| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 7:48 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 ones 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 | | | | 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.
E-mail article | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu May 03, 2007 7:27 am Post subject: |
| http://www.antiwar.com/orig/giraldi.php?articleid=10900
May 2, 2007
A High Price to Pay for Ignorance
Philip Giraldi
The Pentagon and White House continue to argue that they are not planning a war against Iran in spite of the continuing buildup of naval forces in the Persian Gulf, which will peak with the arrival of a third carrier group at the end of May. The naval aviation and missile resources available, which are not being used to support combat operations in neighboring Iraq, far exceed any reasonable level required to send Iran a warning or to reassure Gulf Arab allies. The carrier concentration has even weakened U.S. ability to respond militarily elsewhere, most particularly in the Western Pacific, where an unpredictable North Korea continues to pose a genuine threat. Multiple carrier groups in the Persian Gulf can only mean that another preemptive war, this time against Iran, is either about to take place or is being viewed as a serious option.
Critics of an air and naval assault on Iran have provided many good reasons why war between Washington and Tehran would be a disaster for U.S. global interests, ranging from a spike in oil prices to the unleashing of worldwide terrorism. What is not being appreciated clearly either by the media or policy-makers is the central dilemma in war planning with Iran, which is the apparent lack of reliable intelligence on Iranian intentions and capabilities. Planning for war without good information has a surreal quality, like a blind man trying to describe something he cannot see, with guesses and "what-ifs" replacing certainties.
There has been a notable silence on Iran coming from the intelligence community. Late in 2006, shortly before he was forced to resign over his unwillingness to cook the intelligence on Iran, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte responded to congressional criticism by conceding that there were major deficiencies in what information was being obtained about the Islamic Republic. Since that time, a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran has been stalled because of White House demands that the product be more useful, i.e., demonstrative of Iranian bad behavior and intentions. CIA analysis suggests that it cannot be demonstrated that Tehran currently has a nuclear weapons program, though the case either for or against Iran rests on a paucity of information, not on a solid understanding of what is going on inside the country and among its leadership. On a purely practical level, leaving moral and ethical considerations aside, until the United States can answer key questions about Iran, including its ability to retaliate, its terrorism resources, and the nature and location of its nuclear program, no military action should be contemplated.
The impending intelligence failure on Iran is very similar to that which took place regarding Iraq, and for many of the same reasons. From a practical point of view, it is very difficult to spy on a country if you do not have an embassy in its capital and also have an embargo or sanctions in place that prohibit business relations. It is even more difficult when that country has a very small group of decision-makers that control all information carefully. Spy fiction notwithstanding, most effective agents are volunteers who offer to provide their services, whether for money or for idealism. Oleg Penkovsky, the Russian who was the most important Western spy of the 20th century, was an idealistic volunteer who had to make several attempts to contact the British and American embassies in Moscow before he finally succeeded. Put simply, when the volunteer cannot reach you, you don't have any spies. It is reasonable to assume that America has very few real spies inside Iran.
Politicians who are ignorant of the Middle East frequently confuse advocacy with intelligence and allow the former to become the basis for policy formulation, sometimes by default. Lacking good intelligence resources, much so-called information that is reaching policy-makers in Washington comes from émigré groups and lobbyists with an agenda – again very much like what happened in the lead-up to the Iraq war. These groups are all interested in emphasizing the threat from Iran, not in objective analysis that might exonerate the mullahs.
The leading Iranian émigré group is the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which pretends to have a network of independent sources within Iran but actually is largely dependent on information from Israeli intelligence. The "critical analysis" of events in Iran that reaches policy-makers in Washington frequently comes from it and other lobbying and advocacy groups such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), all of which share an "Iran agenda" that calls for regime change. AIPAC is known to be the source of a position paper on Iran that most congressmen rely on to shape their own views. Israel's advocates, including peripatetic politicians such as ex-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, make frequent visits to the United States, where they have good access to the media and potential supporters, to reinforce the case that Iran must be dealt with forcefully.
