Here's one way to get a grip the the situation:
'nuff said.
Blue Ibis
'nuff said.
Blue Ibis
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Condoleezza Pregnant: Giving Birth to Monster
Turning the page over to eloquence:
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Condoleezza Pregnant: Giving Birth to Monster
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
24 July 2006
Rice sees bombs as "birth pangs"
In Norman Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpah, he writes:
And now, Condoleezza Rice thinks that further ethnic cleansing of the Middle East by the psycho-bullies of Israel is just "birth pangs" of a "New Middle East."
Most Westerners have been brainwashed to think that the "Arab-Israeli Conflict" is some kind of old, historical hatred, a "cosmic clash of religions, cultures, civilizations. This is what Finkelstein refers to as a "contrived controversy." It is all bunk and mystification and it serves to blow smoke on the so-called "Two State Solution" that is the favored political gambit of most normal, decent, humane and moral people. Noam Chomsky favors this view to some extent, but I sometimes wonder how a person can have any moral fiber at all if they, on the one hand, agree that a deed is totally morally reprehensible, and on the other hand, suggest that righting the wrong is not feasible.
Nevertheless, there has been a consensus that the Two State Solution is the best one for over 25 years. In 1989, a UN Generally Assembly resolution passed nearly unanimously; it stipulated "[t]he withdrawal of Israel from the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967." The only dissenting votes were the U.S., Israel, and Dominica.
In 2004, basically the same resolution was passed again with the only dissenting votes being cast by the U.S., Israel, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Uganda.
So, why does Israel and the U.S. (and UK too), continue to blow the mystifying smoke on the problem, to continue to try to present it as a "clash of civilizations" or a "cosmic war between good and evil" and all that crap?
The answer is simple: if you look at it with all that nonsense stripped away you see the simple truth: it is a political problem that was created by politicians with Imperialist agendas.
The fact is, from the very beginning, the establishment of a National Home for the Jews involved blanket negation of the inalienable rights of the residents of that land to keep their homes.
One cannot help but draw the comparison between the justifications for the creation of the National Home for the Jews with the Nazis justifications for Lebensraum.
So, why do we tolerate it on the part of Israel? Why are we all sitting around and watching Israel doing the same things that the Nazis were doing, listening to psychopaths like Condoleezza Rice refer to it as "Birth Pangs" of a "New Middle East"? Have we taken leave of our senses? Is the universe of normal, decent and moral people so filled with smoke that we can no longer see what is right and what is wrong?
Well, as a matter of fact, that seems to be the case.
Winston Churchill testified before the Peel Commission saying that the indigenous population of Arabs had no more right to Palestine than a "dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time." He further opined that "No wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
Shades of Adolf Hitler!
"From the outset Zionism worked towards the creation of a purely Jewish state and was glad to rid the country of its Arab inhabitants.' [Isaac Deutscher]
To say that the Israeli government is acting irrationally when it refuses to "remove or assuage the grievance" of Palestinians is missing the point. Considering that the Palestinians' chief grievance is the denial of their homeland, if the Zionists were to act "rationally" according to that standard, and remove this grievance, i.e. to give them back their homeland, then there would be no Israel.
It is equally wrong to think that Palestinians - and the wider Arab community - have been acting irrationally when they blame the Zionists for all the misery in the Middle East. They are acting quite normally.
Which brings us back to Condoleezza Rice: Few things have ever revealed the psychopathic nature of the Bush Neocon Cabal more clearly than this soulless and truly inhuman series of remarks. Rice has revealed herself to be - like Benny Morris - a morally repellant creature. And, as Finkelstein has pointed out, the universe inhabited by normal human beings - honest and decent people - is one where the majority concur on the facts and their moral and legal implications, though they may have different ideas of how to implement a political solution. One could say that all normal people demand an immediate cease-fire. Period. You can work out the details later, but stop now before one more precious baby is lost and one more mother regrets the real birth pangs that brought her child into a world where he or she was destined to become only cannon fodder for such as the likes of Condoleezza Rice.
But let's look again at what Rice said: a "New Middle East." What could she have meant by that? Just what kind of Middle East can you have when Israel is systematically ethnically cleansing the region of - well... anybody but Israelis. And there's your answer. That is, after all, the vision of Israel.
And so we see just what kind of "New Middle East" Condoleezza Rice is talking about: she is pregnant and giving birth to a Monster.
Condoleeza Rice
Isreal War Crimes
Ethnic Cleansing
NEOCONS
Gaza
Lebanon
New Middle East
***************************************
Condoleezza Pregnant: Giving Birth to Monster
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
24 July 2006
Rice sees bombs as "birth pangs"
Condoleezza Rice has described the plight of Lebanon as a part of the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" and said that Israel should ignore calls for a ceasefire.I have to say that, as the mother of five children, these remarks stopped me cold in my tracks. Aside from the obvious question "what can Condoleezza Rice - a woman who has never given birth - know about "birth pangs"? - there is another more compelling question: what kind of human being can be so callous as to say such a thing when tens of thousands of mothers in the Middle East have suffered the unimaginable grief of seeing their beautiful babies crushed under the jackboots of rapacious Imperialism and religious fanaticism?
"This is a different Middle East. It's a new Middle East. It's hard, We're going through a very violent time," the US secretary of state said.
"A ceasefire would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo.
"Such a step would allow terrorists to launch attacks at the time and terms of their choosing and to threaten innocent people, Arab and Israeli, throughout the region."
In Norman Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpah, he writes:
In the course of preparing the chapters of this book devoted to Israel's human rights record in the Occupied Territories, I went through literally thousands of pages of human rights reports, published by multiple, fiercely independent, and highly professional organizations - Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights - Israel - each fielding its own autonomous staff of monitors and investigators.Let's run that by one more time: The scholarly consensus is that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and Israel's leading historian, Benny Morris, thinks that this was a good thing.
Except on one minor matter, I didn't come across a single point of law or fact on which these human rights organizations differed.
In the case of Israel's human rights record, one can speak today not just of a broad consensus - as on historical questions - but of an UNQUALIFIED consensus. All these organizations agreed, for example, that Palestinian detainees have been sytematically ill treated and tortured, the total number now probably reaching the tens of thousands.
Yet if, as I've suggested, broad agreement has been reached on the FACTUAL record, an obvious anomaly arises: what accounts for the impassioned controversy that still swirls around the Israel-Palestine conflict?
To my mind, explaining this apparent paradox requires, first of all, that a fundamental distinction be made between those controversies that are real and those that are contrived.
To illustrate real differences of opinion, let us consider again the Palestinian refugee question.
It is possible for interested parties to agree on the facts yet come to diametrically opposed moral, legal, and political conclusions.
Thus, as already mentioned, the scholarly consensus is that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948.
Israel's leading historian on the topic, Benny Morris, although having done more than anyone else to clarify exactly what happened, nonetheless concludes that, morally, it was a good thing - just as, in his view, the "annihilation" of Native Americans was a good thing - that, legally, Palestinians have no right to return to their homes, and that, politically, Israel's big error in 1948 was that it hadn't "carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan" of Palestinians.
However repellant morally, these clearly can't be called FALSE conclusions.
Returning to the universe inhabited by normal human beings, it's possible for people to concur on the facts as well as on their moral and legal implications, yet still reach divergent POLITICAL conclusions.
Noam Chomsky agrees that, factually, Palestinians were expelled; that, morally, this was a major crime; and that, legally, Palestinians have a right of return. Yet, politically, he concludes that implementation of this right is infeasible and pressing it inexpedient, indeed, that dangling this (in his view) illusory hope before Palestinian refugees is deeply immoral.
There are those, contrariwise, who maintain that a moral and legal right is meaningless unless it can be exercised and that implementing the right of return is a practical possibility.
For our purposes, the point is not who's right and who's wrong but that, even among honest and decent people, there can be a real and legitimate differences of political judgment.
This having been said, however, it bears emphasis that - at any rate, among those sharing ordinary moral values - the range of political disagreement is quite narrow, while the range of agreement quite broad."
And now, Condoleezza Rice thinks that further ethnic cleansing of the Middle East by the psycho-bullies of Israel is just "birth pangs" of a "New Middle East."
Most Westerners have been brainwashed to think that the "Arab-Israeli Conflict" is some kind of old, historical hatred, a "cosmic clash of religions, cultures, civilizations. This is what Finkelstein refers to as a "contrived controversy." It is all bunk and mystification and it serves to blow smoke on the so-called "Two State Solution" that is the favored political gambit of most normal, decent, humane and moral people. Noam Chomsky favors this view to some extent, but I sometimes wonder how a person can have any moral fiber at all if they, on the one hand, agree that a deed is totally morally reprehensible, and on the other hand, suggest that righting the wrong is not feasible.
Nevertheless, there has been a consensus that the Two State Solution is the best one for over 25 years. In 1989, a UN Generally Assembly resolution passed nearly unanimously; it stipulated "[t]he withdrawal of Israel from the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967." The only dissenting votes were the U.S., Israel, and Dominica.
In 2004, basically the same resolution was passed again with the only dissenting votes being cast by the U.S., Israel, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Uganda.
So, why does Israel and the U.S. (and UK too), continue to blow the mystifying smoke on the problem, to continue to try to present it as a "clash of civilizations" or a "cosmic war between good and evil" and all that crap?
The answer is simple: if you look at it with all that nonsense stripped away you see the simple truth: it is a political problem that was created by politicians with Imperialist agendas.
The fact is, from the very beginning, the establishment of a National Home for the Jews involved blanket negation of the inalienable rights of the residents of that land to keep their homes.
The injustice inflicted on Palestinians by Zionism was manifest and, except on racist grounds, unanswerable: their right to self-determination, and perhaps even to their homeland, was being denied.
Several sorts of justification were supplied for the Zionist enterprise as against the rights of the indigenous population, none of which, however, withstood even cursory scrutiny. Belief in the cluster of justifications put forth by the Zionist movement presumed acceptance of very specific Zionist ideological tenets regarding Jewish "historical rights" to Palestine and Jewish "homelessness."
For example, the "historical rights" claim was based on Jews having originated in Palestine and resided there two thousand years ago. Such a claim was neither historical nor based on any accepted notion of right.
It was not historical inasmuch as it voided the two millennia of non-Jewish settlement in Palestine and the two millennia of Jewish settlement outside it. It was not a right except in mystical, Romantic nationalist ideologies, the implementation of which would wreak - and have wreaked - havoc.
Reminding fellow Zionists that Jewry's "historical right" to Palestine was a "metaphysical rather than a political category" and that, springing as it did from "the very inner depths of Judaism," this "category ... is binding on us rather than on the Arabs," even the Zionist writer Ernst Simon was emphatic that it did not confer on Jews any right to Palestine without the consent of the Arabs.
One cannot help but draw the comparison between the justifications for the creation of the National Home for the Jews with the Nazis justifications for Lebensraum.
The term Lebensraum... was coined by Friedrich Ratzel in 1897, and used as a slogan in Germany referring to the unification of the country and the acquisition of colonies, as per the English and French models. It was adapted from Darwinian and other scientific ideas of the day about how ecological niches are filled. Similar concepts are still used today in geography and biology.[1]That sure does sound familiar, doesn't it? And it was soundly and violently condemned by the entire world which fought a World War to end such expansionist aspirations on the part of Germany.
Ratzel believed the development of a people is primarily influenced by their geographical situation and that a people that successfully adapted to one location would proceed naturally to another. This expansion to fill available space, he claimed, was a natural and necessary feature of any healthy species.
These beliefs were furthered by scholars of the day, including Karl Haushofer and Friedrich von Bernhardi. In von Bernhardi's 1912 book Germany and the Next War, he expanded upon Ratzel's hypotheses and, for the first time, explicitly identified Eastern Europe as a source of new space.
The attempts to implement the Lebensraum happened in Zamosc County and Wartheland (see Generalplan Ost). The biggest obstacle to implement the Lebensraum further was the fact that by the end of 1942 the Sixth Army was defeated at Stalingrad. After the second big defeat in the tank battle at Kursk during July 1943 and the Allied landings in Sicily, all further Lebensraum plans came to a halt.
The Lebensraum ideology was a major factor in Hitler's launching of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. The Nazis hoped to turn large areas of Soviet territory into German settlement areas as part of Generalplan Ost.
Developing these ideas, Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, proposed that the Nazi administrative organization in lands to be conquered from the Soviets be based upon the following Reichskommissariats:
Ostland (Baltic States, Belarus and eastern Poland),
Ukraine (Ukraine and adjacent territories),
Kaukasus (Caucasus area),
Moskau (the Moscow metropolitan area and adjacent European Russia)
The Reichskommissariat territories would extend up to the European frontier at the Urals.
These administrative entities were to have been early stages in the displacement and dispossession of Russian and other Slav peoples and their replacement with German settlers, following the Nazi "Lebensraum im Osten" plans. [Wikipedia]
So, why do we tolerate it on the part of Israel? Why are we all sitting around and watching Israel doing the same things that the Nazis were doing, listening to psychopaths like Condoleezza Rice refer to it as "Birth Pangs" of a "New Middle East"? Have we taken leave of our senses? Is the universe of normal, decent and moral people so filled with smoke that we can no longer see what is right and what is wrong?
Well, as a matter of fact, that seems to be the case.
Another sort of justification conjured away the injustice inflicted on the indigenous population with the pretense that Palestine was (nearly) vacant before the Jews came. Ironically, this argument has proven to be the most compelling proof of the injustice committed: it is a back-handed admission that, had Palestine been inhabited, which it plainly was, the Zionist enterprise was morally indefensible. Those admitting to the reality of a Palestinian presence yet functioning outside the ideological ambit of Zionism couldn't adduce any justification for Zionism except a racist one: that is, in the great scheme of things, the fate of Jews was simply more important than that of Arabs. If not publicly, at any rate privately, this is how the British rationalized the Balfour Declaration. For Balfour himself, "we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination" for the "present inhabitants" of Palestine, because "the question of the Jews outside Palestine [is] one of world importance" and Zionism was "rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of a far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land." [Finkelstein]At the time, British Cabinet Minster, Herbert Samuel, recognized that denying the Arabs majority rule was "in flat contradiction to one of the main purposes for which the Allies were fighting," but he then turned around and bought into the smokescreen belief propagated by religion, to wit "the anterior Jewish presence in Palestine "had resulted in events of spiritual and cultural value to mankind in striking contrast with the barren record of the last thousand years."
