| Author | Message | | Alpha | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat May 14, 2005 10:10 am Post subject: |
| The following is very interesting because the 'A Clean Break' document advised Israel to do what is mentioned by Netanyahu in the following article:
http://www.jewishsightseeing.com/usa/wash_dc/capitol_building/19990514-capitol_filner.htm
Jewish networking in the U.S. Congress
Rep. Bob Filner (D-San Diego) describes process
San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, May 14, 1999:
Jewish officeholders file
By Donald H. Harrison
Washington D.C. (Special) -- Over lunch in the House Members Dining Room, Rep. Bob Filner (D-San Diego) recently addressed our questions about the kind of networking that occurs among his 22 fellow Jewish members of the House of Representatives.
Meetings are regularly arranged between Jewish members of Congress and visiting members of the Israeli government, he replied.
There also is a monthly Torah study class that Rabbi Jay Marcus of New York City conducts for House members. "We usually have a bagel bruncheon," Filner said. "I go a majority of the time. He picks out a section of the Torah that has relevance to some current event. He might talk about women in the Torah, or the use of violence, or some other abstraction, and of course everyone brings it back to today and what is happening.
Rep. Bob Filner, under painting of Cornwallis'
surrender to Washington, in House Members
Dining Room
"He leads the discussion, which sometimes can be very difficult because Congress members are notorious for never staying at a meeting. They go in and out; they always go rushing around, and he tries to do his thing -- and when he finishes there are maybe 3 to 8 people there but they are not the same 3 to 8 people he started with. It is very difficult to teach under such circumstances."
While African-Americans have a formal Black Caucus, Jews in the Congress historically have not wanted to formalize their relationships."Perhaps it goes back to our history, not drawing atention," Filner said. Nervetheless, through informal meetings Jewish members often function as a caucus, he said.
"We watch each other--how each votes on things," Filner explained. "If there seems to be something strange, we will ask each other 'why are you voting this way? Before I vote I had better understand why you are doing this.'"
He said two Democratic congressmen from the Los Angeles area -- Henry Waxman and Howard Berman -- are always well informed on Jewish communal issues. On matters affecting the Holocaust, Congressman Tom Lantos from Northern California--a Hungarian-born Survivor--is considered a leader.
The congressman led us from lunch to the floor of the House of Representatives which, not being in session, was open for private tours given by members of Congress.
We were surprised how compact the chamber really is. The aisle through the center of the House which the President of the United States walks en route to delivering each year's State of the Union message looks so much longer when viewed on television. And the rostrum from which he speaks, including the dais behind him where the Speaker of the House and the Vice President of the United States sit, looks so much bigger on television.
There are no assigned seats, Filner said, although by tradition Democrats and Republicans sit on separate sides of the chamber. From his wallet, he pulled an electronic identification card and showed how it fits into any of several machines strategically located around the room.
While the voting machine reads the card, members of Congress can vote by pressing nearby buttons for "yes," "no" and "abstain." Each member of Congress's vote is shown during the voting period on a large electronic board on either side of the Speaker's rostrum.
As we returned from the floor of the House to the Rayburn House Office Building, we were joined on the short private subway ride -- as luck would have it -- by another Jewish Congressman, Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich.
Levin suggested that most Jewish members of Congress are well informed both on the Middle East as well as on domestic Church-State issues not only because of networking in Washington, but because "the Jewish communities are active at home, so a majority of the members are contacted there."
Asked about the impact of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has been considered the second-most influential lobby in Congress behind the American Association of Retired People (AARP), according to various rating services, Levin replied:
"AIPAC has always reflected more rather than less the views of the Israeli government" regardless of which party was in power in Israel. "There have been a lot of Jewish members (of Congress) who have not always agreed with the incumbent prime minister of Israel," he added. "We are not monolithic, and we haven't been bashful about raising our concerns."
Whereas support for Israel is strong among Jewish members of Congress, it no longer is so nearly unanimous as it was prior to the Republicans taking over Congress, Filner said.
