The Anti-Empire Report Number 72

August 4th, 2009
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org

Keeping track of the empire's crimes

If you catch the CIA with its hand in the cookie jar and the Agency admits the obvious — what your eyes can plainly see — that its hand is indeed in the cookie jar, it means one of two things: a) the CIA's hand is in several other cookie jars at the same time which you don't know about and they hope that by confessing to the one instance they can keep the others covered up; or b) its hand is not really in the cookie jar — it's an illusion to throw you off the right scent — but they want you to believe it.

There have been numerous news stories in recent months about secret CIA programs, hidden from Congress, inspired by former vice-president Dick Cheney, in operation since the September 11 terrorist attacks, involving assassination of al Qaeda operatives or other non-believers-in-the-Empire abroad without the knowledge of their governments. The Agency admits to some sort of program having existed, but insists that it was canceled; and if it was an assassination program it was canceled before anyone was actually assassinated. Another report has the US military, not the CIA, putting the plan — or was it a different plan? — into operation, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the program.¹

All of this can be confusing to those following the news. And rather irrelevant. We already know that the United States has been assassinating non-believers, or suspected non-believers, with regularity, and impunity, in recent years, using unmanned planes (drones) firing missiles, in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, if not elsewhere. (Even more victims have been produced from amongst those who happened to be in the same house, car, wedding party, or funeral as the non-believer.) These murders apparently don't qualify as "assassinations", for somehow killing "terrorists" from 2000 feet is morally and legally superior to doing so from two feet away.

But whatever the real story is behind the current rash of speculation, we should not fall into the media's practice of at times intimating that multiple or routine CIA assassination attempts would be something shocking or at least very unusual.

I've compiled a list of CIA assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against prominent foreign political figures, from 1949 through 2003, which, depending on how you count it, can run into the hundreds (targeting Fidel Castro alone totals 634 according to Cuban intelligence)²; the list can be updated by adding the allegedly al Qaeda leaders among the drone attack victims of recent years. Assassination and torture are the two things governments are most loath to admit to, and try their best to cover up. It's thus rare to find a government document or recorded statement mentioning a particular plan to assassinate someone. There is, however, an abundance of compelling circumstantial evidence to work with. The list can be found here.

For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I've put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected.

After his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama was much praised for mentioning the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. But in his talk in Ghana on July 11 he failed to mention the CIA coup that ousted Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966³, referring to him only as a "giant" among African leaders. The Mossadegh coup is one of the most well-known CIA covert actions. Obama could not easily get away without mentioning it in a talk in the Middle East looking to mend fences. But the Nkrumah ouster is one of the least known; indeed, not a single print or broadcast news report in the American mainstream media saw fit to mention it at the time of the president's talk. Like it never happened.

And the next time you hear that Africa can't produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel's widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.⁴

• Gross interference in democratic elections in at least 30 countries⁵
• Waging war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army, in some 30 countries
• Dropping bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
• Attempts to suppress dozens of populist/nationalist movements in every corner of the world⁶

The Myths of Afghanistan, past and present

On the Fourth of July, Senator Patrick Leahy declared he was optimistic that, unlike the Soviet forces that were driven from Afghanistan 20 years ago, US forces could succeed there. The Democrat from Vermont stated:

"The Russians were sent running as they should have been. We helped send them running. But they were there to conquer the country. We've made it very clear, and everybody I talk to within Afghanistan feels the same way: they know we're there to help and we're going to leave. We've made it very clear we are going to leave. And it's going to be turned back to them. The ones that made the mistakes in the past are those that tried to conquer them."⁷

Leahy is a long-time liberal on foreign-policy issues, a champion of withholding US counter-narcotics assistance to foreign military units guilty of serious human-rights violations, and an outspoken critic of robbing terrorist suspects of their human and legal rights. Yet he is willing to send countless young Americans to a living hell, or horrible death, or maimed survival.

And for what? Every point he made in his statement is simply wrong.

The Russians were not in Afghanistan to conquer it. The Soviet Union had existed next door to the country for more than 60 years without any kind of invasion. It was only when the United States intervened in Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow with one militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists; precisely what the United States would have done to prevent a communist government in Canada or Mexico.

It's also rather difficult for the United States to claim that it's in Afghanistan to help the people there when it's killed tens of thousands of simply for resisting the American invasion and occupation or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; not a single one of the victims has been identified as having had any kind of connection to the terrorist attack in the US of September 11, 2001, the event usually cited by Washington as justification for the military intervention. Moreover, Afghanistan is now permeated with depleted uranium, cluster bombs-cum-landmines, white phosphorous, a witch's brew of other charming chemicals, and a population, after 30 years of almost non-stop warfare, of physically and mentally mutilated human beings, exceedingly susceptible to the promise of paradise, or at least relief, sold by the Taliban.

As to the US leaving ... utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask the people of South Korea — 56 years of American occupation and still counting; ask the people of Japan — 64 years. And Iraq? Would you want to wager your life's savings on which decade it will be that the last American soldier and military contractor leaves?

It's not even precise to say that the Russians were sent running. That was essentially Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev's decision, and it was more of a political decision than a military one. Gorbachev's fondest ambition was to turn the Soviet Union into a West-European style social democracy, and he fervently wished for the approval of those European leaders, virtually all of whom were cold-war anti-communists and opposed the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan.

There has been as much of the same "causes" for wars that did not happen as for wars that did.

Henry Allingham died in Britain on July 18 at age 113, believed to have been the world's oldest man. A veteran of World War I, he spent his final years reminding the British people about their service members killed during the war, which came to about a million: "I want everyone to know," he said during an interview in November. "They died for us."⁸

The whole million? Each one died for Britain? In the most useless imperialist war of the 20th century? No, let me correct that — the most useless imperialist war of any century. The British Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire, and the wannabe American Empire joined in battle against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire as youthful bodies and spirits sank endlessly into the wretched mud of Belgium and Germany, the pools of blood of Russia and France. The wondrous nobility of it all is enough to make you swallow hard, fight back the tears, light a few candles, and throw up. Imagine, by the middle of this century Vietnam veterans in their 90s and 100s will be speaking of how each of their 58,000 war buddies died for America. By 2075 we'll be hearing the same stirring message from ancient vets of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many will remember that there was a large protest movement against their glorious, holy crusades, particularly Vietnam and Iraq?

Supreme nonsense

Senate hearings to question a nominee for the Supreme Court are a supreme bore. The sine qua non for President Obama choosing Sonia Sotomayor appears to be that she's a woman with a Hispanic background. A LATINA! How often that word was used by her supporters. She would be the first LATINA on the Supreme Court! Dios mio!

Who gives a damn? All anyone should care about are her social and political opinions. Justice Clarence Thomas is a black man. A BLACK MAN! And he's as conservative as they come.

Supreme Court nominees, of all political stripes, typically feel obliged to pretend that their social and political leanings don't enter into their judicial opinions. But everyone knows this is rubbish. During her Senate hearing, Sotomayor declared: "It's not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It's the law."

The former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evan Hughes, would not agree with her. "At the constitutional level where we work," he said, "ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections."⁹

By Sotomayor's own account, which echos news reports, she was not asked about her position on abortion by either President Obama or his staff. But what if she is actually anti-abortion? What if she turns out to be the swing vote that overturns Roe vs. Wade?

What if she's a proud admirer of the American Empire and its perpetual wars? American dissidents, civilian and military, may depend on her vote for their freedom from imprisonment.