There is also a tactical problem caused by poor intelligence. Without good information, Iran's nuclear program becomes hard to target in a military sense, and a massive air and sea attack might not even solve the alleged problem. There are hundreds of known nuclear-related targets in Iran, with many others still undiscovered and hidden. Many of the sites are located in cities, meaning that an attempt to take them out would result in numerous civilian casualties. Iran has been preparing for an American attack for some years, and there are reports that many of the sites are deep underground and hardened with layers of concrete, meaning that a genuine attempt to completely destroy them could require tactical nuclear weapons. The unilateral use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. would change the world, and not for the better, as it would let the genie out of the bottle and create the worst possible precedent for other nuclear powers like India, Pakistan, and Israel.
Poor intelligence also means that Iran's capacity for retaliation is unclear. If one of the purposes of war is to inflict more damage on the enemy than the enemy inflicts on you, it is essential to know your foe's capabilities. One possible retaliatory scenario considered to be likely and currently being war-gamed by the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies involves Iran's stirring-up of its Shi'ite co-religionists in neighboring Iraq against American forces, cutting supply lines and making every Iraqi neighborhood a safe haven for insurgents. Today's chaos in Baghdad would look positively benign in comparison to the national uprising that would ensue.
Iran could also use its missiles and biological and chemical weapons to strike against other U.S. forces in the region, in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar. It could effectively attack regional U.S. friends and allies such as the Emirates, Kuwait, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. It might, for example, call on the Shi'ite majority in Bahrain to rebel and overthrow the Sunni emir, leading to an immediate loss of the base for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. It almost certainly would use Silkworm missiles and suicide boats to close the narrow Straits of Hormuz, cutting off petroleum from the entire Gulf region and driving oil up to $400 per barrel. If it were really lucky, it could sink an American aircraft carrier.
Worldwide, Iran could have Hezbollah terrorist cells believed to be underground in the United States and Europe stage terrorist attacks. It could destabilize all of Asia by assassinating Presidents Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, possibly resulting in an Islamic Republic in Pakistan that would be armed both with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Attacking Iran for the wrong reasons and with the same poor intelligence that produced the Iraq catastrophe would cause American influence and power to collapse throughout the Middle East and central Asia, an extremely high price to pay for ignorance. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu May 03, 2007 8:03 am Post subject: |
| 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 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat May 12, 2007 3:03 am Post subject: |
| General Jim David (who wrote the following) is mentioned on the cover of Paul Findley's 'They Dare to Speak Out' book (third edition) as mentioned prior:
From: BGJDAVID
Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 10:27:21 EDT
Subject: U.S. Policy a failure in the Middle East
After reading the below article you will understand why the United States must bear much of the responsibility for the ongoing unrest and violence in the Middle East. By arming Israel with the vast military arsenal that we have done so in the past and continue to do today, the Israelis have always used heavy bombardment, militarism and revenge on other countries, as a means of accomplishing their objective but as Lebanese Prime Minister Saniora says "militarism and revenge are not the answer to instability; compromise and diplomacy are.''
One must wonder if Israel's lobby in Washington hasn't done more harm than good with its extortion tactics in corrupting our politicians in becoming "yes" men for Israel and making Zionism our mandatory State religion. I am one who believes that the attack on 9-11 and the war in Iraq would've never occured if the U.S. wasn't so supportive Israel's brutal and illegal occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and of the 22 years in Southern Lebanon.
05/11: AOL News: Saniora Criticizes Israeli War Inquiry
Saniora Criticizes Israeli War Inquiry
.c The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) - Lebanon's prime minister in an op-ed piece published Friday in The New York Times urged Israel to work for a Middle East settlement based on an Arab peace initiative, and said the United States can help the parties compromise.
Prime Minister Fuad Saniora also criticized an Israeli inquiry into last summer's war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah for failing to address the huge losses and damage inflicted on Lebanon by Israel's massive bombardment.
``The July war proved that militarism and revenge are not the answer to instability; compromise and diplomacy are,'' Saniora wrote. ``This should be the impetus for Israel to seek a comprehensive solution based on the Arab Peace Initiative.''
The initiative promises full peace with Arab nations in return for Israel's withdrawal from territories captured in the 1967 war and the creation of a Palestinian state. It also calls for a ``just solution'' to the issue of Palestinian refugees.
