Exchange on Palestine and the Lobby: Blankfort, Dunbar-Ortiz and Kaminer

I am forwarding the following exchange with historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz regarding Matan Kaminer's article in Political Affairs, not because she asked me to do so, but because I think that an open debate on the issue of "The Lobby" is important and the failure to have this debate or even talk about the subject has been a major contributing factor to the sad state of American politics today and to building a movement that would seriously challenge the status quo. My message follows her for easier reading.-JB

-----Original Message-----
>From: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
>Sent: Apr 11, 2007 10:16 AM
>To: Jeffrey Blankfort
>Cc: matan.kaminer@gmail.com
>Subject: Re: On the Lobby: Matan Kaminer responds and my response to him
>
>
>Jeffrey, thanks for sending out Matan's piece and the
>correspondence. I very much agree with Matan's analysis, and, as
>usual, have questions of yours.
>
>you write:
>
>"Moreover, I have yet to see any argument of substance that
>demonstrates what strategic benefits the US gains from Israel's
>occupation and continuing theft of Palestinian land . .. This is not
>to say that in the absence of Israel that the US would be any less
>imperialistic, but it's activities in the Middle East would have been
>markedly different. It would, I am sure, not have launched or have
>been able to launch the current war against Iraq without the public
>and hidden orchestration of a score of mostly Jewish neocons and the
>support of the lobby (of which the neocons are a key part !) that
>even as Madeline Albright recently admitted, is the greatest foreign
>policy disaster in US history and which was opposed from the start by
>the old line US establishment represented by the senior George Bush,
>by his former Sec of State, James Baker and their National Security
>Advisor Brent Scowcroft, none of whom were considered friendly to
>either Israel or American Jewry, and all of whom have far greater
>connections to the oil industry than anyone in the current
>administration, including Dick Cheney. And those divisions in the US
>ruling class over America's unconditional support for Israel run
>quite deep, a reality of which the ideologically encapsulated
>American left is totally ignorant and apparently wishes to remain so."
>
>Actually, Jeffrey, I don't think you have an understanding of how US
>imperialism works in the post-colonial era. You might read Samir
>Amin's, Empire of Chaos to gain a better understanding. Israel is
>useful as a Western enclave (or at least its ruling class's
>maintenance of that stance) precisely to keep the region unsettled
>and chaotic. Iraq has been "mismanaged" as all the US imperialists
>are now saying, but none of them opposed it initially. Sometimes it
>seems that you want to see the empire managed more rationally, rather
>than dismantled.
>
>You write: "...long before the Christian Zionists appeared on the
>scene..."
>
>Jeffrey, I'm sorry, but you also don't know anything about Protestant
>fundamentalism, within which I grew up. US Protestant
>fundamentalists are inherently Christian Zionists. They are
>biblical literalists, and the Book of Revelation (which I had to
>memorize when I was 12 years old) says that the Jews must return to
>Israel, and when they do, Christ will return and take all believers
>to heaven (the Rapture), of course, leaving the Jews to burn in
>hell. I recall very well the celebration in my rural Southern
>Baptist church when the state of Israel was founded in 1948. I was
>10 years old. Believe, our nearly illiterate preacher was not in
>touch with the Israeli lobby.
>
>I hope you will send my comments to your list.
>
>Roxanne
>
>

Dear Roxanne,

I have not read "Empire of Chaos", but I am familiar with the position that you say it takes. I see it as yet another one that attempts to employ Marxist analysis to deny or address the historical facts that refute it. A reason must be found, it seems from this perspective, to explain the unconditional US support for Israel and if one doesn't work, let's try another. What must be avoided at all costs is to "blame the Jews," in this case, the organized Jewish community establishment in the US that makes up the heart of the pro-Israel lobby. If the "chaos" theory is what is in play in the Middle East, why not in other parts of the globe? In Latin America, the US failure in Iraq has rendered it incapable of dealing with the increasing march towards the left led by Venezuela. What is it capable of doing regarding North Korea?

You also write, in response to my statements that Bush Sr. Baker, and Scowcroft opposed the war, that "none of them opposed it initially." This is simply not true and their opposition was not secret nor were their reasons. (When Dubya was asked by NBC's Tim Russert why he was disagreeing with Bush Sr. about the war, Junior replied, "I answer to a higher father.") They preferred a weakened, but stable regime under Saddam to the "quagmire" they predicted that would be produced by a US occupation, and although it was not spelled out, the predictable coming to power of the Shia which would then link up with Iran. Yes, they were much more capable managers of US imperialism while having been openly critical of Israel, but this does not mean that I support them or am content with a more efficient form of US world hegemony.

If we are looking for the origins of the current Iraq war, we have to take their opposition into account and explain why, while at the same time examining what forces in US society were orchestrating the false intelligence and fomenting the war propaganda and the finger, whether it fits into Marxist theory being beside the point, points to the right wing of the Jewish establishment, the neocons and its influential think tanks, i.e., the Washington Inst. for Near East Policy (created by AIPAC), the American Enterprise Inst., and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, none of whose roles ever seem to be discussed, let alone mentioned, in what passes for "left" critiques of the war in Iraq which we are told is simply about "oil" and the US desire to control Iraq's vast oil reserves. Anyone knowledgeable about how the oil system works knows how oversimplified that explanation is. Of course, oil, is the key factor in the region, but, if there is one thing that oil producers require, its huge profits from the war notwithstanding, is stability in the region where the oil is being produced because pipelines and drilling platforms are very vulnerable to attack. Needless to say, there is no evidence that the oil companies supported the war and had they been allowed to, they would have happily made a deal with Saddam and we would have had no war at this point in time. To point that out does not put me in bed with the oil companies or Saddam. It's just the way it would have been had not Israel and it's US lobby been around to exert its power on the scene.

As for the power of the Christian Zionists and when it emerged as a political force, it has been eagerly seized upon by, if not welcomed, by those who dismiss or downplay the power of the Jewish Zionists. They succeed in distorting its power as well as its history as a political force. While there is a long record of Christian support for Zionism I have yet to find any evidence that it played a significant role in building US support for Israel on Capitol Hill until Begin was elected Prime Minister and invited Jerry Falwell to visit Israel, which then led to a visit by Pat Robertson and the rest is history. Even today, they are nowhere near as powerful in Washington as those in the "Left" like to think they are and their presence and growth has not demonstrably changed the already dominant position of the Jewish lobby in Washington. That the Christian Zionists before WW2 were not significant politically nor until relatively recently was that they were not embraced or welcomed by the leading elements of American Jewry. As Israel's behavior has come under increasing attack by mainstream US churches, the lobby, becoming desperate, began to embrace the evangelicals, and particularly so, when, a few years ago. Falwell and Robertson were invited to hold prayer breakfasts at the Israeli embassy. What is rarely mentioned by those recalling the early days of Christian support for Zionism is that the dominant religious message prior to World War 2 was largely "anti-Jewish" led by Father Coughlin who railed against Jews on his national radio program and by the likes of Gerald L K Smith with his publication, "The Cross and the Flag."

As a friend who had worked as a staff member of a former Congressman wrote me this morning, one of the insidious aspects of the lobby's power is that pro-Israel Jewish members of Congress have been routinely assigned committee chairmanships that give them the power to oversee legislation in areas that have been politically critical for Israel, not just foreign aid, but South Africa, which under Howard Wolpe, was able to neutralize efforts to penalize Israel for selling arms to the South African apartheid regime, and Latin America, where the US was criticized for aiding the Contras in Nicaragua, and the death squad regimes of El Salvador and Guatemala, while ignoring the major role played by Israel in all three of those countries. (This myopia was also to be found among the various solidarity committees that were, at the time, Jewish dominated.)

What troubles me is that those who reject the position that the Israel Lobby, Jewish Lobby, Zionist Lobby, however one names it, is the dominant factor in shaping US Middle East policy, have never taken the time to actually do the research, to read the books that have been written on the subject. (In an email to a friend several years ago, rejecting a suggestion that he debate me on the issue of the lobby, Noam Chomsky wrote that it was my "obsession." As for him, he wrote, "I don't write about it, I don't talk about it") I suspect that underlying their position is the unexpressed feeling that to accept the truth about the negative role played by the organized Jewish establishment in America would be to somehow betray those Jews with whom you and others were so active over the years in struggling for civil rights, in the unions for the 8-hour day, and for progressive causes in general while ignoring the one glaring exception, the expulsion of the of Palestinians from their land and the right to return to it, which most of those very same Jews either vigorously defended, quietly accepted or ignored. This happens to be a sad piece of history of the Old Left and much of what was called the New Left in the 60s that I know all too well from direct experience with both. It is time to get past that and accept reality as it is, not how you would like it to be.

