Before the United States government subcontracted the Chilean military to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973, it carried out a number of important missions in the country in preparation for the coup of 11 September. These included major strikes, especially by truck owners, which crippled the economy, massive demonstrations that included middle-class housewives and children carrying pots and pans demanding food, purging the Chilean military of officers who would oppose the suspension of democracy and the introduction of US-supported fascist rule, and a major media campaign against the regime with the CIA planting stories in newspapers like El Mercurio and others. This was in a context where also the Communist Party and the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR) criticised and sometimes attacked the Allende regime from varying leftist positions.
The Chilean example is important to keep in mind when one looks at the Palestinian situation today, as it functions as a sort of training video for US-planned anti-democratic coups elsewhere in the world. Not only are the US and Israel financially backing the open preparation for a coup to be staged by the top leadership of Fateh (and in the case of Israel allowing weapons' transfers to Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas's Praetorian Guard), but so are the intelligence services of a number of Israel-and US-friendly Arab countries whose intelligence services have set up shop openly in Ramallah more recently, making their longstanding and major, though understated, involvement in running the Palestinian territories more open and shameless. Indeed the intelligence "delegation" of one such Arab country has rented out a multi-story building in Ramallah to conduct their operations there.
Israel has helped this effort all along by kidnapping and arresting Fateh members who resist the collaborationist policies of the top leadership. As for the leadership itself, it has periodically purged members of Fateh who oppose its policies, and marginalised those in the Diaspora who continue to resist them. The Fateh/PA coup leaders consist of Abbas and the ruling triumvirate of Mohamed Dahlan, Yasser Abd Rabbo, and Nabil Amr. The profiles of these three make them well suited for the tasks ahead. Dahlan is universally known as America's and Israel's main corrupt military man on the ground. Abd Rabbo (aka Yasser Abd Yasser, literally "Yasser worshipper of Yasser" on account of his subservience to Arafat) is the architect of the Geneva accords, which recognise Israel's right to be a racist Jewish state as legitimate and reject the right of Palestinian refugees to return as illegitimate. He recently upheld the Israeli position when fighting with the Qatari foreign minister and his staff during the latter's visit to the occupied territories. Amr is the former PA information minister, and a former visiting fellow at the Israel lobby think tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is also the speechwriter for Abbas and Dahlan.
Abbas and these three have undertaken not only to launch massive strikes by the Fateh security thugs that they have armed to police the territories on behalf of Israel, and strikes by the bureaucracy that staffs the PA ministries, but also have coerced large numbers of Palestinians, including teachers and professors, under the force of guns, to uphold a strike against Hamas, when most of them had voted for Hamas in the first place and refuse to strike. Palestinians who have fought for decades to keep their schools and universities open against Israeli draconian closures and suspension of Palestinian education, are now forced by Fateh and its armed thugs to stop the Palestinian educational process with strikes against Hamas, and threaten to shoot people if they refuse to follow Fateh's coup directives.
In addition, Abbas and the Fateh/PA triumvirate have organised demonstrations in Ramallah by middle-class Palestinians, including housewives, who brought out their pots and pans, in a scene borrowed from 1973 Santiago, in demonstrations against Hamas. The Fateh-controlled press, especially Al-Ayyam is fomenting major anti-Hamas propaganda campaign in preparation for the coup and is thus playing the same role as El Mercurio did in Chile. Al-Ayyam is aided in its efforts by the anti-Hamas secular Palestinian intelligentsia, most of whose members are on the payroll of the bankrollers of the Oslo process and its NGOs. These old leftist Palestinians, like their counterparts in Lebanon, are better known today as the right-wing left, as they take up right-wing positions while insisting that they are still leftists based on positions they had held in the 1980s or earlier.
The plan is that the Fateh/PA rulers would do their utmost to provoke Hamas to start the war at which point Fateh, with the aid of the intelligence services of friendly Arab countries, as well as assistance from Israel and the US, would crush Hamas and take over. Indeed, the first unsuccessful round took place when the Israeli government kidnapped a third of the Hamas government, both cabinet ministers and parliament members, and placed them in Israeli jails. This was not sufficient to bring Hamas down, and not for lack of help that Fateh rendered the Israeli occupiers. Aside from the initial burning of the Legislative Council building, Fateh thugs have also burned the prime minister's office, shot at his car, burned offices in different ministries several times, harassed and threatened Hamas ministers and parliamentarians whom Israel failed to kidnap and arrest, refused to allow the government ministries to operate, and so forth. Hamas however, is wisely adamant that it will respond by force only when Fateh launches an all-out war to bring about its planned coup, but not before.
Fateh's planned coup is not only based on the popularity of Hamas and its electoral victory but also on Hamas's increased ability to defend itself against Fateh forces. If the US and Israel armed Fateh thugs under Arafat's leadership to crush the first Palestinian Intifada and any remaining resistance to the occupation since 1994, today, Hamas is almost as well- armed as Fateh forces and can defend the rights of the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation and the well-armed Palestinian collaborators that help to enforce it. This is where the situation today differs measurably from that of the mid-1990s. To offset this new balance of forces, the United States government, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has been training Abbas's Praetorian Guard in Jericho for over a month with American, British, Egyptian, and Jordanian military instructors, and is providing arms to them in preparation for the confrontation with Hamas. The Israeli cabinet in turn has recently approved the transfer of thousands of rifles from Egypt and Jordan to Abbas's forces. The Israelis also approved a US request that Israel allow the Badr Brigade -- part of the Palestine Liberation Army currently stationed in Jordan -- to deploy in Gaza. These steps have been conceived by General Keith Dayton, the American security coordinator in the occupied territories, who wants the Badr Brigade to function as Abbas's "rapid reaction force in Gaza". As a possible step to increase its security and military roles in the occupied territories, the Jordanian government recently established a legal committee to review the provisions of Jordan's decision to "disengage" from the West Bank announced on 31 July 1988, effectively suggesting the possibility of a reversal of part or all of these provisions. More recently, the Israelis intensified their bombings and killings in Gaza, most recently in Beit Hanoun murdering over 50 Palestinians in a few days.
Mahmoud Abbas and his ruling triumvirate are reticent at the moment to start an open war for fear of a public backlash. They prefer to remove Hamas through imposing a "national unity" government that would undercut Hamas gradually and peacefully. However, Abbas and his triumvirate are quickly losing patience. Indeed, in a hastily-arranged meeting of the Diaspora-based Fateh Central Committee set to convene in Amman three weeks ago to ratify the coup plans, members of the committee opposed Abbas's US and Israel-supported coup, which forced Abbas to cancel the meeting altogether claiming falsely lack of quorum as the reason. This speaks to Abbas's desperation in engineering the coup without adequate preparation. Indeed, rumour has it across the occupied territories that the desperate attacks committed recently against Palestinian Christian churches were the work of undercover thugs. Those who sent them want Palestinian Christians and the world at large to think that these were Hamas acts in response to the pope's racist pronouncements against Islam. Hamas duly condemned the attacks. Few in the occupied territories believe that Hamas was behind them and most know that they were the work of undercover agents.
The Fateh plan is simple: where Israel and its Lebanese allies failed to crush Hizbullah in the Sixth war, Fateh and its Israeli allies will succeed in crushing Hamas, even if the ongoing Israeli war against Hamas and the Palestinian people becomes an all-out Seventh war. The flurry of visits by Condoleezza Rice to the area in the last few weeks hoped to put the final touches on this plan. If Hamas, like Hizbullah, could be provoked into a military response, the coup planners believe, then Fateh's and Israel's wrath (backed by the US, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) would be unleashed to finish Hamas off. The Fateh leadership and its thugs are sharpening their knives for the showdown. Hamas has remained calm despite the pressure.
In the meantime, Ramallah proper (excluding the surrounding villages), continues to be what many now refer to as the Palestinian Green Zone, sheltering, in addition to the intelligence staff of Israel and Israel-friendly Arab countries, those Palestinians who are paid and protected by the Oslo process, whether the Oslo bureaucracy, its technicians, and hired intellectuals, or the business and middle classes recently habituated to the new name-brand consumerism that the Green Zone can offer. This opulent life contrasts with the life of the rest of the Palestinians outside Ramallah who live in misery, hunger, and under the bombardment of the Israelis and the attacks of savage Jewish colonial settlers, not to mention the harassment by Fateh thugs. In Ramallah itself, the trigger-happy thugs shoot at random during their demonstrations, injuring and sometimes killing passers by "in error". Even the few secular intellectuals who deign to oppose Fateh inside Ramallah are harassed in different ways. Some of them experience mysterious robberies that are repeated every time they make anti-Fateh statements. The preservation of Ramallah as the Green Zone is paramount to Abbas and the Fateh/PA triumvirate, whose fear of any reform introduced by Hamas would strip the elite of the benefits of corruption and the dolce vita that Fateh-rule has ensured for them.
Meanwhile, Abbas and his triumvirate will continue to treat Hamas the way Israel has treated the PLO and other Arab countries all along. In the interminable negotiations that Hamas held with Fateh to avert a showdown, whenever Hamas would agree to a Fateh demand, Fateh would up the ante and insist on another concession or claim that its initial demands always included the now expanded terms, even though they did not. Moreover, Fateh would also publicly interpret Hamas's concessions as having included things that Hamas had not agreed to at all. If this is reminiscent of the post-Oslo negotiating strategy that the Israelis used successfully with Arafat, this is because it is the same strategy. Abbas has gone so far as to walk away from negotiations, and refuse to speak to Hamas leaders, just as the Israelis have done often with the PA. Moreover, if the Israelis would often carry undercover attacks against Western interests to implicate Arab governments, the clearest example being the infamous Lavon Affair of the mid-1950s targeting Egypt, similar operations are being committed to implicate Hamas by undercover agents, like the recent example of the attacks on the churches illustrates. There may be many more such operations being planned.
Whatever fig leaf still covered the Fateh leadership's complete collaboration and subservience to Israeli interests has now fallen off. As a result, there is very little left that can restrain Fateh's actions. The next few weeks will be decided by how much Fateh leaders are itching for a fight to save their skins and fortunes, and how much patience Hamas can muster in the face of so much thuggery. In the meantime, what has been unfolding in the Palestinian territories is nothing short of the Chilean script.
Pinochet is in Palestine. His success however remains far from certain.
* The writer is associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. He is the author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians (Routledge, 2006).
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
More Bush/Cheney War Profiteering in the Middle East - Bechtel Bails on Iraq
After making billions and then pulling out of Iraq, the company has big plans for raking in more lucre in Bush's Middle East Free Trade Area.
Last month, the Bechtel Corp. became the first major U.S. contractor to announce that it was pulling out of Iraq. Bechtel's departure marks yet another significant failure for Bush's economic invasion of Iraq. It does not mark, however, the end of Bechtel's adventures in the Middle East as the company looks to take advantage of the Bush administration's expanding U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area.
Bechtel received a quiet "request for proposals" from the Bush administration more than a month before the war began, which ultimately yielded the company $2.4 billion for work on electricity, water, sewage treatment, bridges, highways, airports, hospitals, schools and more.
It is virtually impossible to assess the performance of any one company working in Iraq. Only one independent monitoring agency exists, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR), a congressionally mandated office tasked with oversight of all U.S. spending on Iraq reconstruction. Of the 13,578 projects planned and paid for by the U.S. government for work in Iraq, SIGIR has assessed just 65.
But even this limited oversight allows us to debunk claims made by Bechtel. For example, the company reports that it rebuilt "war-damaged bridges on key highways." But SIGIR's October report to Congress finds that "no bridge or expressway projects have been completed" in Iraq.
Bechtel also claims that it failed to build a key maternal and children's hospital in Basra because of "security concerns." While SIGIR, on the other hand, makes clear that it ordered Bechtel to be dropped from the $50 million project after the company misreported its progress and went $90 million over budget and a year and a half behind schedule.
SIGIR's October report also allows us to clearly assess the overall failure of U.S. reconstruction in Iraq. In the electricity sector, less than half of all planned projects in Iraq have been completed, while 21 percent have yet to even begin. The term "complete," however, can be misleading as, for example, SIGIR finds that the electricity sector has been hampered by the failure of contractors to build transmission and distribution lines to connect new generators to homes and businesses. Thus, nationally, Iraqis have just 11 hours on average of electricity a day, and in Baghdad, the heart of instability in Iraq, there are between four and eight hours on average per day.
While there has been greater success in completing water and sewage projects (79 percent are complete), electricity controls both water and sewage in Iraq. Therefore, the fact that 80 percent of potable water projects are reported complete does little good if there is no electricity to pump the water into homes, hospitals or businesses.
The health care sector is truly a tragedy, with just 36 percent of planned projects reported complete. Just 12 of 20 planned hospitals are complete, while only six of 150 planned public health centers are serving patients today.
What went wrong? U.S. Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, author of a U.S. government study of the likely effect that U.S. bombardment would have on Iraq's power system in 2003, answered the question well when he said, "Frankly, if we had just given the Iraqis some baling wire and a little bit of space to keep things running, it would have been better. But instead we've let big U.S. companies go in with plans for major overhauls."
Companies like Bechtel entered Iraq with hopes of cashing in on much more than reconstruction contracts. As Cliff Mumm, head of Bechtel's Iraq operation, said in December 2003, Iraq "has two rivers, it's fertile, it's sitting on an ocean of oil. Iraq ought to be a major player in the world. And we want to be working for them long term."
Bechtel's vision was part of a larger Bush administration plan to transform Iraq from a state- to a market-controlled economy virtually overnight and by U.S. fiat. The administration implemented new laws in Iraq (virtually all of which remain in place today) allowing for, among other things, the privatization of Iraq's state-owned enterprises and for American companies to receive preferential treatment over Iraqis in the awarding of contracts.
So, Bechtel was hired instead of the Iraqi companies who had successfully rebuilt their country after the previous U.S. invasion. And, since Bechtel's contract guaranteed that all of its costs would be covered, plus a set rate of profit, it took its time, spending its first five months in Iraq doing a countrywide assessment rather than rebuilding. Bechtel then worked on expensive new facilities that showcased its skills and would serve its needs were it to run the systems itself one day (and which have proven far too expensive for Iraqis to run). The Iraqis, meanwhile, knew that the Americans had received billions of dollars for reconstruction, that Iraqi companies had been rejected, and that the country was still without basic services. The result was increasing hostility, acts of sabotage targeted directly at foreign contractors and their work, and a rising insurgency.
In the end, Iraq has not emerged as the wealthy free market haven companies like Bechtel had hoped for, at least not yet (the economic policies put in place by the Bush administration remain and the work is on-going to turn Iraq into a corporate-friendly Middle East Mecca). However, the war has not been completely useless.
One month after the invasion of Iraq, President Bush announced plans for a U.S. Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) to expand his economic vision from Iraq to the rest of the Middle East. The war intensified the pressure on countries to prove that they were with, rather than against, the Unitede States. As a result, the MEFTA has progressed rapidly, with 14 nations signing agreements with the administration.
Bechtel is a member of the U.S. Middle East Free Trade Coalition, the corporate lobbying group behind MEFTA. Thanks to the MEFTA, a new free trade agreement expected to be signed with the United Arab Emirates this year is already opening new opportunities for U.S. firms, including Bechtel. The company was recently hired by the Abu Dhabi Ports Co. of the UAE to manage the construction of a major new industrial zone at the country's Khalifa Port.
While Bechtel turns its attention beyond Iraq, U.S. taxpayers, must remain focused. Those companies that have failed in Iraq must be held accountable and forced to return all misspent funds. This money, plus the several billions of as of yet unspent U.S. reconstruction money, and new money, must be made immediately available to Iraqi companies and workers. The U.S. corporate invasion of Iraq of must be brought to a quick end and it must not be allowed to spread.
Several key committees in the U.S. Congress are set to be run by allies in this fight. Most notably, congressman Henry Waxman of California, who will chair the House committee on government reform. Now is the time to push hard and push often to expose the companies and demand action from our newly empowered elected officials.
Antonia Juhasz is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time" and contributing author with John Perkins to the forthcoming book, "A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption." TheBushAgenda.net.
Last month, the Bechtel Corp. became the first major U.S. contractor to announce that it was pulling out of Iraq. Bechtel's departure marks yet another significant failure for Bush's economic invasion of Iraq. It does not mark, however, the end of Bechtel's adventures in the Middle East as the company looks to take advantage of the Bush administration's expanding U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area.
Bechtel received a quiet "request for proposals" from the Bush administration more than a month before the war began, which ultimately yielded the company $2.4 billion for work on electricity, water, sewage treatment, bridges, highways, airports, hospitals, schools and more.
It is virtually impossible to assess the performance of any one company working in Iraq. Only one independent monitoring agency exists, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction (SIGIR), a congressionally mandated office tasked with oversight of all U.S. spending on Iraq reconstruction. Of the 13,578 projects planned and paid for by the U.S. government for work in Iraq, SIGIR has assessed just 65.
But even this limited oversight allows us to debunk claims made by Bechtel. For example, the company reports that it rebuilt "war-damaged bridges on key highways." But SIGIR's October report to Congress finds that "no bridge or expressway projects have been completed" in Iraq.
