Ian Swanson: Pelosi hears boos at AIPAC

(See brief note below. --RB)


Pelosi hears boos at AIPAC
By Ian Swanson
March 13, 2007
Members of the main pro-Israel lobbying group offered scattered boos to a statement by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that the Iraq war has been a failure on several scores.

The boos, mixed with some polite applause, stood in stark contrast to the reception House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) received minutes earlier. Most of the crowd of 5,000 to 6,000 stood and loudly applauded Boehner when he said the U.S. had no choice but to win in Iraq.

Pelosi and Boehner were speaking at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual meeting. AIPAC has not taken a position on the war in Iraq or the supplemental spending bill to be considered this week by the House Appropriations Committee, but much of Boehner’s speech was about the future of the Iraq conflict.

Boehner sought to link the fight in Iraq to the future of Israel, as he said a failure in Iraq would pose a direct threat to Israel.

Pelosi said the U.S. military campaign in Iraq had to be judged on three accounts: whether it makes the U.S. safer, the U.S. military stronger and the region more stable.

“The war in Iraq fails on all three counts,” Pelosi said. Some of the crowd applauded before catcalls and boos could be heard. A spokesman for AIPAC argued the boos were in response to those clapping for Pelosi.

AIPAC leaders have said about 6,000 of their members are in town for this week’s annual meeting, which ends today. Members are set to lobby individual lawmakers on the Hill for the rest of today. A priority for the group is to convince Congress to approve tougher sanctions on Iran, which is seen as a growing threat to Israel.

***

Ronald writes:

What can one say after reading this? The bad guys have the power and they are using it, in the most destructive way possible: that's what bad guys do.

Bleier et al: AIPAC Pushes to Eliminate anti Iran war language from House bill

3.13.07
It's done. AIPAC won. The language that might have helped to keep Bush from attacking Iran has been stripped from the House bill. The (air) attack on Iran could come as early as the end of March or thereabouts when there will be the overlap of three US battle carrier groups as Seymour Hersh has described, So now if Bush-Cheney will be stopped it will be because they are suffering too many body blows from the clear disaster that is Iraq, the Justice Department scandals, Bush's falling popularity and so on.
Were it not for the indomitable, sociopathic, and extremely powerful Cheney, i.e., if we were run by a more normal president, there would undoubtedly be sufficient pushback to stop the catastrophe that will be the war against Iran. As it is, today, March 13, 2007, it looks like a very close call. One huge problem making it happen is the deployment of forces. Military historians might like to weigh in and give instances when such enormous forces were deployed and not used. Certainly since 1991, in the two previous instances of attacking Iraq, first came the extraordinary deployment, then the attack.
One interesting and perhaps academic question relating to AIPAC's power as outlined below is that their rightwing policies are NOT reflected in the rank and file of Zionist Jews (not to mention the tiny non-Zionist minority) who like all normal people and the majority of the US public can see that attacking Iran would be BAD, for Israel, and the US, not to mention millions of Middle Eastern people. I suspect that most Zionists are not even aware that AIPAC has so powerfully weighed in on this crucial issue.

Another similar question is: What if you could explain to grass roots Zionists that their unquestioning support of Israel helps to insulate Bush-Cheney and make possible the threatened Iran attack? How would they respond? Would they give up their Zionism? My guess is that they would go into denial. They would say that there is no connection between their support for a Jewish state and Bush-Cheney's reckless, suicidal militarism.

Ronald
http://bleiersblog.blogspot.com
http://desip.igc.org

Xymphora wrote:
Sunday, March 11, 2007
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/
Definitive ZOG experiment
I love testable theories. The best way to test a theory is to make a prediction based on the theory, and see what actually happens. Nancy Pelosi has put language in the Iraq war spending bill that would prevent Bush from going to war in Iran without the approval of Congress. This, of course, just confirms the constitutional power of Congress which has essentially been a dead letter in recent decades. AIPAC is opposing (or here; see also here) such language. Rahm Emanuel is ‘predicting’ (hint, hint) that the language won’t survive.

Here we have the definitive ZOG experiment. If the language stays, the United States, and the Democratic Party, aren’t under the complete control of the ZOG run by the Israeli extreme right and the Jewish Billionaires Club. If the language, which seems innocuous and obvious for a party that has regained political control solely on the basis of its opposition to more Bush wars, is removed or emasculated, we will have one hundred per cent proof that American foreign and military policy is being run exclusively by and for the interests of a foreign power.


Jeffrey wrote:


"Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois predicted that the language would ultimately not be included in the supplemental on the House side, although it is favored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; John P. Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee; and some Jewish lawmakers.

"Emanuel said opposition could extend beyond pro-Israel lawmakers. “‘Keep this all about Iraq’ is the view,” he said."


That, of course, is Israeli-American Emanuel's position. During the first Gulf War, when he was working as a high level staff member in Bill Clinton's White House, he took a special leave in order to volunteer in the IDF's program Volunteers for Israel in which Jews from the diaspora work on an Israeli military base freeing Israeli soldiers to go and maraud and kill in other countries.-JB




CQ Reports: AIPAC Pushes to Eliminate Anti-Iran War Language from Pelosi Iraq Bill
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/mar/09/pro_israel_lobbyists_push_to_eliminate_anti_iran_war_language_from_pelosi_iraq_bill


Iran Language Draws Opposition as Democrats Near Agreement on Supplemental

CQ TODAY -- March 8, 2007
By Jonathan Allen, CQ Staff

Hawkish pro-Israel lawmakers are pushing to strike a provision slated for the war spending bill that would, with some exceptions, require the president to seek congressional approval before using military force in Iran.

The influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee also is working to keep the language out, said an aide to a pro- Israel lawmaker.

The language is likely to spark an internal battle among House Democrats, some of whom fear an expansion of the Iraq War into Iran and others who are wary of sending a signal to Tehran that Congress wants to take the use of force off the table.

Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois predicted that the language would ultimately not be included in the supplemental on the House side, although it is favored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; John P. Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee; and some Jewish lawmakers.

Emanuel said opposition could extend beyond pro-Israel lawmakers. “‘Keep this all about Iraq’ is the view,” he said.

But a Democratic leadership aide said there are no plans to remove the provision.

“There’s heat,” the leadership aide acknowledged. “We’ve heard their concerns, but we think it’s likely to remain on the bill.”

Max Fuller: Proof of US orchestration of Death Squads in Iraq

The Silence of the Lambs? A Cry to Raise Our Voices!
(Note: check out url below for many links which don't show up here.)

Proof of US orchestration of Death Squads Killings in Iraq

Testimony of Iraqi torture victim confirms the presence of US personnel at the infamous Jadiriyah bunker

by Max Fuller
09 March 2007

URL: http://www.brusselstribunal.org/FullerKillings.htm

Probably everyone remembers the discovery of the Jadiriyah detention facility in November 2005. US troops were reported to have uncovered the prison in their hunt for a missing person, only to discover some 170 detainees in horrific conditions, many of them clearly the victims of obscene tortures. Although it was admitted that the facility belonged to the interior ministry and that the detainees were held by a secretive interior ministry force known as the Special Investigations Unit, the story was quickly shuffled away as yet another example of the work of Shiite militiamen, in this instance, as was the vogue at that time, the Badr Brigade. Myriad promises were forthcoming both from the US and Iraqi governments that investigations would be rapidly carried out and better supervision would in future be applied to Iraqi-run detention facilities (for instance the Iraqi government assured the world that a ministerial level investigation would rapidly be carried out, while US officials promised a legal team to go through the detainees’ files and a US embassy spokesman stated that Justice Department and FBI officers would provide technical assistance).

Of course, given the scale of the abuse (flayings, burnings, drillings etc) and the proximity of the perpetrators to the Iraqi government (by dint of working for the Interior Ministry as well as by any possible Badr-SCIRI links) and to the US occupation which had, after all, established them (as numerous reports have amply documented, eg Knight Ridder, 9 May 2005), such investigations were grossly less than what was urgently required – a full and public criminal investigation by independent international agencies. In the event, even these limited promises came to nothing, as the UN Human Rights Office in Iraq recently highlighted. What we have actually seen is neither investigation nor prosecutions, despite the fact that Jadiriyah lies at the heart of the state of fear that Iraq undeniably now is.

In October last year I had the privilege to interview one of the victims of that terrible abuse, the distinguished former Professor of Pedagogy at Baghdad University Tareq Samarree, who had been seized from his home in March 2005 by plain-clothed interior ministry personnel without charge. Professor Samarree, who provided a horrific first-hand account of the torture that he had suffered as well as details of others who had died and of the disappearance of his son within the Iraqi detention system, never had sight of any hint of judicial process nor any access to the outside world. What made Professor Samarree’s story most striking were the details of his release. Professor Samarree’s physical condition was so bad when the American soldiers discovered the facility that he, along with around a dozen other detainees, was instantly taken to a local hospital. Here, he and his companions remained without access to lawyers, journalists, officials or even a telephone. In fact, it quickly became clear that these victims of torture were to be returned to Iraqi detention. Professor Samarree, another of whose sons lives in the United States, was fortunate to be able to persuade an American solider to take pity on him and assist him and two of his companions to escape. The last words the soldier said to Professor Samarree were ‘Run, run. Don’t look back!’

Within days Professor Samarree had arranged for himself and his family to flee the country. He is now in Europe, where he is claiming political asylum.

The full details of Professor Samarree’s story and a detailed account of the US-built Iraqi intelligence apparatus are contained in the article Ghosts of Jadiriyah, published by the BRussells Tribunal. It should be noted that the story was offered on the one-year anniversary of discovery of the Jadiryah facility to a range of mainstream media publications, including New Yorker, New Statesman, the Independent, The Big Issue, as well as to the radical left publication Z Mag. Of them all, only the New Statesmen and Z Mag were courteous enough even to reply to affirm their rejection. It seemed that Professor Samarree’s remarkable story and any further interest in Jadiriyah were simply off the agenda.

But Jadiriyah, with its ghosts and its horror, will not go away.