What does she think about the "War on Terror"? The civil liberties and freedom from torture of various Americans and foreigners may depend on her attitude. In his 2007 trial, Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was found guilty of aiding terrorists. "The jury did seem to be an oddly cohesive group," the Washington Post reported. "On the last day of trial before the Fourth of July holiday, jurors arranged to dress in outfits so that each row in the jury box was its own patriotic color — red, white or blue."¹⁰ No one dared to question this blatant display of patriotism in the courtroom; neither the defense attorney, nor the prosecutor, nor the judge. How can we continue to pretend that people's legal positions exist independently of their political sentiments?

In the 2000 Supreme Court decision stopping the presidential electoral count in Florida, giving the election to George W. Bush, did the politics of the five most conservative justices play a role in the 5 to 4 decision? Of course. Judges are essentially politicians in black robes. But should we care? Don't ask, don't tell. Sonia Sotomayor is a LATINA!

Given the large Democratic majority in the Senate, Sotomayor was in very little danger of being rejected. She could have openly and proudly expressed her social and political positions — whatever they may be — and the Democratic senators could have done the same. How refreshing, maybe even educational if a discussion ensued. Instead it was just another political appointment by a president determined to not offend anyone if he can help it, and another tiresome ritual hearing. The Republican senators were much less shy about revealing how they actually felt about important issues.

It didn't have to be that way. As Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun.org pointed out during the hearings: "Democratic Senators could use their time to ask questions and make statements that explain why a liberal or progressive worldview is precisely what is needed on the Supreme Court."

NATO and Eastern Europe resource

No one chronicles the rise of the supra-government called NATO like Rick Rozoff in his "Stop NATO" mailings. NATO has become an ever-expanding behemoth, making war and interfering in political controversies all over Europe and beyond. The United States is not the world's only superpower; NATO is another, as it surrounds Russia and the Caspian Sea oil reserves; although the distinction between the two superpowers is little more than a facade. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the NATO/US 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. On April 23, 1999 missiles slammed into Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in downtown Belgrade, killing 16 employees. The station, NATO claimed, was a legitimate military target because it broadcast propaganda. (Certainly a novel form of censorship; not to mention the fact that NATO could simply have taken out the station's transmitter.) What apparently bothered the Western powers was that RTS was reporting the horrendous effects of NATO's bombing as well as passing footage of the destruction to Western media.

To mark the anniversary, Amnesty International recently issued a demand that NATO be held accountable for the 16 deaths. Amnesty asserts that the bombing was a deliberate attack on a civilian object (one of many during the 78 days) and as such constitutes a war crime, and called upon NATO to launch a war crimes probe into the attack to ensure full accountability and redress for victims and their families.

Readers might consider signing up for the "Stop NATO" mailing list. Just write to: rwrozoff [at] yahoo.com. Rozoff scours the East European press each day and comes up with numerous gems ignored by the mainstream media. But a warning: The amount of material you'll receive is often considerable. You'll have to learn to pick and choose. You can get an idea of this by reading previous reports at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/messages.

Notes

1. The Guardian (London) July 13, 2009 ^↩
2. Fabian Escalante, "Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro" (Ocean Press, 2006) ^↩
3. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 32^↩
4. William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 23 ^↩
5. Ibid., chapter 18 ^↩
6. Rogue State, chapter 17, intermixed with other types of US interventions ^↩
7. Vermont TV station WCAX, July 4, 2009, WCAX.com ^↩
8. Washington Post, July 19, 2009 ^↩
9. William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939-1975 (1980), p.8 ^↩
10. Washington Post, August 17, 2007 ^↩

–

William Blum is the author of:

• Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
• Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
• West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
• Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 [at] aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area.

Soros's pro-junta "colored revolution" in Honduras

Supporters of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya who have returned to the United States from Honduras report that the country's military-backed junta is supported by throngs of wealthy elites in the streets who have adopted the color white in support of the junta and its acting president Roberto Micheletti.

The selection of the color white is perhaps fitting for a nation where the capitalist elite that supported the coup is practically 100 percent white and of European ancestry. The "white" nature of the coup leaders was best spelled out by the junta's first "Foreign Minister" Enrique Ortez Colindres who said of President Barack Obama: "that little black boy who knows nothing about anything . . . a little black man who doesn’t know where Tegucigalpa is."

The use of white flags in pro-junta demonstrations and the wearing of white shirts by junta supporters is reminiscent of the themed "color revolutions" fomented and financed by global troublemaker and crisis financial speculator George Soros. At the same time white flags and shirts appeared on the streets of Honduras, green flags and clothing were being worn by anti-government demonstrators in Iran. The involvement of the Soros-linked National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which has worked with Soros's Open Society Institute (OSI) in organizing opposition movements and demonstrations in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Myanmar, Tibet, Serbia, and Sinkiang province in China, in the street demonstrations in both Honduras and Iran is clear. Soros's Latin American Program, part of OSI, states that it promotes "democratic institutions" in Latin America, which is true if one believes that U.S.-supported oligarchies in Colombia and Panama and the Honduran junta are "democratic institutions."

Soros and NED funds have been intermingled in support of the Honduran junta under the ruse of "preserving the rule of law" in Honduras, which is code for supporting the right-wing junta. One of the cover projects is called Civic Participation and Democratic Planning. In Honduras, OSI is reported to use "local researchers" for its "projects." Similarly, such intermingled funds are used to destabilize Hugo Chavez's government in Venezuela under the guise of combating "anti-Semitism" in that country.

Soros and U.S.-backed themed revolutions:

Honduras (2009)	White Revolution
Iran (2009)	Green Revolution (unsuccessful)
Georgia (2003)	Rose Revolution
Ukraine (2004)	Orange Revolution
Kyrgyzstan (2005)	Tulip or Pink Revolution
Moldova (2009)	Twitter Revolution (partly successful)
Lebanon (2005)	Cedar Revolution
Belarus (2006)	Denim Revolution (unsuccessful)
Myanmar (2007)	Saffron Revolution (unsuccessful)
Tibet (2008)	Crimson Revolution (unsuccessful)
Mongolia (2005)	Yellow Revolution (partly successful)

Last November, Soros gathered a few Latin American leaders together in the Dominican Republic for a typical Soros contrivance called "The Emerging Global Financial Order," a regional economic summit that was, in reality, pushing for final adoption of the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA).

In addition to Soros and Zelaya, others participating included two of Soros's capitalist right-wing pals, President Elias Antonio Saca of El Salvador (now replaced by progressive president Mauricio Funes) and Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis of Haiti, where the democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was, like Zelaya, was forced into exile after a U.S.-sponsored coup ousted him in 2004. The meeting was officially hosted by Dominican President Leonel Fernandez who maintains friendly relations with Latin American progressive leaders. Also present were the general secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Barcena and the secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS) Jose Miguel Insulza, a supporter of Zelaya.

After Zelaya embraced Chavez's Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), an anti-capitalist Latin American bloc, the heat from the right-wing, as well as faux progressives like Soros and his gang, was turned up on the Honduran president. That pressure culminated in the coup against him and Honduras's "White Revolution."

Feud between Rahm Emanuel and Netanyahu heats up

The political bickering between White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, himself a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen with strong links, as previously reported by WMR, to the Mossad, and the Israeli government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is heating up, according to U.S. intelligence sources.

Our sources also report that, currently, the major impetus for incessant rumors about Obama's lack of a U.S. birth certificate is the Netanyahu government. WMR first reported on the attempt to paint Obama as born in Mombasa, Kenya after our South African intelligence sources reported that a group of U.S. intelligence operatives, similar to the one that Karl Rove dispatched to South Africa in 2004 to dig up dirt on Teresa Heinz Kerry from South African and Portuguese colonial security files, arrived in Nairobi to dig up dirt on Obama's Kenyan-born father and was on the hunt for a certificate of birth for his son at a Mombasa maternity hospital. The hunt for dirt on the Obama family, which was known to and approved by key officials of the Hillary Clinton campaign, turned up empty-handed.