Bechtel also claims that it failed to build a key maternal and children's hospital in Basra because of "security concerns." While SIGIR, on the other hand, makes clear that it ordered Bechtel to be dropped from the $50 million project after the company misreported its progress and went $90 million over budget and a year and a half behind schedule.
SIGIR's October report also allows us to clearly assess the overall failure of U.S. reconstruction in Iraq. In the electricity sector, less than half of all planned projects in Iraq have been completed, while 21 percent have yet to even begin. The term "complete," however, can be misleading as, for example, SIGIR finds that the electricity sector has been hampered by the failure of contractors to build transmission and distribution lines to connect new generators to homes and businesses. Thus, nationally, Iraqis have just 11 hours on average of electricity a day, and in Baghdad, the heart of instability in Iraq, there are between four and eight hours on average per day.
While there has been greater success in completing water and sewage projects (79 percent are complete), electricity controls both water and sewage in Iraq. Therefore, the fact that 80 percent of potable water projects are reported complete does little good if there is no electricity to pump the water into homes, hospitals or businesses.
The health care sector is truly a tragedy, with just 36 percent of planned projects reported complete. Just 12 of 20 planned hospitals are complete, while only six of 150 planned public health centers are serving patients today.
What went wrong? U.S. Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, author of a U.S. government study of the likely effect that U.S. bombardment would have on Iraq's power system in 2003, answered the question well when he said, "Frankly, if we had just given the Iraqis some baling wire and a little bit of space to keep things running, it would have been better. But instead we've let big U.S. companies go in with plans for major overhauls."
Companies like Bechtel entered Iraq with hopes of cashing in on much more than reconstruction contracts. As Cliff Mumm, head of Bechtel's Iraq operation, said in December 2003, Iraq "has two rivers, it's fertile, it's sitting on an ocean of oil. Iraq ought to be a major player in the world. And we want to be working for them long term."
Bechtel's vision was part of a larger Bush administration plan to transform Iraq from a state- to a market-controlled economy virtually overnight and by U.S. fiat. The administration implemented new laws in Iraq (virtually all of which remain in place today) allowing for, among other things, the privatization of Iraq's state-owned enterprises and for American companies to receive preferential treatment over Iraqis in the awarding of contracts.
So, Bechtel was hired instead of the Iraqi companies who had successfully rebuilt their country after the previous U.S. invasion. And, since Bechtel's contract guaranteed that all of its costs would be covered, plus a set rate of profit, it took its time, spending its first five months in Iraq doing a countrywide assessment rather than rebuilding. Bechtel then worked on expensive new facilities that showcased its skills and would serve its needs were it to run the systems itself one day (and which have proven far too expensive for Iraqis to run). The Iraqis, meanwhile, knew that the Americans had received billions of dollars for reconstruction, that Iraqi companies had been rejected, and that the country was still without basic services. The result was increasing hostility, acts of sabotage targeted directly at foreign contractors and their work, and a rising insurgency.
In the end, Iraq has not emerged as the wealthy free market haven companies like Bechtel had hoped for, at least not yet (the economic policies put in place by the Bush administration remain and the work is on-going to turn Iraq into a corporate-friendly Middle East Mecca). However, the war has not been completely useless.
One month after the invasion of Iraq, President Bush announced plans for a U.S. Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) to expand his economic vision from Iraq to the rest of the Middle East. The war intensified the pressure on countries to prove that they were with, rather than against, the Unitede States. As a result, the MEFTA has progressed rapidly, with 14 nations signing agreements with the administration.
Bechtel is a member of the U.S. Middle East Free Trade Coalition, the corporate lobbying group behind MEFTA. Thanks to the MEFTA, a new free trade agreement expected to be signed with the United Arab Emirates this year is already opening new opportunities for U.S. firms, including Bechtel. The company was recently hired by the Abu Dhabi Ports Co. of the UAE to manage the construction of a major new industrial zone at the country's Khalifa Port.
While Bechtel turns its attention beyond Iraq, U.S. taxpayers, must remain focused. Those companies that have failed in Iraq must be held accountable and forced to return all misspent funds. This money, plus the several billions of as of yet unspent U.S. reconstruction money, and new money, must be made immediately available to Iraqi companies and workers. The U.S. corporate invasion of Iraq of must be brought to a quick end and it must not be allowed to spread.
Several key committees in the U.S. Congress are set to be run by allies in this fight. Most notably, congressman Henry Waxman of California, who will chair the House committee on government reform. Now is the time to push hard and push often to expose the companies and demand action from our newly empowered elected officials.
Antonia Juhasz is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time" and contributing author with John Perkins to the forthcoming book, "A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption." TheBushAgenda.net.
Monday, November 13, 2006
The Democrats Don't Care - Screw the Palestinians, Full Steam Ahead By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
At a panel on the defense and foreign policy impact of the midterm election, sponsored two days after the election by Congressional Quarterly, Steven Simon, late of the Clinton administration and still a member of the Democratic, pro-Zionist mainstream at the Council on Foreign Relations, pronounced on prospects for Palestinian-Israeli peace and essentially declared it not worth anyone's effort. Using words, a tone, and a body language that clearly betrayed his own disinterest, he said that Hamas is "there" (exaggerated shrug), that the Israeli government is in turmoil after its Lebanon "contretemps" (dismissive wave of the hand), that both sides are incapable of significant movement, and that therefore there is no incentive for anyone, Democrat or Republican, to intervene (casual frown indicating an unfortunate reality about which serious people need not concern themselves). There is simply no prospect for more unilateral Israeli withdrawals and therefore for any progress toward peace, Simon said in conclusion -- signaling not only a total lack of concern but an utter ignorance of just what it is that might bring progress, as if Israeli unilateralism were truly the ticket to peace.
Thus spake the Democratic oracle. Not that anyone who knows the Palestinian-Israeli situation from other than the selective focus of the Zionist perspective had any expectations in the first place. No one ever thought the new Democratic Congress would hop to and put pressure on Israel to make peace. Just remember John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, to say nothing of Bill Clinton, when any question of the Democrats' stance arises. And don't forget Nancy Pelosi, who rushed to condemn Jimmy Carter for using the word "apartheid" in the title of his new book and for whom, according to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency profile, support for Israel is personal and "heartfelt." One Jewish activist and long-time friend described her as "incredibly loyal" (interesting term) and as feeling Jewish and Israeli issues "in her soul."
But Simon's brief disquisition on the futility of even making an effort was particularly striking for its profound dismissiveness and its profound blindness to what is and has been going on on the ground. Simon's "contretemps" in Lebanon was no mere embarrassing misstep but a murderous rampage that killed 1,300 innocent Lebanese and dropped over a million cluster bomblets in villages across the south, left to be discovered by returning residents. But the Democrats don't care, and Steven Simon considers this hardly worth a second thought. Israel gets itself in trouble, showing its true brutal nature in the process, and this gives Simon and the Democrats a handy excuse to avoid doing anything.
Eighteen Palestinian innocents in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip were murdered while sleeping in their beds a day before Simon spoke, killed by Israeli shellfire, round after round fired at a residential housing complex -- 16 members of one extended family and two others who came to help them after the first round exploded. The Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.
In the six days preceding this incident, Israel assaulted Beit Hanoun the way it assaulted Jenin and Nablus and other West Bank cities in 2002 -- a murderous assault reminiscent of Nazi sieges or of the Russian siege of Chechnya, in which in these six days 57 Palestinians were killed, to one Israeli soldier. The dead include Palestinian fighters and a large number of civilians, including children and including two women shot down in the street while attempting to lift the Israeli siege of a mosque. The mosque was leveled. The Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.
In the four months preceding this six-day siege, the Israelis killed 247 Palestinians in a prolonged attack on Gaza. Of the dead, two-thirds are civilians, 20 percent children. Of nearly 1,000 injured, one-third are children. The Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.
Israel is planning a larger siege of Gaza, concentrating not just on Beit Hanoun in the north but on Rafah in the south, ostensibly to unearth arms-smuggling tunnels. This has been going on for years; Rafah has been the scene of Israel's murderous pummeling periodically since the intifada began -- in 2003 when Rachel Corrie was killed trying to protect the home of an innocent family from demolition, in 2004 when hundreds of homes were demolished in multiple sieges and a peaceful protest demonstration was strafed from the air. But the Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.
Gaza, of course, is not the only Palestinian territory being raped and pillaged. Its 1.4 million residents are the most distraught -- living imprisoned in a territory with the highest population density in the world, walled in with no exit except as Israel sporadically allows, being deliberately starved by the official policy of Israel, which dictates to the U.S., which dictates to Europe, vulnerable to constant Israeli assault. But the West Bank's 2.5 million Palestinians are not much better off. They continue to be killed by Israelis and squeezed by Israel's separation wall, by settlement expansion, by movement restrictions, by theft of agricultural land, by diminishing economic opportunity, and by massive Israeli-fostered unemployment. Their death toll is only minimally less than Gaza's.
This obscenity of oppression and murder does not faze the Democrats or any of Israel's Zionist supporters in the U.S. Whatever Israel wants is all right with the Democrats. The 110th Congress will screw the Palestinians just the way the Republican 109th did.
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. They spent October 2006 in Palestine and on a speaking tour of Ireland sponsored by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Thus spake the Democratic oracle. Not that anyone who knows the Palestinian-Israeli situation from other than the selective focus of the Zionist perspective had any expectations in the first place. No one ever thought the new Democratic Congress would hop to and put pressure on Israel to make peace. Just remember John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, to say nothing of Bill Clinton, when any question of the Democrats' stance arises. And don't forget Nancy Pelosi, who rushed to condemn Jimmy Carter for using the word "apartheid" in the title of his new book and for whom, according to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency profile, support for Israel is personal and "heartfelt." One Jewish activist and long-time friend described her as "incredibly loyal" (interesting term) and as feeling Jewish and Israeli issues "in her soul."
But Simon's brief disquisition on the futility of even making an effort was particularly striking for its profound dismissiveness and its profound blindness to what is and has been going on on the ground. Simon's "contretemps" in Lebanon was no mere embarrassing misstep but a murderous rampage that killed 1,300 innocent Lebanese and dropped over a million cluster bomblets in villages across the south, left to be discovered by returning residents. But the Democrats don't care, and Steven Simon considers this hardly worth a second thought. Israel gets itself in trouble, showing its true brutal nature in the process, and this gives Simon and the Democrats a handy excuse to avoid doing anything.
Eighteen Palestinian innocents in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip were murdered while sleeping in their beds a day before Simon spoke, killed by Israeli shellfire, round after round fired at a residential housing complex -- 16 members of one extended family and two others who came to help them after the first round exploded. The Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.
In the six days preceding this incident, Israel assaulted Beit Hanoun the way it assaulted Jenin and Nablus and other West Bank cities in 2002 -- a murderous assault reminiscent of Nazi sieges or of the Russian siege of Chechnya, in which in these six days 57 Palestinians were killed, to one Israeli soldier. The dead include Palestinian fighters and a large number of civilians, including children and including two women shot down in the street while attempting to lift the Israeli siege of a mosque. The mosque was leveled. The Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.
In the four months preceding this six-day siege, the Israelis killed 247 Palestinians in a prolonged attack on Gaza. Of the dead, two-thirds are civilians, 20 percent children. Of nearly 1,000 injured, one-third are children. The Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.
Israel is planning a larger siege of Gaza, concentrating not just on Beit Hanoun in the north but on Rafah in the south, ostensibly to unearth arms-smuggling tunnels. This has been going on for years; Rafah has been the scene of Israel's murderous pummeling periodically since the intifada began -- in 2003 when Rachel Corrie was killed trying to protect the home of an innocent family from demolition, in 2004 when hundreds of homes were demolished in multiple sieges and a peaceful protest demonstration was strafed from the air. But the Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.
Gaza, of course, is not the only Palestinian territory being raped and pillaged. Its 1.4 million residents are the most distraught -- living imprisoned in a territory with the highest population density in the world, walled in with no exit except as Israel sporadically allows, being deliberately starved by the official policy of Israel, which dictates to the U.S., which dictates to Europe, vulnerable to constant Israeli assault. But the West Bank's 2.5 million Palestinians are not much better off. They continue to be killed by Israelis and squeezed by Israel's separation wall, by settlement expansion, by movement restrictions, by theft of agricultural land, by diminishing economic opportunity, and by massive Israeli-fostered unemployment. Their death toll is only minimally less than Gaza's.
This obscenity of oppression and murder does not faze the Democrats or any of Israel's Zionist supporters in the U.S. Whatever Israel wants is all right with the Democrats. The 110th Congress will screw the Palestinians just the way the Republican 109th did.
Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. They spent October 2006 in Palestine and on a speaking tour of Ireland sponsored by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
TERRORIST GROUP BASED IN CALIFORNIA (Vietnamese court convicts seven, including three U.S. citizens, on terrorism charges)
By MARGIE MASON Associated Press Writer
(AP) - HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam-A Vietnamese court convicted seven people, including three U.S. citizens, on terrorism charges Friday, saying the group had plotted to take over radio airwaves to call for an uprising against the communist government.
A judge sentenced all of them to 15 months in prison, with credit for time served. They will all be freed within one month, and the Americans will be required to leave the country within 10 days of their release.
The defendants, all of Vietnamese descent, had been jailed without charges for more than a year, prompting Washington to pressure Hanoi to move forward swiftly and fairly.
U.S. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plan to visit Vietnam next week for the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Both countries had been eager to resolve the case before Vietnam's biggest-ever international event begins.
The charges were punishable by 12 years to execution, but prosecutors sought lesser terms, saying the defendants had repented and had no previous criminal records.
It is highly unusual for Vietnam to hand down a lenient sentence for national security crimes, especially in a high-profile case. The quick resolution to the diplomatically sensitive case comes amid APEC preparations and Vietnam's entrance into the World Trade Organization, approved this week.
Prosecutors read a 21-page indictment accusing the defendants of plotting to smuggle radio equipment to Vietnam to take over the airwaves and call for "a total uprising that would lead to violence and harm to the lives of civil servants and ordinary people."
"This is a terrorist case of a particularly serious nature," the indictment said.
It said the scheme was hatched by the "Government of Free Vietnam," a Garden Grove, California, organization that the Vietnamese government considers a terrorist group.
It is considered among the more virulent of the many anti-communist groups founded by Vietnamese refugees in the United States. Many of its leaders are soldiers of the former South Vietnamese Army who fled Vietnam after the war ended in 1975. The group is run by Chanh Huu Nguyen, wanted in Vietnam for failed plots to bomb the Vietnamese Embassy in Thailand and targets in Vietnam.
Prosecutors say the group set up an adoption agency in Cambodia as a front to disguise their plans.
Sentenced were U.S. citizens Thuong Nguyen Foshee, 58, of Orlando, Florida; Le Van Binh, 31, of Tampa, Florida; and Huynh Bich Lien "Linda," 51, of San Gabriel, California, along with Vietnamese citizens Tran Dat Phuong, 65; brothers Ho Van Giau, 59, and Ho Van Hien, 38, and 35-year-old Cao Tri - a U.S. resident who had been living in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Addressing the court before her sentencing, Foshee said, "I accidentally committed a mistake."
"I've been away from this country for too long," Foshee said. "I don't speak good Vietnamese and I do not know much about Vietnamese laws."
Earlier, under questioning from the judge, some of the defendants acknowledged carrying radio equipment to Cambodia on behalf of the Government of Free Vietnam. Others described themselves as employees of an adoption agency.
Foshee said Chanh had invited her to join his organization, but that she had declined. She said she met with him at his office in the United States several times, and that he had referred to her as "vice foreign minister."
The group gives titles to people as though they served in an actual government.
Foshee's brother, Nguyen Phu Tri, 41, told The Associated Press that Vietnamese officials told him in July 2005 to warn her to break off any ties with the group.
Tri told the court that Chanh's group gave him an air ticket and money to carry four radio transmitters from the U.S. to Cambodia. He said he had been trained to assemble and operate the equipment so he could pass the knowledge on to others.
Lien said she was not a member of the Government of Free Vietnam, but had gone to work for USIM, a charity in Cambodia that helped arrange adoptions of Cambodian children by people in the United States.
She said that she knew Chanh was associated with USIM, but that all she did was help care for children.
The case has attracted attention from U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican, who raised the issue with the administration of President George W. Bush on Foshee's behalf and is reportedly blocking a key vote in Congress that would normalize trade relations between the former foes.
Bush had been hoping to get the bill approved before the APEC summit. Resolution of the terrorism case might increase his chances, although Congress will only be in session briefly before he departs next week.
2006-11-10T10:52:2
(AP) - HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam-A Vietnamese court convicted seven people, including three U.S. citizens, on terrorism charges Friday, saying the group had plotted to take over radio airwaves to call for an uprising against the communist government.
A judge sentenced all of them to 15 months in prison, with credit for time served. They will all be freed within one month, and the Americans will be required to leave the country within 10 days of their release.
The defendants, all of Vietnamese descent, had been jailed without charges for more than a year, prompting Washington to pressure Hanoi to move forward swiftly and fairly.