"Five or six years ago, every Jew--almost by definition--would vote for the foreign aid bill, because it had foreign aid for Israel and you couldn't possibly want to undermine that. Well, now if there is something in the foreign aid bill that is a problem on some other issue, people may--to make a point-vote against it. If they throw in something like anti-family planning -- this is since the Republicans have been in the majority -- then all of a sudden the bill is not so clear cut."
Filner said like most Jewish members of Congress, he often is invited to make an appearance before Jewish groups holding their national meetings in Washington.
"I just happened to follow (former House Speaker Newt) Gingrich one time, and I gave the standing speech that I give now. The Republicans come to all these groups, they see Jewish, and they talk about Israel, Israel, Israel. So I get up there--to a Federation or JCRC or UJA group-- and say 'hey, ask these folks where they stand on prayer in the schools, or on public education or on choice issues. They come here and they want your support because they are for Israel. Well, Israel is very important. It is a key issue. But so are these other issues. Don't let them get away with it.'
"Invariably," Filner said, "people will come up to me and say 'I am glad you said that. We have been here all day and no one else has.'"
Filner said he was disappointed the time when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a joint session of Congress that the time has come when Israel, with its strong economy, should begin reducing its dependence on foreign aid.
"I was watching the Republicans," Filner recalled. "He just saved their rear ends because their budget already required us to decrease. Politically I would have said let them put forward a budget that decreases the aid, and then we can get them on that. Don't start your negotiations saying we accept a decrease in aid. I saw politically how they just lit up -- that saved them so much. They could say 'well, the prime minister himself said we had to start.' So we ended up cutting aid to a certain degree and not getting any political price paid for it." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 11:17 am Post subject: 'Pretext for War' |
| http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040801/news_lz1v1pretext.html
'Pretext for War'
... finds a slew of flaws and abuses
Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani
August 1, 2004
In the walk-up and wake of the Iraq war, it's no secret that one of the most bitter battles in Washington has been between the CIA and the State Department on one side, and neoconservative hawks in the Pentagon and White House on the other.
Intelligence and State Department officials have characterized the neocons as hawkish ideologues who entered office before 9/11 with an agenda to depose Saddam Hussein. They have accused the hard-liners of cherry-picking and hyping intelligence in order to sell the war against Iraq.
The hawks have characterized the CIA as a bunch of risk-averse, bean-counting bureaucrats, hobbled by what Richard Perle has called "ideologically liberal assumptions." They have accused the agency of continuing intelligence failures, from the overthrow of the shah's government in Iran in 1979 to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
As James Bamford, the author of two respected books on American intelligence, tells it, there is plenty of blame to go around. His new book, "A Pretext for War," draws a damning portrait of the country's intelligence agencies as woefully ill-equipped to deal with the threats of terrorism and a post-Cold War world. It also draws a scathing picture of ideologues in the Bush administration, manipulating dubious evidence about links between al-Qaeda and Saddam and flawed information about weapons of mass destruction in the push toward war.
In addition, Bamford suggests that the CIA caved to pressure from administration hard-liners. He quotes a CIA case officer who says that in January 2003, one of the agency's higher-ups called a meeting and said, "You know what if Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so." And he writes that the CIA chief George Tenet said of the provocative intelligence about Iraq that Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the United Nations in February 2003: "I'm standing behind it 100 percent," even though much of that intelligence later turned out to be flawed, and Tenet stated this year that his agency "never said there was an 'imminent' threat" from Saddam.
Much of the information and many of the theories in Bamford's book will be familiar to readers from earlier magazine and newspaper articles, and other books: most notably, Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" and "Plan of Attack"; "Ghost Wars," Steve Coll's exhaustive history of the CIA, Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan; the former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke's best-selling expose of the war on terror, "Against All Enemies"; and "Inside 9-11," a detailed chronicle of the terrorist attacks of 2001 by Der Spiegel journalists.
But Bamford unearths new details about everything from the identity of one of the undisclosed locations used by Vice President Dick Cheney after 9/11 (Site R, a secret military command post on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border) to the failures of a special CIA unit charged with tracking bin Laden, and he connects the many dots, both old and new, to create a vivid, unsettling narrative.
