Mossad's (almost) forgotten journalist assassination victim, David Holden

Mossad's (almost) forgotten journalist victim

In the archives of the CIA can be found the smallest of news clippings with some of the most revealing information. Take one small clipping from the New Times "Overseas Bulletins," preceded by "Bee-bee-beep, Bee-bee-beep," on February 20, 1978.

The item concerns the professional assassination of the London Sunday Times' top foreign correspondent, David Holden, in Cairo on December 7, 1977. Holden had just returned to Cairo airport from a trip to Damascus, east Jerusalem, and Amman where he was trying to size up reaction to the upcoming peace talks between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Holden was always considered pro-Arab by the Israelis, mainly because of his close connections to top Palestinian leaders and his sympathy for their plight. After landing at Cairo airport, Holden never made it to his hotel room at the Cairo Hilton. Holden's body had been discovered on a Cairo roadside with a single bullet fired from a silencer-enabled 9 mm automatic pistol. The bullet pierced Holden's heart and exited through his chest.

Holden had, like many British and American Middle East correspondents, including ABC News' Peter Jennings and John Cooley, developed a close working relationship with a number of Arab leaders and diplomats. With much of the Arab world rejecting Sadat's peace offering to Israel following the Egyptian President's landmark November 1978 visit to Jerusalem, Holden was in a position to act as a back channel between Egypt, Britain and the United States -- Holden also enjoyed close contact with MI-6 and CIA personnel -- Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian leadership. If Holden was acting as a high-level courier, certain parties opposed to any Middle East peace deal may have wanted him dead and the contents of his briefcase secured.

The CIA's interest in the New Times item, published a little over two months after Holden's assassination, may be the following: "It seems that Holden, who had strong ties to moderate Palestinian factions in Jordan, was attempting to act as an 'honest broker between them and Egyptian officials, with the ultimate goal of facilitating an Israeli-Egyptian agreement for the West Bank. Some CIA Mideast officials believe the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence organization) had Holden killed . . ."

The assassination of Holden was followed by a carefully scripted character assassination. It was suggested that Holden, who was married, had a pre-marital homosexual relationship with a German Jewish communist-turned-Zionist-turned anti-Zionist named Leo Silberman. Holden, who was 53 when he was killed, was known as a lady's man by his family and colleagues.

In stories about Holden that appeared in The Times as recently as September 6, 2009, and other newspapers, there was scant attention paid to the CIA clipping that Holden was, in fact, assassinated by the Mossad. The most recent Times story actually suggests that Holden was murdered by the CIA. Of course, The Times of today scarcely resembles the broadsheet of 1977, having been turned by the neocon/Zionist media mogul Rupert Murdoch into a tabloid largely devoid of independent investigative journalism.

To further absolve Mossad of Holden's assassination, the Soviet news agency TASS reported on June 19, 1979, that the satirical London bi-weekly magazine, Private Eye, identified Holden as himself a Mossad agent. Private Eye had paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in libel claims over the years and The Times and Sunday Times were always high on its target list.

In July 1977, Holden's paper reported on the torture of Palestinian prisoners, described as the "ugliest forms" of torture. Meir Vilner, the Secretary General of the Israeli Communist Party, issued the following statement on January 27, 1979, "The London 'Sunday Times' talked about this torture in July 1977. Of the 49 former prisoners in Israeli jails questioned by the paper's correspondents, 44 had been tortured. The publication of these facts gave rise to hysteria in Zionist circles, and barely a few months later the dead body of the leading special correspondent of the 'Sunday Times', David Holden, was found." Vilner appeared to have been suggesting a quid pro quo in Holden's assassination by the Israelis.

Welcome Home, War! How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties

By Alfred W. McCoy

In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate for generations," warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid seeds that the Global War on Terror has planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties.

Don't be too surprised, then, when, in the midst of some future crisis, advanced surveillance methods and other techniques developed in our recent counterinsurgency wars migrate from Baghdad, Falluja, and Kandahar to your hometown or urban neighborhood. And don't ever claim that nobody told you this could happen -- at least not if you care to read on.

Think of our counterinsurgency wars abroad as so many living laboratories for the undermining of a democratic society at home, a process historians of such American wars can tell you has been going on for a long, long time. Counterintelligence innovations like centralized data, covert penetration, and disinformation developed during the Army's first protracted pacification campaign in a foreign land -- the Philippines from 1898 to 1913 -- were repatriated to the United States during World War I, becoming the blueprint for an invasive internal security apparatus that persisted for the next half century.

Almost 90 years later, George W. Bush's Global War on Terror plunged the U.S. military into four simultaneous counterinsurgency campaigns, large and small -- in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and (once again) the Philippines -- transforming a vast swath of the planet into an ad hoc "counterterrorism" laboratory. The result? Cutting-edge high-tech security and counterterror techniques that are now slowly migrating homeward.

As the War on Terror enters its ninth year to become one of America's longest overseas conflicts, the time has come to ask an uncomfortable question: What impact have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and the atmosphere they created domestically -- had on the quality of our democracy?

Every American knows that we are supposedly fighting elsewhere to defend democracy here at home. Yet the crusade for democracy abroad, largely unsuccessful in its own right, has proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling "the homeland."

Even if its name is increasingly anathema in Washington, the ongoing Global War on Terror has helped bring about a massive expansion of domestic surveillance by the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) whose combined data-mining systems have already swept up several billion private documents from U.S. citizens into classified data banks. Abroad, after years of failing counterinsurgency efforts in the Middle East, the Pentagon began applying biometrics -- the science of identification via facial shape, fingerprints, and retinal or iris patterns -- to the pacification of Iraqi cities, as well as the use of electronic intercepts for instant intelligence and the split-second application of satellite imagery to aid an assassination campaign by drone aircraft that reaches from Africa to South Asia.

In the panicky aftermath of some future terrorist attack, Washington could quickly fuse existing foreign and domestic surveillance techniques, as well as others now being developed on distant battlefields, to create an instant digital surveillance state.

The Crucible of Counterinsurgency

For the past six years, confronting a bloody insurgency, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has served as a white-hot crucible of counterinsurgency, forging a new system of biometric surveillance and digital warfare with potentially disturbing domestic implications. This new biometric identification system first appeared in the smoking aftermath of "Operation Phantom Fury," a brutal, nine-day battle that U.S. Marines fought in late 2004 to recapture the insurgent-controlled city of Falluja. Bombing, artillery, and mortars destroyed at least half of that city's buildings and sent most of its 250,000 residents fleeing into the surrounding countryside. Marines then forced returning residents to wait endless hours under a desert sun at checkpoints for fingerprints and iris scans. Once inside the city's blast-wall maze, residents had to wear identification tags for compulsory checks to catch infiltrating insurgents.

The first hint that biometrics were helping to pacify Baghdad's far larger population of seven million came in April 2007 when the New York Times published an eerie image of American soldiers studiously photographing an Iraqi's eyeball. With only a terse caption to go by, we can still infer the technology behind this single record of a retinal scan in Baghdad: digital cameras for U.S. patrols, wireless data transfer to a mainframe computer, and a database to record as many adult Iraqi eyes as could be gathered. Indeed, eight months later, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had collected over a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans. By mid-2008, the U.S. Army had also confined Baghdad's population behind blast-wall cordons and was checking Iraqi identities by satellite link to a biometric database.

Pushing ever closer to the boundaries of what present-day technology can do, by early 2008, U.S. forces were also collecting facial images accessible by portable data labs called Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facilities, linked by satellite to a biometric database in West Virginia. "A war fighter needs to know one of three things," explained the inventor of this lab-in-a-box. "Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?"

A future is already imaginable in which a U.S. sniper could take a bead on the eyeball of a suspected terrorist, pause for a nanosecond to transmit the target's iris or retinal data via backpack-sized laboratory to a computer in West Virginia, and then, after instantaneous feedback, pull the trigger.

Lest such developments seem fanciful, recall that Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward claims the success of George W. Bush's 2007 troop surge in Iraq was due less to boots on the ground than to bullets in the head -- and these, in turn, were due to a top-secret fusion of electronic intercepts and satellite imagery. Starting in May 2006, American intelligence agencies launched a Special Action Program using "the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government" in a successful effort "to locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias."