U.S. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice plan to visit Vietnam next week for the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Both countries had been eager to resolve the case before Vietnam's biggest-ever international event begins.
The charges were punishable by 12 years to execution, but prosecutors sought lesser terms, saying the defendants had repented and had no previous criminal records.
It is highly unusual for Vietnam to hand down a lenient sentence for national security crimes, especially in a high-profile case. The quick resolution to the diplomatically sensitive case comes amid APEC preparations and Vietnam's entrance into the World Trade Organization, approved this week.
Prosecutors read a 21-page indictment accusing the defendants of plotting to smuggle radio equipment to Vietnam to take over the airwaves and call for "a total uprising that would lead to violence and harm to the lives of civil servants and ordinary people."
"This is a terrorist case of a particularly serious nature," the indictment said.
It said the scheme was hatched by the "Government of Free Vietnam," a Garden Grove, California, organization that the Vietnamese government considers a terrorist group.
It is considered among the more virulent of the many anti-communist groups founded by Vietnamese refugees in the United States. Many of its leaders are soldiers of the former South Vietnamese Army who fled Vietnam after the war ended in 1975. The group is run by Chanh Huu Nguyen, wanted in Vietnam for failed plots to bomb the Vietnamese Embassy in Thailand and targets in Vietnam.
Prosecutors say the group set up an adoption agency in Cambodia as a front to disguise their plans.
Sentenced were U.S. citizens Thuong Nguyen Foshee, 58, of Orlando, Florida; Le Van Binh, 31, of Tampa, Florida; and Huynh Bich Lien "Linda," 51, of San Gabriel, California, along with Vietnamese citizens Tran Dat Phuong, 65; brothers Ho Van Giau, 59, and Ho Van Hien, 38, and 35-year-old Cao Tri - a U.S. resident who had been living in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Addressing the court before her sentencing, Foshee said, "I accidentally committed a mistake."
"I've been away from this country for too long," Foshee said. "I don't speak good Vietnamese and I do not know much about Vietnamese laws."
Earlier, under questioning from the judge, some of the defendants acknowledged carrying radio equipment to Cambodia on behalf of the Government of Free Vietnam. Others described themselves as employees of an adoption agency.
Foshee said Chanh had invited her to join his organization, but that she had declined. She said she met with him at his office in the United States several times, and that he had referred to her as "vice foreign minister."
The group gives titles to people as though they served in an actual government.
Foshee's brother, Nguyen Phu Tri, 41, told The Associated Press that Vietnamese officials told him in July 2005 to warn her to break off any ties with the group.
Tri told the court that Chanh's group gave him an air ticket and money to carry four radio transmitters from the U.S. to Cambodia. He said he had been trained to assemble and operate the equipment so he could pass the knowledge on to others.
Lien said she was not a member of the Government of Free Vietnam, but had gone to work for USIM, a charity in Cambodia that helped arrange adoptions of Cambodian children by people in the United States.
She said that she knew Chanh was associated with USIM, but that all she did was help care for children.
The case has attracted attention from U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican, who raised the issue with the administration of President George W. Bush on Foshee's behalf and is reportedly blocking a key vote in Congress that would normalize trade relations between the former foes.
Bush had been hoping to get the bill approved before the APEC summit. Resolution of the terrorism case might increase his chances, although Congress will only be in session briefly before he departs next week.
2006-11-10T10:52:2
Peace, Propaganda & The Promised Land
Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites--oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others--work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.
Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how--through the use of language, framing and context--the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied terrorities appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one. The documentary also explores the ways that U.S. journalists, for reasons ranging from intimidation to a lack of thorough investigation, have become complicit in carrying out Israel's PR campaign. At its core, the documentary raises questions about the ethics and role of journalism, and the relationship between media and politics.
Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how--through the use of language, framing and context--the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied terrorities appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one. The documentary also explores the ways that U.S. journalists, for reasons ranging from intimidation to a lack of thorough investigation, have become complicit in carrying out Israel's PR campaign. At its core, the documentary raises questions about the ethics and role of journalism, and the relationship between media and politics.
In One Word: Massacre (of innocent civilians at Beit Hanoun by Israeli Butchers)
By Uri Avnery
11/11/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- "Thank God for the American elections," our ministers and generals sighed with relief.
They were not rejoicing at the kick that the American people delivered to George W. Bush's ass this week. They love Bush, after all.
But more important than the humbling of Bush is the fact that the news from America pushed aside the terrible reports from Beit Hanoun. Instead of making the headlines, they were relegated to the bottom of the page.
The first revolutionary act is to call things by their true names, Rosa Luxemburg said. So how to call what happened in Beit Hanoun?
"Accident" said a pretty anchorwoman on one of the TV news programs. "Tragedy", said her lovely colleague on another channel. A third one, no less attractive, wavered between "event", "mistake" and "incident".
It was indeed an accident, a tragedy, an event and an incident. But most of all it was a massacre. M-a-s-s-a-c-r-e.
The word "accident" suggests something for which no one is to blame - like being struck by lightning. A tragedy is a sad event or situation, like that of the New Orleans inhabitants after the disaster. The event in Beit Hanoun was sad indeed, but not an act of God - it was an act decided upon and carried out by human beings.
Immediately after the facts became known, the entire choir of professional apologists, explainers-away, sorrow-expressers and pretext-inventors, a choir that is in perpetual readiness for such cases, sprang into feverish action.
"An unfortunate mistake… It can happen in the best families… The mechanism of a cannon can misfunction, people can make mistakes… Errare humanum est… We have launched tens of thousands of artillery shells, and there have only been three such accidents. (No. 1 in the Olmert-Peretz-Halutz era was in Qana, in the Second Lebanon War. No. 2 was on the Gaza sea shore, where a whole family was wiped out.) But we apologized, didn't we? What more can they demand from us?"
There were also arguments like "They can only blame themselves." As usual, it was the fault of the victims. The most creative solution came from the Deputy Minister of Defense, Ephraim Sneh: "The practical responsibility is ours, but the moral responsibility is theirs." If they launch Qassam rockets at us, what else can we do but answer with shells?
Ephraim Sneh was raised to the position of Deputy Minister just now. The appointment was a payment for agreeing to the inclusion of Avigdor Liberman in the government (in biblical Hebrew, the payment would have been called "the hire of a whore", Deut. 23,19). Now, after only a few days in office, Sneh was given the opportunity to express his thanks.
(In the Sneh family, there is a tradition of justifying despicable acts. Ephraim's brilliant father, Moshe Sneh, was the leader of the Israeli Communist Party, and defended all the massacres committed by Stalin, not only the gulag system, but also the murder of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and its satellites and the Jewish "doctors plot").
Any suggestion of equivalence between Qassams and artillery shells, an idea which has been adopted even by some of the Peaceniks, is completely false. And not only because there is no symmetry between occupier and occupied. Hundreds of Qassams launched during more than a year have killed one single Israeli. The shells, missiles and bombs have already killed many hundreds of Palestinians.
Did the shells hit the homes of people intentionally? There are only two possible answers to that.
The extreme version says: Yes. The sequence of events points in that direction. The Israeli army, one of the most modern in the world, has no answer to the Qassam, one of the most primitive of weapons. This short-range unguided rocket (named after Izz-ad-Din al-Qassam, the first Palestinian fighter, who was killed in 1935 in a battle against the British authorities of Palestine) is little more than a pipe filled with home-made explosives.
In a futile attempt to prevent the launching of Qassams, the Israeli forces invade the towns and villages of the Gaza Strip at regular intervals and institute a reign of terror. A week ago, they invaded Beit-Hanoun and killed more than 50 people, many of them women and children. The moment they left, the Palestinians started to launch as many Qassams as possible against Ashkelon, in order to prove that these incursions do not deter them.
That increased the frustration of the generals even more. Ashkelon is not a remote poverty-stricken little town like Sderot, most of whose inhabitants are of Moroccan origin. In Ashkelon there lives also an elitist population of European descent. The army chiefs, having lost their honor in Lebanon, were eager - according to this version - to teach the Palestinians a lesson, once and for all. According to the Israeli saying: If force doesn't work, use more force.
The other version holds that it was a real mistake, an unfortunate technical hitch. But the commander of an army knows very well that a certain incidence of "hitches" is unavoidable. So-and-so many percent are killed in training, so-and-so many percent die from "friendly fire", so-and-so many percent of shells fall some distance from the target. The ammunition used by the gunners against Beit-Hanoun - the very same 155mm ammunition that was used in Kana - is known for its inaccuracy. Several factors can cause the shells to stray from their course by hundreds of meters.
He who decided to use this ammunition against a target right next to civilians knowingly exposed them to mortal danger. Therefore, there is no essential difference between the two versions.
Who is to blame? First of all, the spirit that has gained ground in the army. Recently, Gideon Levy disclosed that a battalion commander praised his soldiers for killing 12 Palestinians with the words: "We have won by 12:0!"
Guilty are, of course, the gunners and their commanders, including the battery chief. And the General in charge of the Southern Command, Yoav Gallant (sic), who radiates indifference spiked with sanctimonious platitudes. And the Deputy Chief-of-Staff. And the Chief-of-Staff, Dan Halutz, the Air-Force general who said after another such incident that he sleeps well at night after dropping a one-ton super-bomb on a residential area. And, of course, the Minister of Defense, Amir Peretz, who approved the use of artillery after forbidding it in the past - which means that he was aware of the foreseeable consequences.
The guiltiest one is the Great Apologizer: Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister.
Olmert boasted recently that because of the clever behavior of his government "we were able to kill hundreds of terrorists, and the world has not reacted." According to Olmert, a "terrorist" is any armed Palestinian, including the tens of thousands of Palestinian policemen who carry arms by agreement with Israel. They may now be shot freely. "Terrorists" are also the women and children, who are killed in the street and in their homes. (Some say so openly: the children grow up to be terrorists, the women give birth to children who grow up to be terrorists.)
Olmert can go on with this, as he says, because the world keeps silent. Today the US even vetoed a very mild Security Council resolution against the event. Does this mean that the governments throughout the world - America, Europe, the Arab world - are accessories to the crime at Beit Hanoun? That can best be answered by the citizens of those countries.
The world did not pay much attention to the massacre, because it happened on US election day. The results of the election may sadden our leaders more than the blood and tears of mothers and children in the Gaza strip, but they were glad that the election diverted attention.
A cynic might say: Democracy is wonderful, it enables the voter to kick out the moron they elected last time and replace them with a new moron.
But let's not be too cynical. The fact is that the American people has accepted, after a delay of three years and tens of thousands of dead, what the advocates of peace around the word - including us here in Israel - were saying already on the first day: that the war will cause a disaster. That it will not solve any problem, but have the opposite effect.
The change will not be quick and dramatic. The US is a huge ship. When it turns around, it makes a very big circle and needs a lot of time - unlike Israel, a small speed-boat that can turn almost on the spot. But the direction is clear.
Of course, in both new houses of Congress, the pro-Israeli lobby (meaning: the supporters of the Israeli Right) has a huge influence, perhaps even more than in the last ones. But the American army will have to start leaving Iraq. The danger of another military adventure in Iran and/or Syria is much diminished. The crazy neo-conservatives, most of them Jews who support the extreme Right in Israel, are gradually losing power, together with their allies, the crazy Christian fundamentalists.
As former Prime Minister Levy Eshkol once said: when America sneezes, Israel catches cold. When America starts to recover, perhaps there is hope for us, too
Uri Avnery is an Israeli author and activist. He is the head of the Israeli peace movement, "Gush Shalom".
11/11/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- "Thank God for the American elections," our ministers and generals sighed with relief.
They were not rejoicing at the kick that the American people delivered to George W. Bush's ass this week. They love Bush, after all.
But more important than the humbling of Bush is the fact that the news from America pushed aside the terrible reports from Beit Hanoun. Instead of making the headlines, they were relegated to the bottom of the page.
The first revolutionary act is to call things by their true names, Rosa Luxemburg said. So how to call what happened in Beit Hanoun?
"Accident" said a pretty anchorwoman on one of the TV news programs. "Tragedy", said her lovely colleague on another channel. A third one, no less attractive, wavered between "event", "mistake" and "incident".
It was indeed an accident, a tragedy, an event and an incident. But most of all it was a massacre. M-a-s-s-a-c-r-e.
The word "accident" suggests something for which no one is to blame - like being struck by lightning. A tragedy is a sad event or situation, like that of the New Orleans inhabitants after the disaster. The event in Beit Hanoun was sad indeed, but not an act of God - it was an act decided upon and carried out by human beings.
Immediately after the facts became known, the entire choir of professional apologists, explainers-away, sorrow-expressers and pretext-inventors, a choir that is in perpetual readiness for such cases, sprang into feverish action.
"An unfortunate mistake… It can happen in the best families… The mechanism of a cannon can misfunction, people can make mistakes… Errare humanum est… We have launched tens of thousands of artillery shells, and there have only been three such accidents. (No. 1 in the Olmert-Peretz-Halutz era was in Qana, in the Second Lebanon War. No. 2 was on the Gaza sea shore, where a whole family was wiped out.) But we apologized, didn't we? What more can they demand from us?"
There were also arguments like "They can only blame themselves." As usual, it was the fault of the victims. The most creative solution came from the Deputy Minister of Defense, Ephraim Sneh: "The practical responsibility is ours, but the moral responsibility is theirs." If they launch Qassam rockets at us, what else can we do but answer with shells?
Ephraim Sneh was raised to the position of Deputy Minister just now. The appointment was a payment for agreeing to the inclusion of Avigdor Liberman in the government (in biblical Hebrew, the payment would have been called "the hire of a whore", Deut. 23,19). Now, after only a few days in office, Sneh was given the opportunity to express his thanks.
(In the Sneh family, there is a tradition of justifying despicable acts. Ephraim's brilliant father, Moshe Sneh, was the leader of the Israeli Communist Party, and defended all the massacres committed by Stalin, not only the gulag system, but also the murder of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and its satellites and the Jewish "doctors plot").
Any suggestion of equivalence between Qassams and artillery shells, an idea which has been adopted even by some of the Peaceniks, is completely false. And not only because there is no symmetry between occupier and occupied. Hundreds of Qassams launched during more than a year have killed one single Israeli. The shells, missiles and bombs have already killed many hundreds of Palestinians.
Did the shells hit the homes of people intentionally? There are only two possible answers to that.
The extreme version says: Yes. The sequence of events points in that direction. The Israeli army, one of the most modern in the world, has no answer to the Qassam, one of the most primitive of weapons. This short-range unguided rocket (named after Izz-ad-Din al-Qassam, the first Palestinian fighter, who was killed in 1935 in a battle against the British authorities of Palestine) is little more than a pipe filled with home-made explosives.
In a futile attempt to prevent the launching of Qassams, the Israeli forces invade the towns and villages of the Gaza Strip at regular intervals and institute a reign of terror. A week ago, they invaded Beit-Hanoun and killed more than 50 people, many of them women and children. The moment they left, the Palestinians started to launch as many Qassams as possible against Ashkelon, in order to prove that these incursions do not deter them.
That increased the frustration of the generals even more. Ashkelon is not a remote poverty-stricken little town like Sderot, most of whose inhabitants are of Moroccan origin. In Ashkelon there lives also an elitist population of European descent. The army chiefs, having lost their honor in Lebanon, were eager - according to this version - to teach the Palestinians a lesson, once and for all. According to the Israeli saying: If force doesn't work, use more force.
The other version holds that it was a real mistake, an unfortunate technical hitch. But the commander of an army knows very well that a certain incidence of "hitches" is unavoidable. So-and-so many percent are killed in training, so-and-so many percent die from "friendly fire", so-and-so many percent of shells fall some distance from the target. The ammunition used by the gunners against Beit-Hanoun - the very same 155mm ammunition that was used in Kana - is known for its inaccuracy. Several factors can cause the shells to stray from their course by hundreds of meters.
He who decided to use this ammunition against a target right next to civilians knowingly exposed them to mortal danger. Therefore, there is no essential difference between the two versions.
Who is to blame? First of all, the spirit that has gained ground in the army. Recently, Gideon Levy disclosed that a battalion commander praised his soldiers for killing 12 Palestinians with the words: "We have won by 12:0!"
Guilty are, of course, the gunners and their commanders, including the battery chief. And the General in charge of the Southern Command, Yoav Gallant (sic), who radiates indifference spiked with sanctimonious platitudes. And the Deputy Chief-of-Staff. And the Chief-of-Staff, Dan Halutz, the Air-Force general who said after another such incident that he sleeps well at night after dropping a one-ton super-bomb on a residential area. And, of course, the Minister of Defense, Amir Peretz, who approved the use of artillery after forbidding it in the past - which means that he was aware of the foreseeable consequences.
The guiltiest one is the Great Apologizer: Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister.
Olmert boasted recently that because of the clever behavior of his government "we were able to kill hundreds of terrorists, and the world has not reacted." According to Olmert, a "terrorist" is any armed Palestinian, including the tens of thousands of Palestinian policemen who carry arms by agreement with Israel. They may now be shot freely. "Terrorists" are also the women and children, who are killed in the street and in their homes. (Some say so openly: the children grow up to be terrorists, the women give birth to children who grow up to be terrorists.)
