A former Mossad director opposed to the assassination of world leaders says the case of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is different.
Meir Amit, who died in July at the age of 88, shared some of “his fears for the future of the Middle East” in an interview published by The Media Line.
Amit, who directed some of the most notorious Mossad operations while he was the organization’s chief, said he viewed Iran’s nuclear activities as a path leading to World War III.
“I look at the situation as World War III,” he said.
“Namely, all the Muslims, all over the world, are united. Unfortunately, the Western world is not united. Russia is not cooperating, China is not cooperating. Israel is just a small thing in the picture. We have to look at that as a global war and act accordingly,” Amit added.
He went on to talk about his familiarity with the political structure of Iran, explaining that he had been sent on special missions to the country in the 1960′s while Israel maintained ties with Iranian leaders.
“At that time we had very good relations with Iran. I was meeting the Shah once a month. We were sitting and chatting and appraising the situation,” Amit said.
The former Mossad chief added that while he did not advocate the assassination of political figures, he believed otherwise in the case of the Iranian president.
“Personally I am against assassinating leaders and all my life I was against it when I was head of Mossad. But Ahmadinejad has crossed the line. With all he is doing on the nuclear front, saying Israel should be wiped off the map and arranging a conference on the Holocaust where he said it never happened. From my point of view, he is somebody who shouldn’t be with us,” Amit said.
The remarks were disclosed as earlier, Iran’s former intelligence minster Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i said Israel, in collaboration with Iranian terrorist groups, planned to assassinate President Ahmadinejad.
“The Zionist regime had met with the MKO on the sidelines of the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting in Egypt and in Paris to assassinate Mr. Ahmadinejad,” Mohseni-Ejeie was quoted by Fars News Agency as saying earlier in July.
The terrorist group had, however, set conditions for carrying out the assassination, the minister added. “They had asked that the US and the West remove their name from their blacklists.”
November 12, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Iran, Israel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Meir Amit, Middle East, Mossad |
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Glenn Greenwald has published in LeMonde, yet another eye-popping story about the NSA. But in this case, it turns out the NSA was not the culprit. Look no farther than the Mossad for the presumably guilty party. In 2012, during the French presidential elections, which Nicolas Sarkozy would go on to lose to Francois Hollande, French counter-intelligence discovered that a foreign intelligence agency had penetrated the computer systems of the Elysee Palace, the French White House. A French magazine blared that it was an NSA job. French intelligence apparently believed this and took the NSA to the woodshed. Relations were very tense between these otherwise strong allies.
But given Snowden’s recent revelations about the all-seeing NSA, this case was different. The NSA began investigating and discovered that none of its operatives had been responsible (at least in this particular case). Because the case threatened to endanger relations with a U.S. ally, they went so far as to query the intelligence agencies of twenty U.S. allies, who all professed ignorance of the operation. In meetings with their French counterparts, NSA officials revealed all this and swore they were not the culprits. But they tellingly noted that among the nations they had not queried was Israel because, in their words, discussion of matters related to France was not within the purview of the NSA-Mossad relationship. This is the equivalent of what Monty Python called, “Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.”
What specifically did Unit 8200 want to learn about French policy from such an intrusion? According to my own Israeli source, there was no specific mission. Spying was indiscriminate and opportunistic. He would not speaking directly to this particular incident because he did not want to expose a specific operation if there was one. But he would say this:
Unit 8200 and Mossad hack everyone they technically can. You can never know what interesting intelligence will come from a phone call/email of any foreign leader or official – so they spy on anyone possible.
In other words, Israeli intelligence has no restraints, unlike (we hope) spy agencies of other western nations. Where the NSA got into trouble (after Snowden’s revelations were published) was that it was operating as if it were Unit 8200, rather than an American agency restrained by American laws and constitutional practice. At least until recently, the NSA and Israeli cyber-intelligence could’ve been twins.
That is why the recently revealed agreement between the NSA and Unit 8200 to share intelligence (even about U.S. citizens) was no surprise at all. And what 8200 didn’t learn directly from data supplied to them by the NSA it could derive from its own intelligence operations here in the U.S., where the FBI finds Israel to the be the third-most active spy operation of all foreign countries active here.
Mossad’s intelligence method of “flooding the zone” to get whatever information it can from whatever sources it can, further cements the notion that it is not an agency of a truly democratic nation with checks and balances and protections for citizens and non-citizens. There are, or should be, things that allies just don’t do to each other. But for Israel, there is no such thing as an ally. There are nations that further its interests (known in most other countries as ‘allies’) and nations which oppose its interests (enemies). Israel spies on its greatest ally (as we’ve seen) and its greatest enemy. There is hardly a distinction made except that the nature of the information sought is different.
October 26, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | France, Israel, Mossad, National Security Agency, NSA, Unit 8200, United States |
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KUALA LUMPUR – Anyone with the chutzpah to accuse Israel of genocide is going to bring on a preemptive strike. That is as guaranteed as cream cheese on a bagel.
The word “genocide” is loaded, since many and probably most Jews believe themselves to have a monopoly on the term. Most often cited in reference to the Holocaust, the G word elicits an intense emotional reaction. “War crimes” is an acceptable term in international parlance, for even Israel’s most vociferous citizens grudgingly admit to instances of unrestrained violence against Palestinians.
“Genocide”, however, is in a class by itself, being the thermonuclear bomb of moral outrage. How dare supporters of Palestinian rights charge the Mideast’s “only democratic society” with systematic annihilation prompted by racial intolerance, economic greed, cultural chauvinism and religious bigotry?
Suspicion Mars Proceedings
The organizers of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal have brought on just such woe onto themselves by summoning a panel of international judges to rule on whether Israeli is guilty of genocide ever since its national birth in 1948.
The judicial proceedings got no further than the preliminary pretrial stage before it collapsed under acrimonious accusations ranging from prosecutors allegedly “poisoning minds” of Palestinian witnesses to outrage over a judge acting as ”an agent of the Mossad.”
The trigger for the heated denunciations between the prosecution team and the judicial panel was the prosecutors’ request for Judge Eric David, a law professor with the Free University of Brussels, to recuse himself (to voluntararily withdraw from the panel of judges).
The prosecutors had raised the issue of his earlier legal opinion to the effect that the People’s Mujaheedin (PMOI), an Iranian exile paramilitary which until recently was on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist groups should not be categorized as a terrorist entity.
According to media reports, the PMOI was involved in assassinating nuclear scientists and bombing factories in Iran. The group, largely based in Iraq , was militarily trained by the Israel secret service Mossad during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation.
Co-Prosecutor Francis Boyle, a New York-based law professor, stated that the favorable opinion on that terrorist group implies that Judge David is politically aligned with the foreign policy of Israel , the defendant in the current tribunal on Palestinian rights. To this question of conflict of interest, Jurist David refused to give an answer, nor did the presiding judge demand him to respond.
Lead Prosecutor Gurdial Singh argued that the complainants, Palestinians who personally suffered war crimes by Israeli forces, had grounds for suspicion about Judge David’s impartiality given his past approval of Mossad-linked forces.
Gurdjial pointed out:
“This tribunal being a court of conscience, there must be not even a single blot on integrity.”
After tension-packed deliberations behind closed doors, the panel ruled in favor of Judge David without examining his controversial opinion and unanimously affirmed that he should serve on the tribunal. That ruling provoked Prosecutor Boyle to call for a mistrial, and the panel responded by accusing him of contempt of court. The proceedings soon descended into chaos and many more back-rooms parleys, before both sides agreed to an indefinite adjournment, possibly of several months, before the start of trial. In total, the preliminary session lasted less than two days, August 21-22, before it whimpered to a halt.