The Israeli government had no immediate comment Friday on Saniora's call. Israel has expressed reservations about the initiative and the United States has lauded the offer as a possible basis for reviving the Arab-Israeli peace process.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Thursday met in Cairo with her counterparts from Egypt and Jordan, two Arab nations that have peace treaties with the Jewish state. Cairo and Amman are trying to persuade Israel to accept the Arab peace initiative.
With the U.S. support and that of other international partners, ``we hope to use the Arab Peace Initiative as the foundation to finally bring about a comprehensive peace to our troubled region,'' Saniora wrote.
``Leading these peace efforts is not only an American responsibility, it is in the United States' interests: Peace in the Middle East would offer a gateway to reconciliation with the Muslim world during these times of increased divisiveness and radicalism,'' he wrote in the piece.
Saniora said that Arabs, too, have legitimate security concerns.
``The only way for the people of Israel and the Arab world to achieve stability and security is through a comprehensive peace settlement to the overarching Arab-Israeli conflict,'' he wrote. ``The inevitable alternative is increased extremism, intolerance and destruction.''
Israel's military campaign last summer sought to crush the pro-Iranian and pro-Syrian Hezbollah and win release of two Israeli soldiers the militants kidnapped in a cross-border raid that triggered the conflict.
Israel, however, failed to achieve those goals as Hezbollah militants fired thousands of rockets into Israel during the conflict and, although pushed back from the border, are still armed today.
The fighting ended with a U.N.-brokered cease-fire that called for deployment of U.N. peacekeepers and Lebanese troops in southern Lebanon along the border with Israel.
The Winograd commission, an Israeli government-appointed inquiry into the war, has said that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was responsible for ``very severe failures'' in the conflict that ended inconclusively and killed more than 1,200 combatants and civilians, most of them in Lebanon.
05/11/07 05:32 EDT | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu May 24, 2007 12:49 am Post subject: |
| From: "E.A. Richards"
Subject: Re: US enabling of the following kind of attack by Israel against the Palestinians was the primary motivation for 9/11 and the earlier attack on the World Trade Center in 1993
Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 08:39:08 -0500
The de facto capitol of the United States is Jerusalem; the capital of the United States is controlled by Jerusalem.
When will the American people wake up to realism?
Dr. E.A. Richards, P.E.
http://my.execpc.com/~drer/ear1.htm
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2007 6:43 AM
Subject: Re: US enabling of the following kind of attack by Israel against the Palestinians was the primary motivation for 9/11 and the earlier attack on the World Trade Center in 1993
Look what CBS News consultant (and former CIA analyst) Michael Scheuer had to say about unqualified support for Israel via the following URL (why doesn't CBS News and the other mainstream news networks make this known to the US public - we already know the answer as Paul Findley also addresses such in his 'They Dare to Speak Out' book which Jim is mentioned on the cover of!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHyUhdRFbB8
Take a look at the following URL as well:
http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2007/05/enormous-injustice-perpetrated-in-1948.html
Israeli airstrike kills 8 in Gaza Strip
By SARAH EL DEEB, Associated Press Writer 29 minutes ago
Palestinian rockets slammed into southern Israel on Monday morning after an Israeli airstrike hit a Hamas lawmaker's house and killed eight people in the deadliest attack of a renewed Israeli campaign against incessant rocket fire.
The Israeli airstrike Sunday night, which followed a government decision to step up operations against Islamic militants, hit the house of lawmaker Khalil al-Haya, who was not at home and was unharmed.
At least 13 people were wounded. All the dead and wounded were relatives and neighbors, his wife said. Hamas said two of the dead were militants.
Army spokeswoman Capt. Noa Meir said the airstrike was not aimed at al-Haya, but at a group of five armed Hamas men, including a senior militant, near the home.
"They, and only they, were the target, and they were hit," Meir said. Any civilian casualties, she said, "were the result of the terrorists' use of civilians as human shields."
Israel resumed its airstrikes in Gaza last week in response to increased Palestinian rocket fire at southern Israeli towns. The airstrikes have killed 36 Palestinians, most of them Hamas militants.