Winston Churchill testified before the Peel Commission saying that the indigenous population of Arabs had no more right to Palestine than a "dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time." He further opined that "No wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
Shades of Adolf Hitler!
Finkelstein makes a small apology for the Brits saying:The so-called "historic necessity" of Jews being given a National State is also bunk. There was a massive exertion of the Zionists to get Jews to go to Palestine; Jews were often conscripted in a heavy-handed way to go to Palestine. Zionists vigorously opposed the settlement of any Jews anywhere else. In documented cases, many Jews were given the choice between going to concentration camps under Nazi rule or going to Palestine.
"The point is not so much that the British were racists but rather that they had no recourse except to racist justifications for denying the indigenous population its basic rights. Pressed to justify what was done, they became racists not from predilection but from circumstance: on no other grounds could so flagrant a denial be explained."
"From the outset Zionism worked towards the creation of a purely Jewish state and was glad to rid the country of its Arab inhabitants.' [Isaac Deutscher]
To say that the Israeli government is acting irrationally when it refuses to "remove or assuage the grievance" of Palestinians is missing the point. Considering that the Palestinians' chief grievance is the denial of their homeland, if the Zionists were to act "rationally" according to that standard, and remove this grievance, i.e. to give them back their homeland, then there would be no Israel.
It is equally wrong to think that Palestinians - and the wider Arab community - have been acting irrationally when they blame the Zionists for all the misery in the Middle East. They are acting quite normally.
Which brings us back to Condoleezza Rice: Few things have ever revealed the psychopathic nature of the Bush Neocon Cabal more clearly than this soulless and truly inhuman series of remarks. Rice has revealed herself to be - like Benny Morris - a morally repellant creature. And, as Finkelstein has pointed out, the universe inhabited by normal human beings - honest and decent people - is one where the majority concur on the facts and their moral and legal implications, though they may have different ideas of how to implement a political solution. One could say that all normal people demand an immediate cease-fire. Period. You can work out the details later, but stop now before one more precious baby is lost and one more mother regrets the real birth pangs that brought her child into a world where he or she was destined to become only cannon fodder for such as the likes of Condoleezza Rice.
But let's look again at what Rice said: a "New Middle East." What could she have meant by that? Just what kind of Middle East can you have when Israel is systematically ethnically cleansing the region of - well... anybody but Israelis. And there's your answer. That is, after all, the vision of Israel.
And so we see just what kind of "New Middle East" Condoleezza Rice is talking about: she is pregnant and giving birth to a Monster.
Condoleeza Rice
Isreal War Crimes
Ethnic Cleansing
NEOCONS
Gaza
Lebanon
New Middle East
Saturday, July 22, 2006
The Most Dangerous Alliance inthe World
Here on the internet is the only place where you have asmall chance of gettinga POV other than that dictated by the PTB"s lap-dog media. Norm Solomon tells it like it is.
Blue Ibis
*************************************************
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
http://www.fair.org
The Most Dangerous Alliance in the World
Media Beat (7/20/06)
By Norman Solomon
After getting out of Lebanon, writer June Rugh told Reuters: "As an American, I'm embarrassed and ashamed. My administration is letting it happen [by giving] tacit permission for Israel to destroy a country." The news service quoted another American evacuee, Andrew Muha, who had been in southern Lebanon. He said: "It’s a travesty. There’s a million homeless in Lebanon and the intense amount of bombing has brought an entire country to its knees."
Embarrassing. Shameful. A travesty. Those kinds of words begin to describe the alliance between the United States and Israel. Here are a few more: Government criminality. High-tech terror. Mass murder from the skies. The kind of premeditated action that the U.S. representative in Nuremberg at the International Conference on Military Trials -- Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson -- was talking about on August 12, 1945, when he declared that "no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."
The United States and Israel. Right now, it's the most dangerous alliance in the world.
Of course, Israeli officials talk about murderous crimes against civilians by Hezbollah and Hamas. And Hezbollah and Hamas officials talk about murderous crimes against civilians by Israel. Plenty of real crimes to go around. At the same time, by any measure, Israelis have done a lot more killing than dying. (If you doubt that, take a look at the website of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem and its documentation of deadly events.)
In American media, the current mumbling about the need for "restraint" is little better than window-dressing for bomb-dropping. The prevalent dynamic is based on a chain of rarely spoken lies, however conscious or unconscious: none more important than the lie that a religion can make one life worth more than another; render a human death unimportant; elevate certain war-inflicted agonies to spiritual significance.
"Israel has overwhelming military superiority in both southern Lebanon and Gaza," the New York Times noted in mid-July. A pattern is deeply entrenched in U.S. media and politics: the smaller-scale killers condemned, the larger-scale killers justified with endless rationales.
Stripping away the righteous rhetoric, media manipulation and routine journalistic contortions, what remains in joint U.S.-Israeli policy is the unspoken assumption that might makes right. Myths spin around as convenient. Israel ceremoniously "withdraws" from Gaza, only to come back with missiles and troops however and whenever it pleases. The West Bank also continues to be a place of subjugation and resistance. And, as W.H. Auden observed, "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return."
The Israeli leaders who launched July's state-of-the-killing-art air assault on Gaza and Lebanon had to know that many civilians would be killed, many others wounded, many more terrorized. The smug moral posturing that Israel's military does not target specific civilians is moldy political grist -- and, in human terms, irrelevant to the totally predictable carnage.
"There are terrorists who will blow up innocent people in order to achieve tactical objectives," President Bush said on July 13. Of course he was referring to actions by Hezbollah and Hamas. We're supposed to pretend that Israel does not also "blow up innocent people in order to achieve tactical objectives."
Israel calls itself a Jewish state, and its leadership often claims to represent the interests of Jewish people. Killers who terrorize often claim to be acting on blessed behalf of others of the faith. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus... By now, such demagoguery ought to be transparent.
In the 40th year of Israel's unconscionable occupation of Palestinian territories, Israeli leaders have their agenda. What's ours?
It should include clearly opposing the most dangerous alliance in the world.
In the United States, evading the "might makes right" core of the alliance is easy. The dodge makes dropping bombs on Lebanon and Gaza that much easier for the Israeli government. As usual, you can hear it in the weasel-worded statements from even the better politicians on Capitol Hill. You can read it in New York Times editorials. Instead of saying that aggressive war by Israel "is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy," the message is that aggressive war by Israel is accepted and embraced as an instrument of policy.
Most of all, you can hear it in the silence.
Blue Ibis
*************************************************
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
http://www.fair.org
The Most Dangerous Alliance in the World
Media Beat (7/20/06)
By Norman Solomon
After getting out of Lebanon, writer June Rugh told Reuters: "As an American, I'm embarrassed and ashamed. My administration is letting it happen [by giving] tacit permission for Israel to destroy a country." The news service quoted another American evacuee, Andrew Muha, who had been in southern Lebanon. He said: "It’s a travesty. There’s a million homeless in Lebanon and the intense amount of bombing has brought an entire country to its knees."
Embarrassing. Shameful. A travesty. Those kinds of words begin to describe the alliance between the United States and Israel. Here are a few more: Government criminality. High-tech terror. Mass murder from the skies. The kind of premeditated action that the U.S. representative in Nuremberg at the International Conference on Military Trials -- Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson -- was talking about on August 12, 1945, when he declared that "no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."
The United States and Israel. Right now, it's the most dangerous alliance in the world.
Of course, Israeli officials talk about murderous crimes against civilians by Hezbollah and Hamas. And Hezbollah and Hamas officials talk about murderous crimes against civilians by Israel. Plenty of real crimes to go around. At the same time, by any measure, Israelis have done a lot more killing than dying. (If you doubt that, take a look at the website of the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem and its documentation of deadly events.)
In American media, the current mumbling about the need for "restraint" is little better than window-dressing for bomb-dropping. The prevalent dynamic is based on a chain of rarely spoken lies, however conscious or unconscious: none more important than the lie that a religion can make one life worth more than another; render a human death unimportant; elevate certain war-inflicted agonies to spiritual significance.
"Israel has overwhelming military superiority in both southern Lebanon and Gaza," the New York Times noted in mid-July. A pattern is deeply entrenched in U.S. media and politics: the smaller-scale killers condemned, the larger-scale killers justified with endless rationales.
Stripping away the righteous rhetoric, media manipulation and routine journalistic contortions, what remains in joint U.S.-Israeli policy is the unspoken assumption that might makes right. Myths spin around as convenient. Israel ceremoniously "withdraws" from Gaza, only to come back with missiles and troops however and whenever it pleases. The West Bank also continues to be a place of subjugation and resistance. And, as W.H. Auden observed, "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return."
The Israeli leaders who launched July's state-of-the-killing-art air assault on Gaza and Lebanon had to know that many civilians would be killed, many others wounded, many more terrorized. The smug moral posturing that Israel's military does not target specific civilians is moldy political grist -- and, in human terms, irrelevant to the totally predictable carnage.
"There are terrorists who will blow up innocent people in order to achieve tactical objectives," President Bush said on July 13. Of course he was referring to actions by Hezbollah and Hamas. We're supposed to pretend that Israel does not also "blow up innocent people in order to achieve tactical objectives."
Israel calls itself a Jewish state, and its leadership often claims to represent the interests of Jewish people. Killers who terrorize often claim to be acting on blessed behalf of others of the faith. Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus... By now, such demagoguery ought to be transparent.
In the 40th year of Israel's unconscionable occupation of Palestinian territories, Israeli leaders have their agenda. What's ours?
It should include clearly opposing the most dangerous alliance in the world.
In the United States, evading the "might makes right" core of the alliance is easy. The dodge makes dropping bombs on Lebanon and Gaza that much easier for the Israeli government. As usual, you can hear it in the weasel-worded statements from even the better politicians on Capitol Hill. You can read it in New York Times editorials. Instead of saying that aggressive war by Israel "is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy," the message is that aggressive war by Israel is accepted and embraced as an instrument of policy.
Most of all, you can hear it in the silence.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
George Galloway is MY MAN!!!
One of the few politcians in the world today with real principles and real cojones. Just think if there were ten more like him!
Blue Ibis
*********************************
"Recognize the Centrality of the Palestine Question": An Interview with George Galloway
by Dan Moore
George Galloway MP is the controversial British politician who has proved a thorn in the side of advocates of the Iraq war. He is a fierce advocate of the Palestinian state, and a redoubtable campaigner against oppression and injustice throughout the world. In 2005 he made a memorable appearance before the US Senate, successfully defending himself against claims that he benefited from the Iraqi oil-for-food program. I'm Not the Only One is his critically acclaimed book on the Middle East, and the US and British administrations approach to this troubled region.
MOORE: You've taken a close interest in the Palestinian issue. Are you surprised that the international community has not condemned Israel's consistently aggressive stance against Gaza?
GALLOWAY: I'm not at all surprised. I'm dismally reconciled to the gigantic double standard that lies at the heart of Western policy towards the Middle East and the Muslim world. I have long become inured to the double standard that allows Israel to have hundreds of nuclear weapons and refuse to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, yet be rewarded by the West, whilst Iran has no nuclear weapons, has joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and is, according to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, facing a devastating war.
I am dismally aware of the extent to which the blood of Palestinians is not worth anything like the blood of Israelis, still less the blood of Westerners. A good case in point was on the BBC's Question Time when every single member of the panel knew the name of the Israeli occupation soldier 'kidnapped' by the resistance, and they felt they had to pay endless sympathies to his family.
I found myself screaming at the television: "Can any of you name a single Palestinian victim, just say in the last 12 days, when 24 Palestinians, mostly women and children were killed by Israel in bomb, shell and rocket attacks?" No one knows the names of these victims, no one describes the Palestinian leaders who were kidnapped and languish in Israeli dungeons. All were seized in exactly the same way as this Israeli solder was seized. This is a double standard that does not occur to most people, but is endlessly burrowing away in my mind.
MOORE: I guess you'd say that the lack of recognition for the democratically elected Hamas Government is another example of Western double standards.
GALLOWAY: That is just one of many contradictions. Palestine is the only Arab country in which there is a free vote, and in it the Islamist party won, and the response from external powers was that the party that won should immediately scrap the policy on which it won the election and adopt the policy of the party it defeated. When they refused to do this, an economic and political siege was imposed on the entire kidnapped Palestinian population, because of their temerity at electing politicians of whom the West does not approve.
MOORE: Why do you think the US administration is persisting with Guantanamo Bay despite damning criticism from the Supreme Court, among others?
GALLOWAY: It is a peculiarity of the current Washington regime that it cares nothing about international opinion, nothing about international law and diplomacy. These are all merely tactics to be picked up and put down according to the needs of the hour. It is interesting in the respect that the judges both in the UK and the US are practically the last bastions against overwhelming executive power. The legislature in both countries has completely failed to perform that role of checking and balancing the power of government.
In Britain Mr. Blair has launched a jihad against the judiciary. It has come to something for an old Labour man like me when it's the judges in the House of Lords who are defending liberty in the land and it's a Labour government that's destroying them, and brutally insulting and campaigning against the judges for doing their job. In the United States, even in a court that is stuffed with Bush appointees, the judges could not stomach this legal atrocity called Guantanamo any longer.
One British minister, Harriet Harman, the Solicitor General, put it in a nutshell when she said: "If there's nothing wrong with what's going on at Guantanamo Bay, why isn't it in America?" To answer this, it is not in America because if it were it would be subject to due process. It is precisely because there has to be no legal norms that it has to be extra terrestrial.
MOORE: The late Clarence Darrow once wrote of capital punishment: "it is administered for no reason but deep and fixed hatred of the individual and an abiding thirst for revenge." Is this sentiment behind the reported construction of death chambers in Guantanamo Bay?
