Ankara – The report just issued by the UN Human Rights Council’s ‘independent international commission of inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic’ is now being passed along the line to the UN Security Council, with the recommendation by the UN Human Rights Commissioner, Navi Pillay, that the Syrian government be referred to the International Criminal Court for prosecution.
In its terms of reference the commission describes itself as a ‘fact-finding body’ based on the standard of ‘reasonable suspicion’. Yet if there is anything that characterizes this document, it is the lack of attention to fact. The report is based on accusations, allegations and claims against the Syrian government which it does not even attempt to verify. It repeats the claim that the Syrian government’s security forces are responsible for the deaths of 3500 people – the figure usually given – when there is strong prima facie evidence that a large number of the dead, civilians as well as soldiers, have been the victims of armed gangs operating across the country. It does not even say where it picked up this figure, since increased to 4000 by Navi Pillay, or whether it has any independent evidence that it is accurate.
Two central questions needed to be dealt with if this commission wanted to get at the facts. First, how much truth is there in the allegations being made against the Syrian government and its security forces? Here the commission records the allegations but makes no attempt to verify them. Thus the facts remain unknown. Second, how much truth is there in the allegations made by the Syrian government? Here the commission does not even deal with the allegations. Despite this bias, the result is the same: the facts remain unknown.
The commission says it interviewed 223 victims and witnesses of alleged human rights violations, ‘including civilians and defectors from the military and security forces’. It does not say who these people are, where it got their names from, why they were chosen and who covered the costs of their travel and accommodation. It indicates that other sources of its information include ‘non-government organizations, human rights defenders, journalists and experts’. As this same group is the source of many of the unsubstantiated if not patently false accusations (i.e. dead people who have turned up alive) appearing in the mainstream media, it is obviously important to know precisely which organizations and individuals helped the commission and what the information was that they supplied, but the commission does not say.
The commission regrets that the Syrian government, ‘despite many requests’, failed to engage in dialogue ‘and grant the commission access to the country’. But as the Syrian government points out, in a letter printed as an annex to this report, it had established its own Independent Special Legal Commission, with sub-commissions operating across Syria since the end of March, and therefore would not be able to provide the UN commission with the material it wanted until it had concluded its own inquiries. However, because it could not accommodate itself to the commission’s timetable, it is accused of failing to cooperate.
On September 12 the president of the Human Rights Council (Laura Dupuy Lasserre) appointed three ‘high level experts’ as members of the commission of inquiry: Paulo Pinheiro (chairman), Yakin Ertürk and Karen Koning AbuZayd. They were required to produce their report by the end of November, with an update to be handed in by March, 2012. There is no indication of why the end of November was chosen for the deadline and not December or January, giving the commission more time to investigate the allegations being made. The time frame was extremely constricted given the work load. Within the space of six weeks (end of September to the middle of November), 223 witnesses were interviewed and a report prepared. The commission’s mandated task was ‘to investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law since March 2011 in the Syrian Arab Republic, to establish the facts and circumstances that may amount to such violations and of the crimes perpetrated and where possible to identify those responsible with a view of ensuring that perpetrators of violations, including those that may constitute crimes against humanity, are held accountable’. This clearly could not be done in six weeks. The apparent rush to get the report out will raise questions in many minds about timing, given the way in which the net is being closed around the Syrian government by those who want to bring it down.
The commission presents one side of the story throughout. For virtually every claim it makes there is a counter narrative which it ignores. One such claim involves the use of snipers. The commission says or implies that they were state security forces. There is countervailing evidence of armed civilians shooting at demonstrators to throw the blame on to the state. Perhaps there is truth in both versions, but both versions needed to be considered. The fact remains that the identity of these snipers is not known.
The report alleges that roadblocks and security checks were set up to prevent people from joining demonstrations but makes no mention of allegations of roadblocks being set up by armed gangs and the consequent kidnapping and killing of civilians. It refers to killings and arrests at Jisr al Shughur but not the evidence of the massacre of soldiers and civilians around the town in July: even if only prima facie it deserved to be considered. It produces claims of torture and killing ‘reportedly’ taking place in Homs military hospital ‘by security forces dressed as doctors and allegedly acting with the complicity of medical personnel’. Such a serious charge surely needs more to back it up than ‘reportedly’. The report mentions the raid on a mosque in Dar’a early in the protest movement but not the stockpile of weapons found there. It refers to the torture and murder in custody of two teenage boys and claims that up to November 9, ‘reliable sources’ indicated that 256 children had been killed by state forces. This is such a serious accusation that some corroborative evidence was needed but there is nothing, not the name even of one of these children and not the circumstances in which they were allegedly killed.
It quotes a ‘defector’ (no evidence that this person actually is one) as being told by his commander to ‘disperse the crowd or eliminate everybody including children’. There is no supporting evidence for this accusation. The state security forces are accused of rape but there is no mention of the cases of rape reported by the Syrian authorities to have been committed by armed gangs as part of their project to terrorize and intimidate the civilian population. The army is accused of using tanks and heavy weapons against residential buildings. These accusations are denied by the government. Furthermore, if they were used, were the civilians inside those buildings armed and shooting at the army, as seems to have been the case at Homs and probably elsewhere? The commission does not mention the use of heavy weapons by armed men against the army. Apparently it has not seen the videos of the charred bodies of soldiers lying beside burnt-out tanks. The commission’s statement that it is ‘aware of acts of violence committed by demonstrators’ is a minor point beside the violence of the armed gangs. The substantial body of evidence of their crimes surely needed to be considered if the human rights of all Syrians and not just those who have died at the hands of state security forces are to be taken into account.
In short, this report does not even meet its own ‘lower standard of proof’. In fact, and this seems to be the only fact insofar as this report is concerned, there is little proof of anything. The commission perhaps needed to be reminded that the ‘defectors’ and the Syrian National Council do not represent the Syrian people. Bashar al Assad’s personal popularity plays out well for his government amongst a normally skeptical people. His face has been the focal point of demonstrations of support by millions of people in recent months. If anything, sanctions imposed by the US, the EU, the Arab League and Turkey, along with the constant threat of force, seem to have strengthened public support for Bashar and his government. The commission certainly would have had no difficulty in finding Syrians prepared to come to Geneva to tell another side of the story. Apparently there was no room for them and no interest in what they had to say.
We have just seen what has been done to Libya in the name of human rights and the ‘responsibility to protect’. Uncounted thousands of Libyans were killed in eight months of bombing and missile attacks by French, British and American warplanes. There is prima facie evidence that war crimes were committed but there is not even the suggestion that someone will be held accountable. Further back stands Iraq, invaded in 1991 and then subjected to a decade of sanctions which ended the lives of about one million Iraqis, including hundreds of thousands of children. The second war launched in 2003 brought the overall civilian death toll since 1991 to somewhere between 1.5 and two million Iraqis. Again, prime facie evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity without any of the perpetrators being punished. The kind of lies told before the attacks of 1991 (babies being thrown out of their incubators in Kuwait) and 2003 (weapons of mass destruction) were duplicated in the propaganda war which preceded the aerial assault on Libya this year (mass killing and Viagra-fueled rape).
To their eternal shame, the Arab League and governments which sell themselves on their Muslim credentials took part in or came in behind this war on a Muslim country by three non-Muslim governments. Now a third Arab country is being laid out on the chopping board, not in North Africa but at the very heart of the Middle East. The US, France, Britain and their Arab allies can sense that a momentous victory is at hand and they are pushing as hard as they can, using every weapon at their disposal. At the end of the road lies the possibility of armed intervention through the declaration of a ‘no fly’ zone and a cross-border operation to establish a ‘buffer zone’ or what the French Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, prefers to call a ‘humanitarian corridor’. These are propaganda phrases, of course. What the advocates of intervention are talking about is war and everything it entails – widespread destruction and the death of thousands of people.
Reconstructed Syria’s future is already being written. A leading figure in the Syrian National Council, Burhan Ghaliun, has said that a new government would break relations with Iran and would overturn the present strategic relationship with Hizbullah. The connections of other members of this council with the Gulf States, the US State Department and Israel’s lobbyists in Washington are further evidence of how Syria is to be remolded if the present government can be brought down. Short of the toppling of the Islamic government in Iran, it would be hard to think of a greater triumph for ‘the West’ and its reactionary allies across the Middle East, not to mention the benefits for Israel. Are those Arabs joining the chorus against the Syrian government in the name of human rights even thinking about this?
~
Jeremy Salt teaches the history of the modern Middle East in the Department of Political science, Bilkent University, Ankara. He previously taught at Bogazici (Bosporus) University in Istanbul and the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press, 2008).
December 4, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel |
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A matrix of closely tied university-based strategic studies ventures, the so-called Grand Strategy Programs (GSP), have cropped up on a number of elite campuses around the country, where they function to serve the national security warfare state.
In tandem with allied institutes and think tanks across the country, these programs, centered at Yale University, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University, Temple University and, until recently, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, illustrate the increasingly influential role of a new breed of warrior academics in the post-9/11 United States. The network marks the ascent and influence of what might be called the “Long War University.”
Ostensibly created to train an up-and-coming elite to see a global “big picture,” this grand strategy network has brought together scores of foreign policy wonks heavily invested – literally and figuratively – in an unending quest to maintain US global supremacy, a campaign which they increasingly refer to as the Long War.
He Who Pays the Piper …
The network of grand strategy programs integral to the Long War University came about through the financial backing of Roger Hertog, the multimillionaire financial manager, man of the right and a key patron of the contemporary conservative movement. Hertog is a chairman emeritus of the conservative social policy think tank the Manhattan Institute, and a board member of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and the Club for Growth.
Hertog additionally served on the executive committee of the influential, neoconservative and pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and has been a major financial contributor to Taglit-Birthright Israel.
Respected in various circles as a patron of the arts and culture, of libraries and archives, Hertog was awarded a National Humanities Medal by then-president George W. Bush in November 2007. The ceremonial citation praised him as one, “[whose] wisdom and generosity have rejuvenated institutions that are keepers of American memory.”
