GopBias.Org Blog record and database for March and April, 2008, plus May and June 2008, culminating with the July fourth two hundred and thirty second anniversary of our Declaration of Independence and continuing on to November 4th and beyond to 2009 and 2010 - This web blog holds the key to the great November, 2008 Presidential Election, as the following letters and columns regarding John Sidney McCain III illustrate, and the resurrection of the "strategic framework agreement" by Admiral Mike Mullen (now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), an agreement that will continue to be troublesome, along with the "Status of Forces".
( 7:00 pm EDT 8/22/10 ) This site, GOPBIAS.org, contains a complete background of the political history and nuance of causes and events which have preceded this 8/20/10 announcement by the Obama White House, an announcement, for better or worse, where we are in this struggle in August of 2010 to free ourselves, as Thomas Jefferson wrote for July 4, 1776, from "the political bands" which have virtually bound us since 1948 to the Israeli Zionist virtual armada of political and financial power unmatched in the world today, which is determined to occupy, in one sense or another, the whole of Palestine, and the structure of the Middle East.
This is the time to recognize that this site, GOPBIAS.org, is the foremost source of material, overall and detailed, gathered in one online locale, which is available 24/7. And shortly, there will be GOPBIAS.info, which will cover developments, both detailed and reputable speculation, to chronicle this effort to free us from the current restrictions which bind us.
* THE FOLLOWING AFFECTS EVERYTHING THAT WE HAVE REPORTED.
- "Reports: Israelis, Palestinians Agree to Hold Talks -
"The White House is expected to announce today Israeli and Palestinian leaders have agreed to restart direct negotiations for the first time in nearly two years. Both sides are said to have committed to a one-year deadline to complete the talks. The announcement is an apparent victory for the US and Israel, who have pressed Palestinians to drop their insistence on an Israeli settlement freeze as a precondition for talks. Any negotiations would continue to exclude Hamas, the elected government in the Gaza Strip. The talks will reportedly begin on September 2nd in Washington. A formal announcement is expected today." - Goodman DemocracyNow 8/20/10
( 20:59 BST 8/20/10 ) The British newspaper The Guardian, in reports by Chris McGreal and Rachel Shabi:
Israel and the Palestinians are to resume direct peace talks next month under pressure from Washington to break years of political stalemate.
The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced that the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin ( the spelling "Bibi" prefers in Israel ) Netanyahu, and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, would meet in Washington on 2 September to "relaunch direct negotiations to resolve all final status issues, which we believe can be completed within one year".
Netanyahu welcomed the talks.
"We are coming to these talks with a serious desire to reach a peace agreement between nations, while still preserving Israel's national interests, security being the foremost of them," he said.
But some Israeli and Palestinian former negotiators and politicians greeted the news with scepticism, saying Abbas was only participating under US pressure and Netanyahu had no immediate political interest in reaching a peace agreement.
Clinton said the Egyptian and Jordanian leadership had also been invited to the opening of the negotiations, with Tony Blair, the envoy for the quartet of the US, UN, EU and Russia, "in view of his important work to help Palestinians build the institutions of their future state".
"As we move forward it is important that actions by all sides help to advance our effort not hinder it. There have been difficulties in the past. There will be difficulties ahead. Without a doubt we will hit more obstacles ( Specifically, the ominous, super-clannish Jewish clique, a la Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. ). The enemies of peace will keep trying to defeat us and to derail these talks. But I ask the parties to persevere, to keep moving forward even through difficult times and to continue working to achieve a just and lasting peace in the region," Clinton said.
The US said all main issues would be on the table, including the difficult final status questions of the borders of a Palestinian state, the DIVISION OF JERUSALEM and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
The US Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, said he believed it was realistic to include a one-year deadline to RESOLVE CORE ISSUES on which neither side has been able to reach agreement since the 1993 Oslo peace accords.
"We believe it can be done within a year and that is our objective," he said. Netanyahu and Abbas were "sincere and serious" about peace, he added, and Washington would take a hands-on ( Does that include the "status" of our three-billion annual gift to Israel? ) role in guiding the talks because it was "in the national security interests of the United States".
The date for negotiations was set only after the Obama administration pressured Abbas into agreeing to talks. Abbas has sought guarantees from the US that the Palestinians would not be drawn in to perpetual negotiations that go nowhere while Israel continues to expand in the occupied territories. The White House offered the one-year deadline for talks as a reassurance?
A senior Israeli official said that the government recognizes that the Palestinians have come to the negotiating table reluctantly and that Abbas is politically weak. But he said that with all issues on the table, there is the potential to make progress.
Asked whether there are red lines for Israel, including Netanyahu's previous claim to all of Jerusalem, the official said the only unshakeable demands are "guarantees of Israel's security and Palestinian recognition of Israel's legitimacy ( How one-sided can one agreement be? - the editors. )". - The Guardian 8/20/10
* Clearly this sudden Israeli/US effort is to force the Palestinian entity to abandon their prime positions that "Israel stop settlement activities", and "the two states will recognize the 1967 borders"!
Amy Goodman 8/16/10 -
- US Threatens to Cut Off Arms Deal to Turkey over Criticism of Israel
"The Financial Times is reporting President Obama has personally warned Turkey that unless it shifts its position on Israel and Iran, it could be cut off from future US arms deals. During a meeting at the G20 in Toronto, Obama reportedly met with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan and called on Turkey to cool its rhetoric about an Israeli raid that killed nine Turks on a flotilla bearing aid for Gaza. In addition, Obama criticized Turkey for voting against UN sanctions on Iran. Obama’s warning to Turkey is seen as particularly significant because Ankara wants to buy American drone aircraft that could be used to attack the Kurdish separatist group PKK after the US military pulls out of Iraq."
- [ Israeli commandos murder eight Turkish citizens and one American of Turkish ancestry, on a Turkish commercial ship the Mavi Marmar, but Obama admonishes the Turks for trying to break the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza, in international waters?!?! ]
- US to Fund Israeli Purchase of 20 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters
"Israel is one step closer to purchasing twenty F-35 Joint Strike Fighter warplanes built by Lockheed Martin. The $2.75 billion arms deal will be paid for BY AMERICAN TAXPAYERS as part of the US military aid package to Israel. Israel will become the first foreign country to sign an agreement to buy the F-35 outside the eight international partners that helped to develop the plane." - DemocracyNow 8/16/10
[ These F-35 jet fighters are surely designed, E.G., for an Israeli air attack on a burgeoning nuclear power plant that Iran needs to join the 21st Century, and while our puppet master Israel may object, the great Robin Wright reminded us on the 8/13/10 PBS NewsHour that we approved TWENTY TWO nuclear power plants for the BUTCHER OF IRAN, the hated Shah Rezi Pahlavi, after we had removed the Democratically elected Iranian Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. ]
Amy Goodman 8/17/10
- At Least 50 Die in Suicide Bombing in Baghdad
"In Iraq, at least fifty people have died after a suicide bomber attacked an army recruitment center in central Baghdad. At least 120 people were injured in the blast. The suicide bomber was reportedly wearing an army uniform and talking to recruits when the bomb went off." - DemocracyNow 8/17/10
[Under George Walker Bush the U. S. undertook an unprovoked war against Iraq, virtually directed by Israel, and now, having created the unrestrained military monster of nuclear-weaponed Israel on the Eastern banks of the Mediterranean we're abandoning the ungovernable Iraq, and immersing ourselves in an unending war in Afghanistan, against that Muslim country, which can not fathom, along with the gentile population of the United States that isn't somehow dependent on Jewish largesse' or favor, our subservience to this Hunnish hybrid, the State of Israel and our own AIPAC and ADL.]
We, the people of these United States elected Barack Obama on Nov 4, 2008, NOT to further the interests, and whims, of this "pariah" State of Israel, but to "delegitimize" ( both quotes are Thomas L. Friedman's terms ) to "delegitimize" the God-awful state of economic and political conditions which the truly mercenary eight years of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney subjected this great country to,...
{ There is something depraved in the makeup of Republican office holders, a missing humanitarian gene, a fatal flaw, a total disrespect for the history, the promise, the enlightenment and the meaning of our great nation.
...from financial economic stability and surplus, to financial deficit, the worst since the Great Depression (brought on by another Republican), and unending U. S. wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the first actually begun by Bush/Cheney, and the second a hapless response to 9/11 [the result of Bush/Cheney ignoring the pleas of the counter terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, a close associate of James Bamford, author of the groundbreaking 2004 A Pretext For War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of American Intelligence Agencies, a text which generates nightmares for both Thomas L. Friedman AND "Charlie" Rose (As we speak, "Charlie's" staying away from Israel, right now?)]}. The quoted words are from a convoluted, back-handed online Friedman piece in which he finds offense in that director Oliver Stone apparently has the audacity to claim that Jews "dominate the news media, and their lobby (AIPAC & ADL etc.!) controls Washington." Our response? "Right on the money!"
- "The Constitution and the Mosque
President Obama showed his understanding of the Constitution, and his respect for the American people, last week when he defended the right of a Muslim community group to build a mosque and Islamic center two blocks north of ground zero in Lower Manhattan.
Mr. Obama’s words at a White House dinner celebrating the Muslim holy month of Ramadan were simple and forceful. “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country,” he said.
Republican ideologues, predictably, used his statement as one more excuse not only to attack the president but to spew more of their intolerant rhetoric.
NEWT GINGRICH, WHO HAS BEEN BEATING THIS DRUM FOR WEEKS, ACCUSED THE PRESIDENT OF “PANDERING TO RADICAL ISLAM” AND SAID THE MOSQUE WOULD BE A SYMBOL OF MUSLIM “TRIUMPHALISM.” WE WERE HESITANT ABOUT REPEATING THOSE COMMENTS HERE. BUT THE COUNTRY IGNORES SUCH CYNICISM AND UGLINESS AT ITS OWN PERIL. MAKE NO MISTAKE, THE REST OF THE WORLD IS LISTENING.
Like President George W. Bush before him, President Obama warned against linking all followers of Islam to terrorists. “Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam -- it is a gross distortion of Islam,” he rightly said. It is our tolerance of others, he said, “that quintessentially American creed,” that stands in contrast to the nihilism of those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001.
WE WISH HE HADN’T DILUTED THE MESSAGE THE NEXT DAY, telling reporters that he wasn’t commenting on “the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding.”
He would have done better if he had explained the wisdom of going ahead with the project, which developers said is intended to bring Muslims and non-Muslims together. In addition to a place of worship, it would have a pool and performing arts center. They also have said they want the board to include members from other faiths -- a promise they should take care to keep.
Too many Republican leaders are determined to whip up as much false controversy and anguish as they can, right through November. Some Democrats will cave. We were disturbed on Monday when a spokesman for the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said that Mr. Reid “thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else.”
MR. OBAMA AND ALL PEOPLE OF CONSCIENCE NEED TO PUSH BACK HARD. DEFENDING ALL AMERICANS’ RIGHT TO WORSHIP -- AND THEIR RIGHT TO BUILD PLACES TO WORSHIP -- IS FUNDAMENTAL TO WHO WE ARE." - Editorial N Y Times 8/17/10
Perhaps the critical moment has arrived to challenge what is now nearly seventy years of our submission to a reprehensible subversion of the promise of this great nation, a promise subverted in 1948 by an appalling decision by Zionists to remove the peaceful Palestinians from their homes in Palestine, residences which they had occupied for many centuries. This action reverberated back to the very essence of these United States, not withstanding our brutal treatment of the Native Americans.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote for July 4, 1776: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . . they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation . . . (to begin with) all men are created equal . . . etc."
...and this is what we have intended at GOPBIAS.org.
This 8/11/10 article from The Jerusalem Post, the second which we have noted in full, speaks of a coming event which is a tipping point in our relationship with Israel, an event which cannot be condoned and, thus, cannot be supported either philosophically, or by our three-billion-dollar annual "contribution" to the state of Israel.
The Jerusalem Post:
"'Atlantic' polls Israeli officials about likelihood of strike.
The chance that Israel will launch a military strike against Iran before next July is over 50 percent, according to an article to be published in the upcoming issue of the journal the Atlantic. The article's author, Jeffrey Goldberg, gleaned this information from interviews he conducted over the last year-and-a-half with forty current and past Israeli decision makers.
Goldberg claimed to have spoken with people in and out of government from various political parties. The consensus among them was that Iran is one to three years away from being able to create a nuclear weapon. This fact, coupled with Iran's publicly displayed animosity toward Israel, makes a nuclear Islamic republic a threat to Israel's existence, and therefore a likely candidate to face an Israeli military strike.
Goldberg added that a strike by Israel against an enemy's nuclear program would not be unprecedented, citing the 1981 strike against Iraq's nuclear reactor and the 2007 destruction of Syria's nuclear reactor."
Is Mr. Goldberg confusing "Nuclear Reactor", what is required to produce Nuclear Power, with nuclear weaponry? - Is this, as it appears to be, just another in the model lineup of charges by the State of Israel to deny Iran Nuclear Power?
"He (Goldberg) added that sources close to Prime Minister Binyamin ( the spelling "Bibi" prefers in Israel ) Netanyahu had said that the premier has little faith in the ability of international sanctions passed against Iran to deter the Islamic republic from developing nuclear weapons."
Obviously, through Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic, this is the latest attempt to portray Iran as a threat to Middle East Peace, when in actuality it's Iran's attempt to provide Nuclear Power for energy as is its right under the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which it is a signatory, to which the State of Israel is NOT, even as it sits on a stockpile of +200 Nuclear Weapons, and thus, refuses to sign the treaty.
"The officials interviewed by Goldberg also did not believe that a military strike on Iran from the US under Barack Obama was likely, even in the event that Teheran's nuclear capabilities were at a very advanced state. Not even the hawkish former US president George W. Bush advocated a strike against Iran, so they found it difficult to believe that the dovish Obama would launch an attack. This would increase the likelihood that Israel would see itself as the only barrier between a nuclear Iran and the rest of the world, they said.
The author also added that Netanayhu had told him in the past that the fear is not only of a direct attack from Iran, but also from the power a nuclear Islamic republic would give Teheran's proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Goldberg that another of Israel's fears is that a nuclear Iran would force mass emigration of Israelis.
Goldberg said that not all of the officials he spoke with believed an attack on Iran was a viable option for Israel. He said that numerous sources told him that IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi doubts the usefulness of an Israeli strike on Iran." - Jerusalem Post 8/11/10
- Timely Info -
Amy Goodman DemocracyNow 8/13/10:
"Israel has rejected a new Palestinian offer to base peace talks on establishing a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders. The proposal was based on a statement from the Middle East Quartet of the US, UN, the European Union and Russia earlier this year that also called for a freeze on West Bank settlements and on home demolitions in East Jerusalem. But Israel has refused to accept any preconditions that could scale back its control of the West Bank. Palestinian Authority adviser Mohammad Shtayyeh criticized Israel’s stance.
Mohammad Shtayyeh: 'It is a pity that such a pressure is directed to the Palestinian Authority rather than it should be directed fully and totally against and towards the Israeli government. The Palestinian Authority president Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] has actually made everything possible for successful peace talks. Israel has not offered anything, neither a good environment for peace--i.e. to totally freeze all the Jewish settlements--and, on top of all, Israel has not accepted a clear terms of reference for the peace talks.'" - Goodman DemocracyNow 8/13/10
"Despite promises to engage more forcefully in peace efforts, the Obama administration reportedly rejected two Palestinian requests to take a key role in the talks. Palestinians say the US turned down their proposals to host a meeting between them and Israel on establishing a framework for talks and a separate proposal for President Obama to issue a statement outlining the US stance on what the framework should be, as President Bill Clinton did in late 2000." - Goodman DemocracyNow 8/13/10
In the 8/12/10 N Y Times Isabel Kershner writes - "Flotilla Activists Fired First, Israeli Army Chief Testifies -
Jerusalem - Israel's top military chief said Wednesday that activists on a Turkish ship were the first to open fire as Israeli naval commandos raided the vessel, part of a six-boat flotilla bound for Gaza, fomenting a bloody confrontation on board that left nine activists dead.
Testifying before an ISRAELI COMMISSION OF INQUIRY, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli Army chief of staff, gave the most DETAILED description yet of the MILITARY'S VERSION of the events in late May.
An Israeli military investigation of the episode concluded a month ago that Israeli soldiers most likely fired only after having been fired upon.
General Ashkenazi said it was 'clear and established' that flotilla participants opened fire first." - Kershner N Y Times 8/12/10
CLEARLY, ISRAEL'S PAST RECORD AND THE INCONTROVERTIBLE TESTIMONY OF ALL THE PASSENGERS ON THE MAVI MARMARA IS FURTHER EVIDENCE THAT, AS THE PRIME MINISTER ERDOGAN OF TURKEY HAS STATED:
- ...that David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and their ethnic brethren, excepting the phenomenal Amy Goodman, are no longer representing these United States. Instead, their allegiance is to Israel! The result? There is no limit to the provocative, inciteful virulent actions of our charge in the Middle East, that rogue State of Israel, to which we continue to send three billion$ of our scarce resources every year and, more importantly, shed the blood of our military forces while expending further MULTI billion$, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan all because the Israelis insist on perpetuating their illegal occupation of Palestine.
* Current!
- Hezbollah Blames Israel for 2005 Assassination of Al-Hariri -
DemocracyNow: In Lebanon, the investigation into the 2005 killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri has taken a new turn. On Monday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah claimed Israel was behind the killing, showing intercepted Israeli surveillance footage from an unmanned aerial vehicle of Hariri’s travel routes. Israeli officials dismissed Nasrallah’s claims. Many (Jewish) analysts have predicted the international tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination will hold Hezbollah culpable.
- Israel Threatens to Pull Out of UN Flotilla Inquiry -
DemocracyNow: Israel has threatened to pull out of a UN inquiry into the deadly raid on a Turkish flotilla heading for Gaza, if the UN tries to question soldiers who took part in the operation. An aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Israel will not cooperate with or take part in any panel that seeks to interrogate Israeli soldiers." - Amy Goodman 8/10/10
- Israel Bulldozes Palestinian Cemetery -
The Israeli MILITARY has reportedly destroyed hundreds of gravestones in a centuries-old Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem. Palestinians say bulldozers were used to raze the graves Tuesday as an Israeli court rejected a petition to halt the demolitions. The destruction occurred near the site of the planned "Museum of Tolerance," a project funded by the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. Palestinians have opposed the museum because of its proximity to the cemetery. The Obama administration meanwhile is continuing its effort to convince Palestinian Authority negotiators to drop their insistence on an Israeli settlement freeze as a precondition for talks. After a meeting with Middle East envoy George Mitchell, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the settlement demand remains unchanged.
Saeb Erekat: "Once again, we are not against direct negotiations. Once again, we want to resume direct negotiations. And we believe that the key to direct negotiations is in the hand of the Israeli government. The minute they accept their obligation of stopping settlement activities and ( accepting ) the terms of reference of two states on ’67 [borders], with agreed territorial swap, I think we can begin direct negotiations immediately." - Goodman DemocracyNow 8/11/10
It's not as if President Obama did not have the example of his Democratic predecessor:
"After announcing his budget victory, the President boarded Marine One to fly to the Wye Plantation in Maryland, where he would negotiate the next phase of the efforts to achieve a Middle East peace. For eight days he was isolated there, returning on September 23 (1998) with an agreement. Bringing together the intransigent Yasser Arafat and the implacable Benjamin Netanyahu, he sat them down on either side of him on a stage in the East Room to sign the Wye River Accord. The painstaking negotiations were exhausting, and they nearly collapsed twice when Netanyahu threatened to walk out. At the last minute, his demand for the release of Jonathan Pollard, imprisoned for handing over U. S. national security secrets to the Israelis - a demand the President could not grant - nearly blew up the conference. But Clinton managed to win concessions from each side. He got the Israelis to turn over additional sections of the West Bank to Palestinian Authority control. From the Palestinians he wrung an agreement to drop anti-Israel paragraphs from the Palestinian National Charter and, under CIA supervision, to turn over terrorist suspects to Israel. The accord set the stage for the even more difficult negotiations for "permanent status".
In this Israeli-Palestinian work, Clinton regarded himself as a legatee, a political son, of the murdered Yitzhak Rabin, whom he revered above all other leaders, except perhaps Nelson Mandela. Clinton had erected private shrines to Rabin throughout the living quarters of the White House: he kept a plate of dirt from his grave and the yarmulke he had worn at Rabin's funeral, as well as a crystal sculpture of a dove that Hillary had given him to memorialize Rabin, displayed on a mantel. In the Oval Office, a bust of Rabin joined the busts of Kennedy, Roosevelt, Truman, Franklin, and King." - paragraphs 2 & 3 on page 487 of Sidney Blumenthal's stunning 2003 The Clinton Wars.
* The rabid forces of evil, and we use that common term, in a sense, euphemistically, in that "evil" may not adequately describe the many determinative, Diasporative forms this Jewish/Israeli willingness assumes to court disaster 'round the globe, to force their control over the Middle East. The United States, the foremost power for good in this world has been, of late, compromised by the clout of AIPAC and the ADL etc., AND the pro-Jewish nature of the Obama administration.
A more precise description of the details of this existential threat to World Peace is provided by, first, "The Prior History" and, then, "Some of the Traitors Involved", both of which have been available on GOPBIAS.org now for several years. In fact, these items are among the many that this website provides. In sum, there is no excuse for this great country, with its history of providing a light and the determination for good in the rest of the world, no excuse to be so entangled with such a petty, malicious, self-serving band of pretentious delusional grandiose brigands who actually BELIEVE they are God's Chosen. Throughout GOPBIAS.org are examples of this blatant adulteration of the promise of America, and the concomitant growth of an insatiable Israel bent on control of the Middle East.
