another possible factor, one that I can’t prove but one that I think Americans ought to at least consider: the fact that killing has now become an accepted, essential, normal, and permanent part of American life.

No, I’m not referring to the widespread gun violence in America that liberals point to as part of their gun-control agenda. I’m not even referring to the widespread violence that accompanies the decades-long drug war, especially in Mexico. I’m instead referring to the U.S. government’s regular killing of people thousands of miles away in Afghanistan and Iraq, killing that has now gone on regularly for some 10 years and that has become a fairly hum-drum part of our daily lives.

Six people were killed and 14 were injured in the Arizona shootings, including a woman who was shot through the head and a 9-year-old girl whose life was snuffed out. Everyone is shocked over the horror, which is detailed on the front page of every newspaper across the country.

But let’s face it: Such killings go on every week in Afghanistan and Iraq and have for some 10 years. Parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, grandparents, friends, brides, grooms, and wedding parties. People are killed in those two countries every week, and the killing has now expanded to people in Pakistan.

We don’t see those deaths on the front pages of American newspapers. They’re buried on page 14 of the papers in small news reports, if at all.

Why don’t those killings get front-page coverage?

One, the killings have become commonplace. They’re now just considered normal. Massive death on a massive scale, but normal. We just put all the deaths at the back of our minds. The football playoffs are this weekend. Got to pay the bills this month. Life demands our attention. Anyway, it’s not as if we, the American citizenry, are doing the killing. It’s the military and the CIA that are doing it.

Two, our public officials say that we’re at war and that people are always killed in war. Never mind that what we have in Afghanistan and Iraq are military occupations, not war. The idea is that a military occupation is a sort of war and, therefore, we shouldn’t let the daily killings affect our consciences. Moreover, since we’ve been told that the war on terrorism is considered permanent, we just have to get used to the fact that the weekly killings will be a normal and regular part of our lives for as long as we live.

Third, we are told that the people being killed are terrorists, enemy combatants, or unfortunate collateral damage. Never mind that our public officials have had 10 years to kill terrorists and enemy combatants to their hearts’ content but apparently still haven’t gotten them all. Never mind that the terrorists and enemy combatants might well now consist primarily of people who are simply trying to oust their country of a foreign occupier, like people did when it was the Soviet Union that was doing the occupying. Never mind that the number of terrorists and enemy combatants continues to rise with each new killing. It’s all just part and parcel of the new normality for American society.

In the process, life is cheapened — well, the lives of Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis. The weekly killings of adults and children from those three countries are relegated to page 14 of the newspaper because they’re just Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis. It’s not as if they’re Americans, after all, people who place a much higher value on human life than others.

We mustn’t forget how, for the last 10 years, the lives of Afghans and Iraqis have been expendable for the greater good of their society. How many times have we been reminded, for example, that the deaths of countless Iraqis have been worth the effort to bring democracy to Iraq? In fact, one of the most fascinating phenomena about the Iraq War, an illegal and unconstitutional undeclared war of aggression that the U.S. government waged against a country that had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so, is that there has never been an upper limit on the number of Iraqi deaths that would justify the achievement of democracy in Iraq. Any number of Iraqi deaths, no matter how high, has been considered worth it.

We saw this same reasoning through 11 years of brutal sanctions on Iraq, which were imposed for the purpose of achieving regime change — the ouster of Saddam Hussein from power and his replacement by a pro-U.S. regime. When Bill Clinton’s U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, was asked by Sixty Minutes whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children had been worth it, her answer perfectly reflected the mindset of Washington officials for the past two decades: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

How much value is placed on the lives of people, including children, who are sacrificed for the greater good of society? Not much value at all. Life is supposed to be sancrosanct. But then again, don’t forget that those are only Iraqi people we’re talking about.

How can all this massive, regular, permanent death and destruction not affect and infect a society? Sure, it all takes place thousands of miles away. Sure, it’s buried on page 14 of the newspaper. We don’t see the caskets or the burials. We don’t see the crying, the anguish, or the anger of the survivors. We just go about our daily business, deferring to authority. Our public officials know what is best. That is their job. We have to trust their judgment. If they say that American soldiers and CIA officials have to stay in Afghanistan and Iraq permanently and just go on killing people forever, then we, the citizenry, just have to accept that. If they say they have to expand the killing to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia or wherever, then that is just the way things are. They are the experts. They are in charge.

In the process, everyone convinces himself that the people who are being killed are “bad guys” or people who just happened to be too close to the bad guys, including their wives, children, other family members, or friends.

Of course, the possibility that the U.S. government — the invader, the occupier, the interloper — is the “bad guy” doesn’t even enter into most people’s minds. The thought is too horrible, too terrifying. It might cause citizens to have to search their consciences. Easier to simply continue “supporting the troops” who are “defending our freedoms” by killing all those people on a regular, weekly basis.

The news media are reporting that the accused Arizona shooter, Jared Loughner, tried to join the U.S. military but was unsuccessful. The irony is that if he had been successful, he would have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan and participated in the weekly death-fest and, upon his return, public officials, pundits, media personalities, and even many church ministers would be hailing his heroism and thanking him for serving his country by killing Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, and others in the “defense of our freedoms” here at home.