After the birth certificate story was debunked, Netanyahu resurrected it as a way to pressure Obama from the U.S. fundamentalist right-wing, a group with which he maintains close political and religious links. Currently, Israeli propaganda experts are feeding a flurry of derogatory bogus "intelligence" on Obama to neocon media outlets in the United States.

From WMR's archives: "On February 25, 2008, WMR reported that Karl Rove was quietly assisting the Clinton campaign in a dirty tricks operation against Obama. Rove currently works for Fox News, whose owner Rupert Murdoch, held a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. On February 19, a Stanley [Associates] employee accessed Obama's file for the second time. Sometime later that same week, a team of three Americans arrived in Nairobi, Kenya and traveled to western Kenya and Barack Obama's father's birth place to dig up 'dirt' on Obama's family. The details of Barack Obama Sr., now deceased, would have been readily found in Senator Obama's passport file. That is the real story, minus the neocon obfuscation and smoke screen."

Also, according to WMR's February 25, 2008 report: "WMR's intelligence sources in Africa are reporting that amid the post-election turmoil wracking Kenya, a three-person team (including a possible Korean-American woman) arrived in Nairobi last week and began asking questions about Barack Obama's father, the late Barack Obama, Sr.

The team also inquired about the Senator Obama Secondary School in Nyangoma-Kogelo in northwestern Kenya, the area where Obama's father, an ethnic Luo, hailed and where his grandmother, Sarah Ogwel Onyango, still lives.

There are also reports that another political operative has arrived in South Africa claiming to have personal connections to Obama. The individual, who is not Cuban, is claiming to be part of an Obama-sponsored US-Cuba dialog initiative. The individual is reportedly attempting to make contact with South African Communists 'on behalf' of Obama. The South African Communists contacted are wary of the individual and consider him to be an agent provocateur.

Passport file rifling

On March 24, 2008, WMR reported: "In another case of neocon manipulation of the news, the story about Barack Obama's passport file being accessed by two employees of Stanley Associates, Inc. of Arlington, Virginia, a company whose president, Philip Nolan, has donated to the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and her pal, John McCain supporter Joe Lieberman, has strangely morphed into a story about another State Department contractor snooping on McCain's and Obama's passport files.

The story, when it first broke on the evening of March 20, concentrated on the two employees of Stanley being fingered in the snooping after a computer system audit automatically discovered that a VIP's files were being examined. The initial report from MS-NBC was that the two employees were fired. There was a follow-up report that a third contractor, who was not fired, was disciplined for a passport file access infraction.

But when the neocon owned and operated Washington Times and Fox News began to report the story, emphasis was shifted to the third employee who was not fired. It turns out that the employee works for The Analysis Corporation (TAC), based in McLean, Virginia. It was very convenient for the neocons to shift the story to TAC because its Chief Executive Officer is John O. Brennan, a retired CIA official and adviser to the Obama campaign." [Brennan is now the deputy National Security Adviser in the Obama White House].

Warning shot by Netanyahu fired at Obama

Recent information obtained by WMR from U.S. intelligence sources points to the current false birth certificate controversy is merely a "warning shot" being fired across Obama's bow by the Netanyahu government. Netanyahu's government has been caught leaking "intelligence" on Obama's history to neo-con news media with the caveat that it is based on bona fide Israeli intelligence reports. The real issue, WMR is informed, is the distinct possibility that Obama has been in possession of a passport or passports in addition to his U.S. passport, all stemming from his past post-undergraduate and possible pre-graduate work for Business International Corporation, Inc., a non-official cover "business research" firm in Manhattan that operated on behalf of the CIA. Obama wrote for a few Business International Corporation publications as far as his "official" record is concerned.

Obama has apparently gotten tough with the Netanyahu government, telling the Israeli Prime Minister that he will not be told what to do by Netanyahu or Israel. That toughness has earned Obama a place at the top of Netanyahu's political hit list.

Netanyahu now apparently stands ready to shift the controversy away from the birth certificate non-issue to the more problematic passport issue. In addition to his American passport, Obama may have traveled in the past, while working for Business International Corporation and other U.S. intelligence-connected entities, on a British or Indonesian passport, or both. In addition to Mossad, Britain's MI-6 is said to be aware of Obama's past non-official cover work for the CIA and his past possession of a British passport. This information was reportedly shared with the Hillary Clinton campaign, including former President Bill Clinton, by senior British government officials.

Obama's post-graduate CIA employment

On February 24, 2009, WMR reported: "After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, Barack Obama went to work for a firm called Business International Corporation (BIC), a firm that was linked to economic intelligence gathering for the CIA.

For one year, Obama worked as a researcher in BIC's financial services division where he wrote for two BIC publications, Financing Foreign Operations and Business International Money Report, a weekly newsletter.

An informed source has told WMR that Obama's tuition debt at Columbia was paid off by BIC. In addition, WMR has learned that when Obama lived in Indonesia with his mother and his adoptive father Lolo Soetoro, the 20-year-old Obama, who was known as "Barry Soetoro," traveled to Pakistan in 1981 and was hosted by the family of Muhammadmian Soomro, a Pakistani Sindhi who became acting President of Pakistan {allegedly with the support of the CIA] after the resignation of General Pervez Musharraf on August 18, 2008. [Soomro's father was Pakistani parliamentarian Ahmed Mian Soomro. Muhammadmian Soomro, a former official for the Bank of America, International Bank of Yemen, Faysal Islamic Bank of Bahrain, Muslim Commercial Bank, Agriculture Development Bank of Pakistan, Federal Bank of Cooperatives, and National Bank of Pakistan, represented Pakistan at the 2004 funeral of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan was President while Obama was working on his unspecified mission for the CIA in Pakistan in 1981].

WMR was told that the Obama/Soetoro trip to Pakistan, ostensibly to go "partridge hunting" with the Soomros, related to unknown CIA business. [The Soomro family were political allies of Pakistan People's Party (PPP) leaders Begum Nusrat Bhutto, the widow of the slain ex-PPP Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and Benazir Bhutto, their daughter. Bhutto's brother, Shah Nawaz Bhutto, was found suffocated in his apartment in Cannes, France in 1985 under mysterious circumstances. The Soomros, who are actually a powerful Sindhi clan, continue to be close to the Bhuttos].

The covert CIA program to assist the Afghan mujaheddin was already well underway [at the time of Obama's stay] and Pakistan was the major base of operations for the CIA's support [for the rebels]. Obama also reportedly traveled to India, again, on unknown business for U.S. intelligence. WMR has been told by knowledgeable sources that Obama has, in the past, traveled on at least three passports: U.S., Indonesian, and British.

BIC also maintained a European subsidiary, Business International S.A., in Geneva.

BIC had long been associated with CIA activities since being founded by Eldridge Haynes, a self-professed liberal Democrat. The BIC headquarters was located at the prestigious address of 1 Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in Manhattan. BIC held a series of off-the-record, no press, meetings between top U.S. business executives and top government officials, including the President, and the Secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, Commerce, and Labor; the Attorney General, Senate leadership, and the heads of the Export-Import Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

BIC held international meetings in locations like Brussels and Mexico City. In 1961, a BIC meeting in New Delhi was attended by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Foreign Minister Morarji Desai, who would later become Prime Minister [Desai, in 1992, unsuccessfully sued for libel journalist Seymour Hersh over Hersh's allegations that Desai passed intelligence to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger via the CIA during the 1971 India-Pakistan war. The US Supreme Court refused to consider a federal appeals court decision in Hersh's favor] . . .