Best,

Jeff



>
>On Apr 11, 2007, at 12:34 AM, Jeffrey Blankfort wrote:
>
>Dear Matan,
>
>Thanks for the prompt reply and the family update.
>
>One of the most critical failings in your analysis and of those who
>downplay the influence of the lobby, most notably Noam Chomsky, was
>expressed when you wrote:
>
>"The one undeniable empirical fact is that for three decades and more
>American government policy and the Israel lobby's demands have been
>very close. Not always identical - there have been crises - but
>certainly very close, in an almost unprecedented way. "
>
>Chomsky and others have postulated this as proof that the lobby only
>appears to be powerful because its interests are in line with
>Washington's imperial interests whereas the lobby's critics, among
>them myself, question whether support for Israel has, in fact, been
>in keeping with the US global interests and take the position
>advanced by Stephen Green in "Taking Sides," that Israel and its
>supporters in the US define the limits of action that a US president
>may take in issues relating to Israel and it is left to the president
>to set policy within those limits. Any honest examination of the
>history of US-Israel relations shows this to have been the case.
>
>What is not generally known since Chomsky and those who agree with
>him tend to ignore it, is that as Uri Avnery pointed out more than 20
>years ago, every US president beginning with Nixon have attempted to
>get Israel to withdraw from lands it occupied in 1967 and with the
>exception of Carter forcing a withdrawal from the Sinai, they have
>been forced to pull back when Israel called on its US lobby to rally
>Congress on its behalf. Neither Israel nor its US lobby have ever
>forgiven Carter for Camp David despite it having removed Egypt as a
>military threat since, as I am sure you aware, as Ben-Gurion pointed
>out (in Sharett's diary), Israel requires external enemies in order
>to maintain a sufficiently high state of vigilance, not to mention
>diaspora support. These presidents were not seeking an end to
>Israeli occupation to benefit the Palestinians or the Syrians, but to
>eliminate an ongoing source of friction with the Arab and Muslim
>world which brings no strategic benefits to the United States.
>
>Moreover, I have yet to see any argument of substance that
>demonstrates what strategic benefits the US gains from Israel's
>occupation and continuing theft of Palestinian land while it should
>be obvious that a truncated Palestinian state in the West Bank and
>Gaza would not only be of no threat to the US, it would most likely
>and quickly, out of economic necessity, fall right into the US orbit
>along with Jordan or face economic strangulation as it is
>experiencing today. Arafat certainly made it clear that he was ready
>to jump into the lap of any US president and Abbas and his pathetic
>spokesperson Erekat are even more eager to do so. It was the late
>general Matti Peled who pointed out that the explanation that Israel
>receives support from the US because it is a "strategic asset" was
>invented to justify the continuing support of Israel by the US after
>Begin's election thirty years ago and the recirculation in the US
>press of the accusations made by Einstein, Arendt, and other
>prominent Jews in 1948 that Begin was a fascist in the Nazi mold.
>
>This is not to say that in the absence of Israel that the US would be
>any less imperialistic, but it's activities in the Middle East would
>have been markedly different. It would, I am sure, not have launched
>or have been able to launch the current war against Iraq without the
>public and hidden orchestration of a score of mostly Jewish neocons
>and the support of the lobby (of which the neocons are a key part !)
>that even as Madeline Albright recently admitted, is the greatest
>foreign policy disaster in US history and which was opposed from the
>start by the old line US establishment represented by the senior
>George Bush, by his former Sec of State, James Baker and their
>National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, none of whom were
>considered friendly to either Israel or American Jewry, and all of
>whom have far greater connections to the oil industry than anyone in
>the current administration, including Dick Cheney. And those
>divisions in the US ruling class over America's unconditional support
>for Israel run quite deep, a reality of which the ideologically
>encapsulated American left is totally ignorant and apparently wishes
>to remain so. I am not one to quote Lenin, but he is alleged to have
>said, or written, "Be as real as reality." I have yet to meet a self-
>styled Leninist today who meets that standard nor a Trotskyist, for
>that matter.
>
>Now, I can well understand that given the censorship that is exists
>within the international left on the subject, that you would know
>very little about the lobby's history and its role in making Israel a
>country to which American politicians of both political parties
>routinely pledge their allegiance (more often than they do to the US)
>and why many of these same politicians who have no problem
>criticizing the president of the United States, or the head of state
>of any other country (but one), on the floor of Congress are
>literally afraid to criticize a prime minister of Israel, any prime
>minister, knowing that to do so would be a career threatening, if not
>career ending decision.
>
>Whether or not the lobby represents the majority of American Jews is
>irrelevant when one considers that that it is made up of the entire
>organized Jewish establishment which includes more than 60
>organizations, 150 community relations councils and federations,
>thousands of synagogues, and Washington's major think tanks. If there
>is a single thread that holds them all together it is their support
>of continued US political, military and economic assistance to Israel
>and their universal opposition to the Palestinian right of return. I
>am not aware of a single organization of any significance among
>American Jews that does not subscribe to these positions and I have
>studied the subject quite thoroughly for a number of years. As a
>group, moreover, Jews have long dominated the major donor list of the
>Democratic Party and by giving sums to key players in the Republican
>Party, assured their compliance with the lobby's wishes long before
>the Christian Zionists appeared on the scene. To pretend that their
>being Jewish is less significant than than the fact that they are
>also wealthy capitalists may be comforting but will fool no one,
>least of all the politicians who are on the receiving end of their
>largesse.
>
>To get an understanding of how the lobby works and how it shapes US
>Middle East policy, I recommend that you purchase over the internet
>the following books: Edward Tivnan's "The Lobby," Stephen Green's
>"Talking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant Israel,"
>former Congressman Paul Findley's "They Dare to Speak Out," JJ
>Goldberg's (the editor of the Jewish weekly Forward) "Jewish Power"
>and most recently, Jim Petras's "The Power of Israel in the US."
>Also, you may be interested in three articles of mine:
>
>Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict:
>http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html
>The Israel Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions: http://
>www.leftcurve.org/LC27WebPages/IsraelLobby.html
>A War for Israel: http://www.leftcurve.org/LC28WebPages/
>WarForIsrael.html
>
>Yours,
>
>Jeff
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Matan Kaminer
>Sent: Apr 10, 2007 5:58 AM
>To: Jeffrey Blankfort
>Cc: Reuven Kaminer , Eilat Maoz , gokce gunel
>Subject: Re: Politcal Affairs: Kaminer: The Colonial Drama of Israel
>& Palestine (and JB's response)
>
>Hi Jeff,
>Thanks for your reply. I am Reuven's grandson and Noam's son, by the
>way. I don't know how well I can respond to your criticism, as I am
>really not versed in the facts and figures of the "Israel lobby"
>debate. This is why the points I make briefly below will not be
>empirically based, but rather points of principle. Let me start by
>saying that if I came across as insinuating that any attempt to
>understand the question of the Israel lobby's power is anti-Semitic,
>then I apologize. Such smearing would indeed place me in the same
>ranks as Dershowitz and the others you mention, but it was certainly
>not my intention.
>That said, there are several ways of approaching the question. The
>one undeniable empirical fact is that for three decades and more
>American government policy and the Israel lobby's demands have been
>very close. Not always identical - there have been crises - but
>certainly very close, in an almost unprecedented way. So the question
>must be addressed.
>But there are a few pitfalls along the way. One is the conflation of
>the terms "Jewish", "Israeli" and "Zionist", which I think you are
>not being careful enough to avoid. The fact that many wealthy
>political donors are Jewish and may or may not belong to AIPAC does
>not mean that they represent the American Jewish community in any way
>(most American Jews are not wealthy); similarly, it does not mean
>that they represent the interest either of the state of Israel or of
>its citizens; neither does their Jewishness make their support of
>Zionism a question not worth trying to answer (not all wealthy Jews
>throughout history have been right-wing Zionists). In reality, the
>only generalization one can make about wealthy donors is that they
>are wealthy; this is where we should look for the connection, not in
>their Jewishness.
>It is true that the Zionists conflate Jew, Israeli and Zionist. They
>are hypocritical in the extreme when they then turn around and label
>others who fall into that trap as "anti-Semitic" . However, this does
>not mean that "it is okay" to do as they do. In fact, this is one of
>the main points where leftists need to fight against Zionist
>propaganda, and this is what I tried to contribute to in my article.
>The footnote in the article, where I mention that most of the
>American funding for Israel goes right back to America, was not meant
>to suggest that the profit the US arms industry makes from this
>funding is necessarily the main explanation for the aid. The point
>was that this money should not be seen as just an irrational gift,
>and I stand by that.
>I think that any real understanding of the support the US extends to
>Israel must take into consideration the US empire's own reasons for
>this support. I am not clear on whether you disagree with me on this.
>Do you think supporting Israel is bad for US imperialism? Do you feel
>that it doesn't make any difference, and that these are separate
>issues? Or do you disagree with the assumption I have made, up to now
>implicitly, that US foreign policy is, and always has been,
>imperialistic, and that progressive people all over the world should
>join the fight against it?
>
>Thanks again for your reply. Please feel free to send copies of our
>correspondence to anyone you like.
>
>In solidarity,
>Matan
>
>
>
>On 4/10/07, Jeffrey Blankfort wrote:
>The following article I came across today in my email box and is
>quite interesting in that it represents a view of Israel's
>traditional Marxist Jewish "left." The author, I assume is the son of
>a Jewish American, Reuven Kaminer, a Marxist who emigrated to Israel
>decades ago and whom I met and interviewed there in 1983 when a son,
>Noam, was a member of Yesh G'vul, the refusenik Israeli reservists
>who refused to serve in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon,. The journal,
>Political Affairs, is a venerable publication which used to be close
>to the US Communist Party. I think the article is worth reading but
>did not want to send it without some critical comments.-JB
>
>http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5096/1/252/
>
>Dear Matan,
>
>I have just read your interesting article in Political Affairs in
>which you asked for responses. There are a number of problems I have
>with it, but one in particular, is of immediate concern.. In dealing
>with one of the most serious issues that has enabled the current
>situation in Israel/Palestine to continue and worsen by the day,
>i.e., the role and influence of what in Israel is described as the
>American "Jewish Lobby," you end up with the same mistaken conclusion
>and make the spurious accusation or implication of "anti-semitism"
>that have blocked the arteries of the Palestine solidarity movement
>and contributed to its utter failure in the US and elsewhere.
>Frankly, they are only dissimilar in tone and length from the ravings
>of Alan Dershowitz and the ADL's Abe Foxman but carry the same message..
>
>You write:
>
>"On both sides of the Atlantic, demands to stop preferential
>treatment for Israel have treated this treatment as a kind of
>irrational gift, instead of as the self-interested maneuver it
>obviously is [5]. This stance comes within spitting distance of the
>various conspiracy theories surrounding the "Jewish lobby", and the
>road leading from these to blatant anti-Semitism is quite short."
>
>To say that Israel is supported because two-thirds of its military
>aid is used to subsidize the US arms industry, a pittance when
>compared, for example, with the outright sales of the industry to
>Saudi Arabia, does not begin to account for the total hold that the
>lobby has held over both houses for Congress and both political
>parties for at least the past four decades, over the White House with
>the exceptions of Ford, Carter, and Bush Sr., or the well documented
>Zionist and philo-zionist domination of the mainstream media.
>
>Only those who are ideologically blinded can fail to see that the
>lobby, that is the organized American Jewish establishment, has
>hijacked the America political system and has done so for Israel's
>benefit. (It is not the only culprit in the field, but the only one
>with total "bi-partisan" support) It is not a secret that all the
>presidential candidates are whoring after Jewish money and pledging
>their allegiance to Israel, something that they have, in fact, been
>doing for years, as have members of Congress, and that virtually ever
>big donor mentioned in the media is Jewish. Is this of no consequence
>or is even raising the issue and asking the question, "anti-semitic"
>in your eyes?
>
>Similarly, you do not explain why "in Europe the economic and
>political profit accrued by the European bourgeoisie through its
>support of Israel is not usually an issue." While I am aware that the
>EU is Israel's largest trading partner, it hardly a significant one
>from the EU's standpoint and it is not clear what you mean by
>"political profit" unless you are referring to the monetary and
>political support that Judeophallic European leaders receive from
>Jewish organizational lobbies in their respective countries, such as
>the neo-fascist Zarkosy in France, Merkel in Germany or Blair in the UK.
>
>What I have found disturbing, but after some years amusing and
>predictable, is that the only two sectors of US and Western society
>that view Israel as a "strategic asset" of the US and use this