Did the normalization and trivialization of killing and the denigration and devaluation of life in Afghanistan and Iraq trigger something inside the apparently disturbed mind of the accused Arizona killer? I don’t know. But how can such actions not have a horrible long-term adverse effect on people whose government is permanently engaged in such evil?

January 15, 2011 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

WTC 7 Demolition – Why The Building Really Fell

IranContraScumDid911 | January 13, 2011

The total collapse of WTC 7 at 5:20 PM on 9/11/01 shows all of the features of an implosion engineered through controlled demolition.

Controlled demolition is the use of pre-positioned explosive charges to destroy structures. Depending on the nature of the structure and constraints imposed by its surroundings, a controlled demolition may require a great deal of precision in its planning and execution. That is especially true of tall steel buildings in urban settings, given the natural tendency of such structures to topple. Controlled demolitions of buildings in cities are designed to implode the structures, making them sink into their footprints and fold in on themselves into a small consolidated rubble piles

Observing the collapse of 47-story WTC 7 shows it to have all of the features of an implosion engineered by controlled demolition.

The collapse of the main structure commences suddenly (several seconds after the penthouse falls).
The building sinks in a precisely vertical manner into its footprint.
Puffs of dust emerge from the building’s facade early in the event.
The collapse is total, producing a rubble pile only about three stories high.
The main structure collapses totally in under 7 seconds, only about a second slower than it would take a brick dropped from the building’s roof to reach the ground in a vacuum.

January 14, 2011 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Israelis can tell the whole story of Sudan’s division – they wrote the script and trained the actors

By Fahmi Howeidi | Al-Khaleej Times | 14 January 2011

Now that we have been unable to defend the unity of Sudan, it might benefit us to understand what has happened there. Perhaps that will alert us to the fact that secession of the south is not the end, but is one of a series of splits intended to dismantle the Arab world surrounding Egypt.

From very early on, Zionists realized that minorities in the Arab world represent a natural ally to their state of Israel and so they planned to build bridges with them. Zionist representatives communicated with the Kurds in Iraq, the people in southern Sudan, the Maronites in Lebanon, Kurds in Syria, and the Copts in Egypt; Zionism adopted the principle of divide and conquer, and saw that the most effective way to fragment the Arab world was to create secessionist movements within it. In doing so, it sought the redistribution of power in the region in such a manner to make a group of marginal countries lacking unity and sovereignty, all the easier for Israel, in cooperation with non-Arab countries to control them one after the other later. All the rebel movements triggered by ethnic and sectarian groups in the Arab world have drawn support and advocacy from Israel, which has adopted these separatist movements, as witnessed by the Kurds in Iraq and the rebel movement in southern Sudan.

This situation helps us to understand Israel’s strategy towards the Arab world, which is designed to encourage minorities to express themselves so that they may eventually seize self-determination and independence from the state. What helps in all of this is that the Arab world, contrary to what the Arabs claim, does not consist of one cultural and civilized unity – the mythical “Arab nation” but it is a diverse mix of cultures, religions, ethnicities and multilingualism. Israel has been used to portraying the region as a mosaic that includes in its midst a complex network of multi-linguistic, religious, nationalism forms between Arabs, Persians, Turks, Armenians, Israelis themselves, Kurds, Baha’is, Druze, Jews, Protestants, Alawites, Sabians, Shiites, Sunnis, Maronites, Circassians, Turkomans, Assyrians and so on.

According to Israel’s view, when a land or part of a land has minority groups within it but no collective history, the real history is the history of each minority. This has the purpose of achieving two main objectives:

First, it rejects the concept of Arab nationalism and the call for Arab unity; Arab nationalism in the Israeli perception is an idea shrouded in mystery, if not irrelevant. Arab unity is a myth because the Arabs pay lip service to one nation, but live within mutually incompatible states. It is true that most are united by language and religion, but that is also the case with people across the English- or Spanish-speaking worlds, but that does not make them one nation.

Second, this is used to justify the legitimacy of Israel’s presence in the region as just one more to add to the mix of nationalities, peoples and languages, for which the perception of unity is an illusion. The logical conclusion of this train of thought is that each group of people (whether calling themselves a nation or not) has its own state; thus does Israel gains its legitimacy as one of many nation-states in the Middle East.

The preceding thesis is taken from a text book: “Israel and the South Sudan Liberation Movement”, published in 2003 by the Dayan Centre for Research on the Middle East and Africa. The author is retired head of Mossad Moshe Faraji. I have referred to him on more than one occasion. He is worth looking at again as the crop sown by Israel and its allies since the 1950s is beginning to bear fruit.

Another senior Israeli, former Minister of Internal Security Avi Dichter, referred to Sudan in his 2008 lecture delivered to the Institute for Zionist National Security Studies. “There have been Israeli estimates since Sudan’s independence in the mid-fifties that this country, although far from us, should not be allowed to become a force added to the power of the Arab world because if its resources continue under stable conditions, it will make it a power to be reckoned with.” Hence, Israel’s attention has been directed towards Sudan, hoping to exploit the situation.