Early Monday, Israeli aircraft struck four more times in Gaza, the army said, killing a Hamas militant. The military said two of the targets were weapons factories. Palestinians said one was a cement factory and the other was a house.
The Israeli operations have not managed to stem the Palestinian rocket fire, and militants fired four more rockets at Israel on Monday morning.
There were no casualties. But several people have been wounded in recent days, and the rockets have severely disrupted life in the southern border town of Sderot, the militants' main target.
The Israeli airstrikes appeared to have helped cement a truce between the warring Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah that began to take hold after a week of intense violence.
"No one would condone fighting one another while the Israelis are shelling Gaza," said Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum.
At the time of Sunday night's airstrike, Al-Haya was attending an Egyptian-sponsored truce meeting meant to bring Hamas and Fatah together.
Barhoum said the attack was a sign that Israel is targeting "everyone — civilians and leaders."
"This escalation is very serious," he said, adding that "all options are open" for responding.
U.S. Ambassador Richard Jones gave a boost of support to the Israeli campaign, but urged Israel to do its best to avoid harming civilians.
"We constantly urge Israel to target its response as closely as possible at those who are responsible for the actions, and to avoid innocent collateral damage," Jones said at an academic conference Monday. "I don't think that we urge restraint, but we do urge people to be very clear that they're focused on those who are actually responsible for acts of terror against Israel."
The Israeli government decided Sunday to step up military action aimed at Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two main Islamic militant groups in Gaza.
"The operations will focus on Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, who are responsible for the current escalation," the government said in a statement. It stopped short of approving a large-scale ground invasion or endorsing attacks on Hamas' political leadership.
In an interview with Army Radio on Monday, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter called for the assassination of Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, who lives in exile in the Syrian capital of Damascus.
"Khaled Mashaal isn't immune, not in Damascus and not anywhere else. I'm convinced that at the first opportunity, we will bid him farewell," Dichter said. A Dichter aide told The Associated Press that he was expressing his personal opinion, not government policy.
Israel's attacks have been restricted to the Gaza Strip so far. But in a sign of a possible crackdown in the West Bank, Israeli troops raided two radio stations and one TV channel identified with Hamas early Monday in the city of Nablus, along with two independent TV stations. The troops confiscated equipment and videotapes, workers at the stations said, and all five went off the air.
The army had no immediate comment.
BGJDAVID wrote:
After reading the below article you will understand why the United States must bear much of the responsibility for the ongoing unrest and violence in the Middle East. By arming Israel with the vast military arsenal that we have done so in the past and continue to do today, the Israelis have always used heavy bombarment, militarismon and revenge on other countries, as a means of accomplishing their objective but as Lebanese Prime Minister Saniora says "militarism and revenge are not the answer to instability; compromise and diplomacy are.''
One must wonder if Israel's lobby in Washington hasn't done more harm than good with its extortion tactics in corrupting our politicians in becoming "yes" men for Israel and making Zionism our mandatory State religion. I am one who believes that the attack on 9-11 and the war in Iraq would've never occured if the U.S. wasn't so supportive Israel's brutal and illegal occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and of the 22 years in Southern Lebanon.
05/11: AOL News: Saniora Criticizes Israeli War Inquiry
Saniora Criticizes Israeli War Inquiry
.c The Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) - Lebanon's prime minister in an op-ed piece published Friday in The New York Times urged Israel to work for a Middle East settlement based on an Arab peace initiative, and said the United States can help the parties compromise.
Prime Minister Fuad Saniora also criticized an Israeli inquiry into last summer's war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah for failing to address the huge losses and damage inflicted on Lebanon by Israel's massive bombardment.
``The July war proved that militarism and revenge are not the answer to instability; compromise and diplomacy are,'' Saniora wrote. ``This should be the impetus for Israel to seek a comprehensive solution based on the Arab Peace Initiative.''
The initiative promises full peace with Arab nations in return for Israel's withdrawal from territories captured in the 1967 war and the creation of a Palestinian state. It also calls for a ``just solution'' to the issue of Palestinian refugees.