More recently, Hertog introduced Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker at a Manhattan Institute conference on “A New Social Contract: Reforming the Terms of Public Employment in America.” Embracing the controversial Republican state executive, Hertog praised him as a figure that would someday be looked upon as someone who “helped save the country.”
As a man in the business of shaping intellectual environments, Hertog has been described as the “the epitome of the conservative benefactor who bases his politics on conservative intellectualism and moves patiently and strategically to create, support and distribute his ideas.” Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, said of his longtime friend that, “Roger thinks of philanthropic endeavors as investments. The return he expects is long range.”
Hertog has been a staunch advocate of a conservative, results-based “new philanthropy” – the replacement of open-ended funding for endowed university chairs with money for selected projects, made available on a two- or three-year basis. He makes little distinction between the nonprofit and for-profit ventures that he funds, and has spoken of “retail” and “strategic philanthropy” as “leverage” to transform American universities.
The Long War Men at Yale
The Grand Strategy network originally started at Yale University, alma mater for a long line of US strategic planners and intelligence operatives.
Its founders were the influential conservative “dean of cold war historians,” John Lewis Gaddis, global historian Paul Kennedy and “diplomat-in-residence”
Charles Hill, the former State Department careerist forced into retirement for concealing the role of his boss, then-secretary of state George Schultz, during the Reagan-era Iran-contra scandal.
Yale’s GSP became the centerpiece of International Securities Studies (ISS), “a center for teaching and research in grand strategy,” founded in 1988. Kennedy was the ISS’s first director. It was initially funded, in the main, by the John M. Olin and Smith Richardson Foundations, two major financial backers of numerous conservative and right-wing public and foreign policy causes.
The plans for the Yale GSP evolved out of a series of discussions between Kennedy, Hill, Gaddis and others, including the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, in early 1999. Central to their thinking, according to Gaddis, was their shared concern “to deliberately … train the next generation of world leaders.”
According to Gaddis, the original ideas shaping the program’s curriculum were drawn from the efforts of an earlier generation of strategic planners, such as Henry Kissinger, and stemmed from his experience as a mid-1970s faculty member at the US Naval War College.
The New Haven program became known as the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy in 2007, in recognition of a $17.5 million, 15-year endowment.
The first, Nicholas Brady, had been US secretary of the Treasury under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and was a former director of the Mitre Corporation, the privately contracted manager of federally funded research and development projects for the Department of Defense (DoD) and other agencies.
The other benefactor, Brady’s billionaire business associate, Charles B. Johnson, is a part-owner of the San Francisco Giants and an “overseer” of the conservative Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, among other things.
Both Brady and Johnson sit on the board of directors of Darby Private Equity alongside Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s philanthropist and venture capitalist Sheldon Lubar, member of the board of directors of the University of Wisconsin Foundation and supporter of what had been the University of Wisconsin Madison’s GSP.
Increasingly well-endowed over time, the Yale GSP continued to acquire new associates, among them an additional “diplomat-at-large,” John Negroponte, the former national security adviser, US envoy to the United Nations (UN) and controversial US ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s contra war against Nicaragua.
While the identities of those associated with the Yale program certainly speak volumes, the actual program these people devised is far more revealing, especially since it provided the prototype for future efforts elsewhere.
Aspiring Grand Strategy students are required to write application essays, and the cross-discipline pool of graduate students and undergraduates is carefully vetted. The year-long program comprises a focus on “real world practice” and includes the study of “classics” in strategic thinking, from ancient Chinese general and “The Art of War” author Sun Tzu and Greek historian Thucydides to Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz and Kissinger himself.
In addition to their formal studies, students are required to complete summer projects that have included internships at the European Union’s (EU) Institute for Security Studies and the National Security Agency (NSA). Students completing the program have gone on to careers with the US Department of State, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the DoD’s subcontracted Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA).
The year-long GSP course concludes with a “crisis simulation” session, in which teams of students prepare “emergency rapid response” scenarios as if preparing for a “real time” meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) and the president. Role-playing the president and other administration officials, the presenters are then grilled by program faculty who critique their work.
The simulations and seminars have included numbers of exclusive “outside guests.” CIA head David Petraeus, at the time general in command of the US military operations in the Middle East, paid an unpublicized visit to the Yale GSP’s students and faculty in March 2010.
Other visitors included the likes of Kissinger and George W. Bush’s hardline ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Observers from the CIA and cadets from West Point also sat in on the seminars.
In February 2009, US Marine Corps officers met with GSP faculty and students. The representatives from the “Combat Development Command and the Corp Commandant’s Strategic Initiatives Group” briefed the Yalies and other invited guests on the Marine’s “Vision and Strategy 2025,” a planning document describing “how the Marine Corps’ role and posture in national defense will change in the future global environment.”
Gaddis, in fact, told Yale Alumni Magazine in 2003 that, ” … We now offer workshops in grand strategy at the war colleges and service academies, recreating a connection with the highest levels of the military … And Washington has taken notice.”
Perhaps most significantly, a core of Gaddis and Kennedy students have gone on to become either directors of Grand Strategy projects and related institutes, or to work as closely connected faculty associates elsewhere.
Such students have included historian Matthew Connelly, head of the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative at Columbia University; William Hitchcock, now at the University of Virginia, who helped create the Grand Strategy Program at Temple University; Mark Lawrence of the University of Texas at Austin; Jeremi Suri, currently at the University of Texas at Austin, who created the now-defunct GSP at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Hal Brands, formerly with the IDA and now the American grand strategy assistant professor of public policy at Duke University.
Grand Strategy’s Launch
In September, 2008, some 20 historians and political scientists from around the country gathered at an unpublicized location, a private club nearby Yale. The participants, carefully chosen by the university’s GSP directors, had been invited to meet with Hertog.
The financial management mogul told those at the Yale meet-up that he was willing to spend as much as $10 million over the coming years to fund scholars interested in inaugurating GSPs at their respective campuses. He requested short, three-page proposals from the professors-on-the-rise detailing how they would use his seed money.
He urged them to think about how to connect their projects with others around the country to leverage their collective impact, and cautioned that he did not necessarily want exact replicas of Yale’s venture. The subsequent GSPs and allied programs evolved with his financial assistance.
Long War at Duke
One of the recipients of Hertog “strategic philanthropy” has been the Program in American Grand Strategy at Duke University, headed by Peter D. Feaver, a significant figure in strategic planning circles and an important player within the Long War University. A political scientist with a Harvard PhD, he also is the director of Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS), the well-established strategic policy consortium with affiliates at Duke, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University.
An expert on the relationship between civil society and the military, Feaver served under the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1994 as director for defense policy and arms control on the NSC. He then worked as special adviser for strategic planning and institutional reform on the NSC staff during the Bush years, from June 2005 to July 2007. Feaver is also an affiliate of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the increasingly influential liberal hawk think tank presided over by the warrior intellectual John Nagl, the former career military man who helped write the influential Counterinsurgency Field Manual under the command of former general Petraeus.
The homepage for the Duke GSP reads, “American grand strategy is the collection of plans and policies by which the leadership of the United States mobilizes and deploys the country’s resources and capabilities, both military and non-military, to achieve its national goals.”
In fulfillment of its mission, Feaver has brought in a number of national security state notables, among them, in September 2010, then-secretary of defense Robert Gates, who gave a public address on the all-volunteer military in an age of the Long War and also taught a session of Feaver’s Grand Strategy class.
The Duke GSP and TISS co-sponsored a talk a year earlier by Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster on “Counterinsurgency and the War in Afghanistan.” McMaster served in both Iraq wars and worked on the team that designed the Iraq “surge,” and, at the time of his talk, directed a key division of the Army’s warfare planning center at Ft. Monroe, Virginia.
Other guests of the Duke GSP have included Gaddis and Kennedy from Yale; Michael Doran, the Roger Hertog senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center; and former Bush administration hawks, Stephen Hadley, John Bolton and Douglas Feith.
The Warriors’ Temple
A Hertog Program In Grand Strategy was launched at Temple University in spring 2009, with the assistance of a three-year, $225,000 grant from the Hertog Foundation arranged through two foreign policy historians, the Yale alumnus Hitchcock and Richard Immerman, current director of the university’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy (CENFAD)
A CENFAD newsletter stated that Temple had been chosen “as a site for replicating Yale University’s ‘Grand Strategy’ course – a yearlong seminar on military strategy taught by Charles Hill, John Lewis Gaddis, and Paul Kennedy … ”
The same article pointed out that Hertog did not believe in making unrestricted gifts to academe, but rather believed in setting benchmarks to ensure the goals he envisioned. It went on to state, “that CENFAD, its associates, and students will expend every effort to meet this challenge to make sure that the Hertog Seminar in Grand Strategy remains at Temple.”
Housed at Temple’s History Department, CENFAD was founded in 1993 and “fosters interdisciplinary faculty and student research on the historic and contemporary use of force and diplomacy in a global context.”
CENFAD is currently directed by Immerman, best known in scholarly circles for his historical writing on the CIA. Immerman served from 2007 to 2008 as assistant deputy director of national intelligence, analytic integrity and standards, and analytic ombudsman at the office of the director of national intelligence, an oversight position created to ensure the standards and accuracy of national intelligence documents.
Columbia University’s Long War
Columbia University’s variant of the Hertog-funded strategic studies program, the aforementioned Hertog Global Strategy Initiative had its start in 2010 under the direction of the Yale alumnus and former Gaddis student, the historian Connelly.
Varying from the GSPs elsewhere, Columbia’s is a summer program only. The first year’s session, in 2010, focused on “Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of World Power” and was co-taught by Connelly and University of Texas at Austin’s Francis Gavin. The summer 2011 session focused on “The History and Future Pandemic Threats and Global Public Health.” The projected session for summer 2012 will focus on “Religious Violence and Apocalyptic Movements.”
