LBJ aided and abetted Israel's uranium enrichment program

Archived CIA files, woefully incomplete because of the political selectivity involved with the Freedom of Information and National Archives and Records Administration Acts, do contain enough information that highlights the participation of the administration of President Lyndon Johnson in the illegal acquisition by Israel of enriched uranium from the United States for Israel's nuclear weapons program.

Apparently, the CIA got around the political problems associated with maintaining detailed records on Israel's nuclear proliferation by keeping open source articles on the Israeli espionage activities. One of the archived documents is a Washington Postarticle written by Charles Babcock, dated June 5, 1986, titled "U.S. an Intelligence Target of the Israelis, Officials Say."

The article details the operations of Mossad operative Raphael ("Rafi") Eitan in illegally procuring 200 pounds of enriched uranium -- enough uranium for six nuclear fission bombs -- from a company called NUMEC -- Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation -- in Apollo, Pennsylvania in September 1968. Eitan and three other Mossad operatives traveled to NUMEC's plant and arranged with its owner, an American Zionist nuclear scientist named Zalman M. Shapiro, to have the enriched uranium shipped to Israel clandestinely. Shapiro denied the charges that he gave the uranium to the Israelis and the FBI closed the case, code named "Operation Divert," without charges ever being filed.

The Post article, however, points to a declassified FBI document that points to "Raphael Eitan, chemist, Ministry of Defense, Israel, born 11/23/26 in Israel," was part of the four-man Mossad team that went to the NUMEC facility in September 1968. The actual visit was on September 10, 1968 and it was approved by the Atomic Energy Commission. The team also included Avraham Hermoni, the scientific counselor at the Israeli embassy in Washington, and two officials of Israel's Department of Electronics, which was part of the Israeli Ministry of Science and Development. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Reviewidentified the other two Israelis as Ephraim Beigon and Abraham Bendor, aka Avraham Shalom. Bendor later became the head of Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence service. In addition, Ephraim Lahav, the science minister-counsellor of the Israeli embassy in Washington, made several trips to NUMEC in the 1960s. One of NUMEC's metallurgists was Bernard Cinai, aka Baruch Cinai, an Israeli citizen. NUMEC's illegal nuclear proliferation network extended from Israel and the United States to Britain, France, Japan, Spain, Belgium, and Germany. NUMEC and Israel ran a front operation called Isotopes and Radiation Enterprises (ISORAD). Some NUMEC engineers ended up working for Westinghouse Electric and were interviewed by FBI agents about the missing uranium.

Federal law enforcement sources told the Postthat Hermoni attended a meeting at Shapiro's house in November 1968 at which 11 American scientists were present. In June 1969, FBI counter-intelligence agents witnessed Shapiro meeting with another Israeli embassy science attache at Pittsburgh airport. Shapiro's home and work phones were tapped by FBI agents and he was trailed by FBI agents at every move. Attorney General Ramsey Clark authorized electronic surveillance of Shapiro based on the evidence compiled of his dealings with Mossad. Shapiro used an encrypted telephone provided by Mossad to communicate with Mossad agents in New York.

The only sanctions taken against NUMEC was a $930,000 fine it received from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) for losing the enriched uranium. However, it was clear that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who usually held ultimate sway over domestic espionage matters, wanted to indict Shapiro, who later became the head of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Zionist Organization of America, but was overruled by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Johnson and Nixon White Houses. However, there is also evidence of a strange turn-around in Hoover's feelings about NUMEC and Shapiro. The AEC sent a letter to Hoover in the late 1960s asking whether Shapiro should register as a foreign agent. The FBI director replied that Shapiro was not required to do so. However, after the Justice Department ordered the FBI to back down from its investigation of Israeli nuclear smuggling and the role NUMEC played in it in 1972, Hoover reportedly became very offended at the FBI being called off the case. Hoover died suddenly after his the rift with the Justice Department.

The FBI tried to interview Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the U.S. nuclear submarine, over his dealings with NUMEC and his awarding the firm lucrative Navy contracts. Rickover refused any interviews with FBI agents over his association with the firm. The Navy's contracts with NUMEC saw the transfer of weapons-grade uranium from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to the Apollo plant ostensibly for the production of fuel rods for U.S. nuclear submarines.

In 1974, after the Israeli penetration of America's nuclear weapons program had reached critical mass, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General George "Scratchy" Brown, stated to a Duke University audience that Jews had too much control over America's banks, newspapers and elected officials and that Israel was a "burden" to the Department of Defense. One nettlesome individual Brown had to deal with was Israeli Colonel Yosef Langotsky, the assistant army attache at the Israeli embassy in Washington. Langotsky was known to the FBI as a Mossad spy and he often was caught in secure areas of the Pentagon trying to recruit agents, most of them American Jewish employees of the Defense Department, into serving Israeli intelligence. Langotsky was eventually refused access to the Pentagon and he was recalled by the Tel Aviv authorities in 1979. Brown's comments about Jews were: "they own, you know, the banks in this country. The newspapers. Just look at where the Jewish money is." President Gerald Ford refused to fire Brown, although Ford was under immense pressure to do so, and Brown continued to serve into President Jimmy Carter's administration. Carter also resisted Jewish pressure to fire Brown. Brown retired on June 21, 1978 and died some six months later in December 1978 from a fast-acting form of cancer.

An investigation of Israeli nuclear proliferation by Representative Morris Udall's (D-AZ) House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs yielded little success. In December 1978, Shapiro told Udall under oath, "Let me state emphatically that I have never participated in any theft or diversion of special nuclear material." Udall, who ran for President in 1976, was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease the year following his investigation of Israel's nuclear materials smuggling from the United States. The disease forced Udall to resign from Congress in 1991 and he died in 1998.

It was after Representative John Murtha (D-PA) asked for an investigation of the radioactive pollution caused by NUMEC, Atlantic Richfield, and Babcok & Wilson Co. at the Apollo plutonium and uranium plant in 2002, that the corporate media began investigating Murtha's connections with lobbyists. Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD), whose sister served as executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), edged out Murtha for House Majority Leader after the Democrats took over control of the House in 2006. Murtha was also targeted in the FBI "Abscam" investigation, which used a convicted con-man named Melvin Weinberg to target a number of Democrats, including Senator Harrison Williams (D-NJ), who believed they were dealing with an Arab sheikh who was actually an impostor. Many, including federal judges, believed the Abscam investigation had a certain "odor" about it and was a case of prosecutorial misconduct.

Israel's illegal acquisition of U.S. nuclear technology was aided and abetted by President Lyndon B. Johnson and his CIA director Richard Helms. The chief of the CIA's Science and Technology directorate, Carl Duckett, planned to draft a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in 1969 detailing Israel's development of an atomic bomb in 1968. Duckett told the Post that Johnson told Helms not to publish the NIE. According to the Post, Duckett said Johnson told Helms "Don't tell anyone else, even Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara." Rusk and McNamara were Johnson's Secretaries of State and Defense, respectively. The CIA reportedly had secretly placed "sniffing" devices at Dimona that provided intelligence that proved Israel was developing nuclear weapons. The CIA also kept a wary eye on the smaller Israeli nuclear research facility at Nahal Soreq on the Mediterranean coast, although the site was often used by Israeli propagandists to show to the world that Israel's nuclear ambitions were purely peaceful. Soreq NRC was a branch of Shapiro's and the Israeli government's ISORAD. Duckett and his team had asked the AEC in a 1969 to estimate how many nuclear bombs Israel could make if it possessed all the missing uranium from NUMEC.

Ever since the Johnson administration, every U.S. president has followed a policy of "don't ask, don't tell" when it comes to Israel's nuclear weapons. An acknowledgement by the United States of Israel's nuclear arsenal would not only spur demands for Israel to open its program to international inspection but also focus on the covert methods by which Israel obtained the materials for its nuclear program. However, on a few occasions, U.S. intelligence and military documents have pointed to Israel's nuclear weapons program. The Post article cites a CIA document that was "inadvertently" made public in 1974. The document states: "We believe Israel already had produced nuclear weapons. Our judgment is based on Israeli acquisition of large quantities of uranium, partly by clandestine means."

One of the reasons that Israel is preventing Israeli nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu from emigrating from Israel is the knowledge the scientist undoubtedly possesses of Israel's clandestine nuclear technology acquisition program, including its work with apartheid South Africa and Taiwan in developing nuclear weapons outside the framework of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Vanunu was kidnapped by Mossad agents in Rome and tried and sentenced him in a secret tribunal in Israel for providing photographs of Israeli's Dimona nuclear weapons site to the Sunday Times of London. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had claimed the facility was a "textile factory." Vanunu, who worked at Dimona, was sentenced to 18 years in solitary confinement. Vanunu now leads a Kafkaesque existence in Israel and although he converted to Christianity from Judaism in 1985, Vanunu, a native of Morocco, is prevented from leaving Israel for Australia or the United States.