>argument to explain the massive economic and critical support that
>the US has given Israel over the years is the organized world-wide
>Jewish establishment and what passes for "the left." It is not
>surprising that the former continues to show signs of ever
>increasing power, as we have most recently seen in the West's
>groveling response to Israel's most recent war on Lebanon while the
>latter, in the US, Europe, or for that matter, Israel, is barely able
>to draw a breath.
>It is something to think about.
>
>I have copied this message to my entire mailing list along with your
>original article. You are quite likely to get responses from some of
>them. In any case, I will be happy to pass whatever comments you wish
>to make on to them.
>
>Yours,
>
>Jeff Blankfort
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>------------------------------------------------------
>
>http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5096/1/252/?
>PrintableVersion=enabled
>
>The Colonial Drama of Israel and Palestine
>
>By Matan Kaminer
>Political Affairs
>
>4-09-07, 8:24 am
>
>
>Seen from this side of the Mediterranean, the Western (and especially
>European) view on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exhibits a strange
>trait. One often feels that one is playing a part in a play scripted
>by others, and that deviations from the allotted role may be frowned
>upon by the audience. Of course, the most obnoxious version of this
>theatrical piece is the one in which the Israeli is cast as a brave
>liberal David, up against the brutish Muslim Goliath. Seeing as I am
>writing for a left audience and not for The New York Times, this play
>does not concern me here. Often, though, one feels that the
>international left is also sitting down to watch a drama; this one
>might be titled Colonialism.
>
>Before I go on, let me clarify that I see the situation in Israel/
>Palestine as colonial, and that as a left activist in Israel I see
>anti-colonialism as a central theoretical and practical aspect of my
>activity. But a facile and a-historical importation of anti-
>imperialist stances from other times and places will be useless or
>worse in the struggle for a free Palestine and a socialist and
>democratic Middle East. Our colonialism is different; and although it
>is a family relation of the earlier European colonialisms and a close
>ally of the current, American-led neo-colonialism, it is distinct
>from these and must be fought in different ways.
>
>Outside the left, and perhaps even to some within it, it might
>nowadays be seen as objectionable to call Zionism a colonial movement
>or Israel a colonialist power. This would strike the father of
>political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, as strange. He was an avid
>colonialist who explicitly envisioned the Jewish homeland as a
>European colony under imperial protection. The revival of the Hebrew
>language, never championed by Herzl (the Jews in his utopia spoke
>German), has obscured this link by using ancient roots in new ways.
>However, the Hebrew name used for the first Zionist settlements,
>moshava, can only be translated as "colony"[1] .
>
>A colony in search of a metropole
>
>Colonialism is not only resident latently at the root of Israel's
>existence; it is in full bloom today. One workable definition of the
>term is "the control or governing influence of a nation over a
>dependent country, territory, or people"[2], and this definition
>obviously fits the situation. Of course, ours is in many ways an
>anomalous colonialism. Perhaps the most obvious anomaly is the lack
>of distance between colony and metropole. Israel (the "governing
>nation" or metropole) and Palestine (the "dependent country" or
>colony) are hard to distinguish, not only in terms of geography but
>also of demography: a fifth of Israeli citizens are in fact
>Palestinians, and a substantial portion of the remainder is descended
>from Jewish families that lived in the Arab Middle East for
>generations and spoke Arabic.
>
>In earlier drafts of this article, I hesitated between the headings
>"a colony without a metropole" and "a colony which is its own
>metropole". I finally settled on the rather vague phrasing which
>heads this section. But it is apt, because the Zionist leadership,
>from Herzl to Olmert, has always looked across the seas for a
>metropole. Since 1967 the military responsibilities of the metropole
>have been borne by the United States, with Europe sharing in economic
>responsibility (and benefits). But politically Israel remains
>independent, and not just in a nominal way. Labeling Israel as "the
>fifty-first state" or as "nothing but" an American colony is
>intellectually lazy and politically dangerous.
>
>Why politically dangerous? Because there is another important aspect
>in which Israeli colonialism remains bereft of a metropole: Israelis
>have nowhere to go. Many Israelis are descended from refugees
>(whether from Europe or the Middle East), and most are acutely aware
>of the fact that while the US and Europe may aid us in various ways,
>the majority of Israelis will never be accepted in these countries as
>full citizens the way the repatriated European settlers were. This is
>why no current in the Israeli left, however radical, has ever called
>for "repatriation" or any other kind of transfer of the Israeli
>Jewish population away from Israel.
>
>Colonialism within colonialism
>
>Of course, the ten thousand Israeli settlers evacuated from the Gaza
>Strip in 2005 did have somewhere to go: they were well taken care of
>by the Israeli government. Abroad as well as in Israel there is much
>confusion over the distinction between opposition to the occupation
>of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and opposition to the Zionist
>colonial project in general. I will not attempt any conclusive
>clearing-up of the confusion here, but I believe a careful double
>application of the category of colonialism can be conceptually and
>politically helpful.
>
>In 1967 Israel conquered the portions of British Mandatory Palestine
>previously occupied by Jordan and Egypt [3] and, for the first time,
>took on colonialist aspects in a form familiar to European eyes.
>Colonists, military rule, paternalism, resistance, and repression:
>all of these had existed in Israel/Palestine before, but in forms
>much less obviously resembling those of European colonialism. After
>the occupation, though, even the relations between the "general
>public", the settler right and the state began to bear comparison to
>those in colonialist France, oscillating from harmonious national
>unity to moments of crisis (as in the Algiers putsch and the Rabin
>assassination).
>
>However, as the settlers themselves like to remind Israelis, it is
>hard to pinpoint the essential difference between Tel Aviv and Ariel
>(the largest settlement in the West Bank). It seems that the
>eagerness of the Israeli left (and not only its Zionist sections) to
>denounce the colonialism in the Occupied Territories sometimes serves
>as a mechanism of denial: the Green Line (the 1948 border) is
>essentialized, and the creation of a Palestinian state in the West
>Bank and Gaza is seen as a panacea for all our troubles. The racist
>discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel and the
>theocratic dictatorship over personal life – both aspects of Israeli
>colonialism that were clearly born long before '67 – are put on a
>back burner, or expected to resolve themselves "after we make peace",
>and this is of course without mentioning the return of the
>Palestinian refugees.
>
>Of course, setting priorities is an ugly but necessary part of doing
>politics. I am not denying that stopping the ongoing siege of Gaza is
>a more urgent matter than legalizing marriage between two Israeli
>citizens of different religions [4]. But just as one does not have to
>accept that there is no alternative to capitalism in order to demand
>an increase in the minimum wage, there is no logical contradiction
>between calling for immediate and total withdrawal from the Occupied
>Territories and a critique of Israeli colonialism that does not
>ignore its powerful operations on both sides of the Green Line.
>However, talk of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
>conflict – as opposed to support for talks with the Palestinian
>leadership and a negotiated settlement – does not go hand in hand
>with such an analysis.
>
>The International Angle
>
>The above brings me to the tenuous conclusion that Israeli society
>lives on both sides of the colonial coin. We are colonizers and
>colonized at the same time. This is not surprising or particularly
>anomalous. Colonial society is often stratified, and there can be a
>near-continuum between the top and the bottom of the colonial
>hierarchy. Those near the top, like the Aztec princes under the
>Spanish viceroy, are still colonized; their position is comparable to
>that of the Israeli elite.
>
>Near the top, then, but not quite there. Who is, then? To answer this
>question we need to go beyond nations to classes. The apex of the
>colonial pyramid is most certainly outside of the Middle East, in the
>Olympic heights where the G8, the IMF and NATO live; the reins are
>held in the clutch of the globalized bourgeoisie. This power resides
>not simply in Europe or the United States (or in Japan for that
>matter), but in the hands of those who rule these countries.
>
>We come again to the drama in which we Israelis must play our part
>opposite Palestinians, Iranians, Lebanese and many others. Who are we
>performing for, and why are they enjoying it? Why do the Western mind
>and the Western left dedicate so much time and energy to watching
>this play, analyzing it and attempting to influence it?
>
>Could we find an analogy between the way Israelis watch the wrestling
>match of the settlers against the Palestinians and the way Westerners
>watch Israelis and Arabs go at it? Does viewing this anachronistic
>microcosm provide catharsis? Is European society projecting its
>feelings of guilt for its failure to stand up to imperialism in its
>sinister homegrown variety onto the only blatant colonialists still
>around after the death of South African apartheid?
>
>Developing an anti-colonialist politics
>
>How could a subtler anti-colonialism inform the politics of radical
>Israeli and international activists? I purposely exclude Palestinian
>activists from the question, as this article is written as a
>communication between Israeli and European. Colonialism may have
>taken on a bizarre, atavistic shape in Israel, but it is no less a
>part of the world system than the current French involvement in
>Africa. This means first of all that Europeans must take
>responsibility for the intimate collaboration of their own
>governments with neo-colonialism in the Middle East and with its
>faithful ally, the Israeli state. North American activists, perhaps
>out of a greater alienation from their own elite, have become more
>demanding in the Bush era. But in Europe the economic and political
>profit accrued by the European bourgeoisie through its support of
>Israel is not usually an issue. There is no reason why this should
>not change.
>
>On both sides of the Atlantic, demands to stop preferential treatment
>for Israel have treated this treatment as a kind of irrational gift,
>instead of as the self-interested maneuver it obviously is [5]. This
>stance comes within spitting distance of the various conspiracy
>theories surrounding the "Jewish lobby", and the road leading from
>these to blatant anti-Semitism is quite short.
>
>For Israelis, anti-colonialist politics means taking the long view.
>It means looking beyond various state "solutions" within the
>framework of neo-liberal capitalism towards the articulation of joint
>struggles with Palestinians and other Arabs against reaction, whether
>neo-liberal or fundamentalist. It means turning away from seeing the
>"international community" as a fair arbitrator and towards a vision
>of alliance with the social movements of the third world – including
>the third world of immigrants and dissidents in the belly of the
>imperialist beast, and also including workers, women, ethnic
>minorities and other oppressed groups in the Middle East.
>
>All of us – and this applies to Palestinians as well – must remind
>ourselves that without a globalized politics that demands
>redistribution on a world scale, attempts to remedy the situation in
>Israel/Palestine will only intensify the exploitative power of the
>Arab, Israeli and global bourgeoisies over the rest of us. We must
>resist the facile imitation of the experience of European
>decolonization, which can lead us to reformist national "solutions".
>We must link the right of return of the Palestinian refugees to the
>struggles of immigrants and refugees around the world for human
>rights. We must think long-term about the possible lives of Jewish
>Israelis in a post-Zionist Middle East, and we must turn this
>eventuality from an apocalyptic threat into a viable alternative.
>
>The proportion of migrant workers in the Israeli population is
>already one of the highest in the developed world. These Africans,
>Latin Americans and Asians have been brought here to replace the
>troublesome Palestinian workers whom we have locked behind walls;
>they are periodically shipped off to make sure they don't get any
>ideas. Thus, today the Levant is once again seeing populations moved
>around by force of hunger and violence, an imperialist tactic this
>part of the world has known at least since the days of the Assyrian
>Empire. The struggles of the Palestinians and of oppressed people in
>Israel can, and should, become part of the wider struggle for a world
>without borders and without masters.
>
>
>--Matan Kaminer is an Israeli left activist. He would be happy to
>receive comments at matan.kaminer@gmail.com. The author wishes to
>thank Eilat Maoz for her vital comments and criticism.
>
>[1] The "colonialism within colonialism" (see below) of the 1967
>occupation has a linguistic aspect. While the word moshava ("colony")
>and the linguistically related yishuv ("settlement") and mityashvim
>("colonists", "settlers") are currently seen as politically neutral
>and retain a positive, if somewhat naïve, connotation in Israeli
>culture, the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza are called hitnah)
>aluyot, a word with a different root which echoes the Hebrew
>colonization of Canaan in the Old Testament. This epithet, originally
>borne with pride by the settlers (mitnah)alim), has understandably
>acquired a negative connotation over the years, and the settlers
>themselves now prefer the words yishuv and mityashvim.
>
>[2] Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://
>dictionary.reference.com/browse/colonialism (accessed: February 24,
>2007).
>
>[3] It also conquered the Sinai Peninsula (from Egypt) and the Golan
>Heights (from Syria). I will not discuss these here.
>
>[4] Jews are not allowed to marry non-Jews in Israel. Such marriages
>are recognized by the State only when performed abroad.
>
>[5] For instance, most of the money sent to Israel as military aid
>returns to the West as arms purchases.
>
> >From ReuvenKaminer.com
***