On 7 February 2007 another former inmate from Jadiriyah, Abbas Z Abid, presented his sworn testimony at the international peace conference in Kuala Lumpur. Like Professor Samarree’s, his description of the torture that he and others underwent is almost too harrowing to bear. What sets his testimony apart and completes our understanding of the grim world of Iraq’s secret prisons are the dates of his incarceration. Mr Abid, an electrical engineer from Fallujah who was the Chief Engineer in Baghdad’s Science and Technology Ministry, was arrested in August 2005, but was not released until October 2006. That means that Mr Abid, like Dr Samarree, was held when the American soldiers raided the facility, but his ordeal did not end there. In fact, not only does Mr Abid describe the ongoing tortures that he was repeatedly subjected to after the US intervention, as well as describing the tortures that continued to be inflicted on fellow inmates, including the use of Black and Decker drills and other power tools (Mr Abid names eight fellow detainees who died from their injuries), but Mr Abid states that ‘American troops have visited the prison many times and therefore cannot deny the existence of such a prison’.

The implications of these two testimonies as well as the absence of independent and public scrutiny are obvious. The Occupation has done nothing at all to halt abuse at the Interior Ministry’s network of secret prisons or curtail in any way the culture of impunity in which they exist. And lets be absolutely clear what we are talking about here. This is as close as we can get to the tide of sectarian violence sweeping Iraq, whose victims are almost invariably arrested by Interior Ministry personnel, who are then horribly tortured within Interior Ministry prisons and whose bodies finally surface in abandoned lots, are dredged from rivers, are buried in shallow graves in the desert or left as human detritus around sewage works (Former human rights chief in Iraq John Pace stated that the majority of killings were being carried out by groups under the control of the Interior Ministry, Independent, 26 February 2006, while the Iraqi Organisation for Follow-up and Monitoring in Iraq found that in 92% of some 3498 cases of extrajudicial killing, the victims had been arrested by Interior Ministry forces). Such would undoubtedly have been the final fate of Professor Samarree and Mr Abid’s hapless fellow detainees.

Of course the Americans have always been aware of the existence of this and other horrific dungeons within Interior Ministry facilities. How could they not be? They set them up and continue to operate from the same facilities! And for any who would question the validity or Mr Abid’s testimony that American forces were regular visitors, his story is confirmed by Solomon Moore writing in the Los Angeles Times (9 July 2006), who stated that the US military had been at the facility before the November raid! And the same happened in Basra. After it was revealed by the Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price that British trained policemen had tortured prisoners to death with drills, we discovered, through the New York Times (!!), that American intelligence officers had been working alongside them at the Jamiyat police station, where they passed on names of suspects knowing that those suspects would end up as the victims of death squads. That is their modus operandi and it is duplicated by British military intelligence units, like the Joint Support Group, who brought their nefarious experience from Northern Ireland (where, as Chris Floyd has recently documented, they orchestrated sectarian murder through the Ulster Defence Association) straight to Iraq. Thus in Basra we find a paramilitary death squad outfit called the Revenge of God (Thar Allah) nurtured and protected by the British, linked to police intelligence and given control of nightly curfews, despite its boasts of killing members of the former state (see Ghosts of Jadiriyah for a more complete account)!

Since the mainstream western media will not hear such voices as Professor Samarree and Mr Abid, it is absolutely beholden on every decently minded individual as well as every organisation that opposes the illegal occupation of Iraq to demand the truth and bring an end to this monstrous culture of impunity. Jean Paul Sartre noted that the American assault on Vietnam was not only an attack against that nation, but an act of violence directed against the whole of humanity. If we are to have any hope of rescuing our own collective humanity, we must raise our voices to bring an end to the screaming from Iraq.

Two important notes

Note 1: On Sectarianism

The cherished western mainstream media notion, undoubtedly nurtured by false flag covert warfare and so-called psyops, that Iraq has fragmented into a state of intercommunal sectarian civil war is the biggest single impediment to understanding the role of the Anglo-US Occupation in the thousands upon thousands of extrajudicial killings taking place in Iraq.

The testimonies of Professor Samarree and Mr Abid shed some futher light on just how far we can see sectarianism as a factor in Iraq’s violence. Both accounts describe hearing a language that they believe to be Farsi, as well as, variously, images of Shiite saints and mobile ring tones with Iranian songs. Dr Samarree even states with a high degree of confidence that the head of the Badr Organisation, Hadi al-Amery, attended one of his interrogation sessions.[ii]

There is no reason to doubt their testimonies. In fact, as newspapers have revealed, and I have documented on multiple occasions, the Badr Brigade/Organisation was among the major political parties in exile from whom the CIA recruited the core of the new intelligence apparatus, an organisation which started out with the innocuous title of the Collection Management and Analysis Directorate (CMAD), a title which masked the fact that in reality it was producing what amounted to death lists to be targeted by its paramilitary wing in conjunction with US (and UK) special forces (See Ghosts of Jadiriyah for a detailed discussion).

That such parties are running at least some of the worst detention facilities (others are undoubtedly run by Kurdish groups in the north of Iraq) is therefore not surprising and of course their members at every level of responsibility should face justice. But more instructive are their demonstrable links with the Occupation, which I have sought to document. It is this intellectual authorship of extrajudicial killing that the Western anti-occupation movement needs to focus on. If the torturers and killers in Jadiriyah were indeed taking their instruction from Iran, as some would hold, then they not only need to prove that, but in the face of concrete evidence that such forces work in close conjunction with the US (see also Diyala: a Laboratory of Civil War?), they also need to prove that the US state is working hand in hand with the Iranian state.

In fact, as Kurt Nimmo has highlighted, we know that the Iranian state is being stitched up in Iraq over fabricated charges of supplying weapons to Shiite groups. As anyone who remembers anything about similar US charges in other theatres of war (such as the Nicaraguan Migs, the Gulf of Tonkin incident etc etc) will remember, they were all made up! As modern military theorists hold, the major part of contemporary warfare is informational - or better stated, disinformational.

Note 2: On Genocide

The distinguished dissident academic Edward Herman, recently wrote a paper entitled Iraq: the Genocide Option in which he argued that the US war in Iraq threatened to become genocidal. He was quite right to point to genocide. With credible figures of over one million Iraqi casualties, another three to four million displaced internally and externally, the total collapse of civic infrastructure and the imminent threat of political disintegration, there must already be a very real question as to whether Iraq continues to exist as a viable nation. To fully substantiate the charge, the only question technically remains establishing intent, although I believe that too is perfectly possible when we consider the statements on partition made by the likes of Leslie Gelb (New York Times 25 November 2003, 1 May 2006).

To make his argument, Herman drew upon two analogies: El Salvador and Vietnam. Whilst explicitly acknowledging the existence of the so-called Salvador Option in Iraq, Herman’s argument was that genocide had occurred in Vietnam though the direct application of US force with its implementation of weapons of massive destruction, whereas, in El Salvador, where the US had had to resort to more lightly equipped proxy armies, only mass murder had occurred, which he compared with the Phoenix Programme in Vietnam. With the greatest respect, however, I believe that Herman is understating the terrible impact of the Phoenix Programme, the brutal US-sponsored war in El Salvador and the ongoing Salvador Option in Iraq.

First of all, Herman compares El Salvador’s estimated death toll of some 100,000 (which Noam Chomsky describes as the crucifixion of the country) with the several (commonly around three) million estimated victims in Vietnam. Whilst one should not doubt the scale of the horror brought to Vietnam and its tragic ongoing legacy, it should be pointed out that to compare these figures is somewhat misleading. El Salvador has a population of some five million, compared to around 10 times as many in Vietnam. Thus it would not be unreasonable to suggest that had El Salvador’s Salvador Option been carried out in a country as populous as Vietnam, the direct casualties would have totalled around one million, bringing it instantly into the same order of magnitude as Vietnam. In fact, something very much like this under US auspices did take place in Indonesia. Thus, we can see that with an arsenal of much lighter weapons, including a plentiful array of improvised torture devices, a multitude of human lives can be extinguished. In El Salvador this slaughter was meticulously organised by the US through the training and provision of its armed forces, through control of its intelligence departments and through strategically placed advisors at every level of the Salvadoran Armed Forces.



And the results of the US war in El Salvador were the economic subjugation of the country, including dollarisation, with an uncounted human toll in terms of blocked social reform and the entrenchment of poverty. In the sense that the hopes and dreams of emancipation from economic slavery of the poor majority were drowned in rivers of blood, this too was a genocide.

It also seems unduly dismissive to describe the Phoenix Program as only accounting for the deaths of around 40,000 Vietnamese. The point of the Phoenix Programme was that it was a systematic campaign of targeted killing in South Vietnam designed to destroy the leadership of the resistance movements (including the leaders of the unarmed social resistance) and terrorise the population into obedience (as in El Salvador). As such it formed an important tactical contribution to what amounted to a genocidal attack against the Vietnamese, whose aim was to extinguish that people’s hope of national development. Nor should the value of the eventual exposure of the Phoenix Program be regarded as insignificant. The effect of this exposure was to give the necessary impetus to closing down the Office of Public Safety (Supplying Repression, Institute for Policy Studies, 1981), whose various programmes contributed to the implementation of repressive security apparatuses around the world and certainly added to growing pressure for US withdrawal from Vietnam. We will never know what effect its earlier exposre might have had if more people had been prepared to break the silence.

In his address to the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Vietnam, Jean Paul Sartre specifically addressed the question of genocide. Sartre argued that the US could conduct genocide in Vietnam not because it had the means, but because its lack of significant economic interests meant that there was nothing to lose and the salutary effect of this lesson in apocalypse would not be lost on other nations bidding for independence.

In Iraq (with its much smaller population) the US has already matched in scale the violence perpetrated on Vietnam and the war goes on, although there is little indication that it has given up its economic interests.

Undoubtedly a very great part of this violence is conducted directly by US forces (the extremely credible Lancet study suggests from 30-40%), but, despite surges, that proportion appears to be falling. That leaves perhaps as many as 500,000 violent deaths unattributed to Coalition military action. Herman states that some of these would belong to the Salvador Option, while the bulk of the others would fall into the pattern that he explicitly describes as large-scale communal civil war manipulated by the US. I think it is vital that we all remember that this inter-communal sectarian warfare still consists of anonymous bombs that target the Shia and which most Iraqis for good reason believe are the work of the occupation and sectarian killings of Sunnis by members of the security forces – along with academics, engineers, lawyers, trade unionists, imams, doctors, teachers and other state functionaries by paramilitary forces operating from the Ministry of the Interior[iii]. This is indeed the application of the Salvador Option and it contributes an essential part of the ongoing genocide in Iraq.

[i] The charge that the Badr Brigade was responsible for most of acts of sectarian violence through its alleged infiltration of the Interior Ministry Police Commandos was revised almost overnight following the bombing of the Samarra Mosque in February 2006. From that moment on the majority of complaints against Shiite militiamen were levelled against the so-called Mehdi Army associated with Muqtada al Sadr. No explanation has ever been provided as to how such a switch could have come about, especially perplexing given that it was explicitly clear that police units were the primary culprits prior to Samarra.