A longtime CIA operative told WMR that, ideally, the United States should offer to swap convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard for Vanunu. Ironically, Pollard's Israeli control officer during his espionage for Israel while working for U.S. Naval Intelligence, was Eitan, who later became the head of an Israeli government owned chemical company. Eitan now leads the Gil pensioners' party in the Israeli Knesset. The failure to offer Pollard for Vanunu by successive U.S. administrations points to the power that Israel has over the U.S. decision-making process. In this case, what is good for America is not good for Israel and the loyalty of the Israel Lobby in Washington genuflects to what is good for Israel.

During Pollard's espionage for Israel in the 1980s, the FBI identified California businessman Richard K. Smyth in a scheme to ship 810 "krytrons," electronic triggers for nuclear weapons, to Israel. Smyth fled the United States after his federal indictment in May 1985. Babcock & Wilson Company, which took over the Apollo plant from NUMEC, continued to report the loss of enriched uranium.

Shapiro eventually went to work for Westinghouse's nuclear fuel division and he served as a consultant to the CIA.

With the revelations about the cooperation between the Turkish "Deep State" and Israeli in nuclear proliferation networks brought to light by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, as well as what is known about the CIA brass plate counter-proliferation operations of Brewster Jennings and Associates and Valerie Plame Wilson, there is no reason to believe that Israel has stopped its aggressive acquisition of nuclear materials and technology from the United States and other countries. Shapiro's and the Israeli government's ISORAD later inked a fuel contract with a Turkish entity called Global Fluids International SA. ISORAD has also developed links with the Chinese and Indian nuclear programs. The Post article maintained in the CIA archives quotes John Davitt, the head of the Justice Department's internal security section until 1980, as saying that Israeli intelligence was "more active than anyone but the KGB . . . They were targeted on the United States about half the time and on Arab countries about half the time."

Documented evidence that individuals with AIPAC, the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA), and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), as well as successive "science advisers" at the Israeli embassy in Washington and the Israeli Consulate General in New York have been involved in espionage activities in the United States indicates that not much has changed since Davitt identified the Israeli intelligence threat during his time at the Justice Department.

The Shame and Cowardice of the Chickenhawk

by Bob Wallace



The usual definition of a chickenhawk is someone who supports war but actively avoids fighting. Whenever I think of one, what comes to my mind are Young Republicans, but also leftists, who are just as bad if not worse.

A writer, whose name unfortunately completely escapes me, said the aforementioned definition is not totally accurate. A better one is that a chickenhawk is someone who believes supporting war is a sign of his personal bravery and patriotism, and is convinced that those who oppose war, for whatever principled and thoughtful reasons, are always cowards and traitors.

Still, chickenhawks are cowards. Why, then, can they not see what they are?

There is only one reason: They deceive themselves as to what they truly are. They idealize themselves as proud, brave and patriotic, while others, more clear-sighted, see them for what they are: cowards who will do nothing except stand on the sidelines and yell, "Okay, throw the ball here! Now throw it over there!"

When people refuse to see their bad qualities (what Jung called their Shadows), there is only one thing they can do to protect their self-delusion: project those qualities on other people. Here is an example: when leftists talk about "hate" (which they do all the time), they are projecting their own unacknowledged hate onto other people.

Chickenhawks are the same: They cannot acknowledge their own cowardice, so they must project it onto others. Those Others, to the chickenhawk, are the cowards and traitors, not the chickenhawk.

Yet, the chickenhawk must know, somewhere deep inside, that he is a coward, and so has to be ashamed of himself. How does he cover up his shame? With pride. Pride on top, hiding shame underneath.

The first time I ran across that formulation of pride covering shame was in John le Carre's novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, when he wrote of Leamas' "protective arrogance concealing shame."

Plato once wrote, "The cause of all sins in every case lies in the person's excessive love of self." I wouldn't call what he's writing about "self love." Excessive pride, arrogance, grandiosity, yes, but not self-love.

The social researcher James Gilligan, who spent 35 years dealing with prisoners, wrote, "Shame . . . motivates not confession but concealment of whatever one feels ashamed of." Guilt, he writes, can on the other hand lead to confession and penance.

He also writes, “…people who feel ashamed typically attempt to diminish that painful feeling both by assuming attitudes of arrogance, self-importance, and boastfulness.”

We'll never see confession and penance from chickenhawks, because they have no guilt. And it's a lot easier to admit guilt than shame. And chickenhawks' shame and cowardice is something they will not, cannot, admit. So they project it onto others: “You should be ashamed of yourself for being a coward who’s not supporting our country and its wars.”

I believe the average chickenhawk must be exceptionally narcissistic, which is correctly defined as splitting things into all-good and all-bad – idealization and devaluation. The chickenhawk has to see himself as all good (brave and patriotic), so his own unacknowledged badness (his cowardice) has to be projected onto others.

The late M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist, called this kind of projection “the genesis of human evil.” If he’s correct, and I believe he is, then what chickenhawks are doing, in their self-deception, their unacknowledged cowardice, their arrogance and grandiosity, and their scapegoating of the innocent, is evil.

I sometimes wonder if chickenhawks ever think about how they would handle combat. I think they'd do what a soldier friend of mine saw another soldier do: brag to everyone how tough and brave he was (pride), but when the first shot was fired, he turned and ran (shaming himself).

It's probably a good thing chickenhawks aren't in the military: their cowardice and incompetence would probably get innocent soldiers killed. No, not probably. Would.

There's an old saying -- and I have no idea where it's from -- that the best warriors are the least war-like. I will nod and agree with it.

Why in the world anyone listens to chickenhawks is beyond me. Would anyone in his right mind listen to any coward about anything? All of them should be laughed at and ridiculed into silence -- because the one thing no coward can stand is to be laughed at.

Do the CIA and Mossad have both sides of coin covered in Iran?

Recent reports that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hails from a Persian Jewish family with the surname Sabourjian, which translates from the "weaver of the sabour," sabour being the Persian Jewish prayer shawl, has intelligence agents all over the Middle East wondering if Ahmadinejad, with his bluster about there being no Holocaust and his reviling of Zionism, is just not too good to be true for those who want to attack Iran and overthrow the Islamic Republic. Ahmadinejad's father, Ahmad, did change the family's name from Sabourjian to Ahmadinejad, some say to hide the family's Jewish roots by adopting a Muslim name.

Of course, having Jewish roots in no way makes Ahmadinejad some sort of secret agent for the Mossad. However, the reports could undermine Ahmadinejad's standing among the more radical members of the Iranian Islamic leadership.

Ahmadinejad is linked politically to the Supreme Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Hoseyni Khamenei. However, according to an undated CIA document titled "Recent Developments in Iran," that appears to be from the time of the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, Khamenei is linked to the group of mullahs that included Mir Hossein Mousavi, Ahmadinejad's losing challenger in the recent Iranian presidential election. Mousavi served as Prime Minister under then-President Khamenei in the 1980s. More significantly, Mousavi, who received a great deal of financial support from groups associated with George Soros and his CIA-linked "foundations" during the recent presidential election campaign, was part and parcel of the Iranian end of the Iran-contra affair. Mousavi played a key role in freeing the American hostages in Lebanon in return for secret U.S. military aid in Iran's war against the forces of Saddam Hussein, who was also secretly backed by the Americans.

Another member of the Khamenei bloc, according to the CIA document, was Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, now the Secretary General of the Combatant Clergy Association. Kani's colleague in the bloc, according to the CIA document, was Ayatollah Abdul-Karim Mousavi Ardabili, the head of the Iranian judiciary under Ayatollah Khomeini, who was, along with Khamenei, Rafsanjani, and Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini Beheshti, believed by many in Iran and abroad of having pre- and post-revolution links to the CIA. Beheshti was killed, along with over 70 other members of his Islamic Republican Party on June 28, 1981 in a terrorist bombing carried out by the neocon-supported Mohajedin-e-Khalq (MEK), the favorrite Iranian terrorist group of Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen. Beheshti was close to Mohamad Khatami, who would later become a moderate president of Iran, and Khomeini.

One of Ledeen's associates, Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian Jew who lived mostly in Rome, was a key middleman in the supply of U.S. weapons to Iran in the Iran-contra scandal. Ghorbanifar also became a key interlocutor in the lead-up to the U.S. attack and occupation of Iraq and his involvement is suspected in the forged Niger "yellowcake" uranium documents that were partially used to justify the attack on Iraq.

According to the CIA document, the Khamenei-Mousavi bloc was oposed by the bloc of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and, ironically, a backer of Mousavi in the recent election. Rafsanjani was also a key player in the Iran-contra affair and is suspected of receiving gifts from top Reagan administration officials in cementing the Iranian end of the Iran-contra operational pipeline. Also associated with the Rafsanjani bloc was Grand Ayatollah Hosein-Ali Montazeri, a once-powerful and quite liberal mullah who was exiled to Qom and house arrest by Khamenei. Earlier, Montazeri's chief aide, Mehdi Hashemi, was accused of leaking information on Rafsanjani's connections to the Iran-contra scandal and he was executed as a counter-revolutionary in 1987.