Procedure Matters
After many reporting assignments, along with a long stint at jury duty, in San Francisco criminal trials and New York City gun court, my immediate observation was that the panel of judges in Malaysia overemphasized courtroom decorum while inexplicably failing to follow basic judicial proceedings.
The stress on style rather than the substance of law revealed a “cultural” difference in courtroom custom between the hard-ball rhetoric bandied in American trials versus the polite and deferential manners in wig-adorned chambers under the British tradition. As sadly shown in Kuala Lumpur , however, decorum can often serve as a cloak for institutional inertia and possibly hidden agendas.
Issues of etiquette aside, the most grievous mistake was the panel’s opting for unanimous agreement as a group. Trials with more than one judge, these including tribunals and high courts, are organized for the exact opposite, that is to allow a divided opinion between the majority ruling and a minority dissent. At the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, whatever its merits and flaws, the guilty verdict of the majority of judges was famously opposed by the minority opinion of the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal. In hindsight, that lone dissenting voice rings in our consciences to this day with its warning against victor’s “justice” and lynch “law”.
For a body of judges to act in unison in favor of one of their own profession is a gross violation of the principle of independence for each judge in a court of conscience. The disturbing thought that came to my mind was that insistence on acting as a group is completely out of place in a tribunal. Whether there was verbal manipulation in the judges’ chamber is privy only to those inside, leaving those of us on the outside with nothing but doubt.
Code of Silence
Prosecutors have a right to protest a violation of judicial procedures as the basis for mistrial, as was done by the co-prosecutor. Normally, when a capital crime is at issue, a mistrial can lead to a change of venue and a new judge and jury. If a court cannot possibly render a verdict on the basis of fairness, then another fairer arena must be found.
There were other serious problems: for example, the failure of the presiding judge to order the prosecutors to rephrase aggressive accusations as questions, and his neglect to demand that judge Eric David explain his past opinion to the satisfaction of all in the courtroom.
Judge David, one of the drafters of Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Israeli war crimes against Palestinians, did not give a single word of explanation, much less a convincing argument, for his legal opinion and tacit support of a Mossad-trained terrorist group that was a combatant in the Iraq War and responsible for violent acts against Iranian civilians that are illegal under international law.
His silence smacks not only of delivering selective justice but also of harboring a hidden agenda. Instead of ethical clarity, he chose to the muddy waters. If genuinely in support of the tribunal, he would have recused himself as the source of doubt, even if his intentions were misunderstood.
From the inception of this tribunal on Palestinian rights more than a year ago, the prosecution strategy has been to seek a genocide verdict against Israel , while the defense tactic is, logically, to water-down the ruling to less onerous guilt of war crimes falling far short of genocidal state policy.
Unfortunately, the reluctance of the unified panel to accept transparency and open debate in the proceedings reinforced the perception of judicial bias among the aggrieved complainants from Palestine . That some and possibly many of the jurists were either hesitant or predisposed to reject a verdict of genocide would be understandable in an Israeli courtroom. That such has happened in a predominantly Muslim country is simply astounding.
Perversion of Justice
Unfortunately, and to their eternal shame, many pro-Israeli legal professionals are not up to ethical par, as was shown in a major investigation at The Hague during the mid-1990s. I served as one of a handful of reporters on the case involving a weapons-loaded El Al cargo jet that crashed into an apartment building in Biljmeer district of Amsterdam, killing residents in an intense fire and harming emergency crews with toxic releases. The legal case was criminally undermined by massive amounts of Israeli bribery of witnesses (guised as unofficial out-of-court settlements), interference by the Israeli security team at Schipol Airport and the eventual silencing of the Dutch team that investigated the air traffic maneuvers of the plane.
That Israeli-subverted case never got to trial in The Hague , and I cannot but now fear that the same fate could await the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal.
There are undoubtedly external factors aligned against the tribunal, other than the Israeli opposition to an undesirable verdict on Palestinian rights. Google, which cooperates with Israeli interests, posted warning signs on the website of the Kuala Lumpur foundation in its earlier tribunal hearings against the U.S. government for the illegal war on Iraq .
Closer to home, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have actively promoted protests, similar to their Arab Spring sponsorship, to weaken the Malaysia government. Under the White House strategic pivot to Asia policy and the Pentagon’s Air-Sea Battle Concept, Malaysia is perceived as a potential foe of American geopolitical intervention. Is the pressure on from Tel Aviv and Washington to crack the Kuala Lumpur tribunal?
In Bad Faith
Laymen tend to perceive judges as men and women of ethical principle, non-partiality and free of preconceived biases. Sadly, the vast majority are not. One must remember that for every drone strike against a family home in a remote outland, a judge in a big city signs a writ of execution with not a whit of credible evidence. Constitutional guarantees have been reduced to a scrap of paper, and along with them so goes judicial standards.
For these very reasons, the tribunal in Kuala Lumpur must proceed and in accordance with the highest standard of international law. It is not a predetermined show trial nor a mock court, for this tribunal offers the legal strategy, the arguments and the precedent for the Palestinian Authority to press its long-overdue case in the International Court of Justice.
The Palestinian people have suffered prolonged and inexcusable violations of every human right under a state policy of eviction, banishment, imprisonment, torture and murder, repeatedly in an indiscriminate and cruel manner. If those who speak of the Rule of Law, for those who preside over our courts of law, cannot act, much less decide, against these inhumane practices and policies against a long-standing community, then there exists no law in Israel or at The Hague worthy of our respect and obedience.
The case of the Palestinian people versus the State of Israel is, in fact, a test of conscience for each and every one of us and proof of whether our global civilization is anything more than a facade for brute barbarism.
The Jewish people pride themselves at a moral lamp to humanity in darkness, but with only a few brave and notable exceptions in the cause of Palestinian rights, the dominant reaction of supporters of Israel has been toward obstruction of justice and outright injustice. The outcome can only be tragic for both peoples.
According to the Law Giver
The Hebrew term “Shoah” or calamity, which is also used to describe the Nazi policy against Jews, is the exclusive intellectual property of the Jewish people. “Genocide”, in contrast, is universal, applying to any nationality that faces systematic elimination.
To give credit where it is due, a Polish Jew coined the hybrid word “genocide”, which combines “genus”, Latin for family or breed, with “cide”, which translates as killing. A prosecutor in prewar Poland , before it was divided by German and Soviet forces, devised this word to describe the ultimate crime while drafting his book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe” (published in 1944 by the Carnagie Foundation for International Peace). After immigrating to the United States , Lemkin joined the faculty of Rutgers Law School and drafted a genocide treaty adopted by the newly formed United Nations in 1948.
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to summarize, forbids the killing, maiming and deliberate inflicting on a targeted group those conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
This lawgiver made very clear that the genocide is applicable to any group threatened with “a coordinated plan” for the destruction of “essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves” with objectives including disintegration of political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even their lives.”
Genocide does not necessarily mean the killing of every single member of a group since total extermination is often not feasible even with brutal efficiency.
Lemkin cited many genocide cases from our troubled world history, including “Christians of various denominations, Moslems and Jews, Armenians and Slavs, Greeks and Russians, dark-skinned Hereros in Africa and white-skinned Poles perished by millions from this crime.” The law must protect not just individuals but also groups of people, and by all accounts, the Palestinians are a group suffering most and probably all of the abuses cited.
