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Is Iran Really a Threat?

By Ray McGovern | Consortium News | April 26, 2010

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said publicly that Iran “doesn’t directly threaten the United States.” Her momentary lapse came while answering a question at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, on Feb. 14.

Fortunately for her, most of her Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) fellow travelers must have been either jet-lagged or sunning themselves poolside when she made her unusual admission.

And those who were present did Clinton the favor of disappearing her gaffe and ignoring its significance. (All one happy traveling family, you know.)

But she said it: it’s on the State Department Web site. Those who had been poolside could even have read the text after showering. They might have recognized a real story there — but, granted, it was one so off-message that it would probably not we welcomed by editors back home.

In a rambling comment, Clinton had lamented that, despite President Barack Obama’s reaching out to the Iranian leaders, he had elicited no sign they were willing to engage:

“Part of the goal — not the only goal, but part of the goal — that we were pursuing was to try to influence the Iranian decision regarding whether or not to pursue a nuclear weapon. And, as I said in my speech, you know, the evidence is accumulating that that [pursuing a nuclear weapon] is exactly what they are trying to do, which is deeply concerning, because it doesn’t directly threaten the United States, but it directly threatens a lot of our friends, allies, and partners here in this region and beyond.” (Emphasis added)

Qatar Afraid? Not So Much

The moderator turned to Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Al-Thani and invited him to give his perspective on “the danger that the Secretary just alluded to…if Iran gets the bomb.”

Al-Thani pointed to Iran’s “official answer” that it is not seeking to have a nuclear bomb; instead, the Iranians “explain to us that their intention is to use these facilities for their peaceful reactors for electricity and medical use…

“We have good relations with Iran,” he added.  “And we have continuous dialogue with the Iranians.”

The prime minister added, “the best thing for this problem is a direct dialogue between the United States and Iran,” and “dialogue through messenger is not good.”

Al-Thani stressed that, “For a small country, stability and peace are very important,” and intimated — diplomatically but clearly — that he was at least as afraid of what Israel and the U.S. might do, as what Iran might do.

All right. Secretary Clinton concedes that Iran does not directly threaten the United States; so who are these “friends” to whom she refers? First and foremost, Israel, of course.

How often have we heard the Israelis say they would consider nuclear weapons in Iran’s hands an “existential” threat? But let’s try a reality check.

Former French President Jacques Chirac is perhaps the best-known statesman to hold up to ridicule the notion that Israel, with between 200 and 300 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, would consider Iran’s possession of a nuclear bomb an existential threat.

In a recorded interview with the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and Le Nouvel Observateur, on Jan. 29, 2007, Chirac put it this way:

“Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel?” Chirac asked. “It would not have gone 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed.” Thus, Iran’s possession of a nuclear bomb would not be “very dangerous.”

Chirac and a Hard Place

Soon, the former French president found himself caught between Chirac and a hard place. He was immediately forced to retract, but did so in what seemed to be so clumsy a way as to deliberately demonstrate that his initial candor was spot on.

On Jan. 30, Chirac told the New York Times:

“I should rather have paid attention to what I was saying and understood that perhaps I was on record. … I don’t think I spoke about Israel yesterday. Maybe I did so, but I don’t think so. I have no recollection of that.”

The Israeli leaders must have been laughing up their sleeve at that. Their continued ability to intimidate presidents of other countries — including President Barack Obama — is truly remarkable, particularly when it comes to helping to keep Israel’s precious “secret,” that it possesses one of the world’s most sophisticated nuclear arsenals.

Shortly after Obama became U.S. President, veteran reporter Helen Thomas asked him if he knew of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons, and Obama awkwardly responded that he didn’t want to “speculate.”

On April 13, 2010, Obama looked like a deer caught in the headlights when the Washington Post’s Scott Wilson, taking a leaf out of Helen Thomas’ book, asked him if he would “call on Israel to declare its nuclear program and sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.”

Watch the video, unless you have no stomach for watching our normally articulate President stutter his way through with a mini-filibuster answer, the highlight of which was, “And, as far as Israel goes, I’m not going to comment on their program…”

The following day the Jerusalem Post smirked, “President Dodges Question About Israel’s Nuclear Program.” The article continued: “Obama took a few seconds to formulate his response, but quickly took the weight off Israel and called on all countries to abide by the NPT.”

The Jerusalem Post added that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak chose that same day to send a clear message “also to those who are our friends and allies,” that Israel will not be pressured into signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

(Also the following day, the Washington Post made no reference to the question from its own reporter or Obama’s stumbling non-answer. For more on U.S. politicians dodging this question, click here.)

Consistent Obsequiousness

In his response to Scott Wilson, Obama felt it necessary to tack on the observation that his words regarding the NPT represented the “consistent policy” of prior U.S. administrations, presumably to avert any adverse reaction from the Likud Lobby to even the slightest suggestion that Obama might be ratcheting up, even a notch or two, any pressure on Israel to acknowledge its nuclear arsenal and sign the NPT.

The greatest consistency to the policy, however, has been the U.S. obsequiousness to this double standard. Clearly, Washington and the FCM find it easier to draw black-and-white distinctions between noble Israel and evil Iran if there’s no acknowledgment that Israel already has nukes and Iran has disavowed any intention of getting them.

This never-ending hypocrisy shows itself in various telling ways. I am reminded of an early Sunday morning talk show over five years ago at which Sen. Richard Lugar, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked why Iran would think it has to acquire nuclear weapons. Perhaps Lugar had not yet had his morning coffee, because he almost blew it with his answer:

“Well, you know, Israel has…” Oops. At that point he caught himself and abruptly stopped. The pause was embarrassing, but he then recovered and tried to limit the damage.

Aware that he could not simply leave the words “Israel has” twisting in the wind, Lugar began again: “Well, Israel is alleged to have a nuclear capability.”

Is “alleged” to have? Lugar was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee from 1985 to 1987; and then again from 2003 to 2007. No one told him that Israel has nuclear weapons? But, of course, he did know, but he also knew that U.S. policy on disclosure of this “secret” – over four decades — has been to protect Israel’s nuclear “ambiguity.”

Small wonder that our most senior officials and lawmakers — and Lugar, remember, is one of the more honest among them — are widely seen as hypocritical, the word Scott Wilson used to frame his question.

The Fawning Corporate Media, of course, ignores this hypocrisy, which is their standard operating procedure when the word “Israel” is spoken in unflattering contexts. But the Iranians, Syrians and others in the Middle East pay closer attention.

Obama Overachieving

As for Obama, the die was cast during the presidential campaign when, on June 3, 2008, in the obligatory appearance before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), he threw raw red meat to the Likud Lobby.