[ii] The very fact that Mr Abid is able to describe the special attention given to Sunni detainees demonstrates that there were Shiites among the detainees, a fact commonly glossed over. In addition, Mr Abid was neither detained by the Badr Brigade nor the Mehdi Army but by US and Iraqi forces (the Muthana Brigade, which, despite reported reverence for Muqtada al Sadr, continues to host US advisors), before being handed over to the Special Investigation Unit.

[iii] In each of the high profile accounts of supposed sectarian attacks and massacres that have taken place within the last year a detailed examination of the evidence demonstrates that the violence specifically occurred within the context of security operations and/or directly under the noses of Occupation forces. Examples include Operation Knockout in Baquba, the assault on the Adhamiya district of Baghdad, the massacre in the Jihad district of Baghdad, the massacre in Balad and the mass abduction from the Ministry of Education.

Sherwood Ross: Prof Boyle accuses US of 2001 anthrax attacks

13 December 2006
Anthrax attack on US Congress made by scientists and covered up by FBI, expert says
Sherwood Ross
Middle East Times
December 11, 2006
http://www.aldeilis.net/english/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1976&Itemid=141

WASHINGTON -- The terrorists who perpetrated the 2001 anthrax attack on Congress likely were US government scientists at the army's Ft. Detrick, MD., bioterrorism lab having access to "moonsuits" that enabled them to safely process and manufacture super-weapons-grade anthrax, an eminent authority on the subject says.

Although only a "handful" of scientists had the ability to perpetrate the crime, the culprit among them may never be identified as the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, IA., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens, the authority said.

This action makes it impossible "to pin-point precisely where, when, and from whom these bio-agents had originated," said Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign.

Boyle, who drafted the US Biological Weapons Convention of 1989 enacted by Congress, said destruction of the Ames anthrax "appears to be a cover-up orchestrated by the FBI."

If impartial scientists could have performed genetic reconstruction of the anthrax found in letters mailed to Senators Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy, (D -Vt.), "the trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret but officially-sponsored US government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal" in violation of biological weapons conventions and US laws, Boyle said.

"I believe the FBI knows exactly who was behind these terrorist anthrax attacks upon the United States Congress in the Fall of 2001, and that the culprits were US government-related scientists involved in a criminal US government biowarfare program," Boyle said.

The anthrax attacks killed five people, including two postal workers, injured 17 others, and shut down the operations of the US Congress.

Boyle, a leading American authority on international law, said after the attacks he contacted senior FBI official Marion "Spike" Bowman, who handles counter-terrorism issues, and provided him with the names of the scientists working with anthrax. Boyle told Bowman the Ft. Detrick scientists were not to be trusted.

In addition to then destroying the anthrax, the FBI "retained every independent life-scientist it could locate as part of its fictitious investigation, and then swore them all to secrecy so that they cannot publicly comment on the investigation or give their expert opinion," Boyle said.

Boyle pointed out that Bowman is the same FBI agent "who played a pivotal role in suppressing evidence which in turn prevented the issuance of a search warrant for the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th Al Qaeda hijacker on 11 September 2001, which might otherwise have led to foreknowledge and therefore prevention of those terrorist attacks in the first place."

A self-confessed Al Qaeda operative, Moussaoui was detained on immigration three weeks before 9/11 when a Minnesota flight school reported he was acting suspiciously.

Boyle asked if Bowman received an FBI award in December 2002, for "exceptional performance" because of his capacity "to forestall investigations, because of where they may lead?" He went on to inquire, "Could the real culprits behind the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the immediately following terrorist anthrax attacks upon Congress ultimately prove to be the same people?"

Because of its "bogus investigation," Boyle said, "the greatest political crime in the history of the United States of America since its founding on 4 July, 1776 - the anthrax attacks on Congress, which served not only to deliver a terrorist threat on its members, but actually to close it down for a period - may remain officially unresolved forever."

"Could it truly be coincidental," he continued, "that two of the primary intended victims of the terrorist anthrax attacks - Senators Daschle and Leahy - were holding up the speedy passage of the pre-planned USA Patriot Act ... an act which provided the federal government with unprecedented powers in relation to US citizens and institutions?"

Leahy is incoming Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may have a personal interest in holding hearings to learn who tried to kill him. He recently said President George W. Bush should be "terrified" that he will be the new Chair.

Boyle's views are contained in his book Biowarfare and Terrorism, published by Clarity Press, Inc., of Atlanta, GA. His previously published titles include, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and Destroying World Order. Dr. Boyle holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude and a Ph.D. in political science, both from Harvard.

In a forward to the book, Dr. Jonathan King, Professor of Molecular Biology at M.I.T. and a founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, said the government's "growing bioterror programs [described by Professor Boyle] represent a significant emerging danger to our own population."

A harsh critic of Pentagon biowarfare activities, Boyle pointed out in inflation-adjusted dollars the US spends more on them today than it did on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb in World War II. He has accused the Bush administration of diverting the bio-tech industry "towards biowarfare purposes" and of making corrupting payoffs to Academia to turn university scientists to the pursuit of biowarfare work.

Sherwood Ross is an American journalist who writes on military and political topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

*Glenn Greenwald: What happened to the Padilla videos?

Thank goodness for blogs. Without them, such good ones like Glenn Greenwald's --whose blogs are among the most consistently good -- we'd have to take the word of the Times or the Washington Post for what's important.

Here Greenwald puts the missing Padilla interrogation video tapes in context. If the Times had given it the proper attention, there might have been more pressure to dismiss the US case, or non-case against Jose Padilla.

But there's another issue that the Padilla case raises that the relatively mainstream Greenwald won't touch and that's the issue of responsibilty for 9/11.

Has anyone noticed that the US has produced no examples of terror cells that were not cases of FBI entrapment of foolish and otherwise challenged individuals? In other words: NONE, not one. And when they were forced to put Padilla through the system they had to reduce charges. And that from the beginning, the Bush-Cheney clique have been fighting tooth and nail against habeas corpus, i.e., producing ANY evidence against those they torture and jail indefinitely.

Why this reluctance to produce evidence, to place their evidence before even the compromised judges in our system? Could it be that there is no evidence to produce? That there is no terror outside of the terror that is produced by the US and other states and their respective intelligence and security services -- the secret government.

Many people agree that the war on terror is bogus. But how many have thought through what this really means? How many care to look at the terror of 9/11 with eyes open to the possibility that there were NO Islamic terrorists involved? How many would make the connection between the Bush-Cheney insistence on not having to produce evidence with the lack of the slightest shred of independently verified evidence that any hijackings took place on 9/11.

Hopefully, as the direct and indirect evidence continues to mount, more will start connecting the dots.

Ronald
http://desip.igc.org


Saturday March 10, 2007
What happened to the Padilla interrogation videos?
by Glenn Greenwald

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

This is an infinitely bigger story than the media, thus far, seems to realize. In the Jose Padilla criminal trial, the judge -- Bush-appointee and former federal prosecutor Marcia Cooke, who has a reputation for extreme objectivity -- has ordered the Bush administration to turn over all tapes made of its interrogations of Padilla, as part of Padilla's motion to dismiss the indictment on the ground that he was, in essence, tortured while being held incommunicado for 3 1/2 years. In particular, Padilla's lawyers are most interested in the last interrogation session to which he was subjected -- in March, 2004 -- while still held as an "enemy combatant."

Ten days ago, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported that the administration had produced all of the DVDs it claimed it possessed, but the March, 2004 interrogation video was not among them. The government began claiming that the video "mysteriously disappeared." Bush administration lawyers simply insist that they are "no longer able to locate the DVD."

Associated Press now furthers the story by reporting that Bush lawyers seem to have committed themselves to the position that the video will not be found: "'I don't know what happened to it,' Pentagon attorney James Schmidli said during a recent court hearing." Judge Cooke is reacting exactly how she should -- with utter disbelief in the veracity of this claim:

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke was incredulous that anything connected to such a high-profile defendant could be lost.
"Do you understand how it might be difficult for me to understand that a tape related to this particular individual just got mislaid?" Cooke told prosecutors at a hearing last month.

It is difficult to put into words how extraordinary this is. As the Newsweek article reported:
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."

Then again, credible claims by a citizen that he was tortured while held for years without charges by his own government also used to be the kind of thing "you hear when you're litigating cases in Egypt or Morocco or Karachi," but is now what characterizes the United States.
The March, 2004 video is unlikely the only evidence which the Bush administration is concealing despite being ordered to produce. As the Associated Press reported:

But [Padilla lawyer Anthony] Natale said there may be more tapes missing and other interrogations that were not recorded.
Defense lawyers say brig logs indicate that there were 72 hours of Padilla interviews that either were not taped or for which tapes may be missing. Natale said it seems unlikely that any interrogation session with Padilla was not videotaped "when he was videoed taking showers."

Of course, even if administration's patently unbelievable claim were true -- namely, that it did "lose" the video of its interrogation of this Extremely Dangerous International Terrorist -- that would, by itself, evidence a reckless ineptitude with American national security so grave that it ought to be a scandal by itself. But the likelihood that the key interrogation video with regard to Padilla's torture claims was simply "lost" is virtually non-existent. Destruction of relevant evidence in any litigation is grounds for dismissal of the case (or defense) of the party engaged in that behavior.
But where, as here, the issues extend far beyond the singular proceeding itself -- we are talking about claims by a U.S. citizen that he was tortured by his own government -- destruction of evidence of this sort would be obstruction of justice of the most serious magnitude. This merits much, much more attention.

-- Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald: Bush's signing statement authorized FBI's lawbreaking

Friday March 9, 2007 08:57 EST
The FBI's lawbreaking is tied directly to President Bush
IG report "woefully incomplete

(updated below - updated again - Update III)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

Glenn Greenwald
Multiple media outlets are focusing on the unsurprising story that the FBI seems to have been abusing its powers under the Patriot Act to issue so-called "national security letters" (NSLs), whereby the FBI is empowered to obtain a whole array of privacy-infringing records without any sort of judicial oversight or subpoena process. In particular, the FBI has failed to comply with the legal obligations imposed by Congress, when it re-authorized the Patriot Act in early 2006, which required the FBI to report to Congress on the use of these letters.