Obama's work for a company having ties to the CIA barely registered a blip on the 2008 presidential campaign radar screen. At the very least, Obama helped in providing economic intelligence to the CIA as a contract employee. At most, Obama was, like previous BIC employees who operated abroad for the CIA, a full-fledged non-official cover (NOC) agent. Since President Obama has backpedaled on CIA renditions and torture, as well as warrantless electronic surveillance by U.S. intelligence, he owes the American people a full explanation of the circumstances behind his being hired by BIC, what his job actually entailed, and whether he continued to have a relationship with BIC or any other CIA operation while attending Harvard Law School and thereafter."

WMR obtained some 1975 Business International Corporation reports from CIA archives. The output of the firm suggests that it was primarily providing economic intelligence to the CIA as highlighted by the headlines from its October and November 1975 reports:

- "The Trading Company: A New Way to Cope with Global Changes."

- "Foreign Investors Find India's Emergency Rule a Double-Edged Sword."

- "What Venezuela and Bolivia Want"

- "Raw Material Producers Eye the OPEC Model: Who? Where? How?

- "New UK Perspectives: Wilson's Economic Plan, Oil and EEC Tensions"

- "Latest from Canberra" [a report on the ouster of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's government] [there is also a report on the prospects for New Zealand's Labor government seeing its parliamentary majority trimmed].

- "Dwindling Petrodollars Being Change of Pace to Venezuelan Economy"

- The Big Six Summit in Paris

When Obama was in Pakistan and worked for Business International, the CIA was involved in a massive espionage campaign in India, as well as with a significant support network for the anti-Soviet Afghan mujaheddin in Pakistan. In 1983, while Obama was with Business International in New York, the First Secretary of the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, Henry L. Wetherbee, was expelled after the Indian Intelligence Bureau exposed his involvement with an espionage network of three retired Indian Air Force officers and a civilian. Wetherbee, whose official cover was an embassy policy planning officer, bought classified information from the Indian officials on Soviet equipment being provided for Indian air force bases. At the time, India maintained close military relations with the Soviet Union and was opposed to the U.S. support for the Afghan mujaheddin from bases in Pakistan.

The Pakistan that Obama visited in 1981 on "unknown" CIA business was awash in CIA agents providing Afghan Islamist guerrillas with caches of weapons from old Lee-Enfield rifles to Kalashnikov automatic rifles and rocket launchers to mortars, many of which were from Chinese sources.

It was in the environment of Indian-Pakistani antagonism, coupled with U.S.-Soviet rivalry in nearby Afghanistan, that young Obama was immersed while involved with NOC activities on behalf of the CIA in the early 1980s. While Obama traveled to Pakistan on his Indonesian passport, the CIA's hand-picked dictator, President Suharto, was crushing his political opposition, among them some of his longtime associates who criticized Suharto's dictatorship: A. W. Fatwa, sentenced to 18 years in prison for "subversive" activities; General Hartono Dharsono, sentenced to seven years on the same charges; and former senior minister Slamet Bratanata and General Abdul Haris Nasution, who helped Suharto gain power.

There is a certain optimism by Obama administration officials about the ouster of governments around the world unfriendly to American interests in the Business International reports, suggesting that Obama's early work for the CIA front favorably exposed him to the notion that the overthrow of governments is in the best interests of the United States. Obama's reaction to the recent military right-wing coup against President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras suggests possible influence on him at a young age to such imperialistic American policies. Obama also does not appear to be bothered by the actions of U.S.-supported dictators who act in the very same manner as Suharto during Obama's childhood in Jakarta.

***

Emanuel, for his part, realizes that his future depends on the success of the Obama's presidency. Knowing that he would not last long in a Biden administration or a weakened lame duck Obama administration, Emanuel, WMR is told, is retaliating fiercely against the volley of political threats from Netanyahu and his chief advisers.

Massive Laundering of "black money" through the Social Security Administration

WMR has been tracking the massive theft, some of it systematic, of personal data, including social security numbers, since we began publication in May 2005.

On June 24, 2006, WMR reported: "The epidemic of personal data thefts continues at breakneck speed. Yesterday, the Navy announced that Social Security Numbers and dates of birth on 28,000 naval personnel and family dependents were leaked to a publicly-accessible web site. Shortly prior to that announcement, the Department of Agriculture reported the compromise of 26,000 Social Security Numbers and other personal details on 26,000 Agriculture employees. WMR has previously reported that these thefts are part of a covert U.S. intelligence program to steal personal data on Americans and others to populate Total Information Awareness system surveillance databases. Two officials of two U.S. intelligence activities have confirmed the existence of this program but the FBI has been hamstrung by higher authority not to investigate the thefts thoroughly."

The sources for the information about the intelligence connection to the data thefts were within the Department of Energy at two different locations: Germantown, Maryland and Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

WMR has now learned of another possible use of the stolen personal data: massive money laundering through the Social Security Administration.

A source with a large data processing company that was contracted to process social security payments reported that for a significant period of time hundreds of social security payments were being issued to different names. However, the different names used the same Social Security Number. The social security payments were all directly deposited into the same bank account with that was not associated with a name.

The data processing firm in question was aware of the laundering operation but did nothing to stop the process. There is the possibility that billions of dollars have been laundered through the Social Security direct deposit payment system over the past several years.

In 2007, Representative Elton Gallegly cited the Bank of America and Wells Fargo Bank as turning a "blind eye" to Social Security Number fraud and money laundering in relation to illegal immigration. Gallegly stated: "Wells Fargo was even cited by the Treasury Department last year for 'numerous and recurring deficiencies' in safeguarding against money launderingand terrorist activities. The violations were so egregious that Treasury Department staff recommended a public reprimand. Top officials, however, decided to slap Wells Fargo's wrist quietly and behind closed doors." Gallegly added, "Social Security Numbers have nothing to do with credit." Gallegly also stated that the Bank of America "aids and abets identity theft and money laundering."

In 1988, two E. F. Hutton & Company brokers were indicted for laundering more than a half million dollars for "select clients" using bogus brokerage accounts with false names and Social Security Numbers. One of those indicted, Stephen Fusco, died of cancer in 1985 after the FBI investigation of the operation began.

Cheney assassination team involved Pentagon chain of command

Pentagon officials revealed important details of Vice President Dick Cheney's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) assassination at a Special Operation/Low Intensity Conflict (SOLIC) conference in Arlington, Virginia just weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Reporting to the Pentagon's Undersecretary for Plans and Policy Douglas Feith, the assassination team was known as "Black Special Operations Forces" or "Black SOF" and the assassination team were part of a group responsible for "special programs," according to information revealed at the conference sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA).

The special hit squads used by Cheney were part of a Bush White House program, initiated by the neo-conservative cell in the Pentagon around Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that, according to Pentagon officials consciously shifted policy "to the right." The policy, known as "defensive intervention," gave the U.S. military the authorization to pursue targets for the defense of the country. The actual implementer of the Cheney policy was Robert Andrews, the then-Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for SOLIC, who stated in his remark on February 11, "the U.S. must take quick action against likely sponsors of terrorists . . . without waiting for a basis of legal evidence." Andrews also stated that the standing orders for JSOC and SOF personnel were to "take asymmetric warfare into the heart of terrorism and destroy it."

Andrews also stated that "targeted assassinations" were one means for defensive intervention. He declared, "If I could take out Saddam Hussein, I'd do it. My Secretary wouldn't let me do it, but I'd do it." At the time, the assassination of the foreign leader such as Hussein was prohibited by Executive Order 12333, which bans such actions against foreign political leaders.