Now 65 years after Lemkin formulated the rules of conduct, it becomes painfully apparent that yesterday’s victims can too easily become today’s perpetrators. What has anyone learned from their own suffering?
Yoichi Shimatsu is a Hong Kong-based journalist, is former editor with The Japan Times group in Tokyo and Pacific News Service in San Francisco.
August 25, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Israel, Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission, Mossad, People’s Mujaheedin |
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Two Lebanese nationals, who are on trial in Nigeria, have told a court that they were subjected to torture by Israeli Mossad agents after being arrested.
Mustapha Fawaz and Abdallah Thahini together with another Lebanese national Talal Ahmad Roda were arrested in May after an arms cache was discovered in a residence in the Nigerian city of Kano.
The three Lebanese men reportedly own a supermarket and an amusement park in Abuja, which have been closed since their arrests.
Fawaz told the court on Monday that after he was arrested in Abuja, a security official told him that some “European friends” wanted to ask him some questions.
“I was taken to an interrogation room where I met three Israeli Mossad agents,” he said.
Fawaz also said the interrogators handcuffed his hands behind his back for days, noting he “lost count because they did not allow me to sleep for several days.”
He went on saying, “During the 14 days of interrogation, I was interrogated by six Israeli Mossad agents and one masked white man.”
“I was interrogated in Arabic. I asked to be interrogated in English, but they refused. Most of them are weak in English. They are not Europeans, but Israelis,” he also said, adding no Nigerian official was present during the interrogations.
Thahini gave similar account to the court, saying he collapsed five days after the interrogators did not allow him to sleep.
August 6, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Subjugation - Torture | Abuja, Africa, Human rights, Interrogation, Mossad, Mustapha Fawaz, Nigeria, Press TV |
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BETHLEHEM – Israeli Mossad agents detained a Palestinian in Egypt’s Sinai in June, Israeli media reported Wednesday.
An Israeli judge cleared news of the arrest for publication on Wednesday. Wael Abu Rida was detained on suspicion of “offenses of national security,” the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported.
A magistrates’ court in Beersheba on Wednesday extended Abu Rida’s remand by eight days, the report said.
Judge Yuval Livadaro allowed the publication of some details in Israeli media, but extended the gag order of other details by 10 days.
The detainee’s wife, Amani Abu Rida, had told Ma’an on July 3 that her husband disappeared during a visit to Egypt for medical treatment.
The couple traveled together to Egypt on June 6. Wael Abu Rida suffers cerebral atrophy and sought treatment at a hospital in central Sinai, his wife said.
On June 21, Wael received a phone call and left without returning, his wife said.
The family later received a phone call from the International Committee of the Red Cross informing them that Wael was in Israeli custody, without giving any reason for the arrest.
After the phone call, Amani returned to the Gaza Strip.
July 10, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Egypt, Human rights, Israel, Mossad, Zionism |
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In mid-May, Mustafa Fawwaz, a 49-year-old Lebanese living in northern Nigeria, was headed to the Amigo Mall, a property he co-owns with his brother Fawzi. Hours later, police stormed his supermarket and placed him under arrest.
A few days later, 48-year-old Lebanese Ahmad Tahini was arrested at Nigeria’s Kano International Airport before his flight departed to Beirut. On May 26, the police arrested 51-year-old Talal Rawda at his home, in addition to another Lebanese Hussein Noureddine.
The Nigerian police claimed these four men were part of a “Hezbollah cell,” evidence of which was a weapons depot located inside a house in Kano.
After 40 days of detention, Noureddine was released. The court accused the three remaining Lebanese men of committing “terror-related crimes” and “providing direct assistance to a terrorist group.” The indictment stated: “You confessed that you belong to the armed wing of Hezbollah, which is an international terrorist organization. You have therefore committed a crime.”
Trumped-up Charges
The main charge that led to the men’s arrest linked them to a questionable weapons cache. But the weapons found by police were old and rusting, having clearly been stored in inappropriate conditions.
A source close to the defendants said that the house where the weapons were found was originally owned by a former army general who was active in the Nigerian civil war – 40 years ago. He denies that the men are linked in any way to the weapons or any armed activity.
The three Lebanese men have been charged with terrorism by virtue of their membership in Hezbollah even though the Nigerian government does not consider the party a terrorist organization. This is the lawyer’s defense for the upcoming July 8 court date when he’ll ask the court to drop all charges.
As usual, Israel is connected to this debacle. An Israeli security official told a Western newspaper, “The security cell that was arrested is part of a Shia terror campaign targeting the West and Israel.” It is interesting that the Israeli official did not limit his accusations to Hezbollah but rather included the entire Shia sect.
Yet perhaps the strongest evidence of Israeli meddling in the investigation came from a source close to the detainees who claimed that a Mossad team was allowed to interrogate and investigate the defendants.
Israeli Objectives
Israel has always paid special attention to Nigeria, having signed several trade and industrial agreements with the African country. Yet since 2006, visits by Israeli presidents and security officials to Nigeria focused on signing security agreements and finalizing weapons deals. Nigeria specialists say that the Mossad’s close relations with Nigerian security agencies is not concealed in any way.
Israel hopes to accomplish several goals with these accusations. It seeks to pressure international, and especially European, public opinion to list Hezbollah, or at least its so-called armed wing, as a terrorist group. Another aim is to create fissures in Hezbollah by falsely accusing Lebanese businessmen and shutting down their businesses.
The US and Israel have different ways of targeting Lebanese in Africa. While the US treasury department accuses Lebanese of supporting terrorist organizations, Israel colludes with African security agencies to fabricate charges.
July 2, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance | Africa, Hezbollah, Israel, Mossad, Nigeria, Zionism |
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Steve Sailer has an article on the tie-in between Israeli high tech firms and the NSA spying on American citizens (“Does Israel Have a Backdoor to US Intelligence?“). It’s always seemed very suspicious that Amdocs, an Israeli firm, was responsible for billing for US phone companies, and that two Israeli firms, Narus and Verint, are involved in wiretapping AT&T and Verizon for the NSA. It’s also not surprising that, as noted by James Bamford in his April 2012 article for Wired, someone with close connections to Israel secretly gave software designed by NSA to Israel: “the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country.” Bamford’s source describes him as “a very strong supporter of Israel.”
This is likely yet another example of a long list of American Jews who are credibly believed to have spied for Israel, including pretty much the entire roster of prominent neocons (Perle, Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen; see here, p. 47ff)—none of whom, with the exception of Jonathan Pollard, have been convicted, and many of whom, like the person mentioned here, have never been indicted. And given this long list, it is certainly reasonable to think that Israel is using its connections with the NSA to mine US data for its own purposes. In fact, it would be silly to think otherwise.
The NYTimes, The Washington Post, and the LATimes have completely ignored the Israeli connection, and you certainly won’t hear about it on FOX news. So, as often happens, one must read Israeli papers. Haaretz (but not neocon The Jerusalem Post) has several articles on the Israeli connection. On the PRISM program that collects data from companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL:
The data, gathered by the U.S. National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillance program, came from email accounts, Internet chats, browsing and search histories. The aim was to amass a database through which the NSA could learn whether terror suspects had been in contact with people in the United States.
In contrast to similar cases revealed in the past, the program involved thorough and continuous collection of data, even when no particular person or communications had aroused the authorities’ suspicions. …
Behind the scenes are a host of Israeli companies that have almost certainly taken part in the program as suppliers of technology. They may yet find themselves in the maelstrom, warns Nimrod Kozlovski, head of Tel Aviv University’s program for cyber studies.
