Friday, July 30, 2010

نعم المنطقة في خطر....: أميركا وإسرائيل تعدّان للحرب وهذه هي المؤشرات


المراهنة على السياسات الكبرى هي مراهنة مدمّرة للبنان وتجعل من صغار اللاعبين فيها فرْق عُملة يتأسّف عليهم البعض ولا يسأل عنهم أحد


نعم المنطقة في خطر....: أميركا وإسرائيل تعدّان للحرب وهذه هي المؤشرات

رغم الصيف الحار، سواء من ارتفاع درجات الحرارة عن نسَبها هذا العام، أو من سخونة الأجواء السياسية التي يتحرق من أخبارها أهل المشرق العربي وبلاد الشام، والتي اختلط فيها، "السمك باللبن بالتمر الهندي"، أي تخصيب إيران للماء الثقيل "الملف النووي" بقضية اغتيال رفيق الحريري، وبدور المقاومة وسلاحها، سواء كان في لبنان أو في فلسطين، وشكلوا جميعاً خلطة عجيبة غريبة من الحجج المركبة والأسباب الواهية التي قد تدفع للحرب وتغيير الواقع السياسي في المنطقة لأسباب إذا أردنا اختصارها فنقول: إنها مهمة أميركا في الحفاظ على التفوق العسكري الإسرائيلي في المنطقة.. وإذا رغبنا بالتوسع فالجمل لا تحصى والمفردات لا تنضب. ولكي نحاول الخوص في العمق المتاح لعالم الأسرار التي لم تعد تدفن في هذا الزمن، أن الحرب في المنطقة واقعة لا محالة، سواء في الأشهر القليلة المقبلة، أم في العام المقبل، :

.. نعم، المنطقة في خطر، بل لو كانت هناك كلمة أعظم من الخطر للفظتها. إننا في خضم الغبار الذي يسبق العاصفة التي لا يعرف أحد أين يتبدد غبارها.. نعم، الحرب آتية، وهل يستطيع هذا الكيان "العجيب" العيش من دون حرب، فإسرائيل أنشئت لتكون الحروب جزءاً من حياة هذه المنطقة، والسلام والاستقرار حلم ينتظره سائر أبنائها، ولو لمرة في إحدى ليالي أعمارهم التي يطويها الانتظار من الآتي.. نعم، إسرائيل ووراءها أميركا تعدان للحرب، معطياتهما على الحركة والحراك الصهيونييْن، وعلى ما يردنا من داخل هذا الكيان، أن الكل في هذه المنطقة أصبح يتجسس على الكل الآخر......... وهذا بعض من المعطيات :

إشارات لا يجب اغفالها

1ـ إن وزير الدفاع الإسرائيلي (إيهود باراك) وأثناء زيارته الأخيرة لواشنطن، كان مصمماً خلال محادثاته مع وزير الدفاع الأمريكي (روبرت غيتس) ووزيرة الخارجية (هيلاري كلينتون) على أن خيار القوة العسكرية ضد حزب الله في لبنان وضد إيران لا مفرّ من اللجوء إليها، وتوقيتها خاضع لإعداد المسرح السياسي والإعلامي. كما أن الملحق العسكري الإسرائيلي في واشنطن؛ الجنرال جادي شمني، قال إن ايهودا باراك حصل على ضوء أخضر للتحرك العسكري الإسرائيلي ضد حزب الله عقب اتهام المحكمة الدولية له باغتيال الحريري.

2ـ توجَّه رئيس الأركان العامة للجيش الإسرائيلي؛ الجنرال غابي أشكنازي، إلى كل من فرنسا وإيطاليا للاجتماع بالقيادات العسكرية فيها، وألمحت المصادر العسكرية الإسرائيلية إلى أن وراء هذه الزيارة عدداً من الإشارات، فأشكنازي حمل معه ملفاً متخماً بالمعلومات والتقارير والتصاوير الجوية عن تحويل حزب الله للجنوب اللبناني إلى ميدان قتال فوق الأرض وتحت سطحها، والأمر الأهم أن أشكنازي حصل على موافقة بألا تعترض قوات اليونيفيل القوات البرية الإسرائيلية وهي تندفع في عمق الأراضي اللبنانية.

3ـ قائد المنطقة الشمالية الجنرال؛ جادي إيزنكوت، وبمقتضى التعليمات الصادرة إليه من رئاسة الأركان، رفع مستوى الجاهزية القتالية في صفوف القوات الخاضعة لإمرة القيادة، وذلك من خلال تصعيد التدريبات على عمليات اقتحام الأنفاق التي يُزعم أن حزب الله أقامها في الجنوب لإطلاق الصواريخ وإيواء العناصر المقاتلة.

4ـ حشد وحدات النخبة في الجيش الإسرائيلي (لواء جولاني وجفعاتي، ووحدة أجوز، ووحدة كفير، ووحدة شمشون) وتشكيلات لها خبرة في خوض العمليات العسكرية في جنوب لبنان، إضافة إلى دعوة غير مفصَح عنها لقوات الاحتياط، تمثل 30% من إجمالي قوات الاحتياط.

5ـ تأكيد من قبل قيادات عسكرية إسرائيلية، تحديداً نائب رئيس الأركان؛ الجنرال بيني جانتز، ورئيس شعبة العمليات؛ الجنرال طال روسو، على أن المعركة مع حزب الله ستكون المدخل لمعركة أوسع نطاقاً ضد إيران.

أما الخبراء الاستراتيجيون في إسرائيل، ومن أبرزهم إيميلي لانداو، وإفرايم أسكولاي، ودوري جولد، والجنرال يعقوب عميدرور، فقد أكدوا أن العد التنازلي للمواجهة مع إيران قد بدأ، لكن خوض هذه المواجهة يتطلب أولاً حسم المعركة ضد حزب الله.

إذا أدخلنا مشاهد أخرى للتصعيد، مثل تصعيد النشاط الاستخباراتي والتجسسي، ومحاولة إسرائيل استثمار قرار المحكمة الدولية المكلفة بالنظر في قضية اغتيال الحريري في الاعتبار أيضاً، فسوف يضاف المزيد من الدلائل والمؤشرات إلى أن إسرائيل تستعد للحرب.

أما المشهد الدبلوماسي الذي يتولاه المبعوث الأمريكي جورج ميتشل، والمتمثل في تحريك عملية المفاوضات بين السلطة والعدو الإسرائيلي، فينبغي ألا يضلل أحداً أنه ليس أكثر من محاولة لذر الرماد في الأعين، وعملية تمويه للتغطية على جملة من عمليات التصعيد، والتي ستمتد إلى قطاع غزة ولبنان وسورية وإيران.

التصعيد على الساحة الفلسطينية ينطلق باتجاهين

تصعيد عسكري ضد قطاع غزة، وهجمات وغارات واستعدادات عسكرية أوسع.. تصعيد استيطاني وترانسفيري في الضفة الغربية، تستهدف تهويد ما تبقى من الضفة الغربية، عن طريق الاستيلاء على النسبة المتبقية من الضفة 57%، وتهجير سكان الضفة والقدس.

على المستويين العربي والإسلامي

هناك تصعيد في ساحات أخرى، تشارك فيها، إلى جانب إسرائيل، كل من الولايات المتحدة والاتحاد الأوروبي، ضد السودان والصومال وموريتانيا واليمن والعراق.

كل هذا يتم في نطاق ما يسمى باستراتيجية الإبقاء على بؤر التوتر وتصعيدها، بل وتفجير المزيد منها.

هذا التصعيد لا يحمل طابعاً مختلفاً عن استراتيجية التصعيد والمواجهة التي صاغتها وطبقتها إدارة المحافظين الجدد برئاسة جورج بوش الابن، إنما يأخذ صورة السارق بقفازات بيضاء.

: إنك يا عزيزي تريدنا أن أهمل كل هذه المعلومات ومجمل الأحداث والتطورات عن تفكيرنا، ونقول من الصعب وقوع حرب! لا، فالحرب حاجة إسرائيل، وإذا لم تحدث الآن، فهي واقعة على أبعد تقدير خلال 14 شهراً، وإلا سيبدأ العد التنازلي لانهيار الدولة المغتصبة، حسب رؤى مفكري بني صهيون القابعين وراء أسوار مراكز الأبحاث.