In many ways, the program clearly resembles that developed by Gaddis at Yale. Students spend the first three weeks of the summer in “total immersion,” training in the methods of international history. Eight weeks are then spent conducting independent and team projects, followed by a final week where the students present their research, develop future scenarios and participate in a crisis simulation exercise
Visitors to Columbia’s GSP have included the likes of Kissinger, former Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg (also the former dean of the University of Texas-Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, under whose auspices sits the Robert S. Strauss Center of International Security and Law), and Philip Zelikow, a senior foreign policy official in the Bush administration and former director of the 9/11 Commission.
For their final week’s simulation exercise in summer 2010, seminar students were led by Dr. Betty Sue Flowers, a leading expert in “future forecasting” and the guiding force behind Shell Oil’s Global Scenarios, a much emulated standard for corporate and government scenario projects including the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends Reports.
The Longhorn Long Warriors
In May 2010, Suri, the man behind the now-defunct GSP at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, announced that he was taking a job offer for a joint appointment at the University of Texas-Austin, including a position at the prestigious Strauss Center. A brief survey of the roster there suggests that Suri’s move to Austin was the perfect decision for Madison’s former wunderkind and “rising star.”
The Center has been home for two other Long War intellectuals with high-level national security state ties. One is Philip Bobbitt, concurrently with the Roger Hertog Program on Law and National Security at the Columbia University Law School and a senior fellow at the Strauss Center. The other is Bobby Ray Inman, who recently became the head of the board of directors of Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater USA), the transnational private military and security firm. He formerly served two terms as dean of the aforementioned home of the Strauss Center, the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
Bobbitt, once described by Henry Kissinger as “the outstanding political philosopher of our time,” and by London’s Independent as the “president’s brain,” formerly served as the counselor for international law at the State Department during the George H. W. Bush administration, and at the NSC, where he was director for intelligence programs. He also was senior director for critical infrastructure and senior director for strategic planning under President Bill Clinton.
Inman wore multiple hats before joining Xe’s board. He was a member of the board of directors of the infamous coal company Massey Energy; deputy director of the CIA; director of the NSA; director of naval intelligence; vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency; and former director of Wackenhut Corporation, another transnational security firm and mercenary contractor. He had also been slated to become President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense before withdrawing his name from nomination in 1994.
In 2006, the Strauss Center served as a key backer, along with Columbia University’s American Assembly program, for “The Next Generation Project on US Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions,” a multi-year national effort to solicit new ideas from a geographically diverse range of strategic thinkers outside the traditional East Coast corridors of power.
Directed by Gavin, another important figure in Long War University circles, the project issued a 2010 report on “US Global Policy: Challenges to Building a 21st Century Grand Strategy.” The report was sponsored by the Strauss Center and CNAS.
Long War University Homecoming
In August, 2010 key members of the Long War grand strategist fraternity gathered for a”Workshop on the Teaching of Grand Strategy” at the Naval War College (NWC) at Newport, Rhode Island. It was only logical that they meet there rather than at some university.
The NWC, with its long history of strategic planning dating back to an earlier age of global naval power, had earlier developed the curriculum that became the model for the grand strategies discipline employed at Yale and subsequently elsewhere. For some attendees, such as Gaddis, who spent part of his early teaching career there, the summer return to Newport must have seemed like a homecoming.
The conclave was designed to bring together “some of the nation’s most influential thinkers to explore how they design courses on grand strategy.” The meet-up’s list of attendees read like an abbreviated “who’s who” of warrior academics and national security state intellectuals.
Those in attendance included Gaddis, Hill and Kennedy, as well as their Yale disciples, Columbia’s Connelly, Duke’s Hal Brands, and then-UW-Madison’s Suri.
Among the others were Middle East expert Michael Doran, a Roger Hertog senior fellow at the Saban Center, former deputy assistant secretary of defense under George W. Bush and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Also present was Peter Mansoor, the current chair of military history at Ohio State University and a former Army colonel who served as an assistant to then- general Petraeus while he was commander of the US occupation forces in Iraq. Also in the mix was Aaron Friedberg, who served as national security adviser to then-vice president Dick Cheney, and Georgetown’s Robert J. Lieber, member of the ultraconservative Committee on the Present Danger.
A follow-up thank-you email from the NWC’s lead organizer spoke of his “hope that we will stay connected and assist each other in our common enterprise.” The same note addressed to the workshop’s participants contained an e-mail address likely belonging to Lewis “Scooter” Libby, senior vice president of the Hudson Institute and a past frequent volunteer at the NWC. As Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, Libby was convicted in connection with the federal investigation into the “PlameGate” affair.
The NWC conclave might best be described as an imperial war hawk’s “how-to” teach-in. Geared to instruction on how to teach grand strategy to military men, government officials and university students, its sessions included “‘Great Books’ on Strategy,” “Economics and Grand Strategy,” “Strategic Leadership,” which explored “the relationship of political and military leadership in strategic decision making” and “Great Power Wars,” which discussed how to teach “the strategic significance of the commons – maritime, aerospace, and information.”
The closing session looked at “how to stay connected with each other,” the “sharing of information about courses,” “ways to promote cooperation and break down barriers,” and “how to promote courses in the professional military and the universities.”
The Long War on Campus
The so-called “Grand Strategy Programs” represent but one small component of a proliferating Long War University complex. The number of university programs connected to the national security state, the imperial foreign policy establishment and military planners is vast; so, too, are the numbers of campus-based think tanks and related institutes – well funded by foundations, individual “philanthropy” or federal spending – in service to empire.
“Grand strategy” is little more than imperial doctrine, a “soft” public relations term for strategic studies, a growing academic discipline with origins in the war ministries of an earlier era’s imperial powers.
US warfare doctrine in the post-9/11 era has returned to a focus on counterinsurgency, or COIN, on fighting limited “asymmetric” wars against unconventional enemies defined as “terrorists” or insurgents. Not just low- intensity combat, but an increasingly sophisticated spectrum of intervention – of “nation building” and the “reconstruction” of other societies – is now included in COIN doctrine.
That more robust notion of COIN has come to occupy a central place in the thinking of those semi-warrior intellectuals informing one another and an upcoming generation of their students. Sharing a broad consensus on America’s role in the world and imbued with a sense of American “exceptionalism,” the Long War intellectuals at the national warfare state universities have joined in preparation for permanent war.
Because some of the primary source material gathered for this two-part series was obtained via the Wisconsin Open Records Law, the materials are available upon request.
November 30, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Ivy League, Roger Hertog, Steve Horn, Yale, Yale University |
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Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague says London is withdrawing its diplomatic staff from Iran and that the Iranian Embassy in London will be closed.
Addressing the UK parliament on Wednesday following the student protest outside the UK Embassy in Tehran, Hague said the Iranian Embassy in London will be immediately closed and its diplomatic mission will be expelled from Britain.
Hague added that British diplomatic staff in Tehran have been evacuated, the state-run BBC reported.
Hundreds of Iranian students staged a protest rally outside the UK Embassy in Tehran on Tuesday, pulling down the UK flag and demanding the expulsion of the British envoy.
Protesters also staged another gathering outside a second British diplomatic compound in northern Tehran.
Deputy Commander of the Iranian police Brigadier General Ahmad-Reza Radan told Britain’s Ambassador to Tehran Dominick John Chilcott earlier on Wednesday that a number of the individuals who entered the embassy compound on Tuesday were arrested. He added that some of the other persons of interest have been identified and will be apprehended.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry expressed regret in a statement on Tuesday over the “unacceptable actions” of a number of protesters during the demonstration in front of the embassy.
November 30, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Wars for Israel |
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The lead story in yesterday’s New York Times was titled “U.S. Urges Egypt to let Civilians Govern Quickly” and was about a new stance by the Obama administration pressuring Tantawi and the SCAF to get out of the way of the Egyptian people.
Well nine times in that piece, reporter Helene Cooper states what the American government cares about most, the treaty with Israel. In fact, the last word in the article is Israel.
Here are the nine references, starting with the second paragraph:
the Egyptian military which, perhaps more than any other entity in the region, has for 30 years served as the bulwark protecting a critical American concern in the Middle East: the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel….
the beginning of a shift in how the United States deals with a fast-changing Arab region and tries to preserve the Egypt-Israel peace accord.
…— the Islamists — who might not be as wedded to the peace treaty as the military,” Mr. Indyk said. [Martin Indyk, Israel supporter, former ambassador]
The Obama administration appears now to be openly hedging its bets, trying to position the United States in such a way that regardless of who comes out on top — the army or the protesters — it will still maintain some credibility, and ability, to influence the government and ensure a level of stability in Egypt, and to continue to uphold the Egyptian-Israeli peace deal, which the United States views as central to stability in the region as a whole….
For more than 30 years, the United States has viewed the Egyptian military as the safeguard of the Camp David peace accord that was signed by Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1979. When President Obama broke with Mr. Mubarak this year, administration officials at the same time sought assurances that the Egyptian military would guide the transition to democracy and continue to uphold the treaty.
Since then, Egyptian democracy advocates and the country’s opposing political parties, including the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, have mostly indicated that they, too, would continue to uphold the treaty, albeit with some possible modifications, like the number of troops in the Sinai.
But there remains uncertainty over whether a new civilian Egyptian government will be as wedded to the treaty as the Egyptian military has been, which is why the administration has trod so carefully in Egypt. ..
Of all of the countries undergoing tumult in the Middle East this year, there is none more central to American interests than Egypt. …
Egypt is different. “In terms of the weight of any single country, Egypt outweighs them all,” said Rob Malley, program director for the Middle East and North Africa with the International Crisis Group. “The reason why is because of its size, its population, the historical role its played in influencing Arab public opinion, and, of course, from the U.S. point of view, because of its peace agreement with Israel.”
It makes me wonder, is the self-determination of the 85 million Egyptian people less important than the maintenance of a Jewish-majority state and Jewish government in Israel. Yes. Were decades of Egyptian dictatorship worth it to preserve Israel? I guess so. Is this really the relationship we want with the Arab world?
