The Case for the Impeachment of Barack Obama
Same Crimes, Same Misdemeanors
By DAVE LINDORFF | April 2, 2010
Back in 2005-06, I wrote a book, The Case for Impeachment, in which I made the argument that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as other key figures in the Bush/Cheney administration–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales–should be impeached for war crimes, as well as crimes against the Constitution of the United States.
These days, when I mention the book’s title, people sometimes ask, half in jest, whether I’m referring to the current president, Barack Obama.
Sadly, it is time to say, just 14 months into the current term of this new president, that yes, this president, and some of his subordinates, are also guilty of impeachable crimes–including many of the same ones committed by Bush and Cheney.
Let’s start with the war in Afghanistan, which Obama has taken full ownership of with an escalation that will bring the number of US troops in that country (not counting mercenaries hired by the Pentagon and CIA) to 100,000 by this August.
The president has authorized the use of Predator drone aircraft for a program of bombing conducted against Pakistan which has illegally expanded the Afghan War into another country without any authorization from Congress. These pilotless drones are known to kill far more innocent bystanders than enemy targets, making them fundamentally illegal on principle as weapons. Furthermore, this wave of attacks in Pakistan is a war of aggression against another nation if the word “war” is to have any meaning at all, and as such it is illegal under the UN Charter. Indeed initiating a war of aggression against a country which does not pose an immediate threat to the invader is described in the Charter and in the Nuremberg Tribunal Charter as the gravest of all war crimes.
The president, as commander in chief, has also, in collusion with Attorney Eric Holder, blocked any prosecution of those who authorized and perpetrated torture against captives in the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, and the so-called War on Terror–notably Federal Appeals Court Judge Jay Baybee, and Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo, who as Justice Department attorneys authored the legal briefs justifying torture– and has in fact continued to permit the application of torture against captives. All of this is in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which as a signed set of treaties, are part of the law of the United States. Under those treaties, failure on the part of those up the chain of command to halt or to punish those who commit torture are themselves guilty of the crime of torture.
As commander in chief, President Obama has also overseen a strategy in Afghanistan of expanded attacks on civilians in Afghanistan. As in Iraq under the Bush administration, this current phase of the war in Afghanistan is seeing more civilians killed than enemy combatants, because of the widespread use of weapons like helicopter gunships, aerial bombardment, fragmentation bombs, etc., as well as a tactic of night raids on housing compounds where insurgents are suspected of hiding–raids that frequently lead to the deaths of many women and children and innocent men. It is significant that even the recent execution-style slaying of nine students, aged 11-18, by US-led forces, has not led to an investigation or prosecution of a individual. Rather, the incident is being covered up and ignored, with the clear acquiescence of the White House and the leadership at the Pentagon.
It is also widely believed that under the command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who is known to have directed a large-scale death-squad operation in Iraq before moving to his current position, a similar death-squad campaign of assassination is being conducted now in Afghanistan–a campaign that like the notorious Phoenix Program in the 1960s in Vietnam, is almost certainly resulting in the deaths of many innocent Afghans.
Domestically, the president has continued to allow the policy of detention without trial of hundreds of captives in Guantanamo Bay and other prisons, including Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and his director of national security has even stated that it is the policy of this administration that American citizens deemed by the administration to be enemy combatants or terrorists may be targeted for summary execution. Such officially sanctioned state murder is a blatant violation of the Constitution’s insistence that every American has a right to a presumption of innocence and to a trial by a jury of his or her peers.
The president has also continued and in some ways even expanded the Bush/Cheney administration’s program of warrantless spying by the National Security Agency on the electronic communications of millions of Americans. A part of that program, the monitoring of communications of a now defunct Islamic charity, was just declared illegal by a federal judge in a case that was brought against the Bush/Cheney administration, but which continued to be defended by the current administration. There has not been a decision as yet by the Obama administration about whether to appeal that decision. While the case in question does not represent a crime by the Obama administration, it is clear that it only represents the very tip of the huge iceberg of domestic spying, and the administration’s vigorous efforts to shut down this case or to win it are clear evidence that the NSA is continuing to do the same thing on a vast scale. In fact, the only reason this case even got to trial is because of a government error that resulted in a memo describing the monitoring being mailed inadvertently to the victims of the spying.
While we’re at it, I would also suggest that there is ample evidence to call for the impeachment of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who appears, as head of the New York Federal Reserve, to have colluded in an effort to cover up a massive fraud at Lehman Brothers, and who has subsequently as Treasurer, participated in unprecedented giveaways of taxpayer funds to several of the country’s largest banking institutions.
The above enumeration of criminal and Constitutional transgressions makes it clear that this president, like his predecessor, has, almost since his first day in office, continued down a road of criminal and unconstitutional behavior that threatens the survival of Constitutional government in the United States.
Let me state it simply: President Barack Obama, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Treasury Secretary Geithner, should be impeached for war crimes and high crimes against the Constitution.
Of course, having watched the Democratic Congress shamelessly duck its solemn duty to initiate impeachment proceedings against President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and their criminal subordinates for two years, I have no illusions about that same Democratic Congress allowing an impeachment bill to be filed against this president.
Having said that, I think it is important to at least make the point publicly that this president, like the one before, deserves to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com
Why there is no mainstream investigative journalism about the Israel lobby
By Philip Weiss on March 30, 2010
Today on my drive back to NY from PA I listened to some fine journalism about religion and politics, and it highlighted everything that is wrong with our coverage of Israel/Palestine.
The piece I listened to was an hour’s conversation on Radio Times (WHYY Philadelphia) about the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church. I don’t follow this issue closely, but let me lay out the roles that the different players assumed during the long conversation:
–The two experts on the show were both Catholic writers. Their attitude can be summed up: They want this scandal to come out and be addressed, but they don’t want it to hurt the church. At one point one of the writers actually said that Catholic writers have an obligation to respect their “corporate identity” and not to behave like investigative reporters, but to respect the good things that the church does, and to get the full context.
–The host was Marty Moss-Coane. She was extremely professional, but assertive, skeptical of the writers’ piety: she took up the side of our next two players. And I would note that (according to that link) Moss-Coane is not a Catholic, is married to a Jewish guy and is a former lefty.
–Offstage was the New York Times, which has recently done investigative pieces suggesting that Pope Benedict when a bishop or cardinal in Munich was informed of a pedophilia case in the ’80s and played some role in its being covered up. The two Catholic writers on this show kept dissing the New York Times coverage, saying that it was zealous and investigative; and in other ways they echoed the Pope’s recent warning that Catholics should not be “intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion.”
–The final players in the drama were the listeners. Several called. They were all outraged at the Catholic church. One said that life as an altar boy had hurt him in ways he did not want to talk about but is still coming to terms with. Another spoke of the culture of coverup. Another man said that celibacy was the issue.
Now let me get to the central dynamic of the show. The Catholic writers were performing damage control; still, Moss-Coane bored in on them, and whenever a caller went further than she had gone, for instance, about sexuality and celibacy, she promptly echoed the caller’s point. She stood up for the Times coverage. She asked, wisely, Is the church treating a crime as a sin? She said, What signal does it send people when a former bishop who played an active role in covering up a sex scandal is awarded a sinecure? (The writers said, Well it’s a giant step down for the bishop…) She said, What about what that caller just asked, How is this affecting congregations?
And to every push by Moss-Coane, the Catholic writers pushed back and defended the church. And they would: because they love the church, they see it as a force for good.