ـ باراك طلب الضوء الأخضر الأميركي

ـ اشكنازي أطلع الفرنسيين والطليان على الخرائط والخطط

ـ بيني جانتز: المعركة مع حزب الله مدخل الحرب على ايران

ـ ميتشيل يقوم بأوسع عملية تضليل قبل المعركة

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The opposites game in the US war theaters of operations


The opposites game in the US war theaters of operations
By Tom Engelhardt

Have you ever thought about just how strange this country's version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story that's been on my mind for a while. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the true weirdness buried in it.

The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19 and was headlined, "US military criticized for purchase of Russian copters for Afghan air corps." Maybe that's strange enough for you right there. Russian copters? We all know, at least vaguely, that by
year's end, US spending on its protracted Afghan war and nation-building project will be heading for US$350 billion. And those dollars do have to go somewhere.

Admittedly, these days in parts of the US, state and city governments are having a hard time finding the money just to pay teachers or the police. The Pentagon, on the other hand, hasn't hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to "train" and "mentor" the Afghan military and police - and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again.

That includes the Afghan National Army Air Corps which, in the Soviet era of the 1980s, had nearly 500 aircraft and a raft of trained pilots. The last of that air force - little used in the Taliban era - was destroyed in the US air assault and invasion of 2001. As a result, the "Afghan air force" (with about 50 helicopters and transport planes) is now something of a misnomer, since it is, in fact, the US Air Force.

Still, there are a few Afghan pilots, mostly in their forties, trained long ago on Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, and it's on a refurbished version of these copters, Whitlock tells us, that the Pentagon has already spent $648 million. The Mi-17 was specially built for Afghanistan's difficult flying environment back when various Islamic jihadis, some of whom we're now fighting under the rubric of "the Taliban", were allied with us against the Russians.

Here's the first paragraph of Whitlock's article: "The US government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan's fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead."

So, various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force. That's the story Whitlock sets out to tell, because the Pentagon has been planning to purchase dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what's worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren't getting the contracts.

But let's consider three aspects of Whitlock's article that no one is likely to spend an extra moment on, even if they do capture the surpassing strangeness of the American way of war in distant lands - and in Washington.

1. The little training program that couldn't: There are at present an impressive 450 US personnel in Afghanistan training the Afghan air force. Unfortunately, there's a problem. There may be no "buy American" program for that air force, but there is a "speak American" one. To be an Afghan air force pilot, you must know English - "the official language of the cockpit", Whitlock assures us (even if to fly Russian helicopters). As he points out, however, the trainees, mostly illiterate, take two to five years simply to learn the language. (Imagine a US Air Force in which, just to take off, every pilot needed to know Dari!)

Thanks to this language barrier, the US can train endlessly and next to nothing is guaranteed to happen. "So far," reports Whitlock, "only one Afghan pilot has graduated from flight school in the United States, although dozens are in the pipeline. That has forced the air corps to rely on pilots who learned to fly Mi-17s during the days of Soviet and Taliban rule." In other words, despite the impressive Soviet performance in the 1980s, the training of the Afghan air force has been re-imagined by Americans as a Sisyphean undertaking.

And this offers but a hint of how bizarre US training programs for the Afghan military and police have proven to be. In fact, sometimes it seems as if exactly the same scathing report, detailing the same training problems and setbacks, has been recycled yearly without anyone who mattered finding it particularly odd - or being surprised that the response to each successive piece of bad news is to decide to pour yet more money and trainers into the project.

For example, in 2005, at a time when Washington had already spent $3.3 billion training and mentoring the Afghan army and police, the US Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report indicating that "efforts to fully equip the increasing number of [Afghan] combat troops have fallen behind, and efforts to establish sustaining institutions, such as a logistics command, needed to support these troops have not kept pace". Worse yet, the report fretted, it might take "up to $7.2 billion to complete [the training project] and about $600 million annually to sustain [it]".

In 2006, according to the New York Times, "a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department ... found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone." At best, stated the report, fewer than half of the officially announced number of police were "trained and equipped to carry out their police functions".

In 2008, by which time $16.5 billion had been spent on army and police training programs, the GAO chimed in again, indicating that only two of 105 army units were "assessed as being fully capable of conducting their primary mission", while "no police unit is fully capable".

In 2009, the US Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction reported that "only 24 of 559 Afghan police units are considered ready to operate without international help". Such reports, as well as repeated (and repetitive) news investigations and stories on the subject, invariably are accompanied by a litany of complaints about corruption, indiscipline, illiteracy, drug taking, staggering desertion rates, Taliban infiltration, ghost soldiers, and a host of other problems. In 2009, however, the solution remained as expectable as the problems: "The report called for more US trainers and more money."

This June, a US government audit, again from the Special Inspector General, contradicted the latest upbeat American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) training assessments, reporting that "the standards used to appraise the Afghan forces since 2005 were woefully inadequate, inflating their abilities".

The usual litany of training woes followed. Yet, according to Reuters, President Barack Obama wants another $14.2 billion for the training project "for this year and next". And just last week, the Wall Street Journal's Julian Barnes reported that new Afghan war commander General David Petraeus is planning to "retool" US strategy to include "a greater focus on how Afghanistan's security forces are being trained".

When it comes to US training programs then, you might conclude that Afghanistan has proved to be Catch-22-ville, the land where time stood still - and so, evidently, has the Washington national security establishment's collective brain. For Washington, there seems to be no learning curve in Afghanistan, not when it comes to "training" Afghans anyway.

And here is the oddest thing of all, though no one even bothers to mention it in this context: the Taliban haven't had tens of billions of dollars in foreign training funds; they haven't had years of advice from the best US and NATO advisors that money can buy; they haven't had private contractors like DynCorp teaching them how to fight and police, and strangely enough, they seem to have no problem fighting.

They are not undermanned, infiltrated by followers of President Hamid Karzai, or particularly corrupt. They may be illiterate and may not be fluent in English, but they are ready, in up to platoon-sized units, to attack heavily fortified US military bases, Afghan prisons, a police headquarters and the like with hardly a foreign mentor in sight.

Consider it, then, a modern miracle in reverse that the US has proven incapable of training a competent Afghan force in a country where arms are the norm, fighting has for decades seldom stopped, and the locals are known for their war-fighting traditions. Similarly, it's abidingly curious that the US has so far failed to train a modest-sized air force, even flying refurbished Italian light transport planes from the 1980s and those Russian helicopters, when the Soviet Union, the last imperial power to try this, proved up to creating an Afghan force able to pilot aircraft ranging from helicopters to fighter planes.

2. Non-exit strategies: Now, let's wade a little deeper into the strangeness of what Whitlock reported by taking up the question of when we're actually planning to leave Afghanistan. Consider this passage from the Whitlock piece: "US military officials have estimated that the Afghan air force won't be able to operate independently until 2016, five years after President Obama has said he intends to start withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan. But [US Air Force Brigadier General Michael R] Boera said that date could slip by at least two years if Congress forces the Afghans to fly US choppers."

In other words, while Americans argue over what the president's July 2011 drawdown date really means, and while Karzai suggests that Afghan forces will take over the country's security duties by 2014, Whitlock's anonymous "US military officials" are clearly operating on a different clock, on, in fact, Pentagon time, and so are planning for a 2016-2018 target date for that force simply to "operate independently" (which by no means indicates "without US support".)

If you were of a conspiratorial mind, you might almost think that the Pentagon preferred not to create an effective Afghan air force and instead - as has also been the case in Iraq, a country that once had the world's sixth-largest air force and now, after years of US mentoring, has next to nothing - remain the substitute Afghan air force forever and a day.

3. Who are the Russians now?: Okay, let's move even deeper into American strangeness with a passage that makes up most of the 20th and 21st paragraphs of Whitlock's 25-paragraph piece: "In addition," he reports, "the US Special Operations Command would like to buy a few Mi-17s of its own, so that special forces carrying out clandestine missions could cloak the fact that they are American. 'We would like to have some to blend in and do things,' said a senior US military official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the clandestine program."

No explanation follows on just how - or where - those Russian helicopters will help "cloak" American special operations missions, or what they are to "blend" into, or the "things" they are to do. There's no further discussion of the subject at all.

In other words, the special op urge to Russianize its air transport has officially been reported, and a month later, as far as I know, not a single congressional representative has made a fuss over it; no mainstream pundit has written a curious, questioning, or angry editorial questioning its appropriateness; and no reporter has, as yet, followed up.