It is noteworthy that the CIA document states that the second, Rafsanjani-Montazeri group had the "backing of fanatic terrorist organizations." In fact, the more radical policies came out of the first group that included Khamenei and the now-"moderate" Mousavi. Nevertheless, from the Iran-contra scandal to the secret U.S. arming of Iran, the CIA had its links to both blocs. The relationships built between the CIA and the Khamenei-Mousavi and Rafsanjani blocs in the 1980s may continue with the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad bloc today.

Although the Mossad and CIA were heavily involved in the secret Iran-contra arms shipments to Iran during the 1980s, the CIA document also reveals that an Italian middleman named "Seratore" was involved in secret negotiations to provide Iran with weapons, including tanks from Argentina and armored personnel carriers from Italy.

Netanyahu failed to get back Mossad commandos.

Netanyahu failed to get back Mossad commandos.

Israeli support for rogue regimes brings out the anti-Semitism charges from the usual suspects

As if on cue, the Anti-Defamation League of Israeli excesses apologist Abe Foxman is charging that verified reports of Israeli security assistance to the Honduras coup plotters led by Roberto Micheletti into power in Tegucigalpa smacks of "anti-Semitism." Foxman and his coterie are also charging that statements of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya that Israeli security advisers and mercenaries were involved in supporting the coup are stoking anti-Semitism in Honduras. Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has also come in for criticism from the ADL zealots who charge that his statement that only Israel recognized the Honduran regime are untrue. In fact, Israel represents the Honduran junta diplomatically in Argentina, which severed relations with the junta.

The diplomatic quid pro quo on Argentine representation between the junta and Israel represents de facto recognition by the Jerusalem authorities of the junta in Tegucigalpa. Since the Republic of China on Taiwan has not extended diplomatic recognition to the junta, that means that Israel is the only nation in the world that has extended recognition to the Micheletti junta. However, for the ADL and its supporters, the truth never matters when it comes to Israel and its flagrant violations of international norms and law.

Documents from the CIA archives illustrate how many times in the past Israel backed regimes that had little, if any, international diplomatic support. Although Israel's nuclear and intelligence relations with the apartheid regime of South Africa are well known, the CIA files have yielded some other interesting facts about Israeli "rogue diplomacy."

A CIA Joint Publication Research Service, Foreign Broadcast Information Service document dated June 15, 1979, contains a briefing that states "an important person from the Israeli Secret Service Mossad recently went to Njamena [sic] [Chad], where he met with Goukouni Oueddei."

Oueddei became dictator of Chad in 1979 after his slow ascendancy to power following the 1975 assassination of Chadian President Francois Tombalbaye. Oueddei quickly became an ally of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. However, the CIA document indicates that Israel and Qaddafi were backing the same horse in Chad, Oueddei. Eventually, Oueddei was ousted by his pro-Western Defense Minister Hissene Habre. Oueddei fled to Tripoli, Libya and exile. The CIA document states that the Mossad official "promised that an important contingent of Israeli commandos would soon be sent to support the Goukouni-Hissene Habre clique in Chad." Habre, who was ousted in 1990 and fled into exile to Senegal, is currently on trial in Dakar for the murder of thousands of Chadians while he was dictator. Habre is known as the "African Pinochet," a reference to the murderous Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet who was installed with the help of Henry Kissinger and who was also supported by Israeli intelligence.

Another CIA Joint Publication Research Service, Foreign Broadcast Information Service document dated August 21, 1979, reveals the close links between Israel and Rhodesia, run by a white minority government, recognized by no other state other than apartheid South Africa. The document states "Israel has just established a veritable intelligence network in Salisbury under the direction of a former infantry colonel. This branch of Mossad was set up with the approval of Bishop Muzorewa who asked the Israeli agents to help him track down and eliminate his PF enemies. According to Rhodesian sources, it is possible that Salisbury could become Mossad's main station for the Indian Ocean and southern Africa."

Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who was very pro-Israel, was briefly the Prime Minister of the interim "Zimbabwe-Rhodesia," the nation that followed the "internal settlement" of 1978. The PF, or Patriotic Front, was led by Robert Mugabe, with whom the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia was still battling in a guerrilla war. In 1980, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia became Zimbabwe under the presidency of Mugabe.

Israel's support for the Micheletti regime in Honduras follows decades of Israeli support for some of the world's worst dictators and rogue regimes. Israel and its apologists abhor the facts, however, in the case of Honduras, Chad, and Rhodesia, they speak for themselves.

Maher Zain - Palestine Will Be Free فلسطين سوف تحرر

Cause they even bombed the United Nations...

The Tropes of 'Jewish Antisemitism'

The concept of the 'self-hating Jew' has been dignified with a pseudo-psychopathology by those keen to suppress dissent By Antony Lerman October 05, 2009 "The Guardian" -- - From the moment he took the job heading the UN Human Rights Council's mission to investigate human rights and international humanitarian law violations during the Gaza conflict, it was inevitable that Judge Richard Goldstone, born into a South African Jewish family, would be labelled a "self-hating Jew" and a Jewish antisemite. Immediately on the release in September of his findings, which concluded that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes, Israel's finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, couldn't wait to make this accusation. He certainly wasn't alone. The charge is so popular these days that people who use it must have felt as though they had won the lottery when they were presented with such a high-profile target like Goldstone. They were probably still savouring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's outburst in August when he railed against the two senior and Jewish aides of President Obama, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, calling them "self-hating Jews". If anything finally shows up the concept as bogus and bankrupt, it should be the use of it against Goldstone. Jewish self-hatred means rejecting everything about yourself that is Jewish because it is so hateful to you. As a description of Goldstone, nothing could be further from the truth. A life-long Zionist and a Governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Goldstone believes bringing war criminals to justice stems from the lessons of the Holocaust and that the creation of Israel symbolised what the postwar human rights movement was all about. But to those who level the accusation, the real degree of Jewish affiliation of the accused is irrelevant. Now it's quite obvious that calling someone a self-hating Jew in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict is intended as a demeaning political insult, a way of delegitimising the views of Jews with whom you violently disagree. But one of the reasons why the charge is so ubiquitous and is impervious to evidence and argument that proves it to be bogus is that it's not just used as an epithet. To some scholars and serious commentators, Jewish self-hatred is a proven psychopathological condition, an academically respectable category, and exponents of it can be found throughout history. Their testimony helps to underpin the accusation. Professor Robert Wistrich, who heads an antisemitism research centre at the Hebrew University, accepts the concept without question and taught a course on it. Lord Sacks, Britain's mainstream Orthodox Chief Rabbi, endorsing the concept in his last two books, says it was born in 15th-century Spain. A recent convert to this way of thinking is David Aaronovitch, the Times and Jewish Chronicle columnist, who "discovered" that there was such a thing as a genuine self-hating Jew after encountering the virulently anti-Jewish writings of Otto Weininger, the brilliant young Viennese Jew who converted to Christianity in 1902 and killed himself a year later. And Robin Shepherd, of the Henry Jackson Society, in a thoroughly wrong-headed book out this month subtitled Europe's Problem With Israel, uses the concept to explain why leftwing Jews "publicly turn against Israel". This is sheer intellectual laziness, or an ideological or political predisposition dressed up in academic language, or both. In fact, the way all of the key historical figures from the late 19th and early 20th centuries who are used to prove the existence of Jewish self-hatred – Weininger, Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, Heinrich Heine – related to their Jewishness has been shown to be far too complex to allow the self-hating Jew label to be anything other than a crude mis-characterisation. Moreover, the perceived antisemitism in their writings was mirrored in the writings of Zionists, especially the founder of political Zionism Theodor Herzl. He painted the weak ghetto Jew, in his 1897 essay "Mauschel", as "a distortion of the human character, unspeakably mean and repellent", interested only in "mean profit". Far from being the antithesis of Jewish self-hatred, it is arguable that Zionism was actually a display of it. The Jewish self-hatred accusation assumes that there is a correct manner and degree to which people should express their Jewish identities in public; and that there is a particular set of core values and institutions which one should favour. Neither of these assumptions is justifiable on the basis of Jewish teachings or Jewish history. The accusation also assumes that Jewishness "is or should be a primary identity", and therefore to reject it or criticise it is somehow unnatural and wrong. Yet, criticising an aspect of one's identity does not automatically imply criticism of that identity per se. Implied in the concept of Jewish self-hatred is the notion of a Jewish essence. But the long history of the Jews – integral to which is conversion, assimilation, a wide variety of sometimes clashing Jewish identities, the understanding that Jewishness can be any one of or any combination of religion, ethnicity or culture – makes nonsense of such an idea. Those who use the accusation sit in judgment on the Jewishness of others. This might be understandable (though insulting) if you are, say, an Orthodox Zionist Jew. But it's clear that many prominent accusers are not of that persuasion. They are, rather, people who would object very strongly to Orthodox rabbis sitting in judgment when they claim the right to determine who is a Jew. When the self-hating Jew allegation is levelled at someone with the degree of integrity of Judge Goldstone, who takes such pride in his Jewishness, and is orchestrated by the Israeli government and prominent Jewish leaders and commentators, the ugly desperation of the accusers is laid bare. Regrettably, given the appalling state of public debate about antisemitism and Israel-Palestine among Jews, no matter how clearly and how often the charge of Jewish self-hatred is shown to be nothing more than a political and personal insult that demeans the accuser and demonises the accused, it won't be going away any time soon.