And no I don’t like instability. I want peaceful transition. But what if the Egyptian people hate the Gaza siege and hate the occupation? What if they want to isolate Israel further? These could be good things. They could hasten freedom in Palestine, whose oppression afflicts the world.
November 28, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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When the Occupy Wall Street protests began to attract attention in the fall, everyone wanted to know where the idea to set up a permanent protest at the heart of Manhattan’s financial district came from. The answer was the mind of Kalle Lasn, the co-editor (along with Micah White) of the anti-consumerist “culture jamming” magazine Adbusters. It was Adbusters, calling for an American “Tahrir moment,” that originally put out the call to occupy Wall Street on September 17.
But not all the attention Lasn and his magazine received was positive, though. It was the New York Times coverage of Adbusters and Lasn’s role in the Occupy movement that caused him the most grief by smearing them as anti-Semitic.
“For me, the New York Times is really important right now, because it was one of the most ugly experiences of my year, where they took a couple of quick swipes at my magazine and me personally,” Lasn told Mondoweiss in a recent phone interview. “I have such huge respect for the New York Times and I subscribe to it and I’ve been reading it every morning for the last ten years of my life.”
Now, Lasn is speaking out about the New York Times‘ refusal to print his response to two articles in the newspaper that alleged Adbusters was anti-Semitic. (Read more about the controversy here, and read this New Yorker article on the origins and future of Occupy Wall Street for more about Lasn and White.)
Mondoweiss recently caught up with Lasn for an extended interview with the sixty-nine year old activist to discuss Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, the Israel lobby and more.
Alex Kane: Tell me about yourself, I’ve read some, but details about your life and what you’re doing at Adbusters.
Kalle Lasn: Well, I don’t think my history’s all that fascinating, but I think the really fascinating thing about Adbusters magazine and what I’m doing right now is this Occupy movement that we helped to spark a couple of months ago and the possibilities for where this movement could—the possibility it could fizzle out, but it could also blossom into this powerful kind of force on the political left that could change not just the way we think about financial speculators and fat cats on Wall Street, but all kinds of arenas as well, including the political and foreign policy arenas. So, yeah, that’s sort of the big thing in my life right now, just thinking about that and trying to infuse our magazine and our website and our tactical briefings with this spirit of this youthful revolt that the Occupy movement represents.
AK: How do you see Adbusters’ role in the Occupy movement?
KL: Well you know, we were the people who were lucky enough to sort of spark the whole thing just at the right moment with some of the posters we came up with and that hashtag Occupy Wall Street [#occupywallstreet], choosing that magical date, September 17th, that seemed to absolutely be the right moment. When a movement is ripe, then all it takes is one spark, and I think that spark did happen on September the 17th, and after that of course, the movement started to have a life of its own, and all we’ve really been doing is churning out our tactical briefings and trying to, to the extent that it’s possible, to sort of have influence on a movement like this, to infuse our Adbusters’ tactical ideas into the movement and trying to keep our finger in the pie, so to speak.
AK: Obviously, Adbusters’ role in this has been distorted, which has led to the charges of anti-Semitism. I know you have the right of reply campaign going on, but what’s your general take?
KL: Let me enlarge the conversation a little bit. I think one of the interesting things about this Occupy movement is that I think it will come back, after hibernating for the winter, it will come back next spring and it will get involved in more than just economics. It will start playing around with politics and possibly launching third political parties and all kinds of political energy will come out of this movement. And one of the arenas that I think it may have some influence on is this—kind of a, what Adbusters long ago started calling the United States of Amnesia—this fact that most of the people in America actually aren’t getting the information that they need to make wise decisions about foreign policy and political matters. I think from my perspective, it seems like American political thinking is being distorted by a number of bubbles, and one of those bubbles is that AIPAC bubble, which is a very powerful, probably the most powerful lobby in America, and it has the power to intimidate politicians and get them to never say anything negative about Israel, and it’s got to the point where even the president of the United States is intimidated by this lobby and forced to do all kinds of things that he wouldn’t normally do.
I think another one of the bubbles is a media bubble, because there’s a special sensitivity to this issue, and the Holocaust, and it’s such an emotionally charged thing, and I think the media is quite often pro-Israeli in a knee-jerk way. For example, when Ehud Barak visited the United States of America last week, he went on the Charlie Rose Show, and with Fareed Zakaria, and he basically blitzed the media, and he left the impression that somehow it would be absolutely perfectly okay for us to attack Iran. Some of the other ways of looking at it—like this idea that Israel also has nukes, and that maybe a smarter strategy would be to fight for a nuclear-free Middle East rather than bomb the hell out of Iran, and some of the historical nuances about American CIA involvement back there a long time ago that started this unholy business that has been unfolding these past 30, 40, 50 years—those things were completely missing from the media. And then even newspapers like the New York Times, which is one of the great newspapers of the world, has Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner, a couple of their main people who write about the Middle East and Israeli/Palestine matters, and these two people are so obviously biased in favor of Israel, that it’s really disheartening to see the New York Times not mixing it up a little bit more and allowing more of a Palestinian perspective into what they write.
And David Brooks had a quick swipe at Adbusters, and then Joseph Berger took an even more vicious anti-Semitic swipe at Adbusters, and when we wrote them back a letter demanding a right of reply, they wouldn’t even print it, because we weren’t just talking about Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner and David Brooks, but we actually pointed out in our letter that the New York Times has got an anti-Palestinian bias to it, and they didn’t want to run that letter, I don’t know why. I hope you can phone them up and ask them. I did send an envelope to everybody at the New York Times giving them this back and forth e-mail exchange that I had fighting for my right of reply.
So there’s an AIPAC bubble, there’s a media bubble, but I think one of the even more powerful bubbles that exists in America in addition, is what I call the neocon bubble, and this is a very powerful, quite often very highly pro-Israeli bunch of intellectuals who have sort of been keeping all of us on our toes and they were instrumental in pushing a lot of policies, very heavily pro-Israeli policies, they were instrumental in pushing for the Iraq War and now they’re also instrumental in pushing for an attack on Iran. We have three big bubbles in America, and this is what we here at Adbusters have been kind of fighting against for the last 15 years.
AK: Right. It’s interesting, because what connects all those bubbles, really, is a devotion to Israel. But the article that David Brooks and Commentary criticized Adbusters for was pointing out the very simple fact that many neoconservatives are Jewish, and it’s a sensitive subject for many reasons obviously. But what are your thoughts on how all these questions relate to Jewish privilege and influence in the United States?
KL: Well, I’m not quite sure what you’re asking here, I mean, as I pointed out in my right of reply letter, David Brooks wrote an article last year where he pointed out that x percent of Pulitzer Prize winners were Jewish, and he had sort of a litany of a half-dozen percentages that all pointed out how intellectually powerful and creative the Jewish people are. And in my right of reply letter, I wanted to ask David Brooks, well, if he can quote those percentages, then why can’t Adbusters point out that a percentage of the neocons are also Jewish?
But for me, I think the really big point is, that article we wrote—that was written seven years ago. It was a half-page article in a copy of Adbusters seven years ago, and it has caused us a lot of grief—grief because we were attacked for being anti-Semitic, because if you start defending yourself against anti-Semitism, I found, then it’s a losing proposition. It’s like defending yourself against rabies; it’s like defending yourself against smallpox. The more you defend yourself, the more excited you get about defending yourself against it, the more people think, well this is suspicious, maybe the guy does have rabies, maybe the guy does have smallpox, maybe he is anti-Semitic.
So defending yourself against anti-Semitism is really a game, and I played that game for the first few months, and years after that article came out, I always lost. So I’ve decided I’m not going to play that game anymore. I would like to now go on the offensive, and I would like to talk about AIPAC, and I’d like to talk about the New York Times and Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner and David Brooks, and I’d like to, above all, start popping these three bubbles. The people who feel that American foreign policy has been distorted by the neocons, by the media and by AIPAC, it’s time for us to stop arguing about it and start going on the offensive. Stop defending yourself and go on the offensive right now and start popping those three bubbles. And I’m hoping that a lot of people of like mind from this Occupy movement will move into this area, and we will be as aggressive as AIPAC, as aggressive as some of these neocons have been, and fighting back against them. What I’m saying is, we need a hashtag, #occupytheneocons, we need a hashtag, #occupyAIPAC.
AK: You said the charges of anti-Semitism caused you at Adbusters a lot of grief. Was this personal grief, was this professional grief? Obviously, the charge of anti-Semitism can be a powerful one, and it can be career wrecking for some people.
KL: Oh yeah, it has ruined a lot of careers. And it’s damaged many of them. I really sympathize with people like Norman Finkelstein and even President Carter, who dare to use words like apartheid, or who dare to speak back against these neocons, and suddenly found themselves vilified, they found themselves pilloried in the media, and so it is a very, very dangerous thing to stand up and speak the way that Adbusters and many other people have done, because it can be career destroying, for a politician it could mean you’re not going to get elected next time around, and it’s for a lot of people, it’s just like a lose-lose proposition. It takes a lot of courage, and I hope that from now on the political left will have more of that courage, because why we’ve been losing these political battles for so long, and why American foreign policy has been so distorted by the dual-loyalties of many neocons. It’s because we’re always on the defensive, we’re scared to go on the offensive and we’re scared to actually expose one by one these neocons and actually point out where their loyalties lie and so on. And we’re scared to really rabidly go after AIPAC because it’s such a huge, big opponent that can do us in. So yes, I think we need more courage on the political left.
AK: You live in Canada, correct?
KL: Yes.
AK: And you know, Palestine, when it comes up in the Occupy movement, in New York at least, there’s been some controversy about it—kind of the old dividing line in left and anti-war movements. Where you live—I know Canada has become extremely right-wing in its support for Israel—but is the discourse the same where you live, or is it different?