Why do I think this was fine journalism? Because the host was behaving as a good broadcast journalist with smart questions, the New York Times was behaving like a good investigative zealous newspaper when it smells a disgraceful scandal, and the listeners were sharp and engaged, pushing the story.
Now I hate the pedophilia scandal, I think it’s a good reason for the Catholic hierarchy to collapse, for congregations to implode. I think it’s wrapped up in celibacy. When the Catholic writers protested that the memo the Times uncovered from the ’80s (describing slap-on-the-knuckles discipline in a pedophilia case, and the future Pope was cc’d) doesn’t implicate the Pope, because he was just part of a “culture,” I think, Don’t b.s. me. This was not a routine memo. And isn’t there a problem with an institution that wakes up 30 years after the fact to the idea that it’s not good to damage children?
The significance of this piece for me was wholly about the journalism of the Israel lobby. The central problem in that story is that the roles of the Journalist and the New York Times are being played by the Catholic writers! The very parochial attitudes that Moss-Coane found so distasteful in the Catholic story are exhibited by countless journalists when it comes to Israel. Because they are Jews who have an investment in the emotional goodness of the Jewish state. Yes, people like Dan Schorr and Wolf Blitzer and Tom Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg and Ethan Bronner, but also a lot of fellow travelers whose investment is not as well known to me. And they all get away with their piety all the time!
In the Israel lobby case we have an allegation now several years old that is way more serious than the Catholic scandal: the allegation that the forcible conflation of American and Israeli interests is damaging our country’s reputation. It is a form of corruption as deep and “cultural” as the Catholic mess Moss-Coane is investigating, but this time the broker-journalists are implicated in the culture. The former executive editor of the New York Times, Max Frankel, is vetting editorials to protect the Jewish state; my old newspaper the New York Observer is telling me to take a hike because I want to write about the Israel lobby; the Atlantic is killing Walt and Mearsheimer; Wolf Blitzer and Dan Senor used to work for the lobby and are now all over cable; and Jeff Goldberg used to be an Israeli soldier and is interviewed on Meet the Press by David Gregory, who is studying Hebrew. Ethan Bronner’s son goes into the IDF, and Bronner is the lead reporter for the New York Times???!! And on it goes, it never stops.
I am saying that all the f—ing excuses that the two Catholic writers made for their beloved church are being made all the time for the Jewish state by our journalists; it is in the culture of our journalism; and meanwhile there is no Moss-Coane to jump on them and keep them honest. I wonder if she’s ever covered the Israel/Palestine situation with half the honesty she covered the Catholic scandal, let alone the question of how it is corrupting our politics. I bet she hasn’t. Has she ever had on Palestinians to talk about the separate roadways in the West Bank, and then asked, why Americans are supporting Jim Crow conditions?
Well you get the point. And again, the New York Times, which should be printing the Pentagon Papers of the Iraq war, which should be interrogating neoconservatives about their crazy theory that invading Baghdad would take the Arabs’ minds off Israel/Palestine, which should be asking John Mearsheimer what his evidence is that oil had nothing to do with the disastrous decision to go to war, which should be telling readers why Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban give so much money to the political parties, and asking whether Adelson’s $300,000 gift in 2000 had anything to do with the hiring of Douglas “One-Jerusalem” Feith to a big job at the Pentagon where he would pass cooked data to Congress– the Times is doing no investigative journalism about the lobby at all. (In fact the best investigative work is being done by Grant Smith at IRMEP; and he’s marginalized…).
And now we have General Petraeus saying that the special relationship is hurting us; and Obama is trying to take Netanyahu on; and still these powerful men are getting no goddamn cover from the mainstream press in the form of investigative journalism that arouses the public about the abuses. If I were the Catholic church, I’d be mad.
Turkey opposes Iran sanctions, blasts Israel
Press TV – March 29, 2010
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has once again dismissed sanctions as a proper solution to the Iranian nuclear issue.
Erdogan said at a Monday joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Ankara that he was opposed to new sanctions against Iran. He said diplomacy was still the best possible means of solving the issue.
“We are of the view that sanction is not a healthy path and… that the best route is diplomacy.”
Erdogan then wondered why the international community refused to impose sanctions against the Middle East’s sole nuclear weapons power, in an apparent allusion to Israel.
“We are against nuclear weapons in our region. But is there another country in our region that has nuclear weapons? Yes, there is. And have they been subjected to sanctions? No,” Erdogan said.
The US, which accuses Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, has been lobbying for more UN Security Council (UNSC) sanctions against Tehran.
Turkey, a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, is among countries that are opposed to imposing sanctions on Iran. Ankara has made it clear that any coercive measure against Tehran over its nuclear work would be of no avail.
This is while Merkel, whose country is working with the five permanent UNSC members over the Iranian nuclear issue, called on Turkey to support fresh sanctions against Tehran.
“We would be happy if Turkey votes in April on the Iran issue together with the United States and the European Union,” she said.
Iran says any punitive measures against the country are legally baseless as Tehran’s nuclear work is being fully monitored by the UN nuclear watchdog.
Israel unveils “green” strategy to defeat enemies
Plan to make oil redundant in a decade
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth | 30 March 2010
Uzi Landau, the national infrastructures minister, outlined a vision of a world without oil this week to Israel’s most loyal supporters in Washington as he searched for wealthy American-Jewish investors and White House support for the strategy.
His message was: “The West is addicted to oil, and so is bound by states that support terrorism… Whoever wants to fight radical Islam and terrorist organizations should know that by purchasing gasoline, he’s giving terrorists increased motivation.”
Analysts say the plan’s chief goals are to cripple the large oil-producing Gulf states, particularly Iran, which is seen as Israel’s main rival in the region, and resistance groups that oppose Israel’s long-term occupation of Palestinian land.
“Israel hopes that by repackaging the ‘war on terror’ in this way it can gain sympathy in the West and deflect increasing expectations that it make concessions to solve the conflict with the Palestinians,” said Avner de Shalit, a politics professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Thousands of delegates at last week’s annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in the US, heard Mr Landau describe the Israeli strategy as the best way to win the “war on terror”.
The conference was also attended by many senior US politicians, including administration officials such as Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state.
Without Arab money from oil, Mr Landau argued, Iran would fade as a regional power and “terror groups” like Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon would cease to exist. Instead, Israel could serve as an alternative “powerhouse” in the Middle East for environmentally friendly energy sources.
Both Israel and the US are determined to isolate Iran, which they claim is trying to develop a nuclear warhead to rival Israel’s own large nuclear arsenal. The White House is seeking to impose stiff sanctions, whereas Israel is believed to favour a military strike.
Israel failed to crush Hamas and Hizbullah, two resistance groups that are backed by Iran, during attacks on Gaza last year and on Lebanon in 2006.
In the session – entitled “Breaking the habit: Can US-Israel cooperation reduce our oil dependence?” – Mr Landau appealed to the US to join Israel in eradicating oil dependency as a way to defeat terror.
As he left Israel for the conference, he told local reporters he would try to persuade his audience that “by taking away its primary source of funding, we can defeat terrorism without firing a single bullet”.
Mr Landau is known to be acting on the direct instructions of Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who announced back in October a “national project” to end the world’s reliance on oil within a decade.
At the same time Mr Netanyahu gave responsibility to the National Economic Council, a think-tank inside his office, to develop “breakthrough” inventions that would eradicate the world’s need for oil and coal-based electricity.
“Dependence on fossil fuels strengthens the dark regimes that encourage instability and fund terror with their petrodollars,” Mr Netanyahu told the cabinet as he unveiled the plan.
