Hamas slams US congress moves to add freed detainees to terrorism list
Palestine Information Center – 29/10/2011
GAZA — The Hamas Movement strongly denounced some US congressmen for their call to include Palestinian ex-detainees, who were released as part of the recent swap deal with Israel, on the white house’s list of terrorism.
In a press statement to the Palestinian information center (PIC) on Saturday, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum condemned this call as explicit incitement to murder and a green light for the Israeli occupation state to commit more crimes against the Palestinian people and kill freed prisoners.
The spokesman stated that the US unjust and double-standard policies were always the reason for the crimes committed by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people.
He stressed that the occupied people of Palestine who struggle for freedom always pay the price for the US support for the Zionist terrorism.
The US congress supports terrorism and the murder of women, children and innocent occupied people, and rejects the democracy that has brought Hamas to power, he noted.
The Hamas spokesman appealed to human rights organizations and the world’s free people to stand by the Palestinian freedom prisoners who were released recently and to mobilize worldwide support for them.
NYT Bureau Chief To Appear On Panel For Islamophobic Organization’s Film
By Eli Clifton | Think Progress | October 26, 2011
The New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Ethan Bronner, has stirred up controversy over recent speaking engagements. But an announcement on the 92nd St. Y’s website shows that Bronner is now scheduled to appear on a panel hosted by the Clarion Fund, an Islamophobic organization, to discuss the “threat of a nuclear Iran.”
The invitation, as it appears on the Clarion Fund’s website, reads:
On Monday, November 7, 2011, at 7:30 PM, the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, NY will host a panel discussion about the threat of a nuclear Iran, interspersed with clips from the award-winning documentary Iranium. The panel will be moderated by the film’s director, Alex Traiman, and will be simultaneously broadcasted in over 20 communities throughout the U.S. (details below).
Panelists include:
John R. Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem Bureau Chief, The New York Times
Nazie Eftekhari, Director, Iran Democratic Union
Richard Green, Executive Director, Clarion Fund
Richard Perle, former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Bush administrationClick HERE for details and to order tickets.
Bronner and the 92nd Street Y are free to associate themselves with whatever organizations they choose. But the fact that the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief is lending his name to a Clarion Fund event, and the promotion of a film which advocates for military action against Iran, raises further questions about Bronner’s growing record of engaging in activities which could produce the appearance of a conflict of interest or undermine the impartiality of his reporting.
The Clarion Fund, which was profiled in the Center for American Progress’ Islamophobia report, “Fear, Inc.,” distributed the inflammatory anti-Muslim documentary Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against The West to 28 million swing state voters before the 2008 presidential election. Clarion is closely tied to Aish Hatorah, an evangelist, far-right, Israeli ultra-orthodox organization. Traiman, Iranium’s director and the moderator of the panel on which Bronner will appear, has close ties the Israeli far-right and lives in an ideological West Bank settlement.
Iranium, makes the case for attacking Iran and promotes an official U.S. policy of regime change. The film, much like the other documentaries produced by Clarion, portrays a clash of civilizations, promotes the view that Muslims value death over life and suggests that irrational hatred of Israeli and anti-Semitism is the only explanation for the frustration expressed by Muslim countries against the U.S.
~
Max Blumenthal adds:
By agreeing to speak at the Islamophobic Clarion Fund’s 92nd Street Y event on November 7 beside neoconservative Richard Perle and uber-hawk John Bolton, Ethan Bronner is explicitly violating New York Times ethical guidelines. After I published my report about Bronner’s unethical business arrangement with a right-wing Israeli public relations firm, the Times‘ Standards Editor Phil Corbett sent out a memo to the entire Times staff reminding them about the paper’s guidelines for speaking engagements. A staffer leaked the memo to Gawker. It included the following stipulations, which Bronner is clearly violating:
Speaking fees are generally not allowed from companies, lobbying groups or other sources that might raise questions about our impartiality.
— Even if an engagement does not involve a fee, we should avoid situations that would create an appearance of favoritism or suggest too close a relationship between a Times journalist and the people or institutions we cover.
Provoking a Path to Persia
The Saban Center’s prescient paper on war with Iran
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | October 20, 2011
In June 2009, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy published “Which Path to Persia?—Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran.” Writing in a tone strikingly reminiscent of the Project for a New American Century’s infamous pre-9/11 paper “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the six co-authors noted that, “It seems highly unlikely that the United States would mount an invasion without any provocation or other buildup.” For a think tank specifically established by media mogul Haim Saban to protect Israel, this could prove to be a formidable obstacle impeding their desired march—of U.S. troops—to Tehran.
