War Without End

Alpha

From: "Jeffrey Blankfort"

Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 21:13:21 -0800
Subject: Nation: Get Carter by Chris Hedges

Other than Hedges being too kind to the memory of Rabin, this piece represents another public exposure of the Zionist Fifth Column in America that is ready and willing to support the suppression of the 1st Amendment and whatever else is necessary to preserve support for Israel, no matter how many lives, Palestinian, Lebanese, Iraqi, and American, that support requires. Until and unless the anti-war movement and those who claim solidarity with the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq are willing to take a public stand against this noxious cancer within the US body politic, they will continue to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.-JB

http://www.thenatio n.com/doc/ 20070108/ hedges
Get Carter
by CHRIS HEDGES

[from the January 8, 2007 issue] The Nation.

Jimmy Carter, by publishing his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, walked straight into the buzz saw that is the Israel lobby. Among the vitriolic attacks on the former President was the claim by Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, that Carter is "outrageous" and "bigoted" and that his book raises "the old canard and conspiracy theory of Jewish control of the media, Congress, and the U.S. government." Many Democratic Party leaders, anxious to keep the Israel lobby's money and support, have hotfooted it out the door, with incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announcing that Carter "does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel."

Carter's book exposes little about Israel. The enforced segregation, abject humiliation and spiraling Israeli violence against Palestinians have been detailed in the Israeli and European press and, with remarkable consistency, by all the major human rights organizations. The assault against Carter, rather, says more about the failings of the American media--which have largely let Israel hawks heap calumny on Carter's book. It exposes the indifference of the Bush Administration and the Democratic leadership to the rule of law and basic human rights, the timidity of our intellectual class and the moral bankruptcy of institutions that claim to speak for American Jews and the Jewish state.

The bleakness of life for Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip, is a mystery only to us. In the current Israeli campaign in Gaza, now sealed off from the outside world, almost 500 Palestinians, most unarmed, have been killed. Sanctions, demanded by Israel and imposed by the international community after the Hamas victory last January in what were universally acknowledged to be free and fair elections, have led to the collapse of civil society in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as widespread malnutrition. And Palestinians in the West Bank are being encased, in open violation of international law, in a series of podlike militarized ghettos with Israel's massive $2 billion project to build a "security barrier." This barrier will gobble up at least 10 percent of the West Bank, including most of the precious aquifers and at least 40,000 acres of Palestinian farmland. The project is being financed in large part through $9 billion in American loan guarantees, although when Congress approved the legislation in April 2003, Israel was told that the loans could be used "only to support activities in the geographic areas which were subject to the administration of the Government of Israel prior to June 5, 1967."

But it is in Gaza that conditions are currently reaching a full-blown humanitarian crisis. "Gaza is in its worst condition ever," Gideon Levy wrote recently in the Israeli paper Ha'aretz. "The Israel Defense Forces have been rampaging through Gaza--there' s no other word to describe it--killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately. ... How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical talk about 'the end of the occupation' and 'partitioning the land' now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before.... This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment."

And as Gaza descends into civil war, with Hamas and Fatah factions carrying out gun battles in the streets, Ha'aretz reporter Amira Hass bitterly notes, "The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called 'what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.'"

In fact, if there is a failing in Carter's stance, it is that he is too kind to the Israelis, bending over backward to assert that he is only writing about the occupied territories. Israel itself, he says, is a democracy. This would come as a surprise to the 1.3 million Israeli Arabs who live as second-class citizens in the Jewish state. The poverty rate among Israeli Arabs is more than twice that of the Jewish population. Those Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank are not permitted to get Israeli residency for their spouses. And Israeli Arabs, who do not serve in the military or the country's intelligence services and thus lack the important personal connections and job networks available to veterans, are systematically shut out of good jobs. Any Jew, who may speak no Hebrew or ever been to Israel, can step off a plane and become an Israeli citizen, while a Palestinian living abroad whose family's roots in Palestine may go back generations is denied citizenship.

The Israel lobby in the United States does not serve Israel or the Jewish community--it serves the interests of the Israeli extreme right wing. Most Israelis have come to understand that peace will be possible only when their country complies with international law and permits Palestinians to build a viable and sustainable state based on the 1967 borders, including, in some configuration, East Jerusalem.

This stark demarcation between Israeli pragmatists and the extreme right wing was apparent when I was in the Middle East for the New York Times during Yitzhak Rabin's 1992 campaign for prime minister. The majority of American Jewish organizations and neoconservative intellectuals made no pretense of neutrality. They had morphed into extensions of the right-wing Likud Party. These American groups, to Rabin's dismay, had gone on to build, with Likud, an alliance with right-wing Christian groups filled with real anti-Semites whose cultural and historical ignorance of the Middle East was breathtaking. This collection of messianic Jews and Christians, leavened with rabid American imperialists, believed they had been handed a divine or moral mandate to rule the Middle East, whether the Arabs liked it or not.

When Rabin, who had come to despise what the occupation was doing to the citizenry of his own country, was sworn in as prime minister, the leaders of these American Jewish organizations, along with their buffoonish supporters on the Christian right, were conspicuous by their absence. On one of Rabin's first visits to Washington after he assumed office, according to one of his aides, he was informed that a group of American Jewish leaders were available to meet him. The surly old general, whose gravelly cigarette voice seemed to rise up from below his feet, curtly refused. He told his entourage he did not have time to waste on "scumbags."

Alpha · Posted: Sat Jan 27, 2007 8:18 am Post subject:

Former U.S. Senator: Support for Israel in Congress is Based on Fear
By James Abourezk
December 11, 2006

I can tell you from personal experience that the support Israel has in the Congress is based completely on political fear -- fear of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell you that very few members of Congress -- at least when I served there -- have any affection for Israel or for its Lobby. What they have is contempt, but it is silenced by fear of being found out exactly how they feel. I've heard too many cloakroom conversations in which members of the Senate will voice their bitter feelings about how they're pushed around by the Lobby to think otherwise. In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics of the Lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the Lobby's animosity by making their feelings public.

Thus, I see no desire on the part of Members of Congress to further any U.S. imperial dreams by using Israel as their pit bull. The only exceptions to that rule are the feelings of Jewish members, whom, I believe, are sincere in their efforts to keep U.S. money flowing to Israel. But that minority does not a U.S. imperial policy make.

Secondly, the Lobby is quite clear in its efforts to suppress any congressional dissent from the policy of complete support for Israel which might hurt annual appropriations. Even one voice is attacked, as I was, on grounds that if Congress is completely silent on the issue, the press will have no one to quote, which effectively silences the press as well. Any journalists or editors who step out of line are quickly brought under control by well organized economic pressure against the newspaper caught sinning.

I once made a trip through the Middle East, taking with me a reporter friend who wrote for Knight-Ridder newspapers. He was writing honestly about what he saw with respect to the Palestinians and other countries bordering on Israel. The St. Paul Pioneer press executives received threats from several of their large advertisers that their advertising would be terminated if they continued publishing the journalist's articles. It's a lesson quickly learned by those who controlled the paper.

With respect to the positions of several administrations on the question of Israel, there are two things that bring them into line: One is pressure from members of Congress who bring that pressure resulting in the demands of AIPAC, and the other is the desire on the part of the President and his advisers to keep their respective political parties from crumbling under that pressure. I do not recall a single instance where any administration saw the need for Israel's military power to advance U.S. Imperial interests. In fact, as we saw in the Gulf War, Israel's involvement was detrimental to what Bush, Sr. wanted to accomplish in that war. The U.S. had to suppress any Israeli assistance so that the coalition would not be destroyed by their involvement.

So far as the argument that we need to use Israel as a base for U.S. operations, I'm not aware of any U.S. bases there of any kind. The U.S. has enough military bases, and fleets, in the area to be able to handle any kind of military needs without using Israel. In fact I can't think of an instance where the U.S. would want to involve Israel militarily for fear of upsetting the current allies the U.S. has, i.e., Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The public in those countries would not allow the monarchies to continue their alliance with the U.S. should Israel become involved.

I suppose one could argue that Bush's encouragement of Israel in the Lebanon war this summer was the result of some imperial urge, but it was merely an extension of the U.S. policy of helping Israel because of the Lobby's continual pressure. In fact, I heard not one voice of opposition to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon this summer (except Chuck Hagel). Lebanon always has been a "throw away" country so far as the congress is concerned, that is, what happens there has no effect on U.S. interests. There is no Lebanon Lobby. The same was true in 1982, when the Congress fell completely silent over the invasion that year.

I think in the heart of hearts of both members of congress and of the administrations they would prefer not to have Israel fouling things up for U.S. foreign policy, which is to keep oil flowing to the Western world to prevent an economic depression. But what our policy makers do is to juggle the Lobby's pressure on them to support Israel with keeping the oil countries from cutting off oil to the western nations. So far they've been able to do that. With the exception of King Feisal and his oil embargo, there hasn't been a Saudi leader able to stand up to U.S. policy.

So I believe that divestment, and especially cutting off U.S. aid to Israel would immediately result in Israel's giving up the West Bank and leaving the Gaza to the Palestinians. Such pressure would work, I think, because the Israeli public would be able to determine what is causing their misery and would demand that an immediate peace agreement be made with the Palestinians. It would work because of the democracy there, unlike sanctions against a dictatorship where the public could do little about changing their leaders' minds. One need only look at the objectives of the Israeli Lobby to determine how to best change their minds. The Lobby's principal objectives are to keep money flowing from the U.S. treasury to Israel, requiring a docile congress and a compliant administration. As Willie Sutton once said, "That's where the money is."
James Abourezk was a U.S. Senator, the first Arab-American to serve in the Senate, from South Dakota from 1973 to 1979. He is the vice chairman of the Council for the National Interest.
________________________________________

Council for the National Interest Foundation
1250 4th Street SW, Suite WG-1
Washington, District of Columbia 20024
http://www.cnionline.org/
http://www.rescuemideastpolicy.com/
Phone: 202-863-2951
Fax: 202-863-2952

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http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/chains/signs20061204_TheLobbythatdoesn27texist.php

The Lobby (that doesn't exist)

The following letter was sent to Jewish-American journalist Jeff Blankfort from James Abourezk, former US Senator from South Dakota

3 December 2006

The following letter was sent to me today by James Abourezk, former US Senator from South Dakota, and he readily complied when I asked that I be allowed to forward it to my list because what he had to say is of the utmost importance, given last month's election and all the new faces in Congress, and the immediate previous posting to you and James Petras's article earlier in the day..

START:

Dear Jeff:

I just finished reading your critique of Noam Chomsky's positions in an e mail sent to me by Tony Saidy.

I had never paid much attention to Chomsky's writings, as I had all along assumed that he was correct and proper in his position on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But now, upon learning that his first assumption is that Israel is simply doing what the imperial leaders in the U.S. wants them to do, I concur with you that this assumption is completely wrong.

I can tell you from personal experience that, at least in the Congress, the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear--fear of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell you that very few members of Congress--at lleast when I served there--have any affection for Israel or for its Lobby. What they have is contempt, but it is silenced by fear of being found out exactly how they feel. I've heard too many cloakroom conversations in which members of the Senate will voice their bitter feelings about how they're pushed around by the Lobby to think otherwise. In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics of the Lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the Lobby's animosity by making their feelings public.

Thus, I see no desire on the part of Members of Congress to further any U.S. imperial dreams by using Israel as their pit bull. The only exceptions to that rule are the feelings of Jewish members, whom, I believe, are sincere in their efforts to keep U.S. money flowing to Israel. But that minority does not a U.S. imperial policy make.

Secondly, the Lobby is quite clear in its efforts to suppress any congressional dissent from the policy of complete support for Israel which might hurt annual appropriations. Even one voice is attacked, as I was, on grounds that if Congress is completely silent on the issue, the press will have no one to quote, which effectively silences the press as well. Any journalists or editors who step out of line are quickly brought under control by well organized economic pressure against the newspaper caught sinning.

I once made a trip through the Middle East, taking with me a reporter friend who wrote for Knight-Ridder newspapers. He was writing honestly about what he saw with respect to the Palestinians and other countries bordering on Israel. The St. Paul Pioneer press executives received threats from several of their large advertisers that their advertising would be terminated if they continued publishing the journalist's articles. It's a lesson quickly learned by those who controlled the paper.