Gideon Bromberg, head of the Israeli green group Friends of the Earth, said Israel had a very poor record on environmental issues, but that he welcomed Mr Netanyahu’s belated interest “even if it is for the wrong reasons”.
“He is an opportunist and recognizes that oil brings power,” said Mr Bromberg. “If you can find an alternative to it, you make yourself more powerful and make your enemies weaker.”
Haaretz has reported that Mr Netanyahu also hopes that new green technologies will allow Israel to strengthen its ties with China, which the government believes is the rising global power and less interested in the Palestinians and Israel’s occupation than the US and Europe.
Although Israel has developed new solar energy and water technologies, Mr Netanyahu is reported to want a revolution in fuels used in transport, which accounts for a large proportion of oil use. Israeli companies are already involved in researching battery technologies for cars.
There are strong indications that Israel’s green technologies drive is related to plans developed by US neo-conservative groups in the build-up to the attack on Iraq. Mr Netanyahu is known to have maintained close ties to neo-conservatives in the US.
Some of these groups lobbied the previous administration of George W. Bush to invade Iraq so that its oil fields could be privatized and the international markets flooded with oil.
According to the reasoning of officials at one influential think-tank, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, privatization would drive down oil prices, break up the Saudi-backed OPEC oil cartel, and drain money away from “terror groups” and radical Islamic education.
Some neo-cons regarded this policy as particularly beneficial to Israel, because it would starve Hamas and Hizbullah of funds and take the pressure off Tel Aviv to end the occupation.
In practice, however, the occupation of Iraq did not help Israel. Funding to Hizbullah and Hamas instead appears to be provided by Iran.
The influence of neo-conservative think-tanks on Mr Landau has been indicated in recent weeks by the decision to share the stage with leading neo-conservatives such as James Woolsey, a former head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
At a debate on ending global oil dependency at Israel’s annual “national security” convention in Herzliya in February, attended by most of the Israeli cabinet, Mr Woolsey urged the destruction of OPEC, claiming that Saudi Arabia controlled 90 per cent of Islamic education.
He said that when people filled up their cars “you are helping to finance the people who finance hatred, incitement and terror”.
That view was echoed by other participants.
In December the United Nations criticized Israel for its poor record on using renewable energy sources. It ranked bottom for using solar sources to generate electricity, behind countries such as Senegal, Eritrea and Mexico, as well as Western countries with only a few hours of sunlight.
A government watchdog, Israel’s state comptroller, issued a report the same month arguing that Israel had not taken even basic measures to address climate change.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jkcook.net.
‘Dennis Ross more sensitive to Netanyahu than US interests’ (Surprised?)
By Philip Weiss on March 28, 2010
My post last night on Dennis Ross [copied below] was right on time. Laura Rozen at politico reports that Ross is at the center of a battle within the Obama administration about how nice to be to Israel. The piece includes a frank statement of confused loyalty:
“He [Ross] seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests,” one U.S. official told POLITICO Saturday. “And he doesn’t seem to understand that this has become bigger than Jerusalem but is rather about the credibility of this Administration.”
Let me repeat myself. This guy is the living embodiment of the Israel lobby. He was till recently chairman of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, which opposes intermarriage, among other charming and important campaigns. Aaron David Miller said that the U.S. too often acted as “Israel’s lawyer” at Camp David; and that meant Ross. Dan Kurtzer’s book, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace, said that the US team lacked diversity and cross-cultural expertise– again, ethnocentric Ross. Kurtzer and co-author Scott Lasensky write: “’The perception always was that Dennis [Ross] started from the Israeli bottom line,’ said a prominent Arab negotiator, ‘that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to the Arabs.’” No wonder Kurtzer lamented “the deference that some policymakers pay to Israeli domestic political concerns. Israel plays an outsized role in U.S. politics and diplomacy…”
The lobby; and Ross denied the existence of the lobby when it was under attack, because it was his own power base.
Netanyahu’s AIPAC speech last week was so shocking that it has rung in a new era for the lobby. Basically: the F.U. period, overplaying its hand in plain sight of the American people. The (in)ability of an American administration to free itself of Ross is a real test of the perseverance of the lobby in our politics.
More on Ross: this was in the original RSS feed on the Politico piece but is not in the published version:
Ross, the U.S. official continued, “starts from the premise that U.S. and Israeli interests overlap by something close to 100 percent. And if we diverge, then, he says, the Arabs increase their demands unreasonably. Since we can’t have demanding Arabs, therefore we must rush to close gaps with the Israelis, no matter what the cost to our broader credibility.”
This is the old neocon delusion, in order to support their loyalty to Israel’s interests: there is no difference between our interests and Israel’s. A preposterous assertion, for any two states.
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Dennis Ross opposed a tenet of the new Obama Middle East policy
By Philip Weiss on March 27, 2010
Dennis Ross personifies the Israel lobby. That gives him his power, that’s why Obama has him in his administration. Putting Ross in a policy job–the Iran portfolio–makes the lobby happy. And Obama has to keep the lobby happy.
It would be a sign of real independence if Obama could lose this guy whom Bush I and Clinton couldn’t lose either. Here Matt Berkman reminds us that Dennis Ross wrote a book with David Makovsky just a year or so back in which he argued vehemently against an idea that is becoming a tenet of the Obama doctrine in the Middle East: linkage, the (plain as the nose on your face) idea that the Israel/Palestine conflict is linked to America’s fortunes in the Middle East.
So Ross is against a key principle of the Obama administration! And he works for him… Go figure! Berkman:
“Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East” devoted a chapter to debunking the “myth” that Israel’s violent occupation of Palestinian land foments challenges for U.S. foreign policy in the region.
“Of all the policy myths that have kept us from making real progress in the Middle East, one stands out for its impact and longevity: the idea that if only the Palestinian conflict were solved, all other Middle East conflicts would melt away,” Ross and Makovsky wrote. “This is the argument of ‘linkage.’”
Makovsky, a frequent commentator on U.S.-Israel relations who never fails to recapitulate this argument, launched into it earlier this month during testimony for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “There are no strict linkages between the Palestinian and Iranian issues,” he said. “Regardless of progress on peace, Iran will seek a nuclear weapon. Moreover, senior Arab security officials say privately that they do not see progress on peace as decisive in influencing Arab efforts to halt Iran in any way.”
Of course, formulated in this way, the “linkage” thesis is an easily refutable straw man. No reasonable observer of the Middle East believes that “all other Middle East conflicts” will “melt away” if the U.S. succeeds in brokering a peace agreement. Nor has anyone ever contended that resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict would “decisively” impact U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran, or that Iran would immediately abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons should the long-suffering Palestinians achieve national self-determination.
But by concocting and then launching an assault on spurious iterations of the “linkage” idea, hawkish Zionists like Ross and Makovsky are attempting to inoculate Israel’s settlement and occupation policies from any criticism that might implicate them in the degeneration of regional security dynamics.
So Ross was against settlement evacuation too? Maybe Obama should blow him off for dinner, or can him.
Netanyahu to Ask Obama for Bunker Buster Bombs against Iran
Al-Manar, 21/03/2010
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will press the American administration during his upcoming visit to Washington to release sophisticated bunker-busting bombs needed for a possible strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, the Sunday Times reported in its website.
Netanyahu will leave for the United States on Sunday evening in order to attend a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He is also expected to meet with senior administration officials.
In Washington, Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. A meeting with President Barack Obama is in the works.