KL: I think it’s very similar. Especially right now, we have a prime minister who is very right-wing and the discourse is very, very similar, I think it’s kind of a North American discourse, and I don’t think there’s a huge different between the Canadian discourse and the U.S. discourse. It’s just very, very similar, and the situation here is the same. Like for example, when we published an article that Canadian Jewish groups here found disturbing or offensive, then they were instrumental in convincing the biggest magazine distributor in Canada to pull 3,000 issues of Adbusters and not to allow Adbusters to distribute our magazine in their hundreds of stores around Canada. So this is the sort of power they have and this is the grief that they can cause for people. Quite apart from some people getting offended and canceling their subscription, which is just par for the course when you run a magazine, but the Jewish lobby, the pro-Israeli lobby in Canada and the U.S., has this power to really make magazines like us pay a price for speaking back.
AK: What do you make of the fact that there has been controversy, at least some and obviously Palestine doesn’t play a big part in the Occupy movement, but the fact that there has been at least some online controversy about Palestine in the Occupy movement. What does that say to you?
KL: Oh, I haven’t thought too much about that, I don’t really think about stuff like that. I mean, for me, it’s a more simple kind of situation, I don’t really bother with smaller skirmishes. I mean, for me, it’s about Israel behaving badly, and it’s about the Palestinian freedom fight, which I really believe in. I believe that the Palestinian freedom fight is one of the great freedom fights of our time, and I want to support it in any way that I can.
AK: And you were saying before, as the Occupy movement expands, you want and you think and you’re interested in seeing whether the Occupy movements take on U.S. foreign policy. Can you talk more about that?
KL: You know, well, I think that the political left has been whining and complaining and being kind of useless, in the sense that the Berlin Wall fell back in 1989, and we basically have been very ineffectual. And here at Adbusters we have been saying for a long, long time that we have to jump over the dead body of the old left, and we’ve been trying to do that but now with this Occupy movement I think it is finally possible to jump over the dead body of the old left, and for some of these Young Turks who are coming out of the Occupy movement, for us to start having our own powerful, kind of a, intellectual group of people that can stand up to the neocons, and can infuse the American media with different perspectives than what we’re getting right now and we can sort of engage with AIPAC in a way where they don’t always win. So I think that many of the occupiers will not agree with me that the Palestinian freedom fight is one of the great freedom fights of all time and they should be supported, I mean they will have their own perspective, but I think, and do feel, that now that it’s kind of “cool” to be left again, there will be some powerful lefty political discourse starting to come out of this movement. And I think it has the power to start popping some of these bubbles that I’ve been talking about and giving the people of America more information to make wise decisions about whether we should support an attack on Iran, or whether we should cut off the money supply to the Palestinians, or whether we should allow Netanyahu to build more settlements, and stuff like that.
AK: I know you said your personal background wasn’t pertinent, but I was reading that you were born in Estonia. Is that correct?
KL: That’s correct. If you’re looking for some sort of, bit of a hint from my history for where I’m coming from, is that, yeah, I was born in Estonia and when the Russians came in my family caught the last [way] out and spent the next five years in various displaced persons’ camps in Europe and Germany, and I remember the first few years of my life were full of emotional, political discourse. I went to sleep every night listening to the adults argue about the Nazis and the Russians and so I’m a highly politicized human being right from the start. And I’ve always believed in, I’ve always taken the side of, I hate bullies. I hate bullies and I love freedom fights.
AK: How has that experience shaped your politics on Israel/Palestine?
KL: Yeah. When I see Israel acting so arrogant and so tough—here’s one of the most powerful military forces in the world, they have nukes—and when I see them cordoning off Gaza the way they do and when they attack Gaza the way they did, it just fills me with rage because this is a powerful bully that is basically turning Gaza into kind of a turkey shoot. I really see it in this kind of very visceral way, like how could they possibly get away with doing this? For me, it’s almost a very black and white battle where, let’s stop arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong, let’s just take sides and start fighting for the human rights and the other rights that the Palestinians should have, and let’s not allow the bully to always win. I mean, it’s time to stop the bully.
November 28, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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Yesterday I did a shocked post about the fact that Ed Rendell, the telegenic former governor of Pennsylvania, a favorite of Chris Matthews and MSNBC, did a fundraiser for the Israeli army in Philadelphia, at which he said it was the obligation of American Jews to support Israel thru thick and thin. Help!
Well, my wife and I have a houseguest from Philly for Thanksgiving, and he shocked me a little bit more by telling me about David Cohen.
Cohen is Rendell’s longtime political guru, his David Axelrod. Cohen is executive vice president of Comcast, the company that bought NBC and MSNBC in 2009.
Not surprisingly, David Cohen is close to Barack Obama. A few months ago, he raised $1.2 million for Obama in a heartbeat, at his Philadelphia home.
Later in the evening, Comcast’s executive vice president, David L. Cohen, hosted about 120 people in his home for a dinner, each of the attendees giving at least $10,000 for Obama’s reelection campaign.
Like Ed Rendell, Cohen is pro-Israel. He is the former vice chair of the Jewish Federations in Philadelphia, a pro-Israel organization. Cohen was said by a Philadelphia Jewish publication to be “genetically hard-wired” to serve that role:
He believes that there is historic precedent for Jews “rallying to Federation” during times of crisis. “Whenever Israel’s physical security is threatened, people turn to Federation to provide support,” he says, adding “we must ignite this same Jewish passion to meet local needs addressed by Federation and its partner agencies.”
As the owner of NBC, Cohen sits at the right hand of his old friend, and Rendell’s old friend, Brian Roberts. Roberts’s father Ralph started Comcast, and Brian is today chairman of Comcast.
Big surprise– Brian Roberts is also very close to the president. Last summer Barack Obama visited Brian Roberts’s house on Martha’s Vineyard. The media industrial complex!
Is Roberts also pro-Israel? I don’t know, but I suspect he is; he participated in several Israeli athletic events in the 80s and 90s according to Wikipedia: the Maccabiah games, the Jewish Olympics. And he received an award from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
What is the Israel lobby? It is the force inside our discourse that defends the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel, forever. Are all Jews part of the Israel lobby? Of course not. There is growing diversity inside the Jewish community, bucking the commandment, Thou must support Israel. But Ed Rendell is certainly part of the lobby, witness his participation in that Israeli army fundraiser. And I think Cohen is part of it, too, given his former role at the Federations. I don’t know about Roberts. But I wonder how he’d feel about, say, Palestinian solidarity types speaking on his network.
Guess what? About four months after Comcast bought NBC, Chris Matthews visited Israel. A year later he was back, and talking up Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat.
Call me cynical, but this proves the old adage, Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns one. And it explains why Chris Matthews keeps his mouth shut on Israel/Palestine. Matthews is from Philadelphia. His brother lives in Chestnut Hill, not far from Brian Roberts and David Cohen. And Chris Matthews is a shrewdy, as my grandmother used to say.
Walter Russell Mead silenced Glenn Loury at bloggingheads the other day by saying it’s anti-semitic to speak about the Jewish presence in the media, and the Jewish presence in the Israel lobby. I would counter that while these issues are uncomfortable, responsible intellectuals simply cannot avoid them if they want to make sense of our society and our foreign policy. Brian Roberts and David Cohen are two of the most powerful figures in our media, they are both Jewish, and one of them has inhaled the pro-Israel religion, as has his dear friend, Ed Rendell, who is on their network all the time. Imagine for one minute if Catholics played this role in a media organization, and it was by and large against abortion. Would liberals be afraid to talk about religious identity and ideology? Of course not.
November 27, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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It’s interesting that the Third Man at the centre of a growing scandal involving a plot to attack Iran and the man who appointed him to be Britain’s first Jewish ambassador to Israel share a somewhat similar background. In a profile of Matthew Gould entitled “New envoy’s a passionate horse-loving Zionist,” the Jewish Telegraph quotes the ambassador:
“My dad’s parents came from Poland in the 1910s and 1920s and met in Birmingham. My grandfather actually took part in the Battle of Cable Street in east London, something I am really proud of. The family’s original name was Goldkorn, but my dad, Sid, changed it when he went to read maths at university.”
In a Mail Online article from August 4, 2007 entitled “Putin aide: ‘Miliband’s hatred for Russia runs in family’” we learn
“The [Russian] newspaper said that in the Twenties the Foreign Secretary’s grandfather, Samuel, then Shimon, Miliband, a native of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, had fought under the command of Trotsky ‘eliminating’ white Russians opposed to Communism.”
Is it possible that Shimon Miliband and Matthew Gould’s grandfather knew each other from radical Jewish circles in early 20th century Poland? More importantly, what influence might their common ideological heritage have played in David Miliband’s decision to send Gould as Britain’s supposed “Man in Tel Aviv.”
November 27, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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A Turkish newspaper has unveiled that French military forces are training armed Syrian rebels to fight the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
According to Milliyet, as cited by IRNA, France has sent its military training forces to Turkey and Lebanon to coach the so-called Free Syrian Army — a group of defectors operating out of Turkey and Lebanon — in an effort to wage war against Syria’s military.
The report added that the French, British, and Turkish authorities “have reached an agreement to send arms into Syria.”
The Turkish daily said that the three have informed the US about training and arming the Syrian opposition.
According to Milliyet, a group of armed rebels are currently stationed in Turkey’s Hatay Province near the border with Syria.
The report comes as an earlier report had revealed that the British and French intelligence agencies have reportedly tasked their agents with contacting Syrian dissidents based in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli in order to help fuel unrest in Syria.
Reports also said that French intelligence agents have been sent to northern Lebanon and Turkey to build the first contingents of the Free Syrian Army out of the deserters who have fled Syria.
Syria has been experiencing unrest since mid-March, with demonstrations being held both against and in support of President Assad.
Damascus says the unrest has been largely incited by elements that are well-paid and armed by foreign powers. Hundreds of people, including members of the security forces, have been killed in the turmoil.