With respect to the positions of several administrations on the question of Israel, there are two things that bring them into line: One is pressure from members of Congress who bring that pressure resulting in the demands of AIPAC, and the other is the desire on the part of the President and his advisers to keep their respective political parties from crumbling under that pressure. I do not recall a single instance where any administration saw the need for Israel's military power to advance U.S. Imperial interests. In fact, as we saw in the Gulf War, Israel's involvement was detrimental to what Bush, Sr. wanted to accomplish in that war. They had, as you might remember, to suppress any Israeli assistance so that the coalition would not be destroyed by their involvement.

So far as the argument that we need to use Israel as a base for U.S. operations, I'm not aware of any U.S. bases there of any kind. The U.S. has enough military bases, and fleets, in the area to be able to handle any kind of military needs without using Israel. In fact I can't think of an instance where the U.S. would want to involve Israel militarily for fear of upsetting the current allies the U.S. has, i.e., Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The public in those countries would not allow the monarchies to continue their alliance with the U.S. should Israel become involved.

I suppose one could argue that Bush's encouragement of Israel in the Lebanon war this summer was the result of some imperial urge, but it was merely an extension of the U.S. policy of helping Israel because of the Lobby's continual pressure. In fact, I heard not one voice of opposition to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon this summer (except Chuck Hagel). Lebanon always has been a "throw away" country so far as the congress is concerned, that is, what happens there has no effect on U.S. interests. There is no Lebanon Lobby. The same was true in 1982, when the Congress fell completely silent over the invasion that year.

I think in the heart of hearts of both members of congress and of the administrations they would prefer not to have Israel fouling things up for U.S. foreign policy, which is to keep oil flowing to the Western world to prevent an economic depression. But what our policy makers do is to juggle the Lobby's pressure on them to support Israel with keeping the oil countries from cutting off oil to the western nations. So far they've been able to do that. With the exception of King Feisal and his oil embargo, there hasn't been a Saudi leader able to stand up to U.S. policy.

So I believe that divestment, and especially cutting off U.S. aid to Israel would immediately result in Israel's giving up the West Bank and leaving the Gaza to the Palestinians. Such pressure would work, I think, because the Israeli public would be able to determine what is causing their misery and would demand that an immediate peace agreement be made with the Palestinians. It would work because of the democracy there, unlike sanctions against a dictatorship where the public could do little about changing their leaders' minds. One need only look at the objectives of the Israeli Lobby to determine how to best change their minds. The Lobby's principal objectives are to keep money flowing from the U.S. treasury to Israel, requiring a docile congress and a compliant administration. As Willie Sutton once said, "That's where the money is."

Jim Abourezk

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The hidden cost of free congressional trips to Israel
Branded as 'educational’, these trips offer Israeli propagandists an
opportunity to expose members of Congress to only their side of the story.
by Senator Jim Abourezk
Christian Science Monitor
26 January 2007
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0126/p09s01-coop.html
SIOUX FALL, S.D. - Democrats in Congress have moved quickly - and
commendably - to strengthen ethics rules. But truly groundbreaking reform
was prevented, in part, because of the efforts of the pro-Israel lobby to
preserve one of its most critical functions: taking members of Congress on
free "educational" trips to Israel.
The pro-Israel lobby does most of its work without publicity. But every
member of Congress and every would-be candidate for Congress comes to
quickly understand a basic lesson. Money needed to run for office can come
with great ease from supporters of Israel, provided that the candidate makes
certain promises, in writing, to vote favorably on issues considered
important to Israel. What drives much of congressional support for Israel is
fear - fear that the pro-Israel lobby will either withhold campaign
contributions or give money to one's opponent.
In my own experience as a US senator in the 1970s, I saw how the lobby tries
to humiliate or embarrass members who do not toe the line.
Pro-Israel groups worked vigorously to ensure that the new reforms would
allow them to keep hosting members of Congress on trips to Israel. According
to the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper, congressional filings show Israel as
the top foreign destination for privately sponsored trips. Nearly 10 percent
of overseas congressional trips taken between 2000 and 2005 were to Israel.
Most are paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, a sister
organization of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the major
pro-Israel lobby group.
New rules require all trips to be pre-approved by the House Ethics
Committee, but Rep. Barney Frank (D) of Massachusetts says this setup will
guarantee that tours of Israel continue. Ron Kampeas of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency reported consensus among Jewish groups that "the new
legislation would be an inconvenience, but wouldn't seriously hamper the
trips to Israel that are considered a critical component of congressional
support for Israel."
These trips are defended as "educational." In reality, as I know from my
many colleagues in the House and Senate who participated in them, they offer
Israeli propagandists an opportunity to expose members of Congress to only
their side of the story. The Israeli narrative of how the nation was
created, and Israeli justifications for its brutal policies omit important
truths about the Israeli takeover and occupation of the Palestinian
territories.
What the pro-Israel lobby reaps for its investment in these tours is
congressional support for Israeli desires. For years, Israel has relied on
billions of dollars in US taxpayer money. Shutting off this government
funding would seriously impair Israel's harsh occupation.
One wonders what policies Congress might support toward Israel and the
Palestinians absent the distorting influence of these Israel trips - or if
more members toured Palestinian lands. America sent troops to Europe to
prevent the killing of civilians in the former Yugoslavia. But when it comes
to flagrant human rights violations committed by Israel, the US sends more
money and shields Israel from criticism.
Congress regularly passes resolutions lauding Israel, even when its actions
are deplorable, providing it political cover. Meanwhile, polls suggest most
Americans want the Bush administration to steer a middle course in working
for peace between Israelis and the Palestinians.
Consider, too, how the Israel lobby twists US foreign policy into a
dangerous double standard regarding nuclear issues. The US rattles its
sabers at Iran for its nuclear energy ambitions - and alleged pursuit of
nuclear arms - while remaining silent about Israel's nuclear-weapons
arsenal.
Members of Congress may not be aware just how damaging their automatic
support for Israel is to America's interest. At a minimum, US policies
toward Israel have cost it valuable allies in the Middle East and other
parts of the Muslim world.
If Congress is serious about ethics reform, it should not protect the Israel
lobby from the consequences. A totally taxpayer-funded travel budget for
members to take foreign fact-finding trips, with authorization to be made by
committee heads, would be an important first step toward a foreign policy
that genuinely serves America.
____________________________________________________
Jim Abourezk is a former Democratic senator from South Dakota.

Additional at the following URL:

New Book: The Power of Israel in the United States

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/08/17/new-book-the-power-of-israel-in-the-united-states.php

Alpha

The powerful AIPAC (pro-Israel) lobby has the US Congress look the other way on the following which is a blatant violation of international law (UN Security Council Resolutions 242, 338, etc.) as such support of Israel continues to fuel hatred of US in the Arab/Muslim world:

Subject: 'Outposts' Thriving in the West Bank (intro by General Jim David who is mentioned on Paul Findley's 'They Dare to Speak Out' book
From: Jim David
Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2007 15:18:57 EST
Subject: 'Outposts' Thriving in the West Bank

The Israeli government has been criticized numerous times by many human rights organizations for its cruel and mean-spirited demolition policy of Palestinain homes. According to Amnesty International and B'tselem, a Jewish Human Rights group, Israel has demolished more than 12,000 Palestinian homes. Israel tries to justify this policy by stating that the homes are built without approved building permits thereby making the construction illegal. But since building permits are issued to Jews only, it makes it impossible for the Palestinians to legally add on or to build new homes.
Amnesty International reports, and I quote, "Thousands of Palestinians, like Ahmed, live under constant fear of their home being demolished by the Israeli authorities because they have no chance of getting a building permit -- even on land that has belonged to their families for generations. Without a permit their home is effectively illegal. There is normally no warning of the time or date of a house demolition; the family may only have 15 minutes to take out what belongings they have before the furniture is thrown into the street and their home
bulldozed.":

http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/engMDE150781999

Now let me quote one more part of the report and it goes on to say, "The Palestinians are targeted for no other reason than because they are Palestinians. The demolition of their houses is in no doubt linked with Israeli discriminatory policy to restrict Palestinian development to existing urban areas."
Israel: House demolitions - Palestinians given "15 minutes to leave..." - Amnesty International It just stuns me that after more than 12,000 homes of innocent Palestinians have been demolished leaving more than 30,000 children homeless, the U.S. government has never taken action. What other nation in this world would we allow such crime to go unpunished while continuing to award with such generous foreign aid? Never do we see any member of the Bush Administration condemning such an act. Never do we see the State Department issuing any threats. The only time we hear or see any of the Bush people condemning any violence is when the Israelis suffer any attacks. It seems that the only warning that the Bush people give is warning the Palestinians to stop the violence. I guess condemning the Israelis for demolishing 12,000 homes of innocent people would be considered "anti-Semitic."
The below Associated Press story came out just a few hours ago. It's a story about the hundreds of Jewish Outposts in the West Bank constructed without the approval of the Israeli government. These are beautiful homes with manicured yards but built without any legal permit. Will any of these homes be demolished? Will these Jews be given only 15 minutes to take out their belongings? Of course not. These are homes owned by Jews on Palestinian land and the Israeli government just turns a blind eye as you will read in the following story. This is the double standard that we see with the Israeli government.
I will be attending a breakfast at the Carter Center this week and Jimmy Carter will be there. This is one subject I plan to discuss with him.
02/17: AOL News: 'Outposts' Thriving in the West Bank

'Outposts' Thriving in the West Bank

By RAVI NESSMAN
.c The Associated Press

BRUCHIN, West Bank (AP) - With its playgrounds, identical houses and manicured flower beds, Bruchin looks like any placid Israeli suburb. Except that Bruchin is not supposed to exist.

Bruchin is among more than 100 West Bank outposts never officially authorized by the Israeli government. And Israel's repeated commitments to freeze settlement construction haven't hampered Bruchin's transformation from a cluster of trailers less than eight years ago into a thriving community of 380 people, girded by government supplied roads, electricity and water.

``Normally, when you think of an outpost you think of a water tower. This is a real town,'' said Amishai Shav-Tal, one of Bruchin's founders.

Unlike the full-blown settlements that have been built in the face of international criticism, the outposts have never gone through the public process of gaining official government approval. Many of them began as little more than a cell phone tower or trailer erected by settlers on a West Bank hilltop to establish a presence there, a seed they used to quickly establish a new community.

The outposts infuriate the Palestinians, who see them as part of a plan to strengthen the Jewish grip on land they want for an independent state.

With the international community focusing its disapproval mainly on the traditional settlements, Israel has managed to quietly plant a slew of the outposts across the West Bank, say Palestinians, Israeli critics and even the settlers themselves.

``This is the game that the government always played with the settlers: 'You will do it, we will turn a blind eye and then one day when we are politically able to, we will legalize it,''' said Dror Etkes, who monitors settlements for the Israel's Peace Now movement.

Israel has not built an official settlement in more than a decade. When it approved a new one in late December, it quickly backed down under international condemnation.

But Bruchin is a different story. Settler leaders and a former Cabinet minister say the government cooperated through every phase of its creation in the northern West Bank. In recent talks with the Defense Ministry, which must approve new settlement construction, the settlers demanded Bruchin be the first in a string of developed outposts to be recognized as full settlements, which would ease fears that they could be forcibly removed.

``They have no choice, they have to recognize most of the outposts,'' said Bentzi Lieberman, a settler leader.

Over the 40 years since Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast War, the settlers have cultivated political allies and manipulated divided coalition governments in their favor. They capitalized on Palestinian hostility toward Israel to push the claim that the entire West Bank is the Jews' biblical birthright and a vital security buffer with the Arab world.

But some outpost residents fear the government may be turning against them.

As prime minister, Ehud Olmert started out with what looked like a campaign to tear down the unauthorized settlements, and was elected on a platform calling for the country to abandon much of the West Bank and all but the largest settlement blocs.

Political troubles following last summer's war in Lebanon have forced Olmert to put his plan on hold, but the settlers of Bruchin say they felt the change.

The army office in charge of the West Bank has issued orders to stop construction at the outpost and to demolish what has already been built, spokesman Capt. Zidki Maman said without providing details. It has also prevented Bruchin from upgrading its electricity hookup, which the settlers complain is too small for its growing population.

``Bruchin is an illegal outpost,'' Maman said.

The settlers blame U.S. pressure, and say they feel betrayed by the government.

Meanwhile, Bruchin continues to thrive - with the government's help.

On a sunny winter morning, soldiers sent by the government stand guard at Bruchin's gates, while the squeals of children at play ring out from the outposts' nine preschools, many of them funded by the Education Ministry.