Olmert can go on with this, as he says, because the world keeps silent. Today the US even vetoed a very mild Security Council resolution against the event. Does this mean that the governments throughout the world - America, Europe, the Arab world - are accessories to the crime at Beit Hanoun? That can best be answered by the citizens of those countries.
The world did not pay much attention to the massacre, because it happened on US election day. The results of the election may sadden our leaders more than the blood and tears of mothers and children in the Gaza strip, but they were glad that the election diverted attention.
A cynic might say: Democracy is wonderful, it enables the voter to kick out the moron they elected last time and replace them with a new moron.
But let's not be too cynical. The fact is that the American people has accepted, after a delay of three years and tens of thousands of dead, what the advocates of peace around the word - including us here in Israel - were saying already on the first day: that the war will cause a disaster. That it will not solve any problem, but have the opposite effect.
The change will not be quick and dramatic. The US is a huge ship. When it turns around, it makes a very big circle and needs a lot of time - unlike Israel, a small speed-boat that can turn almost on the spot. But the direction is clear.
Of course, in both new houses of Congress, the pro-Israeli lobby (meaning: the supporters of the Israeli Right) has a huge influence, perhaps even more than in the last ones. But the American army will have to start leaving Iraq. The danger of another military adventure in Iran and/or Syria is much diminished. The crazy neo-conservatives, most of them Jews who support the extreme Right in Israel, are gradually losing power, together with their allies, the crazy Christian fundamentalists.
As former Prime Minister Levy Eshkol once said: when America sneezes, Israel catches cold. When America starts to recover, perhaps there is hope for us, too
Uri Avnery is an Israeli author and activist. He is the head of the Israeli peace movement, "Gush Shalom".
OTTO REICH: Funeral for a liar
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD – Granma International staff writer –
IF lying was a life-threatening disease, Otto Reich would have been on his deathbed long ago: his latest feats of deception, along with his grotesque personality, show how an individual with a proven criminal past can continue to make headlines and manipulate the U.S. public, with the complicity of the media.
On October 26, Reich published an article on the Internet that has now become – without a doubt – the most spectacular piece of foolishness in his little-known career as a misinformation specialist.
That day, the former U.S. Special Envoy to the Western Hemisphere for the Secretary of State in the Bush administration, announced with the utmost seriousness that if Fidel Castro was not dead already, he would be within a matter of hours, and that “Confirmation of the terminal illness comes from the usual sources but in a non-conventional manner.”
He added, with the tone of one who knows everything and more, that “The Cuban government has been summoning to Havana representatives of the major international media to negotiate the best seats, camera angles, and interviews with the despot’s political survivors, and to inform them of the ground rules for coverage of the state funeral.”
What follows is really mind-blowing: Reich confides to his readers the model for this funeral, coming straight out of his imagination – as sick as it is cynical: that of Pope John Paul II.
Bush’s former advisor on Latin America follows with a ridiculous description of an event that never took place.
This memorable piece of writing – which has certainly contributed to the permanent misinformation campaign carried out under the Bush Plan for Cuba – is accompanied by an indulgent note mentioning that Otto J. Reich collaborated with George W. Bush from 2001 to 2004, first as assistant secretary of state and then on the National Security Council.
BUDDY OF LUIS POSADA AND FELIX RODRIGUEZ
His official biography, available through U.S. embassies in Latin America when he was a White House official, left out his most important exploits: how he helped Félix RodrÃguez MendigutÃa, the official who in the name of the CIA ordered Che to be murdered, and Luis Posada Carriles, the most dangerous terrorist on the continent, in covering up the massive drugs-for-arms trafficking that supplied the Nicaraguan Contra forces.
Reich, when he was U.S. ambassador in Caracas, Venezuela, orchestrated the entry of Posada’s accomplice, Orlando Bosch Avila, to U.S. territory.
Born accidentally in Cuba in 1945 to an Austrian father, Reich got married to the CIA at the University of North Carolina, thanks Frank Calzón, who guided his path to the White House.
After spending two years in the ranks of the U.S. Army in Panama, Reich moved to Miami in 1972, where the CIA JM/WAVE
station flourished, carrying out anti-Cuba terrorist operations. That is also where Porter Goss was stationed, who was later to become CIA director under George Bush Jr., as well as a large number of other terrorists who reappeared in the following years in a succession of crimes, from Watergate to Operation Condor.
EMINENT FABRICATOR OF FAKE NEWS
Reich appeared in the U.S. public eye when George Bush Sr., former head of the CIA, was vice president (under Reagan). Reich was then appointed director of the Latin America Department of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where John Bolton was general counsel.
He then became chief of the so-called Office of Public Diplomacy, a CIA invention to use State Department cover for cover-up and misinformation work. He was under the orders of Colonel Oliver North.
Years later, a report from the General Accountant Office revealed to Congress the nature of the deception operations carried out by Reich in the U.S. dirty war in Nicaragua. The U.S. public then discovered how, using taxpayers money, he had fabricated a series of gross lies with the goal of misinforming both citizens and politicians.
He published news claiming that the Sandinistas were persecuting Misquito Indians, and that they had purchased a number of Mig-29 fighter planes from the Soviet Unions to prepare air attacks against the United States. He went so far as to order the fabrication of false statements attributed to the names of the Contra’s mercenary ringleaders.
Reich published announcements asking for donations for the Contra – as a way of justifying the appearance of the drug-trafficking money, raised by his cohorts in Ilopango, in the bank accounts of anti-Sandinista mercenaries in the Grand Cayman Islands and Switzerland.
With the ostentatious title of Special Counsel for Public Diplomacy of the State Department, he remained in permanent contact with Félix RodrÃguez and Luis Posada, who, from the Ilopango air base in El Salvador, were directing the trafficking that was later exposed in the Coca-Contra scandal.
IN CARACAS, HE GETS BOSCH OUT OF JAIL
When the operation “blew up,” Reich was suddenly named U.S. ambassador in Caracas, Venezuela. There, he carried out the mission of taking care of the case of Orlando Bosch, who was in prison for the murderous attack on a Cubana Aviation airliner. He got Bosch a friendly ruling from a military court.
Bosch was already known as a dangerous terrorist: he had publicly admitted – in an interview published in the New York Times on May 3, 1977 – his responsibility in more than 50 attacks carried out by the CORU organization.
Bosch arrived in the United States on May 17, 1988 with a visa illegally obtained for him by Reich, despite contrary orders from State Department officials, and was immediately arrested for having violated parole years before.
In July 1990, after a campaign unleashed by Reich, Congressional candidate Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, her campaign director Jeb Bush, and their buddies in the Miami mafia, George Bush authorized – without great risk – the release of the murderous pediatrician.
In 1991 and 1992, Reich — there is no limit to his shamelessness – represented the United States in the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
In 1996, he founded RMA International, and received $600,000 from the Bacardi corporation for protecting its interests and facilitating the murderous Helms-Burton Act, signed by Bill Clinton on March 12, 1996 in the midst of the Special Period in Cuba.
In January 2002, Otto Juan Reich was chosen as assistant secretary of state, despite opposition from Congress, which refused to give its consent to such a scandalous appointment.
It is now known how, that very year, he encouraged several conspirators to carry out their unsuccessful coup d’état against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and how he led the misinformation campaign.
In 2003, forced to step down, he became a “special envoy for Western Hemisphere initiatives,” given that it allowed him to carry out other “initiatives,” such as preparing the coup against Haitian President Aristide and the creation of the presidential Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which created the Bush Plan and its secret appendixes with plans for aggression.
Reich resigned on May 4, 2004, to be a self-employed lobbyist and dedicate himself full-time – with the complicity of media agencies that pretend to ignore his past and use him as a refernce – to his specialty: lying.
His last exclusive, however, could mark the end of what was left of his marketing value. And his political death, given that there has to be a limit to the fun, even with carte blanche from the Bush clan.
IF lying was a life-threatening disease, Otto Reich would have been on his deathbed long ago: his latest feats of deception, along with his grotesque personality, show how an individual with a proven criminal past can continue to make headlines and manipulate the U.S. public, with the complicity of the media.
On October 26, Reich published an article on the Internet that has now become – without a doubt – the most spectacular piece of foolishness in his little-known career as a misinformation specialist.
That day, the former U.S. Special Envoy to the Western Hemisphere for the Secretary of State in the Bush administration, announced with the utmost seriousness that if Fidel Castro was not dead already, he would be within a matter of hours, and that “Confirmation of the terminal illness comes from the usual sources but in a non-conventional manner.”
He added, with the tone of one who knows everything and more, that “The Cuban government has been summoning to Havana representatives of the major international media to negotiate the best seats, camera angles, and interviews with the despot’s political survivors, and to inform them of the ground rules for coverage of the state funeral.”
What follows is really mind-blowing: Reich confides to his readers the model for this funeral, coming straight out of his imagination – as sick as it is cynical: that of Pope John Paul II.
Bush’s former advisor on Latin America follows with a ridiculous description of an event that never took place.
This memorable piece of writing – which has certainly contributed to the permanent misinformation campaign carried out under the Bush Plan for Cuba – is accompanied by an indulgent note mentioning that Otto J. Reich collaborated with George W. Bush from 2001 to 2004, first as assistant secretary of state and then on the National Security Council.
BUDDY OF LUIS POSADA AND FELIX RODRIGUEZ
His official biography, available through U.S. embassies in Latin America when he was a White House official, left out his most important exploits: how he helped Félix RodrÃguez MendigutÃa, the official who in the name of the CIA ordered Che to be murdered, and Luis Posada Carriles, the most dangerous terrorist on the continent, in covering up the massive drugs-for-arms trafficking that supplied the Nicaraguan Contra forces.
Reich, when he was U.S. ambassador in Caracas, Venezuela, orchestrated the entry of Posada’s accomplice, Orlando Bosch Avila, to U.S. territory.
Born accidentally in Cuba in 1945 to an Austrian father, Reich got married to the CIA at the University of North Carolina, thanks Frank Calzón, who guided his path to the White House.
After spending two years in the ranks of the U.S. Army in Panama, Reich moved to Miami in 1972, where the CIA JM/WAVE
station flourished, carrying out anti-Cuba terrorist operations. That is also where Porter Goss was stationed, who was later to become CIA director under George Bush Jr., as well as a large number of other terrorists who reappeared in the following years in a succession of crimes, from Watergate to Operation Condor.
EMINENT FABRICATOR OF FAKE NEWS
Reich appeared in the U.S. public eye when George Bush Sr., former head of the CIA, was vice president (under Reagan). Reich was then appointed director of the Latin America Department of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where John Bolton was general counsel.
He then became chief of the so-called Office of Public Diplomacy, a CIA invention to use State Department cover for cover-up and misinformation work. He was under the orders of Colonel Oliver North.
Years later, a report from the General Accountant Office revealed to Congress the nature of the deception operations carried out by Reich in the U.S. dirty war in Nicaragua. The U.S. public then discovered how, using taxpayers money, he had fabricated a series of gross lies with the goal of misinforming both citizens and politicians.
He published news claiming that the Sandinistas were persecuting Misquito Indians, and that they had purchased a number of Mig-29 fighter planes from the Soviet Unions to prepare air attacks against the United States. He went so far as to order the fabrication of false statements attributed to the names of the Contra’s mercenary ringleaders.
Reich published announcements asking for donations for the Contra – as a way of justifying the appearance of the drug-trafficking money, raised by his cohorts in Ilopango, in the bank accounts of anti-Sandinista mercenaries in the Grand Cayman Islands and Switzerland.
With the ostentatious title of Special Counsel for Public Diplomacy of the State Department, he remained in permanent contact with Félix RodrÃguez and Luis Posada, who, from the Ilopango air base in El Salvador, were directing the trafficking that was later exposed in the Coca-Contra scandal.
IN CARACAS, HE GETS BOSCH OUT OF JAIL
When the operation “blew up,” Reich was suddenly named U.S. ambassador in Caracas, Venezuela. There, he carried out the mission of taking care of the case of Orlando Bosch, who was in prison for the murderous attack on a Cubana Aviation airliner. He got Bosch a friendly ruling from a military court.
Bosch was already known as a dangerous terrorist: he had publicly admitted – in an interview published in the New York Times on May 3, 1977 – his responsibility in more than 50 attacks carried out by the CORU organization.
Bosch arrived in the United States on May 17, 1988 with a visa illegally obtained for him by Reich, despite contrary orders from State Department officials, and was immediately arrested for having violated parole years before.
In July 1990, after a campaign unleashed by Reich, Congressional candidate Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, her campaign director Jeb Bush, and their buddies in the Miami mafia, George Bush authorized – without great risk – the release of the murderous pediatrician.
In 1991 and 1992, Reich — there is no limit to his shamelessness – represented the United States in the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
In 1996, he founded RMA International, and received $600,000 from the Bacardi corporation for protecting its interests and facilitating the murderous Helms-Burton Act, signed by Bill Clinton on March 12, 1996 in the midst of the Special Period in Cuba.
In January 2002, Otto Juan Reich was chosen as assistant secretary of state, despite opposition from Congress, which refused to give its consent to such a scandalous appointment.
It is now known how, that very year, he encouraged several conspirators to carry out their unsuccessful coup d’état against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and how he led the misinformation campaign.
In 2003, forced to step down, he became a “special envoy for Western Hemisphere initiatives,” given that it allowed him to carry out other “initiatives,” such as preparing the coup against Haitian President Aristide and the creation of the presidential Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, which created the Bush Plan and its secret appendixes with plans for aggression.
Reich resigned on May 4, 2004, to be a self-employed lobbyist and dedicate himself full-time – with the complicity of media agencies that pretend to ignore his past and use him as a refernce – to his specialty: lying.
His last exclusive, however, could mark the end of what was left of his marketing value. And his political death, given that there has to be a limit to the fun, even with carte blanche from the Bush clan.
Saturday, November 11, 2006
Israel Detonated Radioactive Bunker Buster Bomb in Lebanon
What kind of weapon leaves traces of radiation & produces such lethal and circumscribed consequences?
Global Research, November 11, 2006
RAI News (translated from the ItaIian) - 2006-11-09
Maurizio Torrealta presents a new documentary
KHIAM SOUTHERN LEBANON
A BOMB’S ANATOMY
By Flaviano Masella, Angelo Saso, Maurizio Torrealta
The special report was triggered by the radioactivity measurements reported on a crater probably created by an Israeli Bunker Buster bomb in the village of Khiam, in southern Lebanon. The measurements were carried out by two Lebanese professors of physics - Mohammad Ali Kubaissi and Ibrahim Rachidi. The data - 700 nanosieverts per hour – showed remarkably higher radiocativity then the average in the area (Beirut = 35 nSv/hr ). Successivamente, on September 17th, Ali Kubaissi took British researcher Dai Williams, from the environmentalist organization Green Audit, to the same site, to take samples that were then submitted to Chris Busby, technical adisor of the Supervisory Committee on Depleted Uranium, which reports to the British Ministry of Defense. The samples were tested by Harwell’s nuclear laboratory, one of the most authoritative research centers in the world. On October 17th, Harwell disclosed the testing results - two samples in 10 did contain radioactivity.
On November 2nd, another British lab, The School of Oceanographic Sciences, confirmed Harwell’s results – the Khiam crater contains slightly enriched uranium. Rainews24 also took a sample taken by Dai Williams for testing by the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Ferrara. The testing - which is still ongoing - found an anomalous structure: the sample’s surface includes alluminium and iron silicates, normal elements in a soil fragment. Yet, looking inside, estremely small bubbles can be found with high concentration of iron. Further testing will clarify the origin of these structures: what seems to be certain at the moment is that they are not caused by a natural process.
What kind of weapon is this? What weapon leaves traces of radiation and produces such lethal and circumscribed consequences?
Researcher Dai Williams believes this is a new class of weapons using enriched uranium, not through fission processes but through new physical processes kept secret for at least 20 years.
Physicist Emilio del Giudice form the National Institute of Nuclear Phisics came to the same conlcusion: “There are two ways to explain the origin of the enriched uranium found in Khiam:
About the origin of enriched Uranium there are two possibilities:
1) this material was present already in the structure of the bombs, but I am puzzled since one should explain the rationale of the use of a material which is both expensive and dangerous , because of its enhanced radioactivity, to people handling it , including military personnel of Israeli Army.
2) the enrichment has been the consequence of the use of the bomb; this possibility is hardly compatible with the known effects of conventional nuclear weapons and should imply that some newly discovered nuclear phenomenon could be at work.
The Israeli army denied the use of uranium-based weapons in Lebanon. So, how can people defend themselves from potential uranium-related harm? What precautions will the Unifil troops in the area take, and what kind of testing has been carried out to prevent the risks? The documentary directly covers those qestions.