Someone wrote into his speech: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided.” This obsequious gesture went well beyond the policy of prior U.S. administrations on this highly sensitive issue, and Obama had to backtrack two days later.

“Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations,” Obama said when asked if he was saying the Palestinians had no future claim to the city.

The person who inserted the offending sentence into his speech was not identified nor fired, as he or she should have been. My guess is that the sentence inserter has only risen in power within the Obama administration.

So, why am I reprising this sorry history? Because this is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees as the context of the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

Even when Israel acts in a manner that flies in the face of stated U.S. policy – calling on all nations to sign the NPT and to submit to transparency in their nuclear programs – Netanyahu has every reason to believe that Washington’s power-players will back down and the U.S. FCM will intuitively understand its role in the cover-up.

L’Affaire Biden – when the Vice President was humiliated by having Israel announce new Jewish construction in East Jerusalem as he arrived to reaffirm U.S. solidarity with Israel — was dismissed as a mere “spat” by the neoconservative editorial page of the Washington Post.

Making Amends

Rather than Israel making amends to the United States, it has been vice versa.

Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, trudged over to an affair organized by the AIPAC offshoot think tank, Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), last Wednesday to make a major address.

I got to wondering, after reading his text, which planet Jones lives on. He devoted his first nine paragraphs to fulsome praise for WINEP’s “objective analysis” and scholarship, adding that “our nation — and indeed the world — needs institutions like yours now more than ever.”

Most importantly, Jones gave pride of place to “preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them,” and only then tacking on the need to forge “lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.” He was particularly effusive in stating:

“There is no space — no space — between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel’s security.”

Those were the exact words used by Vice President Joe Biden in Israel on March 9, before he was mouse-trapped by the announcement of Israel’s plans for East Jerusalem.

The message is inescapably clear: Netanyahu has every reason to believe that the Siamese-twin relationship with the United States is back to normal, despite the suggestion from CENTCOM Commander, Gen. David Petraeus, earlier this year that total identification with Israel costs the lives of American troops.

Petraeus’s main message was that this identification fosters the widespread impression that the U.S. is incapable of standing up to Israel. The briefing that he sponsored reportedly noted, “America was not only viewed as weak, but there was a growing perception that its military posture in the region was eroding.”

However, in the address to WINEP, National Security Adviser Jones evidenced no concern on that score. Worse still, in hyping the threat from Iran, he seemed to be channeling Dick Cheney’s rhetoric before the attack on Iraq, simply substituting an “n” for the “q.” Thus:

“Iran’s continued defiance of its international obligations on its nuclear program and its support of terrorism represents (sic) a significant regional and global threat. A nuclear-armed Iran could transform the landscape of the Middle East…fatally wounding the global non-proliferation regime, and emboldening terrorists and extremists who threaten the United States and our allies.”

A Bigger Mousetrap?

Jacques Chirac may have gone a bit too far in belittling Israel’s concern over the possibility of Iran acquiring a small nuclear capability, but it is truly hard to imagine that Israel would feel incapable of deterring what would be a suicidal Iranian attack.

The real threat to Israel’s “security interests” would be something quite different. If Iran acquired one or two nuclear weapons, Israel might be deprived of the full freedom of action it now enjoys in attacking its Arab neighbors.

Even a rudimentary Iranian capability could work as a deterrent the next time the Israelis decide they would like to attack Lebanon, Syria or Gaza. Clearly, the Israelis would prefer not to have to look over their shoulder at what Tehran might contemplate doing in the way of retaliation.

However, there has been a big downside for Israel in hyping the “existential threat” supposedly posed by Iran. This exaggerated danger and the fear it engenders have caused many highly qualified Israelis, who find a ready market for their skills abroad, to emigrate.

That could well become a true “existential threat” to a small country traditionally dependent on immigration to populate it and on its skilled population to make its economy function.

The departure of well-educated secular Jews also could tip the country’s political balance more in favor of the ultra-conservative settlers who are already an important part of Netanyahu’s Likud coalition.

Still, at this point, Netanyahu has the initiative regarding what will happen next with Iran, assuming Tehran doesn’t fully capitulate to the U.S.-led pressure campaign. Netanyahu could decide if and when to launch a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, thus forcing Washington’s hand in deciding whether to back Israel if Iran retaliates.

Netanyahu may not be impressed – or deterred – by anything short of a public pronouncement from Obama that the U.S. will not support Israel if it provokes war with Iran. The more Obama avoids such blunt language, the more Netanyahu is likely to view Obama as a weakling who can be played politically.

If Netanyahu feels himself in the catbird seat, then an Israeli attack on Iran seems to me more likely than not. For instance, would Netanyahu judge that Obama lacked the political spine to have U.S. forces in control of Iraqi airspace shoot down Israeli aircraft on their way to Iran? Many analysts feel that Obama would back down and let the warplanes proceed to their targets.

Then, if Iran sought to retaliate, would Obama feel compelled to come to Israel’s defense and “finish the job” by devastating what was left of Iran’s nuclear and military capacity? Again, many analysts believe that Obama would see little choice, politically.

Yet, whatever we think the answers are, the only calculation that matters is Israel’s. My guess is Netanyahu would not anticipate a strong reaction from President Obama, who has, time and again, showed himself to be more politician than statesman.

James Jones is, after all, Obama’s national security adviser, and is throwing off signals that can only encourage Netanyahu to believe that Jones’s boss would scurry to find some way to avoid the domestic political opprobrium that would accrue, were he to seem less than fully supportive of Israel.

Backing Off the NIE?

Netanyahu has other reasons to take heart with the political directions of Washington.

According to Sunday’s Washington Post, the U.S. intelligence community is preparing what is called “a memorandum to holders of Iran Estimate,” in other words an update to the full-scale National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) completed in November 2007, which downplayed Iran’s nuclear capabilities and intentions.

The NIE’s update is now projected for completion this August, delayed from last fall reportedly because of new incoming information.

The Post article recalls that the 2007 NIE presented the “startling conclusion” that Iran had halted work on developing a nuclear warhead. Why “startling?” Because this contradicted what President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had been saying during the previous months.

It is a hopeful thing that senior intelligence officials from both CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency have, the way the Post puts it, “avoided contradicting the language used in the 2007 NIE,” although some are said to privately assert that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon.

The Post says there is an expectation that the previous NIE “will be corrected” to indicate a darker interpretation of Iranian nuclear intentions.