The demise of the dollar By Robert Fisk

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

By Robert Fisk

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place – although they have not discovered the details – are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China's former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. "Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable," he told the Asia and Africa Review. "We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security."

This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil – yet again turning the region's conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves.

The decline of American economic power linked to the current global recession was implicitly acknowledged by the World Bank president Robert Zoellick. "One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations," he said in Istanbul ahead of meetings this week of the IMF and World Bank. But it is China's extraordinary new financial power – along with past anger among oil-producing and oil-consuming nations at America's power to interfere in the international financial system – which has prompted the latest discussions involving the Gulf states.

Brazil has shown interest in collaborating in non-dollar oil payments, along with India. Indeed, China appears to be the most enthusiastic of all the financial powers involved, not least because of its enormous trade with the Middle East.

China imports 60 per cent of its oil, much of it from the Middle East and Russia. The Chinese have oil production concessions in Iraq – blocked by the US until this year – and since 2008 have held an $8bn agreement with Iran to develop refining capacity and gas resources. China has oil deals in Sudan (where it has substituted for US interests) and has been negotiating for oil concessions with Libya, where all such contracts are joint ventures.

Furthermore, Chinese exports to the region now account for no fewer than 10 per cent of the imports of every country in the Middle East, including a huge range of products from cars to weapon systems, food, clothes, even dolls. In a clear sign of China's growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China's reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro.

Ever since the Bretton Woods agreements – the accords after the Second World War which bequeathed the architecture for the modern international financial system – America's trading partners have been left to cope with the impact of Washington's control and, in more recent years, the hegemony of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.

The Chinese believe, for example, that the Americans persuaded Britain to stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the dollar. But Chinese banking sources say their discussions have gone too far to be blocked now. "The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the basket of currencies," a prominent Hong Kong broker told The Independent. "The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the euro. They have no choice because they won't be able to use the US dollar."

Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.

The US discussed the trend briefly at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh; the Chinese Central Bank governor and other officials have been worrying aloud about the dollar for years. Their problem is that much of their national wealth is tied up in dollar assets.

"These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate."

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.

Jumpin' Jack Verdi, It's a Gas, Gas, Gas Iran and the Pipelineistan Opera By Pepe Escobar

Back before email, a world traveler who wanted to keep in touch and couldn't just pop into the nearest Internet café, might drop you a series of postcards from one exotic locale after another. Pepe Escobar, that edgy, peripatetic globe-trotting reporter for one of my favorite on-line publications, Asia Times, has been doing just that for TomDispatch readers as he explores the geography that undergirds our civilization, the pipelines that crisscross Eurasia through which flow energy -- and trouble. This, then, is his third "postcard" from what he likes to call Pipelineistan. The first in March began laying out a great, ongoing energy struggle across Eurasia via an embattled energy corridor (and a key pipeline) that runs from the Caspian Sea to Europe through Georgia and Turkey -- and the Great Game of business, diplomacy, and proxy war between Russia and the U.S. that has gone with it.

In May, he plunged eastward into tumultuous Central and South Asia and the devolving battleground that, in Washington, goes by the neologism AfPak (for the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations). Now, he heads west toward Europe and another developing struggle, this time over just how natural gas from the Caspian Sea will reach Europe. Think of this as a story that lurks under so many other stories. For instance, this very day, the representatives of Russia, Germany, China, France, Britain, and for the first time, the United States, will be sitting down with Iran's representative in Geneva for what's billed as an historic exchange. On the table -- and in global headlines -- will be the Iranian nuclear program, a previously secret Iranian nuclear site, Iranian medium-range missile tests, sanctions of various sorts, the possibility of future attacks on that country's nuclear establishment, and so on. What won't be in the headlines, or the accompanying reams of analysis, is the approximately 15% of the world's natural gas deposits Iran controls. As it happens, for the Europeans and the Russians (and so for Washington), that's the story hidden under the Iranian imbroglio, which is why we need Pepe Escobar. Tom

Jumpin' Jack Verdi, It's a Gas, Gas, Gas

Iran and the Pipelineistan Opera
By Pepe Escobar

Brussels -- Oil and natural gas prices may be relatively low right now, but don't be fooled. The New Great Game of the twenty-first century is always over energy and it's taking place on an immense chessboard called Eurasia. Its squares are defined by the networks of pipelines being laid across the oil heartlands of the planet. Call it Pipelineistan. If, in Asia, the stakes in this game are already impossibly high, the same applies to the "Euro" part of the great Eurasian landmass -- the richest industrial area on the planet. Think of this as the real political thriller of our time.

The movie of the week in Brussels is: When NATO Meets Pipelineistan. Though you won't find it in any headlines, at virtually every recent NATO summit Washington has been maneuvering to involve reluctant Europeans ever more deeply in the business of protecting Pipelineistan. This is already happening, of course, in Afghanistan, where a promised pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India, the TAPI pipeline, has not even been built. And it's about to happen at the borders of Europe, again around pipelines that have not yet been built.

If you had to put that Euro part of Pipelineistan into a formula, you might do so this way: Nabucco (pushed by the U.S.) versus South Stream (pushed by Russia). Be patient. You'll understand in a moment.

At the most basic level, it's a matter of the West yet again trying, in the energy sphere, to bypass Russia. For this to happen, however -- and it wouldn't hurt if you opened the nearest atlas for a moment -- Europe desperately needs to get a handle on Central Asian energy resources, which is easy to say but has proven surprisingly hard to do. No wonder the NATO Secretary General's special representative, Robert Simmons, has been logging massive frequent-flyer miles to Central Asia over these last few years.

Just under the surface of an edgy entente cordiale between the European Union (EU) and Russia lurks the possibility of a no-holds-barred energy war -- Liquid War, as I call it. The EU and the U.S. are pinning their hopes on a prospective 3,300-kilometer-long, $10.7 billion pipeline dubbed Nabucco. Planning for it began way back in 2004 and construction is finally expected to start, if all goes well (and it may not), in 2010. So if you're a NATO optimist, you hope that natural gas from the Caspian Sea, maybe even from Iran (barring the usual American blockade), will begin flowing through it by 2015. The gas will be delivered to Erzurum in Turkey and then transported to Austria via Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary.

Why, you might ask, is the pipeline meant to save Europe named for a Verdi opera? Well, Austrian and Turkish energy executives happened to see the opera together in Vienna in 2002 while discussing their energy dilemmas, and the biblical plight of the Jews exiled by King Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar), a love story set amid a ferocious struggle for freedom and power, swept them away. Still, it's a stretch to turn aluminum tubes into dramatic characters.

Of course, the operatic theater here isn't really in the tubing, it's in the politics and strategic implications that surround the pipeline. In Eastern Europe, for instance, Nabucco is seen not as a European economic or energy project, but as a creature of Washington, just like the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey that President Bill Clinton and his crew backed so vigorously in the 1990s and which was finally finished in 2005. For those who have never believed the Cold War is over -- the Eastern Europeans among them -- once again it's the good guys (the West) against the commies... sorry, the Russians... at an energy-rich OK Corral.

The Great Borderless Gas Bazaar

Russia's answer to Nabucco is the 1,200-kilometer-long, $15 billion South Stream pipeline, also scheduled to be finished in 2015; it is slated to carry Siberian natural gas under the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria. From Bulgaria, one branch of the pipeline would then run south through Greece to southern Italy while the other would run north through Serbia and Hungary towards northern Italy.

Now, add another pipeline to the picture, the $9.1 billion Nord Stream that will soon enough snake from Western Russia under the Baltic Sea to Germany, which already imports 41.5% of its natural gas from Russia. The giant Russian energy firm Gazprom holds a controlling 51% of Nord Stream stock; the rest belongs to German and Dutch companies. The chairman of the board is none other than former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

Put this all together and Russia, with its pipelines running in all directions and firmly embedded in Europe, spells trouble for Nabucco's future and frustration for Washington's New Great Game plans to contain the Russian energy juggernaut. And that's without even mentioning Ukhta which, chances are, you've never heard of. If you aren't in the energy business, why should you have? After all, it's a backwater village in Russia's autonomous republic of Komi, 350 kilometers from the Arctic Circle. Built by forced labor, it was once part of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag archipelago. By 2030, however, you'll know its name. By then, a pipeline from remote Ukhta will be flooding Europe with natural gas and the village will be one of Nord Stream's key transit nodes.