“In fact, if the United States were to decide that to garner greater international support, galvanize U.S. domestic support, and/or provide a legal justification for an invasion, it would be best to wait for an Iranian provocation, then the time frame for an invasion might stretch out indefinitely,” Saban’s think-tankers ruefully observed.
“With only one real exception, since the 1978 revolution, the Islamic Republic has never willingly provoked an American military response, although it certainly has taken actions that could have done so if Washington had been looking for a fight. Thus it is not impossible that Tehran might take some action that would justify an American invasion. And it is certainly the case that if Washington sought such a provocation, it could take actions that might make it more likely that Tehran would do so (although being too obvious about this could nullify the provocation). However, since it would be up to Iran to make the provocative move, which Iran has been wary of doing most times in the past, the United States would never know for sure when it would get the requisite Iranian provocation. In fact, it might never come at all.”
Seemingly undeterred by Iran’s frustrating unwillingness to provide the requisite provocation, the analysts continued to examine this option:
“As noted above, in the section on the time frame for an invasion, whether the United States decides to invade Iran with or without a provocation is a critical consideration. With provocation, the international diplomatic and domestic political requirements of an invasion would be mitigated, and the more outrageous the Iranian provocation (and the less that the United States is seen to be goading Iran), the more these challenges would be diminished. In the absence of a sufficiently horrific provocation, meeting these requirements would be daunting.”
Ruling out the likelihood of “an overt, incontrovertible, and unforgivable act of aggression—something on the order of an Iranian-backed 9/11 … given Iran’s history of avoiding such acts,” the authors went on to explore where “the question of provocation gets murky.”
“Most European, Asian, and Middle Eastern publics are dead set against any American military action against Iran derived from the current differences between Iran and the international community—let alone Iran and the United States,” they wistfully noted. “Other than a Tehran-sponsored 9/11, it is hard to imagine what would change their minds.”
Even Iran’s long-time Sunni rival in the region appeared recalcitrant to the idea. “Saudi Arabia is positively apoplectic about the Iranians’ nuclear program, as well as about their mischief making in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories,” the pro-Israeli analysts empathised. “Yet, so far, Riyadh has made clear that it will not support military operations of any kind against Iran. Certainly that could change, but it is hard to imagine what it would take.”
Would a dastardly plot to blow up King Abdullah’s “hand-picked, trusted envoy” in a D.C. restaurant suffice, perchance?
At least, the lead author of “Which Path to Persia?” seems to think so. On October 11, Kenneth Pollack opined on “Iran’s Covert War Against the United States”: “It’s shocking, but not entirely surprising to learn that the United States government has evidence that the Iranian regime was trying to kill Saudi Ambassador to the United States Adel al-Jubeir.”
Posing as a responsible sceptic regarding the ludicrous plot, Pollack concluded that the ultra-cautious regime he analysed for the Saban Center two years previously—relevant information not provided to the reader—may have changed for the worse: “But, if this incredible claim is proven true, it should remind us that Iran also is not a normal country by any stretch of the imagination, and that in a Middle East already in turmoil we now face a more aggressive, more risk-taking Iran that may be looking to stir the pot in ways that it once found imprudent.”
As Stephen M. Walt remarked about an earlier Tehran-baiting paper by the Saban Center director, “It is hard to read this piece without hearkening back to Pollack’s The Threatening Storm, the book that convinced many liberals to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003. What made that book especially persuasive was Pollack’s depiction of himself as a former dove who had oh-so-reluctantly concluded that there was no option but to go to war.”
Interestingly, The Daily Beast/Newsweek which published Pollack’s op-ed is partly owned by Jane Harman, whose service in Congress reportedly included a quid pro quo with an Israeli agent, involving political donations from billionaire Haim Saban, to lobby the Department of Justice to reduce espionage charges against two officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Pollack, a former member of the National Security Council, was mentioned in the indictment against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman as one of the government officials who provided information to the two former AIPAC employees about—you guessed it—Iran.
When asked “who would want to create the impression” that the United States needs to engage in military activity against Iran, former CIA operative Michael Scheuer replied, “If I was looking at a counterintelligence operation to decide where this information came from, I’d be very interested to see if I could find an Israeli hand or a Saudi hand.”
Thanks to Kenneth Pollack, that search can now be narrowed.
Maidhc Ó Cathail is a political analyst and editor of The Passionate Attachment.
CrossTalk: Tehran Baiting
RussiaToday on Oct 19, 2011
Washington claims it has uncovered an Iranian plot targeting the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. with assassination. However, the known facts about this plot go anywhere from the dubious to the outright unbelievable. Who is really behind this plot? That is, if there really was a genuine plot in the first place. And who benefits from seeing U.S.–Iranian relations go from bad to worse?