It seems a safe, if sad, bet that the same Likud-friendly forces that attacked experienced diplomat Chas Freeman as a “realist” and got him “un-appointed,” after National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair had named him Director of the National Intelligence Council, will try to Netanyahu-ize the upcoming Memorandum to Holders.

The National Intelligence Council has purview over such memoranda, as well as over NIEs. Without Freeman, or anyone similarly substantive and strong, it seems likely that the intelligence community will not be able to resist the political pressures to conform.

Resisting Pressure

Nevertheless, the intelligence admirals, generals and other high officials seem to be avoiding the temptation to play games, so far.

The Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Gen. Ronald Burgess, and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. James Cartwright, hewed to the intelligence analysts’ judgments in their testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee last Wednesday.

Indeed, their answer to the question as to how soon Iran could have a deliverable nuclear weapon, if fact, sounded familiar:

“Experience says it is going to take you three to five years” to move from having enough highly enriched uranium to having a “deliverable weapon that is usable… something that can actually create a detonation, an explosion that would be considered a nuclear weapon,” Cartwright told the panel.

What makes Cartwright’s assessment familiar – and relatively reassuring – is that five years ago, the director of DIA told Congress that Iran is not likely to have a nuclear weapon until “early in the next decade” — this decade. Now, we’re early in that decade and Iran’s nuclear timetable, assuming it does intend to build a bomb, has been pushed back to the middle of this decade at the earliest.

Indeed, the Iranians have been about five years away from a nuclear weapon for several decades now, according to periodic intelligence estimates. They just never seem to get much closer. But there’s not a trace of embarrassment among U.S. policymakers or any notice of this slipping timetable by the FCM.

Not that NIEs – or U.S. officials – matter much in terms of a potential military showdown with Iran. The “decider” here is Netanyahu, unless Obama stands up and tells him, publicly, “If you attack Iran, you’re on your own.”

But don’t hold your breath.

(For a BBC documentary on Israel’s nuclear program, click here.)

April 27, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Six decades of dispossession

Founded on ethnic cleansing, erasing the Palestinians remains the modus operandi of the state of Israel

By Khaled Amayreh | Al-Ahram | April 22, 2010

With a strange combination of self- righteousness and self-gratification, Israel this week celebrated its 62nd anniversary. Using skilfully fabricated sound bites, Israeli leaders sought to deflect blame for the lingering conflict with the Palestinians and the stalemated political process, invoking the old mantras about the Jewish homeland and the miraculous establishment of Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel was extending one hand towards peace while the other was holding a sword in self-defense. Meanwhile, Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders used the occasion to assert Israel’s determination to continue to build settlements on occupied Palestinian land, including in occupied East Jerusalem.

“We are a peace seeking nation that prays for peace,” he said.

Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, also claimed that Israel wanted peace: “On this blessed occasion, I want to say in the name of the state of Israel at large: We don’t seek war. We are a nation that yearns for peace, but knows, and will always know, how to defend ourselves.”

Peres’s words came less than 24 hours after one Israeli official warned that Israel would “send [Syria] back to the Stone Age” in any military confrontation. Israel continues to occupy the Syrian Golan Heights taken in 1967.

Overlooking Israel’s decades-old repressive occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as last year’s relentless campaign against the Gaza Strip, Israeli leaders tried to draw a rosy picture of a state that stands falsely accused by extremists in the international community. Meanwhile, though singing the praises of Israeli democracy, the rampant discrimination against Israel’s Palestinian citizens — who make up more than a quarter of Israel’s population — was equally ignored.

Last week, Israel announced plans that would lead to the deportation of tens of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and places of residence in the West Bank. The plans were viewed by most Palestinians, including the Western-backed Palestinian Authority (PA), as a revival of the policy of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians — the policy upon which Israel’s existence was founded.

Some Palestinian officials argue privately that despite 62 years since Israel’s creation in Palestine, ethnic cleansing remains Israel’s ultimate if undeclared strategy towards the Palestinians, both in Israel proper and the territories occupied in 1967. Israeli officials deny the charges. However, Israeli behavior on the ground fully vindicates the Palestinian view.

In East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally declared part of its “eternal and undivided capital,” Israeli authorities have continued meticulous efforts aimed at emptying the town of its non-Jewish inhabitants. There are nearly half-a-million Palestinians living in Jerusalem and its vicinities.

Similarly, Jewish settler thugs, often in tacit coordination with the occupation army, are stepping up attacks on and acts of vandalism against Palestinian villagers, especially in areas adjacent to Jewish settlements. This week, several Arab cars were torched and a mosque desecrated in the Nablus region, apparently by gangs from nearby settlements.

What is more alarming about these Jewish terrorist attacks against Palestinians is that the attacks do not come in response to Palestinian resistance, but rather as a “price tag” in response to half-hearted efforts by the Israeli government to partially freeze settlement expansion in response to American pressure.

Israel’s Independence Day ceremonies saw Israeli leaders reiterating familiar rejections of any equitable resolution to the enduring conflict with the Palestinians, such as the creation of a viable and territorially contiguous Palestinian state. At the same time, the majority of Israelis reject the idea of annexing the West Bank into Israel, fearing that Israel would lose its Jewish identity as a result.

Some Israeli leaders, such as Moshe Yaalon, former army chief of staff who now holds the post of minister of strategic affairs, say openly that the war of 1948 has not really ended. In an interview this week with the right-wing Israeli paper, The Jerusalem Post, Yaalon suggested that Israel would first have to achieve total victory over the Arabs before contemplating a lasting solution.

Like Netanyahu, Yaalon is frustrated that many Europeans and Americans have come to view the Israeli occupation as the cause of instability in the Middle East. The problem, Yaalon suggests, is “Jihadi Islam”.

On the other hand, Yaalon — who epitomizes the current Israeli government view — doesn’t reject the concept of a Palestinian state outright, so long as this state doesn’t encompass East Jerusalem or lead to the dismantlement of Jewish colonies in the West Bank. “I don’t care, then, if they would call it a state or even an empire,” he said.

For the current Israeli leadership, the “neutralization” of the “Iranian threat” is taken as a precondition for any progress on the Palestinian front. Israel is widely believed to possess 200- 300 nuclear warheads. Overemphasis of the Iranian “threat” is seen by many as a “red herring” aimed at retaining Israeli military supremacy and hegemony in the region.

Indeed, most Palestinian and Arab observers dismiss the Israeli “Iran scare” as a mere “tactical trick” aimed at disposing of any potential foe in order to further enhance Tel Aviv’s maneuverability on the Palestinian issue. In other words, Israel wants to strip the Palestinians and Arabs of real or potential assets while delaying as long as possible the quest for a lasting solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict.