The Israeli government had no immediate comment Friday on Saniora's call. Israel has expressed reservations about the initiative and the United States has lauded the offer as a possible basis for reviving the Arab-Israeli peace process.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Thursday met in Cairo with her counterparts from Egypt and Jordan, two Arab nations that have peace treaties with the Jewish state. Cairo and Amman are trying to persuade Israel to accept the Arab peace initiative.
With the U.S. support and that of other international partners, ``we hope to use the Arab Peace Initiative as the foundation to finally bring about a comprehensive peace to our troubled region,'' Saniora wrote.
``Leading these peace efforts is not only an American responsibility, it is in the United States' interests: Peace in the Middle East would offer a gateway to reconciliation with the Muslim world during these times of increased divisiveness and radicalism,'' he wrote in the piece.
Saniora said that Arabs, too, have legitimate security concerns.
``The only way for the people of Israel and the Arab world to achieve stability and security is through a comprehensive peace settlement to the overarching Arab-Israeli conflict,'' he wrote. ``The inevitable alternative is increased extremism, intolerance and destruction.''
Israel's military campaign last summer sought to crush the pro-Iranian and pro-Syrian Hezbollah and win release of two Israeli soldiers the militants kidnapped in a cross-border raid that triggered the conflict.
Israel, however, failed to achieve those goals as Hezbollah militants fired thousands of rockets into Israel during the conflict and, although pushed back from the border, are still armed today.
The fighting ended with a U.N.-brokered cease-fire that called for deployment of U.N. peacekeepers and Lebanese troops in southern Lebanon along the border with Israel.
The Winograd commission, an Israeli government-appointed inquiry into the war, has said that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was responsible for ``very severe failures'' in the conflict that ended inconclusively and killed more than 1,200 combatants and civilians, most of them in Lebanon.
05/11/07 05:32 EDT | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jun 02, 2007 12:01 pm Post subject: |
| BLOG | Posted 03/13/2007 @ 12:49pm
Pelosi's Disastrous Misstep on Iran
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=174804
When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her allies in the chamber's Democratic leadership initially accepted that spending legislation designed to outline an Iraq exit strategy should also include a provision barring the president from attacking Iran without congressional approval, they opened up a monumental discussion about presidential war powers.
As such, the decision by Pelosi and her allies to rewrite their Iraq legislation to exclude the statement regarding the need for congressional approval of any military assault on the neighboring country of Iran sends the worst possible signal to the White House.
It is not too much to suggest that Pelosi disastrous misstep could haunt her and the Congress for years to come.
Here's how the Speaker messed up:
The Democratic proposal for a timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq included a provision that would have required President Bush to seek congressional approval before using military force in Iran. It was an entirely appropriate piece of the Iraq proposal, as the past experiences of U.S. involvement in southeast Asia and Latin America has well illustrated that when wars bleed across borders it becomes significantly more difficult to end them. Thus, fears about the prospect that Bush might attack Iran are legitimately related to the debate about how and when to end the occupation of Iraq.
Unfortunately, Pelosi is so desperate to advance her flawed spending legislation that she is willing to bargain with any Democrat about any part of the proposal.
Under pressure from some conservative members of her caucus, and from lobbyists associated with neoconservative groupings that want war with Iran and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC), Pelosi agreed on Monday to strip the Iran provision from the spending bill that has become the House leadership's primary vehicle for challenging the administration's policies in the region.
One of the chief advocates for eliminating the Iran provision, Nevada Democrat Shelley Berkley, said she wanted it out of the legislation because she wants to maintain the threat of U.S. military action as a tool in seeking to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. "It would take away perhaps the most important negotiating tool that the U.S. has when it comes to Iran," explained Berkley.
The problem with Berkley's "reasoning" -- if it can be called that -- is this: Nothing in the provision that had been included in the spending bill would have prevented Bush from threatening Iran. Nothing in the provision would have prevented war with Iran. It merely reminded the president that, before launching such an attack, he would need to obey the Constitutional requirement that he seek a declaration of war.
By first including the provision and then removing it, Pelosi and her aides have given Bush more of an opening to claim that he does not require Congressional approval.