As just another little factoid of no great import buried deep in an article focused on other matters, undoubtedly no one has given it a thought. But it's worth stopping a moment and considering just how odd this tiny bit of news-that-won't-ever-rise-to-the-level-of-news actually is. One way to do this is to play the sort of opposites game that never quite works on this still one-way planet of ours. Just imagine a similar news item coming out of another country.
  • Hot off the wires from Tehran: Iranian special forces teams are scouring the planet for old American Chinook helicopters so they can be well "cloaked" in planned future forays into Afghanistan and Pakistan's Balochistan province.
  • The People's Daily reports: Chinese special forces operatives are buying relatively late model American helicopters so that ... Well, here's one problem in the opposites game, and a clue to the genuine strangeness of American activities globally: why would the Chinese need to do such a thing (and, in fact, why would we)? Where might they want to venture militarily without being mistaken for Chinese military personnel?

    That might be a little hard to imagine right now, but I guarantee you one thing: had some foreign news source reported such a plan, or had Whitlock somehow uncovered it and included it in a piece - no matter how obscurely nestled - there would have been pandemonium in Washington. Congress would have held hearings. Pundits would have opined on the infamy of Iranian or Chinese operatives masking themselves in our choppers. The company or companies that sold the helicopters would have been investigated. And you can imagine what Fox News commentators would have had to say.

    When we do such things, however, and a country like Pakistan reacts with what's usually described as "anti-Americanism", we wonder at the nationalistic hair-trigger they're on; we comment on their over-emotionalism; we highlight their touchy "sensibilities"; and our reporters and pundits then write empathetically about the difficulties American military and civilian officials have dealing with such edgy natives.

    Just the other day, for instance, the Wall Street Journal's Barnes reported that US Special Operations Forces were expanding their role in the Pakistani tribal borderlands by more regularly "venturing out with Pakistani forces on aid projects, deepening the American role in the effort to defeat Islamist militants in Pakistani territory that has been off limits to US ground troops". The Pakistani government has not been eager to have American boots visibly on the ground in these areas, and so Barnes writes: "Because of Pakistan's sensitivities, the US role has developed slowly."

    Imagine how sensitive they might prove to be if those same forces began to land Russian helicopters in Pakistan as a way to "cloak" their operations and blend in? Or imagine just what sort of hair-trigger the natives of Montana might be on if Pakistani special operations types were roaming Glacier National Park and landing old American helicopters outside Butte.

    Then consider the sensitivities of Pakistanis on learning that the just-appointed head of the Central Intelligence Agency's National Clandestine Service turns out to be a man of "impeccable credentials" (so says CIA director Leon Panetta). Among those credentials are his stint as the CIA station chief in Pakistan until sometime in 2009, his involvement in the exceedingly unpopular drone war in that country's tribal borderlands, and the way, as the director put it a tad vaguely, he "guided complex operations under some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable".

    Here's the truth of the matter, as Whitlock's piece makes clear: we carry on in the most bizarre ways in far-off lands and think nothing of it. Historically, it has undoubtedly been the nature of imperial powers to consider every strange thing they do more or less the norm.

    For a waning imperial power, however, such an attitude has its own dangers. If we can't imagine the surpassing strangeness of our arrangements for making war in lands thousands of kilometers from the US, then we can't begin to imagine how the world sees us, which means that we're blind to our own madness. Russian helicopters, that's nuthin' by comparison.

    Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of
    The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books),
  • Does event honoring Israeli spy suggest another Israeli operation?


    Does event honoring Israeli spy suggest another Israeli operation?
    By Jeff Gates

    Jul , 2010,


    Less than two weeks prior to the mass murder of September 11, 2001, the Israeli government made a $1 million grant to Israeli super-spy Jonathan Pollard. In retrospect, the facts suggest that grant may well have served as a signal to Israeli operatives inside the U.S.

    On July 13, 2010, in observance of Pollard’s 9,000th day of incarceration, the Jerusalem municipality dimmed the lights illuminating the Old City. This gesture of Israeli solidarity included a projection onto the darkened walls of a message urging that President Obama release their spy from prison.

    Thus, the concern among knowledgeable intelligence operatives that this Pollard commemoration may mean that another Israeli operation is underway.

    On March 4, 1987, this Israeli-American was sentenced to life imprisonment for conveying to Israel more than 1 million classified U.S. military documents. Tel Aviv passed those secrets on to Moscow.

    In practical effect, this Israeli espionage jettisoned not only America’s Cold War defense strategy, it also jeopardized the entirety of NATO’s defense posture.

    From 1948 to 1989, U.S. taxpayers invested $20 trillion in Cold War-related defense (in 2010 dollars). In practical effect, an Israeli spy operation negated those outlays. Following Pollard’s arrest in 1986, Israel repeatedly assured U.S. leaders that he was part of a rogue spy operation.

    Not until 12 years later did Tel Aviv concede the obvious: Pollard was an Israeli spy the entire time. According to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, “[It is] difficult to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by . . . Pollard’s treasonous behavior.”

    Twelve years later, the Pollard storyline shifted again when in June 2010 Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., revived the phony “rogue” portrayal in yet another attempt to distance Tel Aviv from the fact that Israel continues its espionage operations in the U.S.

    Another “hyphenated American,” Oren relinquished the U.S. component of his citizenship to serve as Israel’s ambassador to Washington. Though he withdrew his Pollard statement, no one could explain why someone with his sophistication would issue a “rogue operation” statement.

    Signaling the network

    Tel Aviv’s first concerted attempt to gain Pollard’s release dates to 1998 when, while negotiating the Wye River Accords, Prime Minister Ehud Barak secured from President Bill Clinton an agreement for Pollard’s release. Clinton backpedaled when threatened with a mass resignation by outraged members of the U.S. intelligence community.

    The entryway to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, features an agency crest imbedded in the tiled floor. An adjoining wall commemorates with stars the unnamed dead who lost their lives as U.S. intelligence operatives. Those featured typically achieved the equivalent military rank of colonel.

    As a result of Pollard’s spying, 110 C.I.A. operatives lost their lives. In addition, a reported 1,600 prime American assets were lost due to this Israeli espionage. Americans have yet to be told the true extent of this loss.

    In the history of U.S. national security, Pollard enjoys top billing as inflicting the most damage. In Israel, he is revered. Eligible for release in 2015, he will be welcomed home as a Zionist hero to a nation that granted him citizenship and several national awards.

    His iconic status assures that news of Pollard -- any news whatsoever -- emboldens Israeli-Americans committed to the Zionist geopolitical agenda. Attempts to secure his release assure hyphenated Americans that their “homeland” will stand in solidarity with them at any cost. Israeli offers of large sums of money reinforce that commitment.

    Americans remain largely clueless about the espionage role played by Israeli-Americans. Few recall Jonathan Pollard. Fewer still grasp the costs that Pollard’s treason imposed in blood and treasure. Nor do Americans understand the overwhelming influence of dual-citizens both in creating and communicating the false intelligence that took the U.S. to war in the Middle East.

    “To wage war by way of deception” has long been the operative credo of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence and operations directorate. Mossad operatives routinely target Israeli-Americans as recruits when staging operations in the U.S.

    Even now, many Americans believe that Israel is an ally despite more than six decades of facts confirming the contrary. Israeli espionage remains ongoing aided by a cadre of cooperative members of both the House and Senate and their staffs.

    To believe otherwise allows gullibility to displace facts confirming the gravity of the threat that this entangled alliance imposes on the U.S. and, by extension, on the international community.

    This latest Israeli adoration of traitor Jonathan Pollard is clearly an affront to the U.S. as Israel’s sponsor, financier, protector and primary arms supplier. Of immediate concern, this high profile event may be a signal setting in motion another murderous incident meant to persuade Americans that they face an external threat rather than the ongoing threat of an enemy within.

    Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association, Democracy at Risk and The Ownership Solution. See www.criminalstate.com.

    The parallel universe
    By Douglas Valentine

    Jul , 2010,


    As a result of Dana Priest’s three-part article, Top-Secret America, published in the Washington Post, pundits have been falling all over themselves in their rush to describe the size and implications of the elephant in the living room. Forget that none of these pundits has seen fit to write about the elephant before. More important is the fact that the elephant has dimensions Dana Priest never even touched upon.

    Let me tell you a story.