Significantly, this usurpation of the stature of the United States for such malignant purpose is not only condoned by our Media/Press, but also driven by that industry, much the same as the ballyhooed HD phenomena was promoted as an audience-friendly visual upgrade, when its real purpose was to enhance advertising, and a step toward all cable 24/7. In the case of overall Media/Press and the wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Big Picture, so to speak, is to enhance Israel's usurpation of Palestine in toto, to neutralize Muslim hostility to the Jewish imperious domination of the Arab Palestine . . and to, in general, "advertise" this "Jewish nature".
In one issue, this year, August 5th of The New York Times - "All the News That's Fit to Print" - has one article on a joint Israeli, Jordan, Palestinian effort to classify the Dead Sea as one of the new seven natural wonders of the world, but the photo which dominates the story, is of a "private beach" from which "three busloads of ultra-orthodox Jewish women" enter the Dead Sea, and later, "the turn of ultra-orthodox men", all to be finalized by bather, Rina Roth:
"God gave it ( the Dead Sea ) to us as a present. It is for future generations".
In the same issue of The Times is the story of Omar S. Thornton, an employee of a Budweiser franchise Hartford Distributors in Manchester, Connecticut, who shot ten men, killing eight of them and then himself, but the photo of the Budweiser warehouse shows only four men, all wearing yarmulkes, and two attired in their Orthodox Jewish Burial Society uniforms, for one Louie Felder. Not . . Necessary.
These same forces, now led by the Triumvirate of Netanyahu, Avigdor (and here, Joseph Isadore) Lieberman and Ehud Barak, are now on the move intent on subduing a peaceful Iran and a guiltless Lebanon.
- Additional Info -
Amy Goodman 8/5/10: "You also have Israeli citizenship?
EMILY HENOCHOWICZ: I do. They haven’t taken that, so... You know, my heart has been there, and now that I have been changed physically for my whole entire life, I have to go back there. It is part of me, you know? And those people--I must say that one reason that I’ve felt so strongly about supporting the Palestinians is that they’ve been so incredibly friendly and open to me and other internationals--just really warm people. And I really just--I want to give them my love, you know? So I have to go back." - DemocracyNow 8/5/10
- Pentagon Demands WikiLeaks Return Afghan War Documents -
Amy Goodman 8/6/10: "The Pentagon is demanding the whistleblower website WikiLeaks hand over its entire cache of classified military documents on the Afghan war and erase those it’s already released. WikiLeaks has said it still has 15,000 documents on top of the 76,000 it disclosed last month. Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell called on WikiLeaks to 'do the right thing' and return the documents in full.
Geoff Morrell: 'WikiLeaks’s public disclosure last week of a large number of our documents has already threatened the safety of our troops, our allies and Afghan citizens who are working with us to help bring about peace and stability in that part of the world. Public disclosure of additional Defense Department classified information can only make the damage worse. The only acceptable course is for WikiLeaks to take steps immediately to return all versions of all of these documents to the US government and permanently delete them from its website, computers and records.'
Amy Goodman: In a response on its Twitter page, WikiLeaks commented, 'Obnoxious Pentagon spokesperson issues formal threat against WikiLeaks: Destroy everything, or else.'"
* The Public Responds -
- Activists Launch "US Boat to Gaza" Campaign -
Amy Goodman DemocracyNow: Hundreds of people boarded a New York boat on Thursday night to support a planned aid mission to the Gaza Strip. Organizers with the US Boat to Gaza campaign are hoping to raise at least $370,000 to join the new international aid flotilla planned for later this year. The boat is named The Audacity of Hope after President Obama’s bestselling book. Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights praised the new effort.
Michael Ratner: "Not enough aid is getting in for people to survive. The situation is desperate. And for years, all the countries in the world have done is talk about it, and no one has done anything about it. So with the flotillas that have gone so far, we’re beginning to see some change. And my view is that change, social change, progressive change, change in the blockade, comes when we have people actually engaging in action to break a blockade that is, in my view, utterly illegal."
Amy Goodman: ALSO SUPPORTING THE CAMPAIGN WAS EMILY HENOCHOWICZ, THE TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD US ART STUDENT WHO LOST HER LEFT EYE IN MAY AFTER BEING SHOT IN THE FACE BY AN ISRAELI TEAR GAS CANISTER AT A PROTEST AGAINST ISRAEL’S DEADLY ATTACK ON THE FIRST FREE GAZA FLOTILLA.
Emily Henochowicz: "The main thing is that when you’re not there, it can seem so much more shocking to talk about freeing Palestine and freeing--you know, when you talk about the blockade on Gaza and trying to see Palestinians just as regular people, when you’re there, it just makes so much sense." - Goodman DemocracyNow 8/6/10
Can you imagine the Tim Russert-selected Gwen Ifill or her co-host Jeffrey Brown on PBS NewsHour, or her weekly Washington Week extending themselves to include this information?
- The Specifics -
To the Editor:
I agree with Efraim Karsh. The Arab countries have failed the Palestinians in every way. Their rhetoric about the rights of Palestinians has been uttered to serve their own causes rather than those of the Palestinians.
The Palestinians are alone and, with the exception of extremists among them, there is nothing they would like better than to have peace with Israel, have jobs, send their children to school, have easy access to hospitals, and have the ability to move around without checkpoints, walls and fear of eviction or house demolition.
There is an opportunity to agree to a solution now. For Mahmoud Abbas to get the support of his population for face-to-face negotiations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to demonstrate that he means what he says when HE TALKS ABOUT THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT’S WILLINGNESS TO NEGOTIATE.
He can do this by halting the settlements, easing the siege of Gaza and DISCONTINUING THE EVICTION OF PALESTINIANS FROM THEIR HOMES IN EAST JERUSALEM. This is his challenge.
Mr. Abbas’s challenge is to get the support of the whole Palestinian population and negotiate with a united front.
Being alone is not a sufficient motivator for the Palestinian people, who are suffering daily from life under occupation. It must be accompanied by confidence that Israel is SINCERE IN ITS DESIRE TO NEGOTIATE! - Hanan Watson New York N Y Times 8/3/10
- Julian Assange Answers the Opposition -
This records Mnsgr(Monseigneur). Julian Assange, the originator of WikiLeaks, responses 28/7/10 to BBC Newsnight's Kirsty Wark.
WARK: On the basis that you're saying that President Obama says he can learn from these leaks, is that what you mean?
ASSANGE: Well, I'm under the...simply that the private rhetoric within the White House that we were receiving is starting to match up to the public rhetoric. That was immediately before this leak, so we'll have to see what the sort of political fallout, but the US needs to understand that the world is watching to see is it going to investigate the crimes that are probably revealed by this leak, or is it going to investigate the messengers.
WARK: Why then offer to give financial help to the US officer Bradley Manning who's being held in Kuwait, accused of being involved in the leaks. Why offer to help? Does that not point the finger at him?
ASSANGE: No, not at all. We're in a situation where our technology means we don't KNOW who our sources are. We verify documents, we don't verify sources.
WARK: But, you're offering him financial help. Let’s just be clear. Is it financial help for LEGAL counsel?
ASSANGE: Yes. For legal counsel. He is alleged to have released to us a video exposing the murder of a number of people in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, from 2007. He is being held in Kuwait and he has been recently charged with that. So we are morally obligated to try and help him as an alleged source. However, the mechanism through which he is alleged to have been exposed was not WikiLeaks, it’s not our procedures, he is alleged to have spoken to an unfaithful journalist in the United States who ratted him out to the FBI.
WARK: How confident are you though about the veracity of some of the material and actually do you know what you are dealing with? Because the danger is that you are putting people's lives in danger by not actually understanding what's been leaked to you.
ASSANGE: No. The danger is that this war continues on in the way it has been occurring, we know, for sure, looking at that material, that around 20,000 people have been killed since 2004. There is a danger every day that that circumstance is not addressed.
WARK: But, some of the most damaging material that has come out is about the Pakistani intelligence apparatus working hand in hand with the Taliban to attack the Coalition. That comes from Afghan sources. They would say that wouldn’t they? Their history of enmity is clear?
ASSANGE: It is clear from looking at this material that there are informers who inform for a number of reasons. There are informers who inform for money. There are informers who inform for revenge on perfectly innocent people. And there are informers who inform for the truth.
WARK: Are you against the Coalition action in Afghanistan?
ASSANGE: I am against abuses that occur in war.
COMPLETE INTERVIEW
For those of us who may be hazy in our recollection, here is longtime CIA agent Ray McGovern reminding us of the origin of the atrocity in Fallujah.
GOPBIAS.org: "Incredible. THE most revered sheik in the Middle East, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the aged cleric confined to a wheelchair, was assassinated by an Israeli air strike March 22, 2004, and a short time later the 'so-called' atrocities occurred in Fallujah in which Blackwater employees who had acted in behalf of the CIA were captured, killed, drawn & quartered, burned and hung from a bridge. As agent McGovern reported, the sheik's killing was Act I, and the Fallujah killings were Act II!! All this was reported by agent McGovern, on 'World Have Your Say' on 6/29/10, its next to last program on NPR (OPB) radio!!! What we must be willing to admit is that our actions against Muslims, as we seek to 'support' Israel, our actions have consequences, for which young Americans give their blood and our Treasury makes it all possible."
If you saw the Sunday 8/1/10 ABC broadcasts, i.e. This Week [ from the "Newseum" in D.C. (a more appropriate designation would be the Propaganda Palace) ] and ABC World News Sunday, and CBS Evening News with Russ Mitchell (featuring Sharyl Atkinsson) you have seen why this website, now of twelve years duration, is titled Republican Bias in the Media- - - and why we've promoted Sidney Blumenthal's 2004 The Clinton Wars:
"The House Republicans had been growing bolder in their attacks throughout the spring and early summer of 1994. 'Whitewater and Health Care' read a memo sent to every Republican member by Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, urging them to tie the two together. Smith, a Christian Scientist whose first wife died after refusing medical treatment, was chairman of Gingrich's Theme Team. 'Democrats cannot get past Whitewater and to health care until they admit that full disclosure and congressional hearings lie in front of them,' he wrote in a letter to his colleagues.
'Whitewater is about health care,' Rush Limbaugh announced on April 19. Limbaugh's daily radio talk show was broadcast on 616 stations and had about 20 million listeners. He was the id ( The unbalanced chaos! ) of the angry white conservative males, the 'Leader of the Opposition', according to a cover story in The National Review. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who officiated at Limbaugh's wedding, said he taped Limbaugh's show and listened to it in his chambers. Limbaugh offered screeds against 'feminazis', minorities, and the Clintons, that were peppered with 'facts' which often turned out to be fictions. On his television show, he joked: 'Everyone knows the Clintons have a cat. Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is a White House dog?' And he held up a picture of twelve-year-old Chelsea Clinton. He declaimed about the 1948 Dixiecrat candidate for president who had run on a platform of racial segregation: 'If you want to know what America used to be--and a lot of people wish it still were--then you listen to Strom Thurmond.' When a caller remarked that blacks should have a greater voice in public issues, he shot back: 'They are 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?' About the oldest organization in America devoted to advancing the rights of blacks, he commented: 'The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.' And he kept returning to the subject of Chelsea Clinton: 'Chelsea Clinton must write a paper titled 'Why I Feel Guilty Being White.' '
The President was on the defensive. Whitewater hearings crowded the news, health care was beleaguered. On June 24 he vented his frustration, lashing out at Limbaugh as 'a constant unremitting drumbeat of negativism and cynicism. . .And there's no truth detector. You won't get on afterward and say what was true and what wasn't. . .We don't need a cultural war in this country.' But Limbaugh and Gingrich were ginning one up." - P 119-120 Sidney Blumenthal The Clinton Wars
- 8/2/10 Edit Update -
The OP-ED centered piece in the 8/2/10 issue of The New York Times, "The Palestinians, Alone", by one Efraim Karsh, comfortably ensconced in Kings' College London, A professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies, has to be The most outrageous example of unmitigated pressure propaganda during this tenure of the junior Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. The last paragraph:
" THE SOONER THE PALESTINIANS RECOGNIZE THEIR CAUSE IS THEIRS ALONE, THE SOONER THEY ARE LIKELY TO MAKE PEACE WITH THE EXISTENCE OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL AND TO UNDERSTAND THE NEED FOR A NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENT."
- Up To Date 7/30/10 Report -
BACKGROUND
To the Editor:
Re “The Afghan Struggle: A Secret Archive” (“The War Logs,” front page, July 26):
You write, “The material comes to light as Congress and the public grow increasingly skeptical of the deepening involvement in Afghanistan.”
What public are you talking about? I see few signs of a public even aware that this country is at war and still fewer news reports of protests or other public outcry. The almost complete unwillingness of the public to protest a questionable war -- without dishonoring our soldiers -- is as stunning as it is appalling. - Greg Weisbrod San Antonio N Y Times 7/26/10
To the Editor:
After reading recent news reports about the real situation in Afghanistan, I’m noticing an eerie similarity to Vietnam at the end of the war. A corrupt, isolated president who is despised by his people and survives only by being propped up by the United States military. The assurances that the national army will soon take over the fight, in spite of the fact that it is indifferent and unreliable, suffers from high rates of desertion and has been infiltrated by insurgents. The expanding strength of the insurgency and the inability of the United States to understand or successfully deal with the local culture.
It all sounds hauntingly familiar and appears doomed to end in the same sort of messy failure. - Michael Visser Toronto N Y Times 7/26/10
To the Editor:
Re “95% of the Trains Are on Time? Riders and Reality Beg to Differ” (front page, July 27):
With regard to train delays on New Jersey Transit, the issue is really one of infrastructure.
Not only are delays caused by many of the trains breaking down, but also Penn Station in Manhattan is not built for the number of commuters it serves. In the meantime, we read about Asian and European trains speeding along in comfort.
If our country had its priorities straight on where to spend our tax dollars -- education, poverty relief, infrastructure and so on -- instead of throwing piles of money into futile wars, corrupt foreign governments ( And THAT includes the State of Israel! ) and expensive defense projects, perhaps we’d enjoy a better quality of life. - Bernard Langs New Providence NJ 7/27/10
With sixty-six American military DEATHS by 7/30/10 July of 2010 (of no concern to the bellicose GOP, usually draft dodgers) July '10 becomes the deadliest for U. S. Military Personnel! And for the American charge Israel at the root of our involvement, might this be progress?
AP-Associated Press reports 7/30/10
"Arab League Supports Abbas on Talks
Arab nations on Thursday backed the Palestinian president’s refusal to immediately restart direct talks with Israel despite heavy pressure from the United States. The United States and the Europeans have been pushing a reluctant Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to restart negotiations with Israel, which broke off in 2008. While the Arab foreign ministers endorsed the idea of direct talks, Prime Minister Sheik Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani of Qatar said they left the timing up to Mr. Abbas, who has laid down several conditions. The Arab foreign ministers also sent a letter to President Obama explaining the Arab position on direct negotiations and their requirements for talks. ON THURSDAY, MR. ABBAS SAID HE WOULD REQUIRE WRITTEN ASSURANCES EITHER FROM THE ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER, BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, OR THE AMERICANS ON BORDERS AND SETTLEMENTS TO START THE DIRECT TALKS." - AP
- Past History - And Present -
Amy Goodman, first on Iraq...
"A new government audit has revealed the Pentagon cannot account for over 95 percent of some $9 billion spent in reconstruction funds in Iraq between 2004 and 2007. In its report, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction accused the Pentagon of lax oversight and weak controls of money in the Development Fund for Iraq. The report stated, 'The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss.'" - Goodman DemocracyNow 7/28/10
"Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix testified before the British war inquiry on Tuesday and repeatedly criticized the Bush administration for using 'absurd' arguments to justify the invasion. Blix also described Britain as 'a prisoner on the American train.' Blix said weapons inspectors were convinced that Iraq had no nuclear infrastructure, but the United States refused to accept their findings.
Hans Blix: 'So, on that area at the IAEA, both I in 1997 and Mohamed ElBaradei in 1998, said that we did not think that they could resurrect a nuclear program within a very long time. But we could not guarantee that there were not minor items like prototypes of centrifuges or computer programs, etc. So we wanted to write off the nuclear program. But, of course, it was not for us, it was for the Security Council. And I have seen from some testimony here that I think the UK also wanted to close the nuclear dossier, but the US refused, which we noticed at the time.'" - Goodman DemocracyNow 7/28/10
"During his first official trip to Turkey, British Prime Minister David Cameron criticized Israel’s deadly attack on the Turkish Gaza-bound aid flotilla and accused Israel of turning Gaza into a prison camp.
David Cameron: 'Let me be clear: the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was completely unacceptable. And I have told Prime Minister Netanyahu we will expect the Israeli inquiry to be swift, transparent and rigorous. Let me also be clear that the situation in Gaza has to change. Humanitarian goods and people must flow in both directions. Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp.'
The Israeli embassy in London criticized Cameron’s description of Gaza as a prison camp. In a statement, the embassy said, 'The people of Gaza are the prisoners of the terrorist organization Hamas.'" - Goodman DemocracyNow 7/28/10
- To defeat the righteous, responsible efforts of, essentially, The World, to end the sixty two year effort of the Zionists determined to remove the Palestinians from their homeland of many centuries, Israel's prominent defender, the chief Israeli propagandist "Charlie" Rose devoted the full hour of his 7/29/10 (rebroadcast 7/30/10) program to Israel's "Defense" Minister Ehud Barak and, it became clear, as the Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey has stated: "Israel is a lying machine.", and that includes Ehud Barak [As you might have suspected he's also an ex-prime minister, as Rose informed us, and also "the most decorated soldier in Israel's history (failing to add that it's only because the great Soldier-Statesman Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in November of 1995)].
As we revisit these interminable wars against Iraq and Afghanistan be reminded of the fact that both chaotic conflicts, steeped in American blood and treasure, were and are being waged in behalf of our current, now for some sixty odd years, puppet masters - The "State" of Israel, and its fifth column infiltraitors (originally Franco sympathizers in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War), AIPAC and its DARK representatives:
AIPAC (The American Israel "Public" Affairs Committee), Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (Do they have similar "Conferences" in Great Britain, France and Germany?), JCPA (Jewish Council for Public Affairs), The Jewish Federations of North America, AJC (American Jewish Committee), ADL (Anti-Defamation League), Union for Reform Judaism, Orthodox Union, The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, HADASSAH, NCJW (National Council of Jewish Women), American Jewish Congress, Women's League for Conservative Judaism, B'nai B'rith International, Jewish War Veterans of the United States, CEJL (Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life).
Further, these co-conspirators are doing everything in their dark power to undermine President Obama because they see evidence that he lacks respect for that criminal duo running Israel, Netanyahu & Lieberman! Frankly, more power to Mr. Obama and whoever will join him in protecting the rights of Palestinians, who, it should be remembered, sent no Jews to concentration camps!
- Bottom Line for 7/26/10 Edit Update - The "WikiLeaks" publication of ninety thousands of pages of Top Secret classified military documents, many identifying Black Ops clandestine killings of Taliban operatives and sympathizers, are reminiscent of the Pentagon Papers release by Daniel Ellsberg to expose the venality and futility of the war against Vietnam some four to five decades ago. Australian Julian Assange (This miraculous, courageous Aussie is in the category for a Nobel Peace Prize?) created WikiLeaks.
That war, begun by President Dwight Eisenhower when he canceled the all-Vietnam plebiscite after the defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 (in the same time frame Eisenhower approved the CIA overthrow of Premier Mossadegh of Iran in 1955) ...
... here is the up-to-date of that same Republican mindset some fifty five years later, still after Iranian oil, now in the service of the GOP minority whip Eric Cantor, now exposed by Amy Goodman's DemocracyNow 7/26/10:
"Former CIA director Michael Hayden (with a history in the Air Force, might he be a political colleague with the Navy's John McCain?) said Sunday the chances the US will attack Iran are increasing. Hayden made the comment in an interview on CNN.
Candy Crowley: 'If it should, is there any alternative to taking out their facilities?'
Michael Hayden: 'It seems inexorable, doesn’t it? We engage, they continue to move forward. [Inexorable? In other words, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Weapons Agreement, that all the major powers have signed, EXCEPT FOR THE NUCLEAR WEAPON-LADEN ISRAEL, are meaningless to Hayden, FORMER CIA Director (Israel's tentacles burrow deep).] We vote for sanctions, they continue to move forward. We try to deter, to dissuade, they continue to move forward. My personal view is that Iran, left to its own devices, will get itself to that step right below a nuclear weapon, that permanent breakout stage, so the needle isn’t quite in the red for the international community. And, frankly, that will be as destabilizing as their actually having a weapon.' Who is this jackass? I.E., Hayden is saying that if Iran is THINKING about nuclear weapons (which is logical with a bellicose Israel on its doorstep) it's the same thing as being ARMED by nuclear weapons!
Michael Hayden’s comments come as a group of Republican lawmakers are pushing for passage of a resolution that explicitly supports the right of Israel to use military force against Iran. Forty-seven House Republicans have already signed on to the legislation." - Goodman DemocracyNow 7/26/10
Tom Toles is even more precise in his exposure of the Republican Party...