“The exposure of PRISM underscores the feeling that communications networks and Internet companies have become the main tool for governments to gather information,” he says. “It is critical for the United States at all times to put a wall of separation between the government and commercial enterprises in order to quiet concerns that it has secret relationships with these companies.”
The concern is not just that the local government is spying on its citizens but that the manufacturers themselves have the ability to spy from afar.
Telecommunications systems almost always feature components that can be operated remotely so that software can be updated and routine maintenance chores can be conducted. … But these same systems can be used to penetrate the user country’s communications network as well. With the United States at the center of the world’s Internet traffic that problem is magnified. (“In U.S. snooping affair, Israeli firms at risk “)
Right. It’s quite possible that Gen. Keith Alexander is telling the truth when he says that the NSA is not mining these data on American citizens, but there’s nothing to stop the Israelis from doing so. The assumption must be that Israel has access to American’s emails and internet usage—very useful for all kinds of reasons, including providing ammunition for those who would destroy anti-Zionists, providing insider information in financial transactions, stealing technology, etc. When someone like Gen. David Petraeus, who had been targeted by the ADL for his statements on Israel, is suddenly compromised by leaked emails to his mistress, it’s not surprising that people are wondering at the involvement of the Lobby.
The Haaretz article continues:
Israeli companies are particularly vulnerable to such suspicions [of spying] because they have such close ties to the country’s security establishment.
“Graduates of the IDF’s technology units and those who have worked in other security bodies have created business opportunities for themselves based in no small part on their previous employment,” said Udi Shani, a former Defense Ministry director general, at the Herzliya Conference last March.
That’s one way to say it. But it’s also quite reasonable that the MOSSAD decided to allow its programmers to use the technology created for MOSSAD’s Unit 8200 and then set up companies that would be able to secure foreign contracts which would be impossible for MOSSAD itself to secure for obvious reasons. Indeed, “Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the unit, told Forbes magazine in 2007 that Comverse’s technology was directly influenced by the technology of 8200.”
MOSSAD doesn’t seem too worried about its technology falling into the hands of its ex-employees. In other words, these companies are likely to be MOSSAD operations in all but name.
And in the U.S., because of the power of the Israel Lobby, there would be no outcry in the media, from politicians, or even from the defense establishment when an Israeli company is awarded a contract to do the spying for the NSA. James Petras says as much:
The domestic spy apparatus operates with impunity because of its network of powerful domestic and overseas allies. The entire bi-partisan Congressional leadership is privy to and complicit with its operations. Related branches of government, like the Internal Revenue Service, cooperate in providing information and pursuing targeted political groups and individuals. Israel is a key overseas ally of the National Security Agency, as has been documented in the Israeli press (Haaretz, June 8, 2013). Two Israeli high tech firms (Verint and Narus) with ties to the Israeli secret police (MOSSAD), have provided the spy software for the NSA and this, of course, has opened a window for Israeli spying in the US against Americans opposed to the Zionist state. The writer and critic, Steve Lendman points out that Israeli spymasters via their software “front companies” have long had the ability to ‘steal proprietary commercial and industrial data” with impunity . And because of the power and influence of the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish organizations, Justice Department officials have ordered dozens of Israeli espionage cases to be dropped. The tight Israeli ties to the US spy apparatus serves to prevent deeper scrutiny into its operation and political goals – at a very high price in terms of the security of US citizens. In recent years two incidents stand out: Israeli security ‘experts’ were contracted to advise the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security in their investigation and ‘Stasi-like’ repression of government critics and environmental activists (compared to ‘al Queda terrorists’ by the Israelis) – the discovery of which forced the resignation of OHS Director James Powers in 2010. In 2003, New Jersey governor, Jim McGreevy appointed his lover, an Israeli government operative and former IDF officer, to head that state’s ‘Homeland Security Department and later resigned, denouncing the Israeli, Golan Cipel, for blackmail in late 2004. These examples are a small sample illustrating the depth and scope of Israeli police state tactics intersecting in US domestic repression.
From hearing media accounts of NSA spying, the only data on Americans that are collected are the times of phone calls and the identities of the parties in the phone call. But, as noted above, the data collected go well beyond that to include “email accounts, Internet chats, browsing and search histories.” Another Israeli company mentioned in the Haaretz article with very broad-based spying capabilities is NICE, yet another Israeli company with close ties to the Israeli government. NICE “has technology that is used to monitor some 1.5 billion people. In a brochure published by the company itself, it describes how its system can analyze conversations (including technology to make transcripts of phone calls), and gather and analyze data from public sites. With these tools it can build an intelligence file from millions of communications.” NICE’s website describes itself:
NICE solutions capture interactions, transactions and video surveillance from multiple sources, including telephones, CCTV video feed, emergency services radio communications, emails, chat, social media, and more.
In other words, pretty much all communications can be monitored and, if you represent a threat to the people with access to these operations, you must assume that you are being monitored. (I know of no evidence that the NSA employs NICE.) Although the company claims that its operations are aimed at “customers, criminals and terrorists, or fraudsters,” it’s not at all far-fetched to be suspicious that the information obtained could be used in a very wide range of operations, including insider information on financial affairs. Sailer suggests that fear of having conversations recorded may account for the concentration of elites in urban centers like Washington, DC and New York, and he pointedly links to his previous article on Jewish wealth, implying that insider information is a key to Jewish wealth. However, even voice conversations are susceptible to NICE’s technology. And the other side of the coin is that it would not be at all surprising to learn that Jewish trading networks are privy to information obtained by companies like NICE.
The situation with the NSA is yet another example of what it means to have a Jewish elite in the U.S.: Jewish spies who deliver vital computer programs to Israel are not indicted. And despite a long history of aggressive spying against the U.S., the NSA hires Israeli firms to do its data collection, with nary a word heard in Congress or the media about the obvious problems that presents.
It’s good to be king.
June 23, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | 52 Major American Jewish organizations, David Petraeus, Homeland Security Department, Israel, James Bamford, James Petras, Mossad, Narus, National Security Agency, NSA, United States, Verint |
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Harper Government Sides with US and Israel Against Lebanon
In response to hotly contested claims that Hezbollah was responsible for bombing Israeli citizens in Bulgaria last July, immigration minister Jason Kenney called the Lebanese group a “vile anti-Semitic terrorist organization” and urged the European Union to “follow Canada’s lead in listing Hezbollah as a proscribed and illegal terrorist organization.”
Kenney’s comment last week is part of a concerted campaign against a group the Los Angeles Times has called “Lebanon’s largest political party and most potent armed force.” Stephen Harper blamed Hezbollah for Israel’s summer 2006 invasion, Israel’s fifth, of Lebanon, which left 1,100 (mostly civilian) Lebanese dead and much of the country’s infrastructure destroyed. The month after Hezbollah successfully held off the Israeli invasion, foreign minister Peter MacKay said: “Lebanon is being held hostage by Hezbollah. There can be no doubt about that. Hezbollah is a cancer on Lebanon, which is destroying stability and democracy within its boundaries.” For his part, public safety minister Stockwell Day claimed the “stated intent of Hezbollah is to annihilate Jewish people.” (Despite Day and Kenney’s claims, Hezbollah was created in response to Israel’s 1982-2000 occupation of southern Lebanon and its pronouncements suggest it is largely concerned with Israel’s occupation of Arab lands.)