April 24, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

End Israel lobbies’ pervasive and damaging influence in US politics

Support for Israel is not only tragic and immoral, it is also extremely damaging to Americans.

By Debbie Menon | Salem News | 1 April 2010

In a recent article in the journal Foreign Policy entitled “Petraeus wasn’t the first”, Mark Perry describes succinctly the opposition to US support for Israel, the rationale for this support and how American publishers cover it up.

The article is extremely valuable reading, recommends Alison Weir, the executive director of the website If Americans Knew. “It corrects misconceptions that so many Americans have on the causation of US support for Israel, including even some who are otherwise well informed on Palestine,” she asserts.

Mark Perry is correct in all respects. He quotes Joe Hoar, who remind him that it’s all old history. “What’s the news here? Hasn’t this been said before?” and hasn’t it all been done before?

Indeed, have humans ever learned from history? I think it says something about the nature of our species when you reflect that Albert Einstein once said that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Key elements of the US government have always opposed the concept of a Zionist Israel, ever since the state and defence departments advised President Harry Truman not to sign up to the Zionist project, which he nevertheless did but with reservations, qualifications and conditions that were immediately ignored.

But none of these key elements of governance has influence over the Zionist-controlled US corporate press, entertainment, academic and public (mis)information media (and the corporate and business advertising budgets that drive them) where the roots of American public opinion are planted and from which the blissfully ignorant American masses take the cues for their views and feelings. Nor do they control the free-spending lobbies that buy and sell legislators and politicians on Capitol Hill with the same ease with which they trade banks and corporations on the stock market.

While this is well documented, the sad thing is that today many editors, journalists, analysts and publishers, even in the so-called progressive American media, either still do not know these facts or have chosen not to inform the public about them.

Recent “hate speech” legislation in the US Congress has already eviscerated the freedom of speech guarantees of the First Amendment. Try to persuade me that abuse and vilification of Islam and Christianity will get you the same treatment in the courts that open and objective political criticism of Israel will. The fact that it will almost certainly not is a perfect example of the power of lobbies in controlling the law of, and restricting free speech in, the USA.

The recent 300-36 vote by the US House Representatives rejecting the UN-sponsored Goldstone Report, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)-initiated letter “Reaffirming the US-Israel Alliance”, which was signed by 76 senators and pressed the US president not to put pressure on Israel – and repeated the “unbreakable bond” mantra – is the best evidence of who controls US Middle East policy and how powerless the US president is to serve his own country’s interest. Barack Obama would do well to heed George Washington’s advise, when he warned in his farewell address against “passionate attachment” to an ally. (Also see Anthony Lawson’s video, “Treason by Members of the United States Congress”.)

Yes, it is about this ally’s powerful lobbying and its pervasive influence on American politics, policy and institutions that these and other writers have long written valuable books, revealing facts about the extent of the stranglehold of the Israel lobby over the US Congress and the US administration.

It’s long past time to end one of the most damaging and pervasive cover-ups in the US today, and time for people and institutions to confront Israel’s lobbies.

Paul Findley They Dare to Speak Out

Edgar Tivnan The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy

Donald Neff Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy Towards Palestine and Israel Since 1945

George W. Ball and Douglas B. Ball The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement With Israel, 1947 to the Present

John Mulhall America and the Founding of Israel: An Investigation of the Morality of America’s Role

James Petras The Power of Israel in the United States

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

Jeff Gates Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War (2008) his first release in the Criminal State series.

Debbie Menon is a freelance writer based in Dubai. Her articles have been published widely in print and online. She can be reached at debbiemenon@gmail.com.  For more of her work, visit My Catbird Seat.

April 22, 2010 Posted by | Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Israel First: More on Dr. Lani Kass

By Philip Giraldi | April 22, 2010

My recent account of the career of Dr. Lani Kass was based on what has appeared about her in the public record and media, including her own comments regarding national defense and security policy.  To recapitulate, Kass was born, raised, and educated in Israel.  She has a PhD in Russian studies and is fluent in Russian and Hebrew in addition to English.  Kass reportedly reached the rank of major in the Israeli air force before moving to the United States and working her way up through the US defense establishment.  She is currently the most senior civilian adviser to Air Force Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz and is believed to have access to most American defense secrets.  Kass is best known to the public for her role in promoting Air Force cyberwarfare, but she also appears to have been a major player in counter-terrorism policy and in war preparations directed against Iran even though she has no actual substantive background in those areas.  She believes that the US is engaged in a long war against Islamo-radicalism and that “winning” against Iran is necessary but the American people must be willing to pay the price to succeed.

My concern regarding Dr. Kass is based on the potential conflict of interest and divided loyalty that is normal in anyone who is born in one country and moves to another.  She comes from a country that has a history of large scale and highly aggressive espionage directed against the United States and she appears to continue to have close ties to her birthplace.  Dr. Kass has become a naturalized American while apparently retaining her Israeli citizenship and her three children were reportedly born in Israel, not the United States.  The information she has access to would be extremely valuable to Israel and potentially damaging to US interests, particularly as she likely knows what the US Air Force response to a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran would be.

The issue of Israel aside, one might reasonably argue in any event that a senior officer in any foreign country’s military establishment should be considered an undesirable candidate for a top post in the Pentagon on security grounds.  If Dr. Kass were a dentist it would make absolutely no difference where she came from and what her political views might be, but a person’s ultimate loyalty is not just an abstraction for someone who has relatively free access to the Defense Department’s most highly classified information and is probably also able to influence policy.

I continue to question to what extent Kass has been properly security vetted for her position, to include rigorous inquiry into whether or not she still has ties to the Israeli government. I also can only speculate at the type of advice that Kass is providing to her Pentagon associates as she appears to embrace particularly hard line views about Muslims and about the desirability of going to war with Iran, positions that are rather similar to those promoted by the Israeli government.

Additional information has come to light on Kass that heightens my concern about her high position in the United States government’s defense and security establishment.  Her first job in Washington was with the Advanced International Studies Institute (AISI), a Washington DC area based think tank.  After being recommended by someone at the Pentagon, she was hired for her Russian language skills in an unclassified program funded by the Department of Defense called Soviet Watch.  Her fellow employees understood that she was a former major in Israeli intelligence.  A few months later she moved on to beltway bandit Booz Allen Hamilton.  Some months after she departed AISI, one of her colleagues received a call from a personnel manager at the Industrial War College asking to confirm Kass’s employment with AISI.  The Industrial War College was, as the name implies, an institute set up to coordinate industrial production with Defense Department needs.  Some of its work was classified.  Kass’s colleague told the caller that Kass was an intelligence officer who thought of herself as an Israeli and added that putting her in any position of influence would be a bad idea.