Under General Stanley McChrystal, now U.S. Afghan War commander, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) deployed "every tool available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence" for "lightning quick" strikes. One intelligence officer reportedly claimed that the program was so effective it gave him "orgasms." President Bush called it "awesome." Although refusing to divulge details, Woodward himself compared it to the Manhattan Project in World War II. This Iraq-based assassination program relied on the authority Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld granted JSOC in early 2004 to "kill or capture al-Qaeda terrorists" in 20 countries across the Middle East, producing dozens of lethal strikes by airborne Special Operations forces.

Another crucial technological development in Washington's secret war of assassination has been the armed drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle, whose speedy development has been another by-product of Washington's global counterterrorism laboratory. Half a world away from Iraq in the southern Philippines, the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces conducted an early experiment in the use of aerial surveillance for assassination. In June 2002, with a specially-equipped CIA aircraft circling overhead offering real-time video surveillance in the pitch dark of a tropical night, Philippine Marines executed a deadly high-seas ambush of Muslim terrorist Aldam Tilao (a.k.a. "Abu Sabaya").

In July 2008, the Pentagon proposed an expenditure of $1.2 billion for a fleet of 50 light aircraft loaded with advanced electronics to loiter over battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing "full motion video and electronic eavesdropping to the troops." By late 2008, night flights over Afghanistan from the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt were using sensors to give American ground forces real-time images of Taliban targets -- some so focused that they could catch just a few warm bodies huddled in darkness behind a wall.

In the first months of Barack Obama's presidency, CIA Predator drone strikes have escalated in the Pakistani tribal borderlands with a macabre efficiency, using a top-secret mix of electronic intercepts, satellite transmission, and digital imaging to kill half of the Agency's 20 top-priority al-Qaeda targets in the region. Just three days before Obama visited Canada last February, Homeland Security launched its first Predator-B drones to patrol the vast, empty North Dakota-Manitoba borderlands that one U.S. senator has called America's "weakest link."

Homeland Security

While those running U.S. combat operations overseas were experimenting with intercepts, satellites, drones, and biometrics, inside Washington the plodding civil servants of internal security at the FBI and the NSA initially began expanding domestic surveillance through thoroughly conventional data sweeps, legal and extra-legal, and -- with White House help -- several abortive attempts to revive a tradition that dates back to World War I of citizens spying on suspected subversives.

"If people see anything suspicious, utility workers, you ought to report it," said President George Bush in his April 2002 call for nationwide citizen vigilance. Within weeks, his Justice Department had launched Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), with plans for "millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others" to aid the government by spying on their fellow Americans. Such citizen surveillance sparked strong protests, however, forcing the Justice Department to quietly bury the president's program.

Simultaneously, inside the Pentagon, Admiral John Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's former national security advisor (swept up in the Iran-Contra scandal of that era), was developing a Total Information Awareness program which was to contain "detailed electronic dossiers" on millions of Americans. When news leaked about this secret Pentagon office with its eerie, all-seeing eye logo, Congress banned the program, and the admiral resigned in 2003. But the key data extraction technology, the Information Awareness Prototype System, migrated quietly to the NSA.

Soon enough, however, the CIA, FBI, and NSA turned to monitoring citizens electronically without the need for human tipsters, rendering the administration's grudging retreats from conventional surveillance at best an ambiguous political victory for civil liberties advocates. Sometime in 2002, President Bush gave the NSA secret, illegal orders to monitor private communications through the nation's telephone companies and its private financial transactions through SWIFT, an international bank clearinghouse.

After the New York Times exposed these wiretaps in 2005, Congress quickly capitulated, first legalizing this illegal executive program and then granting cooperating phone companies immunity from civil suits. Such intelligence excess was, however, intentional. Even after Congress widened the legal parameters for future intercepts in 2008, the NSA continued to push the boundaries of its activities, engaging in what the New York Times politely termed the systematic "overcollection" of electronic communications among American citizens. Now, for example, thanks to a top-secret NSA database called "Pinwale," analysts routinely scan countless "millions" of domestic electronic communications without much regard for whether they came from foreign or domestic sources.

Starting in 2004, the FBI launched an Investigative Data Warehouse as a "centralized repository for... counterterrorism." Within two years, it contained 659 million individual records. This digital archive of intelligence, social security files, drivers' licenses, and records of private finances could be accessed by 13,000 Bureau agents and analysts making a million queries monthly. By 2009, when digital rights advocates sued for full disclosure, the database had already grown to over a billion documents.

And did this sacrifice of civil liberties make the United States a safer place? In July 2009, after a careful review of the electronic surveillance in these years, the inspectors general of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the CIA, the NSA, and the Office of National Intelligence issued a report sharply critical of these secret efforts. Despite George W. Bush's claims that massive electronic surveillance had "helped prevent attacks," these auditors could not find any "specific instances" of this, concluding such surveillance had "generally played a limited role in the F.B.I.'s overall counterterrorism efforts."

Amid the pressures of a generational global war, Congress proved all too ready to offer up civil liberties as a bipartisan burnt offering on the altar of national security. In April 2007, for instance, in a bid to legalize the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps, Congressional representative Jane Harman (Dem., California) offered a particularly extreme example of this urge. She introduced the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, proposing a powerful national commission, functionally a standing "star chamber," to "combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States." The bill passed the House by an overwhelming 404 to 6 vote before stalling, and then dying, in a Senate somewhat more mindful of civil liberties.

Only weeks after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, Harman's life itself became a cautionary tale about expanding electronic surveillance. According to information leaked to the Congressional Quarterly, in early 2005 an NSA wiretap caught Harman offering to press the Bush Justice Department for reduced charges against two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of espionage. In exchange, an Israeli agent offered to help Harman gain the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee by threatening House Democratic majority leader Nancy Pelosi with the loss of a major campaign donor. As Harman put down the phone, she said, "This conversation doesn't exist."

How wrong she was. An NSA transcript of Harman's every word soon crossed the desk of CIA Director Porter Goss, prompting an FBI investigation that, in turn, was blocked by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. As it happened, the White House knew that the New York Times was about to publish its sensational revelation of the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, and felt it desperately needed Harman for damage control among her fellow Democrats. In this commingling of intrigue and irony, an influential legislator's defense of the NSA's illegal wiretapping exempted her from prosecution for a security breach discovered by an NSA wiretap.

Since the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House, the auto-pilot expansion of digital domestic surveillance has in no way been interfered with. As a result, for example, the FBI's "Terrorist Watchlist," with 400,000 names and a million entries, continues to grow at the rate of 1,600 new names daily.

In fact, the Obama administration has even announced plans for a new military cybercommand staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees at Lackland Air Base in Texas. This command will be tasked with attacking enemy computers and repelling hostile cyber-attacks or counterattacks aimed at U.S. computer networks -- with scant respect for what the Pentagon calls "sovereignty in the cyberdomain." Despite the president's assurances that operations "will not -- I repeat -- will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic," the Pentagon's top cyberwarrior, General James E. Cartwright, has conceded such intrusions are inevitable.

Sending the Future Home

While U.S. combat forces prepare to draw-down in Iraq (and ramp up in Afghanistan), military intelligence units are coming home to apply their combat-tempered surveillance skills to our expanding homeland security state, while preparing to counter any future domestic civil disturbances here.

Indeed, in September 2008, the Army's Northern Command announced that one of the Third Division's brigades in Iraq would be reassigned as a Consequence Management Response Force (CMRF) inside the U.S. Its new mission: planning for moments when civilian authorities may need help with "civil unrest and crowd control." According to Colonel Roger Cloutier, his unit's civil-control equipment featured "a new modular package of non-lethal capabilities" designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals -- including Taser guns, roadblocks, shields, batons, and beanbag bullets.

That same month, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey flew to Fort Stewart, Georgia, for the first full CMRF mission readiness exercise. There, he strode across a giant urban battle map filling a gymnasium floor like a conquering Gulliver looming over Lilliputian Americans. With 250 officers from all services participating, the military war-gamed its future coordination with the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and local authorities in the event of a domestic terrorist attack or threat. Within weeks, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an expedited freedom of information request for details of these deployments, arguing: "[It] is imperative that the American people know the truth about this new and unprecedented intrusion of the military in domestic affairs."

At the outset of the Global War on Terror in 2001, memories of early Cold War anti-communist witch-hunts blocked Bush administration plans to create a corps of civilian tipsters and potential vigilantes. However, far more sophisticated security methods, developed for counterinsurgency warfare overseas, are now coming home to far less public resistance. They promise, sooner or later, to further jeopardize the constitutional freedoms of Americans.