Discursive in organization, "A Pretext for War" provides selective context for the failure to prevent the attacks of 9/11 and the Bush administration's path to war. Bamford is highly persuasive in recounting the many ways in which American intelligence agencies failed to adapt to the end of the Cold War: They lacked specialists in many key Middle Eastern languages and a sufficient number of analysts to grapple with an avalanche of cyber-age data, and even though Americans like John Walker Lindh had been secretly joining al-Qaeda, operatives appear to have made little effort to penetrate terrorist organizations, preferring the decorous, low-risk tack of trying to recruit foreign embassy officials at cocktail parties.
Bamford does not address the broader question of how Cold War paradigms shaped the thinking of key Bush administration members such as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Cheney. And unlike James Mann in "Rise of the Vulcans," he does not delve into many of the larger factors shaping the hawks' thinking from their experiences in dealing with the Soviet Union to their appropriation of the Wilsonian idea of exporting democracy.
What he does focus on is the role that Israel has played in shaping American policy. Bamford contends that "the blueprint for the new Bush policy" on the Middle East "had actually been drawn up five years earlier by three of his top national security advisers" (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) for the Israeli prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu (who rejected the plan), and that when they entered office in January 2001, all these hawks needed was "a pretext" for war against Iraq. Citing a report from the British newspaper The Guardian, Bamford adds that the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit set up by Feith, "forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon's office in Israel," which "was designed to go around the country's own intelligence organization, Mossad."
In recounting the failures of intelligence before 9/11, Bamford points to missed clues about the hijackers and the poisonous rivalry (not to mention fatal lack of communication) between the CIA and FBI. He also writes that a special unit of the CIA named Alec Station, which was set up in 1996 "with the sole mission of collecting intelligence" on bin Laden and "disrupting his network," had an abysmal record. He notes that "after four years and hundreds of millions of dollars," it failed "to recruit a single source within bin Laden's growing Afghanistan operation." He adds: "It was George Tenet's biggest secret. Not only was al-Qaeda never penetrated, neither the Counterterrorism Center nor Alec Station ever picked up a single piece of usable intelligence on bin Laden or his organization, the country's greatest threat."
Bamford is equally scorching on the subject of an alternative intelligence gathering operation (called the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group) set up at the Pentagon by Feith and Wurmser, arguing that it "was little more than a pro-war propaganda cell" designed "to produce evidence to support the pretexts for attacking Iraq."
He also denounces the Pentagon's heavy reliance on intelligence acquired through Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress and a longtime friend of many prominent administration hawks. Though much of the information from Chalabi's sources about weapons of mass destruction later turned out to be incorrect or fabricated, Bamford writes, it was funneled to the White House and to the press most notably, The New York Times to help sell the "war to the American public."
Both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush are taken to task in these pages as well. In describing the country's vulnerability in the face of terrorism, Bamford repeatedly notes that budget cutbacks during the Clinton administration weakened the country's intelligence agencies, and he writes that the now famous Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." seemed "to have made little impression" on Bush.
He observes that when Tenet, the head of the CIA during both administrations, declared war on terrorism in the wake of the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa it was so low-key that senior officials at the Pentagon and the FBI had not heard of it. And he points out that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who actually controls a large portion of America's spy world, was "far more concerned with downsizing the Pentagon than reorganizing and reinvigorating the intelligence community" when he entered office.
In the end Bamford's conclusions are alarming, if not unfamiliar ones: that incompetence, timidity and a lack of readiness contributed to the failure to prevent the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and that misinformation, ideological agendas and poor intelligence led to the decision to go to war against Iraq.
©New York Times News Service
A Pretext for War
9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
James Bamford
Doubleday, 420 pages, $26.95 | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2006 8:29 am Post subject: |
| Cheney and Netanyahu Pushing : For War Against Syria
by Jeffrey Steinberg
This article appears in the January 20, 2006 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
An ever-more-desperate Dick Cheney is pulling out all the stops to install "Clean Break" hawk Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu as the next Israeli Prime Minister, to push for an immediate confrontation between Israel and Syria. Israeli sources report that Cheney, as of Jan. 11, had an emissary in Israel, exploring the means to put "Bibi" and the Likud back in power, despite collapsing Israeli popular support for the extreme rightwing policies of the neo-con faction that Netanyahu represents.