From there and then to here and now has taken more than twenty years, proceeding through a number of Defense Department positions with ever-increasing responsibility and access.  It would not be out of place to observe that if the report that Kass was truly an intelligence officer for the Israeli Defense Forces is correct the Department of Defense security screeners should have erred on the side of caution based on the supposition that she was still in touch with her former employers. She should never have been given a security clearance and provided access to United States classified information in the first place, which again raises the issue of just if and how thoroughly her background was actually investigated.

More information has also been developed regarding Kass’s current role.  According to a highly reliable source, Dr. Lani Kass is now the principal adviser to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen regarding the Middle East. She recently was involved in a very important meeting, one that concerned Israel.

The meeting took place because of concerns that the United States has been losing the “war of ideas” in the Muslim world.  At the end of last year, General David Petraeus sent a special emissary out on a fact finding mission to meet with the heads of state and top military officers in all of the Muslim countries considered to be friends or allies of the US for a frank exchange of views.  The emissary, an Arabic speaker, learned that no country any longer trusts the United States because it is widely believed that all American policies in the Near East region are subject to veto by Israel.  It was also commonly observed that Washington is complicit in the genocide against the Palestinians because of its failure to do anything to restrain Israel, making it extremely difficult to rally popular support in any Muslim country for US policies.

Petraeus was surprised by the unanimity and emotion of the views that were confidentially expressed and thought the issue to be important enough to move it up the chain of command.  In February, he met with Admiral Mullen and briefed him on his findings.  Mullen was accompanied only by Dr. Lani Kass, who was described to Petraeus as his special assistant for the Middle East.  Mullen expressed some dismay at the implications of the findings while Kass disputed Petraeus’ conclusions and said that the concerns being expressed were greatly exaggerated.  Petraeus nevertheless presented his report to the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 17th together with his judgment that the failure to address the Palestinian issue was putting US soldiers in danger because it was inflaming anti-American sentiment and giving groups like al-Qaeda an unnecessary propaganda victory.

One might argue that Dr. Lani Kass is just another Israel firster who has risen to high office in the US government, not really unlike Dennis Ross, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, and Douglas Feith.  And that might well be true.  But at the same time one must challenge the judgment of those who enabled her rise to a position of great responsibility and power and there should be serious questions about whether her bellicose and racially tinged viewpoint comes from objective and honest analysis of the genuine challenges confronting the United States or from her loyalty to her country of birth.

April 22, 2010 Posted by | Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

US: All Options on the Table Against Syria

By Jason Ditz, April 21, 2010

Though they have admitted once again that they still haven’t actually got any proof that any such thing happened, the US State Department insisted today that “all options are on the table” with respect to retaliating against Syria over its alleged delivery of Scud missiles to Hezbollah.

Assistant Secretary Jeffrey Feltman says the State Department has “really, really serious concern” about the report, and said if Syria actually turns out to have done such a thing it would be a “provocative action.”

Israel made the accusation last week, but it has since been denied by both Syria and Lebanon’s governments. Israel has not provided any public evidence to support its claim, but Hezbollah has been rumored in the media to have been given some old, unusable Scuds at some point in the past.

Scud missiles would give the Lebanese militant group the ability to hit targets anywhere in Israel at a time when Israeli officials are openly talking of launching another invasion of southern Lebanon.

April 22, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

US Vows New Sanctions Against Iran in ‘Weeks’

By Jason Ditz | April 20, 2010

Much as they did several times last week, and several times the week before that, and indeed innumerable times this year, last year, and the year before that, the US today vowed that there would be new sanctions against Iran in a matter of weeks.

This time the pledge came in the form of comments by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D – MD) who promised that the United States would act “sooner, rather than later” in more harsh sanctions against Iran for its civilian nuclear program.

The comments came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again demanded that the US enact “crippling sanctions” against Iran, blocking the nation’s gasoline imports in the hopes of crushing the government. Netanyahu made similar demands earlier in the month, and several times last month, and also innumerable times since coming into office last year.

But once again, the prospect of the sanctions, despite US optimism, seems slim. Russia has repeatedly opposed “crippling” sanctions, and said it would only support very limited sanctions targeting just the nuclear industry. China for its part again declared today that it remains firmly in favor of diplomacy, and says negotiations, not sanctions, remain the best way to solve disagreements.

Background:

March 08, 2010

Israeli Official: West Has 4-8 Weeks Left for Iran Diplomacy


April 21, 2010 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

VoteVets.org Crosses the Line

By Kelley B. Vlahos, April 20, 2010

Anyone paying attention to veterans’ issues on Capitol Hill these days has no doubt heard of VoteVets.org.

During the Bush administration, this group was a thorn in the side of the Republican pro-war agenda that put millions of servicemen and women through the meat grinder in Iraq and Afghanistan. It exposed and derided scandalous weaknesses in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) mental health care system, called for the closing of Gitmo, and fought for the modernization of the GI Bill so that vets could actually go to college as Uncle Sam promised.

So today we are forced to ask one simple question of VoteVets: what’s up with you?

Though technically it is a non-partisan 401(c)(4) organization (that’s Washington-speak for a political non-profit), VoteVets also has a political action committee (PAC) dedicated to electing veterans to Congress. The group’s preferred candidates happen to be Democrats who subscribe to a “progressive” agenda, particularly on issues of national security and foreign policy. The millions of dollars VoteVets has spent in the last two election cycles also paid for negative campaign ads against Republicans in tight races, including the 2008 presidential contest. Fine. Over the last several years, that mission has seemed almost necessary in terms of providing pushback against the influential neoconservative-dominated national security establishment in Washington.

But then comes this new advertising campaign, and for the first time, VoteVets.org looks less like a veterans’ lobby than a full-fledged water-carrier for Democratic interests on Capitol Hill. Not only that, VoteVets.org is employing the same dirty rhetorical tricks that neoconservative hawks invoked to get us into Iraq and Afghanistan – and now possibly Iran:

There are so many things wrong with this advertisement that one wonders if the smartypants at the American Enterprise Institute put it out themselves and slapped the VoteVets.org logo on it. Indeed, the minute it hit the airways back in March, you could almost hear Michael Ledeen and Frank Gaffney giggling gleefully from either side of the Potomac. Liz Cheney might as well have canceled an ad buy in her own Keep America Safe campaign to save some money.

All joking aside, it is troubling to see a group that has been forthright about taking care of the grunts in the field and veterans in our communities indulging in stale neoconservative tropes to appeal to Americans’ base prejudices and fears, all to win a debate over climate-change legislation that the American public has yet to see, much less absorb and weigh in on.