Down a tidy road lined with tall street lights and brick sidewalks, past the marble-walled synagogue and the community center, stand 40 two-story yellow stucco houses in two rows. A large sign says they were built with Housing Ministry help.

Nearby, a cluster of nearby trailers houses another 40 families, who arrived in recent years.

Residents describe Bruchin as a quiet, close-knit, religious suburb. They have neighborhood barbecues, cooking classes for the wives, and after-school judo, ceramics, basketball and Torah for the kids.

``It's a good place,'' said Avi Galimidi, a 30-year-old student who moved here 2 1/2 years ago with his wife and four children. ``It has wonderful and good people. And I want to settle the land.''

Israel has repeatedly promised to freeze all settlement activity in the West Bank, where nearly 270,000 settlers - a 6 percent increase from a year ago, according to government figures - live among 2.4 million Palestinians.

Several thousand Israelis are believed to be living in outposts.

Under the 2003 ``road map'' peace plan, Israel agreed to remove dozens of outposts built since March 2001, but that deal that does not include Bruchin, since it was started two years earlier. Israel also agreed to freeze settlement growth, which should have ended all expansion at Bruchin. Israel did not follow through on either of those commitments.

The Palestinians have also failed to live up to their road map commitment to disband militant groups, who effectively rule the streets of the West Bank and fire missiles at Israeli towns from Gaza.

The U.S. sees the settlements and their continued construction as obstacles to peace, at a time when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has scheduled a Feb. 19 summit between Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to foster a rapprochement.

``The Israel government should live up to its commitments, and that includes on the settlements, that includes on outposts. These are commitments, by the way, to the United States, they're not commitments to the Palestinians,'' U.S. Ambassador Richard Jones said.

The Israelis ``should not create facts on the ground,'' he said.

But more than 100 outposts have been built since 1995, and most now have at least some form of basic infrastructure, Etkes said.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat calls the outposts ``baby settlements.''

``Our worst fear there is being realized, which is that they will boom and become major settlements,'' he said.

Like many outposts, Bruchin was a response to violence - the fatal shooting of an Israeli woman, Yael Mevar, as she drove near an Arab town on Dec. 31, 1997.

Angry settler leaders dusted off old plans for a settlement about 12 miles east of Tel Aviv, between Israel and the large settlement of Ariel, deep in the West Bank. In the spring of 1999, Jewish seminary students moved into trailers on a hilltop.

``You can't come and just shoot Jews and we'll do nothing,'' said Shav-Tal, 31. ``We'll show them that we live in this country, and we are the people that own this country.''

In October, Shav-Tal and five other families answered the students' call to settle in Bruchin. They moved into trailers powered by electricity generators, with water tanks filled every three days, Shav-Tal said.

``The challenge that you have of building something where there is nothing - that's real Zionism,'' he said.

That core group posted fliers in nearby settlements, advertised on the Internet, and were flooded with applications, Shav-Tal said.

``Our problem from the first day was more people want to come than the places we have,'' Shav-Tal said.

More trailers rolled in. The government-owned electricity company hooked Bruchin up to the grid. The water company installed a pump and pipes. The local council paved 1.5 miles of roads. Public bus service began.

The settlers received approval from the Housing Ministry to build 40 permanent houses, and their occupants moved in 2 1/2 years ago, well after the road map was unveiled. Their newly empty trailers became available for new arrivals, and by December, these too were filled, bringing Bruchin's population to 380.

The army may call Bruchin illegal, but in her government-commissioned report on the outposts two years ago, attorney Talia Sasson said the Housing Ministry spent $785,000 on Bruchin's infrastructure and public buildings.

The government was deeply complicit in the creation of many of the outposts, Sasson wrote.

``Most of the outposts were financed by some ministry in Israel,'' she told The Associated Press.

``We helped build it,'' said Yitzhak Levy, who was housing minister in 1999. ``It is supposed to be a city. It has a large area. It is clear that this is a place that was going to grow, and therefore there was investment. It was done openly.''

Yehudit Passal moved here 1 1/2 years ago with her husband and two children because it allowed her family to be near the Tel Aviv job market while strengthening Israel's hold over the West Bank, she said.

Her decision was strengthened, she said, by Israel's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which included the dismantling of 21 settlements and another four in the northern West Bank.

She said she wanted the remaining settlements to be large, ``so it would be that much harder to take them down.''

A few hundred yards down the hill lies a town of 4,000 Palestinians. Its name is Brukhin, the Arabic form of Bruchin. Mayor Akrima Samara says the outpost's existence blocks Palestinians from their olive groves and grazing land, and has dimmed their hopes for a state of their own.

``With every passing day we see the outpost grow,'' he said. ``This land is lost.''

The settlers of Bruchin have big plans. A detailed blueprint envisages expanding their community tenfold, to 750 families, said Itzik Turk, the outpost's general secretary.

But the sympathy the settlers once enjoyed in Israel has weakened as Israelis have wearied of war with the Palestinians and the burden of being an occupying power.

Galimidi, the student, says he is not worried about Bruchin's future.

``I believe that all the problems will be solved little by little,'' he said. In another 20 years, ``Bruchin will be a city, and we will have malls.''

02/17/07 11:31 EST

Alpha · Posted: Sun Feb 18, 2007 7:29 am Post subject:

Rosner's Blog
Shmuel Rosner Chief U.S. Correspondent www.haaretz.com/rosner Biography | Email me

Obama will soon make the case that he'll be as strong on Israel as anyone

My weekend column for the Hebrew print edition is a lengthy piece on U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois). Most Israelis don't know him, and my editors thought he was enough of a political phenomenon to make him worth writing about, even at this early stage of the campaign. Most of the piece was not translated into English, as much of the material in it will not be of any value to American readers who have gotten more than their fair share of Obamania in the last couple of months. The only part of it that's worth presenting here is the section on Obama and Israel. (You can read a news story on Obama's comments about Israel here.)

I've written about Obama and Israel before, in the context of The Israel Factor project. My goal at the time was to try to explain why this bright, charismatic, viable candidate was not getting high marks from our Israel Factor panelists: What is it about Obama that makes them uncomfortable about his possible future attitude toward Israel?

If you don't know someone, then you don't trust him. And "if you don't trust someone, you try to be careful with him," one panelist told me. It's "the unknown factor," another one explained. "What kind of constituency does he bring with him, and how will they influence his positions?"

"We need more time to trust him," a panelist told me. "Voting for Israel a couple of times doesn't constitute enough of a track record on which to make a more favorable judgment." Nathan Diament of the Orthodox Union, who knows Obama from their days at Harvard, made a similar argument this week in his blog: The short political life of Obama hasn't "provide[d] many opportunities for a new politician to establish the kind of record that longer-serving officeholders have built up over time."

Obama has not been deaf to such suspicions. And now that he is not just a "possible candidate" but an officially declared one, he will try to fix these perceptions. "Israelis want more than anything to live in peace with their neighbors, but Israel also has real - and very dangerous - enemies," were Obama's words to Haaretz. "My view is that the United States' special relationship with Israel obligates us to be helpful to them in the search for credible partners with whom they can make peace, while also supporting Israel in defending itself against enemies sworn to its destruction."

In my 60-minute interview with him last week, Obama was not shy about explaining why a viable peace has not yet been achieved. Like all the other major Democratic candidates, he will be a strong advocate for American involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nonetheless, he said he is yet to see - "particularly in the Palestinian community - "leaders who have both the will and the capacity to renounce violence as a strategy to resolve the problems and to actually enforce any agreement that might be reached with the Israelis." Talking about the current prospects for an agreement, Obama said that under the existing conditions, "I think we're not going to see much progress."

But this is just the short version of the policy Obama will be officially presenting soon. This week I was told that while the venue has yet to be selected, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs conference in Washington at the end of February is one possibility. There's also a chance that he will make his comments on Israel at a Washington rally calling for the release of the abducted Israeli soldiers or while speaking to a group of Chicago Jews. One thing is quite clear: It will happen in the next two to three weeks.

I asked about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention in March and was told that he will speak there too, but wants to have another speech sooner. Obama doesn't want to wait such a long time - not when he is running a campaign in which he will need the support of many people who care deeply about Israel. (Oh, let's just say it: Jewish voters are major donors to the Democratic Party and its nominees.) He also wants to make sure that people will hear him, and him alone. After all, Obama will not be the only candidate speaking and getting attention at the AIPAC conference.

On Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Dan Shapiro, a senior adviser to Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Florida), was saying goodbye to the job he has held for six years. He is as knowledgeable as anyone on Israel and the Middle East, and apart from the "real" job he got himself now, he has joined Obama's campaign as an adviser on issues related to Mideast policy.

I spoke to Shapiro about Obama and his views earlier this week, and I asked him to highlight for me the differences between Obama and the current Bush policy regarding Israel. The first difference, he said, will be a greater emphasis on the need for constant engagement by the U.S. Obama will tell you that Bush wasted some long years without investing in diplomacy. You can either agree with him on that or not, but this has become the Democratic party line. All candidates condemn Bush for the hands-off approach.

A second possible difference will involve the question of whether to talk to Syria. Obama believes that America should talk to the Assad regime, so it's hard envisioning him objecting to an Israeli-Syrian dialogue. And then there's the question of Iran - the most important of them all.

A Washingtonian familiar with the Obama campaign reminded me that Obama is the anti-war candidate, and thus will have some maneuvering to do on Iran. He will probably warn of a possible deterioration in relations that could lead to an unintentional war, but by the same token he can also be expected to agree that Iran should not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons and that no U.S. president should take any of the options off the table.

This will be a position similar to those of other Democratic candidates. Some might say that it's a problematic position when it comes to the real world - what if talks with Tehran do not provide an agreement that can actually prevent a nuclear Iran - but nevertheless, it's a good one politically. It sounds anti-war enough for the Democratic Party at large, and anti-Iran enough for those who really understand the significance of the issue at hand.

All these policy points will not even wait for the promised speech. A position paper outlining Obama's views is in the making, and will be distributed to as many Jewish voters as possible.

Will he be able to win over these voters?

After talking to people about him all week, I can tell you this: They very much want to be persuaded that Obama should win their backing, as they all understand the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding his candidacy and the importance of Obama's adding his voice to the camp of Israel supporters.

With such an attitude, it is relatively easy to be convinced.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Obama is a fraud with his 'anti-war' status as he supports the coming attack on Iran for AIPAC (Israel):

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct04/Smith1012.htm

Obama is all for the coming attack on Iran as well:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=67&ItemID=11963

Additional at following URL:

AIPAC hacks Clinton/Edwards call Iran threat to U.S., Israel

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2007/02/02/aipac-hacks-clinton-edwards-call-iran-threat-to-u-s-israel.php

Alpha · Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2007 8:25 pm Post subject:

The following is what US support of Israel has brought to America:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/20/1523257

Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
"Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World"

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Canadian human rights attorney and author Maureen Webb discusses the comprehensive scope of government surveillance, and finds that the use of sophisticated methods to search for terrorists is not identifying the right suspects. [includes rush transcript]
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Love letters, bank transactions, library books, scuba diving lessons…can the government actually use your personal information to predict whether you might be a terrorist?
A new book reveals the comprehensive scope of government surveillance, and finds that the use of sophisticated methods to search for terrorists is not identifying the right suspects.

In “Illusions of Security, Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post 9/11 World,” human rights lawyer Maureen Webb argues the new global security system is threatening both American and global security while also undermining democracy worldwide.

Maureen Webb joins me now here in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!

Maureen Webb, author of the new book "Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World" (City Lights). She is a human rights lawyer and activist. She has spoken extensively on post-September 11 security and human rights issues. She is co-chair of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group and also the Coordinator for Security and Human Rights issues for Lawyers' Rights Watch Canada.

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RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: In Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World, human rights lawyer Maureen Webb argues the new global security system is threatening both American and global security, while undermining democracy worldwide. Maureen Webb joins us now in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!

MAUREEN WEBB: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Why did you focus on this as a human rights lawyer?

MAUREEN WEBB: Well, I think it’s one of the less-examined aspects of the war on terror, and I’m co-chair for a Canadian coalition of civil society groups called the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group. And in 2004, we brought some of the major NGOs working on these issues from around the world: ACLU in the United States, Statewatch in Europe, Focus on the Global South in Asia. And we wanted to look for common patterns that were happening in our countries and see if there was any way that we could collaborate.