In these same years, under the pressure of War on Terror rhetoric, presidential power has grown relentlessly, opening the way to unchecked electronic surveillance, the endless detention of terror suspects, and a variety of inhumane forms of interrogation. Somewhat more slowly, innovative techniques of biometric identification, aerial surveillance, and civil control are now being repatriated as well.

In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could be married to omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly routine monitoring of public space. Military surveillance equipment, tempered to a technological cutting edge in counterinsurgency wars, might also one day be married to the swelling domestic databases of the NSA and FBI, sweeping the fiber-optic cables beneath our cities for any sign of subversion. And in the skies above, loitering aircraft and cruising drones could be checking our borders and peering down on American life.

If that day comes, our cities will be Argus-eyed with countless thousands of digital cameras scanning the faces of passengers at airports, pedestrians on city streets, drivers on highways, ATM customers, mall shoppers, and visitors to any federal facility. One day, hyper-speed software will be able to match those millions upon millions of facial or retinal scans to photos of suspect subversives inside a biometric database akin to England's current National Public Order Intelligence Unit, sending anti-subversion SWAT teams scrambling for an arrest or an armed assault.

By the time the Global War on Terror is declared over in 2020, if then, our American world may be unrecognizable -- or rather recognizable only as the stuff of dystopian science fiction. What we are proving today is that, however detached from the wars being fought in their name most Americans may seem, war itself never stays far from home for long. It's already returning in the form of new security technologies that could one day make a digital surveillance state a reality, changing fundamentally the character of American democracy.

Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of A Question of Torture, among other works. His most recent book is Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (University of Wisconsin Press) which explores the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations throughout the twentieth century in spreading ever more draconian internal security measures here at home.

Copyright 2009 Alfred W. McCoy

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Obama administration playing footsie with Honduran junta

RT: Obama administration playing footsie with Honduran junta

Veterans For Peace Statement for Armistice/Veterans' Day 2009

Veterans' Day began as "Armistice" Day, to celebrate November 11, 1918 when the guns of World War One finally stopped - and what cause for celebration there was!

From August 1914 until November 1918, 30 million soldiers were killed or wounded and another 7 million were taken captive. Never before had people witnessed such industrialized slaughter. A hint of the wreckage can be glimpsed by visiting a Great War memorial in any European town and invariably seeing a list of names long enough to include every young man who lived there at the time - hence the "lost generation."

Today we can hardly imagine the horror of the trenches where rats provided a real service by eating away at the corpses hanging on the barbed wire, in shell holes and half-buried in the walls of the dugouts.

The reality of the battlefield permeated the consciousness back home; so much so that even in America, whose troops arrived in Europe only in the closing months of the war, Congress responded to a universal hope that such a war would never happen again. It passed a resolution calling for "exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding...inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples." Later, Congress added that November 11 was to be "a day dedicated to the cause of world peace."

Armistice Day was more than a time for department store midnight madness sales. It meant more than military color guards marching in parades featuring the cleaned-up machinery of war. It was a reminder of the insane, horrific cost of war paid by soldiers at the front, those who ministered to the dead and wounded, and their families back home. It was a day to reflect on that memory and vow to learn to live in a world without war.

These days, when some still give all, but very few give some, it's easy for most of us to go on with our lives of work, shopping and family as if that's all there was. It's easy to overlook the tremendous pain and pressures caused by the multiple deployments needed for a "volunteer" military - unless someone in your family is directly involved in the fighting or is cut down by war's wide blade of "collateral damage" that can strike an Army base in Texas as well as a village in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Some truths are indeed universal. Veterans For Peace abides by two very simple ones: Wars are easy to start and hard to stop; and the innocent on all sides always suffer most.

The doughboys of WWI, shivering in the soggy, rotten trenches of Europe in November 1918, would have nodded wearily in agreement.

Mike Ferner, President
Veterans For Peace

Dois Muros, Duas Medidas

Senhoras e senhores, Comemora-se, nesses dias tão felizes, o aniversário da queda do muro de Berlim. Mas que coisa mais hipócrita e ridícula! Por que não se obriga Israel a demolir o muro que foi construído para segregar os palestinos?

Ele é MUITO mais odioso do que o de Berlim, porque cerca muitas cidades e aldeias palestinas, deixando somente uma passagem para os moradores entrarem e saírem daquelas povoações. Mas para fazer isso eles, palestinos, em suas PRÓPRIAS TERRAS, têm que se submeter a postos de controle israelenses, contruídos nas únicas "saídas" das cidades.

Veja, aqui em baixo, as características do muro de Berlim, e a seguir, o muro da Segregação (é esse o nome que ele recebeu do próprio governo de Israel), conforme relatado por uma entidade ISRAELENSE, a 'The Applied Research Institute' (Instituto de Pesquisa Aplicada), de Jerusalém.

1. BERLIM :
Construído na madrugada de 13 de Agosto de 1961, tem alguns dos seguintes números:

155 km de comprimento
106 km de muro com 4 metros de altura
67 km de grades metálicas com arame farpado
1 km de valas antitanques com 5 metros de profundidade
105 km de valas com 2,5 metros de profundidade
127 km de cercas eletrificadas
124 km de caminhos para patrulhas
302 torres de observação
20 bunkers

Veja, no endereço indicado abaixo, um vídeo com a animação da "reconstrução" do muro de Berlim. Depois, compare com o relato abaixo, sobre o Muro da Segregação da Palestina.

Veja o vídeo, no endereço abaixo:

http://g1.globo.com/Sites/Especiais/Noticias/0,,MUL1365888-17398,00-VEJA+ANIMACAO+QUE+RECONSTROI+VIRTUALMENTE+O+MURO+DE+BERLIM.html

O Muro da Segregação, na Palestina, que tinha 770 km em 2007, e hoje já exibe 895 km (portanto, aproximadamente 6 vezes mais longo que o alemão) e 12 metros de altura (portanto, 3 vezes mais alto que o berlinense), com uma faixa de segurança de 200 metros de largura (o que resulta 5 vezes mais larga que a do muro alemão...), põe "no chinelo" o famosíssimo muro de Berlim que se comemora o 20º aniversário de sua queda e demolição.

A seguir, dados sobre o Muro dos Sem Vergonha (o de Berlim era conhecido como o Muro da Vergonha, se vocês se lembram) construído por Israel para segregar os palestinos e tomar-lhe os recursos naturais.

2. MURO DA SEGREGAÇÃO, na Palestina:

Em junho de 2002, o governo israelense iniciou uma politica de segregação unilateral entre Israel e o Territorio Palestino Ocupado (OPT), estabelecendo uma Zona de Segregação junto as terras do ocidente da ocupada Cisjordânia. A Zona de Segregação Israelita abrange uma area geográfica substancial e significativa, rica em recursos naturais (água aquiferos), por correr ao longo e através da parte ocidental da Cisjordânia de norte a sul, capturando os mais férteis terrenos agrícolas, isolando comunidades palestinas em enclaves, minando a contiguidade territorial entre as cidades e aldeias palestinas, controlando os recursos naturais, e englobando a maior parte dos colonatos israelitas ilegais. Neste momento, uma explicação do termo 'Muro de Segregação' está em ordem, uma vez que reflete duas formas de estruturas utilizadas pelo Exército israelita para concluir a sua missão na separação territorial do OPT: é tanto uma partição concreta de 8 a 12 metros de altura ou um cerca multipla. Em ambos os casos, o termo Muro de Segregação se aplica .

O Muro de Segregação que corta vastas terras de agricultura é um tipo de vedação que assola uma área de 40-100 metros de largura ao longo da sua rota, e inclui cercas de dupla-camada que são reforçadas com arame farpado, trincheiras, estradas militares, e a faixa de detecção de pegadas (idêntica à que os nazistas construíram na faixa de "segurança" do muro de Berlim), bem como uma cerca de metal eletrificada de quatro a cinco metros de altura, com câmeras de vigilância. Outras partes do Muro de Segregação, que correm através de centros populacionais consistem de 8 a 12 metros de altura que são colocadas juntas de modo a formar uma imensa barreira concreta e sólida com torres militares de até 250 metros.

As alterações na rota do Muro de Segregação Israelita desde 2002

Uma vez que Israel sancionou a construção do Muro de Segregação, em 2002, que foi sujeito a várias alterações que visam beneficiar os colonatos israelitas, em vez da população palestina. Cada mudança resultou em um aumento do comprimento do muro e de uma expansão da área segregada.