Andrews revealed the reason that SOF personnel were used by the Cheney team to carry out assassinations was because they could easily get into otherwise denied areas under the aegis of "training" and "counter-narcotics" programs. He cited the example of Uzbekistan as one country where U.S. SOF forces operated more or less freely after 9/11. Andrews added that SOF were "sources for collecting intelligence in host countries" and that "training contacts are fungible, we can use them for counter-narcotics but for 'other things,' as well." Andrews also stated that counter-narcotics "played a big role in the Summer [0f 2002] allowing us to go in." He revealed that SOF personnel were active in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador in the Summer of 2002 and that they did "other things." Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez narrowly escaped a coup against him in April 2002 that was supported by U.S. SOF teams.

The Pentagon's Joint Combined Education and Training (JCET) program gave the JSOC Special Forces team carrying out "defensive intervention" access to 59 countries under the cover of 139 "training missions." Detainee operations in Guantanamo and other detention centers were also part of the JSOC/SOF mandate.

Much of the defensive intervention strategy originated with the contractor Booz Allen and was part of a larger "strategic psychological operations" program initiated by the Pentagon. Under the umbrella of "influence operations," the program also targeted, according to one Pentagon consultant, "activists, anarchists, as well as opportunists" as the new terrorists. Specifically, animal rights and environmental activists were cited in the "activist" category. Infuence operations were green-lighted by both Cheney and President George W. Bush. Bush justified the program to Pentagon officials by saying "we're bringing justice to the terrorists."

SOF personnel charged with assassinating suspected terrorists also operated in the Philippines in 2002 as part of Operation Balikatan, a joint operation with Philippines Special Operations personnel.

The JSOC/SOF personnel reportedly operated in sensitive locations abroad, including Bosnia. Personnel possessed Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearances and access for the Cheney-Wolfowitz-Feith "defensive intervention" program.

Pentagon officials also revealed that SOF personnel operated domestically under statute granted in the USA PATRIOT Act known as "consequence management."

JSOC/SOF also maintained a "less-than-lethal" program of using against their targets "pepper spray projectiles, ring-shaped rubber bullets, electro-static devices to immobilize vehicles, electro-magnetic devices to disable automobile electronics, light scattering particles to confuse crowds, and electro-shocking devices to immobilize crowds." It was conceded that the electric discharge devices could also immobilize pacemakers and aircraft, which could have lethal consequences.

Although the CIA claims it kept a wary distance from the Cheney assassination program, there was one country where the CIA directly funded an assassination in the waning days of the Clinton administration, an indication that at least part of the Cheney program was already in existence prior to his entering office. Shortly before the January 2001 assassination of Congolese President Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one State Department witness at the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa personally saw large sums of cash arriving at the CIA station at the embassy said to be used for a "special operation." Four days before Cheney's inauguration as Vice President, Kabila was gunned down in a palace coup.

Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire - And Ten Steps to Take to Do So

By Chalmers Johnson

However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.

According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there -- 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.

These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony -- that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations on the planet as possible.

We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past -- including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)

Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us.

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that "[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC, the president again insisted, "Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world." And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that "[w]e will maintain America's military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen."

What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.

According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:

"America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today's world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony."

There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:

"Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them… He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases."

In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.

Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.

Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, "Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe." According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.

In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush's imperial adventures -- if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.

Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us

One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan's modern history -- to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories -- the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain's foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.

Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425): "Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland." An estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.

The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is administered directly by Islamabad, which -- just as British imperial officials did -- has divided the territory into seven agencies, each with its own "political agent" who wields much the same powers as his colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.

According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story (City Lights, 2009, p. 317):

"If Washington's bureaucrats don't remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world's sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States."

In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated: "We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers" (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed.

The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a result of "collateral damage," or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.

When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people, the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far. There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael Jackson.)

Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that, contrary to our own intelligence service's focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always been the problem." They add:

"Pakistan's army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch... from 1973 on, has played the key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the 1980s]… and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan's army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government." (p. 322-324)

The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train "freedom fighters" throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan's consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.

Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India."

Obama's mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William Westmoreland's continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.

Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.

3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases

In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued:

"New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults -- 2,923 -- and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them."

The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan's poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.

That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.

The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The military's record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it's atrocious," writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of Forces Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.

This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.

In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret "understanding" as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.

Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.

Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low numbers of courts martial" for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.

It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of female veterans in 2006 created the Service Women's Action Network (SWAN). Its agenda is to spread the word that "no woman should join the military."

I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.

10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire

Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the "opportunity costs" that go with them -- the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't or won't.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters -- along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth -- that follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army's infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)

7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this possible.

9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.

10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).

[Note on further reading on the matter of sexual violence in and around our overseas bases and rapes in the military: On the response to the 1995 Okinawa rape, see Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, chapter 2. On related subjects, see David McNeil, "Justice for Some. Crime, Victims, and the US-Japan SOFA," Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 8-1-09, March 15, 2009; "Bilateral Secret Agreement Is Preventing U.S. Servicemen Committing Crimes in Japan from Being Prosecuted," Japan Press Weekly, May 23, 2009; Dieter Fleck, ed., The Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces, Oxford University Press, 2001; Minoru Matsutani, "'53 Secret Japan-US Deal Waived GI Prosecutions," Japan Times, October 24, 2008; "Crime Without Punishment in Japan," the Economist, December 10, 2008; "Japan: Declassified Document Reveals Agreement to Relinquish Jurisdiction Over U.S. Forces," Akahata, October 30, 2008; "Government's Decision First Case in Japan," Ryukyu Shimpo, May 20, 2008; Dahr Jamail, "Culture of Unpunished Sexual Assault in Military," Antiwar.com, May 1, 2009; and Helen Benedict, "The Plight of Women Soldiers," the Nation, May 5, 2009.]

Copyright 2009 Chalmers Johnson

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A audácia de Avigdor Lieberman

A audácia de Avigdor Lieberman

Christopher Hitchens
Dos Estados Unidos


Um amigo e colega confiável jura que viu o seguinte incidente alguns anos atrás nos territórios ocupados por Israel. Um médico palestino, precisando urgentemente de permissão para viajar, estava tentando persuadir um soldado em uma barricada na estrada a permitir que ele continuasse até a próxima cidade. Primeiramente, ele tentou falar com o guarda sem expressão em hebraico, no qual muitos árabes são fluentes, mas não recebeu resposta. Então fez uma tentativa em inglês, que é algo como uma língua franca local, mas ainda assim não conseguiu resultado melhor. Após um intervalo desagradável de não-comunicação mútua, tornou-se evidente que a única palavra que o soldado israelense sabia era não, e a única língua na qual conseguia falar isto era em russo.

As palavras ocupação e desapropriação são jogadas por ali bem livremente, mas eu convido você a imaginar uma vida sob ocupação na qual o seu policial hostil da vizinhança nem mesmo falasse a língua do estado ao qual servia, para não dizer qualquer língua conhecida de você. Falando nisso, há uma considerável chance de que o soldado nem fosse judeu; é um segredo descoberto em Israel que dezenas de milhares de imigrantes russos usaram documentos falsificados como uma forma de saírem do seu país natal, fingindo exercitar o "direito de retorno". Então aqui está mais um insulto para encher aqueles cujos trisavós nasceram na Palestina, mas ainda assim são tratados como se vivessem lá apenas por consentimento.