The Scotland Herald reported last week that hundreds of powerful US “bunker-buster” bombs were shipped from California to the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in preparation for a possible attack on Iran. The newspaper quoted a manifest from the US navy as saying that the shipment included 387 “Blu” bombs used for blasting hardened or underground structures.
Experts told the paper that the ammunition was being put in place for an assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Although Diego Garcia is part of the British Indian Ocean Territory, the Herald said, it is used by the US as a military base under an agreement made in 1971. According to the newspaper, the preparations were being made by the US military, but it would be up to President Obama to make the final decision.
The London Weekly said that for the first time since Operation Cast Lead against Gaza, Israel has agreed to ease the blockade on the Strip, discuss all core issues during the proximity talks, with the condition of reaching final conclusions only in direct talks with the PA. It added that Netanyahu will seek returns for the concessions, asking Washington to provide the IAF with the ‘bunker-buster’ bombs.
Without proof, Israel and the West accuse Iran of using its enrichment program to build a nuclear bomb, a charge Tehran firmly denies. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued on Saturday a Persian New Year’s address to Iranians, in which he said that Iran would resist Western pressure even more determinedly in the coming year.
Columbia University Law School ‘Lawfare’ Project for Israel
By David Samel | March 14, 2010
On March 11, I attended the all-day Israel love-fest entitled “Lawfare”, the term coined to describe any effort to hold Israel accountable to international law. Max Blumenthal already has provided readers* with an excellent summation of the afternoon proceedings. I found particularly noteworthy his report that Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke asked Columbia Law Dean David Schizer, one of the conference chairs, why no opposing speakers had been invited, and Schizer lamely responded that one or two speakers had been invited but were unable to attend. The principal organizer of the event, Brooke Goldstein, lined up 15 or 20 speakers who shared a collective viewpoint that Israel should be protected from any legal challenge. Goldstein herself addressed the assembly and voiced the same perspective. The notion that she, or someone else, invited one or two contrary speakers for balance is simply absurd. Certainly Goldstein did not pretend that there was any attempt to be even-handed. If Schizer wanted to participate in this one-sided affair, he should at least be candid about its nature.
Alan Dershowitz himself was not present, but his inconsistent approach to the legal framework of the conflict hovered over the proceedings. Dershowitz insists that Israel is almost completely blameless under existing international law, but just to be safe, he has proposed modifications, such as a “continuum of civilianity” that makes certain civilians more killable than others, and “worst first,” that provides immunity from international law for all but the single worst human rights offender; everyone else gets a pass until the worst is in the dock. Similar themes were repeated throughout the day. Israel has every right to defend itself, even including actions that surely will result in civilian deaths, and by the way, how dare anyone suggest that Israel intentionally kills civilians.
Interestingly, the most well-received speaker was former UN ambassador John Bolton, who adamantly insisted that the US, and Israel are entitled to disregard international law completely and act according to their own whims. He drew the biggest ovations of the day with remarks like “I believe in disproportionate force,” and “If other countries want to subordinate themselves to international law, be my guest.” He disparaged the authority of any international code or organization, saying that the US (and Israel, by implication) need not say, “Mother, may I,” when exercising “full spectrum dominance,” by which he clearly meant launching overwhelming military force against any country or target chosen by the country’s leadership. No doubt Bolton’s absolute contempt for international law and UN authority made him Bush’s perfect choice for UN Ambassador.
Dore Gold was another popular speaker. Fresh from his pathetic performance in a debate against Goldstone at Brandeis, Gold sought to score post-game points. He chose this occasion to reveal that new information had come to light about Israel’s mosque attack that killed 15 worshipers, an incident that Goldstone has repeatedly singled out as particularly reprehensible. According to Gold, the Israeli bombers did not know that the structure was a mosque because it had no minaret. Moreover, they accurately targeted a group of young militants meeting outside the mosque, killing 15 who deserved to die, and the force of the blast carried inside where it might have injured some innocents. (And imagine – there are some who still claim that Israel is unable to properly investigate its own actions.) Gold also bemoaned this week’s EU vote in favor of the Goldstone report: He speculated that Hezbollah would be studying the report for tips on how to fire rockets at Israel from densely populated areas in Lebanon in an effort to goad the Israelis to return fire and kill civilians. Apparently, Gold forgot that Israel already used this pathetic excuse throughout the 2006 Lebanon “war.”
There was frequent use of the buzz words of today’s discourse – delegitimizing and demonization. Irwin Cotler, one of numerous Canadian presenters, expressed outrage at the accusation of apartheid, meant to delegitimize Israel. He noted that apartheid is considered a “crime against humanity,” apparently thinking that the gravity of the accusation was a sufficient defense thereto. He offered no counter-analysis as to why the system of separate roads, facilities, justice systems and grossly unequal allocation of resources in the Occupied Territories was not actual apartheid, similar or worse than its manifestation in South Africa. Nor did he acknowledge the existence of state-sanctioned discrimination against Israel’s minority non-Jewish citizens in virtually every public sphere. I guess he feels it is “legitimizable” bigotry. Other speakers were similarly offended at the comparison, but no one explained why it is inappropriate.
David Scharia, an Israeli attorney specializing in counter-terrorism, noted how much more difficult it became for Shin Bet to acquire information when Israel’s High Court finally banned routine torture for detainees in 1999. Hamas adapted to the ruling by training its operatives to cry “torture,” which of course was impossible because the practice had been banned. ( I suppose previously, Hamas complaints of torture fell on deaf ears because the practice was legal.) While not condemning the ruling outright, Scharia noted that the process of “counter-terrorism” had been rendered lengthier and more complex by the unavailability of physical means to extract information. It’s a tough world, especially when your hands are tied.
Law Professor Ruth Wedgwood allowed that “you can never deliberately attack a civilian or civilian object,” but then failed to recognize that that most reasonable maxim should be applied to Israel as well as Hamas.
For comic relief, there was a rather bizarre address by Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. Ignoring the fact that the conference was falling well behind schedule when he spoke, he quoted at considerable length from Shakespeare’s King John, eventually stumbling to the punchline “Fight fire with fire.” Anyone’s guess is as good as mine as to Shurtleff’s unlikely appearance at this conference.
At one point, Dore Gold, referring to Goldstone, said, “This report is not going away.” For me, it was the most truthful, and encouraging, moment in the entire day. The Shakespeare lesson was a distant second.
* Max Blumenthal:
… The event was organized by a network of American Zionist groups and conservative operatives with apparent encouragement from the Israeli government.
As Scott Horton noticed at Harper’s, the Lawfare Project’s rollout event followed a remarkably similar conference in Jerusalem two weeks earlier. Both conferences followed legislation in the Knesset designed to force NGO’s to disclose their foreign donors so they can be more easily branded as a fifth column and to strangle human rights groups in Israel and occupied Palestine…
Though it is still unclear what actions the project will take, the demonization that human rights groups and other democratic elements in Israel have weathered foreshadows the attacks their American allies may soon face.
Dubai Investigation Exposes Israeli Ops in USA
By Michael Gillespie / March 11th, 2010
An ongoing investigation by the Dubai Police force into the assassination of a high-level Hamas official in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in January has drawn back the curtains of secrecy and deception to reveal yet again the contours of Israel’s massive and ever-expanding espionage operations in the United States.
The murder of Mahmoud Al Mabhouh in his room at the Al Bustan Rotana, a 275-room five-star luxury hotel, in Dubai on January 19 has been widely perceived to be a Mossad operation involving, by the most recent count, 27 suspects traveling on fraudulently obtained and falsified European or Australian passports. In late February and early March, the plot thickened suddenly and significantly when major US media outlet reports connected the crime and many of those involved in it to the USA and to corporations based in the USA and Israel and revealed that some of the suspected assassins, apparently members of a Mossad kidon team, had entered the USA after leaving Dubai.