... And they call themselves "The Party of Lincoln"? Here a welcome brief review of Bush's Brain, Karl Rove, entitled (Drum role, please!) "Courage and Consequence": "Rove, if one is to believe this memoir, has been improbably blessed in his professional life-- working for candidates, most notably George W. Bush, whose problem, if any, is an excess of honor, and against candidates who are near-deranged liars. There are repeated descriptions of how Bush’s 'jaw clenched' in noble resolve (two on consecutive pages) and of Rove, learning of some perfidy, feeling sick to his stomach (once while eating Chinese food). The hagiography would be more bearable if he spent less time attacking his opponents’ patriotism. Those who questioned the honesty of Bush’s claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were playing 'a disgraceful game' and impeding the war effort. When Katrina hit, Rove says, Bush was the one sincerely trying to help. Barack Obama, by contrast, is distinguished by his 'deceptions' and 'audacious hypocrisy.'" - courtesy of The New Yorker 4/5/10.
Remember "I'm the decider?" "W" will be back with us, and in November! Perhaps the public will remember his eight years in which he squandered a near trillion dollar surplus, and replaced it with a trillion dollar deficit. . . after stealing the 2000 presidential election from Vice President Albert Gore. AND, Bush left us with the worst financial collapse since THE GREAT DEPRESSION. Teaming with Matt Lauer of NBCUniversal Bush will be heralding his Decision Points, a book which will 'splain everything. We can't wait.
Elsewhere on GOPBias.org we make special mention of Sidney Blumenthal's 2004 publication of The Clinton Wars, an equal to James Bamford's 2004 blockbuster A Pretext For War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies.
And the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein - 1/8/09
AMY GOODMAN: We're also joined by Norman Finkelstein here in New York, leading critic of Israeli foreign policy, the author of several books, including The Holocaust Industry, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and Beyond Chutzpah.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, the record is fairly clear. You can find it on the Israeli website, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. Mr. Indyk is correct that Hamas had adhered to the ceasefire from June 17th until November 4th (2008). On November 4th, here Mr. Indyk, I think, goes awry. The record is clear: Israel broke the ceasefire by going into the Gaza and killing six or seven Palestinian militants. At that point--and now I'm quoting the official Israeli website--Hamas retaliated or, in retaliation for the Israeli attack, then launched the missiles.
Now, as to the reason why, the record is fairly clear as well. According to Ha'aretz, Defense Minister Barak began plans for this invasion before the ceasefire even began. In fact, according to yesterday's Ha'aretz, the plans for the invasion began in March. And the main reasons for the invasion, I think, are twofold. Number one, as Mr. Indyk I think correctly points out, to enhance what Israel calls its deterrence capacity, which in layman's language basically means Israel's capacity to terrorize the region into submission. After their defeat in July 2006 in Lebanon, they felt it important to transmit the message that Israel is still a fighting force, still capable of terrorizing those who dare defy its word.
And the second main reason for the attack is because Hamas was signaling that it wanted a diplomatic settlement of the conflict along the June 1967 border. That is to say, Hamas was signaling they had joined the international consensus, they had joined most of the international community, overwhelmingly the international community, in seeking a diplomatic settlement. And at that point, Israel was faced with what Israelis call a Palestinian peace offensive. And in order to defeat the peace offensive, they sought to dismantle Hamas.
Well, I think the problem of Mr. Indyk's presentation is he constantly reverses cause and effect. Just as he said a moment ago that it was Hamas which broke the ceasefire, although he well knows it was Israel that broke the ceasefire on November 4th, he now reverses cause and effect as to how the present impasse came about. In January 2006, as he writes in his book, Hamas came to power in a free and fair election. I think those are his words. He then claims on your program and he claims in his book that Hamas committed a "putsch"--his word--in order to eliminate the Palestinian Authority. And as I'm sure Mr. Indyk well knows and as was documented in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair by the writer David Rose, basing himself on internal US documents, it was the United States in cahoots with the Palestinian Authority and Israel which were attempting a putsch on Hamas, and Hamas preempted the putsch. That, too, is no longer debatable or no longer a controversial claim.
Now, Mr. Indyk says that Hamas is reluctant or unclear about whether it wants to rule in Gaza. The issue is not whether it wants to rule in Gaza; the issue is can it rule in Gaza if Israel maintains a blockade and prevents economic activity among the Palestinians. The blockade, incidentally, was implemented before Hamas came to power. The blockade doesn't even have anything to do with Hamas. The blockade came to--there were Americans who were sent over, in particular James Wolfensohn, to try to break the blockade after Israel redeployed its troops in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: The former World Bank president.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Correct. The problem all along has been that Israel doesn't want Gaza to develop, and Israel doesn't want to resolve diplomatically the conflict. Mr. Indyk well knows that both the leadership in Damascus and the leadership in the Gaza have repeatedly made statements they're willing to settle the conflict in the June 1967 border. The record is fairly clear. In fact, it's unambiguously clear.
Every year, the United Nations General Assembly votes on a resolution entitled "Peaceful Settlement of the Palestine Question." And every year the vote is the same: it's the whole world on one side; Israel, the United States and some South Sea atolls and Australia on the other side. The vote this past year was 164-to-7. Every year since 1989--in 1989, the vote was 151-to-3, the whole world on one side, the United States, Israel and the island state of Dominica on the other side. - DemocracyNow 1/8/09
More on Dr. Finkelstein:
- Norman Finkelstein, the subject of "American Radical", a documentary directed by David Ridgen and Nicholas Rossier -
“American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein” is a cautiously respectful documentary portrait of a political firebrand who presents himself as a beacon of moral truth in the murk of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A scholar, author and passionate advocate of the Palestinian cause, Mr. Finkelstein, 56, is a thorn in the side of the Israel lobby.
Early in the film, directed by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier, Mr. Finkelstein is shown at a 1982 rally in front of the Israeli consulate in New York carrying a poster urging “Israeli Nazis” to “stop the Holocaust in Lebanon,” referring to the Israeli invasion of that country. Until he was banned from traveling to Israel, he paid regular visits to Palestinian friends on the West Bank. He is a supporter of Hezbollah.
- Inspired by our 234th Independence Day (God Bless America!!!) we are reintroducing this incredible article (just ahead) by Peter Baker on the FBI under Director Louis J. Freeh, in hopes that within our audience there will be those who will pursue "The Rest of the Story" by way of Sidney Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars", which explains in detail how this nation faltered, and the struggle required to Right the Ship of State.
- 7/14/10 Bastille Day Edit Update -
Additionally, this question: Is there no limit to the incessant "fund raising" for OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting) that billionaires Arlene (Director) and Harold Schnitzer insert into their Public Broadcasting daily programming, programming which coincides with a collateral damaging, as it were, collateral reduction in timely "Hard News", conspicuously led by the absence of the threat to Middle East peace exemplified by Netanyahu & Lieberman's Israel?!?! In actuality, OPB under the Schnitzers has degenerated into OPPB, Oregon Public Propaganda Broadcasting, on a track developed in our age by Roger Ailes (who originated 'FOX' broadcasting) and his protege' Rush Limbaugh. Shameful.
What is often forgotten is that the notorious Schnitzer family of Oregon [which is responsible for the desecration of OPB (Oregon "Public" Broadcasting)] invited the war monger Benjamin Netanyahu to Portland, Oregon in July of 2002 to campaign for Republican Senator Gordon Smith (for whom the phrase "empty suit" was coined), i.e. Democrats for Smith, whose sub rosa supporters surely included Senator Ron Wyden. Netanyahu, whose Israeli acolyte Yigal Amir assassinated the genuine Soldier/Statesman Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November of 1995, this Netanyahu, through the notorious Israeli political apparatus, became the Israeli prime minister 1996-99! And it is this Netanyahu who the Schnitzers invited to Oregon to campaign for Gordon Smith. In all of this there exists (moreso today) , a fanatic, frenetic thread of sordid madness, a true threat to world peace as Netanyahu has demonstrated in the Middle East, and a diminishing informed American public here at home, as the Schnitzers are demonstrating with Oregon Public Broadcasting. We should have known. Netanyahu and the Schnitzers are COUSINS!, and on 7/19/10 Amy Goodman and DemocracyNow informed our ignorance, again.
"A newly revealed tape shows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once openly discussed his intent to attack the Palestinian government, undermine the Oslo peace accords, and manipulate the United States to ensure its approval. The 2001 recording shows Netanyahu meeting with Israeli SETTLERS in the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu was then out of government after serving his first stint in office. Apparently unaware he was being recorded, Netanyahu talks openly of a 'broad attack' on the Palestinian government, saying, 'The main thing, first of all, is to hit them. Not just one blow, but blows that are so painful that the price will be too heavy to be borne.'
"Netanyahu also outlines how he would undermine the 1993 Oslo accords, he said, which established the basis for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, by declaring any West Bank land that Israel wants to retain as 'military' and 'security zones.' Addressing potential US opposition to Israeli expansionism, Netanyahu says, 'I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. THEY WON’T GET IN THE WAY.'" - Amy Goodman DemocracyNow 7/19/10
The New York Times' weasel Adam Nagourney, noted for denigrating active, legitimate Democrats who place our country first, Nagourney is a flack always available to the unprincipled, and, so, in July of 2002 made himself available to the individual who undermined Albert Gore's 2000 campaign for president, a presidency that was stolen by a Supreme Court 5-4 ruling led by the Chief Justice Bill Rehnquist, who led a court majority clinched by the George Herbert Walker Bush placing Clarence Thomas on the Court.
It was the Senator Joseph Isadore Lieberman of Connecticut for whom Mr. Nagourney made available the N Y Times, and the Senator used the space thusly:
"In recent weeks, Mr. Lieberman has repeatedly expressed concerns that DEMOCRATIC EFFORTS TO SEIZE ON ALLEGATIONS OF CORPORATE ABUSE ON WALL STREET could undo efforts made by some members of the party (SENATOR LIEBERMAN) -- most of whom are affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council and refer to themselves as New Democrats -- to move the Democratic Party to the center, and rebut its image as antibusiness.
In the interview last night, Mr. Lieberman said that he had felt the same way in 2000, when Mr. Gore presented his campaign as an appeal on behalf of 'the people' against 'special interests.'"
Is this coy Lieberman indicating that his preference is the Republican Party. . and is he the United States Senator who, on national television during a Joint Session of the House and Senate, kissed George W. Bush on the cheek? The last paragraph of the Nagourney piece informs the Democrats: "If I don't get my way, I'm joining the Republicans"! No wonder Al Gore was so beside himself in the last month of the 2000 Campaign for the American Presidency. And think of the God-awful mess these Republicans have created in our beloved nation.
- Back to the present -
* * When Bill Clinton and Al Gore turned over the White House to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, what went with it was a $236 billion$ surplus. When Barack Obama and Joe Biden took back our White House, Bush & Cheney gave them a $1.3 TRILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT!!! And these Republicans are going to take back the Congress?!?!
AND - regarding jobs: In the last six months of the Bush/Cheney administration this nation lost 3.5 MILLION jobs, which carried over to the first six months of the Obama/Biden Administration, in which the country lost another 3.3 MILLION jobs, ending a year in which the economy bled SEVEN MILLION JOBS. And we're going to put the Republicans back in charge of the CONGRESS of these UNITED STATES OF AMERICA? WHOA!
Next Photo
Any thoughts? (Let Us Know, including letters referring to "Tax-Exempt Funds Aiding Jewish Settlements in Palestinian West Bank", which follow.)
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"F.B.I. Accused of Abusing Power in Clinton Inquiry
by Peter Baker
WASHINGTON--A former DIRECTOR of the Secret Service said Friday that the F.B.I. had engaged in an 'abuse of power' by trying to pressure him to 'give us the president' during the investigation of President Bill Clinton’s interactions with Monica Lewinsky a decade ago.
The official, Lewis C. Merletti, who headed the former president’s protective detail and later became the agency’s director, said in an interview that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had grilled him just days before Mr. Clinton left office in a last-ditch effort to prove that his Secret Service agents had covered up and even facilitated extramarital flings.
Mr. Merletti said that the F.B.I. alleged that he and Mr. Clinton had concocted this deal: in exchange for Mr. Merletti’s stonewalling questions about Ms. Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton would not only appoint him director of the Secret Service but would also provide him women for sexual encounters.
'They said to me, ‘You’re the last person who can give us the president, and you’re going to give him to us,’ ' Mr. Merletti recalled. He called it 'disgraceful' and said of the F.B.I., 'They became involved in a political game, and in the end they tarnished themselves beyond belief.'" - Baker (C) N Y Times 12/19/09
THE ITEM NEITHER INCLUDES THE NAME NOR ANY REFERENCE TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE FBI AT THAT TIME - THE ELUSIVE LOUIS J. FREEH, WHOSE ETHNICITY CHALLENGED HIS OATH OF ALLEGIANCE TO THESE UNITED STATES, TO A DEGREE THAT IMPAIRED HIS BUREAU'S ABILITY TO IMPACT AND, POSSIBLY, PREVENT 9/11!
COMPLETE ARTICLE
... And a more recent dispatch 7/8/10 by the N Y Times' notable Steven Erlanger and one Stephen Castle addresses the Israeli threat to magnify the violence already ongoing generated by its sub rosa ( from the ancient use of the rose at meetings as a symbol of the sworn confidence of the participants ) drive to control the whole of the Middle East. The dateline is Strasbourg, France, and the subject is the European Union's new High Representative for Foreign Policy, the estimable Catherine Ashton. Ms. Ashton stated that "negotiation" was the only possible solution to Iran's nuclear program, and that talks could begin in the fall.
According to Erlanger and Castle, Ms. Ashton went on to state "Iran should feel secure and 'provide nuclear power, if that's what it so wishes, but to stick within the rules we've ALL signed up for in terms of nuclear proliferation (ALL that is, EXCEPT the Nuclear Weapon-Laden Israel)', and allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that Iran has no nuclear weapons program".
To "Charlie" Rose & David Sanger: Are you listening?
- 7/6/10 Edit Update -
- Backup for what follows -
To the Editor:
Nicholas D. Kristof acknowledges what has been obvious for decades: that the occupation of the Palestinian territories is an immoral degradation of the Palestinian people, not to mention an international illegality.
The great tragedy for our own country is that we participate by sending annual “aid” to Israel (a rich and prosperous country) OF MORE THAN $3 BILLION A YEAR. - William LeMoult Barrington R.I. N Y Times 7/1/10
To the Editor:
I would like to express my appreciation for Nicholas D. Kristof’s column on the wrongness of the Israeli occupation. The wall of silence and misrepresentation surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is slowly beginning to crack in this country, and new voices that disagree with the slogans of uncritical supporters of Israel are emerging among Jews.
Unfortunately, many still refuse to see that Israel now behaves as a COLONIAL POWER TRAMPLING ON THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS, WHICH AROSE FROM THE ASHES OF WORLD WAR II. - Daniele Armaleo Durham N.C. N Y Times 7/1/10
- Karmel West Bank
"The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is widely acknowledged to be unsustainable and costly to the country’s image. But one more blunt truth must be acknowledged: the occupation is morally repugnant.
On one side of a barbed-wire fence here in the southern Hebron hills is the Bedouin village of Umm al-Kheir, where Palestinians live in ramshackle tents and huts. They aren’t allowed to connect to the electrical grid, and Israel won’t permit them to build homes, barns for their animals or even toilets. When the villagers build permanent structures, the Israeli authorities come and demolish them, according to villagers and Israeli human rights organizations.
On the other side of the barbed wire is the Jewish settlement of Karmel, a lovely green oasis that looks like an American suburb. It has lush gardens, kids riding bikes and air-conditioned homes. It also has a gleaming, electrified poultry barn that it runs as a business.
Elad Orian, an Israeli human rights activist, nodded toward the poultry barn and noted: 'Those chickens get more electricity and water than all the Palestinians around here.'
It’s fair to acknowledge that there are double standards in the Middle East, with particular scrutiny on Israeli abuses. After all, the biggest theft of Arab land in the Middle East has nothing to do with Palestinians: It is Morocco’s robbery of the resource-rich Western Sahara from the people who live there.
None of that changes the ugly truth that our ally, Israel, is using American military support to maintain an occupation that is both oppressive and unjust. Israel has eased checkpoints this year -- a real improvement in quality of life -- but the system is intrinsically malignant.
B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization that I’ve long admired, took me to the southern Hebron hills to see the particularly serious inequities Palestinians face here. Apparently because it covets this area for settlement expansion, Israel has concocted a series of feeble excuses to drive out Palestinians from villages here or make their lives so wretched that they leave on their own.
'It’s an ongoing attempt by the authorities to push people out,' said Sarit Michaeli, a B’Tselem spokeswoman.
In the village of Tuba, some Palestinian farmers live in caves off the grid because permanent structures are destroyed for want of building permits that are never granted. The farmers seethe as they struggle to collect rainwater while a nearby settlement, Maon, luxuriates in water piped in by the Israeli authorities.
'They plant trees and gardens and have plenty of water,' complained Ibrahim Jundiya, who raises sheep and camels in Tuba. 'And we don’t even have enough to drink. Even though we were here before them.'
Mr. Jundiya said that when rainwater runs out, his family must buy tankers of water at a price of $11 per cubic meter. That’s at least four times what many Israelis and settlers pay.
Violent clashes with Israeli settlers add to the burden. In Tuba, Palestinian children walking to elementary school have sometimes been attacked by Israeli settlers. To protect the children, foreign volunteers from Christian Peacemaker Teams and Operation Dove began escorting the children in the 2004-05 school year -- and then settlers beat the volunteers with chains and clubs, according to human rights reports and a news account from the time.
Attacks on foreign volunteers get more attention than attacks on Palestinians, so the Israeli Army then began to escort the Palestinian children of Tuba to and from elementary school. But the soldiers don’t always show up, the children say, and then the kids take an hour and a half roundabout path to school to avoid going near the settlers.
For their part, settlers complain about violence by Palestinians, and it’s true that there were several incidents in this area between 1998 and 2002 in which settlers were killed. Partly because of rock-throwing clashes between Arabs and Israelis, the Israeli Army often keeps Palestinians well away from Israeli settlements -- even if Palestinian farmers then cannot farm their own land.
Meanwhile, the settlements continue to grow, seemingly inexorably -- and that may be the most odious aspect of the occupation.
In other respects, some progress is evident. Mr. Orian’s Israeli aid group -- Community, Energy and Technology in the Middle East -- has installed windmills and solar panels to provide a bit of electricity for Palestinians kept off the grid. And attacks from settlers have dropped significantly, in part because B’Tselem has equipped many Palestinian families with video cameras to document and deter assaults.
Still, a pregnant 19-year-old Palestinian woman in the village of At-Tuwani was hospitalized this month after an attack by settlers.
Israel has a point when it argues that relinquishing the West Bank would raise real security concerns. But we must not lose sight of the most basic fact about the occupation: It’s wrong." - Nicholas Kristof OP ED N Y Times 7/1/10
- A prime example of the treacherous manner in which present-day Israel conducts itself has been experienced by Turkey, which had been instrumental ensuring Israel's inclusion in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an inclusion long sought, unsuccessfully, by Israel. Turkey's Prime Minister Erdogan has called the Jewish State "a lying machine" after experiencing the singling out of the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara and the deaths of nine of its citizens from Israeli commandos, in the recent effort to provide the virtually imprisoned Gazans with the necessities of life. Note this photo.
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Norman Finkelstein Gaza Massacre Berkeley, CA 13 May 2010, courtesy of Alternative Radio
"Norman Finkelstein received his Ph.D. from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is currently an independent scholar. He is the author of many books including 'Beyond Chutzpah,' 'The Holocaust Industry,' and 'This Time We Went Too Far: Truth & Consequences of the Gaza Invasion.' He is the subject of the documentary 'American Radical.'
Dr. Finkelstein: One of the reasons new opportunities have opened up for reaching into the broad public is what happened in Gaza in 2008-2009. To some extent it’s a kind of peculiarity. Why are we talking even about Gaza a year and a half later? As everybody in this room knows, wars come and go with great frequency in that part of the world, death and destruction occur with great regularity in that part of the world. So why, nearly a year and a half later, are people still talking about Gaza? It’s a kind of a curiosity. It’s the ghost that Israel, try as it does to bury, it can’t succeed. It’s the shadow that Israel, try as it does to evade, it’s unsuccessful. So one of the questions we might want to ponder this evening is, why won’t Gaza go away?
Before looking at those 22 days from December 27 to January 18, those 22 days that Amnesty International called 'the 22 days of death and destruction,' I want to briefly recall what led up to the Israeli assault. It’s always arbitrary where you begin a story. I’ll start in January 2006, when there were elections held in the occupied Palestinian territories and, surprisingly, unpredictably, Hamas, the Islamic movement, won. Former President Jimmy Carter, one of the international observers, said the elections were 'completely honest and fair.' Israel and the United States reacted to those 'completely honest and fair elections' by imposing an economic blockade on Gaza.
In June 2007, the United States, Israel, and some elements among the Palestinian Authority attempted a coup against a legally elected government. In the United States that’s called 'democracy promotion.' Hamas wasn’t too keen on this latest American exercise in 'democracy promotion.' It sent the Palestinian elements packing to the West Bank and it took full control over Gaza. Israel and the United States reacted by escalating, tightening the blockade of Gaza, a blockade which Amnesty International now called 'a flagrant violation of international law,' a blockade which the Goldstone Mission, to which I’ll return, the Goldstone Mission later said that it was 'a possible crime against humanity.'