Part of Cheney's growing desperation stems from the fact that the recent plea agreement between U.S. Justice Department prosecutors and super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, threatens to bring down the entire political dirty-money empire of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), which has been Cheney's principal power base since coming in as Vice President and de facto head-of-state in January 2001. Cheney and DeLay were shown by a recent EIR exclusive story to be politically "joined at the hip" (see EIR, Dec. 30, 2005). The Vice President is so deeply implicated in the DeLay/Abramoff dirty-money machine that the legal defense funds of DeLay and Cheney's ex-chief of staff Lewis Libby are headed by the same two Republican lobbyists, Wayne Berman and former Congressman Bill Paxon (R-N.Y.).
But Israeli sources report, and Washington insiders confirm, that Netanyahu himself is so closely tied to Jack Abramoff that the fallout from Abramoff's plea may bring him down as well, as the international web of money-laundering fronts, tax-exempt charities, and no-bid contractors put together by Abramoff unravels under U.S. prosecutors' scrutiny.
West Bank Story
The first published clue about the Netanyahu/Abramoff links actually surfaced last year, when Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff revealed on May 2, 2005 that one of Abramoff's tax-exempt charities, Capital Athletic Foundation, had funnelled $140,000 to a West Bank settlement, to finance the purchasing of security equipment, including "camouflage suits, sniper scopes, night-vision binoculars, a thermal imager, and other material."
Funds for the Capital Athletic Foundation, ostensibly an Abramoff family charity dedicated to helping inner-city youth, came largely from Indian tribe clients of Abramoff.
The security gear was provided to the West Bank town of Beitar Illit, which Isikoff described as "a sprawling ultra-Orthodox outpost whose residents have occasionally tangled with their Palestinian neighbors."
Beitar Illit is the home of Schmuel Ben-Zvi, a rightwing American who moved to the West Bank, and who was a close high school pal of Abramoff in Hollywood. The $140,000 was paid to an Israeli group called Kollel Ohel Tiferet, which is not publicly registered in Israel.
While Ben-Zvi denied any links to the $140,000 West Bank payoff, an exchange of emails between him and Abramoff told a different story. On receiving the money, Ben-Zvi wrote to Abramoff: "I feel like the tank commanders in the Yom Kippur war, who when hearing over the radio that reinforcements were coming, felt so great that they raised their seats higher out of the tank hatch and went forward." To which Abramoff wrote back: "If only there were another dozen of you the dirty rats would be finished," referring to the Palestinian neighbors of Beitar Illit.
When questions arose over what Israeli entity to pass the money to, Ben-Zvi proposed to write a letter to the Capital Athletic Foundation, on the letterhead of his Snipers Workshop, which he described as "an educational entity of sorts."
Informed of the West Bank funding, Indian tribal lawyer Henry Buffalo told Newsweek, "This is almost like outer-limits bizarre. The tribe would never have given money for this."
FBI sources told Newsweek's Isikoff that the bulk of the $4 million listed as the Abramoff fund's tax-exempt gifts went to a now-defunct Maryland yeshiva where Abramoff's two sons went to school.
Wiring Congress
Another contributor to the Capital Athletic Foundation was an Israeli telecom startup company, Foxcom, which kicked in $50,000 to the Abramoff fund. Foxcom received a $3-million contract to install wireless antenna systems at the U.S. Congress, in a deal pushed through by Abramoff crony Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Administration Committee. The Washington Post revealed on Oct. 18, 2005 that Foxcom had paid Abramoff $280,000 in lobbying fees around the time they got the Congressional contract. An American company, LGC Wireless, which had lost the bid to Foxcom, went to the FBI and charged that the bidding process had been rigged by Ney.
Newsweek reported on Aug. 22, 2005 that U.S. officials had rushed to indict and arrest Abramoff on Aug. 11, because they feared he would flee to Israel, as two of his business partners had already done.