It’s just another example of how seductive Washington politics can be, and how off-putting it is to see veterans exploited, once again, for political gain.

Fellow Antiwar.com columnist and intelligence expert Phil Giraldi had this to say about the ad: “I don’t have any problem with supporting clean energy, though I wonder what that has to do with VoteVets, unless it is a lobbying effort to get groups behind Obama’s next domestic program, which might be the intention of this promotion.”

That seems to be how it’s shaping up, given that the ads are part of a $3 million campaign to promote clean energy legislation favored by progressive Democrats in Congress. The group is also targeting a “bipartisan” package being crafted by Senators John Kerry (D), Lindsey Graham (R), and Joe Lieberman (I), which VoteVets say is too stacked in favor of Big Oil and takes the federal government out of regulating greenhouse gases. No doubt that is why it is running these emotionally stoked and muscular energy ads in swing districts across the country.

“Three years ago, VoteVets would have never used the word ‘enemy’ in an ad like this,” pointed out Inter Press News Service correspondent Gareth Porter. Now we know why. Making a vote against Big Oil a patriotic act against the “Iranian menace” might prove useful in shaming members who do not agree with the planks in their preferred energy agenda.

Is Energy a Veterans’ Issue?

VoteVets.org chairman John Soltz, who as an Iraq vet has been an effective critic of the war overseas (indeed, VoteVets opposed the current surge of 30,000 troops into Afghanistan), recently repeated his group’s cock-eyed brief on MSNBC. “We have states like Iran who are then earning money off our demand and passing that off to terrorist organizations across the Middle East,” he told liberal host Ed Schultz, who flashed a graphic of a poll commissioned by VoteVets.org [.pdf] that conveniently found 73 percent of veterans in favor of “clean energy legislation.”

Come again?

Simply put, the liberal-leaning VoteVets hired Lake Research Partners, a Democratic polling firm, to gin up this issue as a priority for American veterans. But is it really? The question that elicited the 73 percent positive response was this: “Do you favor or oppose a comprehensive clean energy and climate bill that invests in clean, renewable energy sources in America and limits carbon pollution in the atmosphere?”

Sure, a majority of Democrats, Republicans, and independents favor it, according to the poll, but it tells us virtually nothing about what the respondents want specifically, much less that a plan by progressive Democrats in Washington is at all preferred. We all know veterans are not a monolithic group, and while most would agree they want their VA benefits on time and a GI Bill that works, to suggest they all support federal regulation of greenhouse gases and so-called “cap and trade” measures is quite presumptuous.

Liberal Backlash

Despite the campaign’s progressive goals, the ad itself has certainly left the group’s loyal liberal supporters scratching their heads. Wrote pundit Taylor Marsh in March:

“Well, if you wanted to give Sarah Palin’s bomb, bomb, bomb Iran team a freebie, the new Vote Vets ad is it. However, it’s supposed to be about Congress getting us off oil and on to clean energy in order to keep us out of real life energy wars. Instead it serves up powerful visuals and a narrative that promotes going straight at Iran. …

“[T]he ad is a cynical appeal using fear about Iran, specifically, through EFPs [explosively formed penetrators] to get the job done. Vote Vets could have begun the ad the way you ended it, immediately making the oil-clean energy connection, but didn’t. You purposefully chose to focus on the fear card and the Iran boogieman, complete with a picture of Ahmadinejad, before making your clean energy pitch, because you thought that would get the attention. … But they got the emotional appeal exactly backwards, stressing Iranian dangers instead of energy dependence and they did it deliberately.”

To which VoteVets.org representative Richard Allen Smith immediately responded on Marsh’s Web site, “Being that we also created StopIranWar.com, if we’re trying to convince anyone the US should invade Iran, we’re doing a pretty terrible job.”

Sadly, when you click onto StopIranWar.com on the VoteVets.org Web site, there’s nothing to see. Not sure what that is all about. Smith also wrote: “What is dishonest in the ad? Point to one assertion that is untrue.”

Is the ad untrue? Depends on whom you ask. Dishonest? Certainly. I reached out to VoteVets.org media relations man Eric Schmeltzer over the weekend to get some background on the assertion that for every $1 increase in oil on the global market, the government of Iran gets another $1.5 billion in annual revenue, and moreover, that any increase in oil revenue goes directly to the Iranian manufacture of EFPs used against U.S. forces in Iraq or, by extension, Afghanistan.

He said he’d get back to me on the first part of the question but added that the “claim about EFPs is consistent, it says they were created in Iran, which they were. Now, most insurgents have the ability to make them. But the originals came from Iran.”

Schmeltzer might have been suggesting that VoteVets never claimed Iran was directly supplying weapons to hurt our troops, but the ad certainly insinuates that linkage. Soltz also made the charge more directly on his MSNBC appearance on April 8.

I am going to assume then, that in part, the basic premise of the advertisement was culled from this August 2009 report [.pdf] by the Center for American Progress, which is displayed prominently on the VoteVets.org Web site as an accompanying resource in the clean-energy campaign:

“America’s oil dependence has other indirect but no less serious impacts on U.S. interests. For example, high rates of American consumption drive up global demand for oil, which fuels lofty prices and helps to fund and to sustain undemocratic and corrupt regimes. Because of this anti-Western nations such as Iran – with whom the United States by law cannot trade or buy oil – benefit regardless of who the end buyer of the fuel is. …

“Reducing U.S. oil demand in the world market would be a big financial hit to Iran and other unfriendly petrostates.”

The Iranian Connection

Giraldi called this linking of the production and deployment of IEDs to U.S. consumption of oil “largely baloney.”

“The IED technology is simple and has been adapted everywhere from Northern Ireland (where it originated) to today’s Afghanistan. There is no evidence whatsoever that money used to buy oil goes to terrorists (we are funding them directly through bribes paid to move our equipment and supplies in AfPak) and that Iran is profiting thereby and killing our soldiers. What a load of nonsense!”

“There has never been any proof that the Iranian government has any connection with EFPs or other militarized activity in Iraq or Afghanistan. Zero. Nada,” complained war correspondent Dahr Jamail in an e-mail exchange. “It seems funny they are resurrecting a long-since defunct Bush propaganda tactic … seems to me like they could use a new PR person – someone a little more savvy.”

The military of course has been trying to establish such a link for years. In 2008, the U.S. captured several Iranian agents associated with the so-called Iranian “Special Groups” in Iraq. Also in 2008, military officials said they had evidence that sources within Iran were supplying rogue Shia militias with EFPs, while in 2007, President George W. Bush charged that the Iranian Quds Force, a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, was causing unrest and supporting the insurgency in Iraq.