During these months, the former U.N High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, journeyed to Gaza, and she said, Gaza’s 'whole civilization has been destroyed, I’m not exaggerating.'"
COMPLETE ADDRESS
- Amy Goodman DemocracyNow brings us up-to-date 7/6/10 on Netanyahu and his thug "Foreign Minister" Lieberman:
- Israel Partially Eases Gaza Blockade Ahead of White House Meeting -
The Israeli government has partially eased the blockade on Gaza just ahead of today’s visit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House to meet with President Obama. Billed as a "kiss-and-make-up" session, the meeting marks the first time the leaders have met since Israel’s deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship in May. Under Israel’s new rules, most consumer goods will now be allowed into Gaza but construction equipment is still barred. In addition, the sea blockade will continue and Palestinians will still be barred from exporting anything from Gaza.
UN Mideast Envoy Robert Serry praised the slight easing of the blockade.
Robert Serry: "Well of course this is something we have been looking forward to for a very long time. I don’t know how many times I’ve been telling the security council that the situation in Gaza is UNSUSTAINABLE and that the blockade was UNACCEPTABLE and also politically wrong-headed. So the decision now by the Israeli government to substantially ease the closure regime can only be welcomed by me. Of course we have to see it also happen on the ground."
Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri said the people of Gaza will remain under siege until the blockade is completely ended.
Sami Abu Zuhri: "We demand that Obama put real pressure on Netanyahu to lift the siege on Gaza, and to stop demanding simply for allowing more goods into Gaza because this (allowing for toys) does not change anything, but rather cements the policy of the siege."
- B’Tselem: Jewish Settlements Control 42 Percent of West Bank Land -
Part of President Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting will focus on Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. A new report from the Israeli group B’Tselem says Jewish settlements now control more than 42 percent of the West Bank. The group said the actual buildings of the settlements cover just 1 percent of the West Bank’s land area, but their jurisdiction and regional councils extends to more than 42 percent of the area. Much of the land controlled by the settlements was seized (violently in most cases) from Palestinians.
To the Editor:
Re “Tax-Exempt Funds Aiding Settlements in West Bank” (front page, July 6):
I compliment you for reporting on this scandalous use of American taxpayers’ funds to support illegal and ill-conceived activities in the occupied territories of the West Bank. You clearly point out how the actions of groups of naïve American evangelists are obstructing any eventual peace process for the Middle East.
And while the total of $200 million in tax-deductible funds spent over the last decade is shocking, it pales when compared with the more than $30 billion in economic and military aid that the United States government has given to Israel over the last decade. This is much more than we have given the whole impoverished continent of Africa and is by far the largest single destination of official foreign aid. This aid should be stopped immediately. - Richard Huber New York 7/6/10
To the Editor:
Re “Nudge on Arms Further Divides U.S. and Israel” (Diplomatic Memo, front page, July 4):
We give and give to the Israelis, and for what? We ask them not to build settlements on Palestinian land, and they do it anyway. We ask them to sign on to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and they refuse. Why do we continue to waste time and money?
Their actions cause many of the troubles that we encounter around the world, and the Israelis don’t lift a finger to help us. What kind of an ally is that? - Mike Kelly Huntington Beach Cal 7/4/10
To the Editor:
Nicolas D. Kristof is right. The Gaza blockade should be lifted. Collective punishment is illegal and immoral. It is no different than if the Arab world joined in a blockade to starve Israelis to force an end to the 43-year-old occupation.
That would be monstrous, just like the Gaza blockade -- and it wouldn’t work. But it would be no different from what Israel is doing. - M J Rosenberg Chevy Chase Md 7/4/10
The writer is a senior fellow at Media Matters Action Network.
"An investigation by the New York Times has found that the U.S. Treasury Department is helping sustain Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank by granting tax breaks on donations to support them. Over the past decade, at least 40 American non-profit groups have distributed more than $200 million in tax-deductible gifts to help expand the settlements. The Times reports the tax-deductible gifts goes mostly to schools, synagogues and recreation centers but it has also paid for guard dogs, bulletproof vests and rifle scopes for settlers." - Goodman DemocracyNow 7/6/10
- And the N Y Times' Rutenberg, Bronner, Kershner etc., MAJOR reporting ( !while Netanyahu is in OUR White House! ) - "Tax-Exempt Funds Aiding Jewish Settlements in West Bank
HAR BRACHA, West Bank - Twice a year, American evangelicals show up at a winery in this Jewish settlement in the hills of ancient Samaria to play a direct role in biblical prophecy, picking grapes and pruning vines.
Believing that Christian help for Jewish winemakers here in the occupied West Bank foretells Christ’s second coming, they are recruited by a Tennessee-based charity called HaYovel that invites volunteers “to labor side by side with the people of Israel” and “to share with them a passion for the soon coming jubilee in Yeshua, messiah.”
But during their visit in February the volunteers found themselves in the middle of the fight for land that defines daily life here. When the evangelicals headed into the vineyards, they were pelted with rocks by Palestinians who say the settlers have planted creeping grape vines on their (THE PALESTINIANS'!) land to claim it as their own. Two volunteers were hurt. In the ensuing scuffle, a settler guard shot a 17-year-old Palestinian shepherd in the leg.
“These people are filled with ideas that this is the Promised Land and their duty is to help the Jews,” said Izdat Said Qadoos of the neighboring Palestinian village. “It is not the Promised Land. It is our land.”
HaYovel is one of many groups in the United States using tax-exempt donations to help Jews establish permanence in the Israeli-occupied territories -- effectively obstructing the creation of a Palestinian state, widely seen as a necessary condition for Middle East peace.
The result is a surprising juxtaposition: As the American government seeks to end the four-decade Jewish settlement enterprise and foster a Palestinian state in the West Bank, the American Treasury helps sustain the settlements through tax breaks on donations to support them.
AN UNYIELDING STANCE
Deep inside the West Bank, in the northern region called Samaria, or Shomron, lie 30 or so settlements and unauthorized outposts, most considered sure candidates for evacuation in any deal for a Palestinian state. In terms of donations, they do not raise anywhere near the sums produced for Jerusalem or close-in settlements. But in many ways they worry security officials and the Palestinians the most, because they are so unyielding.
In November, after the Netanyahu government announced the settlement freeze, Shomron leaders invited reporters to watch them SHRED THE ORDERS.
David Ha’Ivri, the public liaison for the local government, the Shomron Regional Council, has positioned himself as a fierce advocate. As a leader of an American-based nonprofit, he also brings a militant legacy to the charitable enterprise.
Mr. Ha’Ivri, formerly David Axelrod, was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, and was a student of the virulently anti-Arab Rabbi Meir David Kahane and a top lieutenant and brother-in-law to the rabbi’s son, Binyamin Kahane. Both Kahanes, who were assassinated 10 years apart, ran organizations banned in Israel for instigating, if not participating in, attacks against Arabs. The United States Treasury Department later added both groups, Kach and Kahane Chai, to its terrorism watch list.
As recently as four years ago, Mr. Ha’Ivri was involved in running The Way of the Torah, a Kahanist newsletter designated as a terrorist organization in the United States. He has had several run-ins with the authorities in Israel over the last two decades, including AN ARREST FOR CELEBRATING THE ASSASSINATION OF PRIME MINISTER YITZHAK RABIN IN A TELEVISION INTERVIEW AND A SIX-MONTH JAIL TERM IN CONNECTION WITH THE DESECRATION OF A MOSQUE.
COMPLETE ARTICLE
- 6/30/10 Edit -
"Charlie" Rose, on the weekend of the G-20 meeting in Canada, corralled (much to his chagrin, as it turned out) the firm and informed, and plain-spoken, Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey, and attempted to intimidate him with direct questions regarding Turkey's assessment of the record of the last several years, certainly including the Netanyahu/Lieberman regime, the bloody record of Israel toward the Palestinian population of Gaza...
... this, in the same time frame as the beginning of the Elena Kagan hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee to confirm her presidential appointment as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, to replace the GREAT ONE, the retiring John Paul Stevens. The subject of Ms. Kagan's admiration for an Israeli Justice, Aharon Barak, came up, to which Ms. Kagan, who is Jewish, stated "Israel is a strong 'Rule of Law' Nation". Connectedly, Page 2 of the "Inside The Times" of the 6/30/10 N Y Times, this item: "In remarks that could further strain peace efforts, Israel's Foreign Minister said that there was no chance that a Palestinian State would be established in the next two years."
This Avigdor Lieberman, the "Foreign Minister", is nothing more than a thug with a title, a "bar bouncer", somewhat akin to our divorced Orthodox Joseph Isadore Lieberman, both ill-suited to provide a JUST solution to ending the sixty-two year long bloody abuse of Palestinians, ON LANDS THEY HAVE INHABITED FOR CENTURIES! And "Israel is a strong 'Rule of Law' nation"? The actual record speaks otherwise.
GOPBIAS.org should soon have the transcript of the great Norman Finkelstein's address 5/12-13/10 at the University of California-Santa Cruz to the Middle Eastern Children's Alliance - which address is in direct conflict with Ms. Kagan's "Rule of Law" appellation...
In the Meantime, a spellbinder by our reliable Ray McGovern:
Incredible. THE most revered sheik in the Middle East, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the aged cleric confined to a wheelchair, was assassinated by an Israeli air strike March 22, 2004, and a short time later the atrocities occurred in Fallujah in which Blackwater employees acting in behalf of the CIA were captured, killed, drawn & quartered, burned and hung from a bridge. As agent McGovern reported the sheik's killing was Act I, and the Fallujah killings were Act II!! All this was reported by agent McGovern, on "World Have Your Say" on 6/29/10, the next to last program on NPR (OPB) radio!!! What we must be willing to admit is that our actions against Muslims, as we seek to "support" Israel, our actions have consequences, for which young Americans give their blood and our Treasury makes it all possible.
...Mr. Rose's ham-handed interrogation of the Prime Minister was reminiscent of the tone and substance of his cross-examination of the President of Syria Bashar Al-Assad 5/27/10, equally non-productive for Mr. Rose's purposes. Mr. Rose apparently sees himself as Ambassador-At-Large, and, in that he also advertises that he's the fourth Emanuel brother and, therefore, special, has trouble realizing that he's viewed in the Middle East as an extension of that suspect AIPAC-ADL forum, the Israel of the West, so to speak, which has, for sixty-two years, been creating the bulk of bloody conflict in this world of ours.
- The Tide May Be Turning -
"American Jews Who Reject Zionism Say Events Aid Cause"
- ON RELIGION by Samuel G. Freedman
One day nearly 20 years ago, Stephen Naman was preparing to help the rabbi of his Reform Jewish temple in South Carolina move the congregation into a new building. Mr. Naman had just one request: Could the rabbi stop placing the flag of Israel on the altar?
“We don’t go to synagogue to pray to a flag,” Mr. Naman, 63, recalled having said in a recent telephone interview.
That rabbi acceded to the request. So, after being transferred to North Carolina and joining a temple there six or seven years later, Mr. Naman asked its rabbi to remove the Israeli flag. This time, the reaction was more predictable.
“The rabbi said that would be terrible,” recounted Mr. Naman, a retired paper company executive who now lives outside Jacksonville, Fla., “and that he’d be embarrassed to be rabbi of such a congregation.”
As shocking as Mr. Naman’s insistence on taking Israel out of Judaism may seem, it actually adheres to a consistent strain within Jewish debate. Whether one calls it anti-Zionism or non-Zionism -- and all these terms are contested and loaded -- the effort to separate the Jewish state from Jewish identity has centuries-old roots.
For the past 68 years, that stance has been the official platform of the group Mr. Naman serves as president of, the American Council for Judaism. And while the establishment of Israel and its centrality to American Jews consigned the council to irrelevancy for decades, the intense criticism of Israel now growing among a number of American Jews has made Mr. Naman’s group look significant, or even prophetic.
It is not that members are flocking to the council. The group’s mailing list is only in the low thousands, and its Web site received a modest 10,000 unique visitors in the last year. Its budget is a mere $55,000. As Mr. Naman acknowledges, the council’s history of opposition to Zionism renders it “radioactive” for even liberal American Jewish groups, like J Street and Peace Now.
Yet the arguments that the council has consistently levied against Zionism and Israel have shot back into prominence over the last decade, with the collapse of the Oslo peace process, Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza, and most recently the fatal attack on a flotilla seeking to breach the naval blockade of the Hamas regime. One need not agree with any of the council’s positions to admit that, for a certain faction of American Jews, they have come back into style.
“My sense is that they believe that events are proving they were right all along,” Jonathan D. Sarna, a historian at Brandeis University and author of the seminal book “American Judaism,” said in a telephone interview. “Everything they prophesied -- dual loyalty, nationalism being evil -- has come to pass.”
“I would be surprised if vast numbers of people moved over to the A.C.J. as an organization because of its reputation,” he continued. “But it’s certainly the case that if the Holocaust underscored the problems of Jewish life in the diaspora, recent years have highlighted the point that Zionism is no panacea.”
- AN EFFORT TO SEPARATE THE JEWISH STATE FROM JEWISH IDENTITY HAS CENTURIES-OLD ROOTS.
Mr. Naman grew up in a Texas family deeply involved in the council, and as a result he has lived through the swings of the political pendulum.
“We were ostracized and maligned,” he said. “But we felt back then, and we feel now, that our positions are credible. They’ve been justified and substantiated by what has occurred.”
On that matter, to put it mildly, there is disagreement. If American Zionists who oppose the West Bank occupation face withering criticism from the conservative part of American Jewry, which has tended to dominate the major communal and lobbying groups, then the unapologetic foes of Zionism in the council are met with apoplexy and indignation.
The rejection of Zion, though, goes back to the Torah itself, with its accounts of the Hebrews’ rebelling against Moses on the journey toward the Promised Land and pleading to return to Egypt. Until Theodore Herzl created the modern Zionist movement early in the 20th century, THE BIBLICAL INJUNCTION TO RETURN TO ISRAEL WAS WIDELY UNDERSTOOD AS A THEOLOGICAL CONSTRUCT RATHER THAN A PRAGMATIC INSTRUCTION.
Most Orthodox Jewish leaders before the Holocaust rejected Zionism, saying the exile was a divine punishment and Israel could be restored only in the messianic age. The Reform movement maintained that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality.
“This country is our Palestine,” a Reform rabbi in Charleston, S.C., put it in 1841, “this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple.” The Reform movement’s 1885 platform dismissed a “return to Palestine” as a relic akin to animal sacrifice.
Only when the Reform leadership, on the eve of World War II, reversed course did its anti-Zionist faction break away, ultimately forming the council in 1942. Its discourse was simultaneously idealistic and contemptuous -- A PROPOSED CURRICULUM IN 1952 DESCRIBED ZIONISM AS RACIST, SELF-SEGREGATED AND NON-AMERICAN -- and for a time it boasted leaders like Lessing J. Rosenwald, heir to the Sears fortune, and a membership of 14,000.
IF THE 1967 AND 1973 WARS SHOVED THE COUNCIL TOWARD OBSOLESCENCE, THEN ISRAEL’S CONTROVERSIAL WARS SINCE 2000 HAVE BROUGHT IT BACK FROM THE GRAVE. One hears echoes of its positions in Tony Judt, the historian who has called for a binational state in Palestine; in Tony Kushner, whose screenplay for the film “Munich” portrayed an Israeli’s true home as America; in Michael Chabon, whose novel “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” parodied Zionism; and in the emerging disengagement from Israel on the part of young, non-Orthodox Jews, as Peter Beinart noted recently in an essay in The New York Review of Books.
What is numerically true, thus not open to debate, is that only a tiny proportion of American Jews have ever rejected exile here to emigrate to Israel.
“I think we represent a silent majority,” said Allan C. Brownfeld, a longtime member of the council and editor of its magazines, Issues and Special Interest Report. “We are Americans by nationality and Jews by religion. And while we wish Israel well, we don’t view it as our homeland.”
- Monday 6/28/10 Edit -
Latest from EndtheOccupation.org
* 6/22/10 "We Can Stop These Outrageous Congressional Resolutions - Take Action: Oppose Congressional Resolutions Supporting Gaza Blockade -
Predictably, Israel's attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla has generated resolutions in Congress in support of Israel's illegal blockade of the occupied Palestinian Gaza Strip and in opposition to international civil society efforts to break the blockade.
In the House, Rep. Peter King (NY-3) introduced H.R.5501, the America Stands with Israel Act, which among other outrageous claims 'supports Israel's naval blockade (IN INTERNATIONAL WATERS) of Gaza' and calls on the United States to 'oppose any United Nations investigation into the flotilla incident.' As of June 22, this resolution had 79 co-sponsors.
In the Senate, Sen. John Cornyn (TX) introduced S.Res.548, which libelously terms the Gaza Freedom Flotilla a 'violent attack and provocation by extremists' and condemns 'any future such attempts to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza'. As of June 22, this resolution had 14 co-sponsors." And in the Senate you have the glib "Democrat" Ron Wyden who, for years, supported the notoriously shallow, and compromised, Republican Gordon Smith!
Latest from PalSolidarity.org
* 6/24/10 "Hebron visit by Knesset member provokes settler venom -
A member of the left-wing Knesset party visited Tel Rumeida settlement in Hebron Wednesday, generating a large crowd as walked he through the city. He came to speak and was given a tour of the settlements. The group was surrounded by around 10 police, 40 border police, and also at least two vans of secret police (according to Palestinian bystanders these are the same group who shot dead several people on board the Gaza flotilla last month). There were also representatives of Breaking the Silence, and three or four coach-loads of Zionists following the press and party member into the Tel Rumeida settlement. The heavy police presence suggested concern that (the Jewish) "settlers" would attack the visitors.
Local Palestinians and internationals waited at the bottom of the street as he entered the settlement as well as coaches and the soldiers stationed at the checkpoint there. When the tour/demonstration made their way back down the road towards the coaches, Zionists approached the internationals and began shouting at them. One man was accused of drinking Jewish blood because he was drinking a can of Arabic coke. The settlers shouted ‘This is not Palestine, it is not Arab land and you’d better get used to it!’.
One woman screamed into the face of an international that foreign money had gone to buy the Palestinians shopping malls and that Jews could not even build on a tiny scrap of land. The deluded and venomous nature of what they were saying, caused several internationals to break down in tears. The presence of the police and army to step in and defend the Israeli visitors, and their accommodating attitude towards the ‘peaceful protest’ was also a source of distress. Palestinians are accustomed to being shot at and tear gassed in response to their own peaceful demonstrations."
What follows is in response to former John Donald Imus Jr. regular, southerner Jon Meacham, Phi Beta Kappa, but like the brilliant Bill Rehnquist (who stole the 2000 American presidency from Al Gore for George W. Bush, the hapless figure who brought on this current disaster, the worst since the 1930's, and, incredibly, now blamed on Barack Obama) Meacham, like Rehnquist, has reverted to his personal demons, and on his 6/25/10 NPR "Need To Know" telecast (which again, incredibly, has superseded what was the finest, most informative 'NEED TO KNOW' hour on television, NPR's BILL MOYERS JOURNAL, Meacham, who the Washington Post fired because he drove their Newsweek magazine into insolvency) Meacham 6/25/10 with his "Need To Know" program copied the "Charlie" Rose/ N Y Times David Sanger 6/20/10 telecast which reiterated the constant Israeli theme that it is Iran which poses the constant threat to the Middle East, not the Nuclear Weapon-Laden, avaricious Israel. UNBELIEVABLE!
Amy Goodman is in Canada for the G-8, and then comes the G-20. . . NBC Universal is apparently spending next week on the World Cup in South Africa and/or the chaos in the Gulf. . . July 1st is Canada Day. . . and a week from tomorrow (6/27/10) is our 234th Independence Day - The kind of timing that Netanyahu/Lieberman's Israel selects for murderous rampage. Any thoughts? [ Let us know. ]
DILEMMA
- "Help Iran's Reformers?
To the Editor:
Reuel Marc Gerecht correctly assesses the winds of change in the Green movement in Iran ('Iran’s Revolution: Year 2,' Op-Ed, June 15), but he is wrong about the ability of the United States to effectively aid that movement.
Sadly, decades of United States interference in Iranian affairs have guaranteed that any official American support of an Iranian reform movement will poison that movement with the plausible accusation of another round of American desire to dominate Iran.
This happened in 1953 with the C.I.A.-engineered overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, in the 1980s with the tilt toward Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, and today in the United States-led move to curtail Iran’s nuclear energy program.
The reformers have said clearly and repeatedly that they don’t want our 'help.' So why would we force it upon them -- only to guarantee their failure through invidious association with us?
Iranians are not children. Political evolution in the Islamic Republic is the only way to guarantee permanent reform. - William Beeman London N Y Times 6/15/10
The writer, professor and chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, is the author of “The ‘Great Satan’ vs. the ‘Mad Mullahs’: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other.”
Dr. Beeman could have cited Daniel Pipes' arrangement with the notorious Steven J. Rosen, an article in The Jerusalem Post that has been a mainstay of GOPBIAS.org for several years.
- Brinksmanship -
"Timing of Israel's Advancement of Building Plans in East Jerusalem Is Questioned -
Jerusalem by Isabel Kershner - Jerusalem’s city hall advanced rezoning and development plans on Monday for a hotly contested area of ( Arab ) East Jerusalem, another example of an awkwardly timed, seemingly bureaucratic Israeli maneuver that could upset fragile peace efforts.