That the FBI is abusing its NSL power is entirely unsurprising (more on that below), but the real story here -- and it is quite significant -- has not even been mentioned by any of these news reports. The only person (that I've seen) to have noted the most significant aspect of these revelations is Silent Patriot at Crooks & Liars, who very astutely recalls that the NSL reporting requirements imposed by Congress were precisely the provisions which President Bush expressly proclaimed he could ignore when he issued a "signing statement" as part of the enactment of the Patriot Act's renewal into law. Put another way, the law which the FBI has now been found to be violating is the very law which George Bush publicly declared he has the power to ignore.

It was The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage who first drew attention to the Patriot Act signing statement in a typically superb article, back in March, 2006, which reported:

When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.

The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates.

Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ''a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ''signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.

In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ''impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."

Bush wrote: ''The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "

The statement represented the latest in a string of high-profile instances in which Bush has cited his constitutional authority to bypass a law.

When a country is ruled by an individual who repeatedly and openly arrogates unto himself the power to violate the law, and specifically proclaims that he is under no obligation to account to Congress or anyone else concerning the exercise of radical new surveillance powers such as NSLs, it should come as absolutely no surprise that agencies under his control freely break the law. The culture of lawlessness which the President has deliberately and continuously embraced virtually ensures, by design, that any Congressional limits on the use of executive power will be violated.

That NSLs are a dangerous and oversight-less instrument which entail enormous potential for abuse is hardly a new revelation. But those who tried to warn of such dangers were tarred and feathered as allies of the Terrorists, people who wanted to prevent the Commander-in-Chief from protecting the American people. Who else would possibly express concerns about The Patriot Act?

As a result of that commonplace, debate-precluding cartoon campaign, Russ Feingold -- the only Senator to vote against the original enactment of the Patriot Act -- was able to convince only nine of his fellow Democratic Senators to oppose re-authorization of the Patriot Act. And though the media aided the White House in obscuring the substantive objections he raised to that bill, Feingold repeatedly emphasized that he was in favor of many of the provisions of the Patriot Act, but was concerned about the lack of safeguards to protect Americans from abuse -- specifically the standard-less and oversight-less NSLs (as he said then: "we need to place safeguards on the broad NSL power and to put a sunset on that power so that Congress can make sure it's not abused"). But as usual, such concerns were drowned out by manipulative appeals to the need of the Commander-in-Chief to Protect Us from The Terrorists.

Back in November, 2005, when the re-authorization of the Patriot Act was being "debated," the abuse by the FBI of these NSLs was documented in an excellent expose by The Washington Post's Barton Gellman:

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans. . . . .

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.

In the same Post article, the genuine threat posed by this invasive instrument was made clear by Bob Barr:

"The beef with the NSLs is that they don't have even a pretense of judicial or impartial scrutiny," said former representative Robert L. Barr Jr. (Ga.), who finds himself allied with the American Civil Liberties Union after a career as prosecutor, CIA analyst and conservative GOP stalwart. "There's no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat's decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it."

One of the very few attempts over the last six years from Congress to impose at least some safeguards on the use of radical new executive powers was to require that the FBI report to Congress on the issuance of NSLs, so that Congress could at least know about (and, theoretically, take action in response to) any abuse of these powers. But the minute George Bush got what he wanted -- re-authorization of the Patriot Act -- he proclaimed for all the world to hear that he had the power to violate those provisions and refuse to comply with such safeguards. And now it is revealed that the FBI has, in fact, violated the very provisions which the President proclaimed he could violate. Perhaps someone other than Silent Patriot might want to take note of that connection.

The Bush administration has created vast and permanent data bases to collect and store evidence revealing the private activities of millions of American citizens. When the FBI obtains information essentially in secret -- with no judicial oversight -- that information is stored in those data bases. This is all being done by the executive branch with no safeguards and no oversight, and the little oversight that Congress has required has been defiantly and publicly brushed aside by the President, who sees legal requirements as nothing more than suggestions or options which he will recognize only if he chooses to. That is the constitutional crisis that we have endured under virtually the entire Bush presidency -- the crisis which, for the most part, our mainstream political and media elite have collectively decided not to acknowledge.

The story here is not merely that the FBI is breaking the law and abusing these powers. That has long been predicted and, to some degree, even documented. The story is that the FBI is ignoring the very legal obligations which George Bush vowed were not obligations at all, but mere suggestions to be accepted only if he willed it. It is yet another vivid example proving that the President's ideology of lawlessness exists not merely in theory, but as the governing doctrine under which the executive branch has acted, time and again and as deliberately as possible, in violation of whatever laws it deems inconvenient.

UPDATE: Russ Feingold issued the following statement this morning regarding these revelations (via e-mail):

This report proves that "trust us" doesn't cut it when it comes to the government's power to obtain Americans' sensitive business records without a court order and without any suspicion that they are tied to terrorism or espionage. I fought hard to prevent abuses of this power when the Senate debated reauthorizing the Patriot Act last year. I will work with Senator Leahy and Senator Rockefeller to make sure the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees conduct full and prompt investigations, and I will press for quick Senate action on sensible reforms to help prevent future abuses of National Security Letters.

One of the principal reasons why Sen. Feingold's warnings about the obvious dangers of re-authorization were so easily ignored was the media's tolerance for Op-Eds like this one -- published by The Washington Post in November, 2005 -- from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Needless to say, the first sentence of his argument urging re-authorization of the Patriot Act was this: "On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists inspired by hatred murdered nearly 3,000 innocent Americans."

Gonzales went on to brand as "unfounded" concerns over abuse of the powers granted by the Patriot Act, and said that this was the choice the country faced: "Congress must act now or risk bringing terrorism prevention to a halt. . . . Congress must act immediately and reauthorize the Patriot Act before the men and women in law enforcement lose the tools they need to keep us safe."

As always, the Bush administration presented a choice: (a) succumb to the Leader's will by vesting in him the unchecked powers that he demands, or (b) help The Terrorists attack and kill innocent Americans. That binary, exploitive formula was promoted by the media and it single-handedly prevented rational examination of any of these vital issues over the last six years. The FBI's illegal and abusive conduct is the direct by-product of that manipulation, and it is but a tiny fraction of the systematic law-breaking we have endured since 2001 at the highest levels of our government.

UPDATE II: The full report by the DOJ's Inspector General can be found, in .pdf form, here (h/t sysprog). This report was required by Congress when it re-authorized the Patriot Act, and it covers the FBI's use of NSLs for the period of 2003-2005; the second report, covering 2006, is due at the end of the year.

The report characterized the FBI's conduct as constituting "serious misuse" of the NSL powers, and it is suffuse with findings of the FBI's irregularities and improprieties. Several noteworthy aspects of the report, beginning with an illustrative passage of the report's findings:

And what is done with the information obtained by the FBI? It is stored on government data bases which thousands of government employees can access:

More disturbingly, NSLs are being issued with much greater frequency to obtain the records of "U.S. persons" (citizens and legal residents) rather than aliens:

And while the report concluded that it could not find that these violations were deliberate (hardly a dispositive finding coming, as it does, from the Bush Justice Department), the report emphasized that its investigation into the existence of criminality was itself often hampered by the FBI's failure to maintain proper records concerning its use of NSLs:

The report indicates that there is no consistency, virtually no controls, and continuous violations of legal and regulatory guidelines for how the FBI is using these extremely invasive NSL weapons. The information that the FBI is gathering on Americans simply gets deposited into widely accessed and permanent data bases.

And this report, as indicated, is from the Bush Justice Department. But this is the country we have created for ourselves by allowing the President to insist upon not only more and more invasive powers, but the ability to exercise those powers in virtual secrecy and with no limits. And the few limits which Congress has imposed are simply ignored because the administration knows that -- at least thus far -- there have been no consequences, and little public outcry, prompted by its law-breaking.

The information being gathered and stored on the private lives of American citizens by the federal government is vast and growing -- and that is the conclusion compelled by what we know about what this government has been doing. This is an administration that has operated behind an unprecedented veil of secrecy, and it is undoubtedly the case that there are whole surveillance programs about which we have not learned. Do Americans really want the federal government compiling electronic dossiers on them with virtually no safeguards and no oversight?

UPDATE III: This Daily Kos diarist makes the fair point that it is not technically accurate to say that Congress required the FBI itself to report to Congress on its NSL activities. Instead, Congress required that the Justice Department file the report which was disclosed today, the purpose of which is to report to Congress on the FBI's NSL activities. That point is true as far as it goes, but the fact remains that there is a clear connection between, on the one hand, the FBI's failure to comply with the legal restrictions governing NSLs and its accompanying documentation requirements, and on the other, President Bush's proclamation that those requirements can be ignored.

In other words, the Inspector General technically complied with the Congressional requirement by filing this report, but the report itself was woefully incomplete as a result of the FBI's failure to document its activities as it was required to do. And where the report was able to reach definitive conclusions despite the FBI's record-keeping failures, it concluded that the FBI has been repeatedly violating legal requirements governing NSLs in numerous ways.

-- Glenn Greenwald

Kevin Ryan's Battle for Truth Continues

Kevin Ryan's Battle for Truth Continues

If you are new to Kevin Ryan's story and work, go here:
http://www.ultruth.com/Kevin_Ryan.htm

Kevin Ryan

Kevin Ryan's legal battle with UL is still in the early stages, with UL's team of lawyers filing motions to dismiss the suit. If UL can be made to reveal information in the next stage of the legal battle, "disclosure", then Ryan can clear the record, and the truth can be revealed to a hungry pack of 9/11 skeptics across the nation and increasingly, the globe.

Please contribute to Ryan's Legal Defense Fund if you can:
http://www.ultruth.com/

If you are new to Kevin Ryan's story and work, go here:
http://www.ultruth.com/Kevin_Ryan.htm

Details on the case:

United States District Court, Southern District of Indiana
Cause No. 1:06-cv-1770-JDT-TAB
Judge John D. Tinder
Magistrate Judge Tim A. Baker

Be sure to check out Ryan's new piece:
Looking for Truth in Credentials: The WTC “Experts”

The Nation: Rushed Primaries: What's the rush?

The Nation

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070319/editors
Rushed Primaries

[from the March 19, 2007 issue]

As recently as 1976, Democratic presidential candidates were still duking it out in June primaries. As recently as 1992, Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown dueled well into April. Yet in 2008, with the Democratic and Republican races wide open for the first time in decades, it looks as if the nominees of both parties could be known by the first week in February, thanks to a dramatically speeded-up primary season.