Jeff Blankfort writes:
The following contribution to the discussion of the Israel Lobby between Matan Kaminer and myself is unique because it comes from someone who has actually worked inside the legislative system on both the national and state levels and therefore speaks from an experience that only the handful of persons on my list who have actually served in Congress (and experienced the workings of The Lobby directly ) can claim. As Peggy McCormack points out, this lobby has penetrated and infiltrated our political system, literally hijacked it, in a way that is totally without precedent. The results may be invisible on the surface in the US but they are visible on a daily basis in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq, and if the lobby has its way, Iran. This message should open the eyes of those who defend the lobby's actions as being completely within the spirit of American democracy, when clearly one sees that it is consuming what is left of it from the roots.-JB


Peggy McCormack wrote:

Dear Jeff and anyone else:


The Lobby and American Campaigns

I am so glad that this discussion about the lobby is open, now, to outsiders. My name is Peggy McCormack, and I have worked inside Congress and the California Legislature off and on for 30 years. I am currently teaching at a small college.

Almost everyone who talks about "the lobby", including Jeff Blankfort, who is absolutely the best on this subject (especially of the role the lobby plays with state and local governments and labor unions), are woefully ignorant of the inner workings of Congress. Congress may be the last place that any form of representation of "the people" takes place. As it gets more and more controlled by monied interests, Congress becomes more and more homogeneous. However, with regard to foreign policy, there are always the few brave members who routinely challenge American Imperialist policy. This was certainly true with regard to Latin America, Vietnam and other US imperialist debacles.

It is not true of Israel. Have you questioned how this came about? When it came about? I worked in many Congressional Campaigns and with many Political Campaign firms. Most of the really good campaign firms are controlled by Zionists (read Tom Hayden's article in Counterpunch). They function as money laundries, provide expensive services for practically nothing, demand loyalty to Israel, walk out in the middle of campaigns if candidates do not swear loyalty to Israel, and as private consultants have great impact on reapportionment processes in major states. I am familiar with California because the Campaign Firm that routinely tried to take my former boss out of Congress either by running primary candidates against him, or reapportioning him out, has run the reapportionment in California for the Democrats since 1970. There are other Zionist entities, such as the Congressional Committee for and Effective Congress that "helped" Democrats throughout the US with their reapportionment and made sure that some anti-Israel candidates had districts drawn in order to make picking them off in a primary easy.

Congressional candidates are frightened of the lobby. They certainly don’t want putting up with the hassles of having the "lobby" come after them, but worse, they fear being targeted. Ask Jim Moran, Congressman from Virginia’s 8th District who refused to vote for every anti-Palestinian resolution that came before Congress, and spoke out against the nasty occupation of Palestinians. He endured day to day torment , outrageous surveillance, electronic eavesdropping bugs, photos by Zionist paparazzi’s who followed him, and on and on.

Part of the problem of uncovering the details of how the Lobby works in effectively controlling the campaign technology and expertise is the need for research. My ex-Communist party friends here in California are as ignorant of how the behind the scenes political campaign work is done, as the average citizen. A quick example I often use: I was once hired by a campaign to literally keep volunteers busy and away from the major activity of the campaign. Donations, of course, and endorsements (In the Democratic Party labor), are the milk of American politics. Since the bulk of donations to the Democrats come from Israeli support groups, and Labor, (Blankfort has documented how the Zionists control Labor PAC committees) the power of the Israeli “lobby” becomes clearer and clearer. Tie that to the overpowering control by campaign firms themselves, and yes, Ariel Sharon is right "We own the Congress".

If I could interview Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucus members "off the record" I would uncover recent and current campaign practices that my former boss endured, and sadly, that I watched intimately when I worked in campaigns myself -- loans (that quickly come due if the member steps out of line, as my boss did), "loyalty oaths" prepared speeches, imbedded campaign workers, imbedded Congressional staff, partially paid by various lobbies (this could not happen if AIPAC and their dozens of clones had to register as foreign lobbyists).

Oh, and all those campaign firms that do the extremely expensive work of polling, paid voter registration, and precinct analysis (remember campaign firms do not have to report any of this work) – who pays for that? Blessed candidates get the benefits, but at what cost? It is interesting to note that the power of the lobby grew as campaigning became more and more computerized, and the need for more and more “experts” entered the game.

If I had the time and money, I would investigate this phenomenon, I don’t, but someone needs to look at the “way it works”. Peg McCormack
>

Glen Greenwald can't find the pattern: Cases of missing documents

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html
Thursday April 12, 2007 11:14 EST

The Bush administration's terrible luck with finding documents
Glenn Greenwald

I feel -- in this vaguely intuitive sort of way -- as though there is some kind of a pattern buried within this set of facts, but as much as I search, I just can't quite figure out what it might be:

New York Times, today:

Political advisers to President Bush may have improperly used their Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to conduct official government business, and some communications that are required to be preserved under federal law may be lost as a result, White House officials said Wednesday. . .
As a result, Mr. Stanzel said, "some official e-mails have potentially been lost." He said Mr. Bush had told the White House counsel's office "to do everything practical to retrieve potentially lost messages."



The Politico, March 24, 2007:
In DOJ documents that were publicly posted by the House Judiciary Committee, there is a gap from mid-November to early December in e-mails and other memos, which was a critical period as the White House and Justice Department reviewed, then approved, which U.S. attorneys would be fired while also developing a political and communications strategy for countering any fallout from the firings.


Newsweek, February 28, 2007:
A federal judge ruled today that suspected Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla is mentally competent. . . . But the ruling by U.S. Judge Marcia Cooke in Miami leaves open what may be more intriguing questions than those surrounding the defendant's mental health: what happened to a crucial video recording of Padilla being interrogated in a U.S. military brig that has mysteriously disappeared?
The disclosure that the Pentagon had lost a potentially important piece of evidence in one of the U.S. government's highest-profile terrorism cases was met with claims of incredulity by some defense lawyers and human-rights groups monitoring the case. "This is the kind of thing you hear when you're litigating cases in Egypt or Morocco or Karachi," said John Sifton, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch, one of a number of groups that has criticized the U.S. government's treatment of Padilla. "It is simply not credible that they would have lost this tape. The administration has shown repeatedly they are more interested in covering up abuses than getting to the bottom of whether people were abused."