ABC News reported on February 24 that Dubai police had identified 15 new suspects as part of a ring that killed Al Mabhouh.
“Fourteen of the suspects purportedly used credit cards from META Bank, a regional American bank, to pay for hotel rooms and travel arrangements. … Dubai police linked META Bank to a New York-based company called Payoneer, which provided prepaid MasterCard credit cards issued by META Bank. According to its Web site, Payoneer has a research and development center in Tel Aviv,” reported ABC.
The TV network report noted that some of the additional suspects played a central role in the crime while others were accused of “‘providing prior logistical support and preparations to facilitate,’ making a series of trips to Dubai in advance” of the assassination.
The New York Times reported on March 1 that, “At least two suspects in the killing of a Hamas official in a hotel here in January traveled to the United States afterward, according to a person familiar with the investigation.”
“One suspect traveling on a British passport arrived in the United States on Feb. 14; the other used an Irish passport and arrived on Jan. 21, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case. He did not say where the men entered the country, and added that there was no known record of their leaving,” wrote Robert F. Worth in a story filed from Dubai.
Worth’s report noted that if the suspected assassins who entered the U.S. presented foreign passports, they would have been photographed and finger printed upon arrival.
The Wall Street Journal’s Chip Cummins filed a similar report from Dubai on the same day attributing the information to “people familiar with the situation” and “records shared between international investigators.” In many previous news reports from Dubai information about the investigation had been attributed to Dubai’s Police Chief Lt. Gen. Dhahi Khalfan Tamim.
Neither report explored the rather remarkable news that the suspect carrying a British passport in the name Roy Allan Cannon was confident enough to travel on the falsified document more than three weeks after the assassination and to present it upon arrival in the USA, where passport controls are generally assumed to be most stringent.
“At one time it was possible to produce false identity documents with little or no regard for what is referred to as backstopping as data bases at national points of entry were unsophisticated and were generally unlinked to any central sources of information. That has all changed in the past eight years. European and American passports in particular can all be verified from central data bases that include information that is also drawn from other public record sources,” wrote former CIA officer Philip Giraldi in a February 25 column for Antiwar.com.
On March 3, Al Jazeera TV reported that Tamim, “said he would ask the Dubai prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and the head of Mossad [Meir Degan].”
Tamim’s investigation, which has been described by Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble as “thorough,” has seriously inconvenienced and embarrassed the Israeli government and its espionage organization.
The Money Trail
The Independent Monitor contacted MetaBank’s corporate headquarters in Storm Lake, IA to ask why an Iowa bank would provide credit cards to 14 suspected members of a death squad.
MetaBank’s Lisa Binder, Vice President for Investor Relations and Corporate Communications responded via telephone and e-mail with a statement saying, in part, “The Meta cards in question were issued in conjunction with a Meta Payment Systems program, not at a retail bank location. Meta Payment Systems, which has issued more than 150 million prepaid cards, markets its payroll cards through various Program Managers─in this case, Payoneer─to offer reputable US companies network branded payroll cards with which American companies can pay expatriates, employees and contractors of their company who live in the US and in foreign countries. The cards in question were ‘loaded’ by the companies using direct deposit for payroll, disbursements, and other compensation.”
The Independent Monitor attempted to contact Payoneer offices at 410 Park Avenue in New York City but found that the only phone answered at Payoneer headquarters was a customer support line for Payoneer’s Birthright Israel customers.
Birthright Israel provides first time educational trips to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18 to 26. The program sends “thousands of young Jewish adults from all over the world to Israel as a gift in order to diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; to strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and to strengthen participants’ personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people,” according to the organization’s website.
Funding for Birthright Israel is “provided by our partners: private philanthropists through The Birthright Israel Foundation; the people of Israel through the Government of Israel; and Jewish communities around the world (North American Jewish Federations, Keren Hayesod and the Jewish Agency for Israel). …
“Taglit-Birthright Israel requires that all participants pay their deposit through Payoneer. … If you lose your Payoneer card while in Israel, it can be immediately blocked and will be replaced with a new card within 24 hours. … You will not need to contact your bank back home or worry about making many calls. One call to our Customer Support center and you are all set,” says the www.birthright.payoneer.com website.
Payoneer’s Birthright customer support center declined to provide the Independent Monitor with contact information for Payoneer founder and CEO Yuval Tal or for Payoneer corporate communications/media relations personnel.
“Since the assassination, Tal has been shielded by a wall of public relations representatives and does not respond to media requests for comments. … Tal’s public relations representatives in New York have refused to comment on his past and relations with Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad,” wrote Abbas Al Lawati, a staff reporter for Gulf News.com on March 3.
“Tal is referred to by his associates in Israel as ‘an outspoken Israeli patriot’ despite having lived in New York for over ten years. In a 2006 Fox News interview about Israel’s summer war on Lebanon, Tal was presented as a ‘special ops commando’ on Fox and Friends, and stated that ‘this is a war Israel cannot (afford to) lose,’” wrote Al Lawati.
Payoneer’s website proclaims that the company is “a registered MasterCard Merchant Service Provider (MSP), and partner with MetaBank or Choice Bank Limited to deliver our services. Privately held, our funding partners include Greylock Partners, Carmel Ventures, and Crossbar Capital.”
The Independent Monitor found that all three of Payoneer’s funding partners are venture capital firms that have offices in or strong connections to Israel.
Charlie Federman, Managing Partner of Crossbar Capital, previously co-founded BRM Capital in 1999, headed its New York office, and served as a Managing Director of the Israel and New York based fund until 2007. BRM Group, headquartered in Herzliya was founded by Nir Barkat, mayor of occupied Jerusalem.
Carmel Ventures is also headquartered Herzliya. Greylock Partners, founded in 1965, “operates in a number of global centers of innovation, including Boston, China (Beijing), India (Bangalore), Israel (Herzliya) and Silicon Valley. … Current Greylock portfolio companies include Data Robotics, Digg, Facebook, Imperva, LinkedIn, Palo Alto Networks, Pandora, Picarro, Redfin, Workday and ZipCar,” according to the firm’s website. Greylock’s investment activities in Israel were launched in 2002 by partner Moshe Mor, who “served six years in the Israeli Army as a Captain in the Military Intelligence branch.”
Tal almost certainly possess information that could be of value to U.S. law enforcement and counter-intelligence investigators, but whether their political masters, many of whom have been effectively co-opted by Israel, will allow U.S. investigators to pursue any sort of meaningful investigation is an open question. Thus far there has been little to indicate that U.S. officials are seriously interested in investigating the funding of travel expenses and hotel accommodations of suspected Israeli assassins through U.S. corporations, despite the reported entry of at least two of the suspects into the U.S. on fraudulent, falsified passports.
When the Independent Monitor contacted the Department of State (DoS) for comment about the news reports, a DoS press officer declined to comment and referred questions to the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press offices. A DoJ press officer also declined to comment and referred questions to a DHS press officer who has not responded to an e-mail message sent on March 5.
The Sayanim Network
Any substantive U.S. investigation of the suspected Dubai killers’ connections to the USA would likely focus on members of the Mossad’s worldwide network of sayanim, diaspora Jews who provide a wide variety of services to the Israeli intelligence and special operations agency. In his books, By Way of Deception (1990) and The Other Side of Deception (1994), former Mossad field officer or katsa Victor Ostrovsky described the sayanim network.