That's good news for the early front-runners, especially those with lots of money, but not for grassroots activists who would like to see the race last long enough to get candidates to explain how they'll meet the challenges confronting the nation, to observe how the contenders handle the spotlight and to allow for the possibility of late starters (like global warming crusader Al Gore). The unusually early "Who's Hollywood's favorite?" sparring going on now between Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is not the same as the real thing: Primaries force candidates to connect with voters, not just raise money at cocktail parties.

Unfortunately, the 2008 primaries could move so fast that the only real connections will be made via TV commercials. The front-loading of the selection process will leave little time for old-fashioned person-to-person campaigning. Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Utah have scheduled February 5 primaries, and the big-ticket states--California, Illinois, New Jersey and Texas--are exploring similar moves. Alabama's aiming for February 2, while Florida's toying with January 29. That's got officials in the first caucus state, Iowa (January 14), and the first primary state, New Hampshire (January 22), who zealously guard their political concessions, muttering ominously about shifting dates back toward New Year's.

Why the rush? The process has been speeding up for years, but until this election, party national committees had imposed a measure of order by threatening to reduce the size of convention delegations from states that tried to elbow into the zone traditionally occupied by Iowa and New Hampshire. What's changed is that state legislators have finally figured out that party conventions are just so much theater. So why worry about losing a few delegates? Indeed, when DNC chair Howard Dean threatened to cut the size of the Florida delegation to the 2008 convention, State Representative Dan Gelber of Miami Beach responded, "I don't have any constituents in the DNC. I only have constituents in my district. They would like to be more relevant."

No one can fault voters for that desire. And steps that give racially and ethnically diverse states more influence seem, on the surface, positive. But giving big states a place at the table in January or February changes the dynamic of the competition. Big states demand big campaigns, which play out not in town halls but in thirty-second commercials. To compete seriously in Iowa and New Hampshire and then immediately move to the biggest states will require not millions of dollars but tens of millions--amounts more likely to come from major donors to probable winners than from public financing. That's already led several candidates to reject public financing and its spending limits. In short, front-loading benefits front-runners like Hillary Clinton and John McCain who begin with high name recognition and big bankrolls.

A better process would set up a rotating calendar of regional primaries spread over several months. That would allow candidates who take gutsy stands and engage in aggressive base-building to develop momentum. Comprehensive campaign- finance reform and experiments with new voting systems, such as instant-runoff voting, would also help. But those changes won't come in time for 2008. What this means is that in order for progressives to be part of the process, activism must speed up as well. It may still be possible for the 2008 nominating process to be about more than big names and big money. But that will happen only if we recognize that the train is leaving the station way ahead of schedule--and that if those who seek a better politics are not on board, it will deliver a nominee without us.

Julie's letter to Senator Hillary R. Clinton on Iran

February 15, 2997

Julie wrote to Senator Hillary R. Clinton:

I was shocked to learn that you regard Iran's nuclear
>> energy program as an "existential threat" to the
>> United States. The U.S. signed the non-proliferation
>> treaty that gives Iran the right to develop nuclear
>> energy, so clearly the notion that such research is a
>> threat to us is a new one in U.S. policy circles.
>>
>> It is only Israel that until now has claimed an
>> "existential" fear of Iran developing nuclear weapons.
>> It is unclear to me why Israel is more worried about
>> Iran than Pakistan, when Iran hasn't invaded another
>> country in over two centuries. The U.S. has
>> encouraged both Pakistan and India to go nuclear.
>> Even in the unlikely event that Iran were to violate
>> the NPT successfully under the NPT inspections regime,
>> and Israel were to lose its nuclear monopoly in the
>> area, in what way would the outcome be anything but a
>> stalemate?--no more of an "existential threat" than
>> the one posed by the balance of nuclear power between
>> the U.S. and Russia, India and Pakistan, etc.
>>
>> Your willingness to threaten a country that does not
>> pose a serious threat to the U.S. with genocidal
>> nuclear annihilation is, to say the least, extremely
>> troubling. People's most fundamental human right is
>> the right to their own lives. The U.S. obliged
>> ourselves by signing the Geneva Conventions not to
>> arbitrarily threaten people because of their
>> nationality, and not to carry out genocidal assaults
>> on civilians or the infrastructure that supports their
>> day-to-day lives. You are currently sworn to uphold
>> the U.S. Constitution, which includes all our treaty
>> obligations.
>>
>> Senator Clinton, you were elected to represent the
>> people of New York and to uphold the U.S.
>> constitution. I am a Democratic Party District Leader
>> in Yonkers. Until your position vis a vis Iran
>> returns to respect for human rights and international
>> law, and against "pre-emptive" (i.e. aggressive) war,
>> I will be obliged to oppose your candidacy for higher
>> office.

Sincerely,
Julie ...

Jeffrey .Blankfort: Abu-Khalil & the Lobby: Blind, ignorant or blindly ignorant?

February 24 / 25, 2007
As'ad Abu Khalil Among the Missing
A Debate on the Israel Lobby
http://www.counterpunch.org/blankfort02242007.html

By JEFFREY BLANKFORT

It appeared that all but a handful of the 300 seats were filled in Room 250 of University of San Francisco's McClaren Conference Center on a rainy Thursday night for what was probably the first debate on the power and influence of the Israel Lobby held between critics of Israel. And it almost didn't happen.

A little more than week before the event, those involved in the event: the organizer, Fred Shepherd, of Global Information Services, and the other participants, moderator Khalil Bendib, my debating partner, Dr. Hatem Bazian, of UC Berkeley, and one of our opponents, Prof. Stephen Zunes, of USF, learned that Zunes' anticipated partner, Prof. As'ad AbuKhalil, of CSU, Stanislaus, was not planning showing up.

Rather than having the courtesy to notify us of his intentions, we had to get the information from people who had written AbuKhalil about the debate and to whom he replied that he was not planning to participate.

When contacted by Shepherd, AbuKhalil wrote that he would not accept to take the "No" side of the debate if the question was, as debated Thursday, "Is the Israel Lobby the Dominant Factor in Determining US Middle East Policy?" but would only participate if the question was changed to "Is the Israel Lobby the Sole and Dominant Factor in Determining US Middle East Policy?" AbuKhalil is smart enough to realize that no one, neither Mearsheimer and Walt, nor anyone with any knowledge of US interests in the region would be willing to argue that the lobby is the only factor in determining US policy. What he was doing, it appeared, was trying to sabotage the debate.

Read more:
http://www.counterpunch.org/blankfort02242007.html

Alexander Cockburn: The persecution of Sami Al-Arian

Thanks to Alexander Cockburn for so economically and ably presenting the case and the details of the torture that the heroic Al-Arian is undergoing. From many of the details below, it's clear that the events of 9/11 and the attendant anti Muslim fervor are an essential element and an excuse for the behavior of many of the individuals involved in the torture, from the fanatic judge, to the several prosecutors and their teams, to the individual jailer/torturers. You'd think that this alone would encourage many on the left to look more closely into the (lack of) evidence implicating young Muslim terrorists. If only for the sake of Sami.

(For more on Stephen Emerson's anti-Muslim viciousness, check out the DESIP website below.)
Ronald
http://desip.igc.org

***

Weekend Edition
March 3 / 4, 2007

A Federal Witchhunt
The Persecution of Sami Al-Arian
www.counterpunch.org
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

One of the first big show trials here in the post-9/11 homeland was of a Muslim professor from Florida, now 49, Sami al-Arian. Pro-Israel hawks had resented this computer professor at the University of South Florida long before Atta and the hijackers flew their planes into the Trade towers, because they saw al-Arian, a Palestinian born in Kuwait of parents kicked out of their Homeland in 1948, as an effective agitator here for the Palestinian cause. As John Sugg, a fine journalist, then based in Tampa, who's followed al-Arian's tribulations for years, wrote in the spring of 2006 on this website:

"When was al-Arian important? More than a decade ago, when Israel's Likudniks in the United States, such as [Steven] Emerson, were working feverishly to undermine the Oslo peace process. No Arab voice could be tolerated, and al-Arian was vigorously trying to communicate with our government and its leaders. He was being successful, making speeches to intelligence and military commanders at MacDill AFB's Central Command, inviting the FBI and other officials to attend meetings of his groups. People were beginning to listen and to wonder why only one side of the Middle East debate was heard here. That was the reason for Al-Arian's political prosecution."

Now the United States is a country that is blessed by a constitution, a Bill of Rights and the rule of law, all of them upheld with degrees of enthusiasm that rise and fall according to sex, income and ethnicity. The fall is particularly drastic if your name is Arab, you publicly profess the justice of the Palestinian cause. Living in Florida doesn't help either.

At the direct instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, the feds threw the book at al-Arian in February 2003. He was arrested with much fanfare and charged in a bloated terrorism and conspiracy case. He spent two and a half years in prison, in solitary confinement under atrocious conditions. To confer with his lawyers, he had to hobble half a mile, shackled hand and foot, his law files balanced on his back.

The six-month trial in US District Court in Tampa featured 80 government witnesses (including 21 from Israel) and 400 intercepted phone calls (the results of a decade of surveillance and half a million recorded calls). The government's evidence against Al-Arian consisted of speeches he gave, magazines he edited, lectures he presented, articles he wrote, books he owned, conferences he organized, rallies he attended, news he heard and websites no one accessed. One bit of evidence consisted of a conversation a co-defendant had with al-Arian in his dream. The defense rested without calling a single witness or presenting any evidence since the government's case rested entirely on First Amendment­protected activities.

The man presiding over al-Arian's trial was US District Court Judge James Moody, a creature from the dark lagoon of Floridian jurisprudence. Hospitable to all testimony from Israelis, Moody ruled that al-Arian and his associates could not say a single word about the military occupation or the plight of the Palestinian people. During closing arguments, the prosecution noted a document that mentioned UN Resolution 242. Moody nixed that on the grounds that it showed Palestinians in altogether too warm a light and therefore might tax the objectivity of the jurors. As Sugg wrote after that ruling, if MLK had been on trial in Judge Moody's courtroom for disturbing the peace, he wouldn't have been allowed to mention Jim Crow or lynchings.

In December 2005, despite Moody's diligence, the jury acquitted al-Arian of the most serious charges. On those remaining, the usual prosecutorial flailings under conspiracy statutes, jurors voted 10 to 2 for acquittal. Two co-defendants were acquitted completely. It was a terrible humiliation for the Justice Department, which had flung an estimated $50 million into the trial.