Again and again, the Bush administration has seized any and every opening to claim powers that were never accorded the executive branch by the Constitution or the Congress. Remember that this administration has sought to justify a massive, unregulated domestic spying program by claiming authority under narrow legislation that was passed permitting the president to respond to the September 11, 2OO1, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Never mind that no mention of such spying was included in the 2OO1 legislation; the fact that it was not explicitly barred gave the administration all the room it required to claim the power to disregard the Constitution and the rule of law.
By stripping the Iran provision from the legislation that is now under consideration by Congress, Pelosi has handed Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney -- no believer he is the separation of powers -- exactly what they want. They can and will say that, when the question of whether Congress should require the administration to seek Congressional approval for an attack on Iran, Pelosi chose not to pursue the matter.
Anyone who thinks that Bush and Cheney will fail to exploit this profound misstep by Pelosi has not been paying attention for the past six years. The speaker has erred, dramatically and dangerously.
Pelosi should reverse her decision and restore the Iran provision to the legislation. It is the only way to check and balance an administration that stands ready to exploit every opening it is given by a naive and inept Congress.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
John Nichols' new book is THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders' Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson hails it as a "nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the 'heroic medicine' that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to 'reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.'"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The US and the Middle East
A “Grand Settlement” Versus the Jewish Lobby
by James Petras
www.dissidentvoice.org
December 4, 2006
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec06/Petras04.htm | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 5:52 am Post subject: |
| Subject: CP: Kroth: "Whatever AIPAC Wants, AIPAC Gets"
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:45:52 -0700
From: "Jeff Blankfort" <jblankfort@earthlink.net> Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Subject: CP: Kroth: "Whatever AIPAC Wants, AIPAC Gets"
Another new voice from academia speaking important truth about AIPAC and the Zionist lobby. No wonder the lobby and its Campus Watch are worried. They have been doing what is described here for decades with scarcely a peep from those purporting to support Palestinian rights (and there is still not a peep about the subject from the misleading organizations of the anti-war movement. How come?-JB
http://www.counterpunch.org/kroth07102007.html
July 10, 2007
"Whatever AIPAC Wants, AIPAC Gets"
Democratic Defectors and the Israel Lobby
By JERRY KROTH
In November, the American electorate repudiated Bush's Iraq debacle and established Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate promising to bring this "flawed policy wrapped in illusion" to a decisive end. Bush vetoed their withdrawal timetable, but voters urged their leaders to hold the line and not be bullied. In the end, though, 37 Democratic senators capitulated and gratuitously gave the President his $100 billion no-strings- attached blank check . . . enough money to pay tuition and fees for 1.3 million college students for four solid years!
Deep disappointment set in. Cindy Sheehan, the liberal icon, was so demoralized she resigned and returned to private life. In June, a CNN poll reported that "respect for Congress" plummeted to the lowest level "ever recorded."
Bloggers called them "traitor Democrats", and the descriptor is apropos. At the time of the vote, sixty-two percent of the American people favored a time-table for a withdrawal, but, more significantly, "seventy percent" of Democrats were so inclined. Voting against this burgeoning tide of anger betrayed the will of the people and party that put these Democrats in office.
Curiously, all of the traitor democrats were huge career recipients of funds from the Israeli lobby. If we took ten Democratic apostates and compared them to ten Democrats who stood by the voters, pro-Israeli PAC contributions were "ten times" greater for the turncoats than those who stayed with their constituencies ($322,000 versus $34,000 on average).
To be specific: Carl Levin, outspoken critic of the war and, we thought, a loyal supporter of the new regime to end it, defected and blithely turned his back on his Michigan support base. Despite his strident anti-war rhetoric, the Grand Rapids Independent reports Levin has supported Bush all the way "consistently funding the war and not introducing any meaningful legislation to bring it closer to an end." Practically unknown to his constituents, Levin is one of the largest beneficiaries of Pro-Israeli PAC funds collecting $600,000 in career contributions according to the Washington Report on Mideast Affairs.
Barbara Boxer, Denis Kucinich, and Earl Blaumenauer, all opponents of the war, collectively got $73,000, but turncoat-democrats, Dan Durbin, Max Baucus, and Frank Lautenberg scooped up in excess of a million plus untold benes like travel funds.