“Sayanim─assistants─must be 100 percent Jewish,” wrote Ostrovsky in 1990.
The Mossad’s helpers, chosen because they are well placed, willing, and able to provide valuable assistance to Israeli agents, are businessmen, doctors, lawyers, judges, prosecutors, police officers, intelligence officers, politicians, government bureaucrats, university professors and administrators, media professionals, information technology specialists, any occupation, profession, or position in which a sayan might prove useful in support of Israeli espionage operations.
Though they do not live in Israel, their first loyalty is to Israel. They do whatever Mossad officials, field officers, or assassins ask of them in behalf of Israel against the enemies of Israel or those who are seen as opposed to Israeli policies.
“Often the loyalty of sayanim is abused by katsas who take advantage of the available help for their own personal use. There is no way for the sayan to check this,” wrote Ostrovsky.
“The one problem with the [sayanim] system is that the Mossad does not seem to care how devastating it could be to the status of the Jewish people in the diaspora if it was known. The answer you get if you ask is: ‘So what’s the worst that could happen to those Jews? They’d all come to Israel? Great,’” wrote Ostrovsky.
“A sayan will rent a car or pass money to a kidon with no questions asked,” said Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad (1999) in a report by Alun Palmer of the Mirror (UK) on February 18. Thomas, who has estimated that there are at least 20,000 sayanim in the US and Great Britain, writes that all Mossad assassinations are authorized by the office of the prime minister of Israel.
The illegal use of U.S. banks and credit card companies to fund the movements and other expenses of a Mossad death squad in the Middle East indicates an alarming expansion of Israeli espionage operations on US soil and reveals to an unprecedented extent the foreign intelligence agency’s penetration of major U.S. financial institutions, developments that limn the breadth, depth, and success of the Mossad’s desperate efforts to expand and consolidate Israel’s malignant influence over the Washington foreign policy establishment and sway within a broad range of U.S. institutions, despite growing popular opposition to Israel’s the brutal and patently illegal occupation of Palestine and the punishing siege of Gaza.
The Myth, Cult, and Culture of Redemptive Violence
The supposed clash of civilizations, the conflict between the putatively modern Western Judeo-Christian tradition and radical Islam, the Bush administration’s Global War on Terrorism later rebranded by the Obama administration as Overseas Contingency Operations, and the suppurating wound that is Israel’s long-running illegal occupation and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine are evidence of a retrograde social and political dynamic that now threatens the continued progress and future of human civilization. That dynamic is epitomized by the myth, cult, and culture of redemptive violence.
“The myth of redemptive violence defends the belief that violence saves, that war brings peace. It is one of the oldest stories in the world. It misappropriates the language, symbols and scriptures of Christianity. Its God is the tribal God worshipped as an idol. Its offer is not forgiveness but victory. Its good news is not unconditional love of enemies but their elimination. Its salvation is not a new heart but a successful foreign policy. It is blasphemous. It is idolatrous. And it is immensely popular,” writes Dr. Walter Wink, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City.
Wink might have added that while Christian scripture is tainted by the myth of redemptive violence, the Hebrew Old Testament scriptures, attached at the spine of the Holy Bible to the New Testament, are Christianity’s primary source of the pernicious mythology of redemptive violence. Only about 10 percent of the New Testament is devoted to Jesus’ teachings about the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, the kingdom of Heaven, the happiness of peacemakers, and forgiveness and mercy as moral and spiritual imperatives.
True religion opposes violence as a technique of social evolution, but many Christians have been and are today all too willing and ready to embrace Hebrew Old Testament teachings that glorify war and the wholesale slaughter of innocents and ascribe such acts to the commands of a wrathful God that is both vengeful and violent. The popularity of the myth of redemptive violence in the West and the attitudes and policies it engenders in political and economic spheres of activity severely undercuts the supposed moral superiority of Western modernity and culture in relation to other traditions and cultures.
U.S. leaders often attempt to justify their wars with self-serving declarations that they are fighting for peace.
“One day the Iraqi people will understand that we came in peace,” averred Secretary of State Colin Powell in March 2003 as U.S. troops advanced on Baghdad after a devastating and enormously destructive “Shock and Awe” air assault on the city.
If the status of a civilization can be accurately gauged by the fairness of its courts and the integrity of its judges, resort by national leaders to extra-judicial killings conducted by intelligence agency death squads is emblematic of the West’s glorification of war and ruinous reversion to militarism─autocratic, cruel, and savage. Rigidly ultranationalistic Israel, more an army and an espionage agency with a country than a country with an army and an espionage agency, clearly intends to be the West’s model and instructor in this regard.
A feature article by Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman published in the Washington Post on March 4 quoted Jonna Mendez, who worked for the CIA for 27 years and became the agency’s chief of disguise. Mendez “believes the Dubai perpetrators took the fallout into account, all of it: the TV footage, the blown aliases and the head shots. The agents, she said, clearly knew they were under surveillance─they had simply decided it was unavoidable and a price worth paying.
“‘You can be sure they knew they were being surveilled. Likewise, they would assume that the documents they were using would be made available after the fact,’ said Mendez. ‘What does this mean? It means it didn’t matter. The faces and the documents that were captured by the cameras will probably never be seen again.’
“The fact that the perpetrators had to take the identities of real people rather than simply invent false identities is a symptom of the new world facing modern-day spies, one of databases and traceable passport information, she said.
“The real agents likely don’t resemble the faces in the photos, she said … And if they do, plastic surgery, dental implants and hair grafts can ensure they are unrecognizable afterward.
“‘Steal the identity, disguise the participants, be ready on the other side with another set of identities and documents, and embrace and conceal the protagonists on their return,’ she said.
“‘With that goal in mind this may, in fact, be the operation of the future,’” wrote Friedman.
Thinking Americans have an increasingly clear choice.
They can join the cult of redemptive violence, kneel before a Zionist tribal God of vengeance, and watch their country and its culture revert to the law of nature as militarism runs amok and Israeli spies and assassins, protected by corrupt and co-opted political leaders, roam America at will.
Or they can embrace and actively support not the savagery of assassins but the rule of law. They can cultivate the wisdom, insight, and foresight that are indispensable to the endurance of nations. They can persevere in their efforts to elect honest, wise, and progressive leaders. And they can continue to strive to live up and into the noblest ideals of their religions.
Michael Gillespie, in addition to his regular freelance work for Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, is also a contributing editor and the Des Moines, IA correspondent for The Independent Monitor, the national newspaper of Arab Americans, published by Sami Mashney in Anaheim, CA.
Israel’s Lobby Imposes Crippling Sanctions on America — Again
By Grant Smith, March 12, 2010
The Israel lobby’s campaign against US and international corporations doing business with Iran is gearing up this week. The tip of the spear is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee sponsored expansion of the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996. If signed into law by president Obama, the legislation would institute onerous new monitoring to ensure exports never enter Iran, along with mandatory divestment from and penalties for any corporations discovered doing business in Iran. A new type of “office of special plans” at the Treasury Department that AIPAC and its think tank lobbied to create by executive order in 2004 is also on the warpath. Stuart Levey, the head of the office of “Terrorism and Financial Intelligence” is traveling to Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman “pointing out that they face dramatic risks by doing business with Iran.” Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon finished a long set of meetings urging the US National Security Council to impose harsh sanctions on Iran.