Alicia Valle, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miama, said in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK that the missing DVD was "of the last interrogation of Padilla while in military custody." She further added that a lawyer for DIA had advised the court "that an exhaustive search was conducted but the [DVD] could not be located."



NPR, June 24, 2004:

Key documents are missing from the batch of newly declassified documents the White House released this week on its policies on torture and the treatment of prisoners, critics say. Absent are any memos to and from the FBI and CIA and any documents dated after April 2003. No documents address the State Department's concern over the Bush administration's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions.


USA Today, May 24, 2004:

The Pentagon sought Sunday to explain why some 2,000 pages were missing from a congressional copy of a classified report detailing the alleged acts of abuse by soldiers against Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison. . . . .
[Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita] was responding to a Time magazine report Sunday that about 2,000 of the report's 6,000 pages submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee were missing. The report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba consists of a declassified summary and about 6,000 pages of classified annexes, including statements from witnesses, prison guards and military intelligence officials.



Associated Press, September 5, 2004:
Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973, according to regulations and outside experts.
For example, Air National Guard regulations at the time required commanders to write an investigative report for the Air Force when Bush missed his annual medical exam in 1972. The regulations also required commanders to confirm in writing that Bush received counseling after missing five months of drills.

No such records have been made public and the government told The Associated Press in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it has released all records it can find.

And that is to say nothing of all of the extraordinary and unprecedented steps taken by the administration to justify the concealment of documents and other information -- efforts which, when successful, have made it unnecessary to claim that the documents were lost. But don't worry; it's all to protect us, all for our own good. There is simply no reason for us to know what our Leaders are doing.

UPDATE: Newsweek, March 1, 2006:
[Federal Emergency Management Agency Michael] Brown's comments about the president surfaced in a transcript of an Aug. 29, 2005, videoconference call produced by Bush administration officials today after they initially told Congress that no such document existed. . . .
Administration and congressional officials said that the administration provided congressional investigators earlier this year with official transcripts of the daily noon FEMA conference calls conducted before, during and after Katrina. But the administration initially told Congress that the transcript for the Aug. 29 call -- the call congressional investigators were most curious about, given that it occurred as the hurricane was actually battering the Gulf Coast—did not exist, with officials initially telling Capitol Hill that someone at FEMA or Homeland Security forgot to push the button on a tape recorder.

"Everybody has been looking for that transcript," former FEMA chief Michael Brown said Wednesday.

A White House official unexpectedly e-mailed the transcript to NEWSWEEK earlier today Wednesday morning -- initially without explaining that it was the missing transcript. Two officials familiar with congressional investigations said that the document was turned over to Capitol Hill investigators Tuesday night. Administration officials told both Congress and NEWSWEEK that FEMA officials in Atlanta had taped the Aug. 29 conference call by aiming a video camera at a TV screen rather than following the usual recording procedure. The videotape was subsequently discovered and transcribed.

While the newly discovered transcript does provide new evidence of initial presidential engagement in the Katrina crisis and of conflicting information about the state of New Orleans levees on Aug. 29, it also exposes some contradictions in previous administration explanations about the role of the White House and top officials in handling the crisis.

I suppose the defense for Bush followers who want to claim that all of this is completely innocent is "extreme ineptitude."

UPDATE II: Via email, reader SB adds this very recent incident to the list -- Washington Post, April 3, 2007:
A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.
For years, law enforcement authorities suggested it never happened. The FBI and D.C. police said they had no records of such an incident. And police told a federal court that no FBI agents were present when officers arrested more than 20 protesters that afternoon for trespassing; police viewed them as suspicious for milling around the parking garage entrance.

But a civil lawsuit, filed by the protesters, recently unearthed D.C. police logs that confirm the FBI's role in the incident.

Every story uses almost verbtaim language, because the conduct they are describing is, in each case, almost exactly the same.
UPDATE III: New York Sun, February 2, 2006:

The White House failed to archive some e-mails in accordance with normal procedures in 2003, according to a letter from a special prosecutor investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, disclosed the failure last week to defense attorneys for a former White House official, I. Lewis Libby, who is facing perjury and obstruction of justice charges in the probe.

"We advise you that we have learned that not all e-mail of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system," Mr. Fitzgerald wrote in the January 23 letter, which was filed in federal court on Tuesday.

Associated Press, February 24, 2006:

The defense was told that the White House had recently located and turned over about 250 pages of e-mails from the vice president's office. Fitzgerald, in a letter last month to the defense, had cautioned Libby's lawyers that some e-mails might be missing because the White House's archiving system had failed.

The White House's continuous and repeated failure to preserve e-mail communications in accordance with the law has been publicly discussed for some time now, and has arisen in multiple contexts. This is the discussion which Wolf Blitzer had on CNN with Jeffrey Toobin -- on February 1, 2006 -- about the Fitzgerald letter noting those missing emails (h/t Media Matters):

BLITZER: Let's get some legal analysis now on this new development. Joining us on the phone is our senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. Potentially, how significant or insignificant is this development?

JEFFREY TOOBIN, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: I think you have to say it raises questions. Why were these documents destroyed outside the normal course? Who knew about it? Who ordered it? What kind of documents were there? All these questions may have entirely innocent answers, but we don't know what any of the answers are at this point.

BLITZER: Because when I hear a story like this, it hearkens back, I remember, of course, some of those missing tapes during Watergate and the Nixon White House that evidence may have been destroyed. This may be totally, totally overreaching. There may be a simple explanation, but the fact that the prosecutor writes this letter saying what happened to this -- to these e-mails, that raises certain questions.

TOOBIN: And certainly the Iran-Contra affair was based almost entirely on electronic messages, so-called prof notes sent between Oliver North and colleagues. They have been crucial evidence in all White House investigations. What happened to them? A lot of things get destroyed in the normal course of business. Why were the normal procedures not followed? As you point out, could be completely innocent. But we just don't know.

BLITZER: How normal is it for e-mail to be destroyed in the normal course of business over at the White House?

TOOBIN: A question I don't have the answer to, but presumably the special prosecutor is going to be looking into that question right now.

BLITZER: Jeff Toobin, thanks very much.

The administration -- which has made its contempt for all forms of oversight as clear as can be, and which has engaged in every possible effort to block scrutiny of its conduct -- obviously simply decided that, despite all of these controversies, and despite their legal obligations, they would keep ensuring that highly relevant e-mails continued to disappear, or would simply break the law by using e-mail systems that did not preserve their communications, including communications relating to ongoing investigations. What other reasonable conclusion is possible in light of these facts?

UPDATE IV: Anonymous Liberal notes the perspective which any litigator (assuming they are speaking honestly, rather than with the intent to defend the administration) would have of this matter:

As an attorney who deals with subpoenas and requests for electronic documents on a regular basis, I can tell you that if a private entity--particularly one subject to legally mandated record keeping requirements--were to inform government investigators seeking such documents that they had been "mishandled" and were now "lost," that entity would immediately find itself in a world of hurt and would be lucky if it survived the aftermath.

No amount of talking would be enough to convince the authorities that there was an innocent explanation for the missing documents. They would be absolutely convinced that the "mishandled" documents were intentionally destroyed in order to cover up wrongdoing.

And that is particularly true if -- as is true for the Bush administration -- the party claiming to have "lost" or "mishandled" such key evidence had a long history of making such claims repeatedly with the effect of blocking investigations. And the presumption of corrupt intent would be stronger still if, as in the case of the Bush administration, one of the party's highest officials was recently found guilty of multiple counts of obstruction of justice and false statements for lying to FBI investigators and to a federal grand jury.

A.L. also notes that as a result of the "missing" emails in the Plame matter, "the White House's dual email system was almost surely the subject of intense discussion in early 2004." Thus, efforts to circumvent that system by deleting other emails and using RNC email systems were almost surely intentional.

In fact, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled long ago, in the 1994 case of Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President (summary here), that the White House was required by the Federal Records Act to preserve all of its communications via e-mail (other than "presidential records"). And this April 7, 2000 article from the Christian Science Monitor -- detailing the Clinton White House's extensive efforts to preserve all -- demonstrates that the legal obligation to preserve White House emails has been a much-discussed topic in Washington for years:

In fact, whenever a White House staffer clicks "send," a message reminds them that a copy of their missive is being sent to records management.

When it comes to saving e-mails, the White House is held to a higher standard than the private sector, and even Congress.

Companies that have a policy of saving e-mails usually do so only for three to six months, according to records-management consultants. Many companies consider them the same as phone calls, and don't archive them unless they are equal in weight to a written communication.

But the White House is different. It saves its records for posterity. After President Clinton vacates his office next January, at least 30 million stored e-mails will be deposited with the National Archives, an unfathomable mountain of data ranging from "how about lunch?" to speech drafts, to perhaps more juicy communications. . . .

The White House, on the other hand, installed an e-mail archiving system in July 1994, after a court ruled that electronic records must be preserved in the same way as federal records. It was such a novel concept at the time that it had to be custom-built.

Rove and company were well-aware of their legal obligations to preserve their communications, and were equally aware that using their White House emails to communicate would result in such preservation. This lengthy record by the Bush administration of finding ways to "lose" key documents relevant to investigations and judicial proceedings ought to leave little doubt about the corrupt intent motivating this behavior.

UPDATE V: The Washington Post, December 18, 2003 (h/t AJ):

Hundreds of videotapes that federal prison officials had claimed were destroyed show that foreign nationals held at a New York detention facility after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were victims of physical and verbal abuse by guards, the Justice Department's inspector general said yesterday. . .

A report issued by Fine in June found "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse" at the Brooklyn detention facility's Special Housing Unit, where 84 of the men picked up after the Sept. 11 attacks were held. But investigators said then that firm conclusions on abuse were impossible in many cases because of the lack of videotapes, which prison administrators said at the time had been destroyed.

A federal dragnet after the Sept. 11 attacks resulted in the detention of more than 1,200 foreign nationals, including 762 people who were the focus of Fine's original probe. Most were of Arab or South Asian descent and were held on immigration violations under a directive from Attorney General John D. Ashcroft while authorities attempted to determine whether they were connected to the attack or to terrorist groups. None was ever charged with terrorism-related crimes, however.