A jury split 10-2 in a defendant's favor doesn't augur well for conviction in a retrial. Indeed in the spring of 2006 the government declined to retry a wealthy Tampa businessman (the founder of Hooters) on tax evasion charges because the jury was hung 6 to 6, and therefore the proportion was too high to realistically expect a conviction during a retrial.

But the feds insisted they wanted to put al-Arian through the wringer again and -- prudently, given Moody's prejudice-al-Arian's lawyers urged him to make a plea and put an end to his ordeal and end the suffering of his family.

The terms of the plea agreement were in line with Al-Arian's long-standing contention, despite the government's accusations, that he never contributed to the violent actions of any organization. The government settled for a watered-down version of a single count of providing services to people associated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Statement of Facts in the agreement included only these innocuous activities:

(1) hiring an attorney for his brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najjar, during his deportation hearings in the late 1990s;

(2) filling out immigration forms for a resident Palestinian scholar from Britain; and

(3) not disclosing details of associations to a local reporter. (I remain completely baffled as to why it should be a crime to withhold information from a newspaper reporter.)

A central aspect of the plea agreement was an understanding that al-Arian would not be subject to further prosecution or called to cooperate with the government on any matter. The government recommended the shortest possible sentence.

On May 1, 2006, al-Arian came before Judge Moody for sentencing. Watching the proceedings Sugg, as he reported on the CounterPunch website, noted a smug air among the prosecutors. He also noted that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez had arrived in the Tampa area five days earlier. Under the plea, al-Arian's sentence amounted to little more than time served, followed by his departure from the United States. But Judge Moody sentenced al-Arian to the maximum, using inflamed language about al-Arian having blood on his hands, a charge one juror said the jury emphatically rejected.

Now al-Arian faced eleven months more in prison, with release and deportation scheduled for April 2007. But the feds' appetite was far from slaked. In October, Gordon Kromberg, an assistant federal prosecutor in Virginia notorious as an Islamophobe, called al-Arian to testify before a grand jury investigating an Islamic think tank. The subpoena was a outright violation of al-Arian's April plea agreement and his attorneys filed a motion to quash it. The motion included affidavits by attorneys who participated in the negotiations attesting to the fact that "the overarching purpose of the parties' plea agreement was to conclude, once and for all, all business between the government and Dr. al-Arian." The defense lawyers insisted that al-Arian would never have entered a plea that left him vulnerable to government fishing expeditions.

Al-Arian's lawyers feared that their client was being set up for a perjury trap. Up in Virginia, Kromberg ranted to al-Arian's attorney about "the Islamization of America," while down in Tampa, Judge Moody ruled that federal marshals could drag al-Arian to Virginia to testify. On November 16, al-Arian was brought before the grand jury and placed in civil contempt for refusing to testify.

One month after al-Arian was placed in civil contempt, the grand jury term expired, so Kromberg promptly impaneled a new one. Al-Arian was again subpoenaed and again expressed his ethical stance against testifying. This judge also held him in contempt, which could prolong his imprisonment by up to 18 months.

Al-Arian, who is diabetic, then went on a hunger strike. February 26 marked the sixth week of his water-only hunger strike, in which he has lost 40 pounds and has grown considerably weaker. On the 23rd day of his hunger strike, Al-Arian collapsed and hit his head; he has since been moved to a federal prison medical facility in Butner, North Carolina.

On January 22, when Al-Arian appeared before Judge Lee on the charge of contempt, he had this to say about his recent treatment:

"In the past three weeks, I have been to four prisons. I spent fourteen days in the Atlanta penitentiary under 23-hour lockdown, in a roach and rat infested environment. On two occasions, rats shared my diabetic snack. When I was transported from Atlanta to Petersburg (Virginia) and from Petersburg to Alexandria, they allowed me only to wear a t-shirt in subfreezing weather during long walks. In the early morning, the Atlanta guard took my thermal undershirt which I purchased from the prison and threw it in the garbage and when I complained, he threatened to use a lockbox on my handcuffs which would make them extremely uncomfortable. In Petersburg, the guard asked me to take off my clean t-shirt and boxers and gave me dirty and worn out ones. When I complained, he told me to 'shut the f up.' And when I asked why he was treating me like that, he said 'because you're a terrorist.' When I further complained to the lieutenant in charge, he shrugged it off and said if I don't like it, I should write a grievance to the Bureau of Prisons. When I said he had the authority to give me clean clothes, he refused and said if I don't like it I should write a grievance to the Bureau of Prisons. During one of the airlifts, an air marshal further tightened my already tightened handcuffs, and asked me 'Why do you hate us?' I told him, 'I don't hate you.' He said, 'I know who you are, I've read your s-h-i-t.' These are examples of the government's harassment campaign against me that's been taking place for years because of my political beliefs."

Measured against José Padilla, a man driven insane on Rumsfeld's orders, I guess al-Arian is lucky. He's alive, and still sane, though getting weaker by the day. He needs all the support we can muster. Across the globe, where al-Arian's case has aroused much outrage, respect for the US commitment to Constitutional freedoms sinks lower still.

For information on the case, go to www.freesamialarian.com.

Nation Letter: Philip Green on impeachement: The Bush Team is highly competent

Letter to The Nation Magazine
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070319/letter
Issue of March 19, 2007; distributed March 2, 2007

IMPEACH, IMPEACH, IMPEACH

Our February 12 Impeachment articles, Elizabeth Holtzman's "The Case in Favor" and Sanford Levinson's "The Case Against," surged our mail. It ran overwhelmingly in favor of Holtzman's case for the impeachment of the President and overwhelmingly against Levinson's case for dropping the idea. --The Editors

Philip Green writes:

To argue as my friend Sanford Levinson did that the Administration is only "grossly incompetent"--and that the President therefore should not be impeached, having not committed "high crimes"--is to completely miss the point. It's a highly competent Administration, one of the most competent ever, the way a sociopath--say, Ted Bundy--is competent.

As for high crimes: Under the leadership of George W. Bush, tyranny is now institutionalized in the form of the unitary executive and, especially, the anticonstitutional extension, as though by an absolute monarch, of the constitutionally allocated role of "commander in chief." This is probably the most breathtaking assault on democratic government ever to take place in a supposedly stable democracy. The President's ultimate command (rarely exercised by past Presidents) over the armed forces has been turned into a claim to exercise dictatorial command over all persons, not only in the United States but in other nations as well. As for the legislature, its role in the separation of powers has been effectively abolished, no matter who controls it; it remains to be seen whether any part of that role can be recaptured.

As things stand, the President still ignores it and suffers no penalty for doing so. He does whatever he wants--e.g., setting out to destroy New York State's public hospitals. The things he can't do--e.g., invent and implement an overall "healthcare" policy all by himself--are things he doesn't want to do anyhow, since he and his accomplices are against all government other than that which further enriches or empowers themselves. So all the agitated discussion on the left about what the Democrats ought to be doing is about nothing. Can anyone seriously believe that Bush will give up his warmaking powers if Congress denies him funding?

And what have the leaders of the one-party state accomplished? They've stolen countless billions from the national economy (and Iraq's as well), and transferred it to themselves and their friends; they've installed a regime of spies and torturers at the heart of the state; they've suborned the military to surrender its professional responsibilities to an ex-deserter turned tyrant. Abroad they engage in willful slaughter, including that of the nation's young, to enhance their own control. They've carefully presided over the continued destruction of a center of African-American population exactly as they want to; taken over the National Labor Relations Board for their antiunion agenda; cemented their party's coalition with Christian totalitarians at the expense of science, healthcare and democracy itself; packed the court system and ignored its remnants of independence when it would interfere with their power; stolen one and possibly two presidential elections.

This is incompetence? What could they possibly have done with more success? Quite possibly the idea of impeachment is chimerical. But please!

PHILIP GREEN
New York City

Letter re Ed Koch's Dual Loyalty

2.28.07
To the New York Press:

Once again, Ed Koch displays his unabashed dual loyalty. Dual loyalty is actually a misnomer: the name suggests equal loyalty to two countries, one’s own and a foreign country. But Koch’s loyalty to Israel is much stronger than it is to the US if his latest column arguing for the hardest possible line against Iran is a fair indicator. ("Iran at War With US," 2.28.07)

Does Ed Koch think that a war against Iran would be in the US interest? Most people understand that widening the already catastrophic Iraq war would be terrible for the US even if it only imperiled already tight and expensive world oil supplies. By supporting President Bush’s reckless, pitiless militarism, Koch shows that fealty to Israel’s goal of destroying another Muslim country is more important than the effects on his fellow Americans.

Sincerely,
Ronald Bleier

Mitchel Cohen: Gore and Clinton's inconvenient truths

Here's one of the many choice paragraphs from the article below:

During the Clinton presidency:

"Thousands of acres of healthy forestland across the West were rampaged. Washington's Colville National Forest saw the clear cutting of over 4,000 acres. Thousands more in Montana's Yak River Basin, hundreds of acres of pristine forest land in Idaho, while the endangered Mexican Spotted Owl habitat in Arizona fell victim to corporate interests. Old growth trees in Washington's majestic Olympic Peninsula -- home to wild Steelhead, endangered Sockeye salmon, and threatened Marbled Murrieta -- were chopped with unremitting provocation by the US Forest Service."

Is there anyone reading this who thinks a Hillary Clinton presidency would be any better?

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

February 2, 2007

Some Inconvenient Truths About the Politics of Environmental Crisis
Listen Gore
http://www.counterpunch.org/cohen02022007.html
By MITCHEL COHEN

Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," raises the issue of global warming in a way that scares the bejeezus out of viewers, as it should since the consequences of global climate change are truly earth-shaking. The former Vice-President does a good job of presenting the graphic evidence, exquisite and terrifying pictures that document the melting of the polar ice caps and the effects on other species, new diseases, and rising ocean levels.

But, typically, the solutions Gore offers are standard Democratic Party fare. You'd never know by watching this film that Gore and Clinton ran this country for 8 years and that their policies -- as much as those of the Bush regime -- helped pave the way for the crisis we face today.

Gore never critiques the system causing the global ecological crisis. At one point, he even mourns the negative impact of global warming on U.S. oil pipelines. Oh, the horror! What it all comes down to, for Gore and the Democrats, is that we need to shift away from reliance on fossil fuels and tweak existing consumption patterns.

Even there, Gore and Clinton did nothing to improve fuel efficiency in the U.S. -- a topic which Gore talks about in the movie without any hint that he'd once actually been in a position to do something about it. The question Gore poses is, Who can best manage the relatively minor solutions he recommends, the Democrats or Republicans? For Gore, it's sort of "trust US, not THEM, to deal with this situation because they are liars and we're not." Well, should we trust him?