And still to be unravelled are the Abramoff connections to the Russian oil company Naftasib, which laundered $1 million to another Abramoff "charity," the U.S. Family Network, through a London law firm, James and Sarch, in 1998. Two top Naftasib executives, Marina Nevskaya and Alexander Koulakovsky, spent "quality time" with Tom DeLay in Moscow, shortly before the laundered payoff to Abramoff. The Russian "oil company" lists the Russian Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior as Naftasib's two main clients. Some of the military equipment delivered to the West Bank settlement of Ben-Zvi came from Russia, hinting at Russian Mafiya ties in the background of the Abramoff saga.
Senior Washington sources have cautioned that it would be a mistake to presume that the Abramoff money flow to Israel and Russia primarily went out of the United States. Abramoff's takeover of the gambling cruise ship line SunCruz gave him a perfect instrument for laundering millions of dollars a day through the offshore gambling tables.
Syria War Diversion
The Cheney push to install Netanyahu as Israel's next Prime Minister, replacing the now-incapacitated Ariel Sharon, is, according to Israeli sources, part of Cheney's desperate move to "change the subject" from his growing political problems in Washington.
Netanyahu is pledged, according to the Israeli sources, to a war with Syria, to divert attention, and to move ahead with the decade-old "Clean Break" scheme, drafted for Netanyahu in July 1996 by a group of American neo-con allies of Cheney. The "Clean Break" strategy paper was co-authored by Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Douglas Feith, and others, and called for the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, followed by similar "regime changes" in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. David Wurmser, the single most vociferous advocate of "regime change" in Damascus, is now a senior Middle East policy aide to Cheney. He previously served under Doug Feith at the Pentagon, when Feith was Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the first Bush-Cheney Administration.
Cheney's war scheme against Syria also implicates Abramoff, according to a Jan. 11, 2006 story by Justin Raimondi, posted on antiwar.com. "One investigator, eager to obtain information about the neo-con-sponsored Reform Party of Syria, led by one Farid Ghadry, the Syrian version of Ahmed Chalabi" Raimondi wrote, "stumbled on the Abramoff connection: 'When repeated calls to [Ghadry's] organization went unanswered, I visited the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the RPS. Reform Party of Syria is in the office of super-Zionist lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Middle Gate Ventures, Abramoff's political advisory company, partners with RPS."
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3303cheney_bibi.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'A Clean Break' (war for Israel) agenda (from pages 261-269 of James Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book - scroll down to such at the following URL):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php
James Morris <justicequest2000@yahoo.com> wrote:
Russia & China "serious reservations" about Iran's referral to
Security Council
Iran crisis talks expose west's split with China
Ewen MacAskill and Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
The Guardian Tuesday January 17, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,1688114,00.html
Differences between the west and Russia and China were exposed
yesterday during
a meeting in London to discuss strategy for tackling the crisis over
Iran's
suspected nuclear weapons programme.
After seven hours of talks Britain, France and Germany announced they
are to
seek Iran's referral to the security council at a meeting on February 2
and 3 of
the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Javier Solana, the EU foreign affairs chief, said he was "confident"
Russia and
China will back the referral.
But both countries expressed serious reservations about future handling
of the
crisis, in particular the prospect of the security council imposing
sanctions on
Iran.
Russia, though slowly shifting towards the west's position, is still
holding out
hope that Tehran may yet accept a compromise. China, which has close
economic
ties with Iran, is the most hardline in opposing tough action against
Tehran.
One European diplomat said: "What is really crucial is support from
Russia and
China. China does not look too good. China is the major obstacle."
He added that China, which has a veto on the security council, felt
squeezed
between pressure from the west and dependency on Iranian oil.
A British diplomat said: "There was serious concern about Iranian moves
to
restart enrichment-related activities contrary to the appeals of the
international community not to do so." He added that "there was a
thorough
exchange of views" on the role of the security council.
The crisis escalated last week when Iran broke seals on uranium
enrichment
equipment. Iran denies that it has a covert nuclear weapons programme.