The New York Times started the week with a list of corporations doing business in Iran and their US government procurement revenues. Most companies on this list long ago appeared on hit lists compiled by AIPAC for quiet divestment campaigns in state legislatures across the country. The New York Times ominously highlights in red any company that may be a “possible violator of the Iran Sanctions Act.” National Public Radio’s Scott Simon, after reading it, was apoplectic. He fretted aloud on the air whether US companies and subsidiaries on the target list were “betraying their country’s national security interests.”
What should Americans make of this drive to label all companies doing business with Iran unpatriotic smugglers? First, they should consider the source of the multi-tiered Iran sanctions drive. Then, they should start getting angry.
The proto Israel lobby was born in the cradle of a real arms theft and smuggling operation [pdf] that relentlessly preyed on the United States in the 1940s. Violating US arms export controls and bans on weapons transfers to the Middle East, this network certainly did “betray national security” — but managed to establish a small state in Palestine. The Director of US Central Intelligence judged that “U.S. national security is unfavorably affected by these developments and that it could be seriously jeopardized by continued illicit traffic in the implements of war.” That was an understatement, but none of the financiers of the arms smuggling network ever faced any consequences. When The Pledge, a tell-all book about the smuggling network, was published in 1970 the Department of Justice received public protests about the vast unpunished arms smuggling. The Internal Security Section duly wrote and internally circulated a 9-page book report about the people, dates, and crimes committed. The Chief of the Foreign Agents Registration Unit then responded to one protester that any arms smuggling prosecutions would be barred by the statute of limitations, though he did forward complaints to the FBI and State Department.
The Israel lobby further developed the ethos that “no crime for Israel would be punished in the US” when it allegedly stole and smuggled US weapons grade uranium from NUMEC, “an Israeli operation from the beginning” according to CIA Tel Aviv station chief John Hadden. A secret nuclear arsenal would allow Israel to initiate “The Samson Option” pulling down the entire world if it were ever threatened — a capability judged worth all the stealing and law breaking.
Isaiah L. Kenen, a propaganda officer for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs office in New York in 1948, made it his business to infiltrate Israeli government mandates into US political party platforms while dodging Department of Justice orders that he register and conduct his business openly as an Israeli foreign agent. Like AIPAC this week, Kenen even used the New York Times as a trumpet in his November 2, 1961 Near East Report to deny that Dimona was a nuclear weapons plant. Six weeks after the DOJ cracked down with its final Foreign Agent order on Kenen and company in 1963 after a massive (Israeli-funded) stealth propaganda and lobbying campaign that rivaled the one currently unfurling in the US, Kenen was forced to abandon his American Zionist Council front for the Israeli government, and incorporated AIPAC in Washington, DC. AIPAC went on to stage a full assault on US governance — from attacking the sanctity of our electoral process to trafficking in classified national security information — all to acquire unprecedented power on behalf of its foreign principals.
The most relevant example of AIPAC-Israeli government tag-team law-breaking went on display this week in the form of 49 declassified FBI files. In 1984 71 major US corporations and worker organizations said “no” to an earlier AIPAC economic power grab (a demand to lower all US import barriers to Israeli products while allowing Israel to continue blocking US exports). Israeli minister of economics Dan Halpern stole [pdf] a US government document containing proprietary information and business secrets supplied by US industries most opposed to the Israel Lobby’s economic power grab. Halpern passed it to AIPAC, which made great use of it to undermine the entire advice and consent process. Douglas Bloomfield, AIPAC’s top lobbyist, even made an illicit copy of the classified document after AIPAC was explicitly ordered to return it to the US government (rather than ever do time in jail, Bloomfield now fantasizes about militarily playing the United Arab Emirates off Iran).
The aftermath of this earlier economic crime against US industry has now become clear. By locking many US products of export quantity out of Israel, the trade agreement has delivered an $80 billion dollar cumulative deficit (adjusted for inflation) to the US since enacted. In contrast, last year all other (legitimate) bilateral agreements with such countries as Singapore and Morocco actually produced a $86.33 billion total trade surplus to the US. AIPAC’s trajectory clearly indicates it is a true believer of Julius Caesar’s dictum “If you must break the law, do it to seize power, in all other cases observe it.” But does such ill-gotten might make right?
Americans should be outraged that a foreign lobby like AIPAC is actually trying to write the rules — when warranted application of the law would have abolished it years ago. AIPAC and other nodes of Israel’s lobby successfully broke important US laws to seize power in America. They now expect US private enterprise and workers — the world’s best — to open their own little “offices of special plans” to carefully track company products, profits, and investments in the name of Israel. But this new tax ignores some mighty important facts.
Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and there’s no evidence that it is anywhere near producing nuclear weapons. Non-signatory Israel, with its vast secret arsenal of nuclear weapons — likely built with uranium stolen (but never paid for) from the United States — suddenly demands rule of law from America. Laws drafted by AIPAC. (And by the way, it’ll cost taxpayers at least $76 million to clean up the nuclear waste at NUMEC.)
Israel and its US lobby actually think Americans will go for all of this, that we’re a forgetful and obedient lot, who don’t care much about our laws, economy, or jobs — who are just aching to get into AIPAC’s newly fabricated economic straightjacket.
Better think again.
Sending a laptop to Gaza
Ahmed Moor writing from al-Arish, Egypt, Live from Palestine, 12 March 2010
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Underground tunnels along the border with Egypt have become the main way for besieged Palestinians in Gaza to receive the most basic goods. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages) |
I sat outdoors at a cafe on the Mediterranean Sea in al-Arish, a dusty seaside town in Egypt’s northern Sinai. I drank a tea and smoked a water pipe; it gave me something to do while I waited for Ismail — that’s not his real name — an Egyptian Bedouin tunnel smuggler who was going to deliver a package for me into Gaza.
It’s been nearly ten years since I’ve been to Palestine. I vividly remember the summer of 2000 when I left Palestine with my family. We passed through the Rafah crossing into Egypt. A long Mercedes taxi — they’re ubiquitous in Egypt and Palestine — carried us from Egyptian Rafah to al-Arish and finally to Cairo. From there, we boarded a flight to New York. Most of our extended family remained — they have nothing approaching our freedom of movement because we hold the American passport.
Much has changed since I’d been there last. The second Palestinian intifada flared, raged and then died. Hamas won a majority of seats in the 2006 parliamentary elections and was nearly overthrown by Fatah a year later. When the coup didn’t go as planned the people of Gaza were shut in.
Israel imposed its siege on Gaza in June 2007, after the Fatah coup attempt. The tunnel trade between Egypt and Gaza became the chief mode of transferring commodities into the tiny coastal territory. Flour, gasoline, soda, toys, electronics and yes, small arms are moved into Gaza through hundreds of subterranean tunnels.
I went back to Egypt several weeks ago. A friend in Cairo mentioned that he had a laptop and some CDs that were intended for a friend of his in Palestinian Rafah. He knew that I planned to go to al-Arish, and if I could make it past the checkpoints, to Egyptian Rafah, and asked if I could arrange to have the items smuggled to Gaza. I agreed; the siege is an expression of moral bankruptcy and responsible human beings are compelled to undermine the regime in every way. Furthermore, the Palestinians of Gaza have very few options when it comes to receiving basic goods.
A few days later, I caught a bus to al-Arish. I arrived at about 10pm and checked into my hotel. My friend in Cairo had given me Ismail’s number after speaking to him about me and when I’d be going. So, the next morning I called Ismail and we agreed to meet at a cafe in the afternoon.