While Nabucco as well as South Stream remain virtual, Nord Stream is a Terminator on the run. By 2010, it will be tunneling under the Baltic Sea heading for Germany. By 2011, it should be delivering the goods and a second pipe -- 12 meters wide, 100,000 tubes long -- will be under construction to double its capacity by 2014. Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller pulls no punches: this, he says, will be "the safest and most modern pipeline in the world."

How can Verdi lovers possibly compete? In the middle of a global recession, Gazprom is spending at least $20 billion to conquer Europe via Nord and South Stream. The strategy is a killer: pump gas under the sea directly to Europe, avoiding messy transit routes across troublesome countries like Ukraine. No wonder Gazprom, which today controls 26% of the European gas market, is expected to have a 33% share by 2020.

In other words, in many ways, the Nabucco versus South Stream energy war already looks settled. Nabucco is, at best, likely to be a secondary pipeline, incapable, as Washington once hoped, of breaking the EU away from energy dependence on Russia.

Brussels, predictably, is in its usual multilingual policy mess. Most bureaucrats at its monster, directive-churning body, the European Commission, publicly bemoan the "pipeline war." On the other hand, Ona Jukneviciene, chairwoman of the committees at the European Parliament dealing with Central Asia, admits that Nabucco cannot be the only option.

As for Reinhard Mitschek, managing director of the Nabucco consortium, he tries to put a brave face on things when he stresses, "we will transport Russian gas, Azeri gas, Iraqi gas." As for the top European official on energy matters, Andris Piebalgs, he can't help being a pragmatist: "We'll continue to work with Russia because Russia has energy resources."

From a business point of view, it's tough to argue with South Stream's selling points. Unlike Nabucco, it will offer cheaper, all-Russian natural gas that won't have to transit through potential war zones, and while Nabucco will always deliver limited amounts of Caspian natural gas to market, South Stream, given Russian resources, will have plenty of room to increase its output.

The fact is that, as of now, Nabucco still has no guaranteed sources of gas. In order for the gas to come from energy-rich Turkmenistan, to take but one example, the Turkmen leadership would have to break a deal they've already made with Russia, which now buys all of that country's export gas. There's no way that Moscow is likely to let one of the former Soviet Republics do that easily. In addition, both Russia and Iran could well be capable of blocking any pipeline straddling the floor of the Caspian Sea.

Gazprom will pay to build South Stream, and then distribute and sell gas it already controls to Europe; Nabucco, on the other hand, has to rely on a messy consortium of six countries (Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Germany) simply to finance one-third of its prospective costs, and then convince wary international bankers to shell out the rest.

The Pentagon does the Black Sea

So what does Washington want out of this mess? That's easy. Rewind to then-prospective Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her Senate confirmation hearings on January 13, 2009. There, she decried Europe's dependence on Russian natural gas and issued an urgent call for "investments in the Trans-Caspian energy sector." Think of it as a signal: The new Obama administration would be as committed to Nabucco as the Bush administration had been.

What is never spelled out is why. Enter the Black Sea, that crucial geo-strategic stage where Europe meets the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Enter, thus, Bulgaria, home to a new Pentagon air base in Bezmer, one of six new strategic bases being built outside the U.S. and as potentially important to Washington's future games as the stalwart air bases in Incirlik, Turkey, and Aviano, Italy have been in the past. (Aviano was the key U.S./NATO base for the bombing of the Bosnian Serbs in 1995 and the 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999.)

With the Pentagon's bases already creeping within a stone's throw of Southwest and Central Asia, it doesn't take a genius to imagine the role Bezmer might play in any future attack on Iran (something the Russian defense establishment has already taken careful note of). With both Romania and Bulgaria now part of NATO, Article 5 of the alliance's charter now applies. NATO can take action "in the event of crises which jeopardize Euro-Atlantic stability and could affect the security of Alliance members."

In this way, Pipelineistan meets the American Empire of Bases.

Young Turks and Wily Russians

Why is everyone so damn hooked on Central Asian oil and gas? Elshad Nasirov, deputy chairman of the state-owned Azerbaijani oil company SOCAR, sums the addiction up succinctly enough: "This is the place where there is oil and gas in abundance. It is not Arab, not Persian, not Russian, and not OPEC."

It's the Caspian and, unfortunately for Europe, the region could, in energy terms, turn out to be not the caviar for which it's renowned but so many rotten fish eggs. No one knows, after all, whether the EU will ever be able to buy Iranian gas via Nabucco. No one knows whether the Central Asian "stans" have enough gas to supply Russia, China, and Turkey, not to mention India and Pakistan. No one knows whether any of their leaders will have the nerve to renege on their deals with Gazprom.

Ever since a 2008 British study determined that Turkmenistan may have natural gas reserves second only to Russia on the planet, the European Commission has been on a no-holds-barred tear to lure that country into delivering some of its future gas directly to Europe -- and not through the Russian pipeline system either. Turkmenistan's inscrutable leader, the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, just has to say the word, but despite the claims of EU officials that he has agreed to send some gas Europe-wards, he's never offered a public word of confirmation. No wonder: with Nabucco unbuilt and a pipeline from his country to China still under construction, Turkmenistan can play Pipelineistan games only with Russia and Iran. In fact, Russia essentially controls the flow of Turkmen gas for the next 15 years.

Should Gurbanguly someday say the magic word -- and assuming the Russians don't throw a monkey wrench into the works -- he can marry Turkey, as the key transit country, with the EU and let them all sing Verdi till the sheep come home. In the meantime, angst is the name of the game in Europe (and so in Washington).

A declassified dossier from the FSB, the Russian heir to the KGB, is adamant: considering Nabucco's shortcomings, "Russia will remain the primary supplier of energy to Europe for the foreseeable future." Call it a matter of having your gas and processing it, too. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been making the point for years. If Europe tries to snub it, Russia will simply build its own liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants, to facilitate storage and transport, and sell its LNG all over the world.

Anyway it's worth paying attention to what the St. Petersburg State Mining Institute (where Putin earned his doctorate) has to say. According to the institute, Russia has only 20 years' worth of its own natural gas reserves left. Since Russia plans to sell up to 40% of its gas abroad, "Russian" gas may in the future actually mean Central Asian gas. All the more reason for the Russians to make sure that those massive Turkmen and other reserves flow north, not west.

Whatever Washington thinks, the Europeans know that energy independence from Russia is, in reality, inconceivable. Bottom line when it comes to natural gas: Europe needs everything -- Nord Stream, South Stream, and Nabucco. The bulk of the natural gas in this Pipelineistan maze may well turn out to be Central Asian anyway and a substantial part could be Iranian, if the Obama administration ever normalizes relations with Iran.

That, then, is the current state of play in the European wing of Pipelineistan. Russia seems to have virtually guaranteed its status as the top gas supplier to Europe for the foreseeable future. But that brings us to Turkey, a key regional power for both the U.S. and the EU. As President Obama has recognized, Turkey is both a real and a metaphorical bridge between the Christian and Muslim worlds. It is also an ideal transit country for carrying non-Russian gas to Europe and is now playing its own suitably complex Pipelineistan game.

Chances are that, like Ukhta in far off Siberia, you've never heard of Yumurtalik either. It's a fishing port squeezed between the Mediterranean Sea and the Taurus mountains, very close to Ceyhan, the terminal for two key nodes of Pipelineistan: the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline from Iraq and the monster BTC pipeline. Turkey wants to turn Yumurtalik-Ceyhan into nothing less than the Rotterdam of the Mediterranean.

Even as it dreams of future EU membership, however, Turkey worries about antagonizing Moscow. And yet, being aboard the Nabucco Express and already fully committed to the functioning BTC pipeline puts the country on a potential collision course with Russia, its largest trading partner. Of course, this does not displease Washington.

On the other hand, the Turkish leadership draws ever closer to Iran, which provides 38% of Turkey's oil and 25% of its natural gas. Ankara and Tehran also have geopolitical affinities (especially in fighting Kurdish separatism). Together, they offer the best alternative to the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia) in terms of supplying Europe with Iranian natural gas. All this, of course, drives Washington nuts.

Needless to say, the Nabucco consortium itself would kill to have Iran as a gas supplier for the pipeline. They are also familiar with realpolitik: this could happen only with a Washington-blessed solution to the Iranian nuclear dossier. Iran, for its part, knows well how to seduce Europe. Mohammad-Reza Nematzadeh, managing director of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), has insisted Iran is Europe's "sole option" for the success of Nabucco.