Mesa 2: Alterações na rota do Muro de Segregação Israelita entre Junho de 2004 e Abril de 2007
Data da Mudança
Comprimento do Muro
Area
% da Area da Cisjordania
Junho 2004
645 km
633 km²
11.2
Fevereiro 2005
683 km
565 km²
10
Abril 2006
703 km
555 km²
9.8
Abril 2007
770 km
713 km²
12.6

Fonte: ARIJ GIS Database 2007

De acordo com o último plano revisto em abril de 2007, o muro na Cisjordânia teria 770 km de comprimento, dos quais apenas 80 km (10,4 por cento do seu comprimento total) construídas ao longo da Linha do Armistício de 1949 (Linha Verde). Quando concluído, irá isolar 713 km quadradros da Cisjordânia (12,6 por cento do total da área - 5661 km2) em que veio a ser conhecida como a Segregação da Zona Ocidental - o espaço entre o muro e a Linha do Armistício de 1949 (Linha Verde). Além disso, o muro vai juntar 107 colonatos israelitas (incluindo aqueles ao leste de Jerusalém), acomodando 425.000 pessoas, mais de 80% do total da população israelense assentada na Cisjordânia (530.000).

O mapa do muro que foi revisto e aprovado em abril de 2007 foi publicado em setembro de 2007 no website do Ministério da Defesa israelense, cinco meses após o aval. Ele observa algumas alterações significativas nas regiões noroeste das provincias do Ramallah e no sul de Belém e Hebron (ver mapa abaixo) e aumenta o número de assentamentos que se situam entre a Linha do Armistício de 1949 (Linha Verde), e o Muro de Segregação. Mudanças que foram feitas anteriormente para a rota do Muro incluía algumas pequenas alterações, mas nada para amortecer os efeitos devastadores do Muro aos palestinos e as suas terras.

Uma zona de proteção ao longo do percurso do Muro de Segregação

Em setembro de 2004, o Exército israelense emitiu ordens militares que criaram uma zona de proteção indo de 150-200 metros de largura do lado palestino da segregação onde novas construçoes palestinas são proibidas. Como resultado, um adicional de 252 km quadrados de área na Cisjordânia (4,4%) irão tornar-se inacessíveis aos palestinos.



Mapa 1: O Muro de Segregação Israelense na Cisjordania – Abril 2007

A zona oriental da segregação

O exército israelita tem consolidado o seu controle sobre os terrenos do Leste da Cisjordânia, que é conhecido como a Segregação da Zona Leste (1.555 km ² - 27,5% da Cisjordânia) através de 28 pontos militares ao longo de 200km de norte a sul. Depois da Guerra de 1967, Israel classificou cerca de 925 km2, como parte de uma 'zona militar fechada'. Além disso, Israel tem classificado ilegalmente um adicional de 632 km2 da Segregação da Zona Oriental como 'Terra do Estado', que inclui a área dos assentamentos, de bases militares, e algumas partes das zonas militares fechadas. No total, o Plano de Segregação apropria mais de 40% do total da area da Cisjordânia.

Comunidades Palestinas afetadas pelo Muro de Segregação
Vinte e nove aldeias palestinas 'fronteiras com uma área total de 216,7 km quadrados foram capturados em enclaves por trás do muro de Segregação israelense; além disso, 138 aldeias palestinas' fronteiras com uma área de aproximadamente 554.4 km quadrados estão largamente afetadas e serão perdidas por tras da zona do Muro de Segregação.
Quarenta e cinco comunidades palestinas, incluindo mais de 43.000 pessoas, foram isoladas na Zona Leste de Segregação.
Recursos ambientais apropriados pelo Muro de Segregação
A Segregação da zona oeste isolou 29 poços e 29 nascentes.
A Segregação da zona Leste isolou 204 poços e 43 nascentes.
Até 192 km ² de terras agrícolas foram isoladas no interior da Segregação da zona oeste (6,8% do total de terras agrícolas na Cisjordânia), além de 844 km2 dentro da segregação da zona oriental (29,9% do total de terras agrícolas na Cisjordânia), ambos dos quais constituem 18,3% do total da área da Cisjordânia.
Até 246,8 km2 de florestas e áreas com arbustos estão incluídos na Segregação da zona oeste (10,8% do total de florestas e áreas de espaço aberto na Cisjordânia) e 707,8 km2 na Segregação da zona oriental (31,1% do total de florestas e espaço aberto nas áreas da Cisjordânia), ambas as quais constituem 16,9% da área total da Cisjordânia.
O Muro de Segregação e colonatos ilegais israelitas
A Segregação da zona oeste contém 107 colonatos israelitas (de um total de 199 colonatos na Cisjordânia), com uma população de aproximadamente 425.000 (mais de 80% do total da população israelense assentada na Cisjordânia).
Assentamentos na Segregação da zona oeste cobrem uma área de 106,7 km2 (15% da Segregação da zona oeste).
Cinqüenta e seis postos avançados estão localizados na Segregação da zona oeste.
Assentamentos na Segregação da zona leste cobrem uma área de 38 km2 (2,4% da área da zona).
A Segregação da zona oriental contém 39 colonatos israelitas, com uma população de 12.550 colonos (2,4% do total da população assentada).
Trinta postos avançados estão na Segregação da zona leste.

Muro de Berlim: NÃO pode.
Muro de Israel : PODE !

Visita de Netahiahu e Peres ao Brasil: PODE.
Visita de Ahmadinejad : NÃO pode !

Holocausto judaico : NÃO pode !
Holocausto palestino: PODE !

Bombas atômicas de Israel (68, pelo menos, JÁ existentes) : PODE !
Bomba atômica do Irã (sem qualquer prova de que existirá): NÃO pode !

Que pobre mundo nós vivemos, não ?

Para Israel, o novo país NAZISTA, tudo pode.
Para os palestinos e iranianos, a tortura e o sofrimento atrozes, sem apelação!

Julguem vocês mesmos !

Carlos Tebecherani Haddad

The Annotated pack of lies that oozing Clintonite pustule Lanny Davis, published in the WSJ

Longtime BoRev reader "Jakob" thought it might be "fun" to read this hilarious pack of lies that oozing Clintonite pustule Lanny Davis published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, during a fact checker's strike, perhaps? and then point out each time he just makes shit up or otherwise says something stupid. Behold Jakob's idea of a good a time, after the jump!

The Way Forward in Honduras
The U.S. should recognize the coming election, whether Manuel Zelaya does or not.
LANNY J. DAVIS

For months Honduras has faced a political crisis. In June, its president, Manuel Zelaya, attempted to subvert the country's constitution [Would be interesting to see what Mr. Davis had in mind here, the proposed opinion poll was allowed for under the Citizen Participation Act that was enacted in 2005] and was removed from office [Might it be useful to tell the readers how we was removed? As in kidnapped and exiled by the Honduran military]. He has since pushed to return to power [Did the constitutional president push to return to his rightful place? What a power-hungry dictator!], called the current president--Robert Micheletti--illegitimate [Is this criticism? Not a single country in the World sees Micheletti as legitimate], and has cast a shadow over presidential elections to be held at the end of this month [The gross violations of human rights, as documented by groups both in Honduras and internationally are casting shadows over elections. That and the dictatorship running the country].

On Oct. 30, it appeared the crisis might come to a close when representatives of Mr. Zelaya signed an agreement with representatives of Mr. Micheletti to create a reconciliation government to oversee the country until the next president is seated (among other provisions)[Among other provisions?? You know, like that little provision about Congress voting on Zelaya's return to the presidency. It is hard to imagine the agreement called for a "reconciliation government" headed by the coup president without even the congressional vote on Zelaya's return having taken place. Point five of the agreement refers to returning the executive power back to its position prior to June 28th, was Micheletti the president then?]. But in recent days, that agreement--known as the Tegucigalpa/San Jose Accord--fell apart [What do you know, something true].

It's more accurate to say Mr. Zelaya moved to destroy the accord [This is ridiculous even for a paid lobbyist]. It called for him to propose members of the reconciliation government by Nov. 5, and it also gave Honduras's Congress the right to vote whether to reinstate him as president. But Mr. Zelaya refused to make his appointments, even while Mr. Micheletti proposed his appointments on time [Zelaya refused to make appointments because Congress was delaying the vote on his return to power, a clear prerequisite to naming a reconciliation government. Congress was meant to vote on the issue prior to the November 5 naming of a reconciliation government. Rather, Micheletti moved to install a government with himself at the head, unilaterally. It is important to note that not even the Liberal or National parties submitted candidates to the reconciliation government]. On Friday, Mr. Zelaya declared the accord null and void before Congress could vote on whether to restore him to power [He declared it null and void BECAUSE Congress did not, and did not even plan on, voting on his restoration before the naming of a reconciliation government and perhaps not even before elections on November 29]. Interestingly, he had insisted on adding the congressional vote to the agreement, so his decision to blow up the process before the vote is an indication that even he realizes he would lose a vote in a Congress controlled by his liberal party [This is absurd, if Congress, as they have stated, did not plan on ruling on Zelaya's reinstatement before elections the accord would be null and void].