Translation by Desiree Berlangieri and Maria Letizia Tesorini
http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchieste/09112006_bomba_ing.asp
Global Research, November 11, 2006
RAI News (translated from the ItaIian) - 2006-11-09
Maurizio Torrealta presents a new documentary
KHIAM SOUTHERN LEBANON
A BOMB’S ANATOMY
By Flaviano Masella, Angelo Saso, Maurizio Torrealta
The special report was triggered by the radioactivity measurements reported on a crater probably created by an Israeli Bunker Buster bomb in the village of Khiam, in southern Lebanon. The measurements were carried out by two Lebanese professors of physics - Mohammad Ali Kubaissi and Ibrahim Rachidi. The data - 700 nanosieverts per hour – showed remarkably higher radiocativity then the average in the area (Beirut = 35 nSv/hr ). Successivamente, on September 17th, Ali Kubaissi took British researcher Dai Williams, from the environmentalist organization Green Audit, to the same site, to take samples that were then submitted to Chris Busby, technical adisor of the Supervisory Committee on Depleted Uranium, which reports to the British Ministry of Defense. The samples were tested by Harwell’s nuclear laboratory, one of the most authoritative research centers in the world. On October 17th, Harwell disclosed the testing results - two samples in 10 did contain radioactivity.
On November 2nd, another British lab, The School of Oceanographic Sciences, confirmed Harwell’s results – the Khiam crater contains slightly enriched uranium. Rainews24 also took a sample taken by Dai Williams for testing by the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Ferrara. The testing - which is still ongoing - found an anomalous structure: the sample’s surface includes alluminium and iron silicates, normal elements in a soil fragment. Yet, looking inside, estremely small bubbles can be found with high concentration of iron. Further testing will clarify the origin of these structures: what seems to be certain at the moment is that they are not caused by a natural process.
What kind of weapon is this? What weapon leaves traces of radiation and produces such lethal and circumscribed consequences?
Researcher Dai Williams believes this is a new class of weapons using enriched uranium, not through fission processes but through new physical processes kept secret for at least 20 years.
Physicist Emilio del Giudice form the National Institute of Nuclear Phisics came to the same conlcusion: “There are two ways to explain the origin of the enriched uranium found in Khiam:
About the origin of enriched Uranium there are two possibilities:
1) this material was present already in the structure of the bombs, but I am puzzled since one should explain the rationale of the use of a material which is both expensive and dangerous , because of its enhanced radioactivity, to people handling it , including military personnel of Israeli Army.
2) the enrichment has been the consequence of the use of the bomb; this possibility is hardly compatible with the known effects of conventional nuclear weapons and should imply that some newly discovered nuclear phenomenon could be at work.
The Israeli army denied the use of uranium-based weapons in Lebanon. So, how can people defend themselves from potential uranium-related harm? What precautions will the Unifil troops in the area take, and what kind of testing has been carried out to prevent the risks? The documentary directly covers those qestions.
Translation by Desiree Berlangieri and Maria Letizia Tesorini
http://www.rainews24.rai.it/ran24/inchieste/09112006_bomba_ing.asp
The "Christian Terrorists" Who Aren't in the News By Jennifer L. Pozner
Anti-abortion fanatics spread fear by bombings, murders and assaults, but the media take little notice.
This piece was originally published by Newsday.
On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.
No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.
Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism -- even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're fighting a holy war.
Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.
Abortion providers and activists received 77 letters threatening anthrax attacks before 9/11, yet the media never considered anthrax threats as terrorism until after 9/11, when such letters were delivered to journalists and members of Congress.
After 9/11, Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups received 554 envelopes containing white powder and messages like: "You have been exposed to anthrax. ... We are going to kill all of you." They were signed by the Army of God, a group that hosts Scripture-filled web pages for "Anti-Abortion Heroes of the Faith," including minister Paul Hill, Michael Griffin and James Kopp, all convicted of murdering abortion providers, and a convicted clinic bomber, the Rev. Michael Bray. Another of their "martyrs," Clayton Waagner, mailed anthrax letters while a fugitive on the FBI's 10 most wanted list for anti-abortion related crimes.
"I am a terrorist," Waagner declared on the Army of God's web site. Boasting that God "freed me to make war on his enemy," he claimed he knew where 42 Planned Parenthood workers lived. "It doesn't matter to me if you're a nurse, receptionist, bookkeeper, or janitor, if you work for the murderous abortionist, I'm going to kill you."
That's textbook terrorism, defined by the USA Patriot Act as dangerous criminal acts that "appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" or "to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion."
Which brings us back to car bomber, McMenemy. According to the Detroit Free Press (the only newspaper in the Nexis news database that reported his crime), he targeted the women's health center because he thought it provided abortions. It doesn't. (oops!) It provides mostly low-income patients with pap smears, ob-gyn care, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, birth control, and nutrition and immunization programs for women and children.
The attack caused $170,000 in property damage and left poor families without health care for a week. But long after Edgerton's water-logged carpets are removed, scorched medical equipment replaced and new doors reopened to the public, a culture of fear will linger among doctors, nurses, advocates and patients across the country, who will worry they could be next. Some frightened workers will quit their jobs; some women will be too scared to get the health care they need.
Every fresh incident of anti-abortion terrorism is a reminder that women's health supporters are not safe in a country where abortion is legal but mobilized zealots believe Jesus has empowered them to kill to prevent women from choosing it.
Is McMenemy a lone nut case, or a member of that network of violent extremists? We don't know, because journalists haven't investigated.
Nor have they reported that just last year, nearly one in five abortion clinics experienced gunfire, arson, bombings, chemical attacks, assaults, stalking, death threats and blockades, according to the 2005 National Clinic Violence Survey. Additionally, 59 percent suffered intimidation tactics such as photo/video surveillance.
Federal efforts to hunt down these terrorists improved with the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act in 1994 and the National Task Force on Violence Against Health Care Providers, established by the Department of Justice in 1998. The feds have taken over McMenemy's case, charging him with arson against a business affecting interstate commerce. Yet as of Oct. 5, no news outlet on Nexis reported this, despite a second AP story.
As we continue national debates on how to keep America safe from terrorism, journalists do us -- and especially women -- no good pretending that the threats come only from radical Muslims outside our borders.
Jennifer L. Pozner is founder and executive director of Women In Media & News, a national media analysis, education and advocacy group. She lectures about women, media, politics and popular culture on college campuses across the country, and can be reached at director@wimnonline.org
Saddam: Let's now charge the accomplices By John Pilger
11/09/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- In a show trial whose theatrical climax was clearly timed to promote George W Bush in the American midterm elections, Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced to hang. Drivel about "end of an era" and "a new start for Iraq" was promoted by the usual false moral accountants, who uttered not a word about bringing the tyrant's accomplices to justice. Why are these accomplices not being charged with aiding and abetting crimes against humanity?
Why isn't George Bush Snr being charged? In 1992, a congressional inquiry found that Bush as president had ordered a cover-up to conceal his secret support for Saddam and the illegal arms shipments being sent to Iraq via third countries. Missile technology was shipped to South Africa and Chile, then "on sold" to Iraq, while US Commerce Department records were falsified. Congressman Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House of Representatives Banking Com mittee, said: "[We found that] Bush and his advisers financed, equipped and succoured the monster . . ."
Why isn't Douglas Hurd being charged? In 1981, as Foreign Office minister, Hurd travelled to Baghdad to sell Saddam a British Aerospace missile system and to "celebrate" the anniversary of Saddam's blood-soaked ascent to power. Why isn't his former cabinet colleague, Tony Newton, being charged? As Thatcher's trade secretary, Newton, within a month of Saddam gassing 5,000 Kurds at Halabja (news of which the Foreign Office tried to suppress), offered the mass murderer £340m in export credits.
Why isn't Donald Rumsfeld being charged? In December 1983, Rumsfeld was in Baghdad to signal America's approval of Iraq's aggression against Iran. Rumsfeld was back in Baghdad on 24 March 1984, the day that the United Nations reported that Iraq had used mustard gas laced with a nerve agent against Iranian soldiers. Rumsfeld said nothing. A subsequent Senate report documented the transfer of the ingredients of biological weapons from a company in Maryland, licensed by the Commerce Department and approved by the State Department.
Why isn't Madeleine Albright being charged? As President Clinton's secretary of state, Albright enforced an unrelenting embargo on Iraq which caused half a million "excess deaths" of children under the age of five. When asked on television if the children's deaths were a price worth paying, she replied: "We think the price is worth it."
Why isn't Peter Hain being charged? In 2001, as Foreign Office minister, Hain described as "gratuitous" the suggestion that he, along with other British politicians outspoken in their support of the deadly siege of Iraq, might find themselves summoned before the International Criminal Court. A report for the UN secretary general by a world authority on international law describes the embargo on Iraq in the 1990s as "unequivocally illegal under existing human rights law", a crime that "could raise questions under the Genocide Convention". Indeed, two past heads of the UN humanitarian mission in Iraq, both of them assistant secretary generals, resigned because the embargo was indeed genocidal. As of July 2002, more than $5bn-worth of humanitarian supplies, approved by the UN Sanctions Committee and paid for by Iraq, were blocked by the Bush administration, backed by the Blair and Hain government. These included items related to food, health, water and sanitation.
Above all, why aren't Blair and Bush Jnr being charged with "the paramount war crime", to quote the judges at Nuremberg and, recently, the chief American prosecutor - that is, unprovoked aggression against a defenceless country?
And why aren't those who spread and amplified propaganda that led to such epic suffering being charged? The New York Times reported as fact fabrications fed to its reporter by Iraqi exiles. These gave credibility to the White House's lies, and doubtless helped soften up public opinion to support an invasion. Over here, the BBC all but celebrated the invasion with its man in Downing Street congratulating Blair on being "conclusively right" on his assertion that he and Bush "would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath". The invasion, it is reliably estimated, has caused 655,000 "excess deaths", overwhelmingly civilians.
If none of these important people are called to account, there is clearly only justice for the victims of accredited "monsters".
Is that real or fake justice?
Fake.
Why isn't George Bush Snr being charged? In 1992, a congressional inquiry found that Bush as president had ordered a cover-up to conceal his secret support for Saddam and the illegal arms shipments being sent to Iraq via third countries. Missile technology was shipped to South Africa and Chile, then "on sold" to Iraq, while US Commerce Department records were falsified. Congressman Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House of Representatives Banking Com mittee, said: "[We found that] Bush and his advisers financed, equipped and succoured the monster . . ."
Why isn't Douglas Hurd being charged? In 1981, as Foreign Office minister, Hurd travelled to Baghdad to sell Saddam a British Aerospace missile system and to "celebrate" the anniversary of Saddam's blood-soaked ascent to power. Why isn't his former cabinet colleague, Tony Newton, being charged? As Thatcher's trade secretary, Newton, within a month of Saddam gassing 5,000 Kurds at Halabja (news of which the Foreign Office tried to suppress), offered the mass murderer £340m in export credits.
Why isn't Donald Rumsfeld being charged? In December 1983, Rumsfeld was in Baghdad to signal America's approval of Iraq's aggression against Iran. Rumsfeld was back in Baghdad on 24 March 1984, the day that the United Nations reported that Iraq had used mustard gas laced with a nerve agent against Iranian soldiers. Rumsfeld said nothing. A subsequent Senate report documented the transfer of the ingredients of biological weapons from a company in Maryland, licensed by the Commerce Department and approved by the State Department.
Why isn't Madeleine Albright being charged? As President Clinton's secretary of state, Albright enforced an unrelenting embargo on Iraq which caused half a million "excess deaths" of children under the age of five. When asked on television if the children's deaths were a price worth paying, she replied: "We think the price is worth it."
Why isn't Peter Hain being charged? In 2001, as Foreign Office minister, Hain described as "gratuitous" the suggestion that he, along with other British politicians outspoken in their support of the deadly siege of Iraq, might find themselves summoned before the International Criminal Court. A report for the UN secretary general by a world authority on international law describes the embargo on Iraq in the 1990s as "unequivocally illegal under existing human rights law", a crime that "could raise questions under the Genocide Convention". Indeed, two past heads of the UN humanitarian mission in Iraq, both of them assistant secretary generals, resigned because the embargo was indeed genocidal. As of July 2002, more than $5bn-worth of humanitarian supplies, approved by the UN Sanctions Committee and paid for by Iraq, were blocked by the Bush administration, backed by the Blair and Hain government. These included items related to food, health, water and sanitation.
Above all, why aren't Blair and Bush Jnr being charged with "the paramount war crime", to quote the judges at Nuremberg and, recently, the chief American prosecutor - that is, unprovoked aggression against a defenceless country?
And why aren't those who spread and amplified propaganda that led to such epic suffering being charged? The New York Times reported as fact fabrications fed to its reporter by Iraqi exiles. These gave credibility to the White House's lies, and doubtless helped soften up public opinion to support an invasion. Over here, the BBC all but celebrated the invasion with its man in Downing Street congratulating Blair on being "conclusively right" on his assertion that he and Bush "would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath". The invasion, it is reliably estimated, has caused 655,000 "excess deaths", overwhelmingly civilians.
If none of these important people are called to account, there is clearly only justice for the victims of accredited "monsters".
Is that real or fake justice?
Fake.
Bechtel Departure Removes More Illusions
Bechtel Departure Removes More Illusions
Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily
BAGHDAD, Nov 9 (IPS) - The decision of the giant engineering company Bechtel to withdraw from Iraq has left many Iraqis feeling betrayed. In its departure they see the end of remaining hopes for the reconstruction of Iraq.
"It is much worse than in the time of Saddam Hussein," Communist Party member Nayif Jassim told IPS. "Most Iraqis wish Saddam would be back in power now that they lived out the hardships of the occupation. The Americans did nothing but loot our oil and kill our people."
Bechtel, whose board members have close ties to the Bush administration, announced last week that it was done with trying to operate in the war-torn country. The company has received 2.3 billion dollars of Iraqi reconstruction funds and U.S. taxpayer money, but is leaving without completing most of the tasks it set out to.
On every level of infrastructure measurable, the situation in Iraq is worse now than under the rule of Saddam Hussein. That includes the 12 years of economic sanctions since the first Gulf War in 1991, a period that former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq Dennis Halliday described as "genocidal" for Iraqis.
The average household in Iraq now gets two hours of electricity a day. There is 70 percent unemployment, 68 percent of Iraqis have no access to safe drinking water, and only 19 percent have sewage access. Not even oil production has matched pre-invasion levels.
The security situation is hellish, with a recent study published in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet estimating 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq as a result of the invasion and occupation.
The group Medact recently said that easily treatable conditions such as diarrhoea and respiratory illness are causing 70 percent of all child deaths, and that "of the 180 health clinics the U.S. hoped to build by the end of 2005, only four have been completed -- and none opened."
A proposed 200 million dollar project to build 142 primary care centres ran out of cash after building just 20 clinics, a performance that the World Health Organisation described as "shocking."
Iraqis are complaining louder now than under the sanctions. Lack of electricity has led to increasing demand for gasoline to run generators. And gasoline is among the most scarce commodities in this oil-rich country.
"We inherited an exhausted electricity system in generating stations and distributing nets, but we were able to supply 50 percent of consumer demand during heavy load periods, and more than that during ordinary days," an engineer with the Ministry of Electricity told IPS.
"The situation now is much worse and it seems not to be improving despite the huge contracts signed with American companies. It is strange how billions of dollars spent on electricity brought no improvement whatsoever, but in fact worsened the situation."
The engineer said "we in the ministry have not received any real equipment for our senior stations, and the small transformers for the distributing nets were of very low standard."
Bechtel's contract included reconstruction of water treatment systems, electricity plants, sewage systems, airports and roads.
Two former Iraqi ministers of electricity were charged with corruption by the Iraqi Commission of Integrity set up under the occupation. One of them, Ayham al-Samarraii, was sentenced to jail but was taken away by his U.S. security guards. He insisted that it was not he who looted the ministry's money.
Managers at water departments all over Iraq say that the only repairs they managed were through UN offices and humanitarian aid organisations. The ministry provided them with very little chlorine for water treatment. New projects were no more than simple maintenance moves that did little to halt collapsing infrastructure.
Bechtel was among the first companies, along with Halliburton, where U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney once worked, to have received fixed-fee contracts drawn to guarantee profit.
Ahmed al-Ani who works with a major Iraqi construction contracting company says the model Bechtel adopted was certain to fail.
"They charged huge sums of money for the contracts they signed, then they sold them to smaller companies who resold them again to small inexperienced Iraqi contractors," Ani told IPS. "These inexperienced contractors then had to execute the works badly because of the very low prices they get, and the lack of experience."
Some Iraqi political analysts, rather optimistically, look at Bechtel's departure from a different angle.
"I see the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq," Maki al-Nazzal told IPS. "It started with Bechtel and Haliburton's propaganda, and might end with their escape from the field. They came with Bremer and introduced themselves as heroes and saviours who would bring prosperity to Iraq, but all they did was market U.S. propaganda."
U.S. President George W. Bush told reporters on a visit to Iraq last June: "You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered. You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on behalf of the Iraqi people."
By his standards, the position in Iraq is now much worse.