Is Russia just watching all this gas go by? Of course not. In October 2007, Putin signed a key agreement with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: If Iran cannot sell its gas to Nabucco -- a likelihood given the turbulence of American domestic politics and its foreign policy -- Russia will buy it. Translation: Iranian gas could end up, like Central Asian gas, heading for Europe as more "Russian" gas. With its European and Iranian policies at cross-purposes, Washington will not be amused.

When Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to "rethink Nabucco" if the tricky negotiations for Turkey to enter the EU drag on forever, EU leaders got the message (as much as France and Germany may be against a "Europe without borders"). Pragmatically, most EU leaders know very well that they need excellent relations with Turkey to one day have access to the Big Prize, Iranian gas; and that puts Europe's energy and EU membership inclinations at loggerheads.

Last July in Ankara, Nabucco was formally launched by an inter-governmental agreement. The representatives of Turkey, Austria, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary were there. Obama's special Eurasian envoy, Richard Morningstar (a veteran of the BTC adventure), was there as well. The Central Asian stans were not there.

But crucially, Gurbanguly, ever the showman, finally made an entrance without ever leaving Turkmenistan, (almost) uttering the magic words in a meeting with his ministers in the capital, Ashgabat, on July 10th: "Turkmenistan, staying committed to the principles of diversification of supply of its energy resources to the world markets, is going to use all available opportunities to participate in major international projects -- such as, for example, [the] Nabucco project."

At the Vienna headquarters of Nabucco the mantra remains: this is "no anti-Russian project." Still, everyone knows that Russia's leaders are eager to kill it, and not a soul from Brussels to Vienna, Washington to Ashgabat, knows how to link Central Asia to Europe via a non-Russian pipeline, at the cost of more than $10 billion, without some assurance that Turkmeni, Kazakh, Azerbaijani, and/or Iranian natural gas will be fully (or even partially) on board. Who would be foolish enough to invest that kind of money without some guarantee that hundreds of miles of aluminum tubes won't remain empty? You don't need Verdi to tell you this is one hell of a quirky plot for a global opera.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and analyst for the Real News. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2009 Pepe Escobar

The Powell Memo and the Teaching Machines of Right-Wing Extremists

The Powell Memo and the Teaching Machines of Right-Wing Extremists

Thursday 01 October 2009

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

(Photo Illustration: Ionia K. / Truthout)

Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, echoing the feelings of many progressives, recently wrote in The New York Times about how dismayed he was over the success right-wing ideologues have had not only in undercutting Obama's health care bill, but also in mobilizing enormous public support against almost any reform aimed at rolling back the economic, political, and social conditions that have created the economic recession and the legacy of enormous suffering and hardship for millions of Americans over the last 30 years.[1] Krugman is somewhat astonished that after almost three decades the political scene is still under the sway of what he calls the "zombie doctrine of Reaganism," - the notion that any action by government is bad, except when it benefits corporations and the rich. Clearly, for Krugman, zombie Reaganism appears once again to be shaping policies under the Obama regime. And yet, not only did Reaganism with its hatred of the social state, celebration of unbridled self-interest, its endless quest to privatize everything, and support for deregulation of the economic system eventually bring the country to near economic collapse, it also produced enormous suffering for those who never benefited from the excesses of the second Gilded Age, especially workers, the poor, disadvantaged minorities and eventually large segments of the middle class. And yet, zombie market politics is back rejecting the public option in Obama's health plan, fighting efforts to strengthen bank regulations, resisting caps on CEO bonuses, preventing climate-control legislation, and refusing to limit military spending. Unlike other pundits, Krugman does not merely puzzle over how zombie politics can keep turning up on the political scene - a return not unlike the endless corpses who keep coming back to life in George Romero's 1968 classic film, "Night of the Living Dead" (think of Bill Kristol who seems to be wrong about everything but just keeps coming back). For Krugman, a wacky and discredited right-wing politics is far from dead and, in fact, one of the great challenges of the current moment is to try to understand the conditions that allow it to once again shape American politics and culture, given the enormous problems it has produced at all levels of American society, including the current recession.

Part of the answer to the enduring quality of such a destructive politics can be found in the lethal combination of money, power and education that the right wing has had a stranglehold on since the early 1970's and how it has used its influence to develop an institutional infrastructure and ideological apparatus to produce its own intellectuals, disseminate ideas, and eventually control most of the commanding heights and institutions in which knowledge is produced, circulated and legitimated. This is not simply a story about the rise of mean-spirited buffoons such as Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage. Nor is it simply a story about the loss of language, a growing anti-intellectualism in the larger culture, or the spread of what some have called a new illiteracy endlessly being produced in popular culture. As important as these tendencies are, there is something more at stake here which points to a combination of power, money and education in the service of creating an almost lethal restriction of what can be heard, said, learned and debated in the public sphere. And one starting point for understanding this problem is what has been called the Powell Memo, released on August 23, 1971, and written by Lewis F. Powell, who would later be appointed as a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Powell sent the memo to the US Chamber of Commerce with the title "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System."

The memo is important because it reveals the power that conservatives attributed to the political nature of education and the significance this view had in shaping the long-term strategy they put into place in the 1960's and 1970's to win an ideological war against liberal intellectuals, who argued for holding government and corporate power accountable as a precondition for extending and expanding the promise of an inclusive democracy. The current concerted assault on government and any other institutions not dominated by free-market principles represents the high point of a fifty-year strategy that was first put into place by conservative ideologues such as Frank Chodorov, founder of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute; publisher and author William F. Buckley; former Nixon Treasury Secretary William Simon, and Michael Joyce, the former head of both the Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The Powell Memo is important because it is the most succinct statement, if not the founding document, for establishing a theoretical framework and political blueprint for the current assault on any vestige of democratic public life that does not subordinate itself to the logic of the alleged free market.

Initially, Powell identified the American college campus "as the single most dynamic source" for producing and housing intellectuals "who are unsympathetic to the [free] enterprise system."[2] He was particularly concerned about the lack of conservatives on social sciences faculties and urged his supporters to use an appeal to academic freedom as an opportunity to argue for "political balance" on university campuses. Powell recognized that one crucial strategy in changing the political composition of higher education was to convince university administrators and boards of trustees that the most fundamental problem facing universities was "the imbalance of many faculties."[3] Powell insisted that "the basic concepts of balance, fairness and truth are difficult to resist, if properly presented to boards of trustees, by writing and speaking, and by appeals to alumni associations and groups."[4] But Powell was not merely concerned about what he perceived as the need to enlist higher education as a bastion of conservative, free market ideology. The Powell Memo was designed to develop a broad-based strategy not only to counter dissent, but also to develop a material and ideological infrastructure with the capability to transform the American public consciousness through a conservative pedagogical commitment to reproduce the knowledge, values, ideology and social relations of the corporate state. For Powell, the war against liberalism and a substantive democracy was primarily a pedagogical and political struggle designed both to win the hearts and minds of the general public and to build a power base capable of eliminating those public spaces, spheres and institutions that nourish and sustain what Samuel Huntington would later call (in a 1975 study on the "governability of democracies" by the Trilateral Commission) an "excess of democracy."[5] Central to such efforts was Powell's insistence that conservatives nourish a new generation of scholars who would inhabit the university and function as public intellectuals actively shaping the direction of policy issues. He also advocated the creation of a conservative speakers bureau, staffed by scholars capable of evaluating "textbooks, especially in economics, political science and sociology."[6] In addition, he advocated organizing a corps of conservative public intellectuals who would monitor the dominant media, publish their own scholarly journals, books and pamphlets, and invest in advertising campaigns to enlighten the American people on conservative issues and policies. The Powell Memo, while not the only influence, played an important role in convincing a "cadre of ultraconservative and self-mythologizing millionaires bent on rescuing the country from the hideous grasp of Satanic liberalism"[7] to match their ideological fervor with their pocketbooks by "disbursing the collective sum of roughly $3 billion over a period of thirty years in order to build a network of public intellectuals, think tanks, advocacy groups, foundations, media outlets, and powerful lobbying interests."[8] As Dave Johnson points out, the initial effort was slow but effective:

In 1973, in response to the Powell Memo, Joseph Coors and Christian-right leader Paul Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation. Coors told Lee Edwards, historian of the Heritage Foundation, that the Powell Memo persuaded him that American business was "ignoring a crisis." In response, Coors decided to help provide the seed funding for the creation of what was to become the Heritage Foundation, giving $250,000. Subsequently, the Olin Foundation, under the direction of its president, former Treasury Secretary William Simon (author of the influential 1979 book "A Time for Truth"), began funding similar organizations in concert with "the Four Sisters" - Richard Mellon Scaife's various foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation - along with Coors's foundations, foundations associated with the Koch oil family, and a group of large corporations[9].