The London meeting between senior officials from the US, Britain,
France, China
and Russia - the five permanent members of the UN security council -
plus
Germany, was held to try to avoid a repetition of the security council
divisions
that marked the run-up to the war in Iraq. The west's fear is that
China could
exercise its veto on Iran's behalf.
The Europeans have begun drafting a resolution to put before the IAEA.
"It's
short. It calls for [IAEA chief Mohamed] ElBaradei to report Iran to
the UN
security council," one diplomat said. The western nations have a simple
majority
in favour of referral but are hoping that Russia and China will back
it. The US
and Europeans are focusing on Russia in the hope that if Moscow backs
their
approach, then China will also follow.
President Vladimir Putin, after meeting Angela Merkel on her first
visit to
Moscow as German chancellor, signalled exasperation with Iran's
decision to
break the seals. Indicating he was moving towards the west's position,
he said:
"As for Russia, and Germany, and our European partners and the US, we
have very
close positions on the Iranian problem."
But he cautioned against "abrupt, erroneous steps" and suggested the
issue could
still be defused without reference to the UN. He said Iran has not
excluded the
possibility of accepting a Russian compromise in which Tehran would
conduct
uranium enrichment in Russia rather than Iran. "One of the main
problems is the
enrichment of uranium. We proposed to our Iranian partners to set up a
joint
enrichment venture on Russian territory ... our partners told us they
did not
exclude the implementation of our proposal."
But China, speaking before the London meeting, said resorting to the
security
council would "complicate the issue", citing Iran's threat to hit back
by
halting snap UN inspections at its atomic plants.
The Chinese foreign minister said "all relevant sides should remain
restrained
and stick to solving the Iranian nuclear issue through negotiations".
Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said that dialogue with Moscow and
Beijing
was of "crucial importance".
Iran yesterday banned CNN journalists from the country after the
broadcaster
misquoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying that Iran wanted
nuclear
weapons, the ISNA students news agency said.
What happens next
Vienna Europeans plan emergency IAEA meeting on February 2. Iran will
try to
avoid referral to security council by reopening talks with Russia
New York Once before the security council, the resolution could tell
Iran to
suspend uranium enrichment. If ignored, talks would get tougher as US
and Europe
sought sanctions
Tehran Iran could then scrap deal on intrusive nuclear checks, and
disrupt oil
supplies if sanctions imposed US/Israel Air strikes could begin to
delay Iran's
work on nuclear weapon.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Syrian thought experiment
Xymphora
January 17, 2006
There are apparently still a few stragglers who refuse to accept the fact that the American multi-trillion dollar mistake in Iraq was made under the influence of Israeli agents in the White House (note this uncharacteristically stupid article by Stephen Zunes, containing every straw man in the book, and coming down to the fact that we can't speak the truth now as it sounds too much like untrue anti-Semitic attacks made in the past). Of course there were many other reasons for the attack, and the politics of empire requires that many interest groups have to be serviced when such a major action is taken. No one can argue that the Israeli agents were the only reason for the attack. The Israeli agents were not a sufficient condition for the attack, but they were a necessary condition. The attack would never have occurred but for the actions of those working for Israel.
If you are still not convinced, consider the fact that the Americans are in the middle of using the United Nations and a false concern about the Hariri assassination to plot an attack against Syria (or here). Those who argue against an Israeli cause for the Iraq attack rely on other American possible reasons for wanting regime change in Iraq. What reason can the United States possibly have for attacking Syria?:
Does Syria have weapons of mass destruction? Nope.
Does Syria have a program to build weapons of mass destruction? Nope.
Does Syria have a nuclear program? Nope.
Does Syria have or plan to have nuclear weapons? Nope.
Does Syria pose any possible threat to the United States? Nope.
Does Syria have a strategically important quantity of hydrocarbons? Nope.
Does the United States need Syria as a place to build bases to control the Middle East? Nope.
Does control of Syria give the Americans any strategic benefits whatsoever? Nope.
Was Syria involved with the September 11 attack? Nope.
Is Syria connected to al Qaeda? Nope. In fact, the Syrian government is one of the biggest enemies of Islamist terrorist groups.
Did Syria try to blow up Bush's father? Nope.