The preliminary approval for the plans -- including the demolition of more than 20 Palestinian homes to create an archaeological park, along with a new residential and commercial tourist center -- came a day after Israel won unusual praise from Washington for easing the blockade of Hamas-run Gaza, and amid other signs of progress. A mayoral spokesman said the planning decisions were independent of other considerations.
Similarly, in March, as Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was on a visit here meant to underscore American support for Israel, the Interior Ministry announced 1,600 new housing units for Jews in ( Arab ) East Jerusalem. The Obama administration was infuriated. Mr. Netanyahu said he had been SURPRISED by the move; the interior minister, Eli Yishai, leader of the right-wing Shas Party, insisted that the timing of the announcement was ACCIDENTAL.
THE NEW DEVELOPMENT PLANS ARE BEING PRESSED BY JERUSALEM’S MAYOR, NIR BARKAT, a conservative-leaning ENTREPRENEUR. They focus on Silwan, a volatile neighborhood highly valued by both Israel and the Palestinians for its history and location just outside the Old City wall. PREDOMINANTLY PALESTINIAN, it includes an ancient site believed by many to contain the ruins of the City of David and is close to AL AKSA MOSQUE, which is revered by Muslims.
Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war, then annexed it, but that territorial claim HAS NOT BEEN recognized internationally.
Palestinians say the development plans are designed to strengthen Israel’s hold over East Jerusalem, which they claim as capital for a future state.
After the local planning committee gave preliminary approval on Monday, the plans were to be opened up for public appeal. It will need to pass through two more stages at the local level before approval would be sought from the district committee.
One plan deals with the Bustan area of Silwan. Long zoned as parkland, it now contains 88 structures (Palestinian!) that Israel says were built without permits. The plan calls for 22 of them to be razed to make way for a park, and for the other 66 to become part of a new residential and commercial tourist center. THE PALESTINIAN RESIDENTS HAVE REJECTED THE PLAN.
Another plan would allow building of up to four stories in the main residential area of Silwan, permitting the creation of 1,000 new housing units, city officials said. Only two stories had been permitted, though more than half the structures violate the building code. The changes would also legalize four stories of an illegally built seven-story apartment block in central Silwan that is occupied by ISRAELI "SETTLERS".
Fakhri Abu Diab, a leader of the Bustan residents’ committee whose home is scheduled for demolition, said the city had 'become the enemy of the people.'
'They want to make a garden not by my house, but instead of my house,' he said, adding that his family was 'living in fear.' Mr. Abu Diab said his house was more than 20 years old, that he paid taxes, and that his efforts to legalize the house had failed.
STEPHAN MILLER, A FOREIGN AFFAIRS AIDE (TO THE NOTORIOUS AVIGDOR LIEBERMAN, THE MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS) and spokesman for Mr. Barkat, said the mayor’s position was that either 'we can remain with our heads in the sand like ostriches' and watch the quality of life of the residents worsen, or bring 'proper (?) planning' to communities that were 'forgotten.'
In March, Mr. Netanyahu asked Mr. Barkat to delay the plan for Bustan in order to allow more time to reach an understanding with residents, and Mr. Barkat agreed.
Asked whether any consideration had been given to the timing of Monday’s vote, given that indirect, American-brokered Israeli-Palestinian peace talks started in May, and Mr. Netanyahu plans to meet with President Obama in Washington on July 6, Mr. Miller said “ABSOLUTELY NOT.” - Kershner N Y Times 6/22/10
"Israeli Official Assails Plans for Demolition of Arab Homes
By DINA KRAFT TEL AVIV -- A top Israeli official scolded local officials on Tuesday for giving preliminary approval to a plan calling for the demolition of 22 Palestinian homes, in an echo of past stumbles over Jewish development in ( Arab ) East Jerusalem.
The official, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, was on a visit to Washington, where tensions have run high over Jewish housing in East Jerusalem. A member of the Labor Party, the only centrist element in a right-leaning government, Mr. Barak seemed annoyed by the move, which threatened to upset the indirect, American-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
In a statement released by his office, Mr. Barak said that the municipal authorities were 'not demonstrating any common sense or any sense of timing -- and it is not the first time.'
The Israeli government is still repairing damage done to its relations with the United States when the Interior Ministry announced, during a visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in March, approval for the building of over 1,000 homes for Jews in ( Arab ) East Jerusalem.
In Washington on Tuesday, P. J. Crowley, the State Department spokesman, expressed concern that the proposed plan could compromise the new peace negotiations. 'This is expressly the kind of step that we think undermines trust that is fundamental to making progress in the proximity talks,' he said.
Israel annexed East Jerusalem after the 1967 war, a move that was not recognized internationally. Palestinians predominate in the area and claim it as their future capital. They view efforts by Israel to increase the Jewish presence there as hostile acts intended to thwart any future division of the city.
The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, speaking during a trip to Jordan on Tuesday, criticized the building plan and called on the United States to help block it.
Jerusalem, with its biblical resonance and deep historical roots and symbolism, remains the most volatile issue between Israel and the Palestinians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in keeping with his predecessors, has held firmly that Jerusalem will remain united as Israel’s capital.
But his office, apparently in a bid to stave off another confrontation with the White House, issued a statement playing down the plan. 'We are talking about a process at its very initial stages,' the statement read. 'The plan is still up for debate and comments from the city hall’s local council and then in the district committee of the Interior Ministry, where the stance of the local residents will be heard.'
The statement also expressed the desire that a solution be found that would satisfy local residents.
Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, rejected the criticism, including Mr. Barak’s comments.
The city’s plan, which he has been spearheading, is to raze 22 out of 88 homes that the city said were built illegally on public land in the neighborhood of Silwan, nestled in a valley just below the stone walls of the Old City. Once the homes are cleared in the area called Al Bustan, Mr. Barkat has said there will be room for a large archeological park, about 1,000 new apartments for local residents, shopping and boutique hotels. He sees the package as an important tourist draw that will be good both for local residents and (and centuries long Arab residents? ) Jerusalem.
He envisions the creation of 1,000 more apartment units through the city’s approval of four-story buildings where currently only two stories are allowed. Other plans approved in a preliminary step on Monday would legalize a seven-story apartment building in Silwan where Jewish "SETTLERS" live. - DINA KRAFT N Y Times 6/23/10
- "MIDDLE EAST
Israel: Spy Satellite Is Launched
Israel launched a spy satellite into orbit Tuesday night from an air force base near the center of the country. The new satellite, known as Ofek-9, will help Israel more efficiently monitor the region, including Iran, said Chaim Eshed, the director of Israel’s military space program.
It increases the speed at which Israel can receive high-resolution images of subjects of interest, he said." - DINA KRAFT N Y Times 6/23/10
Is it Israel, or the United States, which determines our policy in that ROGUE state? The Editors
- 6/21/10 Edit - Have you tired of the lockdown on current Hard News on lethal-to-Palestinians Netanyahu's Israel? And are you disgusted with the characteristic brandishing of the disingenuous "Bowing to worldwide pressure and condemnation, Israel on Sunday formally announced 'an eased blockade of Gaza'" that could "'significantly'" expand the flow of goods overland into Gaza? This insidious and crafty wordplay in the 6/21/10 N Y Times FRONT PAGE by "Jerusalem KERSHNER" is exposed in the third paragraph by Isabel's "Netanyahu did not signal an end to the Naval Blockade" IN INTERNATIONAL WATERS, nor "specify precisely what goods would be allowed"! And where does Rahm Emanuel fit here? And when will we see a contiguous Palestinian State, with its capital in Arab East Jerusalem?
And secondly, when will such characters as the N Y Times' David Sanger and "Charlie" Rose, who laid out the ongoing covert program against Iran on Rose's 6/20/10 program (after Saturday's Temple?) which included reference to Robert J. Einhorn's strategy (he's the State Department's Special Adviser for Non-Proliferation & Arms Control, Mr. Einhorn whose purview NEVER includes the Nuclear Weapon-Laden Israel, an arms-bloated state which refuses to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Test-Ban Treaty) Einhorn to hobble the electrification of Iran via Nuclear Power.
All of these people have the same ethnicity! Rose's interview with Sanger was listed as a criticism of President Obama's use of presidential power exercised against British Petroleum, i.e. "BP", which Republican Joe Barton of Texas had labeled a shameful $20 billion "shake-down" of BP (Texas' Barton tops the list of recipients of Big Oil money) - and Sanger had written the front page article for The Times 6/18/10 suggesting Obama "Overstep Tactics". That's how "Charlie" had set up the conversation with Sanger.
But the bulk of this Rose/Sanger tete-a-tete descended to "Charlie" & Sanger's favorite mirage (particularly Sanger's) the nuclear-weaponed Iran...
Don't you realize that this is now the world's greatest hoax, that Iran is determined to build nuclear weapons (It's not their nature!), and that this catastrophic fraud is a manipulation of world opinion to create an indisputable threat to the Middle East by an Israel, backed by the United States, and unfettered by the customary restraints of this 21st Century. These last forty-three years have proved that Israel now sees itself as God's Chosen, a delusion last exhibited by the Third Reich. Never Again!!!
Amy Goodman 4/28/08: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, released intelligence Friday that he said proves North Korea and Syria colluded on a nuclear facility that Israel bombed in September '06. "This facility was being built secretly and against international conventions, and that it was destroyed before it became operational, are the key points to remember. It should serve as a reminder to us all of the very real dangers of proliferation, and our need to rededicate ourselves to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, particularly into the hands of a state or a group with terrorist connections."
Amy Goodman 4/28/08 cont': On Thursday (4/24/08) top US intelligence officials presented lawmakers evidence they said proves that Syria was building a nuclear reactor with North Korean assistance. Among the evidence they displayed were pictures said to be obtained by Israel, allegedly taken inside the facility showing the reactor core being built. Officials said the US believed the site was nearing operational capability, but they declared "low" (It is worth noting that the word "low" was somehow lost as the follow-up articles developed.) confidence the site played a role in a Syrian nuclear weapons program. For more I'm joined on the telephone by Scott Ritter. He's the former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, author of Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change. Scott Ritter. Your evaluation of this whole situation, the information that has been presented to Congress?
Amy Goodman 4/28/08 with Scott Ritter: (Mr. Ritter) First of all we have to be concerned about the evidence. We have interior photographs, and exterior shots, and nothing that links the two. I have to take exception to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he says that 'The alleged activities are against international conventions.' Actually, they're not. If Syria had, in fact, been constructing the reactor they've been accused of, they were in total conformity with international law. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty (which Israel has refused to sign) to which Syria is a signatory, requires that facilities be declared to the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency) ONLY when nuclear materials are to be introduced to these facilities. A facility under construction is not a declarable item. It's absurd to sit there and say that just because Syria and North Korea were pouring concrete, that they are somehow breaking...this notion that the reactor is on the verge of becoming operational...is absurd. There would have to be literally thousands of pounds of pure graphite that would have to be introduced to this facility, and there's no evidence in the destruction. There were a number of reporters after it was blown up. It had been bombed, and if there was graphite that had been introduced, you would have a signature all over the area of destroyed graphite blocks...there would be graphite lying around. This was not the case. This shows that the United States and Israel have a wanton disregard for the rule of law. And this is especially critical when the United States is holding up the non-proliferation treaty as a standard to which we hold Iran and North Korea accountable".
Much has transpired regarding the Middle East since mid-March of 2007 when the Quartette of the UN/European Union/Russia/United States were pressured by the Bush administration to withdraw from supporting an equitable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From the beginning George W. Bush had no intention to support the two-state solution, made clear on pages 261 & 262 of James Bamford's 2004 "A Pretext for War". In addition, in GOPBias.org, under "U.S. Withdraws Annapolis Endorsement At UN" there is confirmation. Now the Quartette, with the leadership of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, has reasserted its responsibility because of the onerous step-by-step decision by Israel/Bush/Cheney/McCain to occupy the lands which Palestinians have inhabited for centuries! To complement the Quartette, the BBC and some NPR reporters and editors have reassumed some of their responsibilities as journalists, and reported this change for the better. It's about time. But they have yet to reverse the overwhelming Media/Press Republican bias in this country. We've just experienced arguably the worst presidency in our history because Cokie Roberts said George W. Bush was "so likable." On the golf programs in past years the same thing was said about Rush Limbaugh. "He's so charming!" Our media works overtime to fabricate positive personal traits for Republicans, and these Republicans have just about done us in. No more! But there are exceptions to this long-standing rule in the Press - Support Republicans, furtively if you must, but all the time. Falling into line: Charlie Gibson, George Stephanopolis, Tim Russert, Bob Schieffer ("W" made his younger brother Tom Ambassador to Japan), Thomas L. Friedman - He's the leader of the pack supporting Israel. BUT NOT BILL MOYERS, whose weekly Journal may be the best program on TV today ( As we report today, 6/23/10, Bill Moyers' reportage is sorely missed. Example: Monday, 6/21/10, Gwen Ifill replayed the audio/video of Rahm Emanuel, i.e. restating Emanuel's acknowledgment that BP's Tony Hayward Isle of Wight sailing (a gratuitous gift to Emanuel, that seems to be paying dividends). Lehrer has granted Ifill more facetime, i.e. less journalism!
NPR 1pm (EDT) 6/17/10 - NPR reported that both Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah West Bank rejected Israel's announcement that it would now permit such assorted items as children's toys (?), but that the overall blockade of Gaza would stand, that ALL items must necessarily be approved by Israeli inspection, and that the prohibition of steel and cement, so necessary to rebuild buildings, infrastructure etc., demolished by the 12/26/08 - 1/18/09 Gaza Massacre, that the prohibition would continue for those items so imperative for any restoration of Gaza. Needless to say, it's been a age, if ever, since NPR mentioned "Hamas" without adding "Both Israel and the United States have classified Hamas as a terrorist organization".
Obviously, this significant breakthrough has not yet reached these two characters below, divorced Orthodox Jew Joseph Isadore Lieberman and the swashbuckling Lothario who left his first wife for the wealthy beer maiden "Cindy" of Arizona (and now seldom sees her except on those publicized "visits" to Tom Brokaw's expansive spread in Montana), the scion John Sidney McCain III.
{ Another significant swashbuckler, of a different stripe but equally hazardous to the Middle East and to our formerly ( prior to 1948 ) beloved by the World United States, the sashaying (as if he owned the place) Rahm Emanuel [ Did you know that although he had little to with the election of Barack Obama, Emanuel sees himself as the President of the United States? . . And that McCain III in flight training crashed three times (which would have washed him out, except for the III; and that McCain was so inept and flustered that he forgot to keep his arms at his side when he ejected; and that the conditions for his release from the North Vietnamese prison, is a State Secret, to this day, i.e. Classified?)]}
What will they do, these Senators from unruly Arizona and Corporate Centred Connecticut weary of defending the rapacious Israel under Netanyahu and Lieberman. What will they do? Their careers are in jeopardy, particularly that of the Senator from Connecticut, whose Haredim brethren in the northern West Bank of Palestine are raising Cain, the biblical murderer of Abel. They are the lawless ultra Orthodox offshoot of an Israeli "Juif-fou", an Israel of Netanyahu & AVIGDOR Lieberman (The city of Chelm mentioned below by Michael Chabon.) that embodies THE gravest threat to the Middle East. And our United States? We are similarly threatened by, for example, the group which published that full-page Dark ad in the 4/30/10 N Y Times, i.e. the stranglehold which AIPAC maintains on the Congress of the United States of America.
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Thomas L. Friedman, not unlike "Charlie" Rose, another furtive supporter of Netanyahu's Israel, claims to be quite shocked, in his 6/16/10 "Letter From Istanbul (N Y Times)", that since 2005 many have noticed that Turkey has responded to the outrageous behavior of Netanyahu toward the 1.5 million residents of Gaza, penned in a virtual prison and abused at will by the Israelis, that the Turks, like the Iranians, now recognize that ISRAEL, not Turkey, Iran or Syria, has created a Middle East circumstance that manifests a powderkeg - and that a diverse group, including David Remnick and Michael Chabon, are desperately attempting to neutralize that threat.
Had you seen the 6/15/10 broadcast, or the rebroadcast 6/16/10, of the "Charlie" Rose gathering of John Hofmeister (former head of Shell Oil), Al Hunt of Bloomberg News, author Doris Kearns Goodwin, Mark Halperin former Political Director of ABC News and his partner in "Game Change" John Heilemann, and political strategist Kevin Sheekey; had you seen these people dissect and analyse President Obama's first telecast from the Oval Office, you would have heard a stunning and salient revelation:
That Rahm Emanuel was on vacation in Israel (where he had gone to supervise his son's Bar Mitzvah) when the BP Deepwater Horizon rig exploded (Transocean actually owns the rig that BP was renting). . .and that good friend James Carville, FROM THE GULF, pleaded with Emanuel to recognize that the "LEAK" was a huge deal, but the all-knowing Rahm dismissed an opportunity to, possibly, save the Obama presidency. As GOPBias.org makes clear, this may be the last chance for several decades to reign in the avaricious Netanyahu, the Lieberman (both Avigdor and Isadore) duo, . . . and from all appearances Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel may not be onboard.
June 15, 2010 Edit -
Amy Goodman 6/14/10
Red Cross: Israel Blockade of Gaza Is Illegal
The International Committee of the Red Cross has declared for the first time Israel’s blockade of Gaza to be illegal under the Geneva Conventions. In a statement, the Red Cross said, "The whole of Gaza’s civilian population is being punished for acts for which they bear no responsibility. The closure therefore constitutes a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law." The Red Cross said more than 100 essential medicines and many basic medical supplies are no longer available in Gaza due to the blockade. A new report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says the blockade has led to economic collapse in Gaza: 95 percent of Gaza’s factories have closed, 98 percent of residents suffer from blackouts, and 93 percent of Gaza’s water is polluted. On Sunday, Arab League chief Amr Moussa visited the Gaza Strip and called for an end to Israel’s blockade of the Palestinian territory.
Amr Moussa: "Taking the mayonnaise and tomato sauce and shaving cream out of the list is no relaxation. This is trivial, and it leads to many of us laughing during the day about this kind of attitude, which we do not consider serious or serious enough to have us deal with such a relaxation. Relaxation means a totally different thing, and relaxation should be on the road or as a step towards the total lifting of the siege."
Here in the United States, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer praised Israel’s efforts to economically strangle the people of Gaza.
Sen. Schumer: “And to me, since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas, while certainly there should be humanitarian aid, people not starving to death, to strangle them economically until they see that that’s not the way to go makes sense."
Israel Forms Inquiry into Flotilla Attack
In related news, the Israeli cabinet has approved plans to set up a three-person panel to conduct an internal investigation into the deadly raid on a flotilla of humanitarian aid ships bound for Gaza. The attack left eight Turks and one Turkish American dead. The panel will be led by a former Israeli Supreme Court judge. The other two members are a retired major-general in the Israeli military and an Israeli professor of international law.
Turkey: We Have No Trust in Israeli Probe
Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, criticized Israel for rejecting calls for an international probe. Davutoglu said, "We have no trust at all that Israel, a country that has carried out such an attack on a civilian convoy in international waters, will conduct an impartial investigation."
Israel’s internal investigation has also been criticized by several newspapers. An editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz says Israel’s investigation seems "more and more like a farce." The editors of the New York Times have questioned whether Israel’s probe would be impartial, credible and transparent. The Obama administration, however, has openly endorsed the Israeli probe. Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations, discussed the issue on Fox News Sunday.
Susan Rice: "We said from the outset that we believe Israel has the will and the capacity to conduct such a credible and impartial investigation. We’ve been working very closely with Israel over the course of the last two weeks as they think through how they plan to constitute such an investigation. And that is what we support and what we think is necessary to address this challenge."
Iran Reportedly Sends Aid Ship to Gaza
Meanwhile, critics of the Israeli blockade of Gaza are continuing to send aid ships to Gaza in defiance of Israel. The Iranian government announced an aid ship bound for Gaza left Iran yesterday. Another Iranian ship is expected to leave later this week. The boats are said to be loaded with food, construction material and toys. One Iranian official said, "Until the end of the Gaza blockade, Iran will continue to ship aid."
Mossad Agent Arrested in Poland
In other news on Israel, a suspected Mossad agent has been arrested in Poland in connection to the January assassination of a Hamas chief in Dubai. The agent, Uri Brodsky, was arrested on suspicion of obtaining a German passport by fraudulent means. Brodsky is the first person known to be arrested in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
Amy Goodman's 6/14/10 guest author Stephen Kinzer -
STEPHEN KINZER: Here’s what I see. I think that in the future the United States needs to look for partners in that region. I think we’ve shown that we don’t fully understand the subtleties there, although we have this idea we get the Middle East, other countries don’t get the Middle East, including countries that are there, therefore our policies are the wise ones and foolish countries in that region that have other ideas are just ignorant and don’t know how really to resolve these problems.
So, who should be our partners? I believe when a country looks for partners, we should be looking for countries that fit two criteria. Number one, they should be countries that have long-term strategic goals that are relatively congruent with ours. But that isn’t enough. You also need one other thing, because alliances and partnerships that are based on just relationships between ruling elites, government-to-government alliances, often tend to be very weak, because those regimes with which we partner are often very unpopular in their own country. And then, since people don’t like their regimes, they see the US friendly with those regimes, then they don’t like us, either. So there needs to be a second basis for our relationship with our partners, and that is, you need to find countries to partner with whose societies are similar to your own. If you look around the Muslim Middle East, there are only two countries that fit those two criteria--long-term strategic goals similar to ours and societies that share values like ours--and those are Turkey and Iran.