Some time later, I made my way to the beach and sat at the seaside cafe when a man approached; it was Ismail. He smiled broadly as we shook hands and introduced ourselves. The deep-brown skin in the corner of his eyes crinkled. His dark hair was short and neat and combed to the side. He reminded me of my father. I ordered a second tea as he sat down on the chair beside me so that we both had a view of the sea’s expanse.
We started talking:
“You know I’m from Gaza,” I said, “Tal al-Sultan in Rafah.”
“Oh, I’ve been there. I have family in Jabaliya.”
We chatted for some minutes about the weather and al-Arish and families we knew in common. He’d been working in the tunnel trade since the siege began. It was a natural way to earn income for him — as a Bedouin, he moved more freely than others in the Sinai, and his relatives in Gaza provided a secure trust network.
Indeed, many Palestinians from Gaza have relatives in Egypt, and vice versa. My own paternal grandmother is a Sinai Bedouin. The extensive kinship networks and intermarriage thrived until Israel occupied the territory in 1967, when it became harder for people to cross the new borders.
Ismail explained how he would deliver the package, stating that “I’ll take it back to [Egyptian] Rafah in my car and hand it over to someone who will give it to a Palestinian from the tunnel. ‘B’ [the person for whom the package is intended] will call the guy and meet up with him. He’ll pay him on that end.”
My package would cost 50 cents to $1 a kilo, but bigger loads would have a cheaper rate. It would take a day or two to deliver at a total cost of roughly $10 — not too expensive by American standards but a considerable sum in Gaza.
Ismail explained that although the tunnels were owned by Palestinians and they did all of the work to construct them — typically at night — the traffic was usually only one way: Egyptian goods into Gaza.
He was deliberately vague about whether the Egyptian army knew the locations of the tunnels and received bribes to allow them to operate. “You have to be careful,” Ismail said, referring to offering bribes to the authorities, “sometimes you can do that but sometimes no. It depends but there isn’t any way to know.”
When I asked about the new wall being constructed underground between Egypt and Gaza with the assistance of the US Army Corps of Engineers, he was dismissive. Ismail explained that it had yet to affect trade and that “some guys have already cut through it.” He noted however that “it hasn’t reached the part of the border where most of the tunnels are. And people are coming up with ways to get around it.”
As our meeting drew to a close Ismail offered me a ride back to town all the while apologizing for not offering me a ride to Rafah. Security on the main road was tough he explained and he couldn’t afford to be subjected to too much scrutiny with a foreigner in the car. He also warned me, saying, “If you make it to Rafah, don’t tell anyone that you’re a journalist — don’t talk to anyone. It’s all mukhabarat [intelligence]. Just say you’re going home.”
I did make it to Rafah later that day. What I saw wasn’t so much a town as a military encampment. Heavy equipment, likely tied to the subterranean wall, was everywhere. Dusty day laborers swarmed the tea shops. Armored personnel carriers patrolled the streets while checkpoints closed off access towards Palestine and the Mediterranean.
It wasn’t long before some men approached me and started asking questions in a non-official, but probing and intrusive way. “Who are you? Where are you from? How did you get here?” Motioning to the military, they asked, “Did they clear you?” I answered the way Ismail told me and decided to leave pretty soon after that; my paranoia got the better of me.
My trip back to al-Arish was uneventful and it gave me an opportunity to reflect about the events of the day and how my home has become a concentration camp. The pressures on the Palestinians in Gaza are immense, but they have not succumbed to the pressure.
By the time I reached Cairo the next day, my friend had confirmed that the laptop was received by his friend in Gaza. Even with billions of dollars expended and complete military siege, Palestinians choose not to die and this story is evidence of that.
Born in the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, Ahmed Moor graduated from university in Philadelphia, after which he spent three years working in finance in New York. He is currently based in Beirut, Lebanon.
Alan Dershowitz was right about Obama
Why I support Obama and Israel
By Alan Dershowitz | Huffington Post | October – 2008
I am a strong supporter of Israel (though sometimes critical of specific policies). I am also a strong supporter of Barack Obama (though I favored Hillary Clinton during the primaries). I am now getting dozens of emails asking me how as a supporter of Israel I can vote for Barack Obama. Let me explain.
I think that on the important issues relating to Israel, both Senator McCain and Senator Obama score very high. During the debates each candidate has gone out of his and her way to emphasize strong support for Israel as an American ally and a bastion of democracy in a dangerous neighborhood. They have also expressed support for Israel’s right to defend itself against the nuclear threat posed by Iran which has sworn to wipe Israel off the map [sic] and the need to prevent another Holocaust.
There may be some difference in nuance among the candidates, especially with regard to negotiations with Iran, but supporters of Israel should not base their voting decision on which party or which candidates support Israel more enthusiastically. In the United States, Israel is not a divisive issue, and voting for President is not a referendum on support for Israel, at least among the major parties.
I want to keep it that way. I want to make sure that support for Israel remains strong both among liberals and conservatives. It is clear that extremists on both sides of the political spectrum hate Israel, because they hate liberal democracies, because they tend to have a special place in their heart for tyrannical regimes, and because they often have strange views with regard to anything Jewish. The extreme left, as represented by Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Norman Finkelstein and, most recently, Jimmy Carter has little good to say about the Jewish state. But nor does the extreme right, as represented by Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, Joseph Sobran and David Duke. When it comes to Israel there is little difference between the extreme right and the extreme left. Nor is there much of a difference between the centrist political left and the centrist political right: both generally support Israel. Among Israel’s strongest supporters have always been Ted Kennedy, Harry Reed, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The same is true of the centrist political right, as represented by Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Oren Hatch and John McCain.
Why then do I favor Obama over McCain? First, because I support him on policies unrelated to Israel, such as the Supreme Court, women’s rights, separation of church and state and the economy. But I also prefer Obama to McCain on the issue of Israel. How can I say that if I have just acknowledged that on the issues they both seem to support Israel to an equal degree? The reason is because I think it is better for Israel to have a liberal supporter in the White House than to have a conservative supporter in the oval office. Obama’s views on Israel will have greater impact on young people, on Europe, on the media and on others who tend to identify with the liberal perspective. Although I believe that centrists liberals in general tend to support Israel, I acknowledge that support from the left seems to be weakening as support from the right strengthens. The election of Barack Obama — a liberal supporter of Israel — will enhance Israel’s position among wavering liberals.
As I travel around university campuses both in the United States and abroad, I see radical academics trying to present Israel as the darling of the right and anathema to the left. As a liberal supporter of Israel, I try to combat that false image. Nothing could help more in this important effort to shore up liberal support for Israel than the election of a liberal president who strongly supports Israel and who is admired by liberals throughout the world. That is among the important reasons why I support Barack Obama for president.
Alan M. Dershowitz is a Professor of Law at Harvard. His most recent book The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand In The Way of Peace which has recently been published by Wiley.
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The great ADHD swindle
By Daniel Ken | TCW Defending Freedom | May 20, 2023
Over more than two decades in the classroom I’ve taught thousands of children and teenagers: some were lovely and lots were hard-working. On the other hand, quite a number were disruptive and argumentative, and a number were violently opposed to learning. But I don’t think I’ve taught more than a handful of kids who could be properly described as having the symptoms of ADHD. And that handful could just as easily have had something else wrong with them. Because here’s the thing: despite the fact that the best part of a million children are medicated for the condition, ADHD doesn’t exist.
There’s no definitive medical test for it, experts can’t agree on what it actually means, and most of the symptoms disappear if the child in question has lots of exercise, good diet and, crucially, a set of clear behavioural boundaries, preferably set early in childhood and, for the boys at least, enforced by a stable adult male living at home. … continue
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