The opposition and Western countries accuse Syrian security forces of being behind the killings in the country, but the government blames what it describes as outlaws, saboteurs and armed terrorist groups for the deadly violence, stressing that the unrest is being orchestrated from abroad.
November 26, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Wars for Israel |
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There is a huge government cover-up in progress over the Werritty connection to Mossad and the role of British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould, and their neo-con plan to start a war with Iran.
Yesterday at 22.15pm I submitted by email a Freedom of Information request for:
All communications in either direction ever made between Matthew Gould and Adam Werritty, specifically including communications made outside government systems.
At 23.31pm I was astonished to get a reply from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The request was refused as it was
“likely to exceed the cost limit”.
Now it is plainly nonsense that to gather correspondence between two named individuals would be too expensive. They could just ask Gould.
And a reply at nearly midnight? The Freedom of Information team in the FCO is not a 24 hour unit. Plainly not only are they hiding the Gould/Werritty correspondence, they are primed and on alert for this cover-up operation.
Even more blatant was the obstruction of MP Paul Flynn, when he attempted to question Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell on the Gould-Werritty connection at the House of Commons Public Administration Committee. These are the minutes: anybody who believes in democracy should feel their blood boil as you read them:
Publc Admininstration Committee 24/11/2011
Q<369> Paul Flynn: Okay. Matthew Gould has been the subject of a very serious complaint from two of my constituents, Pippa Bartolotti and Joyce Giblin. When they were briefly imprisoned in Israel, they met the ambassador, and they strongly believe—it is nothing to do with this case at all—that he was serving the interest of the Israeli Government, and not the interests of two British citizens. This has been the subject of correspondence.
In your report, you suggest that there were two meetings between the ambassador and Werritty and Liam Fox. Questions and letters have proved that, in fact, six such meetings took place. There are a number of issues around this. I do not normally fall for conspiracy theories, but the ambassador has proclaimed himself to be a Zionist and he has previously served in Iran, in the service. Werritty is a self-proclaimed—
Robert Halfon: Point of order, Chairman. What is the point of this?
Paul Flynn:> Let me get to it. Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran.
Chair:> I have to take a point of order.
Robert Halfon:> Mr Flynn is implying that the British ambassador to Israel is working for a foreign power, which is out of order.
Paul Flynn:> I quote the Daily Mail: “Mr Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran and has made several visits. He has also met senior Israeli officials, leading to accusations”—not from me, from the Daily Mail—“that he was close to the country’s secret service, Mossad.” There may be nothing in that, but that appeared in a national newspaper.
Chair:> I am going to rule on a point of order. Mr Flynn has made it clear that there may be nothing in these allegations, but it is important to have put it on the record. Be careful how you phrase questions.
Paul Flynn:> Indeed. The two worst decisions taken by Parliament in my 25 years were the invasion of Iraq—joining Bush’s war in Iraq—and the invasion of Helmand province. We know now that there were things going on in the background while that built up to these mistakes. The charge in this case is that Werritty was the servant of neo-con people in America, who take an aggressive view on Iran. They want to foment a war in Iran in the same way as in the early years, there was another—
Chair:> Order. I must ask you to move to a question that is relevant to the inquiry.
Q<370> Paul Flynn:> Okay. The question is, are you satisfied that you missed out on the extra four meetings that took place, and does this not mean that those meetings should have been investigated because of the nature of Mr Werritty’s interests?
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> I think if you look at some of those meetings, some people are referring to meetings that took place before the election.
Q<371> Paul Flynn:> Indeed, which is even more worrying.
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> I am afraid they were not the subject—what members of the Opposition do is not something that the Cabinet Secretary should look into. It is not relevant.
But these meetings were held—
Chair:> Mr Flynn, would you let him answer please?
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> I really do not think that was within my context, because they were not Ministers of the Government and what they were up to was not something I should get into at all.
Chair:> Final question, Mr Flynn.
Q<372> Paul Flynn:> No, it is not a final question. I am not going to be silenced by you, Chairman; I have important things to raise. I have stayed silent throughout this meeting so far.
You state in the report—on the meeting held between Gould, Fox and Werritty, on 6 February, in Tel Aviv—that there was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis. The UK ambassador was present. Are you following the line taken by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government who says that he can eat with lobbyists or people applying to his Department because, on occasions, he eats privately, and on other occasions he eats ministerially? Are you accepting the idea? It is possibly a source of great national interest—the eating habits of their Secretary of State. It appears that he might well have a number of stomachs, it has been suggested, if he can divide his time this way. It does seem to be a way of getting round the ministerial code, if people can announce that what they are doing is private rather than ministerial.
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> The important point here was that, when the Secretary of State had that meeting, he had an official with him—namely, in this case, the ambassador. That is very important, and I should stress that I would expect our ambassador in Israel to have contact with Mossad. That will be part of his job. It is totally natural, and I do not think that you should infer anything from that about the individual’s biases. That is what ambassadors do. Our ambassador in Pakistan will have exactly the same set of wide contacts.
Q<373> Paul Flynn:> I have good reason, as I said, from constituency matters, to be unhappy about the ambassador. Other criticisms have been made about the ambassador; he is unique in some ways in the role he is performing. There have been suggestions that he is too close to a foreign power.
Robert Halfon:> On a point of order, Chair, this is not about the ambassador to Israel. This is supposed to be about the Werritty affair.
Paul Flynn:> It is absolutely crucial to this report. If neo-cons such as yourself, Robert, are plotting a war in Iran, we should know about it.
Chair:> Order. I think the line of questioning is very involved. I have given you quite a lot of time, Mr Flynn. If you have further inquiries to make of this, they could be pursued in correspondence. May I ask you to ask one final question before we move on?
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> One thing I would stress: we are talking about the ambassador and I think he has a right of reply. Mr Chairman, I know there is an interesting question of words regarding Head of the Civil Service versus Head of the Home Civil Service, but this is the Diplomatic Service, not the Civil Service.
Q<374> Chair:> So he is not in your jurisdiction at all.
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> No.
Q<375> Paul Flynn:> But you are happy that your report is final; it does not need to go the manager it would have gone to originally, and that is the end of the affair. Is that your view?
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> As I said, some issues arose where I wanted to be sure that what the Secretary of State was doing had been discussed with the Foreign Secretary. I felt reassured by what the Foreign Secretary told me.
Q<376> Chair:> I think what Mr Flynn is asking is that your report and the affair raise other issues, but you are saying that that does not fall within the remit of your report and that, indeed, the conduct of an ambassador does not fall within your remit at all.
Sir Gus O’Donnell:> That is absolutely correct.
Paul Flynn:> The charge laid by Lord Turnbull in his evidence with regard to Dr Fox and the ministerial code was his failure to observe collective responsibility, in that case about Sri Lanka. Isn’t the same charge there about our policies to Iran and Israel?
Chair:> We have dealt with that, Mr Flynn.
Paul Flynn:> We haven’t dealt with it as far as it applies—
Chair:> Mr Flynn, we are moving on.
Paul Flynn:> You may well move on, but I remain very unhappy about the fact that you will not allow me to finish the questioning I wanted to give on a matter of great importance.
It is shocking but true that Robert Halfon MP, who disrupted Flynn with repeated points of order, receives funding from precisely the same Israeli sources as Werritty, and in particular from Mr Poju Zabludowicz. He also formerly had a full time paid job as Political Director of the Conservative Friends of Israel.
But despite the evasiveness of O’Donnell and the obstruction of paid zionist puppet Halfon, O’Donnell confirms vital parts of my investigation. In particular he agrees that the Fox-Werritty-Gould “private dinner” in Tel Aviv was with Mossad, and that Gould met Werritty many times more than the twice that O’Donnell listed in his “investigation” into this affair.
Of the six meetings of Fox-Gould-Werritty together which I discovered, five were while Fox was Secretary of State for Defence. Only one was while Fox was in opposition. But O’Donnell has now let the cat much further out of the bag, with the astonishing admission to Paul Flynn’s above questioning that Gould, Fox and Werritty held “meetings that took place before the election.” He also refers to “some of those meetings” as being before the election. Both are plainly in the plural.
It is now evident that not only did Fox, Gould and Werritty have at least five meetings while Fox was in power – with never another British official present – they had several meetings while Fox was shadow Foreign Secretary. O’Donnell is right that what Fox and Werritty were up to in opposition is not his concern. But what Gould was doing with them – a senior official – most definitely is.
A senior British diplomat cannot just hold a series of meetings with the opposition shadow Defence Secretary and a paid zionist lobbyist. What on earth was happening?
The absolutely astonishing cover-up and lack of honesty from the government about the Fox-Gould-Werritty relationship is being maintained with cast-iron resolve. Not only is Gould a self-declared fervent zionist, he was born in the same year as Chancellor George Osborne and attended the same private school – St Paul’s. At least some of the time he was meeting Fox and Werrity while they were in opposition, Gould was Private Secretary to New Labour Foreign Secretary David Milliband. That opens up the question of whether David Milliband, another fervent zionist, was part of the discussions with Mossad and US neo-cons on how to engineer war with Iran, for which Werritty was the conduit.
That would help explain the completeness of the cover-up. The government appears able with total impunity to refuse to answer MPs’ questions on Gould/Fox/Werritty, and they will not respond to Freedom of Information requests. It is now proven without doubt that O’Donnell lied blatantly about the number of Gould-Fox-Werritty meetings, and that Mossad was involved. And yet every single British mainstream media outlet still refuses to mention it.
I know from a mole that the plot involves a plan to attack Iran. For the cover-up to be so blatant and yet so comprehensively maintained, the secret at the heart of this conspiracy must be great, and those complicit must include a very large swathe of the British political and media establishment.
UPDATE: access to this blog is now blocked from FCO and Cabinet Office terminals. Very wise – truth can be contagious.
November 25, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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It is worth going back over the Arab press archive of the past six months. Not to compare what everyone has been saying. But to illustrate that the political and media narrative on Syria has been controlled by three groups.