Now, a partnership among those three countries right now would be difficult to achieve, although I think it might not be as difficult as some people imagine, if we really open our minds and try to be creative here. On the other hand, over the long run, I think, at the very least, we shouldn’t be doing anything that will make this partnership more difficult in the future. Turkey is producing a very interesting new approach to foreign affairs. They’re essentially telling the United States, "We share your values. We share your goals in this part of the world. We’re your military ally. We support the same principles that you support. But we have some advice on tactics for you. You can’t be so confrontational here. You’ve got to ratchet down your rhetoric and try to resolve some of the problems in this region through diplomacy and compromise and negotiation." America is not ready for that kind of advice yet, and that’s what really lies behind the friction of these last few weeks between Turkey and the United States.
As Dark Night Follows Daylight - DemocracyNow: "New York Lawmakers Call for Probe of Flotilla Activists.
A group of New York officials have called on the State Department to investigate the visa applications of two international activists who are scheduled to speak at a Brooklyn church on Thursday about their experience on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish humanitarian aid ship attacked by Israeli commandos two weeks ago. The attack left eight Turks and one Turkish American dead. Democratic Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney spoke at a press conference on Monday.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney: "We have an obligation to protect our borders against potential terrorists, and the State Department should be extra cautious with those who want to arm and help Hamas. After all, Israel is called the 'little Satan,' and America, we’re called the 'big Satan.' And if Gaza flotilla participants were willing to die as martyrs against Israel, we can assume that they would be just as willing to die as martyrs against the United States."
Also at the press conference were New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and three other members of the New York congressional Democratic delegation: Charlie Rangel, Eliot Engel and Jerrold Nadler. - DemocracyNow 6/15/10
- What follows, i.e. the insightful revelation of Mr. Chabon, has not gone unnoticed, and along with the 3/29/10 piece by The New Yorker editor David Remnick, and an "observant" photographer at a Nov '09 revelatory campaign breakfast in Jewish Brooklyn Park New York, "Chosen, But Not Special" has generated a response for June 22-23 The New York Forum [again, heralded by a full page N Y Times ad 6/14/10, America's Flag Day! ] "A CALL TO ACTION" featuring a special address by Ellie Wiesel.
If you are puzzled as to the reason the American people are so tragically misinformed that they exonerate George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but vilify Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, you need look no further than the notables making up this Michael Bloomberg sponsored New York Forum:
Cathleen Black, President, Hearst Magazines; Rupert Murdock, CHMM & CEO News Corp (FOX "News"); Mort Zuckerman, Publisher New York Daily News; James Tisch, CEO Lowes Corp; Robert Wolf, CEO UBS America; James Wolfensohn, Ex World Bank; Vikram Pandit, CEO CITIGROUP; Theodore Roosevelt IV, Mng Director Barclay's Capital.
One of the standard canards of the above ( reiterated on a regular basis by the N Y Times David Sanger) is the perpetual charge that Iran is about to unveil a nuclear weapon. . [ Israel has 100-200 nuclear weapons]. .and that the Persian nation is about to envelope the Middle East. . .[ This in spite of the fact that Iran's borders have not changed since 1639 - and Israel's bootprint, via so-called "settlers", expands almost daily! ]!
Our next edit will include "Charlie" Rose's 6/14/10 interview of the impressive Ibrahim Kalin, an adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan. Mr. Kalin was most adept in side-stepping "Charlie's" efforts to classify Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations, and whose argument that Jerusalem is the keystone, the centerpiece of the major religions of the world and, therefore, hardly suitable as exlusively Jewish. The conversation was such that one would have thought that "Charlie" had already forgotten his 5/27/10 interview with the President of Syria Bashar Al-Assad. But that's not the case. It's just that the Jewish "Charlie" Rose is, at his core, an advocate for Netanyahu's Israel and, therein, lies his fault.
- FINALLY, THE CRUX OF THE ENIGMA -
"Chosen, But Not Special
BY MICHAEL CHABON - BERKELEY
'GAZA Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity' declared the Israeli daily Haaretz on Monday, as though announcing the discovery of some hitherto unknown body of water. Citizens of other nations have long since resigned themselves, of course, to sailing those crowded waters, but for Israelis -- and, indeed, for Jews everywhere -- this felt like headline news.
Regardless of whether we chose in the end to condemn or to defend the botched raid on the Mavi Marmara, for Jews the first reaction was shock, confusion, as we tried to get our heads around what appeared to be an unprecedented display of blockheadedness. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic cast his startled regard back along the length of Jewish history looking for a parallel example of arrant stupidity and found, instead, what Jews around the world have long been accustomed to find in contemplating ourselves and that history: an inborn, half-legendary agility of intellect, amounting almost to a magical power.
'There is a word in Yiddish, seichel, which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: It connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance,' Mr. Goldberg wrote. 'Jews have always needed seichel to survive in this world; a person in possession of a yiddishe kop, a ‘Jewish head,’ is someone who has seichel, someone who looks for a clever way out of problems, someone who understands that the most direct way -- blunt force, for instance -- often represents the least elegant solution, a person who can foresee consequences of his actions.'
This is nonsense, of course -- nonsense to which, I hasten to assure Mr. Goldberg, I have always avidly subscribed. In the aggregate, Jews may or may not be smarter than other groups, but the evidence in favor of granting some kind of inherent or culturally determined supernatural abilities of seichel to the yiddishe kop certainly cannot be found in our history, which is littered as thickly with the individual and collective acts of blockheads as that of any other nation or people or tribe.
An honest assessment of Jewish history must conclude that even the collective act that might seem most tellingly to argue in favor of Jewish intelligence -- our survival across millenniums in spite of constant hatred, war, persecution, intolerance and genocide -- is ultimately just the same trick performed by our species as a whole (at least so far).
The presence of Jews among the not-yet-extinct peoples of the world can no more be credited to any kind of special trait or behavior than the Tasmanians or the Taino ought to be blamed for their own eradication. In the end human survival is a matter of luck -- or destiny, if you prefer -- of decisions taken in distant capitals in vanished eras that bore unforeseeable fruit 200 years on, of chaotically intersecting systems of weather, metaphysics and pandemic, of the failures and weaknesses and limitations of our would-be destroyers.
We construct the history of our wisdom only by burying our foolishness in the endnotes. To imagine a Chelm -- the town inhabited, according to Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, entirely by fools -- requires a presumption of general wisdom elsewhere, as the proper imagining of Heaven requires an earthly realm of sorrow.
As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over -- God love them -- any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.
This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of “Goodbye, Columbus” from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before -- Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people -- but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. A stupid Jew is like a hole in the pocket of your pants, there every time you put them on, always forgotten until the instant your quarters run clattering across the floor.
Jews would be wise to abandon the myth of their exceptionalism.
It was this endlessly repeated yet never remembered shock of encountering our own stupidity as a people -- stupidity now enacted by the elite military arm of a nation whose history we have long written, in our accustomed way, by pushing to the endnotes all counterexamples to the myth of seichel -- that one heard filtering through so much of the initial response among Jews to the raid on the Mavi Marmara.
This sense of widespread shock at Israel’s blockheadedness in the aftermath of the raid seemed not to be confined, in fact, to Jews. Even Israel’s sternest critics will concede that the Jewish state knows how to go about the business of survival in a hostile world with intelligence, ingenuity, creativity, flexibility and preternatural control over the levers of chance and diplomacy (not to mention the global economic system and the news media). Indeed anti-Semites and the enemies of Israel have often been found among the most devout believers in the myth of seichel, of a special -- O.K., a diabolical -- Jewish intelligence.
For we Jews are not, it turns out, entirely comfortable living with the consequences of this myth, as becomes clear from the squirming and throat-clearing that take place among us whenever some non-Jew pipes up with his own observations about how clever and smart we are in our yiddishe kops. These include people like the political scientist Charles Murray, author of an influential essay titled 'Jewish Genius,' or Kevin B. MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State University at Long Beach who argues that Jews essentially undertook a centuries-long program of self-breeding, selecting for traits of intelligence, guile and skill at calculation, as a kind of evolutionary adaptation to the buffetings of history and exile.
Such claims, in mouths of gentiles, are a disturbing echo of the charges of the pogrom-stokers, the genocidalists, the Father Coughlins, who come to sharpen their knives against the same grindstone of generalization on which we Jews have long polished the magnifying lenses of our self-regard. The man who praises you for your history of accomplishment may someday seek therein the grounds for your destruction.
This is, of course, the foundational ambiguity of Judaism and Jewish identity: the idea of chosenness, of exceptionalism, of the treasure that is a curse, the blessing that is a burden, of the setting apart that may presage redemption or extermination. To be chosen has been, all too often in our history, to be culled.
This is the ambiguity that cites the dispensation of God and history, of covenant and Holocaust, to lay claim to a special relationship between Jews and the Land of Israel, then protests when the world -- cynically or sincerely -- holds Israel to a different, higher standard as beneficiaries of that dispensation.
This is the ambiguity that proudly asserts the will and the obligation of Israel to be a light unto the nations, then points to the utterly evil, utterly bankrupt, utterly degraded, utterly stupid misdeeds of ship-sinking, sailor-massacring North Korea -- North Korea! -- in an attempt to give context to its own relatively less-evil, bankrupt, degraded and stupid behavior.
Now, with the memory of the Mavi Marmara fresh in our minds, is the time for Jews to confront, at long last, the eternal truth of our stupidity as a people, which I will stack, blunder for blunder, against that of any other nation now or at any time living on this planet of folly, in this world of Chelm. Now is the moment to acknowledge that the 62-year history of Israel, like the history of the Jewish people and of the human race, has been from the beginning a record of glory and fiasco, triumph and error, greatness and meanness, charity and crime.
The past two decades in particular have illustrated to Jews and to the world a painful premise, but one that was implicit in the Zionist idea from the beginning: If, in the words of the 1948 Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish people have a natural right 'to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state,' then the inescapable codicil of this natural inheritance is that the Jewish people, 'like all other nations,' are every bit as capable of BARBARISM and stupidity.
IF Israel was, as the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann put it, to 'become as Jewish as England is English and America is American,' then, like England and America and every other modern polity, Israel must slog along through history, purblind and panicky, from its founding to its ultimate fate, prey at every moment to -- and, God willing, on guard against -- its rich, inglorious human heritage of blockheadedness.
After my initial shock at this fresh display of foolery by the Chelmites of Jerusalem had subsided, I felt an abstract pity for the wasted dead with their cargo of lumber and delusions, for the ill-equipped, poorly led soldiers who had killed them and, running true and clear like a subterranean stream, pity for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas the past four years, and his family. But I also felt a kind of grim relief, even resolve.
Let us shed our illusions, starting with ourselves, whoever we are and however august our inheritance of stupidity. Let us not forget the eternal hole in our human pocket. Let us not, henceforward, judge Israel or seek to have it judged for its intelligence, for its prowess, for its righteousness or for its moral authority, by any standard other than the pathetic, debased and rickety one that we apply, so inconsistently and self-servingly, to ourselves and to everybody else. And let us not forgive ourselves -- any more than we forgive Israel, or than Israel can forgive itself -- for that terrible inconsistency. - Chabon N Y Times 6/6/10
PalSolidarity.org
EndtheOccupation.org
The Above is an admonition that The New York Times "Ethicist", Randy Cohen, should memorize!
- To Illustrate -
Here an Isabel Kershner report in the 6/7/10 N Y Times (Headlined "Questions Loom as Israeli Envoy Rejects International Inquiry Into Flotilla Clash" - Page A-4) 'splaining the Israeli boardings of the Turkish humanitarian vessel Mavi Marmara and the Irish ship christened Rachel Corrie, Miss Corrie crushed by an Israeli bulldozer March 16th of 2003, both boarded illegally in international waters and posing no military threat to Israel "proper", in ten deaths ( one at point-blank Israeli Commando range to the head) and many more wounded. A report which recounts the Israeli PIC# I (prevaricator in chief, Netanyahu), his number II, Avigdor Lieberman "Foreign Minister" and PIC# III Michael B. Oren on Roger Ailes' FOX. Mr. Oren had no trouble accepting the post of Israeli "Ambassador" (?) to the United States. Does Rahm Emanuel also have dual citizenship?
"Israel Ambassador Rejects Flotilla Clash Inquiry
JERUSALEM -- Israel’s ambassador to Washington said Sunday that his country would reject an international inquiry into last week’s deadly raid on a Turkish ship, but there was still no formal announcement from Jerusalem on the matter.
At the start of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel had information that the 'dozens of THUGS' armed with iron bars, clubs and knives who clashed with Israeli soldiers on the Turkish ship were a distinct group not associated with the hundreds of other passengers on board.
Huwaida Arraf, a leader of the Free Gaza Movement, which organized the flotilla, called Mr. Netanyahu’s assertions 'another pack of lies,' The Associated Press reported. She said that all the passengers were screened for weapons, and that the group’s partners in the mission had agreed not to bring weapons on board. - Kershner Jerusalem 6/7/10
* * The extreme Israeli military response to the Free Gaza - Freedom Flotilla, in international waters, (blacked out or twisted by most U. S. "News" sources) is reminiscent of the 1967 war which Israelis waged against its Middle East neighbors to enlarge its bootprint in its ever-increasing hold on that volatile region, a war in which the Israeli "Defense" Forces (These people are master propagandists, particularly their new Israeli "Ambassador" (?) to the United States, Israeli/American Michael B. Oren.) relentlessly attacked the U. S. S. Liberty, also in international waters, killing thirty four of our sailors, for which it has never apologized, as Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel is a rogue state, AND WITH 100-200 NUCLEAR WEAPONS - was in 1967, as it is today under Netanyahu.
GENERAL ELECTRIC NBC UNIVERSAL HAS NOW AN INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL REPORT FOR WHICH IT CAN BE PROUD, PERHAPS ITS FIRST SINCE WATERGATE! After CBS trounced NBC and ABC in broadcasting awards for the Watergate era, what had been the broadcasting equivalent of Film Oscars, virtually disappeared. NBC's Jim Maceda has, at last, brought journalistic honor to the National Broadcasting Corporation.
Day of mourning in Turkey
NBC Nightly News
6/3/2010 17:41:00
NEWSCASTER: We turn now to the other major story we've been following this week. The fire storm triggered by that Israeli commando raid on ships bound for Gaza not only put the U.S. in a tough diplomatic spot. Turns out the raid also cost an American life. Our own Jim Maceda reports tonight from Istanbul, Turkey.
REPORTER: Today Turkey buried its dead. Thousands gathered at Istanbul's Mosque of the Conqueror to pay their respects. In all, nine were killed, at least 19 wounded when Israeli commandos stormed a flotilla of cargo ships early Monday trying to deliver aid to the besieged Gaza strip. Among the dead, an American, 19-year-old Furkan Dogan whose grief-stricken father learned his son was hit by four bullets in the head and one in the chest.
Ghenghis Acuz [spelling not verified] was lucky. In the lead ship, he survived the worst of the attacks and was among hundreds of activists detained by Israel, but welcomed home early this morning as heroes.
UNIDENTIFIED TURKISH WOMAN: We will remember them for all of our lives.
REPORTER: Acuz says he lost nine good friends, all killed by gunshots at close range.
The way the Israelis treated us makes me sad, he says. But I'm proud of my friends. I wish I had died a martyr, too.
Some mourners were overcome by the heat, the grief and the anger. The scene here is absolutely chaotic. One coffin after another is being carried out. Grieving relatives are crying and hundreds of supporters are shouting death to Israel.
Those chants continued as the bodies moved slowly through the city. But even the burials were punctuated by curses for Israel.
Already, Turkish activists were promising more flotillas determined to break Israel's blockade of Gaza amid fears that could mean more funerals like these. Jim Maceda, NBC News, Istanbul.
And Tom Aspel adds to NBC's return to excellence with his 6/8/10 report on Israel's abominable abuse of the 1.5 million (Many of them children) citizens of Gaza.
Inside Gaza
NBC Nightly News
6/8/2010 17:44:00
NEWSCASTER: We are back now with a rare look inside a place 1.5 million people call home. The Israelis call it a hotbed of terrorism. But the people who live there say they are prisoners of poverty and misery. It's the Gaza Strip and it's once again gotten the world's attention after that raid on a ship trying to break Israel's blockade of Gaza to deliver what many say was food and basic supplies. The Israelis say some of those supplies could have been used as weapons. Israel tonight is still saying no to a UN investigation into the raid. But tonight our own Tom Aspell has a report from behind the blockade.
REPORTER: This is what you see when you cross the border from Israel into Gaza; children desperately scrambling for pebbles - pebbles to be ground into cement. Israel won't let cement into Gaza. It says the cement would be used for tunnels to smuggle weapons, so thousands of homes destroyed in the 2009 offensive can't be rebuilt.
Some supplies, like groceries and even animals, are smuggled through hundreds of illegal tunnels under the border from Egypt. Israel says there's no humanitarian crisis. Some food and medicine is allowed in, but the United Nations says conditions have never been worse.
CHRISTOPHER GUNNESS, UNRWA SPOKESMAN: Eighty percent aid-dependency, 44 percent unemployment, deep poverty tripling in the last year.
REPORTER: Deep poverty and also despair. Eighty percent of Gazans, like Rushti Abatuwila [spelling not verified] get their food from the UN. Born deaf, he has no chance of getting a job here. He and his family, two of them also deaf, live on $70 a month from the Palestinian government.
Israel's blockade on Gaza isn't just about preventing goods from getting in. It's about preventing 1.5 million Palestinians from getting out. It sentences them to life inside a 140 square mile prison.
Life here is a struggle from birth. In Gaza's Shifa Hospital, the best around, there isn't enough special formula for premature babies, not even enough incubators.
REPORTER TO UNIDENTIFIED DOCTOR: So this baby is only one hour old, but there's no place for him.
DOCTOR: Yes. No room. There's no place.
REPORTER: Fifty percent of Gazans are children under 15. Mental health experts say 95 percent of all children in Gaza suffer from trauma and stress.
DR. AHMED ABU TAWAHEENA, GAZA MENTAL HEALTH COMMUNITY DIR.: The most important one of them is their violent behavior, aggressive behavior among school students, for example.
REPORTER: Eight-year-old Machmud Kalil [spelling not verified] has turned to music to erase memories of bombs and missiles during the 2009 offensive when he spent a month hiding in a basement. Machmud had extreme mood swings, either laughing or crying constantly. His mother, Anwan [spelling not verified], says music therapy now keeps him calm. Music may also be his escape. Given the chance, Machmud says he's like to pack up his instrument and leave here forever. - Tom Aspell, NBC News, Gaza.
* * BACKGROUND -
To the Editor:
Nicholas D. Kristof’s column ('Saving Israel From Itself - The flotilla raid was the latest step on a self-destructive path.') could have been written by the peacemaking Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin or Israel’s founder and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, if they were alive today.
Mr. Rabin told me shortly before he was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli extremist that Israel, while pursuing peace, must never play into the hands of Palestinian terrorists, who would try to sabotage the talks with attacks intended to provoke disproportionate retaliation. Yes, Israel would fight the terrorists, but not the Palestinian people. And it would certainly not initiate bloody conflict.
Mr. Ben-Gurion told me that Israel would regret maintaining control of Arab-inhabited regions and another people after the 1967 Six-Day War. He said the war would never end as long as Israel occupied the area, an occupation he felt was both strategically and morally wrong.
And if succeeding right-wing governments had taken his advice, the war might well have been over years ago, preventing Hamas from ruling Gaza, giving Iran no excuse for threatening Israel with nuclear destruction, and making life much easier for the United States.
The Israeli assault on the pro-Palestinian flotilla is a symbolic result of the tragic survival-imperiling refutation by Israeli right-wingers of the visionary views of their country’s two greatest leaders. - Dan Kurzman North Bergen N J 6/3/10
The writer is the author of biographies of Yitzhak Rabin and David Ben-Gurion.
* Les Moonves, via Katie Couric, stiffed the Israeli massacre of humanitarians on a mission to assist the 1.5 million citizens of Gaza. Jim Lehrer's PBS NewsHour followed suit.
* Although the early reports vary dependent upon the source of the "Hard News" [ those originating in Israel suggest that Israeli "Defense" Forces were on a benign venture to merely "escort" (The equivalent of armed Navy Seals dropped from BlackHawk helicopters, some at Midnight!) this legitimate humanitarian mission to relieve the suffering Gazans, under great stress since the Israeli "Christmas (12/26/08 - 1/18/09)" Massacre almost a year and a half ago (The Israelis select, under the guidance of AIPAC, holidays when the United States will be preoccupied, in this case with Memorial Day weekend")], the entire world is alarmed by this outrage and has erupted in protests across the globe.
- LATE BREAKER JUNE 11, 2010 -
* AMY GOODMAN DEMOCRACYNOW
" Israel & US Agree on Israeli Probe into Flotilla Attack
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports Israel and the United States have agreed on the nature of the Israeli probe into last week’s deadly raid on a flotilla of humanitarian aid ships bound for Gaza. The committee is being formed after Israel and the United States rejected calls for an international inquiry into the assault. There will be no official international role in Israel’s investigation, except one American and one European will be allowed to observe the proceedings.
Video Shows Israeli Commandos Executing Flotilla Passenger
Video has been posted on the internet that apparently shows Israeli commandos executing a passenger aboard the Mavi Marmara. In the video, Israeli commandos are seen kicking a passenger while he lies on the deck of the boat. The commandos are then seen firing one and possibly two point-blank shots from above into the victim. The video was first aired on Turkish TV. It has been claimed the video shows the nineteen-year-old US citizen Furkan Dogan being killed, but it has not been possible to verify the identity of the victim.