And what we identified was that there were all of these surveillance initiatives that were being introduced, many of them through international forums like the G8, and that all of our governments seem to be working towards this common goal, but that these initiatives tended to be reported very disparately in the media, and nobody had really connected the dots. We thought it was important, because it’s really one of the more insidious aspects of the war on terror. It will have long-term effects on our democratic societies and democratic movements around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: You began your book with Maher Arar, with Monia’s story, actually --

MAUREEN WEBB: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: -- with his wife. How did you meet them? You’re a Canadian human rights lawyer, and how does that tie in with this global surveillance infrastructure?

MAUREEN WEBB: Well, I actually heard about their story on the radio, as a lot of other Canadians did, often when I was driving my kids to daycare in the mornings. And they became very involved in the story, as well. They asked some very pertinent questions. They asked, you know, who has taken these children’s papa?

AMY GOODMAN: You mean your kids were asking this.

MAUREEN WEBB: Yes. Who took him? Why did they take him? Why can't they get him back? And at that time, I was working on border issues, on the Canadian-US border, in my job. So, you know, I understood that this was sort of a shocking new development, the disappearance of a Canadian citizen. But it was really my kids that engaged me in this story. And I heard Monia talk about her fear that her children would grow up fatherless, and this is what was driving her in her very dignified, very articulate quest to get her husband home.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you briefly explain what happened? Maher Arar, the victim of “extraordinary rendition,” taken by US authorities from Kennedy Airport and sent off when he was headed home from a family vacation to Canada, instead sent off to Syria, where he was tortured, held for almost a year, then sent home. But how did they, in Canada, first start to look at him?

MAUREEN WEBB: Well, after 9/11, the US and Canada began cooperating very closely on national security, and joint teams were set up between agencies like the Mounties in Canada and the FBI and we think the CIA in America. These later became formalized as integrated national security teams. But they were working very closely, and there were really no sovereign checks and balances on the way that information was shared. And the Mounties, you know, in testimony before the Arar inquiry, they said that they had been given a mandate of prevention and that they were to take a zero tolerance approach to risk. And this led them to identify what they said was a potential al-Qaeda cell operating in Ottawa and Toronto. And Maher Arar happened to be a -- you know, it’s a small Muslim community in Ottawa -- he went for lunch with a fellow that was a target of the investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: This was what year? Like ’99?

MAUREEN WEBB: Yes -- no, it was after 2001. They had started -- they were looking at Abdullah al-Maliki before that, but they turned it into a big international terrorism investigation after 2001. And he went for lunch with the guy, stood outside in the rain, talking about where he could buy a good printer for his computer. And he was marked as a person of interest. They had no evidence that he was linked at all to terrorism. It turned out that they had no evidence, hard evidence, that Abdullah al-Maliki was linked to terrorism, either. But from there, they started sharing information with the FBI and the CIA, with no controls over how that information would be used. And in the end, it turned out that when Arar was identified on a passenger manifest list coming from Tunisia to JFK Airport, the Americans grabbed him, and they rendered him to Syria.

AMY GOODMAN: And now, the Canadian government has awarded him $10 million and demanded that the US take him off a terrorist no-fly list, but the US has refused to comply.

MAUREEN WEBB: Yes. And, in fact, the ambassador has told the Canadian government that they have no business to tell the United States who should be on their terrorist list.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to ask you about all sorts of issues, like Echelon, the global surveillance system, biometrics, how they’re being used. But we have to take a break. We’ll be back with Maureen Webb, human rights attorney and author of Illusions of Security. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Maureen Webb, human rights attorney and author, is our guest. Her book, Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World. “Global Surveillance of Electronic Communications Records and Financial Transactions” is the name of one of your chapters, and you start with this George Orwell quote, and he says, “It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time, but at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from the habit that became instinct and the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.” That’s from the book 1984. Explain how it is working now.

MAUREEN WEBB: Well, you know, today in modern societies, each of us pretty much have our wires plugged in all the time. There’s very little you can do without it being recorded some way in an electronic transaction. So after 9/11, governments, the US pushing them, started to look at the communications of people, the financial transactions of people. The NSA program in the United States is a prime example of this. It was a secret program authorized by the President.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the National Security Agency wiretapping.

MAUREEN WEBB: That's right. The domestic wiretapping. And it’s really a large data-mining program, which vacuums up almost all of the emails and telephone calls that are made in the United States and sifts through them for specified criteria that state agents believe show terrorist activity is occurring.

AMY GOODMAN: How does it do it?

MAUREEN WEBB: Well, you know, this is very sophisticated technology. The NSA and its counterparts in the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia have been searching the cyberspace since 1948. They began looking at telephone calls and, as technology advanced, they kept up with it. But their gazes have always been directed outside their own countries. They have never been allowed to spy inside their own borders. And since it’s a secret program, very little is known about it, except that it’s a data-mining program where they sift through traffic patterns, looking for key words and traffic patterns. And in the normal exercise of their mandates, they are looking for economic and technical and security intelligence from other countries.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the Echelon system?

MAUREEN WEBB: Well, that’s the Echelon system that was set up after World War II, and it’s this cooperation of the Anglo-American countries. But as I said, it always looked outwards. I never looked inwards. And so, this was unheard of. And in Canada, we seem to have a similar program that’s been authorized by our Anti-Terrorism Act. So it seems that other countries also are turning their very powerful foreign security establishments on the loose.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the global registration system?

MAUREEN WEBB: Yes. In the book, I describe the main characteristics of this new kind of surveillance, and I think the aim of this new surveillance regime is first to register populations with biometric identity documents. And the idea is that when you have a biometric identifier for everybody, you have a kind of gold standard for making sure you’ve got the person that you want. And then you can start to, with greater confidence, link information to that biometric identifier.

Biometrics is the use of biological characteristics that people have, like fingerprints, iris scans, the dimensions of our faces, which the technology records and then stores either in a database or in a microchip, which can be inserted into identity documents.

AMY GOODMAN: And how does it work -- for example, a retina scan -- and are we going to see these be increasingly mandatory?

MAUREEN WEBB: They are increasingly mandatory. After 9/11, they began to biometrically register the more marginal populations. So, for example, under the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, the United States registered all males between the ages of sixteen and forty-five coming from Muslim countries, who were visiting or traveling through the country. And 80,000 men were biometrically registered in this way.

Then biometric registration was expanded to all visitors to the US, then to all people carrying passports, and then recently a de facto national identity card has been introduced in the United States, which is a country, a common law country, which has always resisted the imposition of a national identity card. And now, you have a biometric national identity card.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Maureen Webb. Interesting last name for this kind of investigation. You talk about UK e-Borders initiative, German trawling, flawed facts, dirty information and guilt by Google. Start with the last.

MAUREEN WEBB: Guilt by Google, that’s not copyrighted. You know, these data-mining programs, what you have to understand is that they’re not sifting through masses of information to find known terrorists or people who are suspected of terrorism on reasonable grounds. What they're doing is they’re sifting through all this information they’re collecting about us all to predict who might be a terrorist. This is predictive technology. And it’s interesting. It comes from the private sector.

I was in Chicago recently speaking, and the person who chaired the event was a CEO of a business intelligence company. And he told the audience just how far businesses have gone down this road of collecting every piece of information they can get about their customers and then data mining it and handling it through different technologies. And he spoke about an article that was published in the Harvard Business Review recently, which basically says that you’re nowhere as a business unless you’re doing this stuff. And this has been imported by the government into the war on terror. It’s predictive analysis.

AMY GOODMAN: And what’s the problem with this?

MAUREEN WEBB: Well, it’s very frightening, because, of course, when you’re looking at prediction, at preemption, you’re not really concerned with accuracy, so that all of the normal protections that we have about our virtual identities, about our personal information, are thrown out of the window. If you’re flagged by a data-mining program, you’ll never know what information has been used against you, you’ll never be able to correct or contextualize it, you won’t even know the criteria by which you’re being judged, because they are also secret.

So, for example, there’s a program that was just revealed about a month ago called the Automated Targeting System Program. And nobody knew that it was operating. In fact, two other programs that were similar to it had been killed by Congress. And this program collects information about people crossing the border, all modes of transportation. It stores it for forty years, and it assigns risk scores to individuals. And a risk score is a statistical rating of how closely your personal information matches the criteria, the secret criteria, that are supposed to protect terrorist activity. And there’s no way you can change your risk score, apparently. You can appeal and say, “Well, I’m not the Jane Doe that you’re thinking of,” and if they believe you, they can note it down, but apparently because you can never change the information, you can never change your risk score.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at your section on shutting down independent media, where you write, “The current risk assessment climate has led to international cooperation in shutting down independent media outlets. In October 2004, two computer servers were seized by the FBI from the England office of the Texas-based internet company Rackspace. The servers were hosting the websites of independent media centers. The seizure was reportedly made under a UK-US mutual assistance treaty of 1996, but on the request of Swiss and Italian police.”

MAUREEN WEBB: Yes, yes. And that’s just one illustration of how closely security agencies are cooperating around the world today. And, for instance, the United States has signed an agreement whereby it has access to all of Europol's information about EU citizens. So some very sensitive information about EU citizens --

AMY GOODMAN: Europol?

MAUREEN WEBB: Europol, the European police.

AMY GOODMAN: Interpol?

MAUREEN WEBB: Interpol is bigger. Europol is for Europe. And so, dozens of American agencies now have direct access to this information, which was previously kept in European hands with European checks and balances. The INSET, the Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams, that I spoke about in the context of the Arar affair, under ordinary mutual assistance agreements, formal requests have to be made between the countries to obtain information, and there’s all kinds of checks and balances that go with that. They make sure that the information is reliable before they pass it on. They make sure that they know what the other country is going to do with the information. But with these integrated teams, the information just flows informally between the agencies that are working together.

AMY GOODMAN: You also talk about it being open season on individuals and groups challenging repressive regimes. How so?

MAUREEN WEBB: Well, you know, this whole new paradigm of terrorism is being embraced by countries around the world and used in repressive regimes to rebrand opponents as terrorists. And these people are often put on international lists. There are sort of new brutal tactics that can be used against them, because it’s become an accepted paradigm, this idea of terrorism. But it really -- you know, I’m not saying that there’s not a thing popularly known as terrorism, but it’s being used politically to really paint as black-and-white complex historical and civil conflicts.

AMY GOODMAN: You write about how in Tunisia the lawyers of people charged with terrorism are being charged with terrorism themselves.

MAUREEN WEBB: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, how do people protect themselves, as we travel either abroad or just at home, as you go on the internet, as you buy things at stores with credit cards? And how does credit cards fit into this?

MAUREEN WEBB: Well, credit cards, the records are handled by companies, and the companies are subject to the USA PATRIOT Act, and the USA PATRIOT Act allows the FBI to issue administrative subpoenas, known as national security letters, without any judicial oversight.

AMY GOODMAN: Can companies resist?

MAUREEN WEBB: Well, they can, I suppose, but they’re gagged from telling anybody about the very existence of the order against them. And most companies aren’t resisting. In fact, many companies are just handing over the information when they’re asked. I think, you know, about 175 universities in the United States handed over information about their students without any request for a subpoena. As you mentioned, scuba diving associations handed over disks with information on two million members. And we know that companies, airlines were handing over information to the Transportation Security Administration.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, telephone companies.

MAUREEN WEBB: And telephone companies. Four out of five of the major telephone companies in the US handed over their records to the NSA for this domestic spy program. And they did it for money.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, for money?

MAUREEN WEBB: Well, it was a contract under which they were paid to hand over this material.

AMY GOODMAN: We have thirty seconds. What do you think is the most important thing to leave listeners and viewers with?

MAUREEN WEBB: I want listeners to understand that they have some control over what happens in the future. Our democratic societies are at risk of being turned into surveillance societies over time, and we’ve got to inform ourselves about what’s happening and tell our democratic representatives that we don’t want them to pass these laws and these measures.

AMY GOODMAN: Maureen Webb, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Maureen Webb is the author of Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World.

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877.

Alpha · Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2007 10:04 am Post subject:

http://www.payvand.com/news/07/mar/1248.html

Payvand's Iran News ...

3/19/07
The US, Israel and Iran: An Interview with Sasan Fayazmanesh
By Mehran Ghassemi, Iranian journalist, Roozna newspaper, Tehran

Sasan Fayazmanesh is chair of the Department of Economics at California State University, Fresno.