Apesar disso, se você for um ex-leão-de-chácara nascido na Moldávia soviética, como Avigdor Lieberman, você pode vir morar na Terra Santa como de direito e tornar-se o líder de um partido que propõe instituir um "juramento de lealdade" não apenas para os cidadãos árabes do Estado de Israel, mas para todos os membros judeus de seitas religiosas ortodoxas que não se declaram como sionistas. E este partido grotesco, chamado de Israel Beiteinu, ou "Israel é nosso lar", é agora o influente, e o seu líder é o pistolão no processo eleitoral israelense.

No início de seu período como imigrante em Israel, Lieberman foi, por pouco tempo, um membro do Kach, o grupo histérico liderado pelo Rabino Meir Kahane, que era morbidamente obcecado com a vida sexual dos árabes e que gritava pela sua expulsão em massa ou - para empregar o eufemismo comum - "transferência". Agora, de alguma forma, ele refinou sua posição, pregando uma troca de territórios e pessoas que se aproximaria mais de uma partição ou mesmo de uma solução de dois estados. Mas como no caso de qualquer uma destas propostas, isto ainda deixa um grande número de árabes sob a soberania israelense, tanto na Cisjordânia como no "território" de Israel. Duvido que Lieberman esteja realmente falando sério quanto a quaisquer negociações de "terra para paz" -- ele discutiu até com Ariel Sharon sobre a retirada de Gaza, então, se fosse por ele, supostamente haveria mais colonos israelenses na faixa. Ele mudou todo o tom do argumento ao decidir questionar a presença dos árabes israelenses que, ao contrário dos seus primos sob ocupação, gozam do direito de cidadania e voto, bem como do privilégio de viver sob a bandeira israelense.

O melhor livro sobre esta comunidade extremamente interessante e negligenciada foi escrito pelo romancista israelense David Grossman em 1992, e se chama "Sleeping on a Wire". Ele contém micro-flashes de esclarecimento (como a probabilidade de que mais árabes israelenses falem hebraico do que judeus americanos) e também algumas reflexões memoráveis sobre a língua e sua relação com literatura e cultura. Todos lembramos que Maimônides escrevia fluentemente em árabe, mas talvez seja menos conhecido que: "A conversa cotidiana dos israelenses palestinos cintila com expressões da Bíblia e do Talmud, de Bialik e Rabino Yehuda Halevy e Agnon. O poeta Naim Araideh derrama: 'Você sabe o que significa escrever em hebraico para mim? Você sabe como é escrever na língua na qual o mundo foi criado?' "

Pode-se não desejar ir tão longe assim, mas permanece o caso que o marxista árabe-israelense Emile Habibi, autor do romance clássico "The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist" foi premiado uma vez com o prêmio anual de Israel para melhor produção literária em hebraico.

Pode-se acrescentar que os mísseis do Hamás e Hezbollah caem sobre estas pessoas, também, em Jaffa e outras cidades, exatamente como eles caem sobre os armênios e drusos israelenses. As discussões e imbricações que unem e formam as camadas dos candidatos contraditórios à terra da Palestina são tão fortes quanto sutis, tão antigas quanto modernas. É por isso que Grossman ficou tão deprimido ao descobrir, no final do seu livro, que a lembrança de 1948 ainda estava nítida mesmo entre os mais bem-sucedidos e prósperos árabes israelenses e que todos eles se sentiam inseguros e secretamente temiam uma renovação da exigência pela sua expulsão. Em 1993, ele se sentiu capaz, até certo ponto, de tranqüilizá-los quanto a isto.

Agora temos que assistir ao surgimento de um brutamontes e um demagogo que tem exigido, com prazer, a execução dos membros árabes eleitos do Parlamento de Israel se eles se encontrarem com o Hamás, que tem exigido o afogamento dos prisioneiros palestinos no Mar Morto, cujos apoiadores cantam "Morte aos árabes" nos seus comícios, e que tem materializado os piores medos daqueles árabes que tem feito os ajustes de mais longa duração com o estado judeu. De qualquer forma, o estilo essencialmente totalitário e inquisitorial de Avigdor Lieberman pode estar ainda mais manifesto na sua insistência que os haredim não-sionistas, ou judeus devotos, também façam um juramento de lealdade ou percam a sua cidadania. Isto leva o machado à raiz da idéia de que os judeus têm uma presença em Jerusalém desde tempos imemoriais e que seus direitos resultantes não são derivados ou dependentes de qualquer estado ou qualquer ideologia. Será uma vergonha se Benjamin Netanyahu fizer uma aliança, mesmo que temporária, com Lieberman. Por mais questionável que o "direito de retorno" já possa ser, ele certamente não pode conceder o direito de expulsar.


Christopher Hitchens é jornalista, escritor e colunista de Vanity Fair e Slate Magazine. É autor do livro "Deus não é Grande: como a religião envenena tudo". Artigo distribuído pelo The New York Times Syndicate.


Opiniões expressas aqui são de exclusiva responsabilidade do autor e não necessariamente estão de acordo com os parâmetros editoriais de Terra Magazine.

Terra Magazine



Foto:musadiqmarhaban.wordpress.com/.../







The Gaza ghetto

A street destroyed in Rafah, southern Gaza, after the war which claimed 1,300 Palestinian and 13 Israeli lives. A top UN official remarked, "It may not be very clear who actually won this conflict, if such a concept means anything in Gaza, but I think it's pretty clear who lost and that was the civilian population of Gaza."





The Gaza ghetto

Children on the ruins of their destroyed mosque in the town of Jabalya. Half of the 1.4m people who live in Gaza are children, and at least 292 were killed and 1,500 injured during Israel's 18-day offensive. Kawather Abed Rabbo, a mother from Jabalya, described how her two daughters, aged two and eight, were killed when they tried to run to safety after a tank started shelling their house: "They had a white flag, made out of our scarves. But as they opened the door there was machine gun fire from the tank."





The Gaza ghetto

Palestinians survey the wreckage in Jabalya on January 20. Many had been unable to leave their houses for three weeks. With Hamas fighters staying mostly in residential areas throughout the conflict, Israeli attempts to eradicate them were focused in the towns and cities of Gaza. In all, their bombing and bulldozers destroyed more than 4,000 buildings, leaving over 50,000 Gazans homeless and 400,000 without running water.




The Gaza ghetto

The scene near Jabalya refugee camp. Many streets are covered in sewage, and food and medicine are in short supply. One estimate for the cost of repairing the damage caused by Israel's assault is almost $2bn. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has said that his country will donate half.




The Gaza ghetto

Workers scavenge for boxes of food on rubble that was once their factory in Jabalya, in the northern Gaza Strip. After Israeli forces retreated from the ruins of Gaza, thousands of Hamas supporters took to the streets claiming victory.





The Gaza ghetto

A Palestinian woman in Jabalya refugee camp. This area used to be a haven of fertile farming land and citrus trees.





The Gaza ghetto

Palestinian medics search for bodies amongst the rubble at Beit Lahiya after the ceasefire. Speaking from his hospital bed, Fared al-Bayar, a father of six, described the situation he now faces: "I left my home and it was OK, but I don't know what happened to it. So far all of my neighbours' homes have been demolished. I have no place to go to when I leave the hospital. Maybe we will have to put up a tent."


Fonte:http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/


Avigdor Lieberman

MKs


Date of birth = Birth date and age|1958|6|5|mf=y
Place of birth = Kishinev, Soviet Union
Year of Aliyah = 1978
Date of death =
Knesset(s) = 15th, 16th, 17th (current)
Party = Yisrael Beiteinu
Former parties = National Union
Gov't roles = Deputy Prime Minister
Minister of Strategic Affairs
Minister of Transportation
Minister of National Infrastructure

Avigdor Levi Lieberman ( _he. אביגדור ליברמן, also spelled Liberman, born 5 June 1958) is an Israeli politician and leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu party.