Iran and the Hollywood Script: A Collaborative Effort
By Daniel McAdams on October 16, 2011
According to FBI director Robert Muller, the latest FBI-created-and-miraculously-defeated terror threat — this time straight out of Iran and straight from the top — was something “straight out of a Hollywood script.” Well, he should know so we’ll take him at his word.
Although the same neocons who are probably writing these Hollywood scripts are screaming “this means war!!”, we cannot help but wonder just how deep is the manipulation of our media and our government by shadow forces both foreign and domestic pushing us covertly toward another war.
Considering the latest news out of the UK, where the male partner of recently-departed-in-scandal Defense Secretary Liam Fox is revealed to have been working covertly with the Mossad to overthrow the Iranian government, these speculations should no longer be written off as the conspiratorial thinking of feverish minds.
Disgraced Secretary Fox had been jet-setting all over the world with his “best man,” Adam Werritty, in tow; Werrittty passed himself off as Fox’s de facto chief of staff, and it is in this capacity that he has been engaged over the past several years covertly bumping up the Iranian “opposition” — the same Green Movement that some of us were attacked for suggesting had a very, umm, Western flavor — and attempting to overthrow the Iranian regime.
Just the outlandish suggestion that a booze-addled Iranian immigrant used car salesman was plotting to have the Saudi ambassador assassinated was enough to have the media, ThinkTankistan, and the Left/Right interventionists screaming that an “act of war” had been committed by Iran and demanding an invasion. Yet why is it never an act of war when Western spooks go into Iran in a blatant attempt to overthrow its government and foment phony “Green Revolutions” where scores are killed?
With the Fox scandal breaking big in the UK, it is increasingly obvious that these scripts written to bring the US and its allies to a disastrous war on Iran are more of a collaborative effort, perhaps Hollywood, Langley, and Tel Aviv.
Liam Fox Is Not a ‘Useful Idiot’
By Gilad Atzmon | October 16, 2011
A rather stinky Israeli espionage mole has just been exposed in Britain. Yesterday, Liam Fox the Defence Secretary resigned following revelations about his dubious relationship with Adam Werritty. Some 17 years younger than Fox, Werrity has been involved with Fox both in business and in the conservative Atlanticist think-tank ‘The Atlantic Bridge’. While Fox was Defence Minister, Werrity visited Fox at the Ministry on many occasions, accompanied Fox on numerous official trips, attended some of his meetings with foreign dignitaries and used official-looking business cards which announced him as an ‘adviser’ to Fox – and all despite having no official government post whatsoever. However, it has now also been revealed that Fox and Werritty were heavily financed by the Israeli lobby and ‘beyond’.
In the The Daily Mail Craig Murray wondered whether Mossad was using both Fox and Werritty as ‘useful idiots’.
“Not only was Werritty being paid to act as an unofficial part of the Defence Secretary’s entourage, the money was coming from people who may have been ready to promote the interests of certain foreign governments, particularly the United States, Israel and Sri Lanka,” writes Murray. “While the United States is a very close ally, its commercial and other interests are not always identical to UK interests. Israel is not a military ally of the UK. There are often tensions between its interests in the Middle East and the UK’s interests, as in the attack on the Gaza Aid convoy which resulted in the death of Turkish citizens. Turkey is an ally of the UK, being a vital member of NATO.”
Murray suggests that “Key funding sources for Werritty were from the Israeli lobby and a rather obscure commercial intelligence agency,” and then wonders, “might Mossad be pulling Werritty’s strings, with or without his knowledge?”
I’m afraid the answer is only too obvious. For a long time I have contended that there are no Jewish conspiracies. Fox and Werritty were not ‘useful idiots’ – individuals who seem to naively support a foreign ideology or thought but in practice are cynically used by a foreign power. They knew exactly what they were doing and who they were aiding. Fox, who In 2006 said, “Israel’s enemies are our enemies and this is a battle in which we all stand together or we will all fall divided.” is a strong supporter of Israel and is a member of Conservative Friends of Israel. Fox also supported the illegal war against Iraq, a war regarded by many as just another Israeli war but fought by American and British soldiers and in 2003 he voted for the invasion of Iraq. He also supports action against Iran.
So Fox and Werritty were not naïve. They knew exactly what they were doing and who were their donors. They fully understood their role and willingly did what was required. And I’m just as convinced that PM David Cameron and his cabinet knew exactly what they were doing when they amended Britain’s jurisdiction laws two weeks ago just so visiting Israeli war criminals could enjoy their stay.