Many of the incidents of abuse were confirmed when investigators viewed more than 300 videotapes recorded from October to November 2001 that showed detainees being moved around the facility and within their cells, investigators said. . . .

The tapes eventually located in August had not been included on inventory sheets provided by the prison and were held in a storage room that also had not been disclosed to investigators, the report said. Many tapes from the period are still missing, and there are unexplained gaps the ones that were found, the report shows.

Incidents like this get reported piecemeal, in isolation, by our national press, but the clear implications are almost never realized and/or explained.

This administration does not believe it is subject to oversight or the rule of law. They hate investigations and scrutiny and do everything possible -- legal and illegal -- to block them. Let us emphasize that Lewis Libby -- Dick Cheney's most trusted advisor who, after Bush, Cheney and Rove, was the most powerful figure in the White House and one of the most powerful individuals in our entire government for five years -- was just found guilty of multiple counts of perjury and obstruction of justice: first by a Republican, Bush-appointed prosecutor who indicted him, then by 12 carefully selected American citizens who were unanimous about his guilt in attempting to thwart a federal investigation into the administration's conduct.

And when that happened, the only debate it prompted among Bush followers was whether Libby should be pardoned now or later, with most demanding a pardon immediately. This is what they do and who they are. They affirmatively believe in lying and destroying evidence and obstructing investigations in order to conceal their behavior. They believe that anything they do is, by definition, good and right, and therefore there is never anything wrong with attempts to hide it or even misleading the country about what they did.

It should not be necessary to explain why those are profound problems, and why the media's reporting on these matters ought to reflect just how serious these scandals are.

-- Glenn Greenwald

Xymphora points to what would otherwise be an unnoticed example of the Washington Post in coordination with the Defense Dept rewriting a factoid from the Iraq war that the Post got right the first time. Along the way, Xymphora suggests that we are living under a military dictatorship. An interesting blog assignment would be to suggest the qualifications necessary to make that statement conform somewhat closer to our reality. --Ronald

Sunday, April 08, 2007
Xymphora writes:
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2007/04/rewrite.html
Rewrite
Eschaton catches the Washington Post in blatant media manipulation of the war in Iraq, manipulation so bad it can be called lying. The original Reuters story contains the following paragraph concerning an American attack on the Iraqi city of Diwaniya, quoting American military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Bleichwehl:

“Bleichwehl said troops, facing scattered resistance, discovered a factory that produced ‘explosively formed penetrators’ (EFPs), a particularly deadly type of explosive that can destroy a main battle tank and several weapons caches.”

These are, of course, the famous explosives that the propagandists claim must be coming from Iran, as the locals in Iraq lack the sophistication to manufacture them. Another lie busted.

But don’t count the Washington Post out yet. In an extensive rewrite of the Reuters piece – in fact, so extensive, you can only see the original framework by looking carefully – the Washington Post scrubs the paragraph about the origin of the EFPs, but ensures that the following is inserted (emphasis in red):

“The U.S. military said two U.S. soldiers died in separate roadside bombings in the east and west of Baghdad on Friday.

One of the bombs was an explosively formed projectile, a particularly deadly type of device which Washington accuses Iran of supplying Iraqi militants.”

In other words, they use the classic Judy Miller/Michael Gordon technique from the New York Times of passing on Bush Administration propaganda by ensuring that it is prominently placed – together with the appropriate weasel words referring back to the original, completely unquestioned, government source – so that there is no technical lying, although the intent is obviously to deceive (the last two honest paragraphs in the Reuters article have also gone missing).

It’s even worse. As Eschaton notes, the Google News capture of the original article contains the original paragraph from the Reuters article. In other words, the truth accidentally slipped out, and they had to rush to fix it. I have to wonder whether the Washington Post news room has some kind of alarm that sounds in those rare cases when the truth is published and the entire staff is mobilized to suppress it.

And they wonder why people no longer buy newspapers.

Sunday, April 08, 2007
Xymphora writes:
The general behind the curtain
I think the rewrite story is extremely important, and won’t receive the attention it deserves. This type of military control over the mainstream media no doubt happens all the time (and is one of the key identifying points of a military dictatorship such as the United States), but it takes a very rare combination of events for it to become so obvious:

A Pentagon spokesman has to misspeak, i. e., tell the truth, and say something outside the ambit of Pentagon propaganda.
A reporter has to honestly report on what the spokesman said, and not engage in the usual self-censorship to bend the story to follow the Pentagon propaganda line.
The editors have to miss the big problem in the story, and allow it to go out over the internet.
Google News has to pick it up and preserve it for posterity.
There has to be a discrepancy in the speed at which the two stories, the original and the rewrite, are fixed (Daily Kos commentator seesdifferent notes that the original Reuters story was fixed subsequent to the fixing of the Washington Post story), so that the editing in the rewrite is obvious.
Some eagle-eyed internet sleuths have to pick it up.
This extremely unlikely series of events directed us to the fact that the Washington Post fixes stories to follow the official Pentagon line. Not only that, but it will go back and rewrite stories that mistakenly go out saying something different than the official Pentagon line. One can only assume that the Pentagon is reading all the mainstream media stories on a real time basis, and is ordering rewrites in those rare occasions where the self-censorship by the mainstream media fails, and it mistakenly allows the truth to escape (the fact that the Washington Post and Reuters both fixed the story to remove the same part which disproved the Pentagon propaganda line is damning).

The outrage, of course, is that mainstream media outlets go along with Pentagon requests, and fit their lies to the required Pentagon pattern. This isn’t a case where there is any possible argument that military censorship is required in order to protect the lives of either American soldiers or civilians. This is a part of a pattern of lies told by the American government about the alleged role of Iran in the Iraqi insurgency, lies with absolutely no legitimate military or political purpose. These lies are intended to excuse the Pentagon’s abject failure in Iraq, and to provide the basis for an attack on yet another innocent sovereign nation that poses no threat to the United States. People are increasingly obtaining their information about the world from sources other than the mainstream media because the mainstream media continues to demonstrate that it is not worthy of trust.

John Spritzler: Israeli exclusionism belies democratic values

It's wonderful the venues John Spritzler is creating to spread the word about what terrible injustices to real people that is a necessary condition of the creation and consolidation of a Jewish state in the former Palestine. All the more that he took as his subject Israel Shahak's revolutionary discoveries of the context of European pre modern anti-Semitism. See below also for John's very good exchange of letters on some of these issues. --RB


John Spritzler wrote:
Dear friends,

Last Tuesday (4.3.07) I gave a talk at the Walpole (Massachusetts) Public Library titled, "Is Jimmy Carter Right About Israel?"

I said Carter was dead wrong, because in spite of his worthy condemnation of Israeli oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, he dismisses the central grievance of Palestinians--Israel's ethnic cleansing of them from the 78% of Palestine that is now Israel-- by not talking about it and by excluding the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes inside Israel from what he defines as a "just solution," and in fact he defends the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine and the ethnic cleansing it uses to ensure an 80% majority population inside of it.

I got a very good response. One man emailed me afterwords, "Enjoyed the talk tremendously."

I began the talk by reading excerpts from a letter to the Somerville News from James Adler, a pro-Israel Jew who said that he supported Israel and opposed divestment because of "the horror of the Holocaust and millennia of persecution and pogroms against the Jews in Europe." But, he said, he felt "honest pain over Israel's history" of "ethnic cleansing" (yes, he used those exact words) which, in his letter, he documents at some length, citing Israeli historian Benny Morris, and quotations of David Ben-Gurion such as: "With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]...I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it...Complete transfer without compulsion--and ruthless compulsion at that--is hardly imaginable."

It is no coincidence that this letter appeared in a Somerville newspaper. Somerville residents, more than probably any other town in the United States, know something about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The Somerville Divestment Project has been doing intense educational work on this topic, to the point that 45% of the voters in a state district inside Somerville voted Yes on a ballot question for the right of return of Palestinians to their homes inside of Israel, despite all of the politicians telling them to vote No because "right of return is code for destroying the state of Israel."

As Americans slowly come to learn the sordid truth about Israel's ethnic cleansing, there is very little left for the pro-Israel camp to say except either "God gave the land to the Jews" (which appeals only to religious fundamentalists) or what James Adler says--that Jews, as much as it pains them to have to do it, need to commit ethnic cleansing to survive in a world of anti-Semitic gentiles. This is the "weep and bash" argument: bash one's victim, but cry genuine tears while doing it.

So, while I devoted the beginning of my talk to describing the ethnic cleansing and reading some passages from Ilan Pappe's wonderful book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, I spent the full second half of the talk dealing specifically with the real lessons, as opposed to the phony pro-Israel "lessons," to be drawn from, as the letter writer phrased it, "the horror of the Holocaust and millennia of persecution and pogroms against the Jews in Europe." To do this, I relied on a wonderful little book called Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, by Israel Shahak, who was a Holocaust survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, who lived in Israel from 1945 until his death in 2001, who was a professor of chemistry at Hebrew University, and who was an ardent champion of human rights for Palestinians.

I read passages and summarized what Shahak wrote about the "horror of the Holocaust and millennia of persecution and pogroms against the Jews in Europe." The audience found it extremely interesting. Here, very very briefly, is what Shahak says. I strongly urge you to get the book and read it, because it provides enormous insight and historical context on this topic.

Shahak points out that from 800 A.D. until approximately the French Revolution (when Jews were no longer required to live in segregated Jewish ghettos and could assimilate into the gentile society), there were no Jewish peasants. Jews, even the poorest, were immensely better off than the peasants, especially the serfs in Eastern Europe and Russia. European rulers, the king or the regional noble, used the Jews to help oppress the peasants. In exchange for this the Jewish ruling class of rabbis was given official clerical standing and total legal power over ordinary Jews, including the right of capital punishment. Unlike peasants, who could never marry nobility, Jews could inter-marry with the nobility if they converted. When, during this pre-modern period, anti-Jewish violence broke out (like during the Crusades), it was always by the people at the bottom of society, while the nobles and king always defended the Jews (for self-interested reasons, like maintaining law and order.)