GALLOWAY: I think so, and if you look at some of the work that is being done in the US about the accountability of the activities at Abu Graib, it is clear that Donald Rumsfeld took a personal hand, as nauseating as it is, in discussing which forms of physical punishment and retribution can be taken against helpless prisoners before it becomes too much like torture to be contemplated.
It is obvious that what was happening at Abu Graib was not the mindless aberrations of some trailer-trash US privates. These were dynamics unleashed from the very top of the US administration. And for what? Whatever information you are going to get out of behaving in that way is far outweighed by the opprobrium into which it brings your country when it inevitably leaks out. And the information you get is usually worthless, as people will say anything under torture.
MOORE: Torture is not usually a weapon employed by democracies.
GALLOWAY: I think the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom know the limitations of democracy. My own father really believed that there was something special about Britain, that it was an especially free country. Were he alive, this epoch would come as a terrible blow because it turns out that we are only free as long as it doesn't really matter much. When it matters the freedoms are taken away. In other words the veneer that covers our society with the emblems of liberty, justice and democracy are very thin and can be dispensed with by the elected dictatorships that we now have on both sides of the Atlantic.
MOORE: Who's to blame for this situation?
GALLOWAY: I blame the Democrats. They have proved themselves to be an utterly spineless, unprincipled group of hucksters. They could have stopped all of this. They needn't have allowed Bush to become President. They could have whipped up a crisis over the brazen theft of the first election, but they didn't and they have been running ever since.
MOORE: The September 11 bombings exposed how certain groups feel about the United States and the West. Some say that since then an even more hard line approach from Washington has emerged. Do you think the current approach to terrorism has elevated or reduced the chances of another 9/11?
GALLOWAY: I said in Parliament just four days after 9/11 that if we handle this in the wrong way we will create 10,000 new Bin Ladens. I don't think that anyone doubts we did this. I use the metaphor that there is this swamp of hatred out there, and in it are festering all sorts of bad things. In time some will emerge to harm us. Instead of draining the swamp by dealing with the causes of it, we have engulfed it with new blood, making the swamp deeper, more toxic, and we will pay a price for it.
MOORE: Moving onto Iraq, do you think Nouri al Maliki is a credible leader of Iraq?
GALLOWAY: Not at all. He is not remotely credible. He is not even known by the Iraqi people.
MOORE: Is his appointment then an example of the imposition of Western-style democracy, necessary if an Iraqi civil war is to be avoided?
GALLOWAY: I believe the opposite is true. The most expedient way to civil war is for us to stay, and if we stay in Iraq will surely be a civil war, and one like none you've ever seen. We are talking about a Yugoslav-style war on top of the world's biggest oilfields, sucking in the Sunnis in neighboring states, Iranians buttressing the Shiite power-base, the Turks becoming involved in Kurdistan. So if you want a civil war, forget $60 a barrel, you won't be able to buy oil at $600 a barrel because there will be no oil as there will be no production of oil in the Gulf, Iran or Iraq. Most of the world's oil supply will be wiped out.
Our presence in the country is the main cause of the war. I'm not saying that if we now withdraw peace and harmony will immediately break out. I'm not saying that withdrawal is a sufficient condition, but it is a necessary condition. If we don't withdraw there will never be a solution. In any event the solution will not be what I or Bush wants. The outcome in Iraq will not be a return to a secular nationalist government. It will be a government of religious obscurantism, Shiite and Sunni, battling it out like what we see in Afghanistan. There will come a day, perhaps we are already there, when people will realize that there are worse things than Saddam Hussein.
MOORE: What is your impression of Saddam Hussein's trial?
GALLOWAY: It's a farce. It would have been much less demeaning to everyone if they had just shot him when they captured him. Everything about the trial is a farce. For a start it is being held not by the Iraqis but by the occupiers, with a few puppets who are put up front for the television cameras, albeit with a 60-minute time delay before we can see the pictures.
I know from my dealings with the Arab population that this trial has done more to rehabilitate Saddam Hussein's reputation in the Muslim world than anything anyone could have designed. He is seen as a lion and they are seen as monkeys.
MOORE: Tariq Aziz defended Saddam from the stand with the following words: "The president of the state of any country, if faced with an assassination attempt, should take procedures to punish those who conduct and help this operation. According to the law, people who support this assassination can also be convicted." Do you think Tariq Aziz was talking about Iraq now, as much as Iraq under Saddam?
GALLOWAY: First of all, when Clinton came into power, he launched a cruise missile attack on Baghdad. It killed some friends of mine. He did so because an Iraqi plot to murder George Bush Senior in Kuwait had been unmasked. Whether that plot was fabricated is another matter, but not only did Clinton execute my friends, without trial, the Kuwaitis executed the plotters because they were planning to kill a president. As it happens I am against capital punishment, at all times in all societies, so I wouldn't have executed any of them, but it is another example of the double standards that we are constantly grappling with here.
MOORE: Do you expect to be invited back to the US Senate?
GALLOWAY: No. I told them last September to put up or shut up, and they appear to have chosen to shut up.
MOORE: Why do you think the Senate and indeed the British Labour Party have been so keen to besmirch your name?
GALLOWAY: I am quite good at what I do, and am quite a dangerous enemy for them. If I were an ineffective, sandal-wearing, woolly jumper-wearing, ghettoized leftist they wouldn't have to worry about me at all. However, because by the grace of God I have the ability to rally together and persuade large numbers of people, and because I have been proved right, the people whom I am against have every reason to besmirch me.
The good news is that they have comprehensively failed. I have just been speaking at a school where a thousand children came to hear me speak. They say that young people are apathetic about politics, but I say they are apoplectic about the pathetic nature of the political class that we have. If someone emerges who speaks clearly, speaks the truth, and provides some kind of vision as to how we get out of this, people will respond.
MOORE: But certain politicians see this approach as threatening. . . .
GALLOWAY: Yes, of course, and they're right to. I'm not a joker. I'm not in this for a laugh. I'm really serious about defeating these people. So they are right to be afraid of me.
MOORE: Are you afraid of them, though?
GALLOWAY: No, not at all, and this is my great strength. As I said to Senator Coleman in Washington, "Do not make the mistake of imagining that I'm afraid of you. You have nothing that I want and I have nothing that you can take away from me. The only thing that matters to me is my reputation amongst the people who support me, and you're not in a position to take that away from me." So I'm not afraid of any of them, and this gives me a sense of power, conviction and courage that I might not otherwise have.
The main problem in the House of Commons is the toxic mix of cowardice and careerism [sounds like the Democrats, eh?] in which most of these people are deeply imbibed. A political class like that deserves contempt, and is in receipt of almost bottomless contempt amongst the people.
MOORE: What you are saying doesn't bode well for those hoping to win the war on terror, does it?
GALLOWAY: There will never be a winner because terrorism isn't an adversary -- it is a tactic. Peter Ustinov, the great European intellectual, put it this way: "War is the terrorism of the rich and powerful, and terrorism is the war of the poor and powerless." This word terrorism has been distorted beyond any further usefulness. Terrorism is what the other guy does.
If you reduce Fallujah to ash, and kill thousands of people using white phosphorus and other banned weapons and overwhelming firepower, that's not terrorism, but if you blow yourself up outside an Iraqi police station, that is terrorism. No person with half a brain can accept that definition of terrorism. So there will be no end to the war on terrorism, because there is no end to the injustice that produced it.
MOORE: President Bush is in his last term of office, as is PM Blair, we are told. What steps will the next leaders of these countries take to heal the rift with nations such as Iran, Syria, and so on?
GALLOWAY: I think they'll do nothing different. I think that Gordon Brown and Blair are two cheeks of the same arse, and Bush and Hilary Clinton are two cheeks of the same arse. In fact, Clinton is demanding more forces to be sent to Iraq. Despite a brief flirtation some years ago with the idea of a modicum of justice for the Palestinians, she has now turned utterly against the Palestinians. She is as slavish in her support of Israel as Bush is.
I can tell you, from 30 years of intimate contact with Gordon Brown, that he will be no different from Tony Blair in the material aspects. If Brown and Clinton are not the next leaders, then it will be people of their ilk, as there is no one on the radar who will do anything differently.
MOORE: So, will the list of disgruntled countries keep growing?
GALLOWAY: Of course. In his majestic article for the New Yorker Seymour Hersh makes it very clear that they are not discussing whether to attack Iran, they are discussing which weapons to use when they attack. Even I was startled at the level of detail Hersh went into about the debate inside the administration about whether to use a tactical nuclear weapon on the Iranian nuclear sites, and only the threat of mutiny from top military brass persuaded Bush to take this proposal off the table. Who knows where he will train his sights on next?
I don't think that they are in a position to invade anyone else right now. If they were, then Hugo Chavez had better watch out, Syria had better watch out, Iran had better watch out. North Korea had better watch out, although if the Americans hear nothing else from me, hear this. Please do not attack North Korea -- that would be picking up a very spiky porcupine indeed.
MOORE: If the status quo is to prevail, what could any new leader do to improve matters?
GALLOWAY: For the purposes of this interview I'll deal only with the Muslim world, although there are many other issues of injustice that afflict much of the planet. The way to drain the swamp is this.
First of all, we have to recognize the centrality of the Palestine question to this big crisis. We have to recognize that the flaw at the heart of Western policy is the injustice suffered by the Palestinian people, and the endless insult added to injury over the past 50 years.
We have to make reparation to the Palestinian people and stop bankrolling and arming Israel. We have to force them to knock down the wall, force them to disgorge every inch of the territory that they illegally occupied in 1967, force them to allow a Palestinian state with an Arab border with Jerusalem as its capital and no Zionist settlements on its land. No control over the airspace, sea space, access and so on. None of that will be done, but it needs to be done.
The second thing that needs to be done is that we need to withdraw from occupied Muslim lands, get our forces out of their lands. The third thing we must do is to stop propping up these tyrants that rule the Muslim world. As I implied earlier on, the Muslim world laughs at the idea that we are for freedom and democracy, as they know that their tyrant is only in power because of our support. I'm not asking for anything to be done to bring these tyrants down, other than to withdraw our support and let their people deal with them.
MOORE: In I'm Not the Only One, you wrote of the Labour Party: "Many of my friends have placed their faith in a campaign to 'Reclaim the Party'. I wish them luck. They will need it. I believe they will not succeed, but I sincerely hope that they do." What, if anything could emerge to fill the void to the left of British politics, and you suggest there is a similar void in the United States?
GALLOWAY: With Respect - the Unity Coalition we are trying to fill the void in the UK, as a void is an unnatural thing, especially in politics. I think that no one is trying to fill the vacuum in the United States.
I would like to make something clear about what I am trying to do. I am not a Marxist, a Leninist, Trotskyist or any other kind of 'ist'. I am just labor. I just believe that every country needs a labor party. A party that will stand up for people who work, those who are too old to work, who are poor, marginalized, on the end of the lash of bigotry and prejudice. A party that will stand up for immigrants, minorities and so on. Every country needs such a party. Britain no longer has one, and we are trying to build one from scratch.
It sounds like a very big mountain to climb, but in 1894 in the East End of London a Scotsman called Keir Hardie became the first ever Labour MP. At the time people said he was splitting the vote and he would let the Conservatives in. From that one victory in 1894 in East London grew the great oak of Labour. All the good that was done by Labour has been abandoned, and we are putting ourselves forward as a true labor party.
Blue Ibis
*********************************
"Recognize the Centrality of the Palestine Question": An Interview with George Galloway
by Dan Moore
George Galloway MP is the controversial British politician who has proved a thorn in the side of advocates of the Iraq war. He is a fierce advocate of the Palestinian state, and a redoubtable campaigner against oppression and injustice throughout the world. In 2005 he made a memorable appearance before the US Senate, successfully defending himself against claims that he benefited from the Iraqi oil-for-food program. I'm Not the Only One is his critically acclaimed book on the Middle East, and the US and British administrations approach to this troubled region.
MOORE: You've taken a close interest in the Palestinian issue. Are you surprised that the international community has not condemned Israel's consistently aggressive stance against Gaza?
GALLOWAY: I'm not at all surprised. I'm dismally reconciled to the gigantic double standard that lies at the heart of Western policy towards the Middle East and the Muslim world. I have long become inured to the double standard that allows Israel to have hundreds of nuclear weapons and refuse to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, yet be rewarded by the West, whilst Iran has no nuclear weapons, has joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty and is, according to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, facing a devastating war.
I am dismally aware of the extent to which the blood of Palestinians is not worth anything like the blood of Israelis, still less the blood of Westerners. A good case in point was on the BBC's Question Time when every single member of the panel knew the name of the Israeli occupation soldier 'kidnapped' by the resistance, and they felt they had to pay endless sympathies to his family.
I found myself screaming at the television: "Can any of you name a single Palestinian victim, just say in the last 12 days, when 24 Palestinians, mostly women and children were killed by Israel in bomb, shell and rocket attacks?" No one knows the names of these victims, no one describes the Palestinian leaders who were kidnapped and languish in Israeli dungeons. All were seized in exactly the same way as this Israeli solder was seized. This is a double standard that does not occur to most people, but is endlessly burrowing away in my mind.
MOORE: I guess you'd say that the lack of recognition for the democratically elected Hamas Government is another example of Western double standards.
GALLOWAY: That is just one of many contradictions. Palestine is the only Arab country in which there is a free vote, and in it the Islamist party won, and the response from external powers was that the party that won should immediately scrap the policy on which it won the election and adopt the policy of the party it defeated. When they refused to do this, an economic and political siege was imposed on the entire kidnapped Palestinian population, because of their temerity at electing politicians of whom the West does not approve.
MOORE: Why do you think the US administration is persisting with Guantanamo Bay despite damning criticism from the Supreme Court, among others?
GALLOWAY: It is a peculiarity of the current Washington regime that it cares nothing about international opinion, nothing about international law and diplomacy. These are all merely tactics to be picked up and put down according to the needs of the hour. It is interesting in the respect that the judges both in the UK and the US are practically the last bastions against overwhelming executive power. The legislature in both countries has completely failed to perform that role of checking and balancing the power of government.