Almost entirely ignored by the Canadian media, the Conservatives’ demonization of Hezbollah gathered steam when Daniel Bellemare, a Canadian official, took charge of the international investigation into the February 2005 assassination of five-time Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri. In November 2007 Bellemare, deputy attorney general and special advisor to the deputy minister of justice until October 2007, was appointed commissioner of the United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission (UNIIIC) into the bombing that killed Hariri and two dozen others. Concurrently, he was named prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which was set to continue the UNIIIC’s work beginning in March 2009.
Both the internal and international investigations into Hariri’s killing were far from conclusive. Initially, Syrian security officers were implicated in the killings and in the post assassination upheaval Syrian troops were driven from the country. Four Lebanese generals were also incarcerated for four years in the killings but they were released when the evidence against them was dismissed.
In 2010 the Netherlands-based STL began to point its finger at Hezbollah and in August 2011 four members of the Party of God were formally charged in the Hariri killings. But before the charges came down the international investigation was discredited in the eyes of many. A July 2011 survey of 800 Lebanese, sponsored by leading Arabic-language daily As-Safir, found that 60 percent of the country believed the international probe was politicized. The poll also found widespread distrust of Bellemare, who was accused of being pro-Israel and anti-Hezbollah. He also had suspiciously close relations with US officials.
Just after Bellemare issued the indictments against four individuals with ties to Hezbollah Lebanese daily Al Akbar published a detailed article on the Canadian titled “UN Tribunal: A Prosecutor’s ‘Tunnel Vision’” (translated by its English edition). “An example of this bias appears in paragraph 59 of the indictment, where Bellemare states that ‘all four accused are supporters of Hezbollah, which is a political and military organization in Lebanon. In the past, the military wing of Hezbollah has been implicated in terrorist acts.’ Bellemare does not offer a reference supporting his assertion that Hezbollah was involved in terrorism, and, so far, no international judicial body has issued a decision describing Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. In fact, there is no international consensus surrounding Hezbollah’s ‘terrorism’ status, and the UN does not recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Several countries, including the US, Israel, and Canada have officially labeled the group as a terrorist organization — though, notably, the European Union has not. Bellemare seemingly chose to include his personal political opinion and perhaps the views of some of his colleagues in an international indictment.”
Many Lebanese believe the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad had a hand in Hariri’s death yet Bellemare refused to say if he interviewed any Israeli suspects. A TV station linked to Hezbollah, Al Manar, claimed Bellemare “lost credibility” for his “politicized tribunal” because he was unwilling to investigate Israel’s possible implication in the killings. The “Israeli enemy is ‘innocent’ and will remain so in the eyes of the international community and the STL Prosecutor Daniel Bellemare.”
The most damning evidence against Bellemare came from the US State Department. A series of US diplomatic cables, released by Wikileaks, suggest he worked closely with the US embassy in Beirut. On one occasion Bellemare asked US officials for information on Syria and for help in convincing the British to assist an investigation committee. The former deputy attorney general also requested two temporary FBI investigators be paid by the US. An October 2008 cable from the ambassador in Beirut to Washington read: “Bellemare showed a good understanding of the problems [for the US] associated with complying … but his frustration was nonetheless evident: ‘You are the key player [he said]. If the US doesn’t help me, who will?’” The US embassy gave Bellemare “an ‘excellence’ preliminary assessment for his effort and determination, and we urge Washington to exert every effort to respond to the investigation committee’s request related to the information and support.”
Hezbollah claimed the Wikileaks cables confirmed that the US manipulated the probe. “The information leaked on meetings between the prosecutor and the US ambassador confirms what we have always said — that the US administration is using the court and the investigation committee as a tool to target the resistance [to Israel, i.e. Hezbollah],” noted Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah in December 2010.
In January 2011 the Lebanese government collapsed when 10 cabinet ministers and one presidential appointee withdrew over then Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s refusal to reject the STL. At the start of 2011 many feared that the STL’s expected indictment of Hezbollah members could re-ignite the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1975-1990. This didn’t bother Washington. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke in favour of the STL and announced $10 million in added funding for the floundering tribunal. The US ambassador in Lebanon Maura Connelly said “the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is an irrevocable, international judicial process; its work is not a matter of politics but of law.” Even President Obama chimed in, saying the STL’s first indictment could end an “era of impunity” and that it was “a significant and emotional time for the Lebanese people.”
In the first 10 weeks of 2011 Foreign Affairs released three statements that dealt with the STL. On January 13 the ministry complained about the dissolution of Lebanon’s government over the matter. “These resignations are an attempt to subvert a safe and secure Lebanon and cannot be tolerated. Hezbollah’s actions in bringing down the government are a clear attempt to undermine the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Canada believes that the work of the Special Tribunal should go forward so that justice can be served.” A follow-up statement explained: “We urge the future Lebanese government to continue to support and cooperate with the Tribunal and to continue to uphold its obligations under UN Security Council resolutions on Lebanon.” In March 2011 the Conservatives gave a further $1 million contribution to the STL. “Canada has been a strong supporter of the Tribunal, having already contributed $3.7 million to the voluntarily funded Tribunal since 2007,” explained foreign minister Cannon.
An August 2011 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) report, detailed in Montréal daily La Presse, found that “many Lebanese consider the work of the STL an inquest led by Canadians.” At the time more than 20 Canadians were involved in the Tribunal’s work and last March another Canadian replaced Bellemare. According to CSIS, this country’s association with the highly divisive tribunal increased the likelihood of Canadians being targeted.
The Conservatives latest salvo against Hezbollah is another reminder that the Harper government has sided with the US and Israel against most Lebanese.
Yves Engler’s latest book is The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s foreign policy
February 15, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Canada, Daniel Bellemare, Hezbollah, Israel, Jason Kenney, Lebanon, Mossad, Zionism |
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Israel’s Office of the Prime Minister on Tuesday summoned the owners and top editors of country’s media establishments to forbid them from publishing reports on a prisoner who had been secretly jailed in 2010.
Haaretz reported that the office called an “emergency meeting” with the Israeli Editors Committee where they were reportedly ordered to “withhold publication of information pertaining to an incident that is very embarrassing to a certain government agency.”
The order comes in response to a new investigative report by Australia’s ABC TV news program Foreign Correspondent which alleges to have revealed the identity of a former inmate in Israel’s Ayalon Prison who was found dead in his cell in 2010.
The secret inmate, known as “Prisoner X,” was reportedly kept in a cell built for the man who assassinated former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Haaretz had earlier posted, then quickly removed a story linking to the Australian report, presumably under government orders.
At 12:38pm, the newspaper Tweeted the story, which was titled: “Report: Security prisoner who committed suicide in Israeli prison in 2010 was Australian.” Less than two hours later a user pointed out that the story had vanished.
No details had previously been released about the prisoner’s identity or reasons behind his incarceration.
The ABC report, which came out Tuesday, identified the man as Ben Zygier, an Australian citizen who had been living in Israel for 10 years before his death.
The report said it had found evidence to suggest that Zygier had been recruited by Israel’s Mossad spy agency, but that it remained unclear why he was being secretly held.
An Israeli court order – issued shortly after his imprisonment in 2010 – that barred media from covering the story remains in effect, the report added.
The prisoner was found hanging from his cell after being held for several months in an apparent suicide.
Media scholars have written on Israel’s tight media restrictions over issues it claims may compromise the security of the Jewish state.