ISRAEL URGED TO JOIN NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY
At a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Arab nations urged Israel on Thursday to join the global Non-Proliferation Treaty and repeated their calls for a nuclear-free Middle East. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a stockpile of nuclear weapons, but Israel has never confirmed nor denied it has nuclear weapons. By shunning the forty-year-old Non-Proliferation Treaty, Israel has not had to declare atomic arms or allow the IAEA to probe all of its nuclear sites. Thursday’s meeting marked the first time the IAEA’s policy-making board tackled the topic of Israel’s nuclear arsenal since 1991.
MOHAMED MOSTAFA FAWZY, EGYPT’S AMBASSADOR TO THE IAEA: "So what we are discussing here is how to apply the safeguards to every state in the Middle East. This is a precise point that we have to deal with, applying the safeguards. So it’s not only that we are asking Israel to join the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty] or not. We are asking for the application of the safeguards agreements on all states in the Middle East."
Glyn Davies, the US Ambassador to the IAEA, defended Israel’s stance on nuclear weapons.
Glyn Davies: "Israel has broken no agreements nor failed to fulfill obligations to the agency. Discussion of this item distracts our collective attention from other pressing matters before the board. Premier among those is Iran, which stands in violation of the NPT and IAEA safeguards obligations and of resolutions of the IAEA Board of Governors and the UN Security Council." (But, there is no evidence that Iran is pursuing anything having to do with nuclear weaponry, limiting its efforts to nuclear power, which, being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty permits!). - DemocracyNow 6/11/10
*The Israelis Exposed -
- -Amy Goodman: This is Democracy Now!, I’m Amy Goodman. We have on the line with us Adam Shapiro. He is a board member of the Free Gaza Movement. Adam, we got word several hours ago that the Israeli military had attacked the Free Gaza Flotilla. We are speaking to you at about 3:30 AM Eastern Standard Time. Can you tell us what you understand has happened?
Adam Shapiro: The Israelis launched a military operation involving about a thousand soldiers, using ships, using helicopters, and using airplanes to attack the flotilla of six ships--three passenger and three cargo ships, at approximately between 8 and 9 pm Eastern Standard Time. All the ships have been captured. One of the ships that we know for sure, which had a satellite communication ability, the large Turkish ship with about 600 passengers including members of Parliament from different countries, was attacked by Israeli soldiers using live ammunition. We now know that at least 14 people have been confirmed killed, and perhaps as many as 20 killed, with over 60 injured, and currently all the ships are being brought into the Israeli port of Haifa.
Amy Goodman: We are reading Israeli military reports that say when they boarded the Turkish ship, that they were attacked by sticks and knives. What do you understand has happened?
Adam Shapiro: Our people on the ship reported live as the soldiers came onto the ship, and reported that soldiers were opening fire as they were coming onto the ship, and they were descending from helicopters. So, our understanding is that the Israeli soldiers opened fire first. I have not seen or heard any thing else about--and there are many journalists on board that ship--anything else about our people, the passengers on that ship, posing any kind of threat. There was a live feed coming from the ship using satellite, video satellite, on satellite, that has been rebroadcast on CNN, on CNN Turk, on Al Jazeera, on Press TV, on numerous media outlets, not one image from this entire footage shows any of the passengers holding any kind of object that could be construed as a weapon. So, I mean, I am sure that the Israelis would like the world to believe that they were the ones being attacked as they assaulted these ships, but this is just Israeli spin.
Amy Goodman: Adam Shapiro, what is the purpose of the Free Gaza Flotilla?
Adam Shapiro: The purpose of the Free Gaza Freedom Flotilla was to literally break the Israeli blockade that it is imposing on Gaza, a form of collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians who are trying to survive at this point, basically, especially after the Israeli attacks in December, 2008-January, 2009, in which much of Gaza was reduced to rubble, and has not been able to have been rebuilt, where Palestinians can’t get basic food and medicine in, to just survive with. And so, this effort was, yes, to deliver the goods and materials that Gaza, the Palestinians in Gaza need, but also to awaken the international community to the abuse that the Palestinians are suffering that has been regarded by the Goldstone Report, by many other reports and by human rights organizations, including the E.U. and other groups, calling this blockade and this siege criminal, as well as cruel and inhuman.
Amy Goodman: What is your response to what has happened in these last hours, to the Israeli military assault on the Free Gaza Flotilla?
Adam Shapiro: We have always been prepared that the Israelis might attack the ships and try, obviously, try to take control of them, and prevent us from reaching Gaza, but the opening of fire against unarmed civilians who pose no threat to Israel, is something, I think, it is absurd in a way that can’t even be described. We all remember what happened to Rachel Corrie in Gaza, standing in front of a home to protect it and being crushed and run over by a bulldozer driver. In this case, I think in a way, it is almost even worse, because Israel said that they were sending their best commandos on this mission, that they were sending their most professional soldiers, and so if these are their professional soldiers, and they opened fire, then we must assume, then, and I don’t think we are incorrect to assume, that they had orders to open fire, because I don’t think that soldiers operating in this way, if they were truly professional, and they were truly the best, well-trained commandos that Israel had, they would have no reason to shoot, unless they were ordered to do so.
And I really hope that the United States, the Europeans, and Turkey, and the other governments who had citizens on board press for an independent investigation, not an Israeli investigation, an independent investigation. This attack took place in international waters, not in Israeli waters.
Amy Goodman: Who was on the Turkish ship?
Adam Shapiro: On board the Turkish ship were over, approximately about 600 passengers. We had quite a large number of Turkish activists. Of course, the boat was secured in Turkey, and purchased by a Turkish organization, so many of their people were on board. We also had members of the European Parliament on board, we had members of Arab parliaments on board, including Egypt and Jordan, we had others activists who have been active in trying to raise the awareness of what’s happening to Palestinians in general and specifically in Gaza, and we had media. We had Al Jazeera on board, we had a couple of Turkish broadcasting channels on board, as well as other print and other forms of media on board.
Amy Goodman: Adam Shapiro, thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
Adam Shapiro: Thank you very much.
Amy Goodman: Adam Shapiro is a board member of the Free Gaza Movement.
* The Final Word -
- ALI ABUNIMAH: Among the more than 700 people on the ship from about thirty-two countries are thirteen United States citizens, including a former ambassador, Ed Peck, who has been released and is reported to be on his way back to the United States. But as in the previous Israeli acts of piracy and war against ships heading to Gaza--you remember when Cynthia McKinney was kidnapped and jailed in Israel for trying to reach Gaza--once again, the United States government is saying and doing nothing publicly that suggests any great concern for its citizens who have been kidnapped by Israel.
And the statements from the Obama administration, particularly that by the US representative at the United Nations, Alejandro Wolff, were really quite shocking and astonishing. You played a clip during the news, where he suggests really that the flotilla were themselves to blame, talking about using non-confrontational and non-provocational methods rather than going by ship--in other words, suggesting--agreeing with the outrageous Israeli claims that trying to reach Gaza with humanitarian aid is somehow a provocation or a confrontation. And Ambassador Wolff also reaffirmed Israel’s so-called right to self-defense in this context, which suggests that the United States, unless it makes clear otherwise, believes that attacking a civilian ship on the high seas and massacring an unknown number of its passengers is somehow self-defense.
I think we also have to keep our eye on the context here, Anjali. Just a week or so ago, the United States Congress voted by 410-to-four--I’ll repeat that, 410-to-four--to a request from the Obama administration for additional military aid, another $205 million. This was clearly a political move by the Obama administration to fund the rather useless Iron Dome rocket defense as a way to appease Israel politically. But the message Israel got from this, as it has gotten from US and international complicity and complacency, the failure to hold Israel accountable for the war crimes documented in the Goldstone report; the failure to hold Israel accountable for the act of international terrorism and murder in a hotel room in Dubai; the failure to hold Israel accountable for four years of murderous siege on Gaza that has killed, by itself, 400 Palestinians for lack of access to medical aid and other needed supplies. The failure to hold Israel accountable in all these ways has sent Israel the message: do what you like, get away with whatever you want to, until people hold Israel accountable.
And so, what the Freedom Flotilla was, was it was a peaceful, unarmed people’s navy, assembled to fill the void and the vacuum where the Obama administration should be, where the UN Security Council should be, where the Arab governments should be, where the European Union should be. And it is a shocking outrage and a crime that will live in infamy, along with the bombing of the King David Hotel, along with the attack on the USS Liberty, along with so many other appalling crimes, that international humanitarian workers bringing aid were attacked on the high seas.
I spoke to you a few months ago when I was in Cairo with the Gaza Freedom March. By now, people have tried to reach Gaza to break the siege by land. They have tried by sea. And they have lost their lives. They have given their lives in the cause of breaking this siege on Gaza. And we have to ask, we have to ask, for what crime are 1.5 million people in Gaza being held prisoner? There is a museum in Berlin, which I visited as a schoolboy, to those who were killed trying to cross, those who were machine-gunned trying to cross over the Berlin Wall. Well, an unknown number of people, because Israel won’t tell us, were machine-gunned for trying to break this blockade. When will there be accountability? And when will the Obama administration stop this outrageous complicity, this enabling, this acting as an accomplice with these crimes against people in Palestine and now against Americans, Turks, Greeks, Jordanians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Swedes, French people, German people, members of Parliament, doctors, retired people, trying to bring medicine to people in Gaza? That our government has not stood up and condemned this in the clearest possible terms is a sign that something is sick in the United States’ system when it comes to speaking about and dealing with Israel. There is a sickness that has to be addressed".
The timing is prescient, what with Charlie Rose having interviewed Bashar Al-Assad, the President of Syria (broadcast 5/28/10)
and scheduled Khaled Meshaal, the political leader of Hamas, for 5/31/10.
Here, a segment of the frank and forthright President Assad on the only solution for peace in the Middle East, the door to which was opened by, of all authors, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker!
CHARLIE ROSE: We have come back to Damascus to talk to President al-Assad about how he sees Syria, its role in the world, its region, the Middle East peace process, and his relationships with Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and others.
Most importantly, we come to talk about Syria and the United States and the possibilities for engagement between the two countries.
Mr. President, thank you very much for allowing me to come here for another conversation with you. It was in 2006 that I was here, and I’m pleased to be back in 2010 to this great city, Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Welcome to Syria. I’m very glad to see you today in Damascus.
CHARLIE ROSE: I’m not the only American who has been here recently. Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was here on Saturday and recently as well. Is something happening in the relationship between Syria and the United States?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Since President Obama came to power, there is some improvement at least in the atmosphere. There are a lot of concrete things happening. It’s moving forward slowly.
But the main interest of the administration now and the visit of Senator Kerry is about how can we re-launch the peace process. President Obama is interested in the peace process in general, but the talk with Senator Kerry was about the Syrian track. And I think the main, the crux of the problem in this region is the lack of peace.
CHARLIE ROSE: It is also said that he came here in a sense as an emissary of the president.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: That’s true.
CHARLIE ROSE: What is it you want to say to the president of the United States about your view of the region, your own strategic sense of what’s possible?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: If you’re going to talk about the region, and you know this region is the heart of the world geographically and politically, you have to talk about the role of a great power, the United States.
I think the main issue in this region is the OCCUPATION. When you talk about conflict you have to go to the reason. The reason we have conflict is that we have occupied land. At the same time you have Security Council resolutions that mention very clearly the need of Israel to withdraw from these lands. So this is where the peace starts.
I think if I am going to talk to him, I would say to him all the details in elaboration. But I would urge him to move faster in order to reach peace in the region.
ADDITIONAL EXCERPT -
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: I think what is destabilizing is the Israeli aggression in our region. They attacked Syria, they attacked Lebanon, they have been attack Israeli -- sorry, the Palestinians on a daily basis. That is what destabilized the region. They go through the door from the occupied land, that is what destabilized the region, not Hezbollah and any other organization that they defend themselves.
"It’s like if you talk about a chapter in a book, every time you read that chapter, you have to read the whole book to understand this chapter.
So the meantime, I would say of course, we will be ready to -- we would like to see this region free of armaments, free of conflict, free of everything. But that will not happen only through talking about one factor while you have the main important factor which is the occupation is in place.
So we have to solve it as a package. And this package should be peace. There is no other way. It’s just a waste of time. So we have to go in this way, through the peace.
An earlier DemocracyNow broadcast 1/14/09
ISRAELI HISTORIAN AVI SHLAIM: As you mentioned, I did national service in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s. And in those days, Israel was a small state surrounded by enemies, and the nation was united in face of the surrounding Arab states. We all felt total commitment to the state of Israel and to the defense of the state of Israel. The Israeli army is called the Israel Defense Forces, and it was true to its name.
But 1967, the war of June 1967, was a major turning point in the history of Israel and the history of the region. In the course of the war, Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan and Sinai from Egypt. After the war, Israel started building civilian territories in the occupied territories in violation of international law. So Israel became a colonial power and an imperial power.
And I, for my part, have never questioned the legitimacy of the Zionist movement. I saw it as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Nor did I ever question the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I reject, what I reject totally, absolutely and uncompromisingly, is the Zionist colonial project beyond the 1967 borders. So we have to distinguish very clearly between Israel proper, within its pre-1967 borders, and Greater Israel, which began to emerge in the aftermath of the June '67 war and has completely derailed the Zionist project.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, specifically talk about Gaza, how it has developed and where it is today, right now under assault by the Israeli military.
AVI SHLAIM: In a long-term historical perspective, I would begin with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. I wrote a book, which you mentioned in your introduction, called The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. It is a history of the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948. It's a very long book, but I can summarize it for you in one sentence, that throughout its sixty years, Israel has been remarkably reluctant to engage in meaningful negotiations with its Arab opponents to resolve the dispute between them and only too ready to resort to military force in order to impose its will upon them. And the current vicious Israeli onslaught on the people of Gaza is the climax of this longstanding Israeli policy of shunning diplomacy and relying on brute military force. - DemocracyNow 1/14/09
And the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein - 1/8/09
AMY GOODMAN: We're also joined by Norman Finkelstein here in New York, leading critic of Israeli foreign policy, the author of several books, including The Holocaust Industry, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and Beyond Chutzpah.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, the record is fairly clear. You can find it on the Israeli website, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. Mr. Indyk is correct that Hamas had adhered to the ceasefire from June 17th until November 4th. On November 4th, here Mr. Indyk, I think, goes awry. The record is clear: Israel broke the ceasefire by going into the Gaza and killing six or seven Palestinian militants. At that point--and now I'm quoting the official Israeli website--Hamas retaliated or, in retaliation for the Israeli attack, then launched the missiles.
Now, as to the reason why, the record is fairly clear as well. According to Ha'aretz, Defense Minister Barak began plans for this invasion before the ceasefire even began. In fact, according to yesterday's Ha'aretz, the plans for the invasion began in March. And the main reasons for the invasion, I think, are twofold. Number one, as Mr. Indyk I think correctly points out, to enhance what Israel calls its deterrence capacity, which in layman's language basically means Israel's capacity to terrorize the region into submission. After their defeat in July 2006 in Lebanon, they felt it important to transmit the message that Israel is still a fighting force, still capable of terrorizing those who dare defy its word.
And the second main reason for the attack is because Hamas was signaling that it wanted a diplomatic settlement of the conflict along the June 1967 border. That is to say, Hamas was signaling they had joined the international consensus, they had joined most of the international community, overwhelmingly the international community, in seeking a diplomatic settlement. And at that point, Israel was faced with what Israelis call a Palestinian peace offensive. And in order to defeat the peace offensive, they sought to dismantle Hamas.
Well, I think the problem of Mr. Indyk's presentation is he constantly reverses cause and effect. Just as he said a moment ago that it was Hamas which broke the ceasefire, although he well knows it was Israel that broke the ceasefire on November 4th, he now reverses cause and effect as to how the present impasse came about. In January 2006, as he writes in his book, Hamas came to power in a free and fair election. I think those are his words. He then claims on your program and he claims in his book that Hamas committed a "putsch"--his word--in order to eliminate the Palestinian Authority. And as I'm sure Mr. Indyk well knows and as was documented in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair by the writer David Rose, basing himself on internal US documents, it was the United States in cahoots with the Palestinian Authority and Israel which were attempting a putsch on Hamas, and Hamas preempted the putsch. That, too, is no longer debatable or no longer a controversial claim.
Now, Mr. Indyk says that Hamas is reluctant or unclear about whether it wants to rule in Gaza. The issue is not whether it wants to rule in Gaza; the issue is can it rule in Gaza if Israel maintains a blockade and prevents economic activity among the Palestinians. The blockade, incidentally, was implemented before Hamas came to power. The blockade doesn't even have anything to do with Hamas. The blockade came to--there were Americans who were sent over, in particular James Wolfensohn, to try to break the blockade after Israel redeployed its troops in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: The former World Bank president.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Correct. The problem all along has been that Israel doesn't want Gaza to develop, and Israel doesn't want to resolve diplomatically the conflict. Mr. Indyk well knows that both the leadership in Damascus and the leadership in the Gaza have repeatedly made statements they're willing to settle the conflict in the June 1967 border. The record is fairly clear. In fact, it's unambiguously clear.
Every year, the United Nations General Assembly votes on a resolution entitled "Peaceful Settlement of the Palestine Question." And every year the vote is the same: it's the whole world on one side; Israel, the United States and some South Sea atolls and Australia on the other side. The vote this past year was 164-to-7. Every year since 1989--in 1989, the vote was 151-to-3, the whole world on one side, the United States, Israel and the island state of Dominica on the other side. - DemocracyNow 1/8/09
END OF EXCERPT -
CHARLIE ROSE: But you have said in an interview recently with an Italian newspaper that you have a strategic vision, but it seems that America is engaged in a trial and error. What did you mean?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: We are wondering about what strategy the United States has toward the different conflict, whether Iraq, Afghanistan, peace process, and any other main conflict.
But I’m talking about different administrations, not only this administration. The question that we asked to many officials is, what is your strategy? They only put the title of stability, but stability is the final -- is the goal of all -- the final stage or the final end of solving all the other problems.
So the United States administration has been failing, failing and failing, in still solving the problems. Why? This is linked and related to what I said that the region has changed. They have to adopt different approach toward our region. They cannot adopt the same approach.
CHARLIE ROSE: But with respect to U.S.-Syria, what would you like to see the United States do?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: In the peace process?
CHARLIE ROSE: In the relationship with Syria.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Of course you cannot separate the two -- the two things, because if they want to play the role of the arbiter, they cannot play that role while they are sided with the Israelis. They have to be impartial arbiter. They are not. And they were never impartial arbiters since the beginning of the peace process.
They have to gain the trust of the different players. If you don’t have good relations with Syria, how can Syria depend on you as arbiter? So you have to improve relations.
So I told the American official that we have to start on improving the relationship - if you talk about putting Syria on the terrorism act, sorry, terrorism list, they have the Syria Accountability Act in the Congress
CHARLIE ROSE: Right, right, which they just reconfirmed.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: yeah, exactly.
CHARLIE ROSE: With some modifications.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: yeah - There was the veto of Syria joining the WTO, but it was lifted. So that's why I say, there are some improvements, but there are still very, we have a long way to go in that regard. So I would like the United States to be fair and to be unbiased in order to achieve that.
CHARLIE ROSE: Senator Kerry has said that Syria is a high priority for this administration. Have they convinced you of that?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: We are waiting for the results. Without the results -- I trust Senator Kerry. I trust Senator Kerry, and I think he is earnest. And I met him five times before this meeting. I met him five times in very difficult circumstances. So what he said, he said what he means.
But at the end he is not the one that is going to implement. You have the administration and you have the Congress. So in the end we are looking for results.
Today I’m convinced about what he said, but I’m convinced that President Obama wants to do something positive in that regard. But I’m not convinced that the institution would allow President Obama to do what he wants to do with Syria and in other subjects and issues.
CHARLIE ROSE: You seem to be saying that President Obama has the right ideas but you’re not sure that he can act on them.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Not, because he cannot, because you have institutions ( ADL? AIPAC? Daniel Pipes ) in the United States. You have your political system. It is not only the president. If it’s only the president, we could blame the president. We can say that he didn’t do what he had to do.
But you have the institutions and you have the Congress. For example, the ambassador to Syria who was about to come, but the Congress, the Republicans in the Congress opposed it recently. So the President has to stop. So that is why I said it’s not that the president doesn’t want to or he cannot do something. It is about the whole political system that you have in the United States. And you know more than me about it.
CHARLIE ROSE: But you consider it an act of respect for Syria that they confirm a Syrian ambassador from the United States?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Yes. But in the end the ambassador is to help your country, not to help my country. I have my ambassador to do that. So this is not a help to Syria. This is a help to the United States that they have ambassadors anywhere in the world.
I’m not saying that this is something to deliver to Syria, but I’m just giving an example about the steps you wanted to take to improve the relations, but somebody (AIPAC?) opposed it because of the political system that you have. That is what I mean.
CHARLIE ROSE: How do you see Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, the northern tier in the region?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Normally you should have good relations with your neighbors, something we’ve learned from our experience during the last decades. We’ve been in conflict, Syria and Iraq, Syria and Turkey, Iraq and Turkey, and other countries.
What did we get? Nothing. We’ve been losing for decades.