Posted by Dahr_Jamail at November 10, 2006 08:15 AM
Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily
BAGHDAD, Nov 9 (IPS) - The decision of the giant engineering company Bechtel to withdraw from Iraq has left many Iraqis feeling betrayed. In its departure they see the end of remaining hopes for the reconstruction of Iraq.
"It is much worse than in the time of Saddam Hussein," Communist Party member Nayif Jassim told IPS. "Most Iraqis wish Saddam would be back in power now that they lived out the hardships of the occupation. The Americans did nothing but loot our oil and kill our people."
Bechtel, whose board members have close ties to the Bush administration, announced last week that it was done with trying to operate in the war-torn country. The company has received 2.3 billion dollars of Iraqi reconstruction funds and U.S. taxpayer money, but is leaving without completing most of the tasks it set out to.
On every level of infrastructure measurable, the situation in Iraq is worse now than under the rule of Saddam Hussein. That includes the 12 years of economic sanctions since the first Gulf War in 1991, a period that former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq Dennis Halliday described as "genocidal" for Iraqis.
The average household in Iraq now gets two hours of electricity a day. There is 70 percent unemployment, 68 percent of Iraqis have no access to safe drinking water, and only 19 percent have sewage access. Not even oil production has matched pre-invasion levels.
The security situation is hellish, with a recent study published in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet estimating 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq as a result of the invasion and occupation.
The group Medact recently said that easily treatable conditions such as diarrhoea and respiratory illness are causing 70 percent of all child deaths, and that "of the 180 health clinics the U.S. hoped to build by the end of 2005, only four have been completed -- and none opened."
A proposed 200 million dollar project to build 142 primary care centres ran out of cash after building just 20 clinics, a performance that the World Health Organisation described as "shocking."
Iraqis are complaining louder now than under the sanctions. Lack of electricity has led to increasing demand for gasoline to run generators. And gasoline is among the most scarce commodities in this oil-rich country.
"We inherited an exhausted electricity system in generating stations and distributing nets, but we were able to supply 50 percent of consumer demand during heavy load periods, and more than that during ordinary days," an engineer with the Ministry of Electricity told IPS.
"The situation now is much worse and it seems not to be improving despite the huge contracts signed with American companies. It is strange how billions of dollars spent on electricity brought no improvement whatsoever, but in fact worsened the situation."
The engineer said "we in the ministry have not received any real equipment for our senior stations, and the small transformers for the distributing nets were of very low standard."
Bechtel's contract included reconstruction of water treatment systems, electricity plants, sewage systems, airports and roads.
Two former Iraqi ministers of electricity were charged with corruption by the Iraqi Commission of Integrity set up under the occupation. One of them, Ayham al-Samarraii, was sentenced to jail but was taken away by his U.S. security guards. He insisted that it was not he who looted the ministry's money.
Managers at water departments all over Iraq say that the only repairs they managed were through UN offices and humanitarian aid organisations. The ministry provided them with very little chlorine for water treatment. New projects were no more than simple maintenance moves that did little to halt collapsing infrastructure.
Bechtel was among the first companies, along with Halliburton, where U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney once worked, to have received fixed-fee contracts drawn to guarantee profit.
Ahmed al-Ani who works with a major Iraqi construction contracting company says the model Bechtel adopted was certain to fail.
"They charged huge sums of money for the contracts they signed, then they sold them to smaller companies who resold them again to small inexperienced Iraqi contractors," Ani told IPS. "These inexperienced contractors then had to execute the works badly because of the very low prices they get, and the lack of experience."
Some Iraqi political analysts, rather optimistically, look at Bechtel's departure from a different angle.
"I see the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq," Maki al-Nazzal told IPS. "It started with Bechtel and Haliburton's propaganda, and might end with their escape from the field. They came with Bremer and introduced themselves as heroes and saviours who would bring prosperity to Iraq, but all they did was market U.S. propaganda."
U.S. President George W. Bush told reporters on a visit to Iraq last June: "You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered. You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on behalf of the Iraqi people."
By his standards, the position in Iraq is now much worse.
Posted by Dahr_Jamail at November 10, 2006 08:15 AM
The Secret World of Robert Gates By Robert Parry
Robert Gates, George W. Bush’s choice to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, is a trusted figure within the Bush Family’s inner circle, but there are lingering questions about whether Gates is a trustworthy public official.
The 63-year-old Gates has long faced accusations of collaborating with Islamic extremists in Iran, arming Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq, and politicizing U.S. intelligence to conform with the desires of policymakers – three key areas that relate to his future job.
Gates skated past some of these controversies during his 1991 confirmation hearings to be CIA director – and the current Bush administration is seeking to slip Gates through the congressional approval process again, this time by pressing for a quick confirmation by the end of the year, before the new Democratic-controlled Senate is seated.
If Bush’s timetable is met, there will be no time for a serious investigation into Gates’s past.
Fifteen years ago, Gates got a similar pass when leading Democrats agreed to put “bipartisanship” ahead of careful oversight when Gates was nominated for the CIA job by President George H.W. Bush.
In 1991, despite doubts about Gates’s honesty over Iran-Contra and other scandals, the career intelligence officer brushed aside accusations that he played secret roles in arming both sides of the Iran-Iraq War. Since then, however, documents have surfaced that raise new questions about Gates’s sweeping denials.
For instance, the Russian government sent an intelligence report to a House investigative task force in early 1993 stating that Gates participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials in 1980 to delay release of 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran, a move to benefit the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
“R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part” in a meeting in Paris in October 1980, according to the Russian report, which meshed with information from witnesses who have alleged Gates’s involvement in the Iranian gambit.
Once in office, the Reagan administration did permit weapons to flow to Iran via Israel. One of the planes carrying an arms shipment was shot down over the Soviet Union on July 18, 1981, after straying off course, but the incident drew little attention at the time.
The arms flow continued, on and off, until 1986 when the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal broke. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege. For text of the Russian report, click here. To view the actual U.S. embassy cable that includes the Russian report, click here.]
Iraqgate Scandal
Gates also was implicated in a secret operation to funnel military assistance to Iraq in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration played off the two countries battling each other in the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War.
Middle Eastern witnesses alleged that Gates worked on the secret Iraqi initiative, which included Saddam Hussein’s procurement of cluster bombs and chemicals used to produce chemical weapons for the war against Iran.
Gates denied those Iran-Iraq accusations in 1991 and the Senate Intelligence Committee – then headed by Gates’s personal friend, Sen. David Boren, D-Oklahoma – failed to fully check out the claims before recommending Gates for confirmation.
However, four years later – in early January 1995 – Howard Teicher, one of Reagan’s National Security Council officials, added more details about Gates’s alleged role in the Iraq shipments.
In a sworn affidavit submitted in a Florida criminal case, Teicher stated that the covert arming of Iraq dated back to spring 1982 when Iran had gained the upper hand in the war, leading President Reagan to authorize a U.S. tilt toward Saddam Hussein.
The effort to arm the Iraqis was “spearheaded” by CIA Director William Casey and involved his deputy, Robert Gates, according to Teicher’s affidavit. “The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.
Ironically, that same pro-Iraq initiative involved Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan’s special emissary to the Middle East. An infamous photograph from 1983 shows a smiling Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein.
Teicher described Gates’s role as far more substantive than Rumsfeld’s. “Under CIA Director [William] Casey and Deputy Director Gates, the CIA authorized, approved and assisted [Chilean arms dealer Carlos] Cardoen in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other munitions to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.
Like the Russian report, the Teicher affidavit has never been never seriously examined. After Teicher submitted it to a federal court in Miami, the affidavit was classified and then attacked by Clinton administration prosecutors. They saw Teicher’s account as disruptive to their prosecution of a private company, Teledyne Industries, and one of its salesmen, Ed Johnson.
But the questions about Gates’s participation in dubious schemes involving hotspots such as Iran and Iraq are relevant again today because they reflect on Gates’s judgment, his honesty and his relationship with two countries at the top of U.S. military concerns.
About 140,000 U.S. troops are now bogged down in Iraq, 3 ½ years after President George W. Bush ordered an invasion to remove Saddam Hussein from power and eliminate his supposed WMD stockpiles. One reason the United States knew that Hussein once had those stockpiles was because the Reagan administration helped him procure the material needed for the WMD production in the 1980s.
The United States also is facing down Iran’s Islamic government over its nuclear ambitions. Though Bush has so far emphasized diplomatic pressure on Iran, he has pointedly left open the possibility of a military option.
Political Intelligence
Beyond the secret schemes to aid Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, Gates also stands accused of playing a central role in politicizing the CIA intelligence product, tailoring it to fit the interests of his political superiors, a legacy that some Gates critics say contributed to the botched CIA’s analysis of Iraqi WMD in 2002.
Before Gates’s rapid rise through the CIA’s ranks in the 1980s, the CIA’s tradition was to zealously protect the objectivity and scholarship of the intelligence. However, during the Reagan administration, that ethos collapsed.
At Gates’s confirmation hearings in 1991, former CIA analysts, including renowned Kremlinologist Mel Goodman, took the extraordinary step of coming out of the shadows to accuse Gates of politicizing the intelligence while he was chief of the analytical division and then deputy director.
The former intelligence officers said the ambitious Gates pressured the CIA’s analytical division to exaggerate the Soviet menace to fit the ideological perspective of the Reagan administration. Analysts who took a more nuanced view of Soviet power and Moscow’s behavior in the world faced pressure and career reprisals.
In 1981, Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl of the CIA’s Soviet office was the unfortunate analyst who was handed the assignment to prepare an analysis on the Soviet Union’s alleged support and direction of international terrorism.
Contrary to the desired White House take on Soviet-backed terrorism, Ekedahl said the consensus of the intelligence community was that the Soviets discouraged acts of terrorism by groups getting support from Moscow for practical, not moral, reasons.
“We agreed that the Soviets consistently stated, publicly and privately, that they considered international terrorist activities counterproductive and advised groups they supported not to use such tactics,” Ekedahl said. “We had hard evidence to support this conclusion.”
But Gates took the analysts to task, accusing them of trying to “stick our finger in the policy maker’s eye,” Ekedahl testified
Ekedahl said Gates, dissatisfied with the terrorism assessment, joined in rewriting the draft “to suggest greater Soviet support for terrorism and the text was altered by pulling up from the annex reports that overstated Soviet involvement.”
In his memoirs, From the Shadows, Gates denied politicizing the CIA’s intelligence product, though acknowledging that he was aware of Casey’s hostile reaction to the analysts’ disagreement with right-wing theories about Soviet-directed terrorism.
Soon, the hammer fell on the analysts who had prepared the Soviet-terrorism report. Ekedahl said many analysts were “replaced by people new to the subject who insisted on language emphasizing Soviet control of international terrorist activities.”
A donnybrook ensued inside the U.S. intelligence community. Some senior officials responsible for analysis pushed back against Casey’s dictates, warning that acts of politicization would undermine the integrity of the process and risk policy disasters in the future.
Working with Gates, Casey also undertook a series of institutional changes that gave him fuller control of the analytical process. Casey required that drafts needed clearance from his office before they could go out to other intelligence agencies.
Casey appointed Gates to be director of the Directorate of Intelligence [DI] and consolidated Gates’s control over analysis by also making him chairman of the National Intelligence Council, another key analytical body.
“Casey and Gates used various management tactics to get the line of intelligence they desired and to suppress unwanted intelligence,” Ekedahl said.
Career Reprisals
With Gates using top-down management techniques, CIA analysts sensitive to their career paths intuitively grasped that they could rarely go wrong by backing the “company line” and presenting the worst-case scenario about Soviet capabilities and intentions, Ekedahl and other CIA analysts said.
Largely outside public view, the CIA’s proud Soviet analytical office underwent a purge of its most senior people. “Nearly every senior analyst on Soviet foreign policy eventually left the Office of Soviet Analysis,” Goodman said.
Gates made clear he intended to shake up the DI’s culture, demanding greater responsiveness to the needs of the White House and other policymakers.
In a speech to the DI’s analysts and managers on Jan. 7, 1982, Gates berated the division for producing shoddy analysis that administration officials didn’t find helpful.
Gates unveiled an 11-point management plan to whip the DI into shape. His plan included rotating division chiefs through one-year stints in policy agencies and requiring CIA analysts to “refresh their substantive knowledge and broaden their perspective” by taking courses at Washington-area think tanks and universities.
Gates declared that a new Production Evaluation Staff would aggressively review their analytical products and serve as his “junkyard dog.”
Gates’s message was that the DI, which had long operated as an “ivory tower” for academically oriented analysts committed to an ethos of objectivity, would take on more of a corporate culture with a product designed to fit the needs of those up the ladder both inside and outside the CIA.
“It was a kind of chilling speech,” recalled Peter Dickson, an analyst who concentrated on proliferation issues. “One of the things he wanted to do, he was going to shake up the DI. He was going to read every paper that came out. What that did was that everybody between the analyst and him had to get involved in the paper to a greater extent because their careers were going to be at stake.”
A chief Casey-Gates tactic for exerting tighter control over the analysis was to express concern about “the editorial process,” Dickson said.
“You can jerk people around in the editorial process and hide behind your editorial mandate to intimidate people,” Dickson said.
Gates soon was salting the analytical division with his allies, a group of managers who became known as the “Gates clones.” Some of those who rose with Gates were David Cohen, David Carey, George Kolt, Jim Lynch, Winston Wiley, John Gannon and John McLaughlin.
Though Dickson’s area of expertise – nuclear proliferation – was on the fringes of the Reagan-Bush primary concerns, it ended up getting him into trouble anyway. In 1983, he clashed with his superiors over his conclusion that the Soviet Union was more committed to controlling proliferation of nuclear weapons than the administration wanted to hear.
When Dickson stood by his evidence, he soon found himself facing accusations about his psychological fitness and other pressures that eventually caused him to leave the CIA.
Dickson also was among the analysts who raised alarms about Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, another sore point because the Reagan-Bush administration wanted Pakistan’s assistance in funneling weapons to Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
One of the effects from the exaggerated intelligence about Soviet power and intentions was to make other potential risks – such as allowing development of a nuclear bomb in the Islamic world or training Islamic fundamentalists in techniques of sabotage – pale in comparison.
While worst-case scenarios were in order for the Soviet Union and other communist enemies, best-case scenarios were the order of the day for Reagan-Bush allies, including Osama bin Laden and other Arab extremists rushing to Afghanistan to wage a holy war against European invaders, in this case, the Russians.
As for the Pakistani drive to get a nuclear bomb, the Reagan-Bush administration turned to word games to avoid triggering anti-proliferation penalties that otherwise would be imposed on Pakistan.
“There was a distinction made to say that the possession of the device is not the same as developing it,” Dickson told me. “They got into the argument that they don’t quite possess it yet because they haven’t turned the last screw into the warhead.”
Finally, the intelligence on the Pakistan Bomb grew too strong to continue denying the reality. But the delay in confronting Pakistan ultimately allowed the Muslim government in Islamabad to produce nuclear weapons. Pakistani scientists also shared their know-how with “rogue” states, such as North Korea and Libya.
“The politicization that took place during the Casey-Gates era is directly responsible for the CIA’s loss of its ethical compass and the erosion of its credibility,” Goodman told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1991. “The fact that the CIA missed the most important historical development in its history – the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself – is due in large measure to the culture and process that Gates established in his directorate.”
Confirmation Battle
To push through Gates’s nomination to be CIA director in 1991, the elder George Bush lined up solid Republican backing for Gates and enough accommodating Democrats – particularly Sen. Boren, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman.
In his memoirs, Gates credited his friend, Boren, for clearing away any obstacles. “David took it as a personal challenge to get me confirmed,” Gates wrote.
Part of running interference for Gates included rejecting the testimony of witnesses who implicated Gates in scandals beginning with the alleged back-channel negotiations with Iran in 1980 through the arming of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s.
Boren’s Intelligence Committee brushed aside two witnesses connecting Gates to the alleged schemes, former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe and Iranian businessman Richard Babayan. Both offered detailed accounts about Gates’s alleged connections to the schemes.
Ben-Menashe, who worked for Israeli military intelligence from 1977-87, first fingered Gates as an operative in the secret Iraq arms pipeline in August 1990 during an interview that I conducted with him for PBS Frontline.
At the time, Ben-Menashe was in jail in New York on charges of trying to sell cargo planes to Iran (charges which were later dismissed). When the interview took place, Gates was in a relatively obscure position, as deputy national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush and not yet a candidate for the top CIA job.
In that interview and later under oath to Congress, Ben-Menashe said Gates joined in meetings between Republicans and senior Iranians in October 1980. Ben-Menashe said he also arranged Gates’s personal help in bringing a suitcase full of cash into Miami in early 1981 to pay off some of the participants in the hostage gambit.
Ben-Menashe also placed Gates in a 1986 meeting with Chilean arms manufacturer Cardoen, who allegedly was supplying cluster bombs and chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein’s army. Babayan, an Iranian exile working with Iraq, also connected Gates to the Iraqi supply lines and to Cardoen.
Gates has steadfastly denied involvement in either the Iran-hostage caper or the Iraqgate arms deals.