February 12, 2013
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Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Haaretz, Israel, Mossad |
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In recent days, reports about an alleged Israeli-US bombing attack that would have allegedly destroyed a large portion of the Fordo nuclear enrichment plant in Qom were circulating in Western media. However, its falsehood was soon revealed by several sources.
The story first appeared on February 25th when an Iranian defector going by the pseudonym Reza Kahlili published an evidence-free article in the US site wnd.com, in which he claimed that the Fordo plant had been the target of a sabotage operation. The article claimed that a blast deep within Fordo had “destroyed much of the installation and trapped about 240 personnel deep underground”.
However, the first doubts came due to the personality of the author himself, as Kahlili, a defector, is widely considered as a liar because of his previous claims. He wrote some months ago that Iran actually had nuclear weapons.
Kahlili’s sole source was Hamid Reza Zakeri, another Iranian defector, who is also notorious for his lies against Iran. A US official has been quoted by some US media as saying that Zakeri was “a fabricator or monumental proportions”.
This is not the first time that defectors are used in order to launch false accusations against a country. In the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, New York Times reporter Judith Miller (and some others) published several stories about Saddam Hussein´s non-existent weapons of mass destruction programs and these reports were used by the Bush administration as a pretext to launch the war. Later, all these allegations turned out to be false and the newspaper was forced to admit that Miller had based her reports on Iraqi defectors. In that sense, the case for the war on Iraq was built on a set of fabricated documents and deliberately manipulated intelligence that US media outlets uncritically reproduced.
Israel spreads the story
Shortly after the Fordo story appeared, Israeli sites and officials tried to make it pass as true. The website of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot repeated the claim and it was later echoed by the Times of London, which added that the story had been confirmed by Israeli intelligence officials. “We are still in the preliminary stages of understanding what happened and how significant it is,” one Israeli official told the London Times. “Israel believes the Iranians have not evacuated the (Fordo´s) surrounding area. It is unclear whether that is because no harmful substances have been released, or because Tehran is trying to avoid sparking panic among residents.”
For his part, Israeli acting Defense Minister, Avi Dichter, reacted to the story by saying that indeed any explosion in Iran was “good news”.
Of course, Israeli officials always knew that the story was false but it is clear that they wanted to feed the notion that they -with US help- were conducting a successful secret war against Iran in order to reinforce their own extremist stance. However, as these stories are revealed as lies, the effect is counterproductive to them because they expose themselves, once again, as liars before the international community, especially on the Iran nuclear issue.
However, two senior Iranian officials dismissed reports of the explosion. Deputy head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Agency Seyyed Shamseddin Barbroudi said there had been no explosion at the Fordo facility, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA). The chairman of the Iranian parliament’s Committee for Foreign Policy and National Security, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, said they were “baseless lies” meant to impact talks on Iran´s nuclear program, reported IRNA.
The Iranians´ statements were then confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which claimed that there were no signs of any explosion whatever in Fordo. The IAEA has live cameras at the site and its inspectors regularly visit it, and, therefore, they would have known if it had been “in ruins with hundreds trapped within”. “We understand that Iran has denied that there has been an incident at Fordo. This is consistent with our observations,” IAEA spokeswoman Gill Tudor said.
The White House also rejected the report as unreliable. “We have no information to confirm the allegations in the report and we do not believe the report is credible,” spokesman Jay Carney said in a briefing with reporters. “We do not believe those are credible reports.”
The false diagram
The Fordo false explosion was not the only Israeli fabrication on the Iranian nuclear issue. On November 27th 2012, the Associated Press agency published a report claiming that it had discovered the existence of alleged evidence of “Iranian work on a nuclear bomb”. “Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima”, the agency said.
This evidence, according to AP, was a “graph” which the agency said was “leaked” to it by “officials from a country critical of Iran’s atomic program” to “bolster their arguments that Iran’s nuclear program must be halted before it produces a weapon”. Moreover, “an intelligence summary was provided with the drawing” claiming that “Iran is working not on isolated experiments, but rather on a single program aimed at mastering all aspects of nuclear arms development.”
Why did AP hide which country had delivered the diagram? It said that officials of that country wanted anonumity, so the agency gave it anonymity. However, everybody was certain it was Israel.
The author of the AP report, George Jahn is also notorious because every time there is a possibility of a diplomatic solution to the crisis over Iran´s nuclear program, he reports an “exclusive” anti-Iranian revelation, always provided to him by “an official of a country tracking Iran’s nuclear program,” or “an official of a country that has been severely critical of Iran´s nuclear program.”
Nevertheless, experts soon discovered that the diagram was fake and amateurish. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, it simply showed that “the bulk of the nuclear fission yield is produced in a short 0.1 microsecond pulse”, which is a common knowledge for any physics student. Later, it was equally discovered that it is widely available all over the Internet and in university textbooks. Even worse, the diagram contained huge errors, which were unlikely to have been made by research scientists who work in a state-run national program.
Scott Kemp, an assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told IPS he suspects the graph leaked to AP was “adapted from the open literature”. He said he believed its authors “were told they ought to look into the literature and found that paper, copied (the graph) and made their own plot from it.”
After the hoax became exposed, Western diplomats privately accused Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, of being behind the leaks, which would be part of an effort to implicate a murdered Iranian in an alleged weapons program. The diplomats also said Mossad is becoming increasingly active in Austria, the home of the IAEA and the place where George Jahn works, in order to drive support for a war on Iran.
Therefore, what AP presented as a kind of highly specialized and very complex document was only a very common graph, which can be easily found on the internet. The agency helped create and spread a dangerous hoax and its credibility was severely damaged by this serious incident that demonstrated that it let itself be manipulated by officials “of an anonymous state” in order to incriminate Iran. The agency did not tell the public who gave it the false and misleading information with the evident goal of misleading the public into believing that Iran had a weapons programme.
Recently and after having scored a heavy defeat in the latest parliamentary elections, where he and his his right-wing partner Avigdor Lieberman lost 25% of their seats in the Knesset, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to hide his current political weakness by shifting the public´s attention to Iran. In his “victory speech”, he insisted that his first challenge would be “preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons”.
Of course, this rhetoric does not deceive anyone, as even the US and the IAEA reports recognize that Iran continues to use civilian enriched uranium only for civilian purposes. US officials have recently said that the assessment included in the 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, which claims that there is no evidence whatever of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, remains the consensus view of the US´s 16 intelligence agencies.
The international community is actually fed up with Israel’s false allegations and fabrications against Iran. Netanyahu and his Zionist supporters in the US probably know that the American and Western public cannot be manipulated into supporting an attack on Iran, as all the polls show.
Another for-Israel war in the Middle East would not benefit anyone but the far right in Israel, the pro-Israeli lobby in the US and its neocon agents. It would not only devastate the Middle East and kill hundreds of thousands, if not more, but it would also produce a decades-long conflict between the Muslim world and the West that would also destroy the West´s economy. Due to all this, the international community and the peoples of the world must confront these Zionist plots threatening the existence and hopes of humanity.
February 7, 2013
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Wars for Israel | Associated Press, Fordo, International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran, Islamic Republic News Agency, Israel, Mossad |
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Tunisia – For the past three months, the Arab Maghreb countries have been witnessing a growing number of controversies and scandals concerning cells linked to Israeli espionage activities.
It began when an informants network was dismantled in Mauritania early this year. Then Mossad made the headlines in Algeria and Morocco in a string of reports, rumors, and hoaxes.