    In 1985, I was contacted by Larry, a CIA officer who had had a breakdown and wanted to talk to me. He had served as a deep cover agent overseas for over 15 years at that point. He had been recruited from the Marines in Vietnam, and given a fake life in which his father had been an Australian soldier in World War II, and his mother a Filipino who died in childbirth. The Australian soldier had abandoned the mother before she gave birth. The father had later died in World War II, and Larry, having been brought up in an orphanage, was adopted as an infant by a couple in the United States.

    In the legend created by the CIA, Larry’s foster parents told him about his real parents while he was a Marine in Vietnam. Larry took advantage of his proximity to the Philippines to travel there and claim his right to Filipino citizenship. In this way the CIA established an agent in the Philippines, with impeccable credentials. Larry eventually was even elected to public office.

    To make a long story short, after Larry’s breakdown, the CIA got him a job as a manager of a Playboy club in Detroit. Later they transferred him to Washington, DC, as manager of the Four Ways restaurant. When I met him there, his Filipino wife and entourage were staffing the facility, along with his CIA hand-holder, who handled finances.

    This was the fanciest place I had never been in my life. It was a place where State Department officials, foreign dignitaries and business tycoons enjoyed the finest wines and the most haute cuisine. Each lavishly appointed room had its own dining table and waiter. As I sat in a leather booth in the wood-paneled basement bar with Larry, he explained that each room was bugged by the CIA.

    As we were talking, a group of well-dressed younger people in the company of one older man took occupied the booth next to us. The rest of the basement bar was empty. They ordered drinks, but remained silent and alert as Larry explained the ins and outs of his CIA experience to me. At one point, he nodded to the older man at the other table; then he informed me that the young people were junior officer trainees from Langley, who were also listening to his lecture.

    Again, to make a very long story short, Larry explained that the CIA manages a parallel society to American society, where deep cover agents like him, as well as retired CIA officers and their agents, are provided with comfortable employment in their retirement years, or when they otherwise need recompense for their service. Many of these agents have no resume that is suitable in the modern professional world. So there is this parallel universe that they are folded into, as managers of the local Ford dealership, or Chinese restaurant, or hotel, or in hundreds and thousands of other jobs.

    Think of it as a sort a witness protection program. Since 1985 it has grown substantially. It is, of course, another facet of Top-Secret America, but the ex-spooks in this dimension are not your average every day wingnut ideologue informant or strong-arm man. They know how to burn down buildings, which is what the CIA does.

    As John Lennon said, “Imagine.”

    Doug Valentine is the author of “The Phoenix Program” and his latest book is “The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped The DEA.” Please visit his website at www.members.authorsguild.net/valentine/bio.htm.

    Leaks are part and parcel of a deliberate disinformation and covert wars strategy...


    Leaks are part and parcel of a deliberate CIA/DOD/OSP disinformation and covert wars strategy...

    WASHINGTON - The 92,000 reports on the war in Afghanistan made public by the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks, and reported on Monday by selected international publications, offer no major revelations that are entirely new, as did the Pentagon Papers to which they are inevitably being compared.

    But they increase the political pressure on a war policy that has already suffered a precipitous loss of credibility this year by highlighting contradictions between the official assumptions of the strategy and the realities shown in the documents - especially in regard to Pakistan's role in the war.

    Unlike the Pentagon Papers, which chronicle the policymaking process leading up to and during the Vietnam War, the WikiLeaks documents relate thousands of local incidents and situations encountered by United States and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops that illustrate severe problems for the US-NATO effort.

    Among the themes that are documented, sometimes dramatically but often through bland military reports, are the seemingly casual killing of civilians away from combat situations, night raids by special forces that are often based on bad intelligence, the absence of legal constraints on the abuses of Afghan police, and the deeply rooted character of corruption among Afghan officials.

    The most politically salient issue highlighted by the new documents, however, is Pakistan's political and material support for the Taliban insurgency, despite its ostensible support for US policy in Afghanistan.

    The documents include many intelligence reports about Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, the director of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's military intelligence agency, in the late 1980s, continuing to work with the Taliban commanders loyal to Mullah Omar as well as the Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar insurgent networks.

    Some of the reports obviously reflect the anti-Pakistan bias of the Afghan intelligence service when it was under former Northern Alliance intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh. Nevertheless, the overall impression they convey of Pakistani support for the Taliban is credible to the news media, because they confirm numerous press reports over the past few years.

    The New York Times led its coverage of the documents with its report on the Pakistani-Taliban issue. The story said the documents reflect "deep suspicions among American officials that Pakistan's military spy service has for years guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than US$1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants."

    The issue of Pakistani "double-dealing" on Afghanistan is one of the Barack Obama administration's greatest political vulnerabilities because it bears on a point of particular political sensitivity among the political and national security elite who are worried about whether there is any hope for success for the war strategy, even with General David Petraeus in command.

    One Democratic opponent of the war policy was quick to take advantage of the leaked documents' focus on Pakistan's support for the Taliban. In a statement issued on Monday, Senator Russ Feingold, Democratic member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the documents "highlight a fundamental strategic problem, which is that elements of the Pakistani security services have been complicit in the insurgency".

    In combination with "competing agendas within the Afghan security forces", Feingold argued, that problem precludes any "military solution in Afghanistan".

    Afghan President Hamid Karzai took advantage of the new story generated by the documents to release a statement pointing to Pakistani sanctuaries across the border as the primary problem faced by his government. "Our efforts against terrorism will have no effect as long as these sanctuaries and sources remain intact," said Karzai.

    Last February, then director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said what administration officials had privately conceded. Disrupting the "safe havens" enjoyed by the Taliban on the Pakistani side of the border, he said, "won't be sufficient by itself to defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan", but it is a "necessary condition" for making "progress" in Afghanistan.

    Implicitly admitting its political vulnerability on the issue, on Sunday the White House issued a compilation of statements by senior administration officials over the past 18 months aimed at showing that they had been tough with Pakistan on Afghanistan.

    But none of the statements quoted in the compilation admitted the reality that Pakistan's policy of supporting the Taliban insurgency has long been firmly fixed and is not going to change.

    Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed in April 2009 that "elements" of the ISI were "connected to those militant organizations". But he suggested that Pakistani chief of staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, with whom Mullen had developed a close personal relationship, was in the process of changing the intelligence agency.

    Mullen essentially pleaded for time, saying that change "isn't going to happen overnight" and that "it takes a fairly significant time to change an organization".

    Admitting that Pakistan's fundamental interests in Afghanistan conflict with US war strategy would be a serious - and possibly fatal - blow to the credibility of the Obama administration's strategy of using force to "reverse the momentum" of the Taliban.

    To the extent that this contradiction and others are highlighted in the coming weeks as the news media comb through the mountains of new documents, it could accelerate the process by which political support for the Afghanistan War among the foreign policy and political elite continues to diminish.

    The loss of this support has accelerated in recent months and is already far advanced. More prominent figures in the national security elite, both Republican and Democratic, have signaled a developing consensus in those circles that the war strategy cannot succeed, paralleling the process that occurred in Washington in 2006 in regard to the Lebanon and Iraq Wars....

    Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy.
    Obama's Afghanistan strategy under siege
    By Jim Lobe

    WASHINGTON - Monday's release by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of classified documents detailing the travails of the United States military in Afghanistan and Pakistan's secret support for the Taliban from 2004 through 2009 comes amid a growing crisis of confidence here in the nearly nine-year-old war.

    Coming on top of the steady increase in US and North Atlantic Treaty organization (NATO) casualties in Afghanistan - July may yet exceed June as the highest monthly death toll for US and NATO forces since the war began in late 2001 - the unprecedented leak can only add to the pessimism that has spread from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to the heart
    of the foreign policy establishment, and even to a growing number of Republicans.

    What hope was generated by President Barack Obama's appointment last month of General David Petraeus, whose counter-insurgency (COIN) tactics are widely credited with curbing Iraq's rapid descent into all-out civil war three years ago, to command US forces in Afghanistan has largely dissipated as a result of the steady flow of bad news - of which the WikiLeaks document dump and the weekend capture by the Taliban of two US seamen in a remote part of the country were only the latest examples.

    Even before the latest events, key figures in the foreign policy elite were breaking with the prevailing consensus of just a few months ago: that Obama's strategy of combining classic COIN military tactics - notably, prioritizing the protection of the population - with building the capacity and extending the reach of the central government through a "civilian surge" could indeed reverse the Taliban's momentum and force them to sue for peace.