In Britain Mr. Blair has launched a jihad against the judiciary. It has come to something for an old Labour man like me when it's the judges in the House of Lords who are defending liberty in the land and it's a Labour government that's destroying them, and brutally insulting and campaigning against the judges for doing their job. In the United States, even in a court that is stuffed with Bush appointees, the judges could not stomach this legal atrocity called Guantanamo any longer.
One British minister, Harriet Harman, the Solicitor General, put it in a nutshell when she said: "If there's nothing wrong with what's going on at Guantanamo Bay, why isn't it in America?" To answer this, it is not in America because if it were it would be subject to due process. It is precisely because there has to be no legal norms that it has to be extra terrestrial.
MOORE: The late Clarence Darrow once wrote of capital punishment: "it is administered for no reason but deep and fixed hatred of the individual and an abiding thirst for revenge." Is this sentiment behind the reported construction of death chambers in Guantanamo Bay?
GALLOWAY: I think so, and if you look at some of the work that is being done in the US about the accountability of the activities at Abu Graib, it is clear that Donald Rumsfeld took a personal hand, as nauseating as it is, in discussing which forms of physical punishment and retribution can be taken against helpless prisoners before it becomes too much like torture to be contemplated.
It is obvious that what was happening at Abu Graib was not the mindless aberrations of some trailer-trash US privates. These were dynamics unleashed from the very top of the US administration. And for what? Whatever information you are going to get out of behaving in that way is far outweighed by the opprobrium into which it brings your country when it inevitably leaks out. And the information you get is usually worthless, as people will say anything under torture.
MOORE: Torture is not usually a weapon employed by democracies.
GALLOWAY: I think the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom know the limitations of democracy. My own father really believed that there was something special about Britain, that it was an especially free country. Were he alive, this epoch would come as a terrible blow because it turns out that we are only free as long as it doesn't really matter much. When it matters the freedoms are taken away. In other words the veneer that covers our society with the emblems of liberty, justice and democracy are very thin and can be dispensed with by the elected dictatorships that we now have on both sides of the Atlantic.
MOORE: Who's to blame for this situation?
GALLOWAY: I blame the Democrats. They have proved themselves to be an utterly spineless, unprincipled group of hucksters. They could have stopped all of this. They needn't have allowed Bush to become President. They could have whipped up a crisis over the brazen theft of the first election, but they didn't and they have been running ever since.
MOORE: The September 11 bombings exposed how certain groups feel about the United States and the West. Some say that since then an even more hard line approach from Washington has emerged. Do you think the current approach to terrorism has elevated or reduced the chances of another 9/11?
GALLOWAY: I said in Parliament just four days after 9/11 that if we handle this in the wrong way we will create 10,000 new Bin Ladens. I don't think that anyone doubts we did this. I use the metaphor that there is this swamp of hatred out there, and in it are festering all sorts of bad things. In time some will emerge to harm us. Instead of draining the swamp by dealing with the causes of it, we have engulfed it with new blood, making the swamp deeper, more toxic, and we will pay a price for it.
MOORE: Moving onto Iraq, do you think Nouri al Maliki is a credible leader of Iraq?
GALLOWAY: Not at all. He is not remotely credible. He is not even known by the Iraqi people.
MOORE: Is his appointment then an example of the imposition of Western-style democracy, necessary if an Iraqi civil war is to be avoided?
GALLOWAY: I believe the opposite is true. The most expedient way to civil war is for us to stay, and if we stay in Iraq will surely be a civil war, and one like none you've ever seen. We are talking about a Yugoslav-style war on top of the world's biggest oilfields, sucking in the Sunnis in neighboring states, Iranians buttressing the Shiite power-base, the Turks becoming involved in Kurdistan. So if you want a civil war, forget $60 a barrel, you won't be able to buy oil at $600 a barrel because there will be no oil as there will be no production of oil in the Gulf, Iran or Iraq. Most of the world's oil supply will be wiped out.
Our presence in the country is the main cause of the war. I'm not saying that if we now withdraw peace and harmony will immediately break out. I'm not saying that withdrawal is a sufficient condition, but it is a necessary condition. If we don't withdraw there will never be a solution. In any event the solution will not be what I or Bush wants. The outcome in Iraq will not be a return to a secular nationalist government. It will be a government of religious obscurantism, Shiite and Sunni, battling it out like what we see in Afghanistan. There will come a day, perhaps we are already there, when people will realize that there are worse things than Saddam Hussein.
MOORE: What is your impression of Saddam Hussein's trial?
GALLOWAY: It's a farce. It would have been much less demeaning to everyone if they had just shot him when they captured him. Everything about the trial is a farce. For a start it is being held not by the Iraqis but by the occupiers, with a few puppets who are put up front for the television cameras, albeit with a 60-minute time delay before we can see the pictures.
I know from my dealings with the Arab population that this trial has done more to rehabilitate Saddam Hussein's reputation in the Muslim world than anything anyone could have designed. He is seen as a lion and they are seen as monkeys.
MOORE: Tariq Aziz defended Saddam from the stand with the following words: "The president of the state of any country, if faced with an assassination attempt, should take procedures to punish those who conduct and help this operation. According to the law, people who support this assassination can also be convicted." Do you think Tariq Aziz was talking about Iraq now, as much as Iraq under Saddam?
GALLOWAY: First of all, when Clinton came into power, he launched a cruise missile attack on Baghdad. It killed some friends of mine. He did so because an Iraqi plot to murder George Bush Senior in Kuwait had been unmasked. Whether that plot was fabricated is another matter, but not only did Clinton execute my friends, without trial, the Kuwaitis executed the plotters because they were planning to kill a president. As it happens I am against capital punishment, at all times in all societies, so I wouldn't have executed any of them, but it is another example of the double standards that we are constantly grappling with here.
MOORE: Do you expect to be invited back to the US Senate?
GALLOWAY: No. I told them last September to put up or shut up, and they appear to have chosen to shut up.
MOORE: Why do you think the Senate and indeed the British Labour Party have been so keen to besmirch your name?
GALLOWAY: I am quite good at what I do, and am quite a dangerous enemy for them. If I were an ineffective, sandal-wearing, woolly jumper-wearing, ghettoized leftist they wouldn't have to worry about me at all. However, because by the grace of God I have the ability to rally together and persuade large numbers of people, and because I have been proved right, the people whom I am against have every reason to besmirch me.
The good news is that they have comprehensively failed. I have just been speaking at a school where a thousand children came to hear me speak. They say that young people are apathetic about politics, but I say they are apoplectic about the pathetic nature of the political class that we have. If someone emerges who speaks clearly, speaks the truth, and provides some kind of vision as to how we get out of this, people will respond.
MOORE: But certain politicians see this approach as threatening. . . .
GALLOWAY: Yes, of course, and they're right to. I'm not a joker. I'm not in this for a laugh. I'm really serious about defeating these people. So they are right to be afraid of me.
MOORE: Are you afraid of them, though?
GALLOWAY: No, not at all, and this is my great strength. As I said to Senator Coleman in Washington, "Do not make the mistake of imagining that I'm afraid of you. You have nothing that I want and I have nothing that you can take away from me. The only thing that matters to me is my reputation amongst the people who support me, and you're not in a position to take that away from me." So I'm not afraid of any of them, and this gives me a sense of power, conviction and courage that I might not otherwise have.
The main problem in the House of Commons is the toxic mix of cowardice and careerism [sounds like the Democrats, eh?] in which most of these people are deeply imbibed. A political class like that deserves contempt, and is in receipt of almost bottomless contempt amongst the people.
MOORE: What you are saying doesn't bode well for those hoping to win the war on terror, does it?
GALLOWAY: There will never be a winner because terrorism isn't an adversary -- it is a tactic. Peter Ustinov, the great European intellectual, put it this way: "War is the terrorism of the rich and powerful, and terrorism is the war of the poor and powerless." This word terrorism has been distorted beyond any further usefulness. Terrorism is what the other guy does.
If you reduce Fallujah to ash, and kill thousands of people using white phosphorus and other banned weapons and overwhelming firepower, that's not terrorism, but if you blow yourself up outside an Iraqi police station, that is terrorism. No person with half a brain can accept that definition of terrorism. So there will be no end to the war on terrorism, because there is no end to the injustice that produced it.
MOORE: President Bush is in his last term of office, as is PM Blair, we are told. What steps will the next leaders of these countries take to heal the rift with nations such as Iran, Syria, and so on?
GALLOWAY: I think they'll do nothing different. I think that Gordon Brown and Blair are two cheeks of the same arse, and Bush and Hilary Clinton are two cheeks of the same arse. In fact, Clinton is demanding more forces to be sent to Iraq. Despite a brief flirtation some years ago with the idea of a modicum of justice for the Palestinians, she has now turned utterly against the Palestinians. She is as slavish in her support of Israel as Bush is.
I can tell you, from 30 years of intimate contact with Gordon Brown, that he will be no different from Tony Blair in the material aspects. If Brown and Clinton are not the next leaders, then it will be people of their ilk, as there is no one on the radar who will do anything differently.
MOORE: So, will the list of disgruntled countries keep growing?
GALLOWAY: Of course. In his majestic article for the New Yorker Seymour Hersh makes it very clear that they are not discussing whether to attack Iran, they are discussing which weapons to use when they attack. Even I was startled at the level of detail Hersh went into about the debate inside the administration about whether to use a tactical nuclear weapon on the Iranian nuclear sites, and only the threat of mutiny from top military brass persuaded Bush to take this proposal off the table. Who knows where he will train his sights on next?
I don't think that they are in a position to invade anyone else right now. If they were, then Hugo Chavez had better watch out, Syria had better watch out, Iran had better watch out. North Korea had better watch out, although if the Americans hear nothing else from me, hear this. Please do not attack North Korea -- that would be picking up a very spiky porcupine indeed.
MOORE: If the status quo is to prevail, what could any new leader do to improve matters?
GALLOWAY: For the purposes of this interview I'll deal only with the Muslim world, although there are many other issues of injustice that afflict much of the planet. The way to drain the swamp is this.
First of all, we have to recognize the centrality of the Palestine question to this big crisis. We have to recognize that the flaw at the heart of Western policy is the injustice suffered by the Palestinian people, and the endless insult added to injury over the past 50 years.
We have to make reparation to the Palestinian people and stop bankrolling and arming Israel. We have to force them to knock down the wall, force them to disgorge every inch of the territory that they illegally occupied in 1967, force them to allow a Palestinian state with an Arab border with Jerusalem as its capital and no Zionist settlements on its land. No control over the airspace, sea space, access and so on. None of that will be done, but it needs to be done.
The second thing that needs to be done is that we need to withdraw from occupied Muslim lands, get our forces out of their lands. The third thing we must do is to stop propping up these tyrants that rule the Muslim world. As I implied earlier on, the Muslim world laughs at the idea that we are for freedom and democracy, as they know that their tyrant is only in power because of our support. I'm not asking for anything to be done to bring these tyrants down, other than to withdraw our support and let their people deal with them.
MOORE: In I'm Not the Only One, you wrote of the Labour Party: "Many of my friends have placed their faith in a campaign to 'Reclaim the Party'. I wish them luck. They will need it. I believe they will not succeed, but I sincerely hope that they do." What, if anything could emerge to fill the void to the left of British politics, and you suggest there is a similar void in the United States?
GALLOWAY: With Respect - the Unity Coalition we are trying to fill the void in the UK, as a void is an unnatural thing, especially in politics. I think that no one is trying to fill the vacuum in the United States.
I would like to make something clear about what I am trying to do. I am not a Marxist, a Leninist, Trotskyist or any other kind of 'ist'. I am just labor. I just believe that every country needs a labor party. A party that will stand up for people who work, those who are too old to work, who are poor, marginalized, on the end of the lash of bigotry and prejudice. A party that will stand up for immigrants, minorities and so on. Every country needs such a party. Britain no longer has one, and we are trying to build one from scratch.
It sounds like a very big mountain to climb, but in 1894 in the East End of London a Scotsman called Keir Hardie became the first ever Labour MP. At the time people said he was splitting the vote and he would let the Conservatives in. From that one victory in 1894 in East London grew the great oak of Labour. All the good that was done by Labour has been abandoned, and we are putting ourselves forward as a true labor party.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Israel's Latest Bureaucratic Obscenity
What a month can bring . . . . .
For those of you sitting comfortably in front of your computers, safe in your homes, spare a thought, and maybe a letter or email to the PTB for those ground under the heel of oppressors.
Again, Signs of the Times is one of the few news outlets where you will find the real story
Blue Ibis
********************************************
Israel's Latest Bureaucratic Obscenity
By JONATHAN COOK
July 12, 2006
The same malign intent from Israel towards the Palestinians is stamped through its history like the lettering in a children's stick of seaside rock. But despite the consistent aim of Israeli policy, generation after generation of Western politicians, diplomats and journalists has shown a repeated inability to grasp what is happening before its very eyes.
The Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi once noted that the first goal of Israel's founders as they prepared to establish their Jewish state on a large swath of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 was to empty Palestine's urban heartlands of their educated elites.
Even before Israel's Declaration of Independence on 15 May 1948, most Palestinians had been terrified away from the two wealthiest cities in coastal Palestine, Jaffa and Haifa. Other Palestinian cities soon fell during the war of 1948: Israeli forces mostly cleansed Lydda, Ramle, Acre, Safad, Tiberias, Baysan and Bir Saba of their native populations. Today all these cities have been repopulated with Jews -- as well as renamed.
Khalidi has written: "These refugees from the urban areas of the country generally tended to be those Palestinians with the highest levels of literacy, skills, wealth, and education". Or, in other words, the small number of Palestinians allowed to remain in their homeland by Israel were peasant families living in isolated rural communities.
These Palestinians posed little threat to the new Jewish state: they lacked the education and tools to resist both the wholesale dispossession of their people and their own personal loss as their farm lands were expropriated by the state to establish the Jewish farming communes of the kibbutz and moshav movements.