What comes out in the wash is the best PAC money can buy: Three months before we invaded Iraq, a New York Times poll showed only 30 percent of the American people favored an all-out invasion, but the Israeli lobby (AIPAC) did, and it prevailed. Hardly a sprinkling of Americans favored the "surge", a meager fourteen percent, but AIPAC did, and the surge is surging as we speak. Fewer than thirty percent of Democrats supported that no-strings-budget, but AIPAC did, and the conclusion plays out another hackneyed chorus of "Whatever AIPAC wants, AIPAC gets."
In 1992, the director of the Israeli lobby, David Steiner, was surreptitiously recorded bragging about playing a role in selecting the Secretary of State and what he got for Israel: "Besides the $10 billion in loan guarantees which was a fabulous thing, $3 billion in foreign, in military aid, and I got almost a billion dollars in other goodies that people don't even know about!" When the tape was made public, Steiner resigned, but it underscored the incredible power, access, and influence this lobby has.
Two professors, Mearsheimer and Walt, recently insinuated that American democracy has been suborned by the Israeli lobby, echoing Senator Fulbright's 1989 indictment that AIPAC had usurped the electoral process and could "elect or defeat nearly any congressman or senator that they wish." Such observations do not fall on deaf ears. Over half the senate and a third of the congress obediently attended the AIPAC annual convention (versus less than a dozen visiting the NAACP's event). Non-attendance can suggest a lawmaker might be soft on terrorism, or, god forbid, anti-Semitic.
Anti-war idealists might think that soon this American war crime, the shock-and-awe carnage, the torture, and the renditions are coming to an end, but the agenda of AIPAC seems bent on keeping American armies in the Middle East as an Israeli first line of defense for the indefinite future. Their major attack dog, Joe Lieberman, recently gave a hint on Face the Nation as to might be next: " military strikes" against Iran. . . all apparently to guarantee that Israel will remain the only nuclear power in the Middle East.
So if you think you voted, or are planning to vote, to bring the troops home and end this national embarrassment, some fool's gold waiting for you at the end of that rainbow.
Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology in California and author of Conspiracy in Camelot: the complete history of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He may be reached at anya@sj.znet.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 7:09 am Post subject: AEI Neo-Cons Try to Rally, Bully Republicans |
| Neo-Cons Try to Rally, Bully Republicans
By Jim Lobe
Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia
WASHINGTON, Jul 9 (IPS) - In the face of a critical Senate debate on future U.S. strategy in Iraq, neo-conservatives and other hawks are trying to rally increasingly sceptical -- and worried -- Republicans behind continued support for President George W. Bush's five-month-old "surge" strategy.
They are arguing that the surge -- the deployment of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to try to pacify Baghdad to encourage political compromise among the major groups in Iraq -- has not been given sufficient time to work and that abandoning it now would amount to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
But the recent defection of several hitherto loyal, if privately critical, senior Republican senators has thrown the hawks -- both inside and outside the administration -- into something of a panic, if only because anti-war Democrats appear to be inching steadily toward the kind of majority that Bush can no longer simply ignore.
Indeed, the New York Times Monday reported that the administration is itself increasingly divided over what to do, with some officials, notably Defence Secretary Robert Gates, "quietly pressing" for beginning a gradual withdrawal of combat troops consistent with the recommendations last December of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), of which he was a member until his nomination last November.
While the White House, through the personal diplomacy of Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, has been spending an extraordinary amount of time "listening" to the sceptics in hopes of keeping them from crossing the aisle on key war-related measures due to be voted on over the next two weeks, neo-conservatives allied outside the administration are taking a harsher tack.
"They are pre-9/11 Republicans," wrote William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, about Sens. Richard Lugar, George Voinovich, Pete Dominici, and John Warner, the four most-senior Republicans who have called for a change of course in Iraq over the past week.
"They have been followers of conventional opinion (during their 20-plus-year Senate careers), not leaders," he went on. "Now they are following conventional wisdom again, in their stately way, in turning against the Iraq war."
"Republicans may think they can distance themselves from all this, but they'll get no credit from voters if they contribute to an ugly outcome in Iraq," argued the lead editorial in Monday's Wall Street Journal. "A divided Republican caucus that undercuts America's military efforts while chasing the mirage of bipartisan comity will only make their own election defeat (in November 2008) more likely."