Why was this? The answer is explained by the social role of Jews in this period.

In Poland (famous for its "anti-Semitism"), for example, the peasants were virtual slaves of the nobility. The nobles owned the towns which were inhabited almost exclusively by Jews. Outside the towns, very many Jews were employed as the direct supervisors and oppressors of the enserfed peasantry—as bailiffs of whole manors (invested with the landlord’s full coercive powers) or as lessees of particular feudal monopolies such as the corn mill, the liquor still and public house (with the right of armed search of peasant houses for illicit stills) or the bakery, and as collectors of customary feudal dues of all kinds. Throughout Europe, where peasants were in the worst serfdom, the social function of a large majority of all Jews in the region was to mediate the oppression of the peasants on behalf of the nobility and the Crown.

Shahak writes:

"Consider the most outstanding example revolt of such persecution, the great massacre of Jews during the Chmielnicki in the Ukraine (1648), which started as a mutiny of Cossack officers, but soon turned into a widespread popular movement of the oppressed serfs. The underprivileged, the subjects, the Ukrainians, the Orthodox [persecuted by the Polish Catholic church] were rising against their Catholic Polish masters, particularly against their masters' bailiffs, clergy and Jews. This typical peasant uprising against extreme oppression, an uprising accompanied not only by massacres committed by the rebels but also by even more horrible atrocities and ‘counter-terror' of the Polish magnates' private armies, has remained emblazoned in the consciousness of east-European Jews to this very day—not, however as a peasant uprising, a revolt of the oppressed, of the real wretched of the earth, nor even as a vengeance visited upon all the servants of the Polish nobility, but as an act of gratuitous anti-Semitism directed against Jews as such...

"Revolts of oppressed peasants against their masters and their masters' bailiffs are common in human history. A generation after the Chmielnicki uprising of the Ukrainian peasants, the Russian peasants rose under the leadership of Stenka Ryazin, and again, one hundred years later, in the Pugachev rebellion. In Germany there was the Peasant War of 1525, in France the Jacquerie of 1357-8 and many other popular revolts, not to mention the many slave uprisings in all pars of the world. All of them—and I have intentionally chosen to mention examples in which Jews were not targets—were attended by horrifying massacres, just as the Great French Revolution was accompanied by appalling acts of terror. What is the position of true progressives—and, by now, of most ordinary decent educated people, be they Russian, German or French—on these rebellions? Do decent English historians, even when noting the massacres of Englishmen by rebellious Irish peasants rising against their enslavement, condemn the latter as "anti-English racists'? What is the attitude of progressive French historians towards the great slave revolution in Santo Domingo, where many French women and children were butchered? [Or Nat Turner's American slave rebellion in 1831 that killed some white children?--J.S.] To ask the question is to answer it. But to ask a similar question of many ‘progressive' or even ‘socialist' Jewish circles is to receive a very different answer; here an enslaved peasant is transformed into a racist monster, if Jews profited from his state of slavery and exploitation."

While Jews were playing a role in society of "assistant oppressor" of the peasants, the rabbis made the Jewish religion one that was extremely hostile and contemptuous of gentiles and even more so, in particular, of peasants. This was necessary to prevent any solidarity from developing between poor Jews and peasants. Poor Jews had to be made to believe that they could only be happy inside of Jewish society, and therefore that they had to obey the rabbis to avoid being expelled from it. Shahak illustrates this by looking closely at what the Talmud actually says in the original Hebrew about gentiles. Also, Jewish literature reflects the contempt for peasants, as Shahak points out: "The Hebrew National poet, Bialik, in his famous poem My Father, describes his saintly father selling vodka to the drunkard peasants who are depicted as animals. This very popular poem, taught in all Israeli schools, is one of the vehicles through which the anti-peasant attitude is reproduced."

Shahak says that Zionism's contempt for Palestinians is a continuation of Jewish cultural contempt for peasants.

In the modern period, when Jews were assimilating and were free of rabbinical rule over their lives, modern anti-semitism developed, which was quite different from the pre-modern phenomenon. Modern anti-semitism was the way that some (mainly middle class) people, who were opposed to modernism fought against it. Modernism, here, means essentially capitalism based on individualism ("rights"), unfettered corporate power, and an increasingly organized and assertive industrial working class, as opposed to a fondly, if not accurately, remembered feudal society with traditional roles and security for some. It sometimes meant big department stores overtaking little ones, or the unions demanding wages that small businessmen couldn't afford. Anti-semites made "the Jews" a scapegoat for all that they hated. But since assimilated Jews now looked and behaved just like their gentile counterparts in society, it was necessary, if they were to be an effective scapegoat, to create the idea that Jews were a separate and diabolical race. Racist anti-Semitism is very different from the old kind based on hatred of opprression. The anti-semites had nothing in common with Europe's conservative aristocratic (where they still existed, like in Germany) and capitalist elite, but they made an opportunistic alliance with each other in some places, especially in 1930's Germany, where Hitler and the aristocratic and capitalist upper classes formed just such an alliance. The success of this opportunistic alliance of conservatism and anti-Semitism was inversely proportional to the power of those parts of society that embraced universal values of equality and democracy; and it was precisely the working class and peasantry which embraced these values the most.(Hitler's greatest enemies were the working class and, especially as the reality of Nazism became apparent, the peasants, as my book on WWII discusses.)

The obvious conclusion to draw from the Holocaust (assuming we want to prevent something like that from happening again!) is to do everything possible to strengthen the parts of society that embrace universal values of equality and democracy, and to fight those who advocate racist theories. Israel (its Zionist leaders in particular) does exactly the opposite: it adopts a racist ideology to justify a Jewish state having as its sovereign authority "the Jewish people" instead of all residents of the state, and it adopts the racist practice of ethnic cleansing to make the population of the Jewish state be 80% Jewish. Zionism thus makes another racist phenomenon, like the Holocaust, more likely, not less likely.

Zionism is itself, of course, a racist phenomenon. Racist movements go on to create their racist mirror image movements too, because the logic of racism is to attack people because of their race, in the name of other people defined as a race. Hitler's "Aryan" attack on "the Jews"strengthened the racists among the Jews who now lead an attack in the name of "the Jewish people" on "Arabs" [actually, "Middle Eastern gentiles" would be more accurate] which in turn only strengthens elements among the Arabs who identify "the Jews" as the enemy. Nobody except the ruling elites benefits in the end from the proliferation of such racist movements--not ordinary gentiles and not ordinary Jews. When people feel surrounded by an external enemy, they are easily made to obey "their own" rulers who exploit and oppress them that much easier. We need to explain all of this to everybody who is at all influenced by "weep and bash" arguments that will be increasingly used to defend Israel as the public learns the truth about Israel's ethnic cleansing.

--John
***
John Spritzler wrote:

My first letter to the Brandeis Hoot got an obnoxious reply calling me an anti-Semite. My reply to it, however, was just printed. (I apologize for my letter's grammatical goofs; I had to compose it in The Hoot's online gizmo.) I think it is very significant that Brandeis students are allowing anti-Israel views to see the light of day at Brandeis. --John

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*Elias Davidsson: Why the Truth of 911 Matters

Elias Davidsson has written an excellent article beating back one of the left's main talking points on why they think we should ignore evidence that the official story is a whitewash, hiding the true conspirators, the real terrorists.

There's only one problem: Davidsson refers to the lack of evidence that 19 Arab hijackers boarded the planes that crashed that day, correctly pointing out that there is no evidence that 19 Muslim terrorists boarded such planes. Yet, he accepts the official story that 4 big passenger jets crashed on 9/11 despite the lack of evidence that any of the four planes in question were destroyed before 2005, and the inability/refusal of the government to present a single airplane part by serial number for independent corroboration.
If there were no planes, there were no fanatic Islamic hijackers, and the war on terror is even more clearly exposed for the big lie that it is.

See the article on No Planes on my website which summarizes and links to key articles on the subject by Gerard Holmgren and Morgan Reynolds.

Ronald
http://desip.igc.org
***

This is why 9/11 matters!
by Elias Davidsson

edavid (at) simnet.is

2 April 2007

A number of people, particularly in the Left, maintain that it does not really matter who committed the atrocities of September 11, 2001 - reactionary Muslim fanatics, the US imperialists, or whoever. According to this view, insisting on identifying the culprits does not advance the interests of the working class or of oppressed people around the world but constitutes a bourgeois diversion. What matters, say some, are the consequences of 9/11, such as the wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq, the establishment of secret prisons, policies of prolonged detention of suspects without due process and access to lawyers, policies of torture, increased police powers typical of states of emergency, etc. Another argument against focusing on the events of 9/11 is the fact that in terms of human harm, these events are minute in comparison to the daily deaths of about 30,000 children from preventable causes (the equivalent of 10 nine-elevent calamities, every single day), or the deaths of 4-5 million people in the civil war in Congo in recent years. The last argument has undoubtedly merit. Prioritizing problems according to their extent in terms of human suffering is certainly a legitimate approach but is not necessarily the most effective one.





To be fair, there has been no real debate whether it does or does not matter who committed the atrocities of 9/11. Most Leftists take the official account on these events for granted and show no interest in even examining the issue from a moral, legal or political perspective.



In the following article, I will attempt to show that there are a number of compelling reasons why determining the truth on the events of 9/11 is of acute relevance to all people who are concerned about world peace, justice, the rule of law and democracy. It is my view that the quest for the truth on the events of 9/11 may be the most potent, and possibly only, revolutionary strategy available today to oppose imperialism, militarism and the neoliberal agenda.



I will first dispose of the claim that combating for the full truth on 9/11 is a diversion from more important political issues. It must be remembered that most 9/11 skeptics are also opponents of the US wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and of the human rights violations committed by the US government against its citizens and foreigners in the name of the "war on terror". The issue is thus not either/or but that of prioritizing issues. The question of priorities can only be pursued, however, once the facts are established. Governments are not forthcoming in revealing the true facts on 9/11. With this article, I attempt to demonstrate the potency of 9/11-truth as a revolutionary democratic tool.