In October 2006, Lieberman and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert signed a coalition agreement. Under the agreement, Lieberman became the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs, a new position with a focus towards the strategic threat from Iran. [http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3318674,00.html PM, Lieberman sign coalition deal] Ynetnews, October 23, 2006.] However, he left the cabinet when Yisrael Beiteinu resigned from the coalition in January 2008.A polarizing figure within Israeli politics, Lieberman is quoted as saying, "I've always been controversial because I offer new ideas. For me to be controversial, I think this is positive." [ [http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/07/news/mideast.php A hard-line Israeli official, Avigdor Lieberman, stakes out extreme positions] ]

Biography

Born in Kishinev in the Soviet Union (today Chişinău, Moldova), Lieberman worked as a nightclub bouncer in Moldavia, [ [http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=1ca859ac-c2ef-48a3-9326-5927c7b3c21b The Father of Palestine] (subscribers-only access), The New Republic, 13 February 2008] and as a broadcaster in Baku before emigrating to Israel in 1978 at the age of 21. In Israel he served in the Israel Defense Forces, and received a BA in International Relations and Political Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

From 1983 to 1988 Lieberman helped found the "Zionist Forum for Soviet Jewry" and was a member of the "Board of the Jerusalem Economic Corporation" and the Secretary of the Jerusalem branch of the "Histadrut Ovdim Le'umit" ("National Workers' Union"). From 1993 to 1996 he served as Director-General of the Likud party, and from 1996 to 1997 was Director-General of the Prime Minister's office serving Benjamin Netanyahu. In 1999 he founded the Yisrael Beiteinu party, and was the editor of the newspaper "Yoman Yisraeli" ("Israeli Diary"). Lieberman supports Israeli membership of the European Union and NATO. [ [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/808111.html Avigdor Lieberman: Israel should press to join NATO, EU] , Ha'aretz, January 1, 2007.]

Lieberman was elected to the Knesset in 1999, and served as Chairman of the "Israel-Moldova Parliamentary Friendship League". In March 2001 Lieberman was appointed Minister of National Infrastructure, but resigned the post in March 2002. He was re-elected in January 2003 as part of a joint National Union-Yisrael Beiteinu list, and in February was appointed Minister of Transportation. However, he was sacked from the cabinet by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in May 2004 due to his opposition to the disengagement plan.

Lieberman is married, with three children, and resides in Nokdim in the West Bank.

Lieberman Plan

In late May 2004, Lieberman proposed a plan in which the populations and territories of Israeli Jews and Arabs, including some Israeli Arabs, would be "separated". According to the plan, Israeli Arab town adjacent to Palestinian Authority areas would be transferred to Palestinian Authority, and only those Arabs who felt a connection with the State of Israel and were loyal to it would be allowed to remain. On May 30 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon condemned Lieberman's statements, stating "We regard Israeli Arabs as part of the State of Israel." [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=433141 Lieberman presents to Russia plan to expel 'disloyal' Arabs] Ha'aretz, May 30, 2004.] On 4 June 2004, as the disputes over the up-coming disengagement plan grew more intense, Sharon dismissed Lieberman from the cabinet. [ [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=435378 PM sacks National Union ministers] , Ha'aretz, June 5, 2004.] [ [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/jun/05/israel Sharon sacks hardliners who stand in his way] The Guardian, June 5, 2004.]

Many Israelis see Lieberman's plan as a form of forced population transfer similar to proposals by the far-right Israeli political parties such as Moledet, Herut or Hayil.Fact|date=March 2008 Though Lieberman's plan would not uproot Arab residents from their homes, it would forcibly revoke their Israeli citizenship and transfer their sovereignty to the Palestinian Authority. The plan has drawn sharp criticism from both Left and Right of Israeli politics; by the former for its discriminatory overtones, and by the latter for the idea of ceding parts of the Land of Israel.Fact|date=March 2008

According to Lieberman, "The peace process is based on three false basic assumptions; that Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main cause of instability in the Middle East, that the conflict is territorial and not ideological, and that the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders will end the conflict." [ [http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3338320,00.html Lieberman: The unfaithful cannot be citizens] Ynetnews, December 10, 2006.]

Popularity and constituency

In a poll published by Yedioth Ahronoth on September 21, 2006, Lieberman had more support than any politician except for Netanyahu to be the next Prime Minister of Israel (Olmert came in fifth, with 7%). [http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3306587,00.html Poll: Only 7 percent want Olmert as PM] Ynetnews, September 21, 2006.] Some Druze support Lieberman, and one third of the Israeli Druze living in Golan Heights voted for him. [http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3315769,00.html Nobody's citizens] Ynetnews, October 16, 2006.] The majority of his constituency are secular Russian-speaking Israelis as well as former Likud supporters, who feel that party has drifted from its founding Jabotinskian principles.cn|date=May 2008

Controversy

Population exchange and loyalty tests

Lieberman advocates giving the Palestinian Authority Arab-Israeli towns near the West Bank and having Arabs who remain Israeli citizens take loyalty tests. Those who refuse would be stripped of their citizenship, but could remain in Israel as permanent residents.Myre, Greg. (2006, December 7.) [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/world/middleeast/07mideast.html?pagewanted=print Israeli Official Discusses Iran and His Controversial Agenda] . "New York Times".] [http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/05/africa/ME_GEN_Israel_Lieberman.php New Cabinet minister Lieberman calls on government to separate Jews and Arabs] . "Associated Press", 5 November 2006. Quote: Under Lieberman's proposal, Arabs permitted to remain in Israel would have to pass a loyalty test to keep their citizenship. Arabs make up roughly one-fifth of Israel's population.] [http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5654988 Israel's new politics: Shutting itself in, hoping for the best] (subscribers-only access), The Economist, March 23, 2006.]

Bombing commercial centers and drowning prisoners

Following nine Palestinian attacks on Israelis during a two day period in March 2002, [- [http://www.nyjtimes.com/Heritage/News/Mar402.htm 'Weekend of terror leaves 23 Israelis dead'] , March 4, 2002.
- On March 4, the first Qassam rocket attack of March 2002 was made into Israel, there were no casualties. (Source: IDF Spokesperson Statistics).Fact|date=April 2008
- [http://news.walla.co.il/?w=/22/191379] Palestinian gunmen took up a position on a pedestrian bridge above Petah Tikva Road at the center of Tel Aviv and attacked two restaurants below, "The Steak Gathering" and "Sea Food Market" killing 3 Israelis and injuring 31 (four severely).
- [http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//191728] suicide bomber detonated in an Egged No. 823 bus.
- [http://www.nfc.co.il/Archive/001-D-6138-00.html?tag=23] [http://www.gamla.org.il/english/memorial/e310.htm] Bethlehem bypass "tunnel" attack.
- [http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=3&x_outlet=1&x_article=823] [http://www.nrg.co.il/online/archive/ART/258/091.html] [http://sderotmedia.com/?p=54] Qassam rocket attack on Sderot injured a 16 month-old baby.] the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Lieberman's proposal for an ultimatum to the Palestinians to halt all terror activity or face wide-ranging attacks on commercial centers: "if it were up to me I would notify the Palestinian Authority that tomorrow at ten in the morning we would bomb all their places of business in Ramallah, for example." [ [http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-1727248,00.html]
- Following terrorist acts in recent days right wing politicians suggest to open war, bomb civilian targets in the Palestinian Authority and conquer the West Bank.
_he. - בעקבות הפיגועים בימים האחרונים מציעים פוליטיקאים מהימין לפתוח במלחמה, להפציץ מטרות אזרחיות ברשות ולכבוש את הגדה.
- Minister of Infrastructure Avigdor Lieberman said: "If it were up to me I would notify the Palestinian Authority that tomorrow at ten in the morning we would bomb all their places of business in Ramallah, for example."
_he. - שר התשתיות אביגדור ליברמן אמר: "אם היה הדבר תלוי בי הייתי מודיע לרשות שמחר בעשר בבוקר אנו נפציץ את כל בתי העסק שלהם ברמאללה, למשל".] This led Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to respond that excessive military measures could lead to accusations of war crimes. [Paul Peachey: [http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article191213.ece We risk charges of war crimes, Peres tells Cabinet] The Independent, March 7, 2002.]