And so history repeats itself. As Israel's violent siege of Gaza continues, the Associated Press reported this week that dozens of Palestinians with American passports have left Gaza, escorted out of the Strip in a convoy of United Nations vehicles. One Palestinian American mother said she and her children could no longer stand the terrifying sonic booms produced by Israeli aircraft flying overhead during the night.
These fleeing Palestinians have two things that most of their kin in Gaza lack: they have lots of money that they might have invested in rebuilding Gaza's economy were Israel not intent on destroying it; and they are familiar with a language and ideas that might have conveyed very effectively to Western audiences the horror currently being endured by Gaza's civilian population.
They are also among the least radicalised elements of Gaza's population and might have been the ones most willing to start a dialogue with Israel -- had Israel shown any interest in negotiating.
But of course their absence from Gaza, and flight to America, will not be mourned by Israel.
How much Israel fears the presence in the occupied territories of Palestinians who have lived in the West -- those who have money and influence, and speak in a language the non-Arab world can understand -- was highlighted in another piece of news this week that went mostly unnoticed.
According to the Haaretz newspaper, Israel's interior ministry has been quietly implementing a new rule since April that allows it to refuse entry to Palestinians holding foreign passports to Israel and the occupied territories. Most of those affected are Palestinians who today have citizenship in America or Europe.
Israel has this power over these Palestinians' lives because, since its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it has usurped control of the borders of the Palestinian territories. In another sign of how mistaken Western observers are in believing that the occupation of Gaza somehow ended with the withdrawal of Jewish settlers last year, Israel is still able to prevent Palestinians with a foreign passport (as well as those from the West Bank) from entering Gaza.
This new policy of exclusion affects thousands of the wealthiest and most educated Palestinians, some of whom have been living in the occupied territories for a decade or more investing in the economy as entrepreneurs, teaching in the universities or establishing desperately needed civil society organisations.
In another irony, many of these Palestinians have a foreign passport only because Israel stripped them of their rights to residency in the occupied territories in violation of international law. Using its control of the area's borders since 1967, Israel revoked the residency of these Palestinians while they were studying or working abroad.
As the Israeli journalist Amira Hass documented in a recent dispatch, some of these Palestinians eventually came back to the occupied territories after marrying a local Palestinian resident but were refused rights of residency they should be entitled to according to the normal principles of family unification.
Instead most Palestinians with foreign passports have remained in the occupied territories at Israel's discretion: as long as they renewed their tourist visa every three months by crossing the border into Jordan or Egypt, they were left in relative peace.
But Israel is now unilaterally changing the rules (as it always does), even if it has been too embarrassed to declare the fact openly. Apparently the US embassy has been aware of the change for some time but does not think it should intervene in the "sovereign decisions" of another country -- or, more accurately, in the decisions of a sovereign country, Israel, in violating the rights of an occupied people, the Palestinians.
Palestinians with US passports have been told by Israel that, when their three-month visas expire, they will no longer be entitled to enter the occupied territories to visit their families -- except in rare "humanitarian cases" such as a close relative dying. Some will be separated from their spouse and children, while others will lose their businesses and everything they have invested in them.
With these foreign passport holders forced to leave the occupied territories, the pressure is sure to grow on their families left behind in Gaza and the West Bank to seek ways to emigrate abroad to be with them again.
The purpose of Israel's current bureaucratic obscenity is the same as it was in 1948 when its highest priority was the clearing of the Palestinian cities of their elites to make way for the establishment of the Jewish state.
This time Israel needs to empty the ghettoes it is crafting for the Palestinians of the most educated and well-connected of their number so that it can more credibly claim that there is no one "moderate" to talk to. Any Palestinian with a stake in an Israeli-imposed peace, even one that damages Palestinian national interests, will have been forced out by Israel's policies long before.
Those who remain behind, trapped by walls of concrete and steel, will be powerless to resist the unilateral and illegal expansion of Israel's borders explicit in Ehud Olmert's convergence plan.
When the only noise heard from the Palestinians in their cages is the occasional whine of a home-made Qassam rocket flying out of the ghetto into the Jewish state, we will be told by Israel and its US ally that terror is the only language the Palestinians know.
But, in truth, it may well be the only language we have left the Palestinians to speak.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is
Gaza Invasion
Lebanon Invasion
Isreal War Crimes
NEOCONS
Palestinian ghettos
Ehud Olmert
West Bank
For those of you sitting comfortably in front of your computers, safe in your homes, spare a thought, and maybe a letter or email to the PTB for those ground under the heel of oppressors.
Again, Signs of the Times is one of the few news outlets where you will find the real story
Blue Ibis
********************************************
Israel's Latest Bureaucratic Obscenity
By JONATHAN COOK
July 12, 2006
The same malign intent from Israel towards the Palestinians is stamped through its history like the lettering in a children's stick of seaside rock. But despite the consistent aim of Israeli policy, generation after generation of Western politicians, diplomats and journalists has shown a repeated inability to grasp what is happening before its very eyes.
The Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi once noted that the first goal of Israel's founders as they prepared to establish their Jewish state on a large swath of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 was to empty Palestine's urban heartlands of their educated elites.
Even before Israel's Declaration of Independence on 15 May 1948, most Palestinians had been terrified away from the two wealthiest cities in coastal Palestine, Jaffa and Haifa. Other Palestinian cities soon fell during the war of 1948: Israeli forces mostly cleansed Lydda, Ramle, Acre, Safad, Tiberias, Baysan and Bir Saba of their native populations. Today all these cities have been repopulated with Jews -- as well as renamed.
Khalidi has written: "These refugees from the urban areas of the country generally tended to be those Palestinians with the highest levels of literacy, skills, wealth, and education". Or, in other words, the small number of Palestinians allowed to remain in their homeland by Israel were peasant families living in isolated rural communities.
These Palestinians posed little threat to the new Jewish state: they lacked the education and tools to resist both the wholesale dispossession of their people and their own personal loss as their farm lands were expropriated by the state to establish the Jewish farming communes of the kibbutz and moshav movements.
And so history repeats itself. As Israel's violent siege of Gaza continues, the Associated Press reported this week that dozens of Palestinians with American passports have left Gaza, escorted out of the Strip in a convoy of United Nations vehicles. One Palestinian American mother said she and her children could no longer stand the terrifying sonic booms produced by Israeli aircraft flying overhead during the night.
These fleeing Palestinians have two things that most of their kin in Gaza lack: they have lots of money that they might have invested in rebuilding Gaza's economy were Israel not intent on destroying it; and they are familiar with a language and ideas that might have conveyed very effectively to Western audiences the horror currently being endured by Gaza's civilian population.
They are also among the least radicalised elements of Gaza's population and might have been the ones most willing to start a dialogue with Israel -- had Israel shown any interest in negotiating.
But of course their absence from Gaza, and flight to America, will not be mourned by Israel.
How much Israel fears the presence in the occupied territories of Palestinians who have lived in the West -- those who have money and influence, and speak in a language the non-Arab world can understand -- was highlighted in another piece of news this week that went mostly unnoticed.
According to the Haaretz newspaper, Israel's interior ministry has been quietly implementing a new rule since April that allows it to refuse entry to Palestinians holding foreign passports to Israel and the occupied territories. Most of those affected are Palestinians who today have citizenship in America or Europe.
Israel has this power over these Palestinians' lives because, since its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, it has usurped control of the borders of the Palestinian territories. In another sign of how mistaken Western observers are in believing that the occupation of Gaza somehow ended with the withdrawal of Jewish settlers last year, Israel is still able to prevent Palestinians with a foreign passport (as well as those from the West Bank) from entering Gaza.
This new policy of exclusion affects thousands of the wealthiest and most educated Palestinians, some of whom have been living in the occupied territories for a decade or more investing in the economy as entrepreneurs, teaching in the universities or establishing desperately needed civil society organisations.
In another irony, many of these Palestinians have a foreign passport only because Israel stripped them of their rights to residency in the occupied territories in violation of international law. Using its control of the area's borders since 1967, Israel revoked the residency of these Palestinians while they were studying or working abroad.
As the Israeli journalist Amira Hass documented in a recent dispatch, some of these Palestinians eventually came back to the occupied territories after marrying a local Palestinian resident but were refused rights of residency they should be entitled to according to the normal principles of family unification.
Instead most Palestinians with foreign passports have remained in the occupied territories at Israel's discretion: as long as they renewed their tourist visa every three months by crossing the border into Jordan or Egypt, they were left in relative peace.
But Israel is now unilaterally changing the rules (as it always does), even if it has been too embarrassed to declare the fact openly. Apparently the US embassy has been aware of the change for some time but does not think it should intervene in the "sovereign decisions" of another country -- or, more accurately, in the decisions of a sovereign country, Israel, in violating the rights of an occupied people, the Palestinians.
Palestinians with US passports have been told by Israel that, when their three-month visas expire, they will no longer be entitled to enter the occupied territories to visit their families -- except in rare "humanitarian cases" such as a close relative dying. Some will be separated from their spouse and children, while others will lose their businesses and everything they have invested in them.
With these foreign passport holders forced to leave the occupied territories, the pressure is sure to grow on their families left behind in Gaza and the West Bank to seek ways to emigrate abroad to be with them again.
The purpose of Israel's current bureaucratic obscenity is the same as it was in 1948 when its highest priority was the clearing of the Palestinian cities of their elites to make way for the establishment of the Jewish state.
This time Israel needs to empty the ghettoes it is crafting for the Palestinians of the most educated and well-connected of their number so that it can more credibly claim that there is no one "moderate" to talk to. Any Palestinian with a stake in an Israeli-imposed peace, even one that damages Palestinian national interests, will have been forced out by Israel's policies long before.
Those who remain behind, trapped by walls of concrete and steel, will be powerless to resist the unilateral and illegal expansion of Israel's borders explicit in Ehud Olmert's convergence plan.
When the only noise heard from the Palestinians in their cages is the occasional whine of a home-made Qassam rocket flying out of the ghetto into the Jewish state, we will be told by Israel and its US ally that terror is the only language the Palestinians know.
But, in truth, it may well be the only language we have left the Palestinians to speak.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is
Gaza Invasion
Lebanon Invasion
Isreal War Crimes
NEOCONS
Palestinian ghettos
Ehud Olmert
West Bank
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Bush, Scripted and Unscripted
Signs Editorial:
Bush, scripted and unscripted
Thursday June 15, 2006
The Guardian
A selection of quotes, scripted and unscripted, that issued from the mouth of the "great liberator". Read them, and realise that the domestic and foreign policies of modern day America are clearly not being dictated by a commander in chief who can barely string a coherent sentence together on his own.
So who really runs America?
Scripted: The success of America has never been proven by cities of gold, but by citizens of character. Men and women who work hard, dream big, love their family, serve their neighbour. Values that turn a piece of earth into a neighbourhood, a community, a chosen nation. (June 1999, when Bush announced his candidacy)
Unscripted: Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. (August 2004)
Scripted: War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing. (Mourning service in Washington following September 11 attacks)
Unscripted: There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring 'em on. (July 2003)
Scripted: The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us. Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. (Joint session of Congress, September 2001)
Unscripted: The point now is how do we work together to achieve important goals. And one such goal is a democracy in Germany. (May 2006)
Scripted: States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. (State of the Union Address, January 2002)
Unscripted: I was not pleased that Hamas has refused to announce its desire to destroy Israel. (May 2006)
Scripted: I know that some of my decisions have led to terrible loss, and not one of those decisions has been taken lightly. I know this war is controversial, yet being your president requires doing what I believe is right and accepting the consequences. (Oval Office speech, December 2005)
Unscripted: I would say the best moment of all [in office] was when I caught a 7.5 pound largemouth bass in my lake. (May 2006)
****************************************
This is the man who "commands" the largest military machine in the world? Who counts Isreal as one of our great allies? It must be that there is no one home, and he is able to be manipulated into anything that it put into his head. Otherwise, that horrors like this could never be condoned
Isreali rocket attack :
or this:
Gaza Picnic Ends in Carnage (video)
It would be unexplainable.
What will you do about it? Start by trying to understand the mindset of the "humans" (???) who perpetrate such horrors. Read Ponerology: the Science of Evil to learn how such these things can happen when society is transformed little by little for the worse, by the psychopaths among us. Learn to recognize them. It is our only hope.
Blue Ibis
Bush, scripted and unscripted
Thursday June 15, 2006
The Guardian
A selection of quotes, scripted and unscripted, that issued from the mouth of the "great liberator". Read them, and realise that the domestic and foreign policies of modern day America are clearly not being dictated by a commander in chief who can barely string a coherent sentence together on his own.
So who really runs America?
Scripted: The success of America has never been proven by cities of gold, but by citizens of character. Men and women who work hard, dream big, love their family, serve their neighbour. Values that turn a piece of earth into a neighbourhood, a community, a chosen nation. (June 1999, when Bush announced his candidacy)
Unscripted: Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. (August 2004)
Scripted: War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing. (Mourning service in Washington following September 11 attacks)
Unscripted: There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring 'em on. (July 2003)
Scripted: The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us. Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail. (Joint session of Congress, September 2001)
Unscripted: The point now is how do we work together to achieve important goals. And one such goal is a democracy in Germany. (May 2006)
Scripted: States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. (State of the Union Address, January 2002)
Unscripted: I was not pleased that Hamas has refused to announce its desire to destroy Israel. (May 2006)
Scripted: I know that some of my decisions have led to terrible loss, and not one of those decisions has been taken lightly. I know this war is controversial, yet being your president requires doing what I believe is right and accepting the consequences. (Oval Office speech, December 2005)
Unscripted: I would say the best moment of all [in office] was when I caught a 7.5 pound largemouth bass in my lake. (May 2006)
****************************************
This is the man who "commands" the largest military machine in the world? Who counts Isreal as one of our great allies? It must be that there is no one home, and he is able to be manipulated into anything that it put into his head. Otherwise, that horrors like this could never be condoned
Isreali rocket attack :
or this:
Gaza Picnic Ends in Carnage (video)
It would be unexplainable.