    In one widely noted column published by Politico in mid-July, Robert Blackwill, a senior national security official in the administrations of both George H W and George W Bush, called for "partitioning" Afghanistan between the Taliban's stronghold of the mostly Pashtun south, and the multi-ethnic northern and western parts of the country where the US and like-minded nations would continue to base a sizeable force.

    "Such a de facto partition would be a profoundly disappointing outcome to America's 10 years in Afghanistan," wrote Blackwill, who dismissed concerns that such a move risked creating a "Pashtunistan" that could threaten the territorial integrity of Pakistan, in another column in the Financial Times last week. "But, regrettably, it is now the best that can be realistically and responsibly achieved."

    At the same time, Richard Haass - like Blackwill a key official in both Bush administrations and president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations for most of the past decade - offered a variation of that stratagem which he called "decentralization", in last week's Newsweek cover story, entitled "We're Not Winning. It's Not Worth It."

    Under Haass' vision, Washington would reduce its efforts to build up the central government and the Afghan army and security forces. Instead, it would provide "arms and training to those local Afghan leaders throughout the country who reject al-Qaeda and who do not seek to undermine Pakistan", including Taliban leaders willing to accept those conditions, while maintaining sufficient US forces at the ready to enforce them.

    While fighting would likely continue in Afghanistan for years, Washington could reduce its troop levels there significantly, according to Haass.

    While Haass has for some time been skeptical of Obama's nation-building strategy in Afghanistan, other influential supporters of the effort are also calling for major adjustments in policy.

    In the New Republic, Steve Coll, a veteran regional expert who also serves as president of the New America Foundation, implicitly took Haass and Blackwill to task, suggesting that their approach would essentially abandon the south to the Taliban and the rest of the country to local warlords.

    Instead, he called for Washington to follow the strategy followed by the last communist ruler of Afghanistan, Mohammad Najibullah, after the Soviet collapse when he sought - albeit unsuccessfully - to forge the broadest possible alliance against the Islamist mujahideen insurgency.

    Washington must now - hopefully, with President Hamid Karzai's cooperation - work to reinforce "a national consensus to prevent the Taliban or any other armed faction from seizing power as international troops gradually pull back from direct combat," according to Coll, who argued that, under current circumstances, "the Afghan body politic is in increasing danger of fissuring," very possibly into civil war as US and NATO forces withdraw.

    While the urgency with which these alternative strategies are being floated reflects the foreign policy elite's disunity over what is to be done, recent polls suggest that public confidence in the current strategy is in steady decline.

    Growing - although hardly overwhelming - majorities believe that the Afghan war, currently funded at about US$100 billion a year and which last month took the lives of 102 NATO soldiers, has not been worth the cost. Much larger majorities believe the war is either stalemated or being lost.

    Public disillusionment is increasingly reflected in the US Congress where a $37 billion emergency war bill has been held up for nearly a month amid doubts about US strategy, doubts that even Petraeus appears unable to dispel.

    Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry, whose loyalty to Obama's foreign policy in general and Afghanistan strategy, in particular, has been much appreciated by the White House, has become increasingly uneasy in recent weeks.

    He will hold hearings this week on the administration's policy toward possible negotiations between Karzai and the Taliban, one of the areas on which the administration - and its NATO allies - appear to be in considerable disarray.

    That unease was evident Monday after the WikiLeaks release.

    "However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," Kerry said in a prepared statement. "Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent."

    The committee's ranking Republican, Senator Richard Lugar, who supported Obama's decision last November to increase US troops levels to 100,000 by this autumn, has also expressed growing doubts about where the strategy is headed. He warned last week that Washington could continue "spending billions of dollars each year without ever reaching a satisfying conclusion".

    And while most Republicans remain hawkish on Afghanistan, severely criticizing Obama's decision to set a July 2011 deadline for beginning the drawdown of US forces from Afghanistan, some in their rank and file, including several figures associated with the populist "Tea Party" movement, are calling for an earlier date.

    Indeed, when the controversial Republican Party chairman Michael Steele argued that Afghanistan was Obama's "war of choice" and suggested that it was being waged in vain, calls for his resignation by party hawks were rejected by a number of right-wing activists.

    "America is weary," Representative Jason Chaffetz told Newsweek. "We're fast approaching several decades [of war] and we are broke but no end in sight."

    Tuesday, July 27, 2010

    The neocons and MEMRI mis-translation game now trains its sights on Vladimir Putin


    July , 2010 -- The neocons and MEMRI mis-translation game now trains its sights on Vladimir Putin...

    The neocons, who can always be relied upon to lie, cheat, steal, fabricate, have also refined the propaganda art of mistranslating foreign language quotes of various foreign leaders for their own insidious purposes.

    In 2006, the corporate media hyped the supposed statement in Farsi by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad that Israel should be "wiped off the map." In fact, what Ahmedinejad actually said, "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Certainly, regime change, something the neocons advocate against governments hostile to their global designs, is not the same as wiping a nation off the map.

    The mistranslations of Ahmedinejad's speeches were largely courtesy of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Mossad front operation that operates out of a post office box in Washington, DC.

    It now appears that Reuters, taking a page from MEMRI, is conducting the same kind of mistranslation operations against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In a July 24 report from Foros, Ukraine, Putin is quoted that he recently met the so-called Russian spies, arrested in the United States and swapped for four Western agents imprisoned in Russia. The article claimed that Putin said he "sang Soviet songs" with the expelled agents told them he admired what they did. However, one of the expelled agents, Anna Chapman is only 29 years old and she would have only ten years old when the USSR collapsed.

    Reuters was apparently playing as fast and loose with translations of Russian as MEMRI does with Farsi and Arabic. RIA Novosti reported that what Putin actually said was he and the expelled agents "sang patriotic songs accompanied by live music and talked about life during the meeting." That is certainly different than Putin, an ex-KGB agent, singing "Soviet songs" as part of some sort of nostalgic remembrance of the former Soviet Union and KGB. But that is the picture painted by Reuters from Ukraine, a nation that is embedded with operatives of the CIA's master-manipulator of disinformation tactics in the former Soviet bloc, George Soros.

    The neocon Wall Street Journal also ran with the "Soviet song" story, when, in fact, one of the songs was from a 1968 series that ran on television in Moscow. The Guardian (UK), which has suspiciously hyped the CIA/DIA/DOD/Wikileaks leak of tens of thousands of classified documents dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan and had to point out that it did not pay Wikileaks for the material, described the TV show theme song as a "sentimental Soviet song." Putin did not call the song Soviet -- that task was taken up by certain Western media like The Guardian, which are more interested in propaganda dissemination than in news reporting.

    A former U.S. intelligence analyst who tracked Russian government communications told WMR, "The Russian word for Soviet is советский (Sovetskiy). The Russian word for patriotic is отечественный (otechestvennyy). Putin either said Soviet or he said patriotic. If Putin was speaking in Russian, as of course he would, then these words could not have been 'mistranslated' by Reuters. Patriotic Russians these days do not sing the Soviet anthem."

    Putin was also reported to have told the alleged Russian agents, "As far as those people are concerned -- everyone of them had a tough life." Reuters reported that Putin was referring to the expelled agents. However, according to the former U.S. intelligence analyst, Reuters, again, appears to have mistranslated Putin's comments. The ex-analyst said, "When Putin spoke of 'their life being hard,' he was not referring to the alleged hard life of the so-called Russian spies. He was speaking generically about the difficulty of being a spy." Putin was a KGB agent assigned to East Germany during the Cold War.

    Reuters and RIA Novosti agreed on one of Putin's comments to the swapped agents. Putin said he knows those who betrayed the agents by name. Putin said of the scandal, "As I said earlier, this came as a result of betrayal. They [the betrayers] always end up badly taking to drink or drugs, in a gutter' he said, adding that he knew all betrayers by their names."

    Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has also been a victim of mistranslations from the same "usual suspects." In 2006, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles launched a polemic against Chavez claiming he said, "the world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, have taken over all the wealth of the world." The canard of Chavez's anti-Semitism was echoed by the neocon Weekly Standard, as well as the Voice of America. In fact, Chavez was not talking about Jews but the Romans and Spaniards. Chavez actually stated:

    "The world has an offer for everybody but it turned out that a few minorities--the descendants of those who crucified Christ, the descendants of those who expelled Bolivar from here and also those who in a certain way crucified him in Santa Marta, there in Colombia--they took possession of the riches of the world, a minority took possession of the planet's gold, the silver, the minerals, the water, the good lands, the oil, and they have concentrated all the riches in the hands of a few; less than 10 percent of the world population owns more than half of the riches of the world."