As Joshua Frank writes, during the campaign for president in 1992 Gore promised a group of supporters that the Clinton-Gore EPA would never approve a hazardous waste incinerator located near an elementary school in Liverpool, Ohio, which was operated by WTI. "Only three months into Clinton's tenure," Frank writes, "the EPA issued an operating permit for the toxic burner. Gore raised no qualms. Not surprisingly, most of the money behind WTI came from the bulging pockets of Jackson Stephens, who just happened to be one of the Clinton-Gore's top campaign contributors."(1)

But failing to shut down toxic incinerators is just the tip of their great betrayal. In the film, Gore references the Kyoto Accords and states that he personally went to Kyoto during the negotiations, giving the impression that he was a key figure in fighting to reduce air pollution emissions that destroy the ozone layer. What he omits is that his mission in going to Kyoto was to scuttle the Accords, to block them from moving forward. And he succeeded.

The Clinton-Gore years were anything but environment-friendly. Under Clinton-Gore, more old growth forests were cut down than under any other recent U.S. administration. "Wise Use" committees -- set up by the lumber industry -- were permitted to clearcut whole mountain ranges, while Clinton-Gore helped to "greenwash" their activities for public consumption.

Under Clinton-Gore, the biotech industry was given carte blanche to write the US government's regulations (paltry as they are) on genetic engineering of agriculture, and to move full speed ahead with implementing the private patenting of genetic sequences with nary a qualm passing Gore's lips.

You'd think watching this film that Gore is just some concerned professor who never had access to power or held hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Occidental Petroleum (driving the U'wa off their lands in Colombia), let alone was the Number Two man actually running the U.S. government!

"Gore, like Clinton who quipped that 'the invisible hand has a green thumb,' extolled a free-market attitude toward environmental issues," writes Frank, who goes on to quote Jeffrey St. Clair: "Since the mid-1980s Gore has argued with increasing stridency that the bracing forces of market capitalism are potent curatives for the ecological entropy now bearing down on the global environment. He is a passionate disciple of the gospel of efficiency, suffused with an inchoate technophilia."(2)

Before Kyoto, before the Clinton-Gore massive depleted uranium bombings of Yugoslavia and Iraq, before their missile "deconstruction" of the only existing pharmaceutical production facility in northern Africa in the Sudan (which exacerbated the very serious problems there, as we're seeing in Darfur today), there was NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. The task of Clinton-Gore was to push through this legislation which not even strong Republican administrations under Reagan or Bush Sr. had been able to do. Since its inception, NAFTA has undermined U.S. environmental laws, chased production facilities out of the U.S. and across the borders, vastly increased pollution from Maquilladoras (enterprise zones) along the U.S./Mexico border and helped to undermine the indigenous sustainable agrarian-based communities in southern Mexico -- as predicted by leftists in both countries, leading to the Zapatista uprising from those communities on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA went into effect.

Clinton-Gore also approved the destructive deal with the sugar barons of South Florida arranged by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, which doomed the Everglades. (In fact, Clinton was on the phone with Alfonso Fanjul, Jr., the chief of the sugar barons, while Monica Lewinsky was busy doing her thing in her famous blue dress under Clinton's desk.)

Early in Clinton-Gore's first administration, they pledged they would stop the plunder of the Northwest forests, writes former Village Voice columnist James Ridgeway. "They then double-crossed their environmental backers. Under Bush Sr., the courts had enjoined logging in the Northwest habitats of the spotted owl. Clinton-Gore persuaded environmentalists to join them in axing the injunction. The Clinton administration went before a Reagan-appointed judge who had a record as a stalwart environmentalist and with the eco toadies in tow, got him to remove the injunction, and with it the moratorium on existing timber sales."(3) Then Gore and Clinton "capitulated to the demands of Western Democrats and yanked from its initial budget proposals a call to reform grazing, mining, and timber practices on federal lands. When Clinton convened a timber summit in Portland, Oregon, in April 1994, the conference was, as one might expect, dominated by logging interests. Predictably, the summit gave way to a plan to restart clear-cutting in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest for the first time in three years, giving the timber industry its get rich wish."(4)

Gore and Clinton sent to Congress the infamous Salvage Rider, known to radical environmentalists as the "Logging without Laws" bill, "perhaps the most gruesome legislation ever enacted under the pretext of preserving ecosystem health." Like Bush's "Healthy Forests" plan, the Clinton-Gore act "was chock full of deception and special interest pandering. 'When [the Salvage Rider] bill was given to me, I was told that the timber industry was circulating this language among the Northwest Congressional delegation and others to try to get it attached as a rider to the fiscal year Interior Spending Bill,' environmental lawyer Kevin Kirchner says. 'There is no question that representatives of the timber industry had a role in promoting this rider. That is no secret.'"(5) What the Salvage Rider did was to "temporarily exempt ... salvage timber sales on federal forest lands from environmental and wildlife laws, administrative appeals, and judicial review," according to the Wilderness Society -- long enough for multinational lumber and paper corporations to clear-cut all but a sliver of the U.S.'s remaining old growth forests.

"Thousands of acres of healthy forestland across the West were rampaged. Washington's Colville National Forest saw the clear cutting of over 4,000 acres. Thousands more in Montana's Yak River Basin, hundreds of acres of pristine forest land in Idaho, while the endangered Mexican Spotted Owl habitat in Arizona fell victim to corporate interests. Old growth trees in Washington's majestic Olympic Peninsula -- home to wild Steelhead, endangered Sockeye salmon, and threatened Marbled Murrieta -- were chopped with unremitting provocation by the US Forest Service."(6)

The assault on nature continued with Gore's blessing.

Around the same time, Clinton-Gore appointee Carol Browner, head of the EPA, was quoted in the NY Times as having said that the administration would be "relaxing" the Delaney Clause (named after its author, Congressman James Delaney, D-NY). Congress had inserted this clause into section 409 of the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1958. It prohibited FDA approval of any food additive found to cause cancer in humans or animals. Alone among all food-related directives, this legislation put the onus on the manufacturers to demonstrate that their products were safe before they were allowed to become commercially available. (7) A federal appeals court in July 1992 expanded the jurisdiction of the Delaney Clause, ruling that it was applicable to cancer-causing pesticides in processed food. Browner retracted her comment, claiming she'd never said it, but the proof was in the pudding. The ban on cancer-causing additives (the "Precautionary Principle") that had held through the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush, Sr. administrations was finally removed, not by the Republicans but by the Clinton-Gore administration. Instead of expanding the Delaney clause to protect produce and other unprocessed foods, the new Food Quality Protection Act legislation permitted "safe" amounts of carcinogenic chemicals (as designated by the Environmental Protection Agency) to be added to all food. (According to Peter Montague, editor of Rachel's Weekly, "no one knows how 'safe amounts' of carcinogens can be established, especially when several carcinogens and other poisons are added simultaneously to the food of tens of millions of people.) Nevertheless, the Clinton-Gore administration spun this as "progress."

The Clinton administration, with guidance from Gore's office, also cut numerous deals over the pesticide Methyl Bromide despite its reported effects of contributing to Ozone depletion and its devastating health consequences on farm workers picking strawberries.

Much is being made these days about the need to save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. But Clinton-Gore opened the National Petroleum Reserve " 24 million untouched acres adjacent to the refuge, home to a large caribou herd and numerous arctic species " to oil drilling. The chief beneficiaary of this was Arco, a major ($1.4 million) contributor to the Democratic Party. At the same time, writes James Ridgeway, "Clinton dropped the ban on selling Alaskan oil abroad. This also benefits Arco, which is opening refineries in China. So although the oil companies won the right to exploit Alaskan oil on grounds that to do so would benefit national development, Clinton-Gore unilaterally changed the agreement so that it benefits China's industrial growth."(8)

Not once in the entire film does Gore criticize this awful environmental record or raise the critical questions we need to answer if we are to effectively reverse global warming: Is it really the case that the vast destruction of our environment that went on under his watch and, continuing today, is simply a result of poor consumer choices and ineffective government policies? Is the global environmental devastation we are facing today rectifiable with some simple tuning-up, as Gore proposes?

Neither he -- as point man for the Clinton administration on environmental issues -- nor Clinton-Gore's Energy Secretary Bill Richardson (with major ties to Occidental Petroleum), nor the Democratic Party in general offer anything more than putting a tiny Band-Aid on the earth's gaping wounds, which they themselves helped to gash open.

Clearly, the vast destruction of the global ecology is a consequence not just of poor governmental policies but of the capitalist system's fundamental drive towards Growth and what passes for Development -- Grow or Die. Environmental activists won't find in Gore the kind of systemic analysis that is needed to stop global warming. Instead, we need to look elsewhere for that sort of deep systemic critique.

Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "G", the newspaper of the NY State Greens. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com



NOTES

1. Joshua Frank, Counterpunch, May 31, 2006, Frank is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush, and edits www.BrickBurner.org

2. Jeffrey St. Clair, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: The Politics of Nature, Common Courage Press, 2004.

3. James Ridgeway, "Eco Spaniel Kennedy: Nipping at Nader's Heels," Village Voice, Aug. 16-22, 2000.

4,5,6 Joshua Frank.

7. The battle over the Delaney Clause has been ably documented by Rachel's Weekly, at www.rachel.org

8. Ridgeway, op cit.

*Gary Leupp: AIPAC Demands "Action" on Iran

Not much to add to this brilliant article which explains why there is little effective congressional opposition to Bush-Cheney's threatened Iran attack which could come as early as this spring. I'll make further comments below. First read Gary Leupp. --RB

February 24 / 25, 2007

"An American Strike on Iran is Essential for Our Existence"
AIPAC Demands "Action" on Iran
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp02242007.html
By GARY LEUPP

Former CIA counterterrorism specialist Philip Giraldi, comparing the propaganda campaign against Iran to that which preceded the war on Iraq, has recently declared, "It is absolutely parallel. They're using the same dance steps-demonize the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux." He's only one of many in his field (including Vincent Cannistraro, Ray McGovern, and Larry C. Johnson) doing their best to expose the Bush-Cheney neocon disinformation campaign according to which Iran is planning to produce nukes in order to commit genocide, while abetting terrorists in Iraq who are killing American troops.