Both warnings came as the Senate begins what is expected to be a debate that could stretch until Congress' August recess on the nearly 650-billion-dollar 2008 Defence Authorisation bill to which Democrats hope to attach a series of Iraq-related amendments that are fiercely opposed by the hawks.
At least two Democratic amendments, both backed by Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, will call for withdrawing all U.S. combat forces from Iraq by some time next spring or summer. They also more narrowly define the mission of the remaining troops -- still likely to number in the tens of thousands -- as training Iraqi forces, helping to secure international borders, striking al Qaeda and other terrorist targets, and protecting U.S. facilities the personnel there.
Similar amendments were approved by the Senate earlier this year but ultimately failed due to parliamentary manoeuvres or a Bush veto that could not be overcome by the small Democratic majority. (Two-thirds of each Congressional chamber are needed to override a presidential veto.)
Another likely amendment, co-sponsored by Sens. Hillary Clinton and Robert Byrd, would repeal Congress' 2002 authorisation for the use of force in Iraq and require Bush to seek a new authorisation defining the specific mission and strategy of U.S. forces there before additional money could be spent on the war.
Yet another, sponsored by Sen. James Webb, would require that active-duty troops be given at least the same amount of time to rest at home as they are deployed to a war zone -- a provision that would make continuation of the current of "surge" of a total of some 165,000 army troops and marines in Iraq impossible to sustain.
While the White House believes it can keep enough Republicans in line on these amendments to defeat their adoption, it is worried that one or two of them could attract as many as 60 votes and thus highlight the erosion in support for its strategy over the past month.
A strong anti-war showing would increase pressure to reverse course even before the mid-September report that Gen. David Petraeus, the military commander charged with implementing the surge, is expected to submit to Congress. Until last week's defections, the surge would not come under serious challenge until after Petraeus delivered his assessment.
The hawks, however, are also very concerned that another amendment, the product of several weeks' work by as many as a dozen centrist Democrats and Republicans, including several of the Republican defectors, may be approved by a veto-proof margin.
That amendment would declare the recommendations of the ISG, which was co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, to be official U.S. policy.
Those recommendations, which included a withdrawal of U.S. combat forces by the end of next March, U.S. diplomatic engagement with Syria and Iran, and intensified efforts to achieve a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are considered anathema by the hawks, especially pro-Likud neo-conservatives who launched a major propaganda campaign against the ISG even before it released its study seven months ago.
Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, explicitly endorsed key ISG recommendations in a major policy address two weeks ago in which he warned that failure to initiate a drawdown of U.S. combat forces in Iraq "very soon" could pose "extreme risks for U.S. national security (because)... it would greatly increase the chances for a poorly planned withdrawal from Iraq or possibly the broader Middle East region that could damage U.S. interests for decades."
Lugar's remarks were hailed at the time by Warner, who predicted that a number of other Republicans were likely to voice similar concerns in the upcoming debate over the defence bill. Warner, whose former chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee has made him particularly influential with on defense issues with his fellow-Republicans, has since become the subject of intense White House lobbying.
After his speech, Lugar became a focus of neo-conservative wrath, with Kristol describing his address as a "case study in pseudo-thoughtfulness, full of cheek-puffing and chin-pulling" and Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) accusing him of "sound(ing) more like an investor rebalancing his portfolio, selling Iraq and buying Israel-Palestine, than a man thinking about strategy in war."
In their view, the surge has resulted in major military gains in recent weeks, even if the political reconciliation that it was supposed to promote has been nowhere in sight, a point made emphatically by Lugar, Warner and other Republican critics.
"The tragedy of these efforts is we are on the cusp of potentially being successful in the next year in a way that we have failed in the three-plus preceding years," ret. Gen. Jack Keane, one of the surge's architects who made much the same point at a special AEI forum on the surge here Monday, told the neo-conservative New York Sun last week, "(B)ut because of this political pressure, it looks like we intend to pull out the rug from underneath that potential success."
In its own editorial Monday, the Sun called the possible approval of legislation setting a withdrawal timetable "the most astounding act of perfidy in the history of Congress."
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38477 | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