What will you do about it? Start by trying to understand the mindset of the "humans" (???) who perpetrate such horrors. Read Ponerology: the Science of Evil to learn how such these things can happen when society is transformed little by little for the worse, by the psychopaths among us. Learn to recognize them. It is our only hope.
Blue Ibis
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Al Qaida Fairy Tales
Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
09/06/2006
Bush has the gall to "hail" the killing of Zarqawi while simultaneously asserting that nothing will change in Iraq. We are repeatedly told that Zarqawi was the "mastermind of sectarian attacks in Iraq", but now that he is dead, absolutely nothing will change, the attacks will continue.
Bush states all of this with the surity of a man that knows exactly who is carrying out the attacks in Iraq and that he can count on them to continue.
Do not, even for one second, be foolish enough to think that the timing of Zarqawi's death was anything but a carefully planned operation designed to force the American people to find new faith in the righteousness of the war on non-existent Islamic terror, and thereby prop up the failed state that is America under the Bush administration.
The official file on Zarqawi, whose real name was Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh, tells us that he was born in Jordan. Barely literate, he became a petty criminal until the call to arms came with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After his time in the terror training camps of Afghanistan Zarqawi returned to his home with a radical Islamist agenda. The intersting part of his file, the part that is generally omitted from such reports, is that the training camps in Afghanistan before and during the soviet invasion of that country that Zarqawi attended, were funded and run by the CIA, making Zarqawi and others like him, assets of the US government.
Consider the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, in an interview in the 15-21 January 1998 edition of Le Nouvel Observateur
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.
Zarqawi was on the CIA's books for over twenty years and when the Neocons came to power in 2000, they immediately went about the task of gathering together a group of likely fundamentlist Islamic patsies to take the rap for the Neocon's planned war on fake Islamic terrorism.
On Wednesday morning at 6am, a U.S. airforce F-16 dropped two 500lb bombs on a single isolated safehouse outside the city of Baqubah, 30 miles northwest of Baghdad, where, we are told, Zarqawi was staying with 5 comrades. In doing so, the NeoCons sacrificed a valuable 'Islamic terrorist' bogeyman. That is not to say, however, that Zarqawi was actually in that "safe house".
As Craig Unger reported in his Vanity Fair article yesterday, during the 70's and 80's, Neocons like Michael Ledeen made something of an artform out of inventing stories of Communist threats to America. In our 'New American Century', these skills of the Neocons are being put to use in inventing equally bogus stories about Islamic terrorism. In Zarqawi, we had a creation of people like Michael Ledeen. As such, there is no reason to believe that Zarqawi was actually in that "safe house", or that he has been in Iraq in recent years.
Have you ever seen the effects of a 500lb bomb? Have you ever seen the effects of two? Generally, such bombs will obliterate everything in the immediate vicinity leaving a large crater at the site of the bombing and cause extensive damage over a wide area. Take the opportunity to watch the video on CNN of the bombing. Notice the extent of the massive explosion.
Now look at the below image of the house before it was bombed:
Realise that after these bombs, absolutely no trace of this house would be left.
Indeed, here is an image of what was left of the house:
Now look at the below image of Zarqawi who, we are told, was in the house at the time these two massive pieces of ordenance were dropped, essentially on his head:
An abrasion on his cheek and a cut on his forehead and above his left eye. All of which leads us to conclude that either 'al-Zarqawi' really was a super human Islamic terrorist or someone in the US government thinks we are all very, very stupid.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
COINTELPRO Primer 202 - Dealing with What Can Happen
As always, the best defense against a pathocrat is to expose far and wide the underhanded tactic used to intimidate and cow his victim.
The only way this despicable example of a lawyer's "muscle letter" can work is to scare the target into silence. The best (sometimes the only) counteraction is to be anything but.
Blue Ibis
***********************************
Jeff Rense Retains Lawyer; Uses Coercion and Intimidation
by Lisa Guliani
After the publication of an article that I wrote for WING TV entitled Jeff Rense: A Reinvention of What?, we now have official confirmation that Jeff Rense has retained the services of a lawyer who is resorting to coercion and intimidation tactics in trying to pressure Patricia Smullin (owner of KOBI-TV in Oregon) into reversing herself by signing a pre-scripted statement in order to avoid a potential "defamation lawsuit."
In fact, this is what Attorney-at-Law Eugene V. Anderson wrote in a letter dated May 31, 2006 in which he wants Ms. Smullin to actually sign a statement that he himself wrote and SCRIPTED for her in advance. The next three paragraphs are what Jeff Rense's legal gun "suggests" that Ms. Smullin write and sign:
"You had virtually no day to day contact with Mr. Rense during his tenure at KOBI-TV where he worked under the then news director, Alan Goldberg, as an anchor/director, from May 1983 to June 1984. While at KOBI Mr. Rense worked extremely hard, producing, writing, and anchoring both the 6-7 and the 11 pm newscasts, Monday through Friday. Mr. Rense was a superb anchor/producer and he earned KOBI an Arbitron rating for his newscasts of a 53 point share, which is unprecedented in our station's history.
I categorically deny the quotations attributed to me in the Wingtv.net article titled "Jeff Rense: A Reinvention of What?" by Lisa Guliani. I deny stating that Jeff Rense is a 'compulsive liar'. I deny stating that Jeff Rense is 'not known for his honesty.'
I deeply regret the totally untrue statements attributed to me in the Wingtv.net article, and I hereby issue a heartfelt, formal and public apology to Mr. Rense. I personally have a great deal of professional respect for Jeff Rense."
To read Attorney Anderson’s entire letter, click here:
Jeff Rense Lawyer (page one)
Jeff Rense Lawyer (page two)
Now remember, Ms. Smullin didn't write a single word above; Jeff Rense's lawyer did! And, of course, if Ms. Smullin ever signs this SCRIPTED statement (that she didn't even write), then Jeff Rense (by dangling the threat of a defamation lawsuit in her face) would publish it on his website and pull a bait-and-switch in a transparent attempt to discredit my article. But as can be seen from the SCRIPT, his underhanded tactic has now been exposed.
Jeff Rense: Mr. Insider
The only way this despicable example of a lawyer's "muscle letter" can work is to scare the target into silence. The best (sometimes the only) counteraction is to be anything but.
Blue Ibis
***********************************
Jeff Rense Retains Lawyer; Uses Coercion and Intimidation
by Lisa Guliani
After the publication of an article that I wrote for WING TV entitled Jeff Rense: A Reinvention of What?, we now have official confirmation that Jeff Rense has retained the services of a lawyer who is resorting to coercion and intimidation tactics in trying to pressure Patricia Smullin (owner of KOBI-TV in Oregon) into reversing herself by signing a pre-scripted statement in order to avoid a potential "defamation lawsuit."
In fact, this is what Attorney-at-Law Eugene V. Anderson wrote in a letter dated May 31, 2006 in which he wants Ms. Smullin to actually sign a statement that he himself wrote and SCRIPTED for her in advance. The next three paragraphs are what Jeff Rense's legal gun "suggests" that Ms. Smullin write and sign:
"You had virtually no day to day contact with Mr. Rense during his tenure at KOBI-TV where he worked under the then news director, Alan Goldberg, as an anchor/director, from May 1983 to June 1984. While at KOBI Mr. Rense worked extremely hard, producing, writing, and anchoring both the 6-7 and the 11 pm newscasts, Monday through Friday. Mr. Rense was a superb anchor/producer and he earned KOBI an Arbitron rating for his newscasts of a 53 point share, which is unprecedented in our station's history.
I categorically deny the quotations attributed to me in the Wingtv.net article titled "Jeff Rense: A Reinvention of What?" by Lisa Guliani. I deny stating that Jeff Rense is a 'compulsive liar'. I deny stating that Jeff Rense is 'not known for his honesty.'
I deeply regret the totally untrue statements attributed to me in the Wingtv.net article, and I hereby issue a heartfelt, formal and public apology to Mr. Rense. I personally have a great deal of professional respect for Jeff Rense."
To read Attorney Anderson’s entire letter, click here:
Jeff Rense Lawyer (page one)
Jeff Rense Lawyer (page two)
Now remember, Ms. Smullin didn't write a single word above; Jeff Rense's lawyer did! And, of course, if Ms. Smullin ever signs this SCRIPTED statement (that she didn't even write), then Jeff Rense (by dangling the threat of a defamation lawsuit in her face) would publish it on his website and pull a bait-and-switch in a transparent attempt to discredit my article. But as can be seen from the SCRIPT, his underhanded tactic has now been exposed.
Jeff Rense: Mr. Insider
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
When NeoCon Bit-Players Crave Attention
What is there to say about the following material? Anne Coulter should never be given a public platform again after this little outing.
Blue Ibis
*************************************
9/11 Widows, New York Papers, Respond to Coulter's 'Slander'
By E&P Staff
Published: June 07, 2006 7:55 AM ET updated 10:00 AM ET
NEW YORK Syndicated columnist and author Ann Coulter appeared on the Today show on Tuesday, promoting a new book. Host Matt Lauer asked her to explain certain remarks in the book aimed at activist 9/11 widows, including her charge that they were nothing but "self obsessed" and celebrity-seeking "broads" who are "enjoying" their husbands' deaths "so much."
After she defended these statements, Lauer inexplicably closed by saying, "always fun to have you here." (???!!)
Elsewhere in the book, Coulter refers to the widows as "witches" and asks, "how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies"?
Blue Ibis
*************************************
9/11 Widows, New York Papers, Respond to Coulter's 'Slander'
By E&P Staff
Published: June 07, 2006 7:55 AM ET updated 10:00 AM ET
NEW YORK Syndicated columnist and author Ann Coulter appeared on the Today show on Tuesday, promoting a new book. Host Matt Lauer asked her to explain certain remarks in the book aimed at activist 9/11 widows, including her charge that they were nothing but "self obsessed" and celebrity-seeking "broads" who are "enjoying" their husbands' deaths "so much."
After she defended these statements, Lauer inexplicably closed by saying, "always fun to have you here." (???!!)
Elsewhere in the book, Coulter refers to the widows as "witches" and asks, "how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies"?
Comment: There you have it. Remember the "kinder, gentler" Amerika the Neocons were supposed to usher in?
In response, a group of five 9/11 widows, who may have been the prime targets of Coulter's remarks, issued a statement denouncing Coulter's views. The New York Daily News on Wednesday featured a smiling Coulter and this headline on its front page: COULTER THE CRUEL. One story inside was topped with "Massive Chip on Her Coulter " and another called her a "a model of meanness."
The Star-Ledger in Newark, meanwhile, carried a story today with the headline "For 9/11 widows, book adds insult to injury." It featured interviews with some of the widows. The New York Post headlined a story: "RIGHTY WRITER COULTER HURLS NASTY GIBES AT 9/11 GALS."
The Post interviewed one of the widows, Mindy Kleinberg of East Brunswick, N.J. -- part of a group Coulter dubbed "The Witches of East Brunswick." Kleinberg said, "We are trying to make sure that nobody else walks in our footsteps. And if she [Coulter] thinks that's wrong, so be it." Newsday (Melville, N.Y.) carried an Associated Press story.
On a separate matter -- charges that she knowingly voted in the wrong precinct in Florida last year -- Coulter said on Fox News Tuesday night that reporters who wrote about the case are "all retarded" and accused Palm Beach officials of having a sexually transmitted disease. "I think the syphilis has gone to their brains," she said. "This is all false, I'm telling you."
Universal syndicates Coulter's column. A spokesman there told E&P it had no response to the latest firestorm.
The five widows' statement is reprinted below (it first appeared at crooksandliars.com).
***
We did not choose to become widowed on September 11, 2001. The attack, which tore our families apart and destroyed our former lives, caused us to ask some serious questions regarding the systems that our country has in place to protect its citizens.
Through our constant research, we came to learn how the protocols were supposed to have worked. Thus, we asked for an independent commission to investigate the loopholes which obviously existed and allowed us to be so utterly vulnerable to terrorists. Our only motivation ever was to make our Nation safer. Could we learn from this tragedy so that it would not be repeated?
We are forced to respond to Ms. Coulter’s accusations to set the record straight because we have been slandered.
Contrary to Ms. Coulter’s statements, there was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again. We adored these men and miss them every day.
It is in their honor and memory, that we will once again refocus the Nation’s attention to the real issues at hand: our lack of security, leadership and progress in the five years since 9/11.
We are continuously reminded that we are still a nation at risk. Therefore, the following is a partial list of areas still desperately in need of attention and public outcry. We should continuously be holding the feet of our elected officials to the fire to fix these shortcomings.
1. Homeland Security Funding based on risk. Inattention to this area causes police officers, firefighters and other emergency/first responder personnel to be ill equipped in emergencies. Fixing this will save lives on the day of the next attack.
2. Intelligence Community Oversight. Without proper oversight, there exists no one joint, bicameral intelligence panel with power to both authorize and appropriate funding for intelligence activities. Without such funding we are unable to capitalize on all intelligence community resources and abilities to thwart potential terrorist attacks. Fixing this will save lives on the day of the next attack.
3. Transportation Security. There has been no concerted effort to harden mass transportation security. Our planes, buses, subways, and railways remain under-protected and highly vulnerable. These are all identifiable soft targets of potential terrorist attack. The terror attacks in Spain and London attest to this fact. Fixing our transportation systems may save lives on the day of the next attack.
4. Information Sharing among Intelligence Agencies. Information sharing among intelligence agencies has not improved since 9/11. The attacks on 9/11 could have been prevented had information been shared among intelligence agencies. On the day of the next attack, more lives may be saved if our intelligence agencies work together.
5. Loose Nukes. A concerted effort has not been made to secure the thousands of loose nukes scattered around the world – particularly in the former Soviet Union. Securing these loose nukes could make it less likely for a terrorist group to use this method in an attack, thereby saving lives.
6. Security at Chemical Plants, Nuclear Plants, Ports. We must, as a nation, secure these known and identifiable soft targets of Terrorism. Doing so will save many lives.