All of the many reasons that the Zionists claim are the real reasons the Americans attacked Iraq simply do not apply to Syria. So why are John Bolton and the Americans well on their way to attacking Syria?
The answer is obvious. Israel. In Sharon's last interview (with the Japanese newspaper Nikkei) he was asked the question "Do you think the Golan Heights will stay under Israeli sovereignty forever?" and answered:
"I don't see any situation where Israel will not be sitting on the Golan Heights. For 19 years the northern part of Israel was under heavy war of attrition. We are not going to return to this situation, although Israel will never attack Syria."
This just repeats Sharon's position on the matter. It is an illegal position under international law, and one that is impossible to maintain unless the Syrian government is replaced by an American puppet. The post-Sharon Likud position calls for 'defensible borders', which includes permanent control of the Golan Heights. The next American war will unquestionably be fought solely for Israeli right-wing interests. Why does it continue to be so hard to accept the real necessary condition for the last American war?
The last attack is past, and the damage it caused can't be fixed, at least not by any possible present or future American government. I'm concerned about the future. Failure to acknowledge the real malign influence of Zionism over the American government is going to doom Syria - and no doubt many other Arabs in the Middle East - to the grim fate of the Iraqis. If you don't cast blame where it is due you are going to be morally responsible for the deaths which are clearly coming, all at the instance of Israel. Failure to acknowledge the truth based on some bad-faith concern about possible anti-Semitism also leaves you intellectually unable to answer some of the mysteries about American politics (it also falls into the Zionist trap of conflating an attack on Zionism with an attack on Jews, forgetting that the real power behind Zionism in the United States is Christian Zionism). Why did the Democrats support the attack on Iraq? Why do they turn down a perfect election issue and refuse - for the most part - to call for withdrawal from Iraq? Why is nobody saying anything about the upcoming holocaust against the Syrian people? There is only one answer for all these questions.
www.xymphora.blogspot.com/2006/01/syrian-thought-experiment.html
__________________________________________________________ | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:52 am Post subject: Advise and assent |
| http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-nsa19feb19,0,5503861.story
EDITORIALS
Advise and assent
February 19, 2006
THAT THE UNITED STATES Senate has a body called the Intelligence Committee is an irony George Orwell would have truly appreciated. In a world without Doublespeak, the panel, chaired by GOP Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, would be known by a more appropriate name — the Senate Coverup Committee.
Although the committee is officially charged with overseeing the nation's intelligence-gathering operations, its real function in recent years has been to prevent the public from getting hold of any meaningful information about the Bush administration. Hence its never-ending delays of the probe into the bogus weapons intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. And its squelching, on Thursday, of an expected investigation into the administration's warrantless spying program.
The committee adjourned without voting on a proposal to probe the National Security Agency program, under which government agents have set up wiretaps on Americans without the warrants required by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. President Bush has acknowledged that he greenlighted the program, essentially claiming that Congress gave him the power to break federal law and violate Americans' 4th Amendment rights when it authorized the use of force after the 9/11 attacks. Though the administration's legal defense has been laughable, its argument that the powers are essential to fight terrorism has scored political points, ratcheting up the pressure on the Senate.
Roberts justified his committee's cave by saying the White House had committed itself to working with senators to pursue legislation on the matter. Translation: Bush won't accept any curbs on his power whatsoever, but he'd be happy to see a bill legalizing his wiretaps.
There's a slim chance the House of Representatives might show more backbone. The same day the Senate committee was performing stupid pet tricks for White House table scraps, the House Intelligence Committee approved its own inquiry into the NSA program. Yet the House is still divided on whether the investigation's scope would involve an intensive look at operational details or merely examine the status of surveillance laws.
There was one piece of good news last week. In a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a federal judge on Thursday ordered the Justice Department to respond to a request for documents on the NSA program within 20 days. Meanwhile, a Kentucky man is preparing a civil-rights suit over the wiretapping. If Congress continues to dither, the courts will be Americans' last hope for an honest appraisal of the spy program — and for at least a slight brake on the White House's relentless pursuit of excessive executive branch power. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