If there is to be a resolution to this crisis, it will likely only come if the Obama administration (which helped both sides hammer out the accord), leaders in the U.S. Congress, and the Organization of American States (OAS) make sure that Mr. Zelaya does not get away with breaking his word [Who has broken their word? First, the Obama administration, who for months qualified their support for elections on Zelaya's return, only to change positions and say they would except the results no matter what. Secondly, the coup government, who clearly subverted the accord to push back the congressional vote and unilaterally install a reconciliation government. Not Zelaya, who signed an accord with a virtual gun to his head, and maintains his rightful and constitutional claim to the presidency].

One vital part of the accord calls for international monitors to go to Honduras to prepare for the presidential elections, which are scheduled for Nov. 29 [Interesting that Mr. Davis considers this a vital point of the accord but not congress voting on Zelaya's return]. Under the accord the monitors will work with the Honduran Supreme Electoral Tribunal, a four-member body [Actually a three member body, but hey, who's counting?] appointed by Honduras's Congress when Mr. Zelaya was in power, and which is independent of the executive branch [and which is now in control of the military, you know, the military that overthrew the president and killed innocent civilians, yeah, that military]. The White House and the U.S. Congress need to call for this step to be taken immediately [Apparently Mr. Davis believes that signing the accord is all that it takes to recognize elections, no matter if the accord is actually carried out. Further, nothing has been done to curb the violations of human rights and freedom of expression that is the biggest barrier to recognizing and participating in elections. Forget Zelaya for a minute, there is no way the legal election period, most of which occurred under a state of siege, has allowed free and fair elections to take place in less than 3 weeks].

Mr. Zelaya's modus operandi is clear. In 2005, he got elected president while vowing to uphold the constitution. He then violated the country's constitution by pushing for a vote that would have allowed him to extend his time in office [I wonder how Mr. Davis might prove this? The proposed opinion poll did not mention term limits, Zelaya clearly stated he did not want to stay in office, in other words Mr. Davis is peddling a lie for money]. Honduras's Constitution specifically states that a president who does that is to be automatically removed, which is why the country's Supreme Court and Congress supported his removal [If that is why the Supreme Court and Congress removed him they did a great job hiding it in the 86 pages that were released by the Supreme Court justifying his ouster. The document never once mentioned term limits or article 239 of the Constitution, which is what Mr. Davis is referring to. And I wonder if the fake "resignation letter" that was presented to Congress had anything to do with term limits?]. Mr. Zelaya's response was to turn to OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza and the OAS to support him in ignoring his constitutional and legal commitments--and they did so [Yes and no, Zelaya and the international community did turn to the OAS, and the OAS did support him. Not to ignore Zelaya's constitutional commitments, but to uphold the Inter-American Democratic Charter which had clearly been violated by the usurpation of democratic institutions by the coup leaders. A little international body called the United Nations also supported Zelaya, oh and the EU, Rio Group, UNASUR and Non-Aligned Movement].

Mr. Zelaya's agenda is to reinstall himself to power before the presidential elections [How silly of the Constitutional President to be restored to power before an election takes place. This is also the "agenda" of the entire international community, except of course the United States]. If he succeeds, he might be able to disrupt those elections and create a constitutional crisis by ensuring that no one is credibly elected president [The constitutional crisis began on June 28, when the CONSITUTIONAL president was illegally OVERTHROWN. The constitutional crisis would continue if the coup was allowed to stand and elections took place under a repressive coup government who's only goal is to consolidate their power and crush the popular movement that has courageously taken to the streets for over 130 days]. If that occurs, he would likely declare himself president ad infinitum--just what he was trying to do when he was ousted in June [Mr. Davis must have been paid a little extra for that statement; "ad infinitum", really?].

The bottom line is that a deal is a deal [and a lobbyist is a lobbyist]. The U.S. government needs to insist on the implementation of the accord and endorse the results of the Nov. 29 presidential elections as verified by international monitors [The implementation of the accord, which calls for a congressional vote on Zelaya's return and a reconciliation government with representatives from all sectors of society. Not a unilaterally installed government with coup president Micheletti continuing to lead]. Once that happens, Mr. Zelaya will be irrelevant, a footnote as a president who thought he was above the constitution [I think the majority of Hondurans, who continue to support their elected president, and who have been fighting in the streets for his return, might not just up and forget everything. Come November 29 it will just be like "that whole coup thing, so last month."].

And then, on Jan. 27, a new president will be sworn into office in Honduras. That will restore to normalcy the proud little constitutional republic that has always been a loyal and reliable ["proud little...", "loyal and reliable", are you talking about your dog? Or a sovereign nation?] friend of the United States [For instance a training ground and launching pad for the U.S. war against Nicaragua, or the loyal client state for U.S. multinationals like United Fruit].

Mr. Davis, an attorney at the Washington D.C. office of McDermott, Will & Emery, is a former special counsel to President Bill Clinton and represents [is paid to spread lies by] the Honduran Latin American Business Council.

Tags:

*Over 2,200 veterans died in 2008 due to lack of health insurance*

Contact:
Mark Almberg, Physicians for a National Health Program, (312) 782-6006,
cell: (312) 622-0996, mark@pnhp.org

*Over 2,200 veterans died in 2008 due to lack of health insurance*

*Harvard researchers say 1.46 million working-age vets lacked health
coverage last year, increasing their death rate*

A research team at Harvard Medical School estimates 2,266 U.S. military
veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health
insurance and thus had reduced access to care. That figure is more than
14 times the number of deaths (155) suffered by U.S. troops in
Afghanistan in 2008, and more than twice as many as have died (911 as of
Oct. 31) since the war began in 2001.

The researchers, who released their analysis today, pointedly say the
health reform legislation pending in the House and Senate will not
significantly affect this grim picture.

The Harvard group analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2009
Current Population Survey, which surveyed Americans about their
insurance coverage and veteran status, and found that 1,461,615 veterans
between the ages of 18 and 64 were uninsured in 2008. Veterans were only
classified as uninsured if they neither had health insurance nor
received ongoing care at Veterans Health Administration (VA) hospitals
or clinics.

Using their recently published findings in the American Journal of
Public Health (tinyurl.com/l7cy8u) that show being uninsured raises an
individual’s odds of dying by 40 percent (causing 44,798 deaths in the
United States annually among those aged 17 to 64), they arrived at their
estimate of 2,266 preventable deaths of non-elderly veterans in 2008.
(See table below.)

“Like other uninsured Americans, most uninsured vets are working people
– too poor to afford private coverage but not poor enough to qualify for
Medicaid or means-tested VA care,” said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a
professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who testified before
Congress about uninsured veterans in 2007 (tinyurl.com/yej6rnq) and
carried out the analysis released today. “As a result, veterans go
without the care they need every day in the U.S., and thousands die each
year. It’s a disgrace.”

Dr. David Himmelstein, the co-author of the analysis and associate
professor of medicine at Harvard, commented, “On this Veterans Day we
should not only honor the nearly 500 soldiers who have died this year in
Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the more than 2,200 veterans who were
killed by our broken health insurance system. That’s six preventable
deaths a day.”

He continued: “These unnecessary deaths will continue under the
legislation now before the House and Senate. Those bills would do
virtually nothing for the uninsured until 2013, and leave at least 17
million uninsured over the long run. We need a solution that works for
all veterans – and for all Americans – single-payer national health
insurance.”

While many Americans believe that all veterans can get care from the VA,
even combat veterans may not be able to obtain VA care, Woolhandler
said. As a rule, VA facilities provide care for any veteran who is
disabled by a condition connected to his or her military service and
care for specific medical conditions acquired during military service.

Woolhandler said veterans who pass a means test are eligible for care in
VA facilities, but have lower priority status (Priority 5 or 7,
depending upon income level). Veterans with higher incomes are
classified in the lowest priority group and are not eligible for VA
enrollment.