Q. How do you evaluate the relationship between the US and Israel at this time? What is this relation based on?

A: Allow me to say beforehand that I am currently writing a book-tentatively entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment- which chronicles the US, Israel and Iran relation since 1979. The book-which is to be completed by the end of summer-examines, in a comprehensive manner, the evolution of the US policy of "dual containment" of Iran and Iraq, particularly as it pertains to Iran. I believe, without such a comprehensive analysis, it is difficult to give meaningful and satisfactory answers to many questions that I am often asked about the current entanglement between Iran on the one side and the US and Israel on the other. With this caveat, I would answer your question by saying that under no previous administration has the relation between US and Israel been as close as under the current, Bush Administration. Why this is the case and what the relation is based on requires the kind of comprehensive analysis that I was referring to above. But let me just say that, as it is well known, the Middle East Policy of the current administration has been determined by the "neoconservatives," individuals who virtually see no distinction between the "interest" of the US and Israel and might even put the "interest" of the latter above the former. Now, I put "neoconservative" in quotation marks because, for reasons that I will not go into here, it is an ambiguous and overrated expression. Also, I put the term interest in quotation marks, since one has to distinguish between perceived and actual interests on the one hand and the interest of ordinary citizens and those of the elite on the other. The individuals who make the US foreign policy, particularly the "neoconservatives," represent a privileged group of people with a unique and peculiar view of the world. To these "neoconservatives" waging wars against Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and possibly Iran and Syria, might appear to be in the "interest" of the US, even though in actuality such policies might be very harmful to the interest of ordinary citizens of the US, particularly in the long-run.

The current relation between the US and Israel, of course, goes beyond the issue of the strength of the "neoconservatives" in the White House. The US Congress, too, has traditionally been, and remains to this day, a close ally of Israel. However, given that the US war against Iraq is going very badly-and the fact the US was egged on to start this war by some Israeli politicians and their "neoconservative" allies in the US-it appears that a few US Congressmen have become lately somewhat uneasy about their blind, unequivocal support for Israel.

Q. How do you evaluate the integration of US and Israeli policy?

A: As it is clear from my answer above, the integration of the US and Israeli policy is nothing new, it is many decades old. But, as I also indicated above, under the current administration this integration has reached a level not seen before. Even at the beginning of the Bush Administration the integration was not as strong as it became later. We all remember that immediately after the September 11 (2001) events the Bush Administration spoke of the creation of a Palestinian State and started a courtship dance with Iran. But the talk and dance ended as soon as the Israeli forces inside and outside the US intervened. Binyamin Netanyahu's September 21, 2001, testimony before the US congress-when he stated that "if the US includes terrorism-sponsoring regimes like Syria, Iran, or the Palestinian Authority in a coalition against worldwide terrorism, then the alliance 'will be defeated from the beginning'"- set the stage for a radical reversal of the US newly conceived policy. Similarly, Ariel Sharon's October 6, 2001, warning that the US should not "repeat the terrible mistake of 1938" stifled any attempt to moderate the US policy. Finally, the January 6, 2002, Karine-A affair-when Israel allegedly captured a ship carrying Iranian arms to the Palestinian Authority group-put a complete stop to any rapprochement between the US and Iran or attempt to establish a Palestinian State. The result was the January 29, 2002, State of the Union Address by President Bush, when the "neoconservative" concept of "axis of evil," coined apparently by David Frum, was put forward. From then on the "neoconservatives" seemed to have complete control of the US Middle East policy and integrated this policy fully with that of Israel.

Q. How do you see the role and the position of the Israeli lobby in the US? Are there similar lobbies in Israel that advocate for US interest?

A. This is a very broad and complicated question that requires at least a book to answer. There are, of course, a number of articles and books written on the subject of various Israeli lobby groups in the US, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The most recent essay, and probably the most comprehensive and academic one, is that of John Mersheimer and Stephen Walt, which can be found online. But even this analysis is not detailed enough and, unfortunately, details that are provided appear only in the footnotes. My own book will deal with the subject matter in a greater detail, but only in so far as Iran is concerned. In other words, I investigate the role that various Israeli lobby groups and individuals have played, particularly since the early 1990s, in formulating the US foreign policy towards Iran. The role, I would argue, is quite extensive. Indeed, I argue, that we have to trace this role to Martin Indyk, the communication advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a staffer at AIPAC, the head of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (which is an offshoot of AIPAC), the Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs at the US Department of State under the Clinton Administration and the former US ambassador to Israel. In his 1993 inaugural address as the national security advisor to Clinton, Indyk stated:

The Clinton administration's policy of "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran derives in the first instance from an assessment that the current Iraqi and Iranian regimes are both hostile to American interests in the region. Accordingly, we do not accept the argument that we should continue the old balance of power game, building up one to balance the other. . . The coalition that fought Saddam remains together, as long as we are able to maintain our military presence in the region, as long as we succeed in restricting the military ambitions of both Iraq and Iran, and as long as we can rely on our regional allies Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the GCC, and Turkey-to preserve a balance of power in our favor in the wider Middle East region, we will have the means to counter both the Iraqi and Iranian regimes. We will not need to depend on one to counter the other.
As I argue in my book, Indyk's claim that the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq was something new was exaggerated and the roots of the policy go back to the Carter Administration and particularly Zbigniew Brzezinski. Setting aside this issue, however, I argue that with the help of Martin Indyk, a few other individuals in the Clinton White House and a few powerful people in the US Congress, various Israeli lobby groups, especially AIPAC, became the underwriters of the sanction policy of the US against Iran. This is particularly true of the 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. But Indyk, I argue, represented the moderate wing of the Israeli lobby groups in general and the Washington Institute in particular. He was close to the Israeli Labor party.

When the Bush Administration came to power, more radical members of the Washington Institute, such as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, took over the formulation and implementation of the White House Middle East policy. These "neoconservatives" were closely linked to the Likud party members, particularly Binyamin Netanyahu. As such, their idea of "containment" of Iran and Iraq went beyond the roundabout way of passing sanctions to ruin the economy of these countries, bringing about discontent, causing revolt and then overthrowing their governments; they advocated a more direct way for "regime change": using the military might of the US to attack these countries. Even though some of these individuals have left office, there are still many such characters in the current administration. One such person is Elliott Abrams, the current deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy. He is, of course, a well-known figure who was convicted, and subsequently pardoned, on charges related to the Iran-Contra scandal. Another one is Stephen Hadley, the current national security adviser to President Bush. Under former President George H.W. Bush, Hadley served as an assistant to Wolfowitz, who was then Undersecretary of Defense. Yet, another individual is Stuart Levey, the present Treasury Department's Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Levey has been working zealously to stop foreign banks from dealing with some Iranian banks. In 2005 Stuart Levey gave an address at AIPAC that began with: "It is a real pleasure to be speaking with you today. I have been an admirer of the great work this organization does since my days on the one-year program at Hebrew University in 1983 and 1984. I want to commend you for the important work that you are doing to promote strong ties between Israel and the United States and to advocate for a lasting peace in the Middle East." Then he goes on to talk about what his office does and how "[w]e levy economic sanctions to pressure obstructionist regimes, and we have the ability to freeze the assets of wrongdoers."

The Israeli lobby groups' influence is, of course, not confined to its members and associates in the White House. The lobby has a great influence in the US Congress as well. Its own current website verifies this influence by stating:

For more than half a century, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has worked to help make Israel more secure by ensuring that American support remains strong. From a small public affairs boutique in the 1950s, AIPAC has grown into a 100,000-member national grassroots movement described by The New York Times as "the most important organization affecting America's relationship with Israel."

Political advocacy is one of the most effective ways in which AIPAC works to accomplish its mission. Each year, AIPAC is involved in more than 100 legislative and policy initiatives aimed at broadening and deepening the U.S.-Israel bond.

Among the "more than 100 legislative and policy initiatives" that each year AIPAC helps to underwrite are the numerous sanctions bills against Iran that I alluded to above. Obviously, given the short space here, I can't elaborate on this and you have to wait until I finish my book.

As far as the second part of your question is concerned, I don't have an answer. That is, whether there are similar lobby groups in Israel that advocate for US interest is not something that I have followed.

Q. You have used the term USrael. What interpretation did you have in mind? What are the implications of this concept for international relation?

A. It seems that some individuals have attributed coining the term "USrael" to me. Unfortunately, I am not the originator of the term. It existed before it appeared in some of my essays. I used it in the sense that under the Bush Administration the US and Israel's foreign policy towards the Middle East converged and became virtually indistinguishable. As I explained earlier, this started to happen a few weeks after the events of the September 11, 2001, when the "neoconservatives" aligned the US policy in the Middle East with that of Likud. Given this alignment, there is no significant policy difference between the US and Israel over Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Syria or Lebanon. This was not the case under the previous administrations. For example, during the Clinton Administration the Likud and their "neoconservative" counterparts in the US were trying to toughen the US stand towards Iran. But near the end of the Clinton era US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, under the pressure from the US corporate lobby, tried to modify the direction of the US belligerent policy towards Iran, much to the dismay of the Israeli lobby groups. Her March 17, 2000, speech-in which she nearly apologized for the CIA's 1953 coup in Iran and spoke of the "regrettably shortsighted" US policy of supporting Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran war-was part of her attempt at rapprochement. We have not seen such rapprochements since the "neoconservatives" took over the US Middle East foreign policy and made it almost identical to that of Israel.

The nearly complete alignment of the US and Israel foreign policy has had a profound implication for the Middle East. For example, the US used to pretend to be an "honest broker" between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But now that veneer has mostly disappeared and the US does not even pretend to be a neutral mediator. Since post September 11, Israel has had a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians. It also has had a free hand in waging the summer of 2006 war against the people of Lebanon. Indeed, as the world watched, the US became the partner of Israel in that war. With regard to Iran, as I have argued above, the implication is clear. Israel and its various affiliates in the US are now the leading force in pushing the US in the direction of confrontation with Iran.

Q. How do you evaluate political developments in the US and Israel? For example, does the change in the balance of power in the US Congress or the coming to power of a different faction in Israel have any impact on strategic interest?

A. It is evident from what I stated earlier that historically both the Democratic and Republican Parties have supported the policy of "containment" of Iran since 1979. This support appears to continue in the future as well. For example, on January 24, 2007, The Jerusalem Post reported from Herzliya Conference in Israel that at "a time when most US Democrats are calling for less military involvement abroad Edwards of South Carolina told conference participants his country must do everything it can to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons." According to this report, Edwards, a leading Democratic presidential candidate stated: "All the options are on the table to ensure that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon." Similarly, the Associate Press of February 2, 2007, reported that Hilary Clinton, another leading Democratic presidential candidate, addressed an AIPAC event a day earlier and stated: "I have advocated engagement with our enemies and Israel's enemies." The prime "enemy" of both countries was, of course, Iran. According to the same report, Hilary Clinton, then stated that the "U.S. policy must be clear and unequivocal: We cannot, we should not, we must not permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons. . . In dealing with this threat . . . no option can be taken off the table." On the same day, the Associated Press reported that the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lashed out at Hilary Clinton and accused her of "timidity" regarding the security threat posed by Iran. Romney, according to the report, told the conservative Republicans that at "this point, we don't need a listening tour about Iran. . . Someone who wants to engage Iran displays a troubling timidity toward a terrible threat of a nuclear Iran." The same Mitt Romney also appeared at the Herzliya Conference, according to The Jerusalem Post, and stated that "Iran must be stopped, Iran can be stopped, and Iran will be stopped. . . The heart of the jihadist threat is Iran. . . I believe that Iran's leaders and ambitions represent the greatest threat to the world since the fall of the Soviet Union and before that Nazi Germany." In a more recent interview with ABC News on February 16, 2007, Mitt Romney called the whole nation of Iran "genocidal" and "suicidal," adding that "you say to yourself this is a setting where, of course, you have to consider the possibility of military action, but we're not there." The rest of the Republican presidential candidates are not much different. The same Jerusalem Post that I referred to above also stated that another "Republican hopeful Sen. John McCain said the US should 'intensify' its military support for Israel to ensure that the country maintained it strategic edge over those who were bent on destroying it such as Iran."

As we can see from the above, presidential candidates from both parties are singing the same tune. The question is which wing of the Israeli lobby groups will be put in charge of formulating the Middle East policy when one of these candidates is elected. Will it be Martin Indyk and Dennis Ross type or Wolfowitz and Perle kind?