Their efforts, and those of many others, are producing results. The mainstream corporate press is far more skeptical about administration claims pertaining to Iran than they ever were towards the equally specious claims made about Iraq on the eve of the 2003 invasion. The American people are now inclined to distrust claims made by nameless officials about Quds Force-provisioned IEDs and EFPs, etc., supposedly smuggled by "meddling" Iranians into Iraq. Unfortunately the Congress dominated by Democrats elected in a popular expression of antiwar sentiment has not taken a firm stance against an attack on Iran based on lies. Maybe given the nature of the power structure it simply can't.

Giraldi matter-of-factly sums up the unfortunate politics of situation.

"The recent formation of the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus should. . . .be noted as well as AIPAC's highlighting of the threat from Iran at its 2006 convention in Washington, an event that featured Vice President Dick Cheney as keynote speaker. More recently, Senator Hillary Clinton addressed an AIPAC gathering in New York City. Neither was shy about threatening Iran. AIPAC's formulation that the option of force 'must remain on the table' when dealing with Iran has been repeated like a mantra by numerous politicians and government officials, not too surprisingly as AIPAC writes the briefings and position papers that many Congressmen unfortunately rely on."

In other words, the American Israel Political Action Committee is the main political force urging---indeed, demanding---U.S. action. That's the AIPAC already under scrutiny for receiving classified information about Iran from Lawrence Franklin, former Defense Department subordinate of Douglas Feith. (That's the neocon Feith who supervised the Office of Special Plans---headed by Abram Shulsky, the neocon specialist on Leo Strauss who currently heads up the Iran Directorate at the Pentagon---that shamelessly cherry-picked intelligence to support the Iraq attack. That's the Franklin who worked in the OSP, and was sentenced last month to 13 years in prison. Feith has not been indicted on any charge and continues to insist in defiance of reason and even a Pentagon internal investigation finding it "inappropriate" that his office's disinformation project was "good government." Small wonder Gen. Tommy Franks, formerly head of the U.S. Central Command, famously called Feith "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." Congressional investigations are just now getting underway into Feith's role in facilitating the invasion of Iraq.)

That's the AIPAC embarrassed by the indictment of its policy director Steven Rosen and senior Iran analyst Keith Weissman for illegally conspiring to pass on classified national security information to Israel. Despite the already intimate ties between Israeli and U.S. intelligence (documented by Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski among others) it seems the Israelis felt obliged to spy on the Pentagon to learn just how inclined the Americans were to oblige them by attacking Iran.

Now, as Israeli calls for a U.S. attack on Iran become more shrill by the day, AIPAC recognizes that the American people profoundly distrust Vice President Cheney and the nest of neocon liars he has sheltered. The Bush-Cheney war machine has been pretty well exposed, and that must worry the warmongers within the group. Israeli Defense Force chief artillery officer Gen. Oded Tira has griped that "President Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran," adding that since "an American strike in Iran is essential for [Israel's] existence, we must help him pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party (which is conducting itself foolishly) and US newspaper editors. We need to do this in order to turn the Iran issue to a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure." Tira urges the Lobby to turn to "potential presidential candidates. . . so that they support immediate action by Bush against Iran," while Uri Lubrani, senior advisor to Defense Minister Amir Peretz, tells the Jewish Agency's Board of Governors that the US "does not understand the threat and has not done enough," and therefore "must be shaken awake."

Many Americans would find such statements deeply offensive in their arrogance and condescension. President Bush has indeed been weakened by the "Iraq failure" Tira acknowledges, arising from a war that the Lobby once endorsed with enormous enthusiasm. (As Gen. Wesley Clark put it way back in August 2002, "Those who favor this attack now will tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel." Recall that that weapon was imaginary.) So now, the Israeli war advocates aver, the U.S. president needs to be helped to do the right thing and attack Iran by lobbyists who will use their power to force the fools in the Democratic Party, especially presidential candidates. Because Americans don't understand and have to be shaken out of their current skeptical mode.

By who? By AIPAC, of course! The confidence expressed by these gentlemen (in the second most powerful political action committee in the country) is quite extraordinary. But alas, maybe it's warranted. Giraldi dispassionately concludes:

"Knowing that to cross the Lobby is perilous, Congressmen from both parties squirm and become uneasy when pressured by AIPAC to 'protect Israel,' even if it means yet another unwinnable war for the United States. The neocons know full well that if a war with Iran were to be started either inadvertently or by design, few within America's political system would be brave enough to stand up in opposition."

One should ask these spineless politicians how they suppose the people will remember their votes and positions within weeks of the "immediate action" Tira and his allies in the Bush administration (most notably Condi Rice's deputy Elliott Abrams, the most powerful neocon remaining in the team) are demanding. Will they not be blamed for the total collapse of cooperation between the U.S. occupation and Iraq's Shiite majority, the fall of the current client regime dominated by Iranian allies, the intensification of Shiite militia attacks on U.S. forces, the broadening of the current two-front war to enflame all of Southwest Asia?

One should ask those squirming manipulators blissfully ignorant of the Islamic world---clueless about the difference between Arabs and Persians or Sunnis and Shiites, coached almost entirely by State Department Zionists who don't bother to conceal their Islamophobia---to recognize that American Jewry is not generally pro-neocon nor united in support of an Iran attack. Indeed many American Jews are alarmed at Israeli/AIPAC efforts to push the U.S. into another crusader war on a Muslim nation. (A lot of them are in New York. Hillary might consult with them rather than suppose that her ticket to the presidency is the support of the Cheney-friendly Lobby. But I wouldn't hold my breath on that.)

One should ask the Lobbyists as well as the government of Israel that they think they serve (as well as the people of Israel, honestly divided in their opinions) how the security of the Jewish State will be abetted by a generalized war between Israel's great patron and the entire Muslim world.

When one plays this Islamophobic game of exploiting ignorance, fear, hatred and bigotry; when one conflates al-Qaeda with Iraq with Hamas with Hizbollah with Iran knowing that most Americans know little about the details and will be inclined to side (for now) with Israel against Muslims in general; when one lies (as the neocons do with such arrogance, supposing they will escape any consequences of the lies down the road)---then one invites a backlash. We live in a racist culture that easily slides into religious bigotry. Why use that culture (not so dissimilar to the German culture of the 1930s) so shamelessly---against Arabs and other Muslim peoples of the Middle East? One's disinformation with its murderous results in the Muslim world might just produce the ignorant conclusion that could sweep Middle America down the road: "The Jews made us do it." That's what the red-necks including a whole lot of today's brain-dead Christian Zionist fundamentalists will say as soon as everything goes wrong in the Middle East, Jesus doesn't come back and is nowhere in sight, and the three U.S. troops killed per day becomes six or ten for no good goddamned reason.

"They have the money, they control the media and the politicians. They made us attack Iran and now look what's happening." That's what the ignorant who can one day cry "Nuke 'em all!" referring to Muslims, and the next day swear "Fucking Christ-killers" will say. Is the Lobby's paranoia about Iran's uranium enrichment so severe as to risk that kind of assessment, that kind of blowback bigotry?

We are perhaps arriving at a critical point in the history of the powerful Lobby, including its capacity to intimidate honest, critically reasoning people who do not embrace its fears, prejudices and preoccupations. It's under unprecedented scrutiny following the carefully argued paper by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" and Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid both published last year, to which it's reacted with its wonted technique of character assassination. The political power of the Lobby would appear to be reaching its zenith; and while it used its hand subtly in the build-up for war on Iraq, it now uses it in crude, bullying fashion. Israeli officials weren't publicly calling for the simple-minded Christian-Zionist Bush to "smite" Iraq to defend Israel in 2003, but now they're nervously demanding that Bush destroy Iran's nuclear facilities to prevent a "genocide" worse that that accomplished by Hitler! Their boldness betrays a confidence that they can indeed continue to shape American political discourse about the Middle East (to the exclusion of any audible Arab or Muslim voice) and that to challenge them is indeed "perilous."

"Attack Iran! NOW! Or support GENOCIDE! and side with the new HITLER! Destroy Iran's nuclear facilities! NOW! Or reveal your thinly-disguised ANTI-SEMITISM!"

That's the hyper-message calculated to stimulate an assault, to which the calm counterterrorism analyst Giraldi draws our attention. One could respond to the message with a polite, firm, principled refusal:

No thanks this time, AIPAC. You're just not credible. Can't do it for you. My constituents aren't into more war, and they think this whole Iran thing's a lot of hype. I can't support nuking Iran, and frankly, I don't see how you can either. I don't think you speak for all or even most American Jews, and you can't scare me this time by accusations of anti-Semitism. I can't have an attack on Iran my conscience, sorry. I'd rather be defeated in the next election. Keep your money; I just can't do what you ask.

Will the Congress targeted by the Lobby be able to say that? If it doesn't, all the belated, posturing moves to limit Bush's power, withdraw troops and end the imperialist war in Iraq will mean nothing. An attack on Iran will unleash the gates of hell. The attackers will argue that a new situation makes all prewar debate irrelevant (or even if encouraging doubt about the "existential" cause, downright treasonous). The fascistic proclivities of the administration will blossom immediately. The legal basis has been laid for the repression of the dissent an Iran attack will naturally inspire. Prison camps, suspension of habeas corpus. The proponents of the war are comfortable with these things, and the waters have already been tested.

O nation miserable,
With an untitled tyrant bloody-scepter'd,
When shalt thou see thy wholesome days again?

Can the American people allow this unelected unpopular administration, headed by a manifestly stupid sadistic fool, to continue to provoke international contempt and fear, while planning more carnage?

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

***

Great article. Leupp unfortunately weakens it at the end by calling Bush stupid. Bush is sadistic, ignorant, inarticulate, vicious, ruthless -- yes, but not stupid. He knows exactly what he's doing. He's pursuing his agenda of permanent war which entails permanent destruction. Without an attack on Iran, the Iraq war would inevitably wind down since it's exposed as the destructive force that it is -- for Iraqis, for the US, for the Middle East, for everyone. The only way Bush-Cheney can continue the Iraq war is to widen it.

Along the same lines, I wonder why people say that Cheney is in denial when he says that the US has done wonderful things in Iraq. It's not as if Cheney is stupid or doesn't know what's going on. By such statements, Cheney is exposing his hold on US policy. If he says that we're doing well in Iraq, than that's the only reality that he will permit -- for all practical and Congressional purposes. And Leupp's article shows in part how and why Cheney and Bush can get away with it: because they have behind them the power of the Israel lobby, since 2001, exposed as the most destructive element in US politics. Without their help the Bush-Cheney agenda of endless war, could not have succeeded.

Ronald

http://desip.igc.org