*****

The table showing the excess deaths of veterans due to lack of insurance
can be found by scrolling down to the bottom of this document:
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/november/over_2200_veterans_.php

A December 2007 paper in the American Journal of Public Health
estimating the number of uninsured veterans from 1987 through 2004 can
be found here: tinyurl.com/yk8ous5

*****

Note: If you are an uninsured veteran having difficulty getting health
care and would like to tell your story to the media, write a short note
to Mark Almberg at mark@pnhp.org.

Physicians for a National Health Program (www.pnhp.org) is an
organization of 17,000 doctors who support single-payer national health
insurance, often called an improved Medicare for All. To speak with a
physician/spokesperson in your area, visit www.pnhp.org/stateactions or
call (312) 782-6006.

Physicians for a National Health Program
29 E. Madison St., Suite 602
Chicago IL 60602
(312) 782-6006
info@pnhp.org
www.pnhp.org
_______________

In the Name of a General, his Son, a Spook & the Godmother of Neocons

Afghan Carpetbaggers Hit Pots of Gold in Washington

Once Upon a Time a General…

Once upon a time there was an Afghani general named Abdul Rahim Wardak. He had studied in both US and Egyptian military schools before joining the army in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, a few years after he joined the army, he decided to defect and joined the Mujahideen movement. We don’t know exactly who in the United States gave him the order to defect, because no one is willing to go on record. However, we know very well that due to their fight against the Communist Soviet Union, the Mujahideen were significantly financed, armed, and trained by the CIA, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, along with several other not as significant nations. We also know that back then, when we were supporting, financing, training and cheering for the Mujahideen as ‘freedom fighters,’ those labeled today as terrorist evil-doer radicals, Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban, were viewed and treated as our allies and entourage.

Now, back to our General. He joined the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan arm of the Mujahideen and fought against the Soviets. Interestingly, during those years, the mid to late 80s, our general Wardak was brought to the United States and coached to testify before the US Congress; not once but several times. He was even flown to the US once to receive medical treatment for a wound he received from a scud missile. I am sure you are savvy enough to know that this was considered ‘highly special’ treatment for a Mujahideen fighter in Afghanistan. Our general was truly loved when it came to our CIA and certain high-level people within the Reagan Administration.

So how good of a military officer was Mr. Wardak? Not a good one – and this assessment seems to be pretty much unanimous. In fact, this is how he’s been known in that part of the world: “… in the 1980’s, he had garnered a reputation as one of the least accomplished commanders of the American-backed Mujahideen resistance to Soviet occupation forces.” If you enter the circles within the Washington DC Afghani diaspora, and if you get close enough to hear the hushed comments, you’d be able to make out words like ‘corrupt,’ ‘ties to drug-running warlords,’ or ‘Afghan mafia.’ But for some ‘mysterious’ reasons our Central Intelligence Agency and hard-core Neocons within our foreign policy arena had deemed this general ultra special and important…

*And the story continues…

Once Upon a Time a Godmother of Neocons…

Once Upon a time there was a woman named Jeane Kirkpatrick, who didn’t really look like a woman but it never mattered, in fact it may have helped her. Jeane was a Democrat, and then, later, she became a Republican. She was on President Reagan’s National Security Council, on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and of course the Defense Policy Review Board. She became the US Ambassador to the United Nations; appointed by President Reagan. Ms. Kirkpatrick was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). She was a hard-core anti-communist, and she was a hawk. But most importantly, she was the woman whom people considered and labeled the Godmother of Neocons.

Ms. Kirkpatrick died in 2006, and here is a widely witnessed account of those who shed the most tears:

“Until the end, she was a cherished mentor to the neo-conservatives. John Bolton – Bush’s outgoing ambassador to the UN and of all her successors there the one who most closely resembled her – publicly wept as he paid tribute to her last week. Perhaps the tears were at the rubble of his President’s Iraq policy, but also for a remarkable woman.”

Before her death, her final ‘known’ government mission was to help pave the way for our preemptive attack on Iraq in 2002:

“…in a final mission, kept secret until her death, to meet Arab envoys in Geneva in 2003 to win them over to the impending invasion of Iraq. Her instructions were to argue that pre-emptive war was justified. But Kirkpatrick knew it wouldn’t work. Instead she made the case that Saddam Hussein had flouted the UN too long and too often.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick, true to her Grand Neocon title, was a strong believer of ‘the end justifies the means.’ She vehemently disagreed with Secretary of State George Schultz on the Iran-Contra affair, in which she supported skimming money off arms sales to fund the Contras. Everything was kosher to her, whether drugs or illegal arms sales, as long as these means served what she considered to be the goal; an imperial US.

Ms. Kirkpatrick similarly, in fact more vehemently, supported our operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 80s where we backed and trained the Mujahideen against the Soviets. Just like what we sanctioned in Nicaragua, in Afghanistan all deals, no matter how insane or unsavory, were means’ to justify the end. This was one of her mottos most cherished by the hawks and the neocons:

“Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies.”

What went unsaid in that quote, but meant and practiced was: Radical Islam, the Taliban, their Madrasas, their terrorizing of women, their heroin business…are perfectly all right, as long as they are on our side, in our camp, on our payroll, instead of on the other side.

Following her ‘direct’ government career, she returned to academia at Georgetown University where for some reason many well-known Neocons, such as James Woolsey and Douglas Feith, chose to flock. And very characteristically our Jeane Patrick continued her contribution to the practice of Neocon-ism…

*And the story continues…

Once Upon a Time a spook…

Once upon a time there was man named Milton Bearden, commonly referred to as Milt. He spent his early years in the state of Washington where his father worked on the Manhattan Project. After a few years with the US Air Force he joined the CIA in 1964.

Milt was CIA’s chosen man for their operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In fact, from 1986 to 1989, when our country was supporting the Mujahideen, he was one of their main men on the ground, working with this coalition of the Taliban, the Saudis and their main man Bin Laden, and the Pakistani ISI. The Director of the CIA, William Casey, was the one who appointed Milt Bearden for this task. Here is Milt’s own words describing his importance in a not very unusual ex-CIA conceited manner:

“For Casey Afghanistan seemed to be possibly one of the keys and so he tapped me one day to go. he said ‘I want you to go to Afghanistan, I want you to go next month and I will give you what ever you need to Win.” To win, yeah he said: “I want you to go out there and win” As opposed to ‘let’s go there and bleed these guys and make it be a Vietnam’, I want you to go and win and whatever you need you can have. He gave me the Stinger Missiles and a billion Dollars!”

He must have done extremely well since he was promoted to CIA Station Chief in Pakistan. In fact he must have done exceedingly well since he was later appointed the chief of the Soviet/East European Division during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and received three glowing medals from the CIA for services rendered.

Milt’s cushy CIA retirement and all those glowing medals must not have been enough, for he then engaged in frenzied marketing and self promotion to get himself entrenched in almost all major US networks and newspapers as a consultant, writer, advisor, and of course as a trusted source – a CIA source to provide quotes and information for scripts at the snap of a finger. He coauthored a book with New York Times reporter James Risen called The Main Enemy. Whether this kind of business arrangement, where a commonly used source partners up with a reporter, presents a conflict of interest or even could be called incestuous, is everyone else’s call.

Most interestingly Mr. Bearden seemed to have lured in the American mainstream media by presenting himself as an outspoken critique of the Bush White House Intelligence policies after the September 11 terrorists’ attack. He suddenly became a major spokesperson on ‘how we created this monster called Osama Bin Laden,’ and the nasty radical Taliban. And the mainstream media couldn’t get enough of him. Ironically, he happened to be the man after William Casey and Neocons’ Jeane Kirkpatrick’s own hearts in creating the Bin Laden monster, bolstering the radical Taliban brand of Islamism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and kosherizing all dirty deeds as means to justify the end(s). He didn’t get those medals or promotions for nothing!

Not only that, Mr. Bearden’s speeches and writings seemed to have received the approval of the CIA and the Bush administration. As we all know you don’t get to publish uncensored and unredacted books as an ex-CIA man unless they want you to. This didn’t seem to raise a single eyebrow in the US media or pseudo activist organizations and think tanks.

While cashing in on his CIA past and government approved public persona within the US media, he quietly began to court the Ex-Taliban carpetbagger crowd in Washington DC in order to tap in to the billions of dollars war market cookie jars…

*And the story continues…

The son, and then the circle all came together…

Our General Wardak disappeared from the Afghan scene at the beginning of the civil war in the 1990s. He brought his family to the United States where he settled comfortably with enough wealth from undetermined sources, and he enrolled his son, Hamed, in Georgetown University.