Given that the US policy towards Iran is devised by different wings of the Israeli lobby groups, and given the affiliations of these groups with Israeli parties, it is natural to expect the same kind of mind set among the Israeli leaders. These leaders, too, are unified in their policy of "containment" of Iran. Whether it is Likud, Labor or Kadima party, the essence of the policy will remain the same. The only difference appears to be how each party or individual intends to "contain" Iran. Some Israeli politicians are more aggressive and fanatical in their "containment" policy than others. For example, in their campaign to demonize Iran, both Binyamin Netanyahu, the "hawkish" former Prime Minister, and Shimon Peres, the "dovish" former prime minister, have repeatedly compared today's Iran to Nazi Germany. But, according to the Agence France Presse of December 5, 2005, Benjamin Netanyahu promised "a pre-emptive air strike against Iran's nuclear installations if he were to be re-elected." Shimon Peres might think twice about such a strike.

Q. How does the US establish a balance between its relation with Arab allies and Israel?

A. Historically, successive US administrations have maintained a symbiotic relation with both their Arabs client states and Israel. At times US's alliance with the Arabs states has caused some annoyance on the part of Israel and its lobby groups. For example, in the early years of the Iran-Iraq war the US decided to sell Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) to Saudi Arabia to assist Saddam Hussein with intelligence. This decision did not sit well with some Israeli politicians and their allies in the US who were interested in "containing" Iraq first. Similar frictions and fissures have appeared at other times. The interesting issue is what has happened in recent times. Some "neoconservatives" in the Bush White House, such as David Wurmser-currently, Middle East adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney-who saw the policy of "dual containment" as too roundabout and time consuming, advocated adopting a new policy: "Dual Rollback of Iran and Iraq." According to this policy, the US was supposed to attack Iraq, bring the Shiite majority to power, use this power-which supposedly would be friendly to the US and Israel-as a counterweight to Shiite Iran, and then do a "regime change" in Iran. The policy, however, has so far not worked as planned. That is, the Iraqi Shiites have not challenged Iran or shown a great affection and admiration for the US and Israel. Given this reality, we now hear something new in the US-Israeli circle: a dangerous "Shiite crescent," headed by Iran, is appearing in the Middle East, stretching from Lebanon to Iraq and beyond. This crescent, we are told, must be defeated by an alliance of the US, Israel and Sunni Arab states. The implication of this policy is that Israel and its neoconservative allies in the US might no longer oppose a close relation between US and its traditional Arab client states, such as Saudi Arabia. The new policy is, of course, based on the old dictum of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." The US and Israel have played this game many times before in their pursuit of colonial domination, sometimes with costly blowbacks. The sad fact is that some Arab states appear to be going along with this old colonial trick and are joining the alliance against the "Shiite crescent."

Q. What is the role of Israel in pressuring Iran regarding the nuclear issue?

A. The role is extensive, particularly if you also include Israel's lobby groups and associates in the US. But showing how extensive it is requires writing a detailed account, which obviously I can't provide here. In my book I trace one of the first official claims about Iran making an atomic weapon to the "neoconservative" Kenneth L. Adelman. According to the July 1984 Department of State Bulletin, on May 2, 1984, Adelman-who was at the time the US Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency-gave an address before the "Mid-America Committee" in Chicago in which he spoke of some "frightening thoughts," such as Iran, Libya, or Palestine Liberation Organization acquiring a nuclear bomb. Adelman then stated that "today, talk about the spread of nuclear weapons to Iran is in the news. A British defense journal recently alleged that Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran is only 2 years away from acquiring nuclear weapons." Twenty three years later, we are still told by the "neoconservatives" and their counterparts in Israel that Iran is 2, 5 or 10 years away from the nuclear bomb. In my book I will provide details of twenty three years of such claims by the Israelis and their associates in the US. Let me just mention one interesting claim. Starting in 1992 Israelis and some "Iranian dissidents," who have been working closely with the Israeli intelligence, began to claim that Iran actually possesses three or four nuclear warheads. According to this claim, Iran had acquired these warheads from Kazakhstan, after the break up of the Soviet Union.

As late as 1998 the news still percolated within the Israeli, "Iranian dissidents" and some American circles. For example, on April 9, 1998, The Jerusalem Post stated: "Iran received several nuclear warheads from a former Soviet republic in the early 1990s and Russian experts maintained them, according to Iranian government documents relayed to Israel and obtained by The Jerusalem Post." "The documents," the Israeli newspaper went on to say, "deemed authentic by US congressional experts and still being studied in Israel, contain correspondence between Iranian government officials and leaders of the Revolutionary Guards that discusses Iran's successful efforts to obtain nuclear warheads from former Soviet republics." The paper then went on to say: "The documents appear to bolster reports from 1992 that Iran received enriched uranium and up to four nuclear warheads from Kazakhstan, with help from the Russian underworld." The following day The Jerusalem Post ran another piece on the same story. This time it claimed that "Iran paid $25 million for what appears to have been two tactical atomic weapons smuggled out of the former Soviet Union in a highly classified operation aided by technicians from Argentina, according to Iranian government documents marked top secret and obtained by The Jerusalem Post." All this, of course, was pure, sheer fabrication by Israel, their US allies and their "Iranian dissidents" partners. The sensational story, however, soon disappeared as the CIA and US government admitted that there was no truth to it. Afterward, the Israelis and their allies went back to estimating how soon Iran will have the atomic bomb; and since the bomb never materialized, they kept pushing the estimate back. Of course, as I will show in my book, the alleged Iranian bomb, similar to the proverbial "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, is an excuse. The real intention is to complete the "dual containment" by "containing" or destroying the one country that is still standing.

Q. The US is facing the anger of the Middle Eastern people as the result of its support for Israel. Is it possible to continue this? Or will the US reach a point when it will be ready to change the equation.

A: As long as the anger of the people of Middle East does not translate into overthrowing the corrupt, tyrannical and reactionary regimes in the Middle East who have symbiotic relation with the US and Israel, I don't see much fundamental change in the US foreign policy. So far, the anger has resulted mostly in sporadic, isolated and individual acts of violence. Such acts have removed the veneer of US being an "honest broker" between Israel and her opponents. Yet, at the same time, these actions have hardened the position of the US, brought her even closer to Israel and resulted in more acts of violence on the part of the US and Israel.

Q. How do you access the prospect of development in the Middle East in the next year?

A. It is very difficult and dangerous to predict the future, especially if one is familiar with the past and its complexities. This is particularly true if one is dealing with individuals who appear to be irrational or believe in a Hobbesian world. Will there be another election in Israel to bring back Binyamin Netanyahu to office? Will he fulfill his promise of "a pre-emptive air strike against Iran's nuclear installations if he were to be re-elected"? Will "neoconservatives" push for the use of a "shock and awe" air strike against Iran and carpet bomb Iranian nuclear and military sites, however irrational that action might appear to be to the rest of the world? Or will Iran capitulate, give up its right under Article IV of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and accept the US-Israeli demand-which is now backed by a UN sanction-to stop all enrichments activities? If Iran does accept this demand, what other demands will be put forward by the US and Israel, given that the nuclear issue, as I argued, is merely an excuse for "containment" of Iran? If Iran does not accept the demand, and if rational people around the world can stop the US and Israel from military adventurism, will there be more severe sanctions drafted against Iran by the UN? Will Russia and China be bribed, cajoled, arm twisted again to go along with these sanctions? Will these sanctions bring about what the US and Israel have been after for years, namely, to ruin the Iranian economy, bring about unrest, and make Iran ripe for a US invasion, as was the case in Iraq? These are difficult questions to answer and make predicting events in the future nearly impossible. The ultimate question, however, is this: is Iran ready to deal with all and every contingency? Does Iran know how this game is played and does it have a well-thought-of, well-articulated and unified game plan of its own? Is Iran fully aware that the US and Israel have patiently and meticulously worked for decades to push Iran into the current corner, where UN sanction has been finally imposed on it? Is Iran ready for the further tightening of the UN sanction noose? Could the economy of Iran, which is already under severe constraints, withstand further pressure? Are Iranians willing to tolerate additional economic hardship, such as the reduction in foreign investment, falling employment and rising inflation? Having carefully studies the history of the US-Israel-Iran entanglement, and having heard many voices from Iran, empty rhetoric and wishful thinking, I am not sure if the answers to the above questions are all affirmative.

Q. In your view is the confrontation of the US with Iran directed toward the strategic position of Iran and its potential impact in the region or is this effort directed to weaken the political and spiritual influence of Iran in the region?

A. It seems like most empires in the past the US does not tolerate disobedience and will not accept any challengers in the world, whether it is Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Somalia, Cuba or Venezuela it does not make much difference. Thus, it is not necessarily the strategic position of Iran or its political and spiritual influence in the region that has led to the confrontation between the two countries. The confrontation, as it is well known, goes back to 1979, when the US "lost" Iran. Ever since the US has been trying to bring back the old order and make Iran another obedient, client state. To use an American expression, until Iran says "uncle" to the US and Israel it is considered to be an "out law," a "rogue nation" that must be punished. Of course, the strategic position of Iran and its political alignment with groups such as Hamas and Hezbolah puts her on the top of the US's agenda.

Q. Will Iran be able to have the capacity to form an alliance against Israel in the region? Or will Iran be forced to collaborate with Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas to form an anti-Israel alliance as opposed to moderate Arab countries?

A. As mentioned earlier, having failed to achieve the desired result in Iraq, the US and Israel are now trying to create the myth of the Shiite crescent headed by Iran. As I also indicated, the traditional Arab client states of the US appear to be accepting this new myth and are going along with the idea of joining US and Israel in the "containment" of Iran. Whether Iran can change this trend appears to be doubtful given the nature of these Arab regimes and their long, historical, and symbiotic relation with the US. That leaves Iran with a very limited choice of allies, such as Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. But, obviously, this alliance doe not do much for Iran in terms of security. Actually, a major reason for the US-Israel policy of "containment," and the resulting insecurity that Iran faces, is Iran's support for groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. As I have argued elsewhere and will argue in my book, when the policy of "dual containment" was announced in the early 1990s, Iran was said to commit three "sins:" 1) sponsoring terrorism worldwide-which was meant support for Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad-2) opposing Middle East peace efforts-which was meant the Oslo "peace process"-and 3) developing weapons of mass destruction-which, at the time, was left ambiguously defined. The sin of opposing the Olso "peace process" was soon dropped out of the equation, since Israel opposed it as well. But the other two sins remained; and, to paraphrase Paul Wolfowitz's explanation for invading Iraq, for bureaucratic reasons the US and Israel settled on the issue of weapons of mass destruction as the core reason for "containing" Iran. In actuality, the main reason for Israel's belligerent policy towards Iran has been the latter's support for Hamas and Hezbollah. As long as that support remains, the attempt to "contain" Iran and the resulting insecurity will remain.

Q. Will Israel serve as pressure lever against Iran? Or will she, by exaggerating the nuclear threat of Tehran, try to create Western shield for itself?

A. Israel, as I have alluded to above and will show in my book, has been the prime force behind "containing" Iran since the end of the US invasion of Iraq in 1991 and the subsequent UN sanctions imposed on the country. Also, given what I said earlier, it is clear that Israel does not need a Western shield and is not really worried about Iran building a nuclear weapon. It is well known-and lately Olmert admitted it indirectly- that Israel has many nuclear warheads. With those warheads, and her advanced Western technology, Israel cannot possibly feel threatened by Iran supposedly developing a primitive nuclear bomb. As President Jacques Chirac stated in his January 31, 2007, interview with The New York Times: "Where would Iran drop this bomb? On Israel? . . It would not have gone off 200 meters into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed to the ground." As I have argued above, the issue of Iran allegedly developing a nuclear weapon is an excuse by the US and Israel to "contain" Iran in the same manner that they "contained" Iraq. The "containment" of Iraq, of course, did not go exactly as planned, but Iraq will be economically and militarily out of action for decades to come. For some of the architects of the US invasion of Iraq, this is a good enough "containment."

Note: This interview is available in Persian on Roozna's web site.

Alpha · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 7:49 pm Post subject:

The following came from General Jim David who is mentioned on the cover of former Republican Paul Findley's 'They Dare to Speak Out' book about the power/influence of the pro-Israel lobby (AIPAC, JINSA, etc.) on the US government/media:

From: BGJDAVID

Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 14:13:24 EDT
Subject: What motivated the hijackers on 9-11?