The most powerful members of this group were Joseph Coors in Denver, Richard Mellon Scaife in Pittsburgh, John Olin in New York City, David and Charles Koch in Wichita, the Smith Richardson family in North Carolina, and Harry Bradley in Milwaukee - all of whom agreed to finance a number of right-wing think tanks, which over the past thirty years have come to include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. This formidable alliance of far-right-wing foundations deployed their resources in building and strategically linking "an impressive array of almost 500 think tanks, centers, institutes and concerned citizens groups both within and outside of the academy.... A small sampling of these entities includes the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Claremont Institute, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, [the] Middle East Forum, Accuracy in Media, and the National Association of Scholars, as well as [David] Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture."[10]

For several decades, right-wing extremists have labored to put into place an ultra-conservative re-education machine - an apparatus for producing and disseminating a public pedagogy in which everything tainted with the stamp of liberal origin and the word "public" would be contested and destroyed. Commenting on the rise of this vast right-wing propaganda machine organized to promote the ideal that democracy needs less critical thought and more citizens whose only role is to consume, well-known author Lewis Lapham writes:

The quickening construction of Santa's workshops outside the walls of government and the academy resulted in the increased production of pamphlets, histories, monographs and background briefings intended to bring about the ruin of the liberal idea in all its institutionalized forms - the demonization of the liberal press, the disparagement of liberal sentiment, the destruction of liberal education - and by the time Ronald Reagan arrived in triumph at the White House in 1980 the assembly lines were operating at full capacity.[11]

Any attempt to understand and engage the current right-wing assault on all vestiges of the social contract, the social state and democracy itself will have to begin with challenging this massive infrastructure, which functions as one of the most powerful teaching machines we have seen in the United States, a teaching machine that produces a culture that is increasingly poisonous and detrimental not just to liberalism, but to the formative culture that makes an aspiring democracy possible. This presence of this ideological infrastructure extending from the media to other sites of popular education suggests the need for a new kind of debate, one that is not limited to isolated issues such as health care, but is more broad-based and fundamental, a debate about how power, inequality and money constrict the educational, economic and political conditions that make democracy possible. The screaming harpies and mindless public relations "intellectuals" that dominate the media today are not the problem; it is the conditions that give rise to the institutions that put them in place, finance them and drown out other voices. What must be clear is that this threat to creating a critically informed citizenry is not merely a crisis of communication and language, but about the ways in which money and power create the educational conditions that make a mockery out of debate while hijacking any vestige of democracy.

Notes:

[1] Paul Krugman, "All the President's Zombies," The New York Times (August 24, 2009), p. A17.

[2] Lewis F. Powell Jr., "The Powell Memo," ReclaimDemocracy.org (August 23, 1971), available online at http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] See Michael P. Crozier, Samuel. J. Huntington and J. Watanuki, "The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission" (New York: New York University Press, 1975).

[6] Powell, "The Powell Memo."

[7] Lewis H. Lapham, "Tentacles of Rage - The Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief History," Harper's Magazine (September 2004), p. 32.

[8] Dave Johnson, "Who's Behind the Attack on Liberal Professors?" History News Network, (February 10, 2005), available online at http://hnn.us/articles/printfriendly/1244.html.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Alan Jones, "Connecting the Dots," Inside Higher Ed (June 16, 2006), available online at http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/06/16/jones.

[11] Lapham, "Tentacles of Rage," p. 38.

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Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux, "The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence" (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability," will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009. Henry A. Giroux's latest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?," has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Yushchenko "poisoning" may have been staged

Yushchenko "poisoning" may have been staged

Key facts to keep in mind while opposing war against Iran

Representatives of Iran and six of the world's most powerful countries are scheduled to meet this week in Geneva, one of a series of events that increasingly looks like a rerun of the build-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

As we prepare for a barrage of anti-Iranian media spin, it would be good for anti-war activists to remember five basic facts:

One: There is absolutely no evidence that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

Two: The U.S. has not discovered a “secret nuclear facility” in Iran.

Three: The recent Iranian tests of long-range missiles is a purely defensive exercise.

Four: Despite what we all have repeatedly heard, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not deny the Holocaust. (Please see quotes below.)

Five: Iran has a lot of oil. A whole lot.

On Oct. 1, a senior Iranian diplomat is to meet with representatives of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council: the U.S., U.K, France, Russia and China, plus Germany, a group dubbed the G-5-plus-1. These will be the first international talks to address Iran's nuclear program in more than a year.

During these negotiations, Iran will attempt to discuss a wide range of issues. The six countries – or at least the U.S., U.K., France and Germany – will make demands on Iran's nuclear program that they already know will be rejected. These four most powerful Western nations will then move to impose even harsher sanctions than the three sets they have already rammed through the U.N. Security Council.

There may even be a military attack on Iran by Israel, a move already given the green light by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

And this will all be in violation of international law.

Is Iran trying to develop a nuclear weapon?

Iran has a program to develop nuclear power for peaceful energy purposes. Part of that program involves enriching uranium to power nuclear reactors. Enriched uranium is also an essential component in building a nuclear bomb, but the enrichment process is so different that it would be virtually impossible to conceal it, and Iran is the most inspected country in the world.

Further, Iran was one of the first countries to sign the U.N.'s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), under which it renounced the right to build nuclear weapons in return for not only the right to develop nuclear power, but to receive help in doing so from the world community.

There is absolutely no evidence that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons. None. Zip. Not from the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, the U.N. body charged with making sure NPT members abide by that treaty. Not from the U.S. and its 16 separate intelligence agencies, nor from Israel and its Mossad intelligence agency nor from counter-revolutionary Iranian organizations such as the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), all of which have been working overtime to come up with any fact, report, material or rumor with which to indict Iran.

Meanwhile, of course, none of the G-5, G-5-Plus-1, G-20 or G-We-Rule-the-World countries are saying “boo” about Israel's estimated 200 nuclear weapons, let alone the U.S. with its 10,000.

It's true that Iran has a lot of oil, but oil is a finite resource. Even Iran's vast reserves will someday run out. So it's developing alternative sources of energy, including solar and wind, as well as nuclear.

The U.S and other Western powers are opposed to Iran developing nuclear power because that would ensure Iran can remain independent. And strong. And influential in its own region. And that is unacceptable to the world's former colonizing powers.

Iran, like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, North Korea, Zimbabwe, the Sudan and many other countries, rejects the status of a “second-tier” country. These countries refuse to accept the authority of the Empire.

They have thrown off the yoke of colonial oppressors and have charted their own independent courses on the world stage. Their peoples are like runaway slaves who have established their own modern maroon colonies and as such are viewed as a threat to the orderly administration of the New World Order.

And they must be brought back under control, lest they serve as dangerous examples for those peoples still enslaved.

That's why keeping those countries from developing technologically is a prime goal of U.S. foreign policy.

Has the U.S. discovered a “secret nuclear facility” in Iran?

On Sept. 21, the Iranian government sent a letter to the IAEA in Vienna describing the construction of a plant designed to enrich uranium, up to 5 percent in purity, sufficient for energy production but well below the 90 percent level required for weapons-grade material. “Further complementary information will be provided in an appropriate and due time,” the letter stated.

According to the provisions of the NPT, Iran and other treaty signatories are required to inform the IAEA six months before a uranium enrichment facility becomes operational. President Ahmadinejad later told a news conference that the new facility won’t be up and running for 18 months.

In other words, Iran was a year early in fulfilling its treaty obligations to provide notice to the IAEA.

But on Sept. 25, U.S. President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy interrupted their G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh to hold a press conference at which they charged Iran with constructing a secret nuclear fuel facility.

Sarkozy, whose country depends on nuclear power for 80 percent of its energy needs, detailed intelligence information that Brown said would “shock and anger the whole international community.” Obama charged Iran with “breaking rules that all nations must follow ... and threatening the stability and security of the region and the world.”

The next day, Iran announced it would place the plant under the IAEA's supervision.

So: Iran built a nuclear facility. Then, fully one year before the required deadline mandated by the U.N.'s NPT, it informed the IAEA about the plant's existence. But, just days before the Oct. 1 seven-nation negotiations, the leaders of the U.S., U.K. and France decided to hold a dramatic press conference to denounce Iran for breaking the rules.

A Sept. 26 story in The Washington Post noted that “the rapidly escalating confrontation provided (Obama) with a fresh opportunity to project toughness and success on the world stage. Obama's detractors have long called him naive for his willingness to engage diplomatically the nation's adversaries, including Iran. Republicans say his decision to change the deployment of a missile shield for Eastern Europe demonstrates weakness, and critics have chastised him for taking time to weigh a decision on sending additional troops to Afghanistan.

“The announcement also provided a boost for the CIA at a time when the agency is facing harsh attacks - and possible prosecution - for detainee interrogations.”

Are the recent Iranian missile tests an offensive move?

Starting on Sept. 26, Iran began testing a number of missiles, including its medium-range Shahab-1 and Shahab-2 and, on Sept. 28, its longer-range Shahab-3. The latter missiles are believed to have a range of up to about 1200 miles, far enough to reach Israel, U.S. bases in the Middle East and parts of Europe.

So the question is, are the missiles meant to be defensive or offensive?