The first group despises all things Syrian – people, government, and institutions. From the day the protests broke out, its members began talking of the “rolling revolution,” the “long-awaited spring,” and the “death-throes of the regime.” They stressed it was all purely peaceful and in the spirit of national unity. Accounts of armed attacks, or of sectarian discrimination and abuses, were dismissed as fabrications.
This group will forever be writing about Syria being sick – not until the country is cured, but until their own dying days. These are the cheerleaders for foreign intervention. They are uninterested in any solution through dialogue. They don’t want anyone to talk to anyone else. They want chaos, blood, bullets, and fire, and spare no thought for the consequences. These characters are either low-level operatives, receiving pay and perks from intelligence agencies in Europe and America, or work as intellectual rent-a-pen for various sheikhs from the oil monarchies. They do not recognize any Syrian opposition group or figure that does not enjoy the sponsorship of France, the approval of the White House, or the blessing of the House of Saud. They only confer legitimacy on those who declare their willingness to see Syria destroyed to put an end to the regime.
For the second group, all is pure darkness. They refuse to admit that there is any problem with the Syrian regime, or accept that it has any genuine opponents. For them, the protests were merely the product of conspiracies hatched during the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. The poor of Deraa, Idlib, and the Hama countryside, and the local activists of Damascus, Homs, Latakia, Riqqa, and Deir al-Zour, were simply misled youth who didn’t know what was good for the country and had no right to do what they were doing. No right to object to the presidency staying in the same family for 40 years; or the corruption rife in every public and private institution; or security men who live by humiliating and blackmailing people; or the relentless suppression of anyone who speaks out or differs.
This group argued that the regime wants reform, and therefore deserves support. But it never questioned the regime about how, with whom, and when this reform could be brought about. In practice, this group did not oppose the repression unleashed against protesters and citizens. It made no distinction between them and gangsters in the pay of foreign powers intent on destroying the country.
But there is also a third group that can see the difference. They understand that a legitimate struggle has been underway, which compels the regime to begin a transition to an inclusive order (one governed by law rather than connections); which puts on trial those who have spewed corruption for decades; kicks doors and windows open to let out the stifling stench of suppression; closes down the political penitentiaries; enables the people to participate effectively in rebuilding state and society; and stops illegal fortunes being accumulated through fraud, embezzlement and influence-peddling.
Nobody but those engaged in such a struggle can grant or deny it legitimacy. The people in the street can tell who is genuine, just as they can tell who is a crook, opportunist, or foreign agent. Similarly, they can differentiate between the sincere people in the state who want true reform, and the spooks, contortionists, and chameleons.
From day one, this group noted that Syria is unlike any other country, and that Bashar Assad resembles neither Hosni Mubarak, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and Muammar Gaddafi, nor the kings of Bahrain and the House of Saud, the emirs of Qatar or Kuwait, or the sons of Zayed. This group said Syria was different, not only because of its internal dynamics and sectarian, ethnic, and political diversity, but also because of what it represents. For decades, Syria has been the linchpin of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
For the past decade, it has been the hub of the struggle against the new Western colonization of our countries. Since the June 2006 war, it has been the decisive player in an ongoing confrontation with Israel which is approaching a critical phase, whether Israel’s allies want that or not. Most importantly, Syria today is key to the changes anticipated after the unravelling of American plans in the region – with the US forced to withdraw its troops from Iraq, reorganize its entire military presence in the Gulf, and prepare to beat a safe retreat from Afghanistan too. This is a moment when regional rulers allied to the US can sense the approach of payback-time – to their peoples, this time, and not just the American colonizer. And Israel, most of all, can appreciate the implications of a strong and cohesive axis stretching from Iran, via Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, to Palestine.
From day one, this group cautioned the regime and its opponents not to be arrogant, and that all-out confrontation on the streets would mean heading toward civil war. This warning was sounded many times. But the regime’s enemies have taken to trumpeting it, now that it has turned into a threat by the West – which seeks civil war as an alternative to a foreign war on the regime in Damascus.
From day one, this group appealed for ways to be found to bring about a historic reconciliation, which would allow the honest opposition – and a big section of the public throughout the country – to say that the protests have begun producing results. These would include alterations to the structure of the regime, leading to free elections that set in motion a real and determined process of change, unstoppable by either security or corruption. Such a reconciliation would enable the regime to help itself by ditching the problematic part of the legacy with which it was burdened. It could thus preserve the components of strength that Syria has developed over the years, while ushering in a new era of political, economic, and cultural development, thus laying solid foundations for Syria to chart its course, unmoved by American threats or Israeli wars.
Syria’s Arab and Western detractors have suffered a significant setback of late. By marching the Syrian opposition through a minefield, scattering and dismembering it, they have prevented it from developing into a national opposition. They have been hijacked by the West. They can no longer proclaim their commitment to independence. Their conferences, activities and statements are now funded by external parties that seek to forcibly colonize them. This section of the opposition does not go in much for reflection or self-criticism about its role in the 1980s. Rather, they think the time has come for revenge. And they see bloodshed as the only route to achieving their objective – exclusive power, to be attained by wiping out the other.
An attempt is currently being made to plunge Syria into a roving civil war. The chosen means are to inflame sectarian, confessional, and political tensions (while accusing the regime of seeking to raise them); to prohibit any contact, dialogue, or national reconciliation; and to ensure continued bloodshed by all available methods. The aim is to exhaust Syria, to make it easy prey should any external predator opt to move in for the kill.
This endeavour is being led by a collection of governments, states, and groups that have no other goal than getting rid of the regime. They will stop at nothing, whether disabling the state and starving the people, setting every corner of the entire country ablaze, attempting to assassinate the regime’s people, or stoking sectarian and confessional strife by whatever infernal means.
On the other side, the Syrian regime needs to build walls around its country, rather than itself. An historic government initiative is long overdue at this difficult and complicated juncture, to make it possible for the well-intentioned people to be called off the streets, to confound Syria’s external foes, and to isolate their clients inside and outside the country. The fact that the world has come to appreciate the scale of the conspiracy against Syria does not prevent if from seeing the internal problem that exists. The regime should be thinking full-time about how best to launch such an initiative. It will never be too late.
Ibrahim al-Amin is editor-in-chief of al-Akhbar.
November 24, 2011
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Wars for Israel |
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The official inquiry castigating the UK’s former defence secretary Liam Fox for what has come to be known as a “cash-for-access” scandal appears to have only scratched the surface of what Fox and accomplice Adam Werritty may have been up to when they met for dinner in Tel Aviv.
Nazareth – Last February Britain’s then defense minister Liam Fox attended a dinner in Tel Aviv with a group described as senior Israelis. Alongside him sat Adam Werritty, a lobbyist whose “improper relations” with the minister would lead eight months later to Fox’s hurried resignation.
According to several reports in the British media the Israelis in attendance at the dinner were representatives of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, while Fox and Werritty were accompanied by Matthew Gould, Britain’s ambassador to Israel. A former British diplomat has claimed that the topic of discussion that evening was a secret plot to attack Iran.
Little was made of the dinner in the 10-page inquiry report published last month by Gus O’Donnell, the cabinet’s top civil servant. O’Donnell found that Werritty, aged 33 and a long-time friend of Fox’s, had presented himself as the minister’s official adviser, jetted around the world with him and arranged meetings for businessmen with Fox.
The former minister’s allies, seeking to dismiss the gravity of the case against him, have described Werritty as a harmless dreamer. Following his resignation, Fox himself claimed O’Donnell’s report had exonerated him of putting national security at risk.
However, a spate of new concerns raised in the wake of the inquiry challenge both of these assumptions. These include questions about the transparency of the O’Donnell investigation, the extent of Fox and Werritty’s ties to Israel and the unexplained role of Gould.
Craig Murray, Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan until 2004, when he turned whistle blower on British and US collusion on torture, said senior British government officials were profoundly disturbed by the O’Donnell inquiry, seeing it as a “white wash.”
Murray himself accused O’Donnell of being “at the most charitable interpretation, economical with the truth.”
Two well-placed contacts alerted Murray to Gould’s central – though largely ignored – role in the Fox-Werritty relationship, he told al-Akhbar.
Murray said he has pieced together evidence that Fox, Werritty and Gould met on at least six occasions over the past two years or so, despite the O’Donnell inquiry claiming they had met only twice. Gould is the only ambassador Fox and Werritty are known to have met together.
In an inexplicable break with British diplomatic and governmental protocol, Murray said officials were not present at a single one of the six meetings between the three men. No record was taken of any of the discussions.
Murray, who first made public his concerns on his personal blog, said a source familiar with the inquiry told him the parameters of the investigation were designed to divert attention away from the more damaging aspects of Fox and Werritty’s behaviour.
Subsequently, the foreign office has refused to respond to questions, including from an MP, about the Tel Aviv dinner. Officials will not say who the Israelis were, what was discussed or even who paid for the evening, though under Whitehall rules all hospitality should be declared.
Also unexplained is why Fox rejected requests by his own staff to attend the dinner, and why Werritty was privy to such a high-level meeting when he had no security clearance.
The real concern among government officials, Murray said, is that Fox, Werritty and Gould were conspiring in a “rogue” foreign policy – opposed to the British government’s stated aims – that was authored by Mossad and Israel’s neoconservative allies in Washington.
This suspicion was partially confirmed by a report in the Guardian last month, as O’Donnell was carrying out his investigation. It cited unnamed government officials saying they were worried that Fox and Werritty had been pursuing what was termed an “alternative” government policy.
Murray said the Tel Aviv dinner was especially significant. His contact had told him the discussion had focused on ways to ensure Britain assisted in creating favourable diplomatic conditions for an attack on Iran.
Israel is widely believed to favor a military attack on Iran, in an attempt to set back its nuclear program. Israel claims Tehran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon under cover of a civilian nuclear energy project.
Israel has its own large nuclear arsenal and is known to be fearful of losing its nuclear monopoly in the region.