The next time someone asks you as to what motivated the hijackers to do what they did on 9-11, just give them this latest Amnesty International report to read and tell them that the United States is the one who gave the Israelis the bulldozers to do what they do. This is just one out of a hundred human rights violations that the Israelis are doing against the Palestinians with full approval by the United States. And our politicians in Washington turn a blind eye in order to appease the Jewish vote, the Jewish media, and the Jewish money while American blood and money pay for these crimes. We all need to call our Congressman/woman. I did today.

House Demolition/forced eviction
from Amnesty International, 27 April 2007
East Med Team
PUBLIC AI Index: MDE 15/029/2007

On 10 April, the Israeli army served demolition orders on all the residents of the Palestinian Bedouin village of Hadidiya, in the Jordan Valley in the east of the occupied West Bank, giving them until 21 April to leave their homes. The inhabitants of the village about 100 men, women and children from several families expect the tents and shacks where they live to be demolished any time. After previous demolitions they have pitched tents again in the village but now they face being forcibly removed from the land where they have lived for decades. Since receiving the orders, some families have left the village to take refuge in other villages, while other families have decided to remain in their homes until they are forcibly evicted.

The Bedouin as a group mostly live in tents off the produce of their herds of sheep and goats. The Palestinian Bedouin residents of Hadidiya have lived in the area since before the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel occupied the West Bank.

The village of Hadidiya was previously demolished in 1997, after its inhabitants had received orders for the demolition of their tents. The residents pitched tents and rebuilt shacks and appealed against the demolitions to the Civil Administration (the Israeli military administration of the West Bank) but lost their case. Five families
living in the village decided to appeal further to the Israeli High Court of Justice. On 10 December 2006 the High Court of Justice finally turned down this appeal. Palestinian appeals to the courts against home demolitions are almost invariably rejected.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

For years Israel has pursued a policy of discriminatory house demolition, allowing scores of Israeli settlements, illegal under international law, to be built on occupied Palestinian land, while confiscating Palestinian lands, refusing building permits for Palestinians and destroying their homes. In particular, there has been relentless pressure from the Israeli army in the West Bank on Palestinians from Bedouin groups to leave the areas where they have been accustomed to live and graze their flocks for decades. The reasons given by the Israeli courts e.g. lack of planning permission, land reserved for agricultural use or land in a military zone are used against Palestinians, while Israeli settlements continue to expand on Palestinian agricultural land. The land vacated has often been used for illegal settlements, such as the vast settlement of Maale Adumim near Jerusalem, which was built on land which was once used by Palestinian Bedouin.

Palestinians, including Palestinian Bedouin, in the Jordan Valley, much of which is now a military area or taken over by some 36 Israeli settlements, have suffered particular pressure. Since May 2005 Palestinians whose identity documents do not give the northern Jordan Valley as their place of residence are not allowed to live in the Jordan Valley. House demolition has been widely used as a means to force the Palestinian population to leave the Jordan Valley; then, living elsewhere, the army will not allow such Palestinians to return . Families often receive house demolition orders written in Hebrew, a language which most Palestinians do not understand or read; sometimes these orders are not given to the families but simply left on the land.

Families often only know of the order when the army arrives to demolish their homes.

RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible, in English, Hebrew or your own language:
- expressing concern that the residents of Hadidiya are facing the demolition of
their homes and calling for the demolition orders to be rescinded;
- calling on the Israeli authorities to stop immediately the destruction of Palestinian houses and other properties in the Occupied Palestinian Territories without absolute military necessity as prescribed by international humanitarian law.

APPEALS TO:
Tzipi Livni
Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs
Ministry of Foreign Affairs
9 Yitzhak Rabin Boulevard
Kiryat Ben-Gurion
Jerusalem 91035
Israel
Fax: +972 2 530 3367
Email: sar@mfa.gov.il
Salutation: Dear Minister

Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit
Military Judge Advocate General
David Elazar Street
Tel Aviv, Israel
Fax: +972 3 608 0366
Email: arbel@mail.idf.il
Salutation: Dear Judge Advocate General

Commander
District Coordination Office (DCO)
Jericho
Fax: +972 2 9943305
Salutation: Dear Sir
COPIES TO: diplomatic representatives of Israel accredited to your country.

PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY. Check with the International Secretariat, or your
section office, if sending appeals after 8 June 2007.

Working to protect human rights worldwide

Alpha · Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 6:09 am Post subject:

Mearsheimer/Walt & JINSA mentioned in 'Q & A' of Iraq panel:

http://www.booktv.org/feature/index.asp?segid=8172&schedID=485

See the 'America Divided' and 'Profiles in Terror' panel discussions via the following URL for how the Mearsheimer/Walt paper was mentioned and how the moderator of the 'Profiles in Terror' panel tried to cut off the America first patriot there who mentioned that the US was attacked on 9/11 because of US support for Israel:

http://www.booktv.org/feature/index.asp?segid=8170&schedID=485

Alpha · Posted: Thu May 03, 2007 7:15 am Post subject:

Jones began writing letters to the families of each and every U.S. soldier, sailor, and Marine killed in Iraq, a practice that he continues today. He's written more than 2,000 in all. He works on them every Saturday, alone in his office in Greenville. He can bear to do only a few at a time. "I can do four or five letters, and then I have to stop and do something else," he says. "And then I come back and do another five." Outside his office on Capitol Hill stands a forest of placards titled "Faces of the Fallen," bearing photographs of Americans killed in Iraq; there are so many that Jones' staff has to rotate the placards. Those not displayed on easels in the hall lean against a breakfront by his desk.
Gradually, one letter at a time, Jones' doubts about the war began to take shape. The failure of U.S. forces to uncover weapons of mass destruction gnawed at him, and the billions of dollars being spent added to his concern. He worried about President Bush's inability to enunciate clear goals for the war. "In all the president's speeches," Jones says, "I've never heard the president say that there is an end point."
Jones turned to those closest to him for guidance, including his pastor. Father Kerber recalls times that he and Jones would pray about important decisions, sometimes getting down on their knees in Jones' congressional office. "He's told me of the anguish he felt about the deaths in Iraq," he says. "He would talk to me after Mass to say that his heart was so disturbed."
Then—"as God would have it," Jones says—his daughter, who works for the state agriculture department in Raleigh, gave him a gift that changed everything. For his long drives back and forth between Washington, D.C., and Farmville, a lonely trip down Interstate 95 that can take five or six hours, she presented him with an audiotape of James Bamford's A Pretext for War, a scathing indictment of the Bush administration's abuse of prewar intelligence that excoriates the neoconservatives who hyped the threat from Iraq. The revelations opened Jones' eyes. "I was so concerned that I bought the book so I could highlight it." Jones invited Bamford to lunch and then brought him back to Capitol Hill for an off-the-record dinner with two dozen members of Congress. Bamford, a former investigative producer for ABC News who has written widely on in-telligence issues, was impressed. "The vast majority of people in Congress, once they make a mistake, don't want to admit it, which is why I have a lot of admiration for Walter Jones," he says. "Until then, he had felt the emotion of the war and the casualties, but he hadn't focused on the lies and the distortion and the exaggeration involved in the period before the war."

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/01/the_three_conversions_of_walter_b_jones.html