    The neocons would have the world believe that Chavez said the Jews expelled Simon Bolivar from Venezuela, when in fact he was referring to the Romans who crucified Christ and the Spaniards who expelled Bolivar. Facts matter little to the neocons, whose stock in trade is comprised of mistruths, half truths, blatant forgeries, wars and extra-judicial assassinations in the Levant and the world by the infamous White House Murder INC,.....

    Ousted President Manuel Zelaya was also subjected to mistranslations after he re-entered Honduras and was given refuge in the Brazilian embassy. Again, the culprits were the "usual suspects," particularly the Miami Herald.

    WMR exposed this disinformation tactic: "The Herald reported on a telephone interview with Zelaya and said the Honduran leader said he was being subjected to 'high-frequency radiation' from Israeli mercenaries who are supporting the Honduran junta. The paper also reported that Zelaya said that the Israelis were using “mind-altering” gas and radiation. In actuality, that is not what Zelaya stated in his conversation on September 24 with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who was attending the UN General Assembly session in New York. Chavez said he spoke to Zelaya by phone at 1:00 pm EDT and the Honduran leader said a piece of equipment on the rooftop of a neighboring home had been recovered and brought into the embassy by Zelaya loyalists. When Zelaya checked the gear’s serial number on the Internet, it turned out the equipment was a cell phone jamming device manufactured in Israel. What Zelaya stated to Chavez and presumably to the Miami Herald is that the junta and its Israeli private security company advisers were jamming the cell phones of those holed up inside the embassy. Zelaya never spoke of radiation death rays but that is the impression the Herald gave and it was quickly picked up by various neocon and Zionist-controlled media outlets."

    The cold warriors and their allies -- the Zionists, the right-wing Cuban exiles, and other retrogressive elements in the Obama administration, appear hell-bent on re-creating the Cold War. Putin joins Ahmedinejad, Chavez, and Zelaya in the neocon mistranslation arena of lies and distortions. The latest ploy of the neocons is to paint Putin as an unrepentant Soviet KGB agent....

    It was 2017. Clans were governing America....

    The first clans organized around local police forces. The conservatives’ war on crime during the late 20th century and the Bush/Obama war on terror during the first decade of the 21st century had resulted in the police becoming militarized and unaccountable.

    As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and
    the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police.

    The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money.

    With the dollar’s demise, import prices skyrocketed. As Americans were unable to afford foreign-made goods, the transnational corporations that were producing offshore for US markets were bankrupted, further eroding the government’s revenue base.

    The government was forced to print money in order to pay its bills, causing domestic prices to rise rapidly. Faced with hyperinflation, Washington took recourse in terminating Social Security and Medicare and followed up by confiscating the remnants of private pensions. This provided a one-year respite, but with no more resources to confiscate, money creation and hyperinflation resumed.

    Organized food deliveries broke down when the government fought hyperinflation with fixed prices and the mandate that all purchases and sales had to be in US paper currency. Unwilling to trade appreciating goods for depreciating paper, goods disappeared from stores.

    Washington responded as Lenin had done during the “war communism” period of Soviet history. The government sent troops to confiscate goods for distribution in kind
    to the population. This was a temporary stop-gap until existing stocks were depleted, as future production was discouraged. Much of the confiscated stocks became the property of the troops who seized the goods.

    Goods reappeared in markets under the protection of local warlords. Transactions were conducted in barter and in gold, silver, and copper coins.

    Other clans organized around families and individuals who possessed stocks of food, bullion, guns and ammunition. Uneasy alliances formed to balance differences in clan strengths. Betrayals quickly made loyalty a necessary trait for survival.

    Large scale food and other production broke down as local militias taxed distribution as goods moved across local territories. Washington seized domestic oil production and refineries, but much of the government’s gasoline was paid for safe passage across clan territories.

    Most of the troops in Washington’s overseas bases were abandoned. As their resource stocks were drawn down, the abandoned soldiers were forced into alliances with those with whom they had been fighting.

    Washington found it increasingly difficult to maintain itself. As it lost control over the country, Washington was less able to secure supplies from abroad as tribute from those Washington threatened with nuclear attack. Gradually other nuclear powers realized that the only target in America was Washington. The more astute saw the writing on the wall and slipped away from the former capital city.

    When Rome began her empire, Rome’s currency consisted of gold and silver coinage. Rome was well organized with efficient institutions and the ability to supply troops in the field so that campaigns could continue indefinitely, a monopoly in the world of Rome’s time.

    When hubris sent America in pursuit of overseas empire, the venture coincided with the offshoring of American manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs and the corresponding erosion of the government’s tax base, with the advent of massive budget and trade deficits, with the erosion of the fiat paper currency’s value, and with America’s dependence on foreign creditors and puppet rulers.

    The Roman Empire lasted for centuries. The American one collapsed overnight.

    Rome’s corruption became the strength of her enemies, and the Western Empire was overrun.

    America’s collapse occurred when government ceased to represent the people and became the instrument of a private oligarchy. Decisions were made in behalf of short-term profits for the few at the expense of unmanageable liabilities for the many.
    Overwhelmed by liabilities, the government collapsed.

    Globalism had run its course. Life reformed on a local basis.


    Tuesday, July 20, 2010

    The Real CIA/MOSSAD Terrorists

    Corbett Report - 9/11 FOIAs Denied, Economic Realism




    What's missing from the Washington Post's Top Secret America 'expose?' 50,000 intelligence reports are published each year and I'll bet not one of them is about the threat of a false flag in our country from our own CIA and the Mossad Siamese twins.... None of them are focused on past and present criminals within the government, pentagon and industry concerning the real story of 9/11. They can't or they would be out of a job or eliminated by the infamous White House Murder INC,....

    Untold billions spent on 'intelligence' and our Secretary of State says bin Laden is still hiding in Pakistan
    . It's not even funny anymore, since OBL died in December of 2001 of kidney failure....

    If we really wanted to end the 'war on terror' and have security, all we would have to do is round up a few hundred of the real terrorist traitors that are right in our midst, bring all of our troops home and cut off all aid and support to Israel and the world banking system. Shut down the Federal Reserve and their banker/Wall St. allies and we might just be heading on the right track....

    Of course we are dreaming. There's no one to do this so I suppose we as a nation, and the world, will just have to wait until the system collapses from the weight of its own utter corruption, deal with mayhem that will follow and try and survive to pick up a few of the pieces.

    It's coming down to saving ourselves ... from ourselves.
    Are we buying the corporate puppet show and missing the gathering mob? We are witnessing a very volatile time. I’m positive that we will be given a spark. Why? Because the arrogant B’s have always done so.

    911 was a vile act of mass murder by the usual Zionist criminals and their buddies. Eventually I hope we get the chance to apologize to the Muslim world for the libelous crusade launched against them in its name.

    It is our burden to carry. Keep spreading the real back story. Don’t let our friends and neighbors get led by the nose to blame the usual patsies.
    Living in la la land the sheeple didn't even march to force the truth about JFK's murder.We didn't protest when they took our rights under the guise of keeping use safe,as Ben Franklin said"those who are willing to give up freedom for safety do not deserve either". We can't even get them to shut down the border,enjoy the coming one world!
    Will we let a neo-liberal ruling clique minority take us to our doom? What will we say to our offspring when they ask why we didn't do anything? Remember the JFK quote "those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."