Finally, a new scandal reverberated across Tunisia last week involving a wide network of Mossad operations, including espionage centers using the country as a base to spy across the Maghreb region.
Abderraouf al-Ayadi, head of the Wafa Movement which split from the Rally for the Republic (RPR), caused a huge stir last week when he revealed that Mossad has stepped up its activities in post-revolutionary Tunisia.
He said that these activities were being conducted under the “cover of European and US NGOs that claim to be charitable, humanitarian, or cultural.”
This echoes earlier statements by the head of the Tunisian Workers Party (formerly POCT), Hamma al-Hammami, about “Israeli spy networks operating in post-revolution Tunisia that took advantage of the state of chaos and lawlessness that swept the country following president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s escape.”
The information revealed by Ayadi and Hammami coincided with a February report by the Yafa Center for Studies and Research focusing on Mossad activities in the Maghreb. The report said that the agency began concentrating its operations in Tunisia following the PLO’s exit from Beirut and relocation to Tunis in 1982.
Interest in the region declined after the signing of the Oslo accords, until the Tunisian revolution brought it back.
The report spoke about the post-Oslo Tunisian-Israeli rapprochement which became public with the establishment of a bureau for economic cooperation in 1996.
The relationship included a secret item about the “establishment of a system for security coordination between the Mossad and Tunisia by Shalom Cohen, a Tunisian Jew working in the North Africa section of the Israeli Mossad. In the same year, he became the director of the Israeli interest bureau in Tunisia.”
According to the report, Cohen used his diplomatic cover to build a “Mossad network” based in the capital Tunis, with branches in Sousse and Djerba.
The Yafa center information is consistent with that which Ayadi said he had received from a high-ranking Tunisian security source who reported the surveillance of a secret Mossad network “of around 300 agents” distributed over the three spying bases.
The first base was in the capital and run by a certain Nachman Jalboagh. It focused on Algeria by collecting information, monitoring targets, and recruiting agents.
The second is in Sousse and run by Doron Pierre. Its operations were primarily inside Tunisia, especially the monitoring the remaining Palestinians in Tunisia, Salafi movements, and groups opposing peace with Israel.
The third is in Djerba, run by Nurit Tsur, and focuses on Libya. It also acts to protect the Jewish sect in Tunisia, which is concentrated on the island, and collects information about Jewish archaeological sites and landmarks in Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya.
Tunisian authorities have remained silent despite the uproar caused by the revelations. The government has yet to take any public action concerning the issue.
Speaking to al-Maghreb newspaper, interior minister Ali al-Arid said “the statements concerning 300 Mossad spies in Tunisia, working under the cover of cultural NGOs and travel agencies, are unfounded and completely irresponsible.”
“They are intended to disturb the work of security agencies that toil night and day to protect Tunisia. Anyone who has information about the issue should contact the security agencies so they can confirm it,” he added.
Tunisian anti-normalization activists believe that the interior minister’s statements contradict information broadcast on official Israeli television in the first days of the Tunisian revolution.
Mossad had boasted about “a special operation in Tunisia, under the cover of European companies, to evacuate a group of Israelis who were visiting Djerba, the site of the oldest synagogue in the world, al-Ghariba temple.”
Tunisian activists suggest that “Mossad activities and crimes are not new in Tunisia. The most famous was the bombing of the Hammam al-Shat suburb in the autumn of 1985. It targeted the offices of late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat. The Mossad also carried out numerous assassinations in Tunisia, including that of the mastermind behind the first intifada, Abu Jihad, in 1988.”
Following the Oslo agreement, nationalist and leftist currents, as well as anti-normalization associations accused Ben Ali of “facilitating Mossad operations and activities in Tunisia.”
This was highlighted in a documentary broadcast by Tunisian television following the revolution called “The State of Corruption.” The film exposed the significant role that Ben Ali played in setting the scene for the accords.
Following Oslo, the former dictator opened an Israeli economic cooperation bureau in Tunis. The office initiated its activities by contacting several Tunisian intellectuals and journalists to lure them into normalization activities. The majority refused to be involved.
The bureau was later closed due to popular pressure following the 2002 Israeli assault on the West Bank and the consequent siege of Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah.
The alarm sounded by Ayadi and Hammami is based on evidence and information corroborated by rights activist Ahmed al-Kahlawi, president of the Tunisian Association for Fighting Normalization and Supporting the Arab Resistance (TAFNSAR).
Kahlawi said that “several foreign organizations active in post-revolution Tunisia, such as Freedom House, play a major role in propagating the culture of normalization under the pretext of defending human rights.”
He also laid bare the schemes of an organization called “AMIDEAST, which teaches English under the supervision of the US embassy. It entices students to give up their animosity towards Israel and promotes programs that claim to call for peace and dialogue between cultures, but in reality it aims to foster normalization.”
“With the fall of Ben Ali, Israel lost a strong strategic ally in North Africa,” Kahlawi explained. He indicated that most Zionist leaders admit this openly, including Benjamin Netanyahu and Silvan Shalom, who is of Tunisian origins (born in the city of Qabis).
Ben Ali had officially welcomed Shalom in 2005 in a meeting that was not covered by the Tunisian media, coinciding with the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis.
Kahlawi said the latest revelations about Mossad’s role in Tunisia should be further grounds for the constituent assembly to ratify chapter 27 of the proposed constitution, related to crimes of normalization and prosecuting collaboration with the Zionist state.
He added that “al-Nahda had rejected the criminalization of normalization, with a demagogic argument contending that the Tunisian constitution will last longer than the Israeli state, which will inevitably perish!”
Most Tunisian anti-normalization activists suspect the real reason behind al-Nahda eschewing the criminalization of normalization to be “pressure from the US on the ruling troika, and specifically on the movement, to prevent the ratification of chapter 27, which had been proposed by anti-normalization associations.”
September 1, 2012
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Aletho News | al-Akhbar, Al-Nahda, Israel, Maghreb, Mossad, Tunisia, Tunisian revolution, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Zionism |
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By Maidhc Ó Cathail | September 24, 2009
By way of deception, shalt thou wage war. – motto of Mossad, Israel’s Intelligence Service
The scenes of flag-waving Libyans welcoming home Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the man known as the Lockerbie bomber, further discredited Muslims in the minds of many. For those whose knowledge of the story is derived mainly from TV news, it appeared to be a callous celebration of mass murder, lending credence to the belief that “Islam” and “terrorism” are virtually synonymous. A closer look at the facts surrounding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, however, reveals a pattern of deception by those who have most to gain from making Muslims look bad.
While the news reports dutifully recorded the protestations of outrage by Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and others at what appeared to be an unseemly hero’s welcome for a convicted terrorist, they neglected to mention that Libyans were celebrating the release of a countryman whom they believe had been wrongfully imprisoned for eight years. Also omitted from the reports was any indication that informed observers of Megrahi’s case in Britain and elsewhere are likewise convinced of his innocence.
Robert Black, the University of Edinburgh law professor who was the architect of the trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, says that “no reasonable tribunal could have convicted Megrahi on the evidence led,” and calls his 2001 conviction “an absolute and utter outrage.” Prof. Black likens the Scottish trial judges to the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass who “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Hans Köchler, a UN-appointed observer at the trial, states that “there is not one single piece of material evidence linking the two accused to the crime,” and condemns the court’s verdict as a “spectacular miscarriage of justice.” And Dr. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was one of the 270 killed on December 21, 1988, dismisses the prosecution’s case against Megrahi and fellow Libyan Lamin Khalifa F’hima as “a cock and bull story.”