Britain, like many in the international community, including the US government, officially favors imposing sanctions on Iran to halt its nuclear ambitions.
The episode of the Tel Aviv dinner, Murray said, raises “vital concerns about a secret agenda for war at the core of government, comparable to [former British prime minister Tony] Blair’s determination to drive through a war on Iraq.”
The Guardian revealed this month that the defense ministry under Fox had drawn up detailed plans for British assistance in the event of a US military strike on Iran, including allowing the Americans to use Diego Garcia, a British territory in the Indian ocean, as a base from which to launch an attack.
The O’Donnell inquiry has done little to allay many officials’ concerns about the series of strange meetings involving Fox, Werritty and Gould.
David Cameron, the British prime minister, has so far refused opposition demands to hold a full public inquiry into Fox and Werritty’s relationship. And the three men at the centre of the saga have refused to discuss the nature of their ties.
This month revelations surfaced that Werritty had had dealings with other government ministers
“It is deeply inadequate of the prime minister to continue to refuse to probe this issue further,” said shadow defense spokesman Kevan Jones, in response to the new information.
The British media have cautiously raised the issue of apparent Israeli links to Fox and Werritty.
The Daily Telegraph reported that the pair secretly met the head of the Mossad – possibly at the Tel Aviv dinner, though the paper has not specified where or when the meeting took place.
Last month the Independent on Sunday claimed that Werritty had close ties to the Mossad as well as to “US-backed neocons” plotting to overthrow the Iranian regime. The Mossad were reported to have assumed Werritty was Fox’s “chief of staff.”
In addition, the O’Donnell report revealed that Werritty’s many trips overseas alongside Fox had been funded by at least six donors, three of whom were leading members of the pro-Israel lobby in Britain.
The donations were made to two organisations, Atlantic Bridge and Pargav, that Werritty helped to establish. Werritty apparently used the organizations as a way to gain access to Conservative government ministers, including three in the defense ministry.
The advisory board of Atlantic Bridge, which Werritty founded with Fox, included William Hague, the current foreign minister, Michael Gove, the education minister, and George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Despite Werritty’s apparently well-established connections to the ruling Conservative party, the media coverage has implied that he was a lone “rogue operator,” hoping to use his contacts with Fox and other ministers to manipulate British government policy.
Murray, however, raises the question of whether Werritty was actually given access, through Fox and Gould, to the heart of the British government. Were all three secretly trying to pursue a policy on Iran favored by Israel and its ideological allies in the US?
A clue to the answer, according to Murray, may lie in a series of meetings between the three that have slowly come to light since O’Donnell published his findings.
According to the 2,700-word report Werritty joined Fox on 18 of his official trips overseas, and that the pair met another 22 times at the defense ministry, with almost none of their discussions recorded by officials. The Guardian has also reported that Fox’s staff repeatedly warned him off his relationship with Werritty but were overruled.
Despite the serious concerns raised about Werritty by defense ministry staff, Gould, one of the country’s most senior diplomats, appears nonetheless to have cultivated a close relationship with Werritty as well as Fox.
According to Murray’s sources, Gould and Werritty “had been meeting and communicating for years.” The foreign office has refused to answer questions about whether the two had any contacts.
O’Donnell’s report mentions another meeting between the three, in September 2010. On that occasion, Gould met Fox in what a foreign office spokesman has described as a “pre-posting briefing call” – a sort of high-level induction for ambassadors to acquaint themselves with their new posting.
Werritty was also present, according to O’Donnell, “as an individual with some experience in…the security situation in the Middle East.” His participation at the meeting was “not appropriate,” O’Donnell concluded.
However, Murray said such briefings would never be conducted at ministerial level, and certainly not by the defense minister himself.
He added that a senior official in the defense ministry had alerted him to two other peculiar aspects of the meeting: no officials were present to take notes, as would be expected; and their conversation took place in the ministry’s dining room, not in Fox’s office.
“As someone who worked for many years as a diplomat, I know how these things should work,” Murray told al-Akhbar.
“So much of this affair simply smells wrong,” he said.
Murray’s queries to the foreign office about this meeting have gone unanswered but have revealed other unexpected details not included in the O’Donnell report.
In a statement in late October, after the report’s publication, a foreign office spokesman said Gould had met Fox and Werritty earlier than previously known – before Gould was appointed ambassador to Israel and when Fox was in opposition as shadow defense minister.
The foreign office has refused to answer questions about this meeting too – including when it occurred and why – or to respond to a parliamentary question on the matter tabled by MP Jeremy Corbyn. All that is known is that it must have taken place before May 2010, when Fox was appointed defense minister.
In replying to Corbyn’s questions, William Hague, the foreign minister, acknowledged yet another meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould – at a private social engagement in the summer of 2010.
Again, the foreign office has refused to answer further questions, including one from Corbyn about who else attended the social engagement.
The trio were also together shortly before the Tel Aviv dinner, when Fox made a speech at the hawkish Herzliya security conference in a session on the strategic threat posed by Iran.
And a sixth meeting has come to light. Fox and Gould were photographed together at a “We believe in Israel” conference in London in May 2011. Werritty was again present.
“That furtive meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould in the MOD dining room [in September 2010], deliberately held away from Fox’s office where it should have taken place, and away from the MOD officials who should have been there, now looks less like briefing and more like plotting,” Murray wrote on his blog about the Ministry of Defense meeting.
Both Werritty and Gould are considered to have an expertise on Iran.
Gould was the deputy head of mission at the British embassy in Iran from 2003 to 2005, a role in which he was responsible for coordinating on US policy towards Iran. Next he was moved to the British embassy in Washington at a time when the neoconservatives still held sway in the White House.
Werritty, meanwhile, has travelled frequently to Iran where he has teamed up with opposition groups seeking the overthrow of the Iranian regime. On his return from one trip to Iran he was called in by Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service for a debriefing according to the Independent on Sunday.
Werritty also arranged for Fox to travel with him to Iran in summer 2007, when Fox was shadow defense minister. He also arranged a meeting in May 2009 at the British parliament between Fox and an Iranian lobbyist with links to the current regime in Tehran.
The murky dealings between Fox, Werritty and Gould, and the government’s refusal to clarify what took place between them, is evidence, said Murray, that a serious matter is being hidden. His fear, and that of his contacts inside the senior civil service, is that “a neo-con cell of senior [British] ministers and officials” were secretly setting policy in coordination with Israel and the US.
Gould’s unexamined role is of particular concern, as he is still in place in his post in Israel.
Murray has noted that, in appointing Gould, a British Jew, to the ambassadorship in Israel in September last year, the foreign office broke with long-standing policy. No Jewish diplomat has held the post before because of concerns that it might lead to a conflict of interest, or at the very least create the impression of dual loyalty. Similar restrictions have been in place to avoid Catholics holding the post of ambassador to the Vatican.
Given these traditional concerns, Gould was a strange choice. He is a self-declared Zionist who has cultivated an image that led the Forward, a main Jewish US newspaper, to describe him recently as “not just an ambassador who’s Jewish, but a Jewish ambassador.”
November 23, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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Influential French Zionist Bernard-Henri Levy, who played a key role in NATO’s intervention in Libya, is now hoping to repeat the same scenario in Syria.
In a revealing installment of his weekly column Le Point magazine titled “Endgame in Syria,” French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy claims that Syrian opposition figures he’s in touch with are increasingly coming around to the view that military intervention, Libya-style, may be the only way to get rid of the regime in Damascus.
He ends his article with a quasi-official declaration of war on Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Levy, who bragged in his last book about the strong influence he has over French President Nicolas Sarkozy, confessed that the two conspired together to marginalize the French foreign ministry so that it would not impede NATO’s intervention in Libya.
In his recent column, Levy reveals secret efforts he has undertaken in the past few months to convince Syrian opposition figures to support him in what he calls the “Gaddafi theory.”
He argues that NATO intervention to overthrow the Libyan dictator has set a “precedent” in the 21st century for developing a new doctrine for toppling authoritarian regimes that shoot at their own people.
Levy goes on to affirm that the Syrian regime will be toppled along the lines of the Libyan scenario, adding that all that is left in Syria is “the final scene which has not been completely written yet.”
Levy, who is well-known for his Zionist views, revealed that his behind-the-scenes endeavor began six months ago with a meeting in London with former Syrian vice president Rifaat Assad.
Perhaps this explains Rifaat’s surprise appearance in Paris last week to call on the Assad family to step down, and for the Syrian people to take up arms against the regime.
Levy also confirms in his column that a number of Syrian opposition figures and military officers who have defected have told him in meetings and discussions he has held with them during the course of the uprising that they support “international intervention.”
On the other hand, Levy says that “a nascent regional power called Qatar” is behind the latest Arab League initiative on Syria, which is part of a plan inspired by the “Libyan precedent.”
Levy goes on to say: “As in Libya? Yes, as in Libya. It is the ‘Libyan precedent’ all over again. The same force, nay, the same forces producing the same effect. How do those involved not see it? What autism prevents Bashar Assad from understanding that the same coalition which toppled Gaddafi is coming together again to topple him?”
The most interesting piece of information revealed in Levy’s article is how a number of Syrian opposition figures he talked to shifted their position towards supporting “international intervention.”
“That had been a taboo until now. ‘Intervention’ was a word that ought not to be uttered. There were, even in France, Syrian opposition figures whom I met while preparing for a rally in solidarity with Syrian civilians this past summer who told me at the time that they would prefer to die than say the word ‘intervention’ or ‘international intervention’,” Levy wrote.
“This is the reason why we did not do in Syria what we did in Libya. Not because of double standards. This ‘moral scandal’ has many reasons and justifications, first among them is that Syrian opposition figures, unlike their Libyan counterparts, not only did not ask for intervention, but often opposed it. Their views however are beginning to change. And this is the reason why the regime in Damascus is doomed,” he continued.
“The war has been declared on Assad.”
November 23, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Wars for Israel |
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