7. Border Security. We continue to have porous borders and INS and Customs systems in shambles. We need a concerted effort to integrate our border security into the larger national security apparatus.
8. Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Given the President’s NSA Surveillance Program and the re-instatement of the Patriot Act, this Nation is in dire need of a Civil Liberties Oversight Board to insure that a proper balance is found between national security versus the protection of our constitutional rights.
-- September 11th Advocates
Kristen Breitweiser
Patty Casazza
Monica Gabrielle
Mindy Kleinberg
Lorie Van Auken
COINTELPRO
Pentagon Strike
9-11 Widows
NEOCONS
Ann Coulter
NSA
9-11 Coverup
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
More Powerful Words from Cindy Sheehan
Blog them far and wide. Shout them loud enough for the pathocrats of the world to know we will not be sheep.
Blue Ibis
**********************************************
Sheehan: From My Lai to Haditha
By Cindy Sheehan
Information Clearing House
06/04/06
This is the most difficult article that I have ever had to write, but I have to write it anyway, unfortunately.
I, and just about anyone and everyone who criticizes George Bush and this war are accused of "not supporting the troops." Since my son, Casey, was killed in Iraq because of lies and to actually make that country safe for our corporate interests, I have been saying the only way we can support our troops at this point is to get them the hell out of this illegal and immoral war.
The massacre in Haditha on November, 19, 2005, is just another way to underscore the fact that our troops are being turned into war criminals in what one article called: "The Worst War Crime of the Iraq War." (Sydney Morning Herald; May 28 , 2006). In a stunning display of shameless hypocrisy George Bush said of the (not uncommon) butchering of innocent civilians in Haditha:
"Our troops have been trained on core values throughout their training, but obviously there was an incident that took place in Iraq,"
Bush also said this following a meeting of his cabinet: the world will see a "full and complete" investigation.
Another false piece of propaganda that we are fed is that we need to support the president, especially when we are "at war." I say, "No, way!" Our kids know the difference between right and wrong before they are sucked into a military system that dehumanizes our soldiers and forces them to dehumanize the "enemy" to the point where it is apparently acceptable behavior to kill children and to cover up the murders. Can we all assume that little Georgie was never told that cold-blooded murder is wrong seeing that his family has supported wars and their inherent crimes for at least three generations?
The double standard that our leaders have set for themselves and the troops is amoral and corrupt. I have not seen anywhere in the discussion of this topic that, not only is Haditha not the worse war crime committed by American or coalition troops, but the entire war is a war crime. The Pentagon needs to be dismantled, cleansed with holy water and purified by incense and left to lie fallow for generations in atonement for all of the crimes that have been planned and committed within its walls.
The following list of illegal, immoral, and atrocious behavior is obvious and not all inclusive by any means:
* 12 years of devastating sanctions that were responsible for killing over 500,000 Iraqi children.
* Destroying antiquities and culture is a war crime and prohibited under Geneva Conventions.
*The invasion of Iraq is a preventive war of aggression against a country that was no threat to the USA or the world and was expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
*The invasion was not sanctioned or approved of by the United Nations .
*"Shock and awe " targeted civilian centers and killed many innocent people.
*Abu Ghraib.
*Guantanamo.
*"Extreme rendition."
*Use of chemical weapons, especially target=" _blank">white phosphorous enhanced with napalm, particularly in the second siege of Fallujah.
*Targeting hospitals, clinics, and threatening Medical Doctors with execution if one treats "insurgents" (which can apparently include babies and pregnant women).
*Using highly compensated mercenaries to carry out executions and torture.
*Forcing a style of government on the citizens and manipulating the outcome of the elections.
*Dishonoring the Constitution of the United States by invading Iraq without a declaration of war by Congress and by breaking our treaties with the United Nations and the ratified Geneva Conventions.
George Bush is correct. A "full and complete" investigation needs to be made into the crimes against humanity in Iraq, and if justice prevails, this would in turn lead to the trial and conviction of George and the rest of the neocon purveyors of torture and murder, for which the maximum penalties should be applied.
The level of accountability needs to rise higher than Specialist or Private and should reach up down the very blackest bowels of an administration that lied through its teeth to get our country into a war of aggression and occupation. The commander in chief needs to be prosecuted: NOW!
The most difficult part of this writing is in trying to reconcile the fact that our soldiers, for one example, in Haditha, could not show conscience and restraint, qualities which may have prevented a murderous rampage. When one sees the pictures of bodies burned beyond human recognition; hears of 2 year old children being killed out of revenge; women being shot for failing to stop at a checkpoint that is in the middle of THEIR country; prisoners being tortured in despicably inhumane ways; ad immoral infinitum: one should be appalled and ashamed to call oneself an American. That some of our soldiers would stoop to the level of their leaders to commit such atrocities is unspeakable. Bush says our troops have been trained in "core values" when he as a so-called born again Christian can claim that God told him to invade Iraq and it's okay to spy on American citizens like he is some kind of sick voyeur with a penchant for death and destruction.
War, under any circumstance, is not a "core value" of humanity; in fact, it is the ultimate failure of humanity. War turns our mostly normal American youth into wanton murderers who have lost their own humanity and love of others. Haditha in this war and My Lai in another disgusting war were unfortunately not aberrations. War is the abominable aberration.
Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, our troops are forbidden from obeying unlawful orders and Iraq was unlawful before it ever began. Our soldiers need to start disobeying the unlawful order to even be deployed to Iraq and not raise their weapons in appeasement to the Bush Regime and say: "This war is the criminal, I am not. Threaten me if you will, but I am not going to be an accomplice in your crimes against humanity."
We as people working for peace have long held that the people of Iraq did not deserve the treatment that they are getting from BushCo, but it is our troops who are pulling the triggers and pushing the buttons or flushing the Koran or sexually abusing prisoners, and we know about it, so that makes us accessories to the crimes, unless we are actively trying to end the severe breach of compassion and mercy that is being carried out in the Middle East.
Yes, we have to work to end the war and to hold everyone who commits atrocities accountable, from private to president, but we also have to support our soldiers that do not want to kill. It is a tragic dichotomy in this society that one can be executed for killing someone, but also be executed or imprisoned for disobeying an order to go and take the life of another human being in war.
There are several ways that our young men and women can be supported in resisting the evil of BushCo and Iraq. The GI Rights Hotline is there to help soldiers get out of going to an illegal and immoral war and the War Resister's League in Canada needs support to help our soldiers find sanctuary and safety. Counter-recruitment is also a powerful tool to use to prevent our children from being sucked into the evil war machine and being used as cannon fodder/weapons of mass destruction for profit.
Where can the people of Iraq go to find sanctuary and safety? They have no place to run to and they have no voice to end this war of terror that is being waged on them by the USA.
It is up to us to be the voice of the babies of Iraq and of the other people whose only crime was to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time with the additional bad luck of living on top of rich oil reserves.
Support the troops? I support only those who are NOT supporting the exploitation of the Iraqi people, and those who do not allow the war profiteers to carry on with their death and destruction all for the sake of an opulent lifestyle. I do not support those who are supporting a criminally insane and treacherous foreign policy. However I, as the mother of a slain soldier, will do anything I can to support all of them by working to shorten their stay in an unwelcoming country, and bring them home from the quagmire that their so-called commander in chief forced them into.
Also, when our troops do come home from the war, they need all of the counseling, job training and help they require to transition back to a life where most people don't even recognize that there is a war being waged.
BushCo and the war machine killed my baby. They have killed tens of thousands more.
BushCo need to be prosecuted and punished like the common criminals that they are.
We owe this to the people of Iraq, the world, and our own soldiers.
We owe it to ourselves.
Cindy Sheehan , Bush Wars , Iraq War Crimes , Haditha , Rendition , Red Pill Press, Pathocrat
Blue Ibis
**********************************************
Sheehan: From My Lai to Haditha
By Cindy Sheehan
Information Clearing House
06/04/06
This is the most difficult article that I have ever had to write, but I have to write it anyway, unfortunately.
I, and just about anyone and everyone who criticizes George Bush and this war are accused of "not supporting the troops." Since my son, Casey, was killed in Iraq because of lies and to actually make that country safe for our corporate interests, I have been saying the only way we can support our troops at this point is to get them the hell out of this illegal and immoral war.
The massacre in Haditha on November, 19, 2005, is just another way to underscore the fact that our troops are being turned into war criminals in what one article called: "The Worst War Crime of the Iraq War." (Sydney Morning Herald; May 28 , 2006). In a stunning display of shameless hypocrisy George Bush said of the (not uncommon) butchering of innocent civilians in Haditha:
"Our troops have been trained on core values throughout their training, but obviously there was an incident that took place in Iraq,"
Bush also said this following a meeting of his cabinet: the world will see a "full and complete" investigation.
Another false piece of propaganda that we are fed is that we need to support the president, especially when we are "at war." I say, "No, way!" Our kids know the difference between right and wrong before they are sucked into a military system that dehumanizes our soldiers and forces them to dehumanize the "enemy" to the point where it is apparently acceptable behavior to kill children and to cover up the murders. Can we all assume that little Georgie was never told that cold-blooded murder is wrong seeing that his family has supported wars and their inherent crimes for at least three generations?
The double standard that our leaders have set for themselves and the troops is amoral and corrupt. I have not seen anywhere in the discussion of this topic that, not only is Haditha not the worse war crime committed by American or coalition troops, but the entire war is a war crime. The Pentagon needs to be dismantled, cleansed with holy water and purified by incense and left to lie fallow for generations in atonement for all of the crimes that have been planned and committed within its walls.
The following list of illegal, immoral, and atrocious behavior is obvious and not all inclusive by any means:
* 12 years of devastating sanctions that were responsible for killing over 500,000 Iraqi children.
* Destroying antiquities and culture is a war crime and prohibited under Geneva Conventions.
*The invasion of Iraq is a preventive war of aggression against a country that was no threat to the USA or the world and was expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
*The invasion was not sanctioned or approved of by the United Nations .
*"Shock and awe " targeted civilian centers and killed many innocent people.
*Abu Ghraib.
*Guantanamo.
*"Extreme rendition."
*Use of chemical weapons, especially target=" _blank">white phosphorous enhanced with napalm, particularly in the second siege of Fallujah.
*Targeting hospitals, clinics, and threatening Medical Doctors with execution if one treats "insurgents" (which can apparently include babies and pregnant women).
*Using highly compensated mercenaries to carry out executions and torture.
*Forcing a style of government on the citizens and manipulating the outcome of the elections.
*Dishonoring the Constitution of the United States by invading Iraq without a declaration of war by Congress and by breaking our treaties with the United Nations and the ratified Geneva Conventions.
George Bush is correct. A "full and complete" investigation needs to be made into the crimes against humanity in Iraq, and if justice prevails, this would in turn lead to the trial and conviction of George and the rest of the neocon purveyors of torture and murder, for which the maximum penalties should be applied.
The level of accountability needs to rise higher than Specialist or Private and should reach up down the very blackest bowels of an administration that lied through its teeth to get our country into a war of aggression and occupation. The commander in chief needs to be prosecuted: NOW!
The most difficult part of this writing is in trying to reconcile the fact that our soldiers, for one example, in Haditha, could not show conscience and restraint, qualities which may have prevented a murderous rampage. When one sees the pictures of bodies burned beyond human recognition; hears of 2 year old children being killed out of revenge; women being shot for failing to stop at a checkpoint that is in the middle of THEIR country; prisoners being tortured in despicably inhumane ways; ad immoral infinitum: one should be appalled and ashamed to call oneself an American. That some of our soldiers would stoop to the level of their leaders to commit such atrocities is unspeakable. Bush says our troops have been trained in "core values" when he as a so-called born again Christian can claim that God told him to invade Iraq and it's okay to spy on American citizens like he is some kind of sick voyeur with a penchant for death and destruction.
War, under any circumstance, is not a "core value" of humanity; in fact, it is the ultimate failure of humanity. War turns our mostly normal American youth into wanton murderers who have lost their own humanity and love of others. Haditha in this war and My Lai in another disgusting war were unfortunately not aberrations. War is the abominable aberration.
Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, our troops are forbidden from obeying unlawful orders and Iraq was unlawful before it ever began. Our soldiers need to start disobeying the unlawful order to even be deployed to Iraq and not raise their weapons in appeasement to the Bush Regime and say: "This war is the criminal, I am not. Threaten me if you will, but I am not going to be an accomplice in your crimes against humanity."
We as people working for peace have long held that the people of Iraq did not deserve the treatment that they are getting from BushCo, but it is our troops who are pulling the triggers and pushing the buttons or flushing the Koran or sexually abusing prisoners, and we know about it, so that makes us accessories to the crimes, unless we are actively trying to end the severe breach of compassion and mercy that is being carried out in the Middle East.
Yes, we have to work to end the war and to hold everyone who commits atrocities accountable, from private to president, but we also have to support our soldiers that do not want to kill. It is a tragic dichotomy in this society that one can be executed for killing someone, but also be executed or imprisoned for disobeying an order to go and take the life of another human being in war.
There are several ways that our young men and women can be supported in resisting the evil of BushCo and Iraq. The GI Rights Hotline is there to help soldiers get out of going to an illegal and immoral war and the War Resister's League in Canada needs support to help our soldiers find sanctuary and safety. Counter-recruitment is also a powerful tool to use to prevent our children from being sucked into the evil war machine and being used as cannon fodder/weapons of mass destruction for profit.
Where can the people of Iraq go to find sanctuary and safety? They have no place to run to and they have no voice to end this war of terror that is being waged on them by the USA.
It is up to us to be the voice of the babies of Iraq and of the other people whose only crime was to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time with the additional bad luck of living on top of rich oil reserves.
Support the troops? I support only those who are NOT supporting the exploitation of the Iraqi people, and those who do not allow the war profiteers to carry on with their death and destruction all for the sake of an opulent lifestyle. I do not support those who are supporting a criminally insane and treacherous foreign policy. However I, as the mother of a slain soldier, will do anything I can to support all of them by working to shorten their stay in an unwelcoming country, and bring them home from the quagmire that their so-called commander in chief forced them into.