Many of the broader linkages have been maintained and promulgated to this day through neoconservative think-tanks and publications such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, The Long War Journal, and The Weekly Standard.

However, a report this March [.pdf] by the Congressional Research Service found that while Iran maintained a high and complicated level of political influence in Iraq, the charges regarding its connection to militant activity over the border were simmering down.

Meanwhile, links between Iran and EFP attacks against Westerners in Afghanistan are tenuous. In fact, despite reports about Iranian-made weapons in the hands of the Taliban, Gen. Stanley McChrystal was forced to tell reporters just four days ago that he has no evidence the Iranian government is channeling weapons or fighters into Afghanistan.

But back to the VoteVets advertisement.

It is so hard to stomach because not only does it indicate the group’s willingness to compromise its standards of truth in order to win over votes in a problematic legislative battle, but it is cynically using our feelings about veterans and our fears of war to do it.

Which is disappointing, since Soltz was one of the first people with Iraq credentials to weigh in publicly on the unexpected resignation of Navy Adm. William Fallon in 2008. Fallon, who was considered one of the military’s most important bulwarks against a neoconservative drive toward war with Iran, said he felt he had to resign after his views were showcased in an April 2008 article in Esquire.

This is what Soltz had to say at the time:

“Let’s call a spade a spade here. Admiral Fallon has not so quietly had severe disagreements with the White House on our Iraq policy, how it impacts the region and global war on terror, for which he is largely responsible, and warning against war with Iran.

“Just one year into his tenure as CENTCOM commander, Fallon resigned today, and you can read into it nothing more than a resignation in protest. …

“Another voice of reason bites the dust.”

Please, Soltz, don’t let VoteVets.org be yet another voice of reason to bite the dust. Continue to elect Democratic veterans to Congress if you must. Keep fighting for energy independence, for sure. But leave the neoconservative appeals and the gratuitous use of veterans out of it. As Gareth Porter said so succinctly, it may be “the politically clever thing to do, but never make hash out of the truth – it’ll come back to bite you.”

April 19, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Who’s behind the Gates memo leak?

By Paul Woodward on April 18, 2010

The New York Times reports on a “secret three-page memorandum” that Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent to National Security Adviser Gen James Jones in January, warning that “the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability,” according to unnamed officials who leaked the information.

The narrative line here which is presumably the line which was being fed to the New York Times‘ ever-obliging reporters, was that the there are gaps in the US strategy for dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It’s far from clear that this was actually the thrust of Gates’ memo.

[I]n his memo, Mr. Gates wrote of a variety of concerns, including the absence of an effective strategy should Iran choose the course that many government and outside analysts consider likely: Iran could assemble all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon — fuel, designs and detonators — but stop just short of assembling a fully operational weapon.

In that case, Iran could remain a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while becoming what strategists call a “virtual” nuclear weapons state.

To say that the US lacks a strategy here, is itself a statement so vague as to be meaningless. It lacks a strategy to prevent Iran becoming a virtual nuclear state? Or it lacks a strategy for dealing with Iran in such an eventuality? Or it lacks a strategy for dealing with the fact that it may not actually know whether Iran has acquired this form of nuclear capability?

There is no indication in this account that the New York Times reporters saw the memo (and it seems reasonable to infer that they did not), so as is so often the case, it’s likely that the most significant detail in this story is the one that will not be revealed: the identity of the senior official who is the primary source of the narrative.

Was it Dennis Ross? He’d certainly fit the profile of someone in the administration who probably feels like it’s time to change the subject and shift attention away from Israel and back to Iran. As another US official recently told Laura Rozen, “He [Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests.”

Background:

Who Is Dennis Ross? – Aletho News | March 8, 2009

April 19, 2010 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Barak: “The Only Way out of Iran Crises is a Bold Israeli Move”

Al-Manar TV – 19/04/2010

Israel Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on Monday that the only way out of the current “stalemate” with Iran is a bold Israeli move, adding that he felt that Iran did not pose an “immediate existential threat” to Israel.

Barak also responded to remarks by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said Sunday that the military options available to Barack Obama would go “a long way” to delaying Iran’s nuclear progress but may not set the country back long-term. He called a military strike his “last option” right now.

Barak told Israel Radio that the time has come for sanctions with a specific deadline “in order to facilitate what Mullen’s remarks imply.”

“I prefer to refrain from speculation about the future,” Barak added. “Right now, Iran does not pose an existential threat to Israel. If Iran becomes nuclear, it will spark an arms race in the Middle East. This region is very sensitive because of the oil flow, the region is important to the entire world. The fact that Iran is not an immediate threat, but could evolve into one, means that we can’t let ourselves fall asleep.”

On Sunday, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, releasing a statement about a secret memorandum he sent to the White House in January, said he identified “next steps in our defense planning process” that would be reviewed by decision makers in the coming weeks and months.

“There should be no confusion by our allies and adversaries that the United States is properly and energetically focused on this question and prepared to act across a broad range of contingencies in support of our interests,” Gates said in the statement, issued to refute characterizations of the memo in a New York Times report.

April 19, 2010 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Israel’s stooges battle for British votes

By Stuart Littlewood | April 17, 2010

We can already see how disastrously the US election turned out, not just for Americans but the rest of us also. “The US president is simply the voice of the Zionist parasite,” writes a friend in Norway. “It is sickening and frightening that Obama is seen toeing the Zionist line.

“Zionism has the US administration and other western governments by the balls.”

Well, that’s certainly the way it looks. Last month Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu slapped America in the face by approving more illegal settlements during vice-president Joe Biden’s visit. What did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton do? She repeated the pathetic mantra: “We have an absolute commitment to Israel’s security. We have a close unshakeable bond between the United States and Israel and between the American and Israeli people”.

Clinton completed her surrender to the Israeli terror machine by sharing the AIPAC Conference platform with a triumphant Netanyahu.

Whereupon over half of America’s lawmakers topped Clinton’s performance by signing a letter committing to the US’s “unbreakable” bond with the racist regime.

Nine months earlier, speaking in a BBC interview, Obama said he believed the US was “able to get serious negotiations back on track” between Israel and the Palestinians. And when asked about Israel’s defiance when called on to halt construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, he urged patience. “Diplomacy is always a matter of a long hard slog. It’s never a matter of quick results.”

The fact is, diplomacy doesn’t work with the Israelis. Everyone knows the problem: Israel’s contempt for international law and UN resolutions. And now we see Obama’s contempt too. In this wobbly leader’s mind Israel is somehow exempt from the laws, conventions, codes of conduct and respect for the rights of others that apply to everyone else in the civilised world.