Defensive, according to Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, as quoted by the semi-official Fars News Agency: “As a result of this capability, those who used to speak of attacking Iran are now declaring that they entertain no such desires or thoughts, for they have realized that attacking Iran is an extremely dangerous act.”

It's a little hard to argue with that logic, since Israeli officials have now toned down their threats to attack Iran, citing an increased international concern after the revelation that Iran had been building a new uranium enrichment facility.

Yes, the missiles could be used to attack as well as defend or retaliate. But Iran hasn't attacked another country for hundreds of years. For it to launch a war now against nuclear-armed opponents would be a complete departure from 30 years of foreign policy into the realm of insanity, something for which there is no recent historical precedent.

Does President Ahmadinejad deny the Holocaust?

Every time I read somewhere that President Ahmadinejad has denied the Holocaust, I try and go back and find his original quote. That's not easy, because most of the time the alleged denial is paraphrased or partially quoted.

This month, I finally got a break.

On Sept. 24, Steve Inskeep, host of National Public Radio's Morning Edition program, interviewed President Ahmadinejad at his hotel in New York. The transcript (see
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113175352&ps=rs) says Ahmadinejad's remarks were delivered via a translator.

Here's the relevant section of that interview:

...

INSKEEP: We have, in a previous interview, discussed how you feel (the Holocaust) is being used unjustly to justify Israel, so we need not cover that ground again. But if you would like to describe to me what specifically you believe happened between 1942 and 1945, I would be interested.

AHMADINEJAD: But then 1942 to 1945 is still about the Holocaust, right? I do raise a couple of questions about the Holocaust, and you are a member of the media, and I believe that you should actually tell people what these questions are, and try to receive answers from them as well.
The first question is, is the Holocaust a historical event or not? It is a historical event. And, having said that, there are numerous historical events. So the next question is, why is it that this specific event has become so prominent? Normally, ordinary people and historians pay attention to historical events. Why are politicians giving so much attention to this particular event? Why are they so biased about it? Does this event effect what is happening on the ground this day, now? What we say is that genocide is the result of racial discrimination. Sometimes we look at history to learn the lessons of history.

INSKEEP: Are you acknowledging that millions of people were killed? Millions of Jews, specifically, were killed during World War II?

AHMADINEJAD: If you bear with me so that I can complete my statements, you will receive your answer. I'm asking, and I'm asking a number of serious questions. And I'm not addressing these questions to you, but to a wider audience — everyone — anyone who cares about the fate of humanity; who care about human beings and the rights of people. These are serious questions. If we are looking at history with the aim to learn — derive lessons from it, then what this indicates is that in the future, we should not carry out the same mistakes that were done in the past. While I personally was not alive 60 years ago, I happen to be alive now, and I can see that genocide is happening now under the pretext of an event that happened 60 years ago. So the fundamental question I raise here is that, if this event happened, where did it happen? As a form of an objection question, who was it carried by? Why should the Palestinian people make up for it?

...

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez recently pointed out that, before the European Conquest, the Americas were home to some 90 million indigenous people. A few hundred years later, there were 4 million.

Up to 100 million Africans died as a result of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Surely these also were “holocausts.”

Six million Jews were systematically murdered in what has come to be known as The Holocaust. And, although it is rarely mentioned, that diabolically efficient mass murder also took the lives of up to 5 million political prisoners, trade unionists, communists, gays and Roma people. Truly, this was one of the world's great atrocities – an atrocity committed in Europe, by Europeans, against Europeans.

It had absolutely nothing to do with Palestinians. Or Iran.

So why, after being elevated to a status above all other mass murders in history, is it used to justify the establishment of what basically is a European colony on Arab land?

Ahmadinejad isn't calling the Holocaust a myth – he's asking why the mythology that has been built up around it is used as a weapon against the Palestinian people and those who support their struggle for self-determination.

Iran has oil

Iran has a lot of oil. And that oil has been off-limits to the world's private oil companies since it was nationalized after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Huge potential profits are at stake. Further, whoever controls the flow of oil – whether or not that involves actual ownership – can control the development of world production, commerce and politics. And the U.S is determined that, rather than allow a multi-polar world to develop, it will be the only country to play that role.

Tasks facing the U.S. anti-war movement

After an unfortunate year-long ebb, the anti-war movement in the U.S. is again beginning to show signs of life. This October there will be many local and regional protests against the U.S-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most will also address the expanding war in Pakistan and the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

While some of these protests also will demand no war against Iran, there seems to be less enthusiasm for addressing this issue. The barrage of media attacks, charges and misinformation has taken its toll. The controversy around the Iranian presidential elections and their aftermath have also played a role. Taken together, these factors have to a certain extent disarmed the anti-war movement, even as the possibility of a new war grows ever more serious.

Now is the time to reaffirm this one simple principle that ought to be the bedrock of our movement: every country that has been oppressed by U.S imperialism has the right to determine its own destiny. It has the right to determine its own form of government, choose its own leaders, decide on its own relations with the rest of the world. And the U.S., as the world's foremost imperialist power, ought to be the last country on earth to presume to dictate to any other how to conduct itself.

It's not necessary to agree with every pronouncement of the leaders of oppressed countries in order to demand loudly and determinedly “No war, sanctions or internal interference!” If we were anti-slavery activists in the 1800s, would we stand by as Nat Turner or John Brown were about to be hung, arguing about tactics or controversial statements? Or would we defend the oppressed and their defenders?
This is how we need to approach the issue of defending Iran.

This October, as we denounce the wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and the continuing oppression of the Palestinian people, we must also raise our voices loud and clear to demand “No war, no sanctions, no internal interference in Iran!”

Phil Wilayto, is a writer and organizer based in Richmond, Virginia, USA. A civilian organizer in the Vietnam-era GI Movement, he is the author of “In Defense of Iran: Notes from a U.S. Peace Delegation's Journey through the Islamic Republic” (December 2008) and “An Open Letter to the Anti-War Movement: How should we respond to the events in Iran?” (June 2009) He can be reached at DefendersFJE@hotmail.com.

Global Research Articles by Phil Wilayto

Newsbytes and comments

1. Besieged Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who is holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has been the subject of a smear campaign launched by the Miami Herald, Washington Post, and New York Times, all supporters of right-wing juntas like the one that is now stomping its fascist jack boot on the people of Honduras. Zelaya has been ridiculed for claiming that Israeli security advisers in Honduras were responsible for the use of cell phone jamming devices and toxic gas on the Brazilian embassy.

Zelaya is correct on both charges, contrary to the fantasies of the Miami, New York, and Washington oligarch newspaper. Weapons and CS gas used by the Hondurans against the Brazilian embassy is reportedly being supplied by a longtime Israeli businessman in Honduras, Yehuda Leitner, the owner of the firms Alfacom and Intrecom. In the 1980, Leitner, operating under the Mossad cover of manager of an agricultural firm in Honduras, Acensa & Shemesh Agrotech, was funneling weapons to the Nicaraguan contras and Honduran death squad Battalion 3-16, set up under the aegis of the CIA and U.S. ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte. Leitner denied at the time that he was an arms trafficker, insisting he was merely a "melon trafficker."

The Israeli weapons firm that funneled the weapons for Leitner was International Security and Defence Systems (ISDS), started in 1982 by Leo Gleser, an Israel Defense Force and Mossad veteran. ISDS specialized in interrogations and supervision of prisoners in Latin America, that is torture and illegal detention. ISDS also, curiously, provided security services to Venezuelan oil companies shortly before the 2002 abortive coup against President Hugo Chavez. The CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces fomented anti-Chavez labor strikes and protests among the oil workers' unions prior to the coup. ISDS benefited greatly from security contracts with U.S. firms in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Leitner has also been associated with another Mossad front company in Tegucigalpa, Interseg, with its address at Col. El Prado, Edif. SYRE, 2nd. piso P.O.Box: 30122 Tegucigalpa M.D.C. The firm was actually recommended as a supplier of security equipment by the U.S. State Department's U.S. Foreign and Commercial Service in 1998.

The cell phone jammers used by the Honduran military on the Brazilian embassy are C-Guard units made by NetLine Communications Inc. of Tel Aviv. One was found on the roof of a home next to the Brazilian embassy and confiscated by Zelaya supporters and taken into the Brazilian embassy as proof of Israeli involvement with the Honduran junta. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) bans the use of such devices in the United States.

2. At a press conference at the UN last week, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was asked why he is shutting down television stations in his country if he says he believes in democracy. Chavez asked the questioner what TV station he shut down. The answer was "RTV." Chavez corrected the reporter and said it was RCTV to which she was referring and he said he did not shut down the strongly anti-Chavez station but transferred its broadcasting licenses to 34 community-based TV stations that broadcast content heavy on public interest matters. The main staple of RCTV, which continues to broadcast unfettered on cable, is soap operas. RCTV backed the April 2002 abortive U.S.-supported coup against Chavez.