The Three Conversions of Walter B. Jones
From freedom fries to Marine funerals, a Southern Republican’s road to Damascus.
Robert Dreyfuss
January/February 2006 Issue UNTIL THE CONGRESSMAN from North Carolina spoke, the hearings were proceeding routinely. The Armed Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives was convened on April 6 in a stately room in the Rayburn office building to consider the progress of the war in Iraq; much of the testimony was barely more animated than the paintings of deceased legislators adorning the walls. Richard Perle, a former Pentagon adviser and one of the war's principal architects, had taken the witness chair. He was serene and unflappable as he answered questions about the Pentagon budget, oil prices, and the training of Iraqi troops.
Then the chairman called on Rep. Walter B. Jones. Glaring at the witness, Jones quoted a statement from Perle's testimony suggesting that the administration had been misled in its assessment of Iraq by "double agents planted by the regime." The congressman's voice quavered as he demanded an apology to the country. "It is just amazing to me how we as a Congress were told we had to remove this man, but the reason we were given was not accurate."
"I went to a Marine's funeral that left a wife and three children, twins he never saw," Jones said, his voice cracking as his eyes began to water. "And I'll tell you—I apologize, Mr. Chairman, but I am just incensed at this statement." He continued, "When you make a decision as a member of Congress and you know that decision is going to lead to the death of American boys and girls, some of us take that pretty seriously, and it's very heavy on our hearts."
Jones wasn't the first erstwhile war supporter in Congress to have second thoughts; lawmakers like Senator Chuck Hagel and North Carolina Rep. Howard Coble preceded him in that reversal, and in November, most of the Senate's Republicans voted for a resolution calling on the administration to "explain to the American people its strategy for the successful completion of the mission." No less a figure than the Senate Armed Services Committee chair, Senator John Warner, a Virginia Republican and one of the Senate's old bulls, has warned that the point is approaching when support of the war may no longer be politically tenable.
Yet among all the defections, Jones' may be the most telling. The courtly 62-year-old Republican represents North Carolina's flag-waving 3rd District, home to the U.S. Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune. He is known to his constituents as a staunchly conservative Christian, and known to the nation and the world for his insistence, back during the lead-up to war in 2003, that House cafeterias replace French fries on the menu with "freedom fries." He banished French toast, too. "A lot of us are very disappointed in the French attitude," Jones said then.
Against that backdrop, Jones' road to Damascus may seem especially long. But in truth, his conversion did not come about in spite of his conservative politics, his religious beliefs, his own military background, and his Marine constituency. It came about because of them.
FARMVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA, is a bucolic village of barely three square miles and fewer than 5,000 residents—including Jones, who was born here in 1943. The town sits at the center of the state's tobacco belt, anchoring Pitt County's role as the state's largest producer of flue-cured tobacco. On a sunny October day, bright white balls of cotton glisten along the approach to the tiny downtown, a no-nonsense place whose blocks are lined with auto parts stores, body shops, and farm equipment vendors. Columned mansions, some in need of upkeep, sit beside neatly manicured Victorians, modest bungalows, and shacks. At the very heart of Farmville, outside the Town Hall, stretches a shaded expanse of green beset with benches, a fountain, a gazebo, and a plaque announcing the Walter B. Jones Town Common. The park is named after Jones' late father, a political icon who represented Farmville and environs in Congress from 1966 to 1992.
The "Faces of the Fallen" exhibit outside Jones' office has grown so large that extra posters are stored by his desk.
Jones Sr. was a feisty Carolina Democrat, and virtually everyone here knows his name. He was "kind of a liberal Democrat, but he disguised it in populist rhetoric," says Carmine Scavo, a political science professor at East Carolina University. A Baptist who believed in traditional family values long before the term became a GOP catchphrase, Jones sent his son to Virginia's Hargrave Military Academy, whose mission statement promises a "wholesome environment in which the Christian faith and principles pervade all aspects of the school program." The young Jones was a star athlete known for his ability to hit long-range jump shots, remembers Millie Lilley, whose husband later taught and coached at Hargrave. "He hoped to go to North Carolina State to play basketball."
Hargrave did vault Jones into N.C. State, though not into the basketball program; it also planted the seed for his life's first major conversion. One day on the Hargrave campus, Jones glanced through an open door and spied a fellow cadet on his knees, saying the rosary. "I was impressed by his devoutness," he says. Jones began thinking and reading about Catholicism. "I didn't so much get into the history of the church as I got into the ritual," he recalls. When he was 31, he formally converted. "I haven't missed a Sunday Mass in 30 years," he says proudly.
Switching religious allegiances was not a minor decision at a time when many in the Bible Belt viewed Catholicism "almost like it was some sect," says Lilley, who now runs Jones' congressional office in Greenville. But Jones' epiphany, she notes, was rooted in his personality more than religious dogma. "He likes the way Catholic services are organized. He likes knowing what to expect."
"He knows the Bible," adds Father Justin Kerber of St. Peter's Catholic Church in Greenville. "I think that comes from his Protestant background." Kerber is a soft-spoken, gray-haired priest from New Jersey who strongly supports President Bush. His church, a modern structure in sandy brown brick whose square cupola is filled with arty stained-glass windows, draws on a growing number of Catholics in eastern North Carolina, including Mexican immigrants and Yankee retirees. Every Saturday afternoon, when he is in town, Jones attends the 5 p.m. Mass, always sitting in the back pew.
Jones went from N.C. State to Atlantic Christian College, served in the National Guard, and settled into a job with a wine broker. "At the time I didn't know a burgundy from a Bordeaux," he says. His territory comprised all of North Carolina and parts of southern Virginia, a region not too distant from the Capitol, where his father was working. He rarely visited him there. "I never had the interest," he says. "I'm a small-town guy."
That would change, setting into motion the second major conversion of Jones' life. In 1982, the district Democratic Party chose Jones to fill out the term of a state assemblyman who'd died. Suddenly, the conservative Christian wine salesman found himself following in his father's political footsteps. With near-universal name recognition, he was reelected again and again. Then, in 1992, Walter B. Jones Sr. fell ill and retired from Congress. In the election that followed, young Jones ran for the seat his father had held—and lost in the primary to Eva Clayton, a liberal, labor-backed county commissioner. That defeat, and the suspicion that North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt had backed Clayton, soured him on the party of his father, his family, and most of his neighbors. What finally pushed him over the edge were his antiabortion beliefs.
"I talked to my father," he says. "I told him, ‘I'm going to change my party affiliation.' And—I give my right hand to my Lord and Savior—he said, ‘I understand that.'" A few months later, Walter B. Jones Sr. was dead. In the Republican landslide of 1994, his son rode Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America" to a seat in Congress.
At first, Jones was a loyal soldier in Gingrich's revolutionary army. He backed tax cuts, a redesigned welfare system, the Balanced Budget Amendment, and more money for the Pentagon. The handbook Politics in America described him as "one of the unreconstructed ‘true believers' of the GOP Class of 1994."
But, like the celluloid Mr. Smith, soon after Mr. Jones went to Washington he found himself disillusioned. The machinations of lobbyists, the power of money, and the ego-driven politics of the nation's capital upset him. "Christ was a man of humility," he says. "Washington is a city of arrogance." Still, when George W. Bush declared a war on terror, and then took that war to Iraq, Jones was an early, firm, and vocal supporter. He believed what the Bush administration said about Iraq's connections to Al Qaeda and about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, and he became one of the war's strongest advocates.
The idea that catapulted Jones into the headlines back then came from Cubbies, a chain of restaurants in eastern North Carolina. In Greenville, Cubbies' black awning spreads out over the corner of Evans Street and East 5th, and signs proclaim: "Voted #1 Cheeseburger and Hot Dog in Pitt County." Inside, the place is packed with sports memorabilia and "Go Pirates" posters. Rough-hewn wood tables surround a comfortable bar. There are 13 Cubbies in North Carolina, including one in downtown Farmville and another in Beaufort, just outside the Cherry Point Naval Air Station. Neal Rowland, who owns the Cubbies franchise in Beaufort, first introduced "freedom fries" in February 2003, and soon customers were clamoring for them at every Cubbies. Jones "was inspired by it," says Rowland. "He came in, and we chitchatted and talked." Back in Washington, Jones prevailed on Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), the chairman of the House Administration Committee, to rewrite the menus on Capitol Hill. With hindsight, it's not one of his proudest moments. "I wish it had never happened," he says now.
Just two months after the French fry incident came the event that would set off Jones' third conversion—the memorial ceremony for Marine Sergeant Michael Bitz. Bitz was a 31-year-old amphibian assault vehicle driver who was killed in Nasiriyah on March 23, 2003, while trying to evacuate wounded troops. The young Marine left behind a wife, Janina, a two-year-old son, and a pair of newborn twins. His funeral was held on the grounds of Camp Lejeune, on the banks of the New River. Jones watched the Marines fold the flag that had draped the coffin and hand it to Janina Bitz as her toddler wandered close by. "She read from the last letter that he sent her," he recalls. "I had tears running from my eyes." The little boy, Joshua, dropped a toy, and a young Marine in dress uniform stooped to pick it up, handing it to the child. "And the boy looked up at him, and the Marine looked down, and then it hit me: This little boy would never know his daddy." The tableau affected Jones in a way that he struggles to explain. "This was a spiritual happening for me," he says. "I think at that point I fully understood the loss that a family feels." Driving home to Farmville that day, grief swelled in him. "The whole way, 72 miles, I was thinking about what I just witnessed. I think God intended for me to be there."
Jones began writing letters to the families of each and every U.S. soldier, sailor, and Marine killed in Iraq, a practice that he continues today. He's written more than 2,000 in all. He works on them every Saturday, alone in his office in Greenville. He can bear to do only a few at a time. "I can do four or five letters, and then I have to stop and do something else," he says. "And then I come back and do another five." Outside his office on Capitol Hill stands a forest of placards titled "Faces of the Fallen," bearing photographs of Americans killed in Iraq; there are so many that Jones' staff has to rotate the placards. Those not displayed on easels in the hall lean against a breakfront by his desk.
Gradually, one letter at a time, Jones' doubts about the war began to take shape. The failure of U.S. forces to uncover weapons of mass destruction gnawed at him, and the billions of dollars being spent added to his concern. He worried about President Bush's inability to enunciate clear goals for the war. "In all the president's speeches," Jones says, "I've never heard the president say that there is an end point."
Jones turned to those closest to him for guidance, including his pastor. Father Kerber recalls times that he and Jones would pray about important decisions, sometimes getting down on their knees in Jones' congressional office. "He's told me of the anguish he felt about the deaths in Iraq," he says. "He would talk to me after Mass to say that his heart was so disturbed."
Then—"as God would have it," Jones says—his daughter, who works for the state agriculture department in Raleigh, gave him a gift that changed everything. For his long drives back and forth between Washington, D.C., and Farmville, a lonely trip down Interstate 95 that can take five or six hours, she presented him with an audiotape of James Bamford's A Pretext for War, a scathing indictment of the Bush administration's abuse of prewar intelligence that excoriates the neoconservatives who hyped the threat from Iraq. The revelations opened Jones' eyes. "I was so concerned that I bought the book so I could highlight it." Jones invited Bamford to lunch and then brought him back to Capitol Hill for an off-the-record dinner with two dozen members of Congress. Bamford, a former investigative producer for ABC News who has written widely on in-telligence issues, was impressed. "The vast majority of people in Congress, once they make a mistake, don't want to admit it, which is why I have a lot of admiration for Walter Jones," he says. "Until then, he had felt the emotion of the war and the casualties, but he hadn't focused on the lies and the distortion and the exaggeration involved in the period before the war."
That was last winter. Since then, Jones has met with numerous opponents of the administration's Iraq policy, including conservatives such as General Anthony Zinni, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, and General William E. Odom of the Hudson Institute, a former director of the National Security Agency. He has sat down in his office with antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan.
Last June, along with Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), Jones introduced a resolution presaging the one his Senate Republican colleagues would pass a few months later, but with one key difference: Jones' version would have required the administration to develop a specific timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. He titled it Homeward Bound.
THE KETTLE DINER is as close as you'll get to the center of daily social life in Jacksonville, North Carolina. It sits astride Marine Boulevard, the city's main drag, which is lined with tattoo and piercing parlors, thrift stores, pawn shops, Saigon Sam's souvenir shop, and Crazy Cuts ("Specializing in military haircuts"). Inside the Kettle Diner on an overcast fall afternoon, Mac McGee, a 26-year veteran of the Marines and a leader of the Military Order of the Purple Heart, is sipping coffee. McGee is 68—his hair, still buzz cut, is gray now. He served three tours in Vietnam. On Iraq, he says, "We need some sort of exit strategy. We don't want another Vietnam, and let's face it, that's where we're headed." Do the boys at Camp Lejeune want out of the war? "They haven't said it," he says. "But I'm sure they're starting to feel that way. I think they're starting to get tired."
Randy Reichler, who shows up at the Kettle later that afternoon, works at Camp Lejeune; he says that when Jones first announced his shift, the anger on the base was palpable. A thin, angular man with blue eyes and gray hair that tumbles down into sideburns, Reichler runs Camp Lejeune's Retired Affairs Office, helping Marines plan their transition back to civilian life. Many people on the base "believe that Jones' statements did hurt us," he says, and some have accused him of wanting "to cut and run, give aid to the enemy." But still, he adds, "some of them say, ‘You know what? We do need an exit strategy.'"
In his office, Jones keeps a portrait of six-year-old Tyler Jones, whose father was killed in Iraq in 2003.
Around the district, reaction to Jones' shift was similarly mixed. "It was about half and half," Jones guesses—an estimate that dovetails with a statewide poll last summer by the Raleigh News and Observer, which found that only 42 percent of Tarheel voters felt the war had been worthwhile. Jones' staffers recall fielding outraged phone calls from veterans, military retirees, and conservative activists. "The phone would ring, and you could tell what was coming just by their tone of voice," says Lilley. There were murmurs about a primary challenge in 2006. But Jones made repeated trips to Jacksonville and explained his stance, holding no-holds-barred town meetings and confronting his critics.
The strategy worked. At the Barnes & Noble café in Greenville, Steve Moore, a beefy retired teacher, says that "what Jones did made my eyes pop open." But, adds Moore—a longtime Democrat who has been voting Republican the past few years—opinion in Farmville is no longer uniformly pro-war. "I'm totally surprised," he says, "at how much opposition to the war there is." A few tables over, Bohdan Leskiw, whose brother served in the Marines, says pushing the president on a timeline for withdrawal "doesn't sound like a bad idea. We can't really send out men to fight and die in that situation."
Brian Colligan, editorial page editor of the Greenville Daily Reflector, says he too has noticed a change. "Especially in the areas around the military bases, you tend to get the expected blind support of the troops and of the war, at least until recently," he says, sitting in his sun-filled office at the paper. "Now people are beginning to separate the two. And it's interesting that Jones has been on the leading edge of that change in sentiment."
In Washington, the congressman's shift has been greeted with less enthusiasm. "Lately, we've been hearing a lot from the ‘blame America first' crowd," says Rep. Robin Hayes (R.-N.C.), without naming Jones specifically. "It is wrong to cut and run on the Iraqi people." The pro-war writer Chris- topher Hitchens called Jones a "moral and political cretin." And when President Bush came to Fayetteville, North Carolina, to give a speech on Iraq last June, Jones was not invited.
The snub from the commander in chief didn't faze the congressman, who has begun disagreeing with Republican leaders on other hot-button topics. He remains one of the House's most visible Christian conservatives; among his legislative goals is a bill—prompted by his discovery of a children's book on two kings who get married to each other—that would create local councils to monitor books in libraries and schools. But on other issues he regularly departs from the party line; he has clashed with the GOP leadership on environmental legislation and voted against the No Child Left Behind Act as well as President Bush's prescription drug plan. The wave of scandals and investigations currently rocking Washington, he says, "might be an opportunity for a purge. The sun has got to shine."
Mostly, Jones has been busy recruiting other Republicans to support his push to hold the administration accountable on Iraq. He's won over at least a half-dozen. "All we're trying to do," he says, "is to start a debate about bringing an end to the war." He insists he isn't worried his independent streak might lose him favor with the White House, party leaders, constituents, or anyone else. Sitting in his Capitol Hill office, the Faces of the Fallen standing sentry in the hall, he has the air of a man utterly convinced of his decision. "I didn't come up here to seek power or to get a chairmanship," he says. "I want to do what I think my Lord wants me to do."
Robert Dreyfuss is a contributing writer for Mother Jones.
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http://www.petitiononline.com/wolfgone/petition.html

Remove Wolf Blitzer, the ex AIPAC and Jerusalem Post employee
from CNN.

To: CNN
As a free and unbiased press is of vital interest to the peace and progress of the world, we demand that CNN remove Wolf Blitzer from his influential position in its corporation.

Mr. Blitzer cannot be expected to report the news as it pertains to Jews, Israel, and the Middle East in an unbiased and honest way. As a former writer for the extreme pro-Israel organization and lobby group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and as a former employee of the Israeli
newspaper the Jerusalem Post, Blitzer’s biases are obvious. Would CNN hire a Palestinian with these same strong connections to Palestinian causes?

In the interest of a truly free unbiased press, we petition CNN to remove Wolf Blitzer from his position as a CNN anchor.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

War Without End

The global war against terror, news about the illegal invasion of Iraq, the corporate puppet presidents, the war criminal Tony Blair, September 11th 2001, the USS Liberty and New World Order crimes against humanity.

The Gorilla in the Room is US Support for Israel - page 4