“I was accused on television and in the print media by people I had never spoken to or met of selling weapons to Iraq, or walking through Miami airport with suitcases full of cash, of being with Bush in Paris in October 1980 to meet with Iranians, and on and on,” Gates wrote in his memoirs. “The allegations of meetings with me around the world were easily disproved for the committee by my travel records, calendars, and countless witnesses.”
But none of Gates’s supposedly supportive evidence was ever made public by either the Senate Intelligence Committee or the later inquiries into either the Iran hostage initiative or Iraqgate.
Not one of Gates’s “countless witnesses” who could vouch for Gates’s whereabouts was identified. Though Boren pledged publicly to have his investigators question Babayan, they never did.
Perhaps most galling for those of us who tried to assess Ben-Menashe’s credibility was the Intelligence Committee’s failure to test Ben-Menashe’s claim that he met with Gates in Paramus, New Jersey, on the afternoon of April 20, 1989.
The date was pinned down by the fact that Ben-Menashe had been under Customs surveillance in the morning. So it was a perfect test for whether Ben-Menashe – or Gates – was lying.
When I first asked about this claim, congressional investigators told me that Gates had a perfect alibi for that day. They said Gates had been with Senator Boren at a speech in Oklahoma. But when we checked that out, we discovered that Gates’s Oklahoma speech had been on April 19, a day earlier. Gates also had not been with Boren and had returned to Washington by that evening.
So where was Gates the next day? Could he have taken a quick trip to northern New Jersey? Since senior White House national security advisers keep detailed notes on their daily meetings, it should have been easy for Boren’s investigators to interview someone who could vouch for Gates’s whereabouts on the afternoon of April 20.
But the committee chose not to nail down an alibi for Gates. The committee said further investigation wasn’t needed because Gates denied going to New Jersey and his personal calendar made no reference to the trip.
But the investigators couldn’t tell me where Gates was that afternoon or with whom he may have met. Essentially, the alibi came down to Gates’s word.
Ironically, Boren’s key aide who helped limit the investigation of Gates was George Tenet, whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering on Gates’s behalf won the personal appreciation of the senior George Bush. Tenet later became President Bill Clinton’s last CIA director and was kept on in 2001 by the younger George Bush partly on his father’s advice.
Now, as the Bush Family grapples with the disaster in Iraq, it is turning to an even more trusted hand to run the Defense Department. The appointment of Robert Gates suggests that the Bush Family is circling the wagons to save the embattled presidency of George W. Bush.
To determine whether Gates can be counted on to do what’s in the interest of the larger American public is another question altogether.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
The 63-year-old Gates has long faced accusations of collaborating with Islamic extremists in Iran, arming Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq, and politicizing U.S. intelligence to conform with the desires of policymakers – three key areas that relate to his future job.
Gates skated past some of these controversies during his 1991 confirmation hearings to be CIA director – and the current Bush administration is seeking to slip Gates through the congressional approval process again, this time by pressing for a quick confirmation by the end of the year, before the new Democratic-controlled Senate is seated.
If Bush’s timetable is met, there will be no time for a serious investigation into Gates’s past.
Fifteen years ago, Gates got a similar pass when leading Democrats agreed to put “bipartisanship” ahead of careful oversight when Gates was nominated for the CIA job by President George H.W. Bush.
In 1991, despite doubts about Gates’s honesty over Iran-Contra and other scandals, the career intelligence officer brushed aside accusations that he played secret roles in arming both sides of the Iran-Iraq War. Since then, however, documents have surfaced that raise new questions about Gates’s sweeping denials.
For instance, the Russian government sent an intelligence report to a House investigative task force in early 1993 stating that Gates participated in secret contacts with Iranian officials in 1980 to delay release of 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran, a move to benefit the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
“R[obert] Gates, at that time a staffer of the National Security Council in the administration of Jimmy Carter, and former CIA Director George Bush also took part” in a meeting in Paris in October 1980, according to the Russian report, which meshed with information from witnesses who have alleged Gates’s involvement in the Iranian gambit.
Once in office, the Reagan administration did permit weapons to flow to Iran via Israel. One of the planes carrying an arms shipment was shot down over the Soviet Union on July 18, 1981, after straying off course, but the incident drew little attention at the time.
The arms flow continued, on and off, until 1986 when the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal broke. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege. For text of the Russian report, click here. To view the actual U.S. embassy cable that includes the Russian report, click here.]
Iraqgate Scandal
Gates also was implicated in a secret operation to funnel military assistance to Iraq in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration played off the two countries battling each other in the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War.
Middle Eastern witnesses alleged that Gates worked on the secret Iraqi initiative, which included Saddam Hussein’s procurement of cluster bombs and chemicals used to produce chemical weapons for the war against Iran.
Gates denied those Iran-Iraq accusations in 1991 and the Senate Intelligence Committee – then headed by Gates’s personal friend, Sen. David Boren, D-Oklahoma – failed to fully check out the claims before recommending Gates for confirmation.
However, four years later – in early January 1995 – Howard Teicher, one of Reagan’s National Security Council officials, added more details about Gates’s alleged role in the Iraq shipments.
In a sworn affidavit submitted in a Florida criminal case, Teicher stated that the covert arming of Iraq dated back to spring 1982 when Iran had gained the upper hand in the war, leading President Reagan to authorize a U.S. tilt toward Saddam Hussein.
The effort to arm the Iraqis was “spearheaded” by CIA Director William Casey and involved his deputy, Robert Gates, according to Teicher’s affidavit. “The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.
Ironically, that same pro-Iraq initiative involved Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan’s special emissary to the Middle East. An infamous photograph from 1983 shows a smiling Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein.
Teicher described Gates’s role as far more substantive than Rumsfeld’s. “Under CIA Director [William] Casey and Deputy Director Gates, the CIA authorized, approved and assisted [Chilean arms dealer Carlos] Cardoen in the manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other munitions to Iraq,” Teicher wrote.
Like the Russian report, the Teicher affidavit has never been never seriously examined. After Teicher submitted it to a federal court in Miami, the affidavit was classified and then attacked by Clinton administration prosecutors. They saw Teicher’s account as disruptive to their prosecution of a private company, Teledyne Industries, and one of its salesmen, Ed Johnson.
But the questions about Gates’s participation in dubious schemes involving hotspots such as Iran and Iraq are relevant again today because they reflect on Gates’s judgment, his honesty and his relationship with two countries at the top of U.S. military concerns.
About 140,000 U.S. troops are now bogged down in Iraq, 3 ½ years after President George W. Bush ordered an invasion to remove Saddam Hussein from power and eliminate his supposed WMD stockpiles. One reason the United States knew that Hussein once had those stockpiles was because the Reagan administration helped him procure the material needed for the WMD production in the 1980s.
The United States also is facing down Iran’s Islamic government over its nuclear ambitions. Though Bush has so far emphasized diplomatic pressure on Iran, he has pointedly left open the possibility of a military option.
Political Intelligence
Beyond the secret schemes to aid Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, Gates also stands accused of playing a central role in politicizing the CIA intelligence product, tailoring it to fit the interests of his political superiors, a legacy that some Gates critics say contributed to the botched CIA’s analysis of Iraqi WMD in 2002.
Before Gates’s rapid rise through the CIA’s ranks in the 1980s, the CIA’s tradition was to zealously protect the objectivity and scholarship of the intelligence. However, during the Reagan administration, that ethos collapsed.
At Gates’s confirmation hearings in 1991, former CIA analysts, including renowned Kremlinologist Mel Goodman, took the extraordinary step of coming out of the shadows to accuse Gates of politicizing the intelligence while he was chief of the analytical division and then deputy director.
The former intelligence officers said the ambitious Gates pressured the CIA’s analytical division to exaggerate the Soviet menace to fit the ideological perspective of the Reagan administration. Analysts who took a more nuanced view of Soviet power and Moscow’s behavior in the world faced pressure and career reprisals.
In 1981, Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl of the CIA’s Soviet office was the unfortunate analyst who was handed the assignment to prepare an analysis on the Soviet Union’s alleged support and direction of international terrorism.
Contrary to the desired White House take on Soviet-backed terrorism, Ekedahl said the consensus of the intelligence community was that the Soviets discouraged acts of terrorism by groups getting support from Moscow for practical, not moral, reasons.
“We agreed that the Soviets consistently stated, publicly and privately, that they considered international terrorist activities counterproductive and advised groups they supported not to use such tactics,” Ekedahl said. “We had hard evidence to support this conclusion.”
But Gates took the analysts to task, accusing them of trying to “stick our finger in the policy maker’s eye,” Ekedahl testified
Ekedahl said Gates, dissatisfied with the terrorism assessment, joined in rewriting the draft “to suggest greater Soviet support for terrorism and the text was altered by pulling up from the annex reports that overstated Soviet involvement.”
In his memoirs, From the Shadows, Gates denied politicizing the CIA’s intelligence product, though acknowledging that he was aware of Casey’s hostile reaction to the analysts’ disagreement with right-wing theories about Soviet-directed terrorism.
Soon, the hammer fell on the analysts who had prepared the Soviet-terrorism report. Ekedahl said many analysts were “replaced by people new to the subject who insisted on language emphasizing Soviet control of international terrorist activities.”
A donnybrook ensued inside the U.S. intelligence community. Some senior officials responsible for analysis pushed back against Casey’s dictates, warning that acts of politicization would undermine the integrity of the process and risk policy disasters in the future.
Working with Gates, Casey also undertook a series of institutional changes that gave him fuller control of the analytical process. Casey required that drafts needed clearance from his office before they could go out to other intelligence agencies.
Casey appointed Gates to be director of the Directorate of Intelligence [DI] and consolidated Gates’s control over analysis by also making him chairman of the National Intelligence Council, another key analytical body.
“Casey and Gates used various management tactics to get the line of intelligence they desired and to suppress unwanted intelligence,” Ekedahl said.
Career Reprisals
With Gates using top-down management techniques, CIA analysts sensitive to their career paths intuitively grasped that they could rarely go wrong by backing the “company line” and presenting the worst-case scenario about Soviet capabilities and intentions, Ekedahl and other CIA analysts said.
Largely outside public view, the CIA’s proud Soviet analytical office underwent a purge of its most senior people. “Nearly every senior analyst on Soviet foreign policy eventually left the Office of Soviet Analysis,” Goodman said.
Gates made clear he intended to shake up the DI’s culture, demanding greater responsiveness to the needs of the White House and other policymakers.
In a speech to the DI’s analysts and managers on Jan. 7, 1982, Gates berated the division for producing shoddy analysis that administration officials didn’t find helpful.
Gates unveiled an 11-point management plan to whip the DI into shape. His plan included rotating division chiefs through one-year stints in policy agencies and requiring CIA analysts to “refresh their substantive knowledge and broaden their perspective” by taking courses at Washington-area think tanks and universities.
Gates declared that a new Production Evaluation Staff would aggressively review their analytical products and serve as his “junkyard dog.”
Gates’s message was that the DI, which had long operated as an “ivory tower” for academically oriented analysts committed to an ethos of objectivity, would take on more of a corporate culture with a product designed to fit the needs of those up the ladder both inside and outside the CIA.
“It was a kind of chilling speech,” recalled Peter Dickson, an analyst who concentrated on proliferation issues. “One of the things he wanted to do, he was going to shake up the DI. He was going to read every paper that came out. What that did was that everybody between the analyst and him had to get involved in the paper to a greater extent because their careers were going to be at stake.”
A chief Casey-Gates tactic for exerting tighter control over the analysis was to express concern about “the editorial process,” Dickson said.
“You can jerk people around in the editorial process and hide behind your editorial mandate to intimidate people,” Dickson said.
Gates soon was salting the analytical division with his allies, a group of managers who became known as the “Gates clones.” Some of those who rose with Gates were David Cohen, David Carey, George Kolt, Jim Lynch, Winston Wiley, John Gannon and John McLaughlin.
Though Dickson’s area of expertise – nuclear proliferation – was on the fringes of the Reagan-Bush primary concerns, it ended up getting him into trouble anyway. In 1983, he clashed with his superiors over his conclusion that the Soviet Union was more committed to controlling proliferation of nuclear weapons than the administration wanted to hear.
When Dickson stood by his evidence, he soon found himself facing accusations about his psychological fitness and other pressures that eventually caused him to leave the CIA.
Dickson also was among the analysts who raised alarms about Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, another sore point because the Reagan-Bush administration wanted Pakistan’s assistance in funneling weapons to Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
One of the effects from the exaggerated intelligence about Soviet power and intentions was to make other potential risks – such as allowing development of a nuclear bomb in the Islamic world or training Islamic fundamentalists in techniques of sabotage – pale in comparison.
While worst-case scenarios were in order for the Soviet Union and other communist enemies, best-case scenarios were the order of the day for Reagan-Bush allies, including Osama bin Laden and other Arab extremists rushing to Afghanistan to wage a holy war against European invaders, in this case, the Russians.
As for the Pakistani drive to get a nuclear bomb, the Reagan-Bush administration turned to word games to avoid triggering anti-proliferation penalties that otherwise would be imposed on Pakistan.
“There was a distinction made to say that the possession of the device is not the same as developing it,” Dickson told me. “They got into the argument that they don’t quite possess it yet because they haven’t turned the last screw into the warhead.”
Finally, the intelligence on the Pakistan Bomb grew too strong to continue denying the reality. But the delay in confronting Pakistan ultimately allowed the Muslim government in Islamabad to produce nuclear weapons. Pakistani scientists also shared their know-how with “rogue” states, such as North Korea and Libya.
“The politicization that took place during the Casey-Gates era is directly responsible for the CIA’s loss of its ethical compass and the erosion of its credibility,” Goodman told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1991. “The fact that the CIA missed the most important historical development in its history – the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself – is due in large measure to the culture and process that Gates established in his directorate.”
Confirmation Battle
To push through Gates’s nomination to be CIA director in 1991, the elder George Bush lined up solid Republican backing for Gates and enough accommodating Democrats – particularly Sen. Boren, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman.
In his memoirs, Gates credited his friend, Boren, for clearing away any obstacles. “David took it as a personal challenge to get me confirmed,” Gates wrote.
Part of running interference for Gates included rejecting the testimony of witnesses who implicated Gates in scandals beginning with the alleged back-channel negotiations with Iran in 1980 through the arming of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s.
Boren’s Intelligence Committee brushed aside two witnesses connecting Gates to the alleged schemes, former Israeli intelligence official Ari Ben-Menashe and Iranian businessman Richard Babayan. Both offered detailed accounts about Gates’s alleged connections to the schemes.
Ben-Menashe, who worked for Israeli military intelligence from 1977-87, first fingered Gates as an operative in the secret Iraq arms pipeline in August 1990 during an interview that I conducted with him for PBS Frontline.
At the time, Ben-Menashe was in jail in New York on charges of trying to sell cargo planes to Iran (charges which were later dismissed). When the interview took place, Gates was in a relatively obscure position, as deputy national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush and not yet a candidate for the top CIA job.
In that interview and later under oath to Congress, Ben-Menashe said Gates joined in meetings between Republicans and senior Iranians in October 1980. Ben-Menashe said he also arranged Gates’s personal help in bringing a suitcase full of cash into Miami in early 1981 to pay off some of the participants in the hostage gambit.
Ben-Menashe also placed Gates in a 1986 meeting with Chilean arms manufacturer Cardoen, who allegedly was supplying cluster bombs and chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein’s army. Babayan, an Iranian exile working with Iraq, also connected Gates to the Iraqi supply lines and to Cardoen.
Gates has steadfastly denied involvement in either the Iran-hostage caper or the Iraqgate arms deals.
“I was accused on television and in the print media by people I had never spoken to or met of selling weapons to Iraq, or walking through Miami airport with suitcases full of cash, of being with Bush in Paris in October 1980 to meet with Iranians, and on and on,” Gates wrote in his memoirs. “The allegations of meetings with me around the world were easily disproved for the committee by my travel records, calendars, and countless witnesses.”
But none of Gates’s supposedly supportive evidence was ever made public by either the Senate Intelligence Committee or the later inquiries into either the Iran hostage initiative or Iraqgate.
Not one of Gates’s “countless witnesses” who could vouch for Gates’s whereabouts was identified. Though Boren pledged publicly to have his investigators question Babayan, they never did.
Perhaps most galling for those of us who tried to assess Ben-Menashe’s credibility was the Intelligence Committee’s failure to test Ben-Menashe’s claim that he met with Gates in Paramus, New Jersey, on the afternoon of April 20, 1989.
The date was pinned down by the fact that Ben-Menashe had been under Customs surveillance in the morning. So it was a perfect test for whether Ben-Menashe – or Gates – was lying.
When I first asked about this claim, congressional investigators told me that Gates had a perfect alibi for that day. They said Gates had been with Senator Boren at a speech in Oklahoma. But when we checked that out, we discovered that Gates’s Oklahoma speech had been on April 19, a day earlier. Gates also had not been with Boren and had returned to Washington by that evening.
So where was Gates the next day? Could he have taken a quick trip to northern New Jersey? Since senior White House national security advisers keep detailed notes on their daily meetings, it should have been easy for Boren’s investigators to interview someone who could vouch for Gates’s whereabouts on the afternoon of April 20.