Also, when our troops do come home from the war, they need all of the counseling, job training and help they require to transition back to a life where most people don't even recognize that there is a war being waged.
BushCo and the war machine killed my baby. They have killed tens of thousands more.
BushCo need to be prosecuted and punished like the common criminals that they are.
We owe this to the people of Iraq, the world, and our own soldiers.
We owe it to ourselves.
Cindy Sheehan , Bush Wars , Iraq War Crimes , Haditha , Rendition , Red Pill Press, Pathocrat
Friday, June 02, 2006
COINTELPRO Primer 202 - What Can Happen
Well, following the unmistakable (mal)odour of disinformation distribution, our reporters Victor Thorne & Lisa Guliani published the article posted here yesterday. Not twenty-four hours later the following incident occurrred. Inasmuch as the light of truth is anathema to these characters, we are not surprised. When you aren't familiar with the tactics employed by pathocrats it is easy to be blind-sided. Bow deeply to Ms. Guliani's courage and learn from Ms. Smullins experience. Better yet, get the new book Ponerology from Red Pill Press.
Ponerology: The Science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, not only details these kinds of tactics, but can give you deep insight into the minds that employ them.
Knowledge Protects, Ignorance Endangers.
Blue Ibis
****************************************************
A War of Nerves
by Lisa Guliani
On May 31, 2006 at 4:30 pm I received an unexpected phone call from Patsy Smullin, owner of KOBI-TV Channel 5 in Medford, Oregon. If you read my latest article entitled, Jeff Rense: A Reinvention of What?, then you know that Patsy Smullin is Jeff Rense’s former employer. This was our third conversation in a weeks' time, and regrettably it wasn't as cordial as our previous exchanges.
Ms. Smullin began the conversation by asking, "Have you heard from the Eugene attorney yet?" She sounded extremely nervous and agitated and her voice was shaking.
I responded with, "An attorney; for what? No, I haven't heard from anybody. What is this about?"
Smullin was having great difficulty expressing herself, and I was trying to put together the gist of what she was attempting (but unable) to say.
Smullin: "You called me asking for Jeff Rense's dates of employment and I had to do a lot of work to get that information for you. I had to go into another building to get that information for you."
Me: "Yes, and I thank you. But what are you talking about now? What attorney? I don't understand what you mean."
Smullin: "You need to remove those two sentences from your article."
Me: "Which sentences?"
Smullin: "The ones about Jeff Rense being a compulsive liar, and about him not being known for his honesty. You need to remove those."
Me: "Why should I remove them? I didn't misquote you at all. I wrote down exactly what you said. I have it in my notes. You knew I was writing an article."
Smullin: (in a low voice): "That's not the way I remember it." (A pause, then excitedly) “You don't seem to understand. I'm trying to help you."
Me: "No, I don't understand, because you haven't told me what you're talking about. That's not the way you remember it? We just spoke YESTERDAY. What are you saying? Are you now suddenly denying that you made those comments? Are you calling me a liar? I wrote exactly what you told me." No response to my questions. (Another pause.)
Smullin: "I'm saying you need to be very careful. I can't say anymore."
Me: "I need to be careful? Careful of what? Are you saying somebody's going to sue me? If so; for what … for quoting you?"
Smullin: "No, no. I really ca't say anymore. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have called, I'm sorry. I can't say anymore." Click.
Well, well, well; isn't this interesting? Patsy Smullin seemed frightened – not at all the way she had sounded during our first two conversations. Previously, she'd sounded upbeat, friendly and more at ease. We'd had two very pleasant phone conversations; one on Friday, May 26, 2006 and the second on Tuesday, May 30, 2006. Ms. Smullin was indeed very helpful in providing the requested dates of employment as I'd requested. She was also quick to respond to my questions, and related recollections of Jeff Rense, her former employee.
At this point, I'd like to be very clear: Patsy Smullin knew perfectly well why I had contacted her. I fully identified myself right from the start, both with her secretary/assistant and to her personally. It is not my tendency to beat around the bush with people, so I told her that I'm an independent freelance writer and the purpose for my call was fact checking. In addition, I laid it out in no uncertain terms (within the first two minutes of our initial contact on May 26, 2006) that I was working on an article about Jeff Rense, and that this fact-checking was necessary in order to verify some information contained in online bios referencing his previous broadcast journalism career.
Let's get this straight: Nobody forced Ms. Smullin to return my phone messages, to respond to my inquiries, or to answer any single question posed to her. Nobody tricked her, lied to her, or twisted her arm to do any of the above, and no one made her call on May 30th to provide me with the dates of Jeff Rense's previous term of employment at KOBI-TV. She did these things of her own free will. To be honest, I didn't expect her to call me back at all. I suspect that others in her position simply would not.
Moreover, I quoted Smullin's responses precisely, as in verbatim-word-for-word regarding every single statement attributed to her in my article. Any and all of those comments she did make, voluntarily, and without embellishment, exaggeration or assistance from me.
Apparently, 24 hours after my article hit the Internet, "Somebody" had a real problem with the fact that I talked to Patsy Smullin. It is my distinct impression that "Somebody" wasn't expecting this particular connection to happen. Surprise, surprise, Jeff. "Somebody" was undoubtedly blindsided by this piece – and I’m telling you right now, it wasn't Patsy Smullin. My impression is that Smullin is a very nice lady, and someone is trying to intimidate her based upon this peculiar phone call I've just described "for the record".
Thus far, I have not been contacted by the aforementioned "Eugene attorney," but if this does happen, I'll certainly apprise everyone of the situation. I'm a little amused at how little time it took for "Somebody" to completely unravel and start throwing their weight around behind the scenes over this latest article I've written. I'll give you three guesses as to who is driving the intimidation machine. Nah, this one's a no-brainer. Make that one guess. Question: Is this how Jeff Rense intends to respond to my article? By putting the "thumb" on people? Fine, Jeff. If that's how you want to play, then so be it.
Just so everybody; and particularly "Somebody" knows: I stand behind every single word written in my article – completely, and 110%. Furthermore, I do not intend to remove anything, including and particularly, the two sentences in which I quoted Patsy Smullin during our conversations. The two sentences that allegedly needed removal addressed the "honesty" of Jeff Rense and were the personal opinion of someone who actually knew him, as related to me over the course of two separate phone discussions. Patsy Smullin's statements were quoted by me accurately, verbatim, and in their proper context; and it should be noted that she would be considered a very credible source of information.
Let it be known that I have never once in my life removed or retracted truthful information from any of my articles, and I am not going to be intimidated into such a cowardly act now by anybody, including a convoy of legal guns from Eugene, Oregon. I stand by EVERY SINGLE WORD in that piece. Patsy Smullin should be commended for telling the truth. Maybe the monkey should get off her back. She didn't write the article. I did.
Message to Jeff Rense: You know exactly where I am and how to contact me. So, if you've got something to say to me, then be a man and do it directly, if you have the cajones. Unlike you, I don't cower in shadows, wear wigs to disguise my identity, or put the squeeze on people - whether overtly or behind the scenes. Furthermore, it is not in my nature to shrink from cowards, hypocrites, liars, bullies, or from truth. I confront each of these squarely head-on, and will most certainly not shrink from the likes of you or any of your "legal thugs". One would hope you're adult enough to do the same.
I do not – and never will - fear the truth. Interestingly enough, it appears that you do. If you want to come after someone, well, here I am.
It's your move.
Lisa Guliani
June 1, 2006
Other Jeff Rense Articles
COINTELPRO
Rense Lies
Ponerology
NEOCONS
Red Pill Press
WING TV
Ponerology: The Science of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, not only details these kinds of tactics, but can give you deep insight into the minds that employ them.
Knowledge Protects, Ignorance Endangers.
Blue Ibis
****************************************************
A War of Nerves
by Lisa Guliani
On May 31, 2006 at 4:30 pm I received an unexpected phone call from Patsy Smullin, owner of KOBI-TV Channel 5 in Medford, Oregon. If you read my latest article entitled, Jeff Rense: A Reinvention of What?, then you know that Patsy Smullin is Jeff Rense’s former employer. This was our third conversation in a weeks' time, and regrettably it wasn't as cordial as our previous exchanges.
Ms. Smullin began the conversation by asking, "Have you heard from the Eugene attorney yet?" She sounded extremely nervous and agitated and her voice was shaking.
I responded with, "An attorney; for what? No, I haven't heard from anybody. What is this about?"
Smullin was having great difficulty expressing herself, and I was trying to put together the gist of what she was attempting (but unable) to say.
Smullin: "You called me asking for Jeff Rense's dates of employment and I had to do a lot of work to get that information for you. I had to go into another building to get that information for you."
Me: "Yes, and I thank you. But what are you talking about now? What attorney? I don't understand what you mean."
Smullin: "You need to remove those two sentences from your article."
Me: "Which sentences?"
Smullin: "The ones about Jeff Rense being a compulsive liar, and about him not being known for his honesty. You need to remove those."
Me: "Why should I remove them? I didn't misquote you at all. I wrote down exactly what you said. I have it in my notes. You knew I was writing an article."
Smullin: (in a low voice): "That's not the way I remember it." (A pause, then excitedly) “You don't seem to understand. I'm trying to help you."
Me: "No, I don't understand, because you haven't told me what you're talking about. That's not the way you remember it? We just spoke YESTERDAY. What are you saying? Are you now suddenly denying that you made those comments? Are you calling me a liar? I wrote exactly what you told me." No response to my questions. (Another pause.)
Smullin: "I'm saying you need to be very careful. I can't say anymore."
Me: "I need to be careful? Careful of what? Are you saying somebody's going to sue me? If so; for what … for quoting you?"
Smullin: "No, no. I really ca't say anymore. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have called, I'm sorry. I can't say anymore." Click.
Well, well, well; isn't this interesting? Patsy Smullin seemed frightened – not at all the way she had sounded during our first two conversations. Previously, she'd sounded upbeat, friendly and more at ease. We'd had two very pleasant phone conversations; one on Friday, May 26, 2006 and the second on Tuesday, May 30, 2006. Ms. Smullin was indeed very helpful in providing the requested dates of employment as I'd requested. She was also quick to respond to my questions, and related recollections of Jeff Rense, her former employee.
At this point, I'd like to be very clear: Patsy Smullin knew perfectly well why I had contacted her. I fully identified myself right from the start, both with her secretary/assistant and to her personally. It is not my tendency to beat around the bush with people, so I told her that I'm an independent freelance writer and the purpose for my call was fact checking. In addition, I laid it out in no uncertain terms (within the first two minutes of our initial contact on May 26, 2006) that I was working on an article about Jeff Rense, and that this fact-checking was necessary in order to verify some information contained in online bios referencing his previous broadcast journalism career.
Let's get this straight: Nobody forced Ms. Smullin to return my phone messages, to respond to my inquiries, or to answer any single question posed to her. Nobody tricked her, lied to her, or twisted her arm to do any of the above, and no one made her call on May 30th to provide me with the dates of Jeff Rense's previous term of employment at KOBI-TV. She did these things of her own free will. To be honest, I didn't expect her to call me back at all. I suspect that others in her position simply would not.
Moreover, I quoted Smullin's responses precisely, as in verbatim-word-for-word regarding every single statement attributed to her in my article. Any and all of those comments she did make, voluntarily, and without embellishment, exaggeration or assistance from me.
Apparently, 24 hours after my article hit the Internet, "Somebody" had a real problem with the fact that I talked to Patsy Smullin. It is my distinct impression that "Somebody" wasn't expecting this particular connection to happen. Surprise, surprise, Jeff. "Somebody" was undoubtedly blindsided by this piece – and I’m telling you right now, it wasn't Patsy Smullin. My impression is that Smullin is a very nice lady, and someone is trying to intimidate her based upon this peculiar phone call I've just described "for the record".
Thus far, I have not been contacted by the aforementioned "Eugene attorney," but if this does happen, I'll certainly apprise everyone of the situation. I'm a little amused at how little time it took for "Somebody" to completely unravel and start throwing their weight around behind the scenes over this latest article I've written. I'll give you three guesses as to who is driving the intimidation machine. Nah, this one's a no-brainer. Make that one guess. Question: Is this how Jeff Rense intends to respond to my article? By putting the "thumb" on people? Fine, Jeff. If that's how you want to play, then so be it.
Just so everybody; and particularly "Somebody" knows: I stand behind every single word written in my article – completely, and 110%. Furthermore, I do not intend to remove anything, including and particularly, the two sentences in which I quoted Patsy Smullin during our conversations. The two sentences that allegedly needed removal addressed the "honesty" of Jeff Rense and were the personal opinion of someone who actually knew him, as related to me over the course of two separate phone discussions. Patsy Smullin's statements were quoted by me accurately, verbatim, and in their proper context; and it should be noted that she would be considered a very credible source of information.
Let it be known that I have never once in my life removed or retracted truthful information from any of my articles, and I am not going to be intimidated into such a cowardly act now by anybody, including a convoy of legal guns from Eugene, Oregon. I stand by EVERY SINGLE WORD in that piece. Patsy Smullin should be commended for telling the truth. Maybe the monkey should get off her back. She didn't write the article. I did.
Message to Jeff Rense: You know exactly where I am and how to contact me. So, if you've got something to say to me, then be a man and do it directly, if you have the cajones. Unlike you, I don't cower in shadows, wear wigs to disguise my identity, or put the squeeze on people - whether overtly or behind the scenes. Furthermore, it is not in my nature to shrink from cowards, hypocrites, liars, bullies, or from truth. I confront each of these squarely head-on, and will most certainly not shrink from the likes of you or any of your "legal thugs". One would hope you're adult enough to do the same.
I do not – and never will - fear the truth. Interestingly enough, it appears that you do. If you want to come after someone, well, here I am.
It's your move.
Lisa Guliani
June 1, 2006
Other Jeff Rense Articles
COINTELPRO
Rense Lies
Ponerology
NEOCONS
Red Pill Press
WING TV
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