Forcing negotiations is immoral

And Obama should know better than to keep harping on about peace negotiations. It is absurd to put a weak party and a strong party together and expect fair results when the strong party is in permanent occupation and has its military boot on the weak party’s neck.

It is immoral to expect the weak party to negotiate while the strong party is in flagrant breach of international law, commits acts of piracy, maintains a crippling blockade, carries out daily air strikes on civilians and continues to steal the weak party’s land and resources.

It is immoral for sponsors of negotiations to be so partisan as to refuse to recognize the democratically elected representatives of the weak party or its right to self-determination and territorial integrity.

It is immoral to force negotiations without first establishing a level playing field and ensuring both sides are compliant with international law. The international community has shirked this responsibility for decades, not because the peoples of the community of nations lack the will but because their leaders are gutless and corrupt.

Then there’s the scandal of the US government’s aid to Israel which runs at nearly $3 billion annually and totals well over $100 billion since 1949. The money helps pay for Israel’s costly occupation of Palestinian territory, its F-16s, helicopter gun-ships, tanks, ordnance, Caterpillar bulldozers, and all the other tools of military oppression and territorial grand theft.

Israel gets more $billions in indirect aid – military support, loan write-offs, rich technology transfers and special grants. Before George W Bush left office he agreed an assistance package of $30 billion over the next ten years.

So the US taxpayer has been cheerfully funding Israeli operations to destroy Palestinian infrastructure (which in many cases has been paid for by British, EU and – yes – US taxpayers) and bring the whole civil society to its knees.

Most of this aid violates US laws that stipulate US-supplied weapons can only be used for “legitimate self-defense” and military assistance is prohibited to any country that engages in “a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights”. Military assistance is also banned to any government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or allow inspection of its nuclear facilities. But thanks to the “unbreakable” bond with Israel these inconvenient laws might as well not exist.

Israelis fiercely attack any attempt to ‘de-legitimise’ their ill-gotten gains while more and more people argue that the state of Israel had no legitimacy in the first place. Nevertheless the Zionist menace now has nuclear fangs and the capability to target most European cities… and, as we have seen, has no sense of restraint whatever.

Gee, thanks, America. Before you go accepting any more peace prizes, Obama, how about bringing to heel this monster the US has been nurturing?

Israel’s ‘Voices’ compete for British vote

Here in Britain we have our own version of AIPAC. The Foreign Office has been under Zionist influence for decades. Our most important security bodies – the Intelligence & Security Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Defence Committee – are headed by Israel flag-wavers. They have embedded themselves in nearly ever nook and cranny of parliamentary life.

Right now these stooges are battling for our votes in a general election.

Before the election campaign the main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, were so wedded to the Zionist cause that both wished to change our laws to protect Israeli leaders from arrest on war crimes charges and provide them with a safe haven in Britain.

Now they keep very quiet about their pro-Israel antics, no doubt hoping the question won’t be brought under the public spotlight or need explaining.

Labour has been in power 13 years and is now under Blair’s successor Gordon Brown, a Zionist sympathizer and patron of the Jewish National Fund. The party’s 115-page manifesto barely mentions the fate of the Holy Land except to say: “We support the creation of a viable Palestinian state that can live alongside a secure Israel.” Note that it’s a secure Israel but only a viable Palestine. Israel must remain comfortably secure while continuing its ethnic cleansing and thieving.

The Conservative Party is favourite to win the election – or was until its leader, David “I’m-a-Zionist” Cameron, flunked a televised leaders’ debate. Cameron too is a dutiful patron of the JNF. His party’s 118-page manifesto says nothing about Britain’s responsibility towards the Palestinians apart from promising support for a two state solution to the Middle East Peace Process. That’s all, full stop.

80% of Conservative MPs and MEPs, it is claimed, are passionate admirers of racist Israel. But they don’t shout it from the rooftops at election time. No, they are furtive because they know deep down that it is a grubby, indefensible position and the public would react with revulsion if the party’s allegiance to a foreign military power that makes war on Christian communities was exposed in the mainstream media.

Sad to say, then, there is no sign of Labour or the Conservatives deviating from the path of betrayal.

Thankfully a third party, the Liberal Democrats, is emerging strongly. Its leader, Nick Clegg, is no rabid Zionist though readers will remember he recently sacked Baroness Jenny Tonge to appease the Israel lobby. However, the Liberal Democrats at least believe Britain and the EU must put pressure on Israel and Egypt to end the blockade of Gaza and talk of borders “which are secure and based on the situation before the 1967 conflict”.

This party looks less corruptible than the others and less likely to worship at the altar of Zionism. Not being considered serious contenders till now, Clegg and his team probably haven’t been groomed by the US administration’s spivs and pimps. So we can expect big efforts to discredit them in the days ahead.

In my simple way I see a glimmer of hope here.

When a proper history comes to be written, Americans will struggle to explain how the most powerful nation on earth was so easily conned and mugged for countless billions of tax dollars to finance the ambitions of a bunch of extremists bent on defiling the Holy Land and spreading their tentacles into every crevice of the western world.

The British also will have some explaining to do.

Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. For further information please visit www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk

April 17, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

China ups Iran gas sale amid US ire

Press TV – April 17, 2010

China’s plans to increase gasoline exports to Iran will effectively thwart US efforts to choke off the country’s energy sector, a recent report reveals.

Forbes reported on Friday that state-owned China National Petroleum Corp.’s trading unit, ChinaOil, has already sent 600,000 barrels of gasoline to Iran in two $55 million shipments. According to the article, the trading unit of China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec), Unipec, has also agreed to sell some 250,000 barrels to Iran through a third party in Singapore.

The report comes at a time when Washington is exerting pressure to halt Iran’s low-level nuclear activities by targeting the country’s gasoline trade.

A bipartisan slate of US senators and lawmakers, tabled a motion in April 2009 that advocated tough sanctions against countries that sell refined petroleum, including gasoline, to Iran. The Islamic Republic has been under US sanctions ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution toppled a US-backed monarch in Iran.

Tehran says Washington has long been using sanctions, which normally pressure ordinary people in a country, as a tool to force independent nations bow to its “illogical demands.”

On Friday, Iranian Oil Minister Masoud Mirkazemi warned that US-led sanctions against Iran will fail to achieve their desired results as the country has managed to become self-sufficient in oil production and products. Mirkazemi further added that Iran has become “quite the expert in tackling sanctions imposed by Western countries” over the past three decades.

April 17, 2010 Posted by | Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

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