Hamed Wardak, a quite chubby and ambitious young man, arrived at Georgetown University, and by the time he got to his senior level he was taken under the wings of one of his professors as her protégé. That professor was none other than our Jeane Kirkpatrick, the proud Godmother of the Neocons. Our savvy readers will understand that this was not due to chance and Hamed’s stars being all aligned. After all, his General father had done his job well serving Kirkpatrick’s and other Neocons’ foreign policy objectives at all costs in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As mentioned earlier, his General father was flown to the US several times and coached by this crowd to give speeches before the US Congress to obtain funds for their overt and covert operations involving the Saudis, Pakistanis and Taliban. So no, these relationships don’t evaporate and disappear. Wardak and his family were accommodated quite well after they were brought to the US, and the Neocons’ future plans for Afghanistan would have plenty of roles for the Wardak family to fill.

Wardak Junior was a known figure among the radical pro-Taliban sympathizers in Washington DC circles. Here are a few quotes from an excellent piece written on the Wardak(s) and Karzai(s):

“During this period, he flirted with pro-Taliban sympathies, due both to his ethnic Pashtun fervor and peer pressure from young DC-area extremists.

Gradually, however, Hamed came under the influence of Kirkpatrick’s philosophical soul mates, notably Marin Strmecki, a Republican essayist and political facilitator with the Smith Richardson Foundation. Strmecki worked at the Pentagon under Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration, along with Lewis “Scooter” Libby – and Zalmay Khalilzad. It was during Hamed Wardak’s reappraisal of the world, via these American political heavyweights, that he came into contact with a group of upwardly-mobile players on Washington’s Afghan-American scene: the Karzais; specifically, two of the six Karzai boys – Qayum and Mahmood. Unlike their younger brother Hamid, who had spent much of his life in Pakistan, Mahmood and Qayum were accomplished US-based businessmen.”

The Karzai brothers took a great interest in Wardak Junior, and he enjoyed the benefits of the Karzais’ flashy and high-flying friends. After the September 11 Terror Attacks, the Karzais made Hamed the Vice President of the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce, which was founded by Mahmood Karzai. As I mentioned briefly in my piece, our Neocon Ex-Congressman Don Ritter happens to be the co-founder of this organization. Hamed was also appointed to an advisor’s post with President Karzai’s first Finance Minister, Ashraf Ghani. No small accomplishment for the barely 30 year old Hamed!

Hamed Wardak’s most productive venture in tapping into the US Defense Sector Pot(s) of Gold began with joining a Washington DC contracting firm, Technologists Inc., founded by Aziz Azimi, who happened to be a very close buddy of Qayum Karzai. Here is a further detail on this by e-Ariana:

“Hamed Wardak’s new alliances proved extraordinarily advantageous as George W. Bush launched his “war on terror,” particularly with Khalilzad and Strmecki enjoying direct access to Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office.”

Do you want to check out the kind of contracts, the kind of millions, we are talking about with Technologists Inc.? Here is one for you:

Technologists, Inc., Rosslyn, Va., was awarded on Jan. 5, 2009, a $96,090,519 firm fixed price contract for the construction of an Afghanistan National Police National Training Center. Work will be performed in Maydan Wardak, Afghanistan, and is expected to be completed by Mar. 31, 2011. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. Web bids were solicited on Oct. 1, 2008, and 13 bids were received. U.S. Army Engineer District, Afghanistan, is the contracting activity (W917PM-09-C-0005).

That’s right. Just one of these contracts is worth nearly $100 million for connected Afghan carpetbaggers cashing in on wars suffered by ordinary American tax payers and US soldiers.

Back to the Wardaks and Karzais:

…

“By the time Khalilzad took up his ambassadorship to Kabul in Dec. 2004, Strmecki had been appointed Rumsfeld’s “Afghanistan Policy Co-ordinator.” That same month, Karzai removed his Minister of Defence, the Northern Alliance’s Mohammed Fahim, a Tajik. Faim’s replacement: Rahim Wardak.”

You heard it right. Our General Wardak was promoted and taken back to Afghanistan to serve in Karzai’s regime as the Minister of Defense. Was he given citizenship when he was brought back to the US to settle? No one is really talking. Did anyone in Afghanistan question having US citizens in their quasi democratic government posts? No one in the US media is reporting. If you are trusted within the Afghan diaspora in the DC area you’ll hear hushed comments about Wardak, his corrupt practices, and the rumors, fairly consistent rumors, of his close connections to the poppy world.

Back to Wardak Junior in Washington DC; With his dad now in Afghanistan as the Defense Minister, and with his Karzai partners and friends, he was busy running from one pot of gold to another:

“During this period, Hamed Wardak’s Washington DC-based firm, Technologists Inc. (Ti), benefited from several large contracts, some arranged directly with the US Defense Department, others via the Afghan Ministry of Defence. Ti’s website boasts that it was the first Afghan-American firm to be awarded a prime contract by the US government. Its portfolio has been fattened by a cornucopia of construction projects, including border crossing stations and the ANA’s Logistics and Command Headquarters, a counter-narcotics “campus” where the US Drug Enforcement Agency and its Afghan counterparts will be based [Emphasis Added] cell block renovations to Kabul’s huge Pul-i-Charkhi prison, and three industrial parks.”

Now recall the hushed voices about our General Wardak’s possible shady connections to heroin and mafia in Afghanistan among the Afghani diaspora in the Washington DC area. Now this same general happens to become the Minister of Defense, while his son runs companies with contracts for services rendered to our very own US Drug Enforcement Agency in Afghanistan, which is supposed to be fighting the heroin trade over there. Could it get more ridiculous and ironic than this?!

Of course it can. As I was working on this piece this New York Times headline popped up on my screen:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home. The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.

I am not going to get side tracked and criticize this NY Times article and its timing. After all, Karzai’s heroin connection and mafia characters have been known for a long time. The New York Times piece is probably timed and written to serve a draft or new operation plan for Afghanistan where we’ll be installing another crook to replace Karzai, but this new crook will be handpicked by this administration and enrich their slate of contractors…

Okay, so now we have Hamed Wardak with his Defense Minister father’s rumored heroin past and present, we have his extremely close ties to the Karzais with their heroin and crime network and connections. In a good and just world this would mean the end of Wardak. But that’s not the kind of world we live in. Hamed and his companies and connections, both in Afghanistan and in the US, are still cashing in; big time.

Here is one of our characters who hasn’t made an appearance for several pages: Milt Bearden, the EX-CIA Rambo in Afghanistan in the 80s, the US media darling on Osama Bin Laden, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Taliban…you name it, the shrewd self promoter with books and movies:

Milt Bearden must have been pretty familiar with our General Wardak since he was on the ground in Afghanistan serving his masters at the CIA and the Whitehouse, including the great advocator of ‘use any means,’ our Godmother of Neocons, Jeane Kirkpatrick. Operation Cyclone must certainly have brought him in contact with involved Taliban Generals, including our General, Osama Bin Laden, and other key ISI operators, and his dealings must certainly have included the major heroin operations tapped into to further fund these ‘freedom fighters.’ In fact, our Spook dealt extensively with Hekmatyar, who is considered one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Heroin Operator in Afghanistan – which supplies 90% of the world’s Heroin:

“One U.S. official who had considerable dealings with Mr. Hekmatyar was Milt Bearden, who during the Soviet occupation ran the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s covert program in Afghanistan. He says Mr. Hekmatyar struck him as “quirky and paranoid.””

Thus, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that our Ex-Spook took an interest in our General’s son, and translated this interest into a close business partnership when our young and chubby Hamed Wardak got closer and closer to big Pots of Gold in Washington DC and his father made it to the Defense Minister position in Afghanistan.

After Hamed Wardak left Technologists Inc. to go further in tapping the US Defense Contractor Gold Pots, and to set up various other front businesses in Afghanistan, many of which happen to be in security sectors, he formed a new front organization, Campaign for a US-Afghan Partnership. Guess who he appointed as the top man for the Board of this ambigious organization? That’s right, none other than our ex-spook, media supplier, Milton Bearden. Check out his glowing background listed on Hamed Wardak’s organization’s website: click here. What exactly this organization does, no one really knows, which should go as another credit to our Mr. Bearden’s CIA background in keeping things convoluted and secretive.