We’ve learned during the last decade that we have to turn the tide. So everybody is going forward with good relation with the other even if it doesn’t have the same vision or even if they disagree about most of the things, not part, not some things.
So this relation, Syria and Iraq, we are neighbors. Syria and Turkey we are neighbors. We affect each other directly. Iran is not my neighbor, but Iran is one of the big countries in the Middle East and an important country and it plays a role and affects different issues in the region.
So if you want to play your role and help yourself and save your interest, you should have good relation with all these influential countries. That’s why this relation I think is very normal.
CHARLIE ROSE: There are those in America would like to believe America can do something that will put some distance between you and Iran, that they can make you less close.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: They contradict themselves. They talk about stability in the region. Stability starts with good relations. You can’t have stability and bad relations.
Second, what their argument, why do they need Syria to be away from Iran? They have conflict with Iran. What does it mean to put Syria away from Iran?
Sometimes they talk about the relation between Syria and Iranian relations, and the peace. That’s not true. It is not realistic, because Iran supported our efforts to achieve, to give back our land through the peace negotiations in 2008 when we had negotiations in Turkey.
CHARLIE ROSE: Let me underline that. You believe that Iran, even though it says it does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, when you through Turkey were trying to negotiate with the Israelis, the Iranians were supportive of that.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Exactly.
CHARLIE ROSE: And so you are saying actions speak louder than words.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Exactly. And actually they said it inward, they said publicly that we support you. They said it twice during the negotiations and formally. So you cannot see with one eye.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: So that is what is happening. They see only what they want to. They hear what they want to hear and they ignore the other stand from the same government.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think America misunderstands Iran?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: They misunderstand the region, definitely. And that sometimes is normal because it is different culture very far away.
But after the 11th of September, at least after the 11th of September, you should learn more about what is happening behind the ocean. It is not about what you think. It is about what we think. They have to understand the society, the culture in this region, and in the rest of the world that this region, because it is complicated.
CHARLIE ROSE: What is this they don’t understand, those in Washington about the region, about the culture, about Syria’s role, about Iran?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: They don’t understand that we want peace. But if you want peace, it doesn’t mean -- if you want to sign a peace treaty, it doesn’t mean we accept to sign capitulation agreement. That’s what they don’t understand. There is a big different between capitulation agreement, that is I'm talking about the perception in our region, how we see it, and peace treaty.
Peace treaty means having all your rights. This is the second about Iran, the nuclear issue. The nuclear fight is about Iran having the right to have peaceful nuclear reactor! You cannot deal with Iran through the Security Council through threats.
And the evidence that they didn’t understand this recent agreement between Turkey, Brazil, and Iran. And I told the official that I met recently from Europe after that agreement that this agreement is the proof that the west didn’t understand this region, because Turkey and Brazil succeeded in getting what the world has been asking for during the last year in a few weeks, because they understand this region and they adopted different approach, which is dialogue, not threat, not imposing.
CHARLIE ROSE: Their interpretation of what happened between Iran and Turkey and Iran and Brazil is that it’s just another effort by Iran to delay sanctions so that they can get on with building a nuclear capacity.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: You mean about the 1,200 kilogram?
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Or about the agreement.
CHARLIE ROSE: The agreement was intended to delay sanctions and nothing more.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Iran didn’t talk about sending or making an agreement, sending uranium abroad. The five countries plus one asked for this and that’s what Iran did. So they talked about it.
You can keep saying that whatever we do, whatever Iran does, you have suspicion about Iran. But the international relation is about -- is not about trusting. It’s about mechanism. You have mechanism. And this mechanism is in the agency, IAEA agency.
And you have the NP-3 treaty, nonproliferation treaty. That’s what you can depend, not the trust. You don’t have to trust. Trust is something personal. But if you talk about the relation, international relation, it’s about mechanism, and you have the mechanism. So whether it is trust Iran or doesn’t trust it is not the issue.
CHARLIE ROSE: But it is the issue that if Iran had nuclear ability for a nuclear weapon, it would destabilize the region.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: That’s why you need the mechanism of the IAEA. That their role is to make sure that this is for civil, not military program.
CHARLIE ROSE: But they say the Iranians have mislead them. The IAEA says Iran has misled us and did not give us the information we needed.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: That happened when they moved the five from the IAEA to the Security Council. But before that, at the very beginning of the issue, remember, there was cameras by the IAEA was set up inside the nuclear reactors.
So when the problem started, particularly because of Bush’s intention, bad intention toward Iran, this is where the problem started. Now I think they have to do two things. Take it away from the Security Council, because if you take any action against Iran, there will be no solution, I think it going to be --
CHARLIE ROSE: In other words, if the Security Council imposes sanctions, you think what?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Iran said publicly a few days ago that if they don’t accept this agreement, and they go to the Security Council, they will withdraw from the agreement. And if they withdraw from the agreement, thus means the problem will be more complicated, and that means there will be no solution.
CHARLIE ROSE: So therefore we should be supportive, not engage in sanctions from the U.N. Security Council --
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Of course.
CHARLIE ROSE: -- and be supportive of the agreement between Iran and Brazil and Iran and Turkey?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Exactly. That is what I mean by going back to the agency.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you believe Iran wants nuclear weapons?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: No.
CHARLIE ROSE: You don’t?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: No.
CHARLIE ROSE: Why not?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Because what would they do when you have nuclear bomb? What can you do? You cannot, is it a deterant? No.
CHARLIE ROSE: Is that what they said to you?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Yes, definitely.
CHARLIE ROSE: President Ahmadinejad says to you, the president of Syria, I do not want nuclear weapons.
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: EVERY OFFICIAL IN IRAN SAYS THAT.
CHARLIE ROSE: And you believe them?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: Of course I believe, because what to do with it? There’s nothing. I mean what is the aim to have it?
CHARLIE ROSE: Then why are they engaged in sort of in the appearance of some, the IAEA, deception, and they discover these centrifuges inside mountains that they didn’t know about?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: It is not deception. That is how you define it in the west.
Actually, the five plus one countries weren’t -- they didn’t come -- they didn’t come to Iran with good intentions. They started with saying you have to stop your program. I have the right to have civil program. Why to stop it?
Syria is suspicious. But it doesn’t matter if your suspicious or not. What are the mechanisms? You should adopt the IAEA. They started making political pressure and this is when you started, the problem started. Not because Iran started to deceive. If they wanted to deceive they wouldn’t have allowed them to have cameras inside the reactors.
CHARLIE ROSE: But you do believe that if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would destabilize the region?
BASHAR AL-ASSAD: We are against any nuclear weapons in the region. We have a Syrian draft in the Security Council since 2003, about freeing the Middle East from any WMDs, of course including Israel, but we do not talk about Iran destabilizing the region if they have -- if you presume that they are going to have nuclear bomb, something I don’t believe in, while ignoring Israel.
Israel started this problem. Israel is the only country who has nuclear bombs in the region, not Iran." - Rose bdcst 5/28/10
Amy Goodman & DemocracyNow in the set-up piece of Israeli intentions against flotilla - 5/27/10
"A showdown is looming in the Mediterranean Sea as a flotilla of nine humanitarian aid ships approaches the Gaza Strip in an attempt to break the Israeli blockade. Israel is vowing to repel the Free Gaza Movement’s 'Freedom Flotilla' after stopping at least three other sailings since January 2009. The ships are expected to reach the Gaza coastline by Friday. Israeli spokesperson Yigal Palmor vowed Israel would stop the ships.
Yigal Palmor: 'This is not in the cause--for the cause of the Palestinian people, not for the cause of peace. This is just for the cause of provocation by people who care not about humanitarian aid or about the prospects of peace. And if they try to force their way into Gaza, after they have been warned time and again not to do so, after they have been warned that this is against international law, well, then they will have to be stopped.'
The flotilla is the largest to attempt to reach the Gaza Strip since Israel imposed the blockade on the coastal territory three years ago." - 5/27/10
Tom Friedman sets-up Israeli response to humanitarian mission.
*** As Ugly As It Gets ***
An appropriate appellation for the Jewish Friedman's support of the abuse of Palestinians by Netanyahu's rogue State of Israel
"Is there anything uglier than watching Democrats sell out other Democrats to a Holocaust-denying, vote-stealing Iranian thug just to tweak the U.S. and show that they, too, can play at the big power table?
No, that's about as ugly as it gets.
Experts (Israelis?) say it would only take months for Iran to AGAIN amass sufficient quantity for a nuclear weapon." - Friedman N Y Times 5/26/10
Relate to Steven Rosen & Daniel Pipes!!!
There is some positive "Hard News" as one searches through the Republican bias in the Media/Press. The 5/22/10 David Leonhardt piece ( "Economic Score" ) in the 5/22/10 N Y Times' Business Day: "With the Senate's passage of financial regulation, Congress and the White House have completed sixteen months of activity that rival any other since the New Deal (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt!) in scope or ambition. . . .the new progressive period has the makings of a generational shift in how Washington operates." Of course the Republican Party and its minions in our media will be Hell-bent (an appropriate allegory) to characterize the progress as dangerous regression.
Specific positive examples through the almost eighty year period are:
* President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the G. I. Bill in 1944 -
* President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 -
* President Barack Obama signing Health Care Reform March 23, 2010 -
One of the failures during the same period is the monstrosity, still unfolding, of the Jewish dispossession of the peoples of Palestine, primarily Palestinians, a result of the Jewish American mindless control of the Senate (etc.) of the United States of America! The Jewish/Israeli threat to the rest of the world was broached by Amy Goodman's DemocracyNow 5/24/10.
* "Report: Israel Offered Nukes to Apartheid South Africa
The Guardian newspaper has published secret South African documents revealing that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the South Africa apartheid regime. In 1975, South Africa’s defense minister, P.W. Botha, asked Israel’s then-Defense Minister Shimon Peres for nuclear warheads. Peres, who is now Israel’s president, responded by offering warheads "in three sizes." The South African documents show that the apartheid-era military wanted the nuclear missiles as a deterrent and for potential strikes against neighboring African states. South Africa did not go ahead with the nuclear deal in part because of the cost. The documents were first uncovered by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, author of the new book 'The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa'. The documents provide new evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of "ambiguity" in neither confirming nor denying their existence." -DemocracyNow 5/24/10
- This is an item that will be excluded from the analysis of the heralded international BBC offering, "World, Have Your Say."
An example of the mindless Media/Press of THIS nation was the aging matron of ABC (heard also on NPR) "Cokie" Roberts on the 5/23/10 "This Week", criticizing President Barack Obama for attempting to halt Israeli "settlers" from forcing Palestinians from land and residences they have inhabited for centuries!
There is a breakthrough, of sorts. In Gary Trudeau's 5/23/10 Doonesbury he has an Afghani General asking: "Do you think it matters that the rebels are Jewish?", this after a Public Relations pro suggests calling the Taliban "the Berzerki Taliban", after which the senior Public Relations pro responds: "Okay. Then how about the Berzerki Talmudi [i.e. the Mishnah and the Gemara, the first of which is never followed by Israel (certainly not under Netanyahu), and therefore, the latter, Gemara, is rendered inoperable.]? It just has to SOUND bad." This will cause Ellie Wiesel (rhymes with weasel) to call his attorneys. . ., as will any attempt to reintroduce to television the 1977 blockbuster "Jesus of Nazareth" with the stellar cast of Anne Bancroft, Ernest Borgnine, James Earl Jones, James Mason, Sir Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Anthony Quinn, Ralph Richardson, Rod Steiger, Peter Ustinov and others, and the superb performance by Robert Powell as Jesus, as well as the original music by the incomparable Maurice Jarre.
But the Republicans are ever-active, particularly in Bush 41 & Bush 43's Texas!
- "Texas School Board to Vote Textbook Revisions
BY Michael Brick -
AUSTIN, Texas -After facing months of protest, conservative members of the Texas Board of Education were expected Thursday night to vote to teach schoolchildren a version of American history that emphasizes the roles of capitalist enterprise, the military, Christianity and modern Republican political figures.
Once a decade, the board members rewrite hundreds of pages of guidelines known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, the blueprint for standardized tests used to judge teachers, principals and entire schools. Last year, conservatives on the board changed the state science curriculum to undermine the teaching of evolution, cell formation and the Big Bang.
Board members planned to add language requiring high school students of the civil rights movement to 'describe the ("positive"?) role of individuals such as governors George Wallace, Orval Faubus, and Lester Maddox and groups, including the Congressional bloc of southern Democrats, that sought to maintain the status quo.'
In another passage, the board would require students to explain the roles of 'Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.'" - Brick Austin N Y Times 5/21/10.
- Major Item: N Y Times Page A-10 5/17/10
- "Brazil and Turkey Say A Nuclear Deal With Iran Is Near
by Alexei Barrionuevo & Sebnem Arsu (and David Sanger from WASHINGTON)
SÃO PAULO - Brazilian and Turkish government officials said Sunday that their leaders had brokered a tentative compromise with Iran in the international standoff over Iran’s nuclear program, a development that could undermine efforts in the UNITED NATIONS (?) to impose new sanctions on the Iranians.
Israel...and the UNITED STATES!
But the blessing of Turkey and Brazil for such a swap agreement could put the Obama administration in the awkward position of appearing (?) to take an unreasonably hard line.
Huh?
On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton predicted (?)
insisted!
...that Mr. da Silva’s mediation effort would (?)
Must!
...fail. She said Iran could be forced to prove its nuclear program was peaceful only with a new round of United Nations sanctions. (?????). - Barrionuevo & Arsu & DAVID SANGER 5/17/10
- The so-called "Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations 'fund'" published a full-page ad in the 5/12/10 N Y Times (A-9) which besmirched the memory of the courageous Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel 1974-77 & 1992-November 4, 1995 (an Israeli Day of Infamy) by omitting that he was a genuine Israeli military hero AND peacemaker, assassinated by the acolyte of Benjamin Netanyahu, Yigal Amir, and that Prime Minister Rabin's killing was heralded by the so-called neocons (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Bernard-Henri Levy, etc.) with their "A Clean Break (the killing of Rabin): A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (Israel)", the first step of which was the elimination of Saddam Hussein. This is included in Mr. Bamford's A Pretext For War, and is the key to the bloody turmoil which continues in Iraq, and is about to escalate in Afghanistan. You can not force the Islamic nations of the Middle East to accept the Israeli abuse of Palestinians. And now that one of its own, eleven year old Israeli Daniel Yuval, has lost a leg to one of the TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY THOUSAND LAND MINES that Israel has planted along its borders, following its conquests of June 1967 [Finally, a rendition of that outrage, by Ethan Bronner in the 5/13/10 N Y Times A-12 (no mention on the front page or page two "Inside The Times")], an issue that has not, until now, been covered by our Media/Press. There may be hope for the Middle East, thanks to the Presidency of Barack Obama. As to the price?....
- Encouraging News on Two Fronts
* NOAM CHOMSKY exposes Israeli/U.S. Nuclear Charade -
Israel Blocks Noam Chomsky from Entering West Bank
The Israeli government has blocked MIT professor Noam Chomsky from entering the West Bank. Chomsky, who is Jewish, was scheduled to speak in the West Bank at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah and meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Chomsky was denied entry after being questioned for three hours. Chomsky has been a longtime critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. On Sunday, Noam Chomsky spoke to Al Jazeera about why he had been refused entry.
Noam Chomsky: "There were two basic points. One was that the government of Israel does not like the kinds of things I say. The second was that they seemed upset about the fact that I was just going to--I was taking an invitation from Bir Zeit, and I had no plans to go on to speak in Israeli universities, as I have done many times in the past."
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky has been denied entry into the West Bank by Israel. The world-renowned linguist and political thinker was scheduled to deliver a lecture at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah and was scheduled to meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. On Sunday afternoon, he was stopped by Israeli border guards at the Allenby Bridge border crossing from Jordan. After three hours of questioning, Chomsky’s passport was stamped with "Denied Entry." His daughter, Professor Aviva Chomsky--she teaches at Salem State College--was also denied entry.
No reason was initially given for the decision, but the Interior Ministry later told Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that officials were now trying to get clearance from the Israel Defense Forces. Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Haddad told Ha’aretz, quote, "We are trying to contact the military to clear things up, and if they have no objection, we see no reason why he should not be allowed in." (Lots Of Luck).
NOAM CHOMSKY: The reasons are quite straightforward. I’ve spoken at Bir Zeit University before, but in every prior occasion, it was a side trip, when I was visiting Israel and giving talks at Israeli universities. This time differs in one respect. I was--I had an invitation from Bir Zeit, and I accepted it gladly, as in many other cases, and I had no intention of going on to speak in Israel as well this time. That’s the only difference. So, essentially, what Israel is saying is that they insist on the right to determine who is allowed to just visit a Palestinian university at their invitation and talk. - Goodman & Chomsky 5/17/10
* CONTINUED *
YOUR MINDS
- "Sex & Drugs & the Spill
'Obama’s Katrina': that was the line from some pundits and news sources, as they tried to blame the current administration for the gulf oil spill. It was nonsense, of course. An Associated Press review of the Obama administration’s actions and statements as the disaster unfolded found 'little resemblance' to the shambolic response to Katrina -- and there has been nothing like those awful days when everyone in the world except the Bush inner circle seemed aware of the human catastrophe in New Orleans.
Yet there is a common thread running through Katrina and the gulf spill -- namely, the collapse in government competence and effectiveness that took place during the Bush years." - Paul Krugman N Y Times 5/10/10
CONTINUED
- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran had "Charlie" Rose for brunch in "Charlie's" interview with him, telecast on NPR 5/4/10, but, of course, "Charlie's" at a disadvantage. His role is to defend the indefensible, and the record of Israel threatening the other nations in the Middle East is over sixty years (including the 12/26/08 - 1/18/09 massacre of the citizens of Gaza) and continues to this day. Mr. Ahmadinejad did not make an issue of it, but he did, with subtle elegance, lay out the recent, since 1953, strife which Iran has suffered at the hands of the western powers (Did you know that France's Sarkozy is of Jewish heritage and, thus, a constant threat to Iran?), which powers have also inserted and emboldened Israel in its occupation of Palestine.
- The New York Times lends a hand -
" In a Neighborhood of Jerusalem
To the Editor:
Just last month, about 40 ultra-right-wing Israelis, you report, marched through a mainly Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem, 'waving Israeli flags in a demonstration of Israeli sovereignty (over Jerusalem)' ('March on East Jerusalem Stirs Anger as Envoy Visits,' news article, April 26). Israeli opposition came from the Israeli prime minister’s office and a settlement group, with Israeli leftist and international activists joining Palestinian counterdemonstrators.
A representative of Fatah, you report, said this was proof that Israel did not have sovereignty there, asking, 'Where else in the world would you need 2,000 armed, fully equipped police officers to secure a failed march of 70 of your own citizens in an area that you claim as your capital?'
It’s time for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to rethink its policy of refusing, in a negotiated settlement, to concede East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. Jerusalem could be divided into two capitals -- Jewish areas to the Jews and Arab areas to the Arabs.
Maybe then Kai Bird’s Arab neighbors will be able to seek restitution for their claim (along with Jews who were forced to leave Arab countries after the 1948 war). - Seymour Reich New York 5/3/10
The writer is a former Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
Here a paragraph from Neil MacFarquhar's N Y Times article (page A-13) 5/4/10 - headlined "At U.N., Ahmadinejad Accuses U.S. of Fostering an Arms Race (i.e. the constant threat from Israel and the West, against Iran, is, frankly so provocative as to ENCOURAGE nuclear weaponry!).
"Although Israel does not take part in the nonproliferation treaty, its arsenal, estimated at 100 to 200 warheads, has overshadowed the conferences in recent years. Egypt and other non-nuclear nations have refused to endorse stricter inspections and other global measures as long as Israel remains outside the treaty.
A compromise worked out in 1995 called for a special conference on creating a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East, but it has never been convened. Egypt is again demanding that gathering. The United States position has been that such a treaty can be worked out only after a comprehensive Middle East peace plan." - MacFarquhar N Y Times 5/4/10
- A Most Timely Exposure Series -
On page A-19 of the 4/29/10 N Y Times is the latest article on one "Rabbi" Sholom Rubashkin of the ill-famed Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, one of the largest kosher meatpacking plants in the country. .before they were closed down when the government learned they were operating on the backs of the low pay-ranges of illegal immigrants, nearly three hundred of whom "served federal prison sentences of five months for identity theft, and, in addition, several human resources managers and floor supervisors were convicted of felony charges of harboring illegal immigrants". The article is dominated by a 5-1/4" X 7" photo of Rabbis "from around the country" praying "outside Federal District Court in Cedar Rapids, Iowa." These people have no shame, AND A FULL-PAGE AD IN THE 4/30/10 N Y TIMES (A-11) GIVES FURTHER EVIDENCE.
But first "Rabbi" Rubashkin. Rubashkin "...used $300,000 in Agriprocessors' funds to pay his credit card bills, $200,000 to remodel his Postville home and $25,000 for jewelry". Prosecutors stated he "was living a rich lifestyle using Agriprocessors' money. He ordered employees to create false invoices and 'directed millions of dollars to be laundered through a secret bank account' in the name of Torah Education, causing more than $26 million in losses for the banks".
"ORTHODOX JEWISH LEADERS HAVE LED A CAMPAIGN IN SUPPORT OF MR. (RABBI!) RUBASHKIN, AND MORE THAN 16,000 PEOPLE SIGNED A PETITION FROM A JEWISH WEBSITE TO JUDGE READE."
- Focusing Jewish Websites
The very next day, 4/30