According to that “cock and bull story,” Megrahi, the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), conspired with Lamin Khalifa F’hima, the station manager for LAA in Malta (who was acquitted), to put a suitcase bomb on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt. At Frankfurt, the lethal suitcase had to be transferred to another flight bound for London Heathrow. Then in Heathrow Airport, it would have to be transferred for a second time onto the ill-fated Flight 103 destined for New York.
But for that rather implausible scenario to be true, the Libyans would have to have had an inordinate faith in the reliability of baggage handlers in two of Europe’s busiest airports at one of the busiest times of the year. Less optimistic would-be bombers would surely have slipped the bomb-laden suitcase on board in London. Fueling suspicions that this is indeed what happened, investigating police were told by a security guard at Heathrow that the Pan Am baggage storage area had been broken into on the night of the bombing.
The reported break-in at Heathrow was part of 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence that Megrahi’s defense could present at an appeal, which in 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, after a three-year investigation, recommended he be granted.
But before that appeal could be heard, the compassionate release of Megrahi, suffering from terminal prostate cancer, conveniently spared the potential embarrassment of all those involved in his dubious conviction. More significantly, it also averted awkward questions being raised, in the likely event of the Libyan being acquitted, about who actually planted the bomb, and why.
Reel Bad Muslims
Many of those who doubt Libya’s responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, perhaps not surprisingly in the current climate, tend to suspect other Muslim countries of involvement. The most popular theory is that Iran hired the Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) led by Ahmed Gibril to avenge the “accidental” shooting down by the USS Vincennes on July 3, 1988 of Iran Air Flight 655, which killed all 288 civilians on board.
Others believe that Abu Nidal, the founder of the infamous Black September terrorist group, may have been involved. If they’re right, it raises disturbing questions about who was ultimately responsible for the Lockerbie atrocity. In his fine biography of Nidal, A Gun for Hire, British journalist Patrick Seale confirms long-held suspicions that many in the Middle East have had about the “Palestinian terrorist” who did more than anyone to discredit the Palestinian cause. “Abu Nidal was undoubtedly a Mossad agent,” Seale asserts. “Practically every job he did benefited Israel.”
Interestingly, one theory which has the PFLP-GC collaborating with Abu Nidal on behalf of Iran, has been espoused by a former Mossad staffer, Yuval Aviv, whose New York-based investigative agency, Interfor, prepared a report for Pan Am’s insurers on the Lockerbie bombing.
Writing under the pen name Sam Green, Aviv also authored Flight 103, a fictional account of the Lockerbie tragedy he claims is “based solidly on real-life facts,” in which the vengeful Iranians enlist a Palestinian terrorist, Ahmed ‘The Falcon’ Shabaan, to do their dirty work. Aviv, who inspired Steven Spielberg’s Munich, hopes his director friend will convert his Lockerbie tale into another Hollywood blockbuster.
Hardly any mainstream commentators, however, have questioned the trustworthiness of a former Mossad agent, who retains close ties with the intelligence service, fingering Palestinians and Iran for a terrorist attack which killed 189 Americans, thereby blackening the reputation of two of Israel’s greatest foes in the minds of those it wishes to convince that the U.S. and Israel face a common enemy.
Dirty Tricks
Not everyone in the media has been as naive about Israeli machinations though. Writing in the Guardian just before the trial of the two Libyans, veteran American journalist Russell Warren Howe, in an excellent article titled “What if they are innocent?” analyses whether the Iranian government, Palestinian terrorists or Israeli intelligence were more likely perpetrators. Howe concludes, “Even if Megrahi and F’hima are found guilty of the most serious charges, there would still be a need for a new investigation: to decide what was Israel’s possibly major role in mass murder and deception of its main benefactor, the US.” Howe is suggesting that even if the Libyans, or other Arabs, had actually planted the bomb, they may still have been duped into doing so by Israeli agents.
Intriguingly, Howe cites a reference in Gordon Thomas’ book on Mossad, Gideon’s Spies,to a Mossad officer stationed in London who showed up in Lockerbie the morning after the crash to arrange for the removal of a suitcase from the crime scene. The suitcase, said to belong to Captain Charles McKee, a DIA officer who was killed on the flight, was later returned “empty and undamaged.”
Moreover, the idea of Libyan responsibility, Howe notes, seems to have originated in Israel. Again, he quotes Thomas, who says that a source at LAP, Mossad’s psychological warfare unit, informed him that “within hours of the crash, staff at LAP were working the phones to their media contacts urging them to publicise that here was ‘incontrovertible proof’ that Libya, through its intelligence service, Jamahirya, was culpable.”
It may also have been Mossad disinformation, Howe suspects, that induced the U.S. government to believe the Libyans were guilty. The day after the Lockerbie bombing, U.S. intelligence intercepted a radio message from Tripoli to a Libyan government office in Berlin that effectively said, “mission accomplished.”
Two years earlier, a similar message intercept had induced Ronald Reagan to order air strikes against Libya, killing over a hundred people, including Qaddafi’s two-year-old adopted daughter. But the message had been faked by Israel, according to Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad case officer, who described the operation in The Other Side of Deception, the second of two exposés he wrote about the Mossad after leaving the service.
Operation Trojan began in February 1986 when the Mossad secretly installed a communications device known as a “Trojan” in an apartment in Tripoli. The Trojan received messages broadcast by Mossad’s LAP on one frequency and automatically transmitted them on a different frequency used by the Libyan government. “Using the Trojan,” Ostrovsky writes, “the Mossad tried to make it appear that a long series of terrorist orders were being transmitted to various Libyan embassies around the world.” U.S. intelligence, as anticipated by the Israelis, intercepted the bogus messages, and believed them to be authentic — especially after receiving confirmation from the Mossad.
Within weeks of the Trojan being installed, two American soldiers were killed in an explosion at La Belle Discothèque, a nightclub in West Berlin frequented by U.S. servicemen. Assuming that Libya was responsible, nine days later the U.S. dropped 60 tons of bombs on Tripoli and Benghazi. Few suspected that the Americans had been tricked into the “retaliation” by Israel, whose subterfuge had punished Qaddafi for his support of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and further alienated the U.S from the Arab world.
Not all Americans are oblivious to Israeli wiles, however. Commenting on the Israeli intelligence service’s penchant for deception, Andrew Killgore, a former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, wrote in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, “Mossad’s specialty was dirty tricks… Its modus operandi had always been the same: pull off a dirty trick but make it appear somebody else had done it.”
As part of any new investigation to establish whether or not the Lockerbie bombing was another one of the Mossad’s “dirty tricks,” detectives might want to interview Issac Yeffet, the former chief of security for the Israeli airline, El Al, who in 1986 was commissioned by Pan Am to survey its security at a number of airports worldwide. As Killgore, in a separate article for the Washington Report, suggestively noted: “Yeffet may have been successful in maintaining perfect security for El Al at Ben-Gurion Airport. But his efforts at Heathrow Airport in London, one of the airports he surveyed for Pan Am, and to which he and his employees had full rein, failed to save Pan Am Flight 103.”
Still protesting his innocence, the dying Megrahi told reporters on his release, “The truth never dies.” That may be so. But as long as the Western media continue to believe that only Israel’s enemies would blow up a civilian airliner, the truth about Lockerbie is unlikely to ever reach a very wide audience.
August 17, 2012
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, Hans Köchler, Jim Swire, Lockerbie, Mossad, Pan Am Flight 103 |
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