Rumors from the Ex-CIA community in the DC area point to another highly lucrative Wardak company paid by US tax payers, NCL, in Kabul, and hint that their buddy Milt may have been playing a major role there. Because of Mr. Bearden’s cozy relationships no one in the media has been looking for these deeper engagements and lucrative partnerships between him and Hamed Wardak.

With their intimate relationship and close ties with the Bush Whitehouse, especially Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney’s quarters, the Wardaks and Karzais ran from one pot of gold to another, filled their pockets and probably Swiss accounts, while the conditions kept worsening in Afghanistan, resulting in more civilian deaths and injured, and more US troop casualties there. Then, the Bush-Cheney era came to an end…

If you are holding your breath for our New President to act differently than his predecessor in enriching Wardaks-like carpetbagger war profiteers, go ahead – inhale and exhale. Hamed Wardak has been a supporter of both Hillary Clinton and President Obama, who between them received a total of $20,000 from Mr. Wardak in 2008. A naïve out of Washington person would scratch his head and ask ‘With all these ties, close connections and friendship with Bush Neocons such as Rumsfeld and Khalilzad, why the heck would he support and pay the Obama camp?’ Washington circle people would never ask such questions. They know very well how things are, that each establishment-based administration has its own set of neocons, hawks, and war profiteers.

Soon we’ll know who our new administration has in mind to replace Karzai’s regime. Will it be an insider like our General Wardak? Certainly not impossible. He’s been the man for decades, and they’ve invested a lot in him and his son, and enriched him and his family tremendously. Will it be another puppet just like Karzai but with a new face? Certainly possible. That would mean another group of carpetbagger war profiteers entering the market to grab the pots of gold financed by us, while the Karzais and Wardaks go away and enjoy their hundreds of millions of dollars stashed somewhere.

No matter what, with this kind of foundation, nothing will change for us, the ordinary Americans. Our tax dollars will go to the Wardaks or Wardaks-like parasites. Our soldiers will lose arms and legs, or their lives. The Afghani civilians will continue to suffer death, destruction, and chaos. Because the story of the General, his son, a spook, and the Godmother of Neocons, is only one of hundreds out there, and as long as we sit on the sideline, watch, and do nothing, there will be hundreds, or thousands more in this story, albeit with different faces and names.

Tags: Abdul Rahim Wardak, Afghanistan, Azimi, Carpetbagger, Don Ritter, Hamed Wardak, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Karzai, Khalilzad, Lobby, Milt Bearden, Milton Bearden, Neocon, War, War Profiteers.

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The true intentions behind the US-Colombia Military Agreement

The true intentions behind the
US-Colombia Military Agreement *

Eva Golinger

AN official document from the Department of the US Air Force reveals that the military base in Palanquero, Colombia will provide the Pentagon with "…an opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout South America…" This information contradicts the explanations offered by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and the U.S. State Department regarding the military agreement signed between the two nations this past October 30. Both governments have publicly stated that the military agreement refers only to counter-narcotics and counterterrorism operations within Colombian territory. President Uribe has reiterated numerous times that the military agreement with the U.S. will not affect Colombia’s neighbors, despite constant concern in the region regarding the true objectives of the agreement. But the U.S. Air Force document, dated May 2009, confirms that the concerns of South American nations have been right on target. The document exposes that the true intentions behind the agreement are to enable the U.S. to engage in "full spectrum military operations in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from narcotics funded terrorist insurgencies…and anti-US governments…"

The military agreement between Washington and Colombia authorizes the access and use of seven military installations in Palanquero, Malambo, Tolemaida, Larandia, Apíay, Cartagena and Málaga. Additionally, the agreement allows for "the access and use of all other installations and locations as necessary" throughout Colombia, with no restrictions. Together with the complete immunity the agreement provides to US military and civilian personnel, including private defense and security contractors, the clause authorizing the US to utilize any installation throughout the entire country - even commercial airports, for military ends, signifies a complete renouncing of Colombian sovereignty and officially converts Colombia into a client-state of the U.S.

The Air Force document underlines the importance of the military base in Palanquero and justifies the $46 million requested in the 2010 budget (now approved by Congress) in order to improve the airfield, associated ramps and other installations on the base to convert it into a U.S. Cooperative Security Location (CSL). "Establishing a Cooperative Security Location (CSL) in Palanquero best supports the COCOM’s (Command Combatant’s) Theater Posture Strategy and demonstrates our commitment to this relationship. Development of this CSL provides a unique opportunity for full spectrum operations in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from narcotics funded terrorist insurgencies, anti-US governments, endemic poverty and recurring natural disasters."

It’s not difficult to imagine which governments in South America are considered by Washington to be "anti-US governments". The constant aggressive declarations and statements emitted by the State and Defense Departments and the US Congress against Venezuela and Bolivia, and even to some extent Ecuador, evidence that the ALBA nations are the ones perceived by Washington as a "constant threat". To classify a country as "anti-U.S." is to consider it an enemy of the United States. In this context, it’s obvious that the military agreement with Colombia is a reaction to a region the U.S. now considers full of "enemies".

COUNTERNARCOTICS OPERATIONS ARE SECONDARY

Per the U.S. Air Force document, "Access to Colombia will further its strategic partnership with the United States. The strong security cooperation relationship also offers an opportunity for conducting full spectrum operations throughout South America to include mitigating the Counter-narcotics capability." This statement clearly evidences that counter-narcotics operations are secondary to the real objectives of the military agreement between Colombia and Washington. Again, this clearly contrasts the constant declarations of the Uribe and Obama governments insisting that the main focus of the agreement is to combat drug trafficking and production. The Air Force document emphasizes the necessity to improve "full spectrum" military operations throughout South America – not just in Colombia – in order to combat "constant threats" from "anti-U.S. governments" in the region.

PALANQUERO IS THE BEST OPTION FOR CONTINENTAL MOBILITY

The Air Force document explains that "Palanquero is unquestionably the best site for investing in infrastructure development within Colombia. Its central location is within reach of…operations areas…its isolation maximizes Operational Security (OPSEC) and Force Protection and minimizes the US military profile. The intent is to leverage existing infrastructure to the maximum extent possible, improve the US ability to respond rapidly to crisis, and assure regional access and presence at minimum cost. Palanquero supports the mobility mission by providing access to the entire South American continent with the exception of Cape Horn…"

ESPIONAGE AND WARFARE

The document additionally confirms that the U.S. military presence in Palanquero, Colombia will improve the capacity of espionage and intelligence operations, and will allow the U.S. armed forces to increase their warfare capabilities in the region. "Development of this CSL will further the strategic partnership forged between the U.S. and Colombia and is in the interest of both nations…A presence will also increase our capability to conduct Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), improve global reach, support logistics requirements, improve partnerships, improve theater security cooperation and expand expeditionary warfare capability."

The language of war included in this document evidences the true intentions behind the military agreement between Washington and Colombia: they are preparing for war in Latin America. The past few days have been full of conflict and tension between Colombia and Venezuela. Just days ago, the Venezuelan government captured three spies from the Colombian intelligence agency, DAS, and discovered several active destabilization and espionage operations against Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela. The operations - Fénix, Salomón and Falcón, respectively, were revealed in documents found with the captured DAS agents. Approximately two weeks ago, 10 bodies were found in Táchira, a border zone with Colombia. After completing the relevant investigations, the Venezuelan government discovered that the bodies belonged to Colombian paramilitaries infiltrated inside Venezuelan territory. This dangerous paramilitary infiltration from Colombia forms part of a destabilization plan against Venezuela that seeks to create a paramilitary state inside Venezuelan territory in order to break down President Chávez’s government.

The military agreement between Washington and Colombia will only increase regional tensions and violence. The information revealed in the U.S. Air Force document unquestionably evidences that Washington seeks to promote a state of warfare in South America, using Colombia as its launching pad. Before this declaration of war, the peoples of Latin America must stand strong and unified. Latin American integration is the best defense against the empire’s aggression.

*The US Air Force document was submitted in May 2009 to Congress as part of the 2010 budget justification. It is an official government document and reaffirms the authenticity of the White Book: Global Enroute Strategy of the U.S. Air Mobility Command, which was denounced by President Chávez during the UNASUR meeting in Bariloche, Argentina this past August 28. I have placed the original document and the non-official translation to Spanish that I did of the relevant parts relating to Palanquero on the web page of the Center to Alert and Defend the People "Centro de Alerta para la Defensa de los pueblos", a new space we are creating to guarantee that strategic information is available to those under constant threat from imperialist aggression.