But the tide has changed. The duplicity of our elected politicians and their ties with the Jewish lobby is now being closely scrutinized. The time has come for all of us in this country to put as much distance as we can between ourselves and Jerusalem.
Did FBI/DEA entrap small-time Iranian drug dealer to frame Tehran in “terror plot” sting?
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | October 15, 2011
“Although the legal document, called an amended criminal complaint, implicates Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar and his cousin Ali Gholam Shakuri, an officer in the Iranian Quds Force, in a plan to assassinate Saudi Arabian Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir, it also suggests that the idea ‘originated with and was strongly pushed by a undercover DEA informant, at the direction of the FBI,’” writes investigative historian and journalist Gareth Porter.
Continuing his analysis of that criminal complaint, Porter points out:
Both that language and the absence of any statement attributed to Arbabsiar imply that the Iranian-American said nothing about assassinating the Saudi ambassador except in response to suggestions by the informant, who was already part of an FBI undercover operation.
The DEA informant, as the FBI account acknowledges in a footnote, had previously been charged with a narcotics offence by a state in the U.S. and had been cooperating in narcotics investigations — apparently posing as a drug cartel operative — in return for dropping the charges. The document is notably silent on whether the conversation was recorded.
A former FBI official familiar with procedures in such cases, who spoke to IPS anonymously, said the FBI would normally have recorded all such conversations touching on the possibility of terrorism.
The absence of quotes from any of those meetings suggests that they do not support the case being made by the FBI and the Obama administration.
The account is quite explicit, on the other hand, that the Jul. 14 and Jul. 17 meetings were recorded at FBI direction. Statements quoted from those transcripts show the DEA informant trying to induce Arbabsiar to indicate agreement to assassinating the Saudi ambassador.
Moreover, a New York Times report on October 13 strongly suggests that the Iranian-born American was a small-time drug dealer:
“Very creepy,” said Bree Tiumalu, who lives two doors down from Mr. Arbabsiar. “We thought of it as ‘the scary house.’ ” There were always lots of people coming and going from the house, mostly in their 20s, she said, but they did not socialize with people on the street. That led some in the community to suspect that drug deals were going on.
While Arbabsiar was a most unlikely recruit for the elite Iranian Qods force, he would appear to be the perfect patsy for pro-Israeli elements in U.S. federal agencies desperately seeking a casus belli with Tehran.
Is alleged Iranian plot a “provocation by an outside agency”? asks Guardian
Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | October 14, 2011
“It has the ring of a far-fetched Hollywood thriller and even the senior law enforcement official involved in the investigation admitted to journalists that the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US did not fit with what was known about the methods and practices of the supposed perpetrators, the Quds force of the Revolutionary Guards,” Julian Borger writes in the Guardian. Of the eight “unanswered questions” Borger raises about the affair, the final one is arguably the most pertinent:
Could the alleged plot be provocation by an outside agency seeking to start a conflict between Iran and its enemies? In that case, Arbabsiar is consciously misleading his interrogators or is being used by his cousin and his associates, who are working for this third party.
When it comes to outside agencies provoking conflicts, few in the mainstream media know the most likely culprits better than Borger. In a July 2003 special investigation entitled “The spies who pushed for war,” the Guardian’s diplomatic editor exposed the Israeli source of the false intelligence coming out of Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon that bypassed the CIA and DIA to concoct a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force:
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon’s office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam’s Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
“None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels,” said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith’s authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel’s Likud party.
In 1996, he and Richard Perle – now an influential Pentagon figure – served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.
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MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) – Vaccine Risk Statement
MMR Vaccine (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) Is It Safer Than Measles, Mumps and Rubella?
Physicians for Informed Consent | December 2024
… It has not been proven that the MMR vaccine is safer than measles, mumps, and rubella. The vaccine package insert raises questions about safety testing for cancer, genetic mutations, and impaired fertility. Although VAERS tracks some adverse events, it is too inaccurate to measure against the risk of measles, mumps, and rubella. Clinical trials do not have the ability to detect less common adverse reactions, and epidemiological studies are limited by the effects of chance and possible confounders. Safety studies of the MMR vaccine are particularly lacking in statistical power. A review of more than 60 MMR vaccine studies conducted for the Cochrane Library states, “The design and reporting of safety outcomes in MMR vaccine studies, both pre- and post-marketing, are largely inadequate.”19 Because permanent sequelae (aftereffects) from measles, mumps, and rubella are so rare (especially in children with normal levels of vitamin A and infected after birth),6,15-17 the level of accuracy of the research studies available is insufficient to rule out the possibility that the MMR vaccine causes greater death or permanent disability than measles, mumps, and rubella. – Read full article
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