    Saturday, July 17, 2010

    The Conception of the Doctrine of War on Terror


    link
    Although the doctrine of War on Terror was announced by G.W. Bush following the events of 9/11[inside job wall to wall ], the real architect of that doctrine is Benjamin Netanyahu. While most people think that Netanyahu is an Israeli politician, he is also an author of a few books on terrorism and is the real father of the War on Terror doctrine. One of his early works on terrorism "International Terrorism: Challenge and Response" dates back to 1979. His major definitive work "Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism" was published in 1995. He has also been promoting his War on Terror doctrine in his speeches. One such speech was delivered at the Jewish Agency Assembly Plenary meetings held in Israel on 24th June 2001. The main points of that speech are:
    1. The Palestinians are to blame for the conflict in the Middle East, and specifically Yasser Arafart.
    2. It is legitimate for established states to engage in wars, because the societies are imperfect.
    3. Palestinians are not waging a legitimate war (like established states using regular armies) and are terrorists.
    4. The Palestinian terrorists deliberately attack civilians.
    5. The Israelis are responding in self-defense.
    6. When the Israelis respond, they respond against combatants.
    7. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority are committed to the destruction of the State of Israel.
    8. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority are using the illegitimate and criminal means of terrorism.
    9. The Palestinian are wrong and the Israelis are right.
    10. Terrorism invariably comes from terrorist regimes.
    11. Terror is useful, only if the cost of waging terrorism, the cost of that regime is lower than the benefits of waging terrorism.
    12. To stop terrorism, one must make the terrorist regime pay very very heavily.
    13. The root core of the Middle East conflict is the existential opposition by a great many in the Arab world still, and certainly by the Palestinian leadership to Israel's very existence.
    14. The first way of ensuring Israel's existence is that the Arabs simply understand that Israel is so powerful, so permanent, so unconquerable in every way that they will simply abandon by the force of the inertia of Israel's permanence all opposition to Israel.
    15. The second way [of ensuring Israel's existence] is for the forces of democratization get to the Arab regimes.
    16. Using propaganda techniques, like broadcasting American television serials (which Netanyahu sees as subversive material) will ultimately bring down regimes like the Ayatollah regime and the Khomeini regime in Iran.
    17. In the 21st century, you cannot achieve a military victory unless you achieve a political victory to accompany it; and you cannot achieve a political victory unless you achieve a victory in public opinion; and you cannot achieve a victory in public opinion unless you persuade that public that your cause is just.
    18. It doesn't make any difference if you are on the side of the angels or on the side of the devil. Anyone fighting in the international arena for public opinion must argue the justice of his cause. Hitler argued for the justice of his cause and Stalin argued for the justice of his cause. They all had propaganda machines. Whether you are right or you are wrong you must argue the justice of your cause.
    Although this speech was delivered some two months before the events of 9/11, one can see in it all the main points advanced by G.W. Bush in his speeches on War on Terror, which followed the 9/11. But at the time of the delivery of the Netanyahu speech, the interest in the Netanyahu "War on Terror" doctrine was limited to a narrow circle of professional Greater Israel Zionists and Middle East experts. It was also obvious that the Netanyahu doctrine could not be implemented by Israel alone without involving into it the full military and financial might of the USA. At the time such involvement seemed an unlikely prospect which could only be achieved through some kind of miracle.

    But this "miracle" did not take long to happen.{more at WTC Demolition}


    George Bush Sr, JFK and the Men Who Stole America
    Anyone lying about the JFK assassination is, as far as I am concerned, suspected of covering up the crimes of murder and high treason that were committed on November 22, 1963. Who lies about a crime but those who are guilty or profiting, in any way, from the cover up? Lying about and covering up a crime is probable cause to suspect the liar of having participated in whatever crime is lied about. Guilt is the most powerful motive to lie about a crime. Conversely, innocent people are powerfully motivated to tell and/or get at the truth.

    Like 911, we were and remain targeted to receive a fusillade of lies, the purposes of which are to distract and confuse. Those guilty of the crime are always those who benefit from the lies. Similarly, those who lie about the crime are almost always guilty of it.

    Nothing silences a potential witness more effectively than death. The murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by known mobster Jack Ruby was entirely too timely, too convenient. It effectively shut Oswald up. Accused of murdering JFK, Oswald protested that he had been set up, that he had been 'a patsy'. Indeed, Oswald had to die. {more - Len Hart}


    Halsell: What Christians don't know about Israel
    by Grace Halsell
    pictured with Lyndon Johnson
    - If Americans Knew (originally written for Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998)

    American Jews sympathetic to Israel dominate key positions in all areas of our government where decisions are made regarding the Middle East. This being the case, is there any hope of ever changing U.S. policy? American Presidents as well as most members of Congress support Israel — and they know why. U.S. Jews sympathetic to Israel donate lavishly to their campaign coffers.

    The answer to achieving an even-handed Middle East policy might lie elsewhere — among those who support Israel but don’t really know why. This group is the vast majority of Americans. They are well-meaning, fair-minded Christians who feel bonded to Israel — and Zionism — often from atavistic feelings, in some cases dating from childhood.
    In the late 1970s, when I first went to Jerusalem, I was unaware that editors could and would classify “news” depending on who was doing what to whom. On my initial visit to Israel-Palestine, I had interviewed dozens of young Palestinian men. About one in four related stories of torture.
    Speaking of these injustices, I invariably heard the same question, “How come I didn’t know this?” Or someone might ask, “But I haven’t read about that in my newspaper.” To these church audiences, I related my own learning experience, that of seeing hordes of U.S. correspondents covering a relatively tiny state. I pointed out that I had not seen so many reporters in world capitals such as Beijing, Moscow, London, Tokyo, Paris. Why, I asked, did a small state with a 1980 population of only four million warrant more reporters than China, with a billion people?

    I also linked this query with my findings that The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post — and most of our nation’s print media – are owned and/or controlled by Jews supportive of Israel. It was for this reason, I deduced, that they sent so many reporters to cover Israel — and to do so largely from the Israeli point of view.

    Yet, increasingly, American Jews have fallen victim to Zionism, a nationalistic movement that passes for many as a religion. While the ethical instructions of all great religions — including the teachings of Moses, Muhammad and Christ — stress that all human beings are equal, militant Zionists take the position that the killing of a non-Jew does not count.
    In the teachings of Christ, there was a break from such Talmudic teachings. He sought to heal the wounded, to comfort the downtrodden.

    The danger, of course, for U.S. Christians is that having made an icon of Israel, we fall into a trap of condoning whatever Israel does — even wanton murder — as orchestrated by God.
    {more at Uprooted Palestinians}

    Friday, July 09, 2010

    Lebanese cleric Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah passes into lore


    Lebanese cleric Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah passes into lore...

    http://www.economist.com/node/16542798?story_id=16542798&fsrc=rss

    "Throughout my life, I have always supported the human being in his humanism and I have supported the oppressed. I think it is the person’s right to live his freedom and it is her and his right to face the injustice imposed on each by revolting against it, using his practical, realistic and available means to end the oppressor’s injustice toward him, whether it is an individual, a community, a nation, or a state; whether male or female."
    - Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935-2010), perhaps sensing his imminent death, during his last dialogue with the Washington DC-based Council for the National Interest on June 2, 2010.

    Tens of thousands of people swarmed the coffin of Lebanon's top Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Fadallah, as it made its way through the streets of south Beirut. His passing shocked and
    saddened the region and the loss of his advocacy of dialogue, respect and unity among all religions is incalculable.

    The loss of his support for the current campaign to obtain civil rights for Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees will make that struggle more difficult. Justice for Palestine and ending the Zionist occupation was part of his unwavering lifelong work. Some media outlets reported that shortly before he died, upon being asked by a medical attendant if he needed anything, he replied, "Only the end of the Zionist occupation of Palestine."

    On the morning of July 4, Zeinab, the nurse on duty at the blood donor’s clinic at Bahman Hospital, a block from my former home in Haret Hreik, had just instructed me to remain sitting for five minutes and to drink the juice she gave me before I returned to south Beirut’s blazing sun.

    A companion and I had each just donated a pint of blood in response to an appeal from friends who worked in the Translation Office of Lebanon’s much loved Fadlallah. He had been hospitalized for the past 12 days but on Friday his stomach bleeding had increased dramatically, related to complications from a liver problem he had been treated for over the past several years. Fadallah also suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure.

    As we waited, Zeinab returned, tears in her eyes, and simply said, "The Sayeed has passed away." And she disappeared. So did my Shia hijabed companion, and as it seemed, everyone from the floor. I decided to walk down the stairs to the main level and could hear sobs from hospital staff on each floor, now seemingly darkened with each level eerier than the preceding one as I descended.

    As I left the main entrance of the hospital, a bit numbed, I was thinking about some of the more than a dozen meetings I had the honor to attend with Fadlallah and some of his staff over the past three years. Such as those who regularly visited him from the Washington DC-based Council for the National Interest (cnionline.org), and one that I had arranged for former US president Jimmy Carter.