In July 2003, reacting to a commitment made by Ariel Sharon to the US, where amnesty could be given to approximately 350 Palestinian prisoners including members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Lieberman rejected a chance to participate in the related committee and said "It would be better to drown these prisoners in the Dead Sea if possible, since that's the lowest point in the world,"McGreal, Chris. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jul/25/israel Palestinian PM's leadership at stake when he pleads with Bush to help free detainees.] "The Guardian", 25 July 2003.] Abu Toameh, Khaled. (2003, 21 July.) [http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-75596261.html PA prepares own dossier on 'incitement'.] ] Chazan, Guy. [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB105952212075781800.html?mod=googlewsj Hawkish Palestinian TV Starts to Incubate Doves.] Wall Street Journal] Liebreman continued, according to Galei Tzahal ('Israel Army Radio'), stating his willingness, as Minister of Transport, to supply buses to take the prisoners there. [ [http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//409686 'Lieberman offered to drown the Palestinian prisoners at sea'] by Walla!, July 6, 2003
- On Galei Tzahal it was reported that Lieberman said at the cabinet meeting that as Minister of Transport he's willing to provide buses to take them at sea and drown them there.
_he. בגלי צה"ל דווח שליברמן אמר בישיבת הממשלה שכשר התחבורה הוא מוכן לספק אוטובוסים לאסירים שיקחו אותם לים ולהטביע אותם שם.] Lieberman's suggestion also led to confrontation between Lieberman and Arab-Israeli MKs Ahmed Tibi (Hadash-Ta'al), Jamal Zahalka (Balad), Taleb el-Sana, Abdelmalek Dahamsha (United Arab List) as well as opposition leader Shimon Peres. [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=315541 Lieberman blasted for suggesting drowning Palestinian prisoners] Ha'aretz, July 8, 2006.]

Israeli Arab MKs as collaborators

In November 2006, Lieberman called for the execution of any Arab Knesset members who meet with representatives of the Palestinian government, saying, "World War II ended with the Nuremberg trials. The heads of the Nazi regime, along with their collaborators, were executed. I hope this will be the fate of the collaborators in [the Knesset] ." [ [http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1145961280390 Lieberman calls Arab MKs who meet with Hamas 'collaborators'] Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2006.] In response, Ahmad Tibi demanded that "a criminal investigation be initiated against Lieberman for violating the law against incitement and racism". [http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3323027,00.html Prosecution: Lieberman's anti-Arab remarks kosher] Ynetnews, November 2, 2006.] Lieberman was cleared of racism charges by the Israeli Deputy State prosecutor, while admitting that the office objected to the content of his statement. Tibi strongly objected to Lieberman's ministerial appointment, describing him as "a racist and a fascist". Labour minister Ophir Pines-Paz, who resigned over Lieberman's appointment, echoed Tibi's remarks, saying that Lieberman was tainted "by racist declarations and declarations that harm the democratic character of Israel". [http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1943313.ece Labour minister quits over Lieberman's role] The Independent, October 31, 2006.]

In remarks in the Knesset in March 2008, shortly after the 6 March attack at Jerusalem's Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, Lieberman stated that "yesterday's attack can not be disconnected from the Arab MKs incitement, which we hear daily in the Knesset." [Haaretz Service:Lieberman: Jerusalem attack is product of Arab MK incitement [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/961964.html] ] and, directed at Arab MKs, that "a new administration will be established and then we will take care of you." [Shahar Ilan:Lieberman to Arab MKs: One day we will 'take care of you' [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/962767.html] ]

Jericho Casino corruption investigation

In January 2008 Yisrael Beiteinu left the government and Lieberman left his position as Minister of Strategic Affairs, and almost immediately afterwards, "Arutz Sheva" reported that an investigation against Lieberman and his daughter that had been "ongoing for years, suddenly became active again once he left the government last week." [Ezra HaLevi. [http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:N1CYDILLtoYJ:www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/125032+%22The+investigation+against+Lieberman+and+his+daughter+have+been+ongoing+for+years,+but+suddenly+became+active+again+once+he+left+the+government+last+week.%22+site:israelnationalnews.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1 Exposé Links Olmert, Lieberman and Sharon to Jericho Casino] Arutz Sheva 01/24/08] An investigative exposé in Haaretz "targeting Lieberman...unearthed connections between the financier of the corruption-laden Oasis Casino in Jericho and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his predecessor Ariel Sharon." [Ezra HaLevi. [http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cache:N1CYDILLtoYJ:www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/125032+%22The+investigation+against+Lieberman+and+his+daughter+have+been+ongoing+for+years,+but+suddenly+became+active+again+once+he+left+the+government+last+week.%22+site:israelnationalnews.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1 Exposé Links Olmert, Lieberman and Sharon to Jericho Casino] Arutz Sheva 01/24/08] Police concluded decisively that Sharon had received a $3 million bribe, and Lieberman is still under investigation for receiving a bribe from Austrian-Jewish businessman Martin Schlaff. [Hillel Fendel. [http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/95989 "Police Say There´s Evidence Linking Sharon to $3 Million Bribe"] Arutz Sheva, 01/03/06]

Coalition agreement

Yisrael Beiteinu agreed to join Ehud Olmert's government on 23 October 2006, with Lieberman offered the post of Minister of Strategic Affairs. Although many in the Labour Party expressed opposition to Yisrael Beiteinu joining the coalition, the party's central committee approved the new coalition and on 30 October, the Knesset voted the party be included in the government by a margin of 61 to 38. In response, Ophir Pines-Paz, who led the opposition camp in the Labour party, announced his resignation, stating that "Lieberman is himself a strategic threat." [http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20061030-042311-5107r Olmert gets hardline partner] United Press International, October 30, 2006.]

However, the party left the coalition on 16 January 2008 in protest at peace talks with the Palestinian National Authority. [ [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/945299.html Lieberman blasts Arab MKs, pulls party out of government] Ha'aretz, January 16, 2008.]

References

External links

* [http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=2&subID=1061 The appointment of Israel’s new deputy PM raises fears of a new catastrophe, says Robert Fox]
*Gilad Katz: [http://omedia.org/Show_Article.asp?DynamicContentID=1875&MenuID=608&ThreadID=1014011 Avigdor Liberman – Politician or Statesman?] ("Omedia", 22 October 2006)
*Akiva Eldar: [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/780996.html Let's hear it for the Haiders] Ha'aretz, October 31, 2006.
* [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=783926 PM: Lieberman opinion on trading Arabs not my own] Ha'aretz, November 5, 2006.
* [http://www.beytenu.org Official website of Yisrael Beiteinu]


Persondata
NAME = Lieberman, Avigdor Levi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES = אביגדור ליברמן
SHORT DESCRIPTION = Israeli politician
DATE OF BIRTH = 5 June 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH = Kishinev, Moldavian SSR, Soviet Union
DATE OF DEATH =
PLACE OF DEATH =


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