Sudan provides strategic depth to Egypt. This was evident post-1967 when Sudan and Libya provided training facilities for the Egyptian air force and army; Sudanese forces were sent to the Suez Canal zone during the war of attrition waged by Egypt between 1968 and 1970. For these two reasons, Dichter added, Israel had to work on weakening Sudan and prevent it from becoming a strong, unified state. This strategic perspective is necessary, he said, for Israeli’s national security. It is worth noting that Dichter’s lecture took place almost thirty years after the peace agreement signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979.

When asked about the future of southern Sudan, Dichter replied: “There are international forces led by the United States that are determined to intervene in Sudan so that the South will become independent, and the same for the Darfur region, like the independence of Kosovo. The situation in southern Sudan is not unlike that in Darfur and Kosovo, in that the two regions aspire to independence and acquire the right to self-determination after their citizens fought for that.”

Israeli support for the rebels in southern Sudan has gone through five stages notes Colonel Faraji:

Phase 1 started in the fifties. For nearly a decade, Israel focused on providing humanitarian aid (medicines, food and doctors) and was keen to provide services to refugees who were fleeing to Ethiopia. The first attempts to invest in the tribal differences in southern Sudan itself began in order to intensify the conflict and encourage the South to secede from the Arab north. Israeli intelligence officers stationed in Uganda opened channels of communication with the leaders of the southern tribes to study the demographic map of the area.

Phase 2 began in the sixties with Israel providing military training in special centres established in Ethiopia. At this stage, the Israeli government became convinced that keeping Khartoum busy with internal wars was sufficient to make sure that it would be unable to provide any support for Egypt’s struggle with the Zionist state.

Proselytizing organizations active in the south encouraged Israel to send members of its intelligence services under the cover of humanitarian aid; the prime goal was to train influential people to sustain the tension in the region. At this stage, Israel also expanded its support to the rebels by providing weapons through Ugandan territory; the first of such deals was in 1962, with mainly Russian armaments which had been captured by Israel when it took part in the aggressive Suez campaign in 1956. Fighters were trained in southern Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya before being pushed over the border to fight inside Sudan.

Phase 3 extended from the mid-sixties into the seventies, when the flow of arms to Southern Sudan was facilitated by an Israeli arms dealer called Gabi Shafine, who was working for Israeli intelligence. Shipments of Russian weapons won by Israel in 1967 were dropped by Israeli cargo planes. Israel also established a school for infantry officers to train the cadres necessary to lead the rebel factions. Israeli elements were involved in the fighting to lend their expertise to the South. At this stage groups were taken to Israel to receive military training. At the beginning of the seventies another channel for the delivery of Israeli support to South Sudan through Uganda was opened officially.

When it seemed that the rebel movement was about to collapse in 1969, Israel made a tremendous effort to urge the rebels to continue their fight, and used every method available to them to persuade southerners that they were engaged in a national struggle between Arab-Muslims in the north who were dominating a Black-African-Christian-Animist south.

Phase 4 from the late seventies through the eighties saw the African continent witness several major diversions (e.g. drought in Ethiopia) which did not stop Israel from supporting the rebels; indeed, support increased after Ethiopia became a regular conduit for the delivery of weapons to the South. John Garang emerged at this stage as a leader supported by Israel; he was received in Tel Aviv and given money and weapons. Israel was keen to train his men in various martial arts; ten pilots were trained to use light fighter aircraft.

Phase 5 started in late 1990 with expanding Israeli support; shipments reached the south through Kenya and Ethiopia. Israel provided the south with heavy anti-tank weapons and anti-aircraft guns. At the beginning of 1993, the coordination between Israel and the SPLA (the southern army) included funding, training, armament, information and supervision by Israeli technicians of military operations.

It is clear that Israel has been eyeing southern Sudan for more than half a century.

A worthy observation is that the insurgency in the south began in 1955, one year before the Declaration of Independence of the state of Sudan. This illustrates that the oft-cited reason for southern secession – the implementation of Shari’a Law by the government of Al-Turabi in 1989 – is merely an excuse; this is a struggle that has gone on long before such proposals were even mooted.

While Israel was supporting the southern rebels with arms, Western countries were continuing their diplomatic efforts to arrange the division of Sudan through a referendum. The peace accord signed between the Khartoum government and the rebels was reached with British, American and Norwegian sponsorship. For more than fifty years, the people of Sudan have faced armed insurrection on one side and diplomatic pressure and dirty tricks on the other. If just a quarter of such an effort had been applied on the situation in Palestine, the problem would have been resolved decades ago. Self-determination appears to be acceptable, indeed highly desirable, if it will weaken a predominantly Arab state, but off the agenda when it involves the Palestinians obtaining their rights against the Zionist state of Israel.

They have planned for this division of Sudan and look set to get what they wanted. As for the Arabs, they have stood and watched as mere spectators. I hope that this is not a precursor for further disappointments to come.

January 14, 2011 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

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