    Suddenly, there was movement for two blocks in front and along the side streets adjacent to Bahman, a state of the art and science Hospital operated by Fadallah’s Al Marbarrat Charity. This hospital was among hundreds of civil buildings in Haret Hreik and South Beirut that Israel had bombed in July 2006.

    "How did these guys get here so fast," I wondered, for it was only minutes since the marja (religious guide) to millions in the Middle East had died. Some security units, dressed in black shirts, caps and trousers, walkie talkies in their left hands, others in civilian clothes, quickly placed traffic barriers in the area. They politely asked that all vehicles including motorcycles be relocated a least two blocks away.

    Some, from their appearance obviously war toughened fighters, wept and consoled men and women who began arriving at the hospital to pay their respects, first in twos and threes and then streams. The loudspeakers from the Hassanayn Mosque, where every Friday Fadlallah, for the past nearly 20 years, delivered sermons to tens of thousands of faithful, Muslim and Christian alike, began broadcasting religious music and Koranic verses to our shocked and grief-stricken neighborhood.

    During the night of the 27th day of Ramadan, known as Laylat al-Kadr, more than 50,000 filled Fadlallah’s mosque and surrounding streets. "The father, the leader, the marja, the guide, the human being is gone. Sayyed Fadlallah has died this morning," senior aide Ayatollah Abdullah al-Ghurayfi told a hastily called news conference, at the hospital, joined by the late cleric’s sons, Sayyed Ali Fadlallah and Jaafar, who, like nearly everyone else in attendance, could not hold back tears.

    On the sweltering evening of July 5, Hezbollah security gave an American delegation the rare honor of viewing the body of Lebanon’s senior Shia cleric inside his mosque near where he would be buried at 1:30 pm the following afternoon. The group met a wide spectrum of Lebanon’s political and resistance leadership, but was not joined by anyone from the US embassy since the US government will boycott Lebanon’s national day of mourning and the burial of this Washington-branded "terrorist".

    It was in 1995 that then president Bill Clinton, at the urging of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and facing a re-election campaign, so designated him. Carter promised during a visit in June 2009 that he would contact President Barack Obama immediately about this travesty but was unable to have his name removed before the Sayeed’s death.

    The American delegation paying their respects included residents of New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California, Hawaii and Oregon, a Catholic priest and two nuns, some of whom were in Beirut as participants in the delayed Lebanon flotilla to help break the siege of Gaza. They felt they were the true representatives of their country, not their embassy, thought by some to be in Lebanon to promote Israel’s agenda, not American interests.

    Ever misleading the public with respect to the Middle East, the mainstream Western media began a thousand reports with the words, "A fiery anti-American critic died ..." It is nonsense of course. Fadallah was very pro-American in the sense that he often extolled the founding American principles and his relationship with the American people was valued by both.

    Barely two weeks before his death, he left his sick bed to meet with a group of Americans from Washington DC against the advice of his doctors, and he urged them to work to preserve the principles on which their country was founded, encourage dialogue between Muslims, Christians and Jews, and end the occupations of the Middle East.

    Like the rapidly growing number of American critics of US policy in the Middle East, many of Fadlallah’s Friday prayer sermons denounced arming and supporting serial Israeli aggressions. For more than 50 years, he worked at "modernizing" the sharia (Koranic law) and rendering it accessible to modern day youth, addressing their concerns, expectations and fears in a fast-changing world.

    He was truly the cleric of the youth and of women, their guide who never oppressed their dreams and always simplified rulings. He was available for questions regarding the most taboo of social and political subjects. He was also the enemy of stalemate and a rejecter of tradition in its inflexible sense. He insisted on subjecting all ideas to discussions, debates and reassessments and was much more interested in human beings than doctrines.

    As the Beirut Daily An-Nahar editorialized: "Sayyed Fadlallah is a unique guide who will be missed by Lebanon and the Arab and Islamic worlds. A long time will pass by before we see the surfacing of someone so tolerant and open-minded who has so much faith in mankind and a wish to cooperate with all the attempts and efforts deployed during the days of friction with all the forces and elites."

    His followers revered him for his moderate social views, openness and pragmatism. Fadlallah issued religious edicts forbidding female circumcision, condemning domestic violence, allowing women to wear cosmetics and finger nail polish which some clerics opposed, and insisting that women could physically resist abusive husbands.

    He rejected the blood-letting at Ashoura events and, like Hezbollah, encouraged his followers to donate blood to the Red Crescent Society instead of cutting themselves. In 2007, he issued a fatwa (religious edict) forbidding "honor killings" which he viewed as barbaric and anti-Islamic. He also opposed the call to jihad by Osama bin Laden and cursed the Afghan Taliban, which he viewed as a sect outside Islam. He was among the first to condemn the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

    Fadlallah opposed suicide attacks but distinguished the right of an individual to sacrifice himself as a weapon during asymmetrical warfare by aggressors. He supported the Islamic revolution in Shi'ite Iran and advocated armed resistance to Israel. In 2009, again during a meeting with Americans, including Jews, Fadlallah, whose family came from the southern Lebanese village of Ainata, reiterated his call for a Muslim-Jewish dialogue as part of interfaith efforts aimed at bridging the gap among various religious, rejecting any offense against Jews or Christians in any Arab or Muslim country.

    But he emphasized to the delegation the importance of a Muslim-Jewish dialogue away from Zionist influence, stressing that Jews need to be freed from the cycle of world Zionism and that Israel should be confronted because of its occupation of Arab lands.

    He welcomed the election of Barack Obama in the US, telling the Wall Street Journal in 2009 that "some of Obama’s statements show that he believes in the method of dialogue". He added: "We don’t have a problem with any American president, but our problem is with his policy that might affect our strategic interest." He later told visitors of his disappointment at Obama’s Middle East policy, accusing him of being "under pressure" from Israeli supporters and "not a man who has a plan for peace".

    Fadlallah had a widespread reputation for piety and scholarship through his teaching and the more than 40 books and treatises he wrote. He established orphanages, religious schools, foundations, clinics and libraries as part of the charitable Al Marrarat Foundation. They are open to all of Lebanon’s sects and foreigners alike, and comprise part of his legacy.

    Fadallah was too moderate, progressive and too effective a spokesman advocating for the deprived to be tolerated by the US administration and Israel. Both required more stereotypical radical Muslim clerics to smear the region. The Mossad is believed to have targeted him more than half a dozen times, including during the July 2006 Israeli attack.

    In Lebanon and in the US, the Central Intelligence Agency is confirmed to have been behind the 1985 bombing outside his home. American author Bob Woodward wrote in his book, Veil: The Secret War of the CIA, that the late CIA director William Casey ordered Lebanese agents Amine GEMAYEL and Jhonny ABDO, using Lebanese military intelligence and other surrogates... to plant the car bomb in frustration and retaliation for unsolved attacks on US interests in the Middle East. Fadlallah escaped death but 85 civilians outside his mosque did not and more than 300 were injured.

    Fadallah’s role as a mentor for resistors to Israeli aggressions and his complicated relations with Hezbollah, including false US allegations that he was the "spiritual guide of Hezbollah" is treated in some detail in Chapter IV of a volume entitled Hezbollah: Inside-Out, to be finalized and released following the achievement of Palestinian civil rights in Lebanon.

    A generation was inspired by Fadallah and listened to him and studied his voluminous writings. Two generations feel the emptiness of his passing away. He was a rare man with an angel’s wit, mirth and singular learning. A marvelous man of gentleness, lowliness and affability. Sometimes, when defending the rights of Muslims, Christians, Jews and all people of faith, or non-believers of good will, his countenance was changed by a sad gravity and his smiling eyes darkened. For to his core, Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah believed in the right and responsibility to resist injustice and occupation.

    He was a man for all seasons whose conscience and piety would not allow him to be idle as long as the poor and downtrodden remained dispossessed and voiceless or his beloved Lebanon and Palestine were occupied. For this, and for no other reason, he was placed and kept on the US political terrorism list as a Specially Designated Terrorist (SDT) in the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, and his American charitable assets were confiscated.

    Like Thomas More, Fadlallah rejected inducements and bribes including removal from Washington's "T [terrorist] list" if he stopped supporting the Lebanese national resistance. He wore his nonsensical "terrorist" label as a badge of honor as his daily good works mocked and marked the list keepers with shame and cowardice for squandering American founding principles.