But the committee chose not to nail down an alibi for Gates. The committee said further investigation wasn’t needed because Gates denied going to New Jersey and his personal calendar made no reference to the trip.
But the investigators couldn’t tell me where Gates was that afternoon or with whom he may have met. Essentially, the alibi came down to Gates’s word.
Ironically, Boren’s key aide who helped limit the investigation of Gates was George Tenet, whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering on Gates’s behalf won the personal appreciation of the senior George Bush. Tenet later became President Bill Clinton’s last CIA director and was kept on in 2001 by the younger George Bush partly on his father’s advice.
Now, as the Bush Family grapples with the disaster in Iraq, it is turning to an even more trusted hand to run the Defense Department. The appointment of Robert Gates suggests that the Bush Family is circling the wagons to save the embattled presidency of George W. Bush.
To determine whether Gates can be counted on to do what’s in the interest of the larger American public is another question altogether.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Oaxaca (like the tlacuache) Fights Back
Laura Carlsen, IRC | November 8, 2006
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
In regional lore, Oaxacans have a reputation for being like the tlacuache. A recurring figure in Mexican mythology, the tlacuache plays dead when cornered. But woe to the enemy who thinks the battle is over. The small but fierce creature merely awaits a more propitious moment to fight back.
The Oaxacan protest movement burns slow, but deep. Oaxacan teachers, who mobilized for a pay raise last May, consciously built on years of protest against social inequality in their state. On June 14, the state government goaded the Oaxacan tlacuachewhen it attempted to evict protesting teachers from Oaxaca's central plaza. Oaxacans responded by forming the broad-based Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). The federal government confronted the growing movement on October 28 when it sent thousands of federal police to occupy the city. The murders, wounding, and disappearance of the protestors have only deepened the resolve of the movement as a whole.
Although the stage was set for confrontation, the movement continued to insist on non-violence. They lay down in front of advancing tanks and distributed flowers to riot-geared cops. On November 2, a crucial battle took place when the police attempted to retake the university. Inside the university, the radio station that has been the backbone of the protest organizing over the past five months was under siege the entire day. Radio APPO did not cease to broadcast and the people did not cease to defend it, despite the grossly uneven odds against them.
“Our eyes are burning with tear gas, but at least now we can see the government for what it really is,” a young woman commented over the air in a voice filled with urgency and determination. “We're not budging.”
People all over the world heard her. Radio APPO streamed through the computers of listeners who followed the battle for the university in blow-by-blow accounts. They instantly activated networks to plan their own protests. Within days, demonstrators gathered in front of Mexican consulates and embassies in the United States and Europe, calling for an end to police repression of the movement. People whose names are well known throughout the world wrote and published letters, and people whose names have been printed only in phone books signed petitions. In a small town in Italy, hundreds of young people gathered to discuss North-South cooperation and declare their solidarity with Oaxaca, and in New York several protesters were arrested in front of the Mexican consulate. The Zapatista Other Campaign mobilized a binational roadblock on the Mexico-U.S. border. The list of actions worldwide goes on and on.
Both houses of the Mexican congress and the secretary of the interior, who is charged with domestic policy, have called for Oaxacan Governor Ulises Ruiz to step down. Despite the breakdown of governance in the state, he has refused saying it is his duty to hold on to his job. On November 5, the movement mobilized tens of thousands of people in a march through Oaxaca. In the pre-dawn hours of November 6, bombs exploded in the offices of the electoral tribunal, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and an international bank. No one was killed or injured, but the tension rose several notches. Several guerrilla groups claimed responsibility for the acts, demanding the resignation of the governor, freedom for political prisoners held following police repression in the town of Atenco, and investigation of the charges of electoral fraud.
The APPO immediately condemned the bombings and repeated that it has no relations with guerrilla groups. It has continued to try to negotiate a peaceful settlement of its demands. In the turbid political atmosphere following Mexico's presidential elections on July 2, Oaxaca's conflict has now catalyzed a series of events that threaten Mexico's stability.
Why Oaxaca?
The mountains of Oaxaca became the refuge of pre-Columbian civilizations that were never fully conquered. The history of resistance and persistence that developed there permitted the survival of cultures that bucked a colonizing mentality and rejected tacitly or explicitly the wholesale imposition of colonial political systems. At the same time, to subjugate the rebels required some of the nation's most brutal forms of repression. Many of these remain fundamentally intact to this day. The governor, whose resignation has become the principal demand of the current Oaxacan insurrection, has inherited the mantle of this centuries-old tradition of repression.
Oaxaca is a land of many peoples. The state encompasses 16 languages within its borders and has the nation's largest number of municipalities (570), in large part due to the determination to preserve and strengthen local self-government. Even in Oaxaca City, where fighting between police and protesters has transformed the urban landscape, diversity precludes any easy characterization. Mixtecos converge with Martians (the local name for the city's large population of foreign artists, writers, pensioners, and NGO workers), tourists with beggars, the rich with the poor.
This diversity, which in another context could fragment a social movement, has become the wealth and collective strength of Mexico's most important social justice rebellion in recent years. Oaxacan teachers have drawn on over 26 years of experience in the democratic teachers' movement. Section 22, the group of Oaxacan teachers organized in the National Education Workers Union (SNTE by its Spanish initials), has long been a stronghold of the democratic faction of the union. For years its leaders have been elected from this dissident faction and have become leaders in Oaxaca's social movements beyond the union as well.
Oaxaca's rebellion also has roots in the battles of the indigenous communities for autonomy and, since the 1970s, for the restoration of communitarian forms of self-government, collective work, and identity. Added to the mix has been the anger of a new generation of high school and university students sick of getting short shrift from governments impoverished by structural adjustment and corruption. And as a final ingredient in a recipe for rebellion, citizens sensitized to the injustice expressed in daily life rose up against a disputed gubernatorial election that seemed to doom their society to more of the same or worse.
Leading Edge
The significance of the Oaxacan movement to Mexico is obvious. It is the first challenge to a federal government with little legitimacy or credibility, elected amid charges of fraud last July. Although Felipe Calderon takes office on December 1, the rules of Mexican politics dictate that all major, and especially very visible, decisions like the repression of the Oaxacan movement must at least be approved by him. The government's decision to send in federal police is in part based on a desire not to pass on a problem to a weak president who lacks the political capacity to resolve it.
The frustrations that led to the formation of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) exist throughout the country. Elections that fail to reflect the popular will, inequalities that sunder communities, brutality and corruption that flourish with impunity—no region is immune from the kind of social unrest that gave birth to the Oaxacan movement. Many Mexicans openly celebrate each victory of the Oaxacans, and each day they maintain the resistance. Knowing this, the government seeks to repress the movement without conceding political ground, so as not to provide a dangerous precedent in a system that relies on the complacency of the political and economic have-nots.
But why do other people care? Does Oaxaca have a meaning beyond an inspirational tale for those who aspire to a more just world?
If the movement for global justice were a territorial battle, Oaxaca would be a tiny point on a very large map, of little consequence except to the people involved. But symbolic battles, although very real for the combatants themselves, are the true terrain of the movement for global justice. They offer an opportunity, even when lost, to defeat the myths that uphold the system.
Oaxaca is the South of the South. It is the truth to the lie that Mexico has joined the First World by grabbing onto the coattails of the United States through the North American Free Trade Agreement. The failure of this integration strategy in Oaxaca and other southern states in Mexico was so obvious that even a recent World Bank report felt obliged to address the issue. Its conclusion—“the southern states did not benefit from NAFTA because they were not prepared to reap the benefits of free trade”—was foregone and surprised no one who has studied the Bank's blame-the-victim logic. If forced to do an evaluation of globalization in general, defenders of neoliberalism would no doubt castigate the entire global South for this supposed failure. Needless to say, it is of little consolation to the hungry, the displaced, the disenfranchised, and the discarded.
The Oaxacan rebellion is proof that for many people, even physical preservation can become secondary to fighting for a conviction. With only the raw material of their own lives in their hands, they have set out to mold a different future. Although demands today center on the governor's resignation and fair pay for teachers, the new forms of organization and consciousness created will endure long after this movement and become the seeds of future movements.
They will also be the seeds of popular rebellions in other places. The Oaxacan rebellion is a reminder that an evaluation of the consequences of free trade and globalization is indeed overdue — and that the World Bank has no right to be the evaluator. The people who have suffered the consequences should evaluate the system. Too often in the North, the reports of protest and rebellion around the world are seen as disparate battles or isolated complaints and not as part of a growing consensus that something is gravely wrong. Those who live in countries that do “reap the benefits of free trade” — not through “preparation” but through the design of the system — have a responsibility to get the message.
What could have been a local conflict has detonated a national confrontation and contributed to the revival of violent factions. The government's lack of political will has blocked real negotiations. It has failed to respond to Oaxaca's valid demands and open up talks on the reforms needed to assure Mexico's peace and stability. Instead, the country is now perilously close to the opposite.
Laura Carlsen is director of the IRC Americas Program in Mexico City, where she has worked as a writer and political analyst for the past two decades. The Americas Program is online at http://americas.irc-online.org/.
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
In regional lore, Oaxacans have a reputation for being like the tlacuache. A recurring figure in Mexican mythology, the tlacuache plays dead when cornered. But woe to the enemy who thinks the battle is over. The small but fierce creature merely awaits a more propitious moment to fight back.
The Oaxacan protest movement burns slow, but deep. Oaxacan teachers, who mobilized for a pay raise last May, consciously built on years of protest against social inequality in their state. On June 14, the state government goaded the Oaxacan tlacuachewhen it attempted to evict protesting teachers from Oaxaca's central plaza. Oaxacans responded by forming the broad-based Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). The federal government confronted the growing movement on October 28 when it sent thousands of federal police to occupy the city. The murders, wounding, and disappearance of the protestors have only deepened the resolve of the movement as a whole.
Although the stage was set for confrontation, the movement continued to insist on non-violence. They lay down in front of advancing tanks and distributed flowers to riot-geared cops. On November 2, a crucial battle took place when the police attempted to retake the university. Inside the university, the radio station that has been the backbone of the protest organizing over the past five months was under siege the entire day. Radio APPO did not cease to broadcast and the people did not cease to defend it, despite the grossly uneven odds against them.
“Our eyes are burning with tear gas, but at least now we can see the government for what it really is,” a young woman commented over the air in a voice filled with urgency and determination. “We're not budging.”
People all over the world heard her. Radio APPO streamed through the computers of listeners who followed the battle for the university in blow-by-blow accounts. They instantly activated networks to plan their own protests. Within days, demonstrators gathered in front of Mexican consulates and embassies in the United States and Europe, calling for an end to police repression of the movement. People whose names are well known throughout the world wrote and published letters, and people whose names have been printed only in phone books signed petitions. In a small town in Italy, hundreds of young people gathered to discuss North-South cooperation and declare their solidarity with Oaxaca, and in New York several protesters were arrested in front of the Mexican consulate. The Zapatista Other Campaign mobilized a binational roadblock on the Mexico-U.S. border. The list of actions worldwide goes on and on.
Both houses of the Mexican congress and the secretary of the interior, who is charged with domestic policy, have called for Oaxacan Governor Ulises Ruiz to step down. Despite the breakdown of governance in the state, he has refused saying it is his duty to hold on to his job. On November 5, the movement mobilized tens of thousands of people in a march through Oaxaca. In the pre-dawn hours of November 6, bombs exploded in the offices of the electoral tribunal, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and an international bank. No one was killed or injured, but the tension rose several notches. Several guerrilla groups claimed responsibility for the acts, demanding the resignation of the governor, freedom for political prisoners held following police repression in the town of Atenco, and investigation of the charges of electoral fraud.
The APPO immediately condemned the bombings and repeated that it has no relations with guerrilla groups. It has continued to try to negotiate a peaceful settlement of its demands. In the turbid political atmosphere following Mexico's presidential elections on July 2, Oaxaca's conflict has now catalyzed a series of events that threaten Mexico's stability.
Why Oaxaca?
The mountains of Oaxaca became the refuge of pre-Columbian civilizations that were never fully conquered. The history of resistance and persistence that developed there permitted the survival of cultures that bucked a colonizing mentality and rejected tacitly or explicitly the wholesale imposition of colonial political systems. At the same time, to subjugate the rebels required some of the nation's most brutal forms of repression. Many of these remain fundamentally intact to this day. The governor, whose resignation has become the principal demand of the current Oaxacan insurrection, has inherited the mantle of this centuries-old tradition of repression.
Oaxaca is a land of many peoples. The state encompasses 16 languages within its borders and has the nation's largest number of municipalities (570), in large part due to the determination to preserve and strengthen local self-government. Even in Oaxaca City, where fighting between police and protesters has transformed the urban landscape, diversity precludes any easy characterization. Mixtecos converge with Martians (the local name for the city's large population of foreign artists, writers, pensioners, and NGO workers), tourists with beggars, the rich with the poor.
This diversity, which in another context could fragment a social movement, has become the wealth and collective strength of Mexico's most important social justice rebellion in recent years. Oaxacan teachers have drawn on over 26 years of experience in the democratic teachers' movement. Section 22, the group of Oaxacan teachers organized in the National Education Workers Union (SNTE by its Spanish initials), has long been a stronghold of the democratic faction of the union. For years its leaders have been elected from this dissident faction and have become leaders in Oaxaca's social movements beyond the union as well.
Oaxaca's rebellion also has roots in the battles of the indigenous communities for autonomy and, since the 1970s, for the restoration of communitarian forms of self-government, collective work, and identity. Added to the mix has been the anger of a new generation of high school and university students sick of getting short shrift from governments impoverished by structural adjustment and corruption. And as a final ingredient in a recipe for rebellion, citizens sensitized to the injustice expressed in daily life rose up against a disputed gubernatorial election that seemed to doom their society to more of the same or worse.
Leading Edge
The significance of the Oaxacan movement to Mexico is obvious. It is the first challenge to a federal government with little legitimacy or credibility, elected amid charges of fraud last July. Although Felipe Calderon takes office on December 1, the rules of Mexican politics dictate that all major, and especially very visible, decisions like the repression of the Oaxacan movement must at least be approved by him. The government's decision to send in federal police is in part based on a desire not to pass on a problem to a weak president who lacks the political capacity to resolve it.
The frustrations that led to the formation of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) exist throughout the country. Elections that fail to reflect the popular will, inequalities that sunder communities, brutality and corruption that flourish with impunity—no region is immune from the kind of social unrest that gave birth to the Oaxacan movement. Many Mexicans openly celebrate each victory of the Oaxacans, and each day they maintain the resistance. Knowing this, the government seeks to repress the movement without conceding political ground, so as not to provide a dangerous precedent in a system that relies on the complacency of the political and economic have-nots.
But why do other people care? Does Oaxaca have a meaning beyond an inspirational tale for those who aspire to a more just world?
If the movement for global justice were a territorial battle, Oaxaca would be a tiny point on a very large map, of little consequence except to the people involved. But symbolic battles, although very real for the combatants themselves, are the true terrain of the movement for global justice. They offer an opportunity, even when lost, to defeat the myths that uphold the system.
Oaxaca is the South of the South. It is the truth to the lie that Mexico has joined the First World by grabbing onto the coattails of the United States through the North American Free Trade Agreement. The failure of this integration strategy in Oaxaca and other southern states in Mexico was so obvious that even a recent World Bank report felt obliged to address the issue. Its conclusion—“the southern states did not benefit from NAFTA because they were not prepared to reap the benefits of free trade”—was foregone and surprised no one who has studied the Bank's blame-the-victim logic. If forced to do an evaluation of globalization in general, defenders of neoliberalism would no doubt castigate the entire global South for this supposed failure. Needless to say, it is of little consolation to the hungry, the displaced, the disenfranchised, and the discarded.
The Oaxacan rebellion is proof that for many people, even physical preservation can become secondary to fighting for a conviction. With only the raw material of their own lives in their hands, they have set out to mold a different future. Although demands today center on the governor's resignation and fair pay for teachers, the new forms of organization and consciousness created will endure long after this movement and become the seeds of future movements.
They will also be the seeds of popular rebellions in other places. The Oaxacan rebellion is a reminder that an evaluation of the consequences of free trade and globalization is indeed overdue — and that the World Bank has no right to be the evaluator. The people who have suffered the consequences should evaluate the system. Too often in the North, the reports of protest and rebellion around the world are seen as disparate battles or isolated complaints and not as part of a growing consensus that something is gravely wrong. Those who live in countries that do “reap the benefits of free trade” — not through “preparation” but through the design of the system — have a responsibility to get the message.
What could have been a local conflict has detonated a national confrontation and contributed to the revival of violent factions. The government's lack of political will has blocked real negotiations. It has failed to respond to Oaxaca's valid demands and open up talks on the reforms needed to assure Mexico's peace and stability. Instead, the country is now perilously close to the opposite.
Laura Carlsen is director of the IRC Americas Program in Mexico City, where she has worked as a writer and political analyst for the past two decades. The Americas Program is online at http://americas.irc-online.org/.
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