1. The first reason why 9/11 matters is rather mundane and might seem trivial to some people. The reason is that the victims of a crime - and this includes relatives of the dead - are entitled to know the truth, namely the What, How, When, Who and Where of the crime. This entitlement is both moral and legal. While US domestic law does not provide victims of a crime with a legal right to the truth, international and regional human rights judicial bodies have inferred the right to the truth from various fundamental human rights. States have also recognized the right to the truth by the establishment of Truth Commissions. The right to the truth is also regarded as one of the remedies due to victims of crimes. To deny to relatives of victims the right to know how, when and where their loved-one died and who was responsible for the death, is cruel. In many cases, determining the facts of a crime is the key for relatives of victims to obtain compensation. In order to circumvent the obligation to provide the truth, the US government offered relatives of 9/11 victims a deal: It would provide them with a substantial financial compensation - at the average $1.8 million per victim - if they accept not to sue anyone, that is not to force discovery of incriminating evidence through the courts. To claim that it is "irrelevant" who committed the mass murder would be rightly regarded as cynical by the stakeholders.



2. The second reason is simply that the perpetrators of any crime should be identified, prosecuted and punished. Law-enforcement serves both to protect society from harm, deter further crime through punishment and attempt to rehabilitate the offender. This is one of the obligation states bear towards its citizens. Due to the massive and premeditated nature of this mass murder, the events of 9/11 should be designated as a crime against humanity. The UN General Assembly has proclaimed by its resolution 3074(XXVIII) of 3 December 1973 the principles of international cooperation in the detection, arrest, extradition and punishment of persons guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. According to Principle 1, "war crimes and crimes against humanity, wherever they are committed, shall be subject to investigation and the persons against whom there is evidence that they have committed such crimes shall be subject to tracing, arrest, trial and, if found guilty, to punishment." According to Principle 8, "States shall not take any legislative or other measures which may be prejudicial to the international obligations they have assumed in regard to the detection, arrest, extradition and punishment-of persons guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity." While this Proclamation by the General Assembly is not binding on states, it contributes - because it was not opposed by any member state - to the crystallization of an international customary norm, which then becomes a binding upon states even without any formal treaty. This Proclamation, incidentally, was adopted without opposition. The establishment of the International Criminal Court was one additional step in ensuring that individuals who commit international crimes be brought to justice, even when states are unwilling or unable to do so. On September 12, 2001, the UN Security Council, by resolution 1368(2001). called on all member states to "work together urgently to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these terrorist (sic) attacks [of September 11, 2001] and stresses that those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable; cooperate in view of securing the prosecution of those who committed this crime." As the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of 9/11 have not been brought to justice, the resolution of the Security Council has not been fulfilled. The United States government has failed to "investigate" the crime of 9/11. Exactly four weeks after 9/11, former US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, specifically ordered FBI personnel to put aside the investigation of this mass murder if any suspicion arises about new terrorist threats. It is therefore no wonder that the FBI did not publicize any results of its investigation and that no person has been charged, let alone prosecuted, for planning or participating in this mass murder. By claiming that it "does not matter" who committed 9/11, the speaker would implicitly endorse the principle of impunity for a crime against humanity and show disregard for international legal norms.



3. The third reason is related to our individual and collective security. No person has been prosecuted for planning, organizing and/or participating in the crime of 9/11, because none has been actually identified and linked to the crime. This may come as a surprise to some readers. Yet, there is no verifiable evidence that the 19 individuals named by the FBI as the 9/11 hijackers, actually boarded the aircraft which crashed on that day: Their names do not appear on passenger lists; no person has testified to have seen them board the aircraft; and their bodily remains have not been identified. As far as we know, the claim that Muslim fanatics hijacked four aircraft on 9/11 remains an unsubstantiated allegation, not a fact. As for the planners of 9/11, the US holds in custody a person by the name of Khaled Mohammed Sheikh, who US leaders have designated as the mastermind of 9/11. He allegedly confessed in March 2007 to have planned the mass murder of 9/11 and 30 other terrorist crimes around the world. Yet, the person who made this confession has not been seen by any outside observer, judge, journalist or human rights worker, since his alleged arrest. That person's identity remains shrouded in mystery. It is not certain that the person who made this alleged confession is at all Khaled Mohammed Sheikh, or any other person, for that matter. Apart from the failure to properly identify that person, it is not known under which conditions that person's confession was made, whether that person was tortured or whether certain promises were made to that person in order to secure his "confession". Serious questions remain about the authenticity of the confession, particularly because the alleged prisoner confessed to crimes, which he could not have planned (because he was already in prison by that time). And even if the real Khaled Mohammed Sheikh made that confession, his confession would not prove that the 19 individuals accused of having committed the mass murder, actually did it, unless he, or other persons, can prove that these 19 Muslims actually boarded the aircraft, were capable of executing their crime and did actually execute it. The bottom line is that we do not actually know who planned and committed the mass murder of 9/11. Much more evidence actually exists which suggests that the US government, not a gang of Muslims has planned and perpetrated the mass murder of 9/11. As no conclusive evidence has been presented as to the identity of the planners and perpetrators, it follows that they may be still out in freedom and able to mount further atrocities. This danger is particularly grave if the crime of 9/11 had been perpetrated at the behest of the US government. So much is at stake here, that those who refuse to inquire who committed 9/11, engage in reckless and irresponsible conduct towards themselves, their families and their societies.





4. The fourth reason is that the events of 9/11 have been used to justify wars of aggression. The events of 9/11 have allowed the United States and NATO to legitimate wars of aggression and military occupation of sovereign states. The aggression against Afghanistan was justified directly by the reference to 9/11. On October 2, 2001, the NATO Council was presented by the US emissary with "evidence" of links between Osama bin Laden and the events of 9/11. On that base the Council, representing all NATO states, invoked for the first time Article 5 of the Atlantic Charter, by which NATO equated the "attack on the United States" as an attack on all NATO members. By virtue of the concept of collective security, NATO fully endorsed US aggression against Afghanistan. The United Nations Security Council was bamboozled as early as September 12, 2001 to designate the events of the previous day as "international" terrorism. Yet the Council was not provided with even a shred of evidence that the mass murder had emanated from outside the United States, let alone from Afghanistan. It is not known whether some members of the Security Council had foreknowledge of the events, were bribed to designate the events in such a language or simply engaged in sloppy drafting. It became shortly later obvious, however, that the Security Council gladly espoused the official account peddled by the US administration and designated terrorism as one of the "most serious threats to peace and security", without even bothering to substantiate this factual designation. NATO and the European Union equally placed the fight against international terrorism at the top of their priorities in security issues. This campaign relies on the maintenance of a public fear of terrorism. If it can be shown that the events of 9/11 were not an act of international terrorism, but a "false flag operation" by the US government, it becomes easier not only to expose the foreign policies of the United States as illegal, but to expose the deceptive nature of the counter-terror ideology promoted by the Security Council, NATO and the European Union. It must be recalled that "false flag operations", (terrorist acts staged by secret services and attributed to enemies) have been committed both by the US and NATO in the last decades (see http://www.aldeilis.net/english/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=24&id=257&Itemid=141).





5. The fifth reason is that the events of 9/11 were followed by the most successful propaganda operation in contemporary history. No precedent exists for such a mass indoctrination under conditions of peace, the free flow of information and the Internet age. Historians and media scholars have not yet come to grips with this phenomenon. The success of this operation can be gauged by the fact that practically entire nations, including nations' intellectual elites and political classes, were made to believe that the mass murder of 9/11 had been masterminded by Osama bin Laden and carried out by 19 fanatic Muslims. An analysis of this mass propaganda easily reveals the techniques used to establish this myth. Among these techniques were stories disseminated by the FBI, such as that a Qur'an and a flight instruction manual were found in a car left by the hijackers at the airport in Boston; that a will in Arabic was found in a suitcase which "did not make it to the flight"; that an intact passport of one of the "hijackers" was found in the ruins of the World Trade Center minutes after the crash of the aircraft, and other such stories impressing upon ordinary citizens that the perpetrators were fanatic Muslims. At the same time, mass media consciously refused to publicize information relative to 9/11 which might have undermined the official account, such as testimonies of firefighters who reported having seen, heard or experienced multiple explosions in the World Trade towers prior to the collapse of the towers (suggesting that pre-placed explosives demolished the towers) or testimonies by residents of a village in Pennsylvania who did not see any evidence of a plane crash at the alleged crash site. Lately, as millions of Americans are beginning to doubt the official account, mass media started a campaign to ridicule and disparage through ad hominem attacks those who express doubts about that account. This campaign reflects desperate efforts to contain the proliferation of facts through the Internet, which the media has shut out. By demanding the full truth on the events of 9/11, it becomes easier to expose the role that mass media play in today's world, as adjunct of the ruling elite. Demanding the truth on 9/11 can serve as a powerful educational tool.

6. The sixth reason is that the official account on 9/11 has been one of the main justifications for restrictions to human rights and for increased police powers, verging on police-state methods. Some people claim that to oppose these measures it is unnecessary to find out who actually committed the mass murder of 9/11. On other hand, if one accepts the official discourse on 9/11 and the ideology on the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, one must accept at least some justifications for these measures. If, however, it can be shown that the official discourse on 9/11 and on Islamic terrorism is fraudulent, it becomes much easier to expose not only the various human rights and constitutional violations as unjustified, but demand the complete cancellation of these measures.

7. The seventh reason is that the events of 9/11 have helped governments to increase the level of secrecy and thus reduce government accountability. Such development is not new but reduces still further the existing rests of democracy. By demanding the full truth on the events of 9/11, the failure of democracy can be made more apparent. The quest for the truth on 9/11 can lead to the quest of accountability on other issues and help to reclaim democratic rights. Those who support democracy, namely the rule by the people, of the people, will find that demanding the truth on 9/11 would help to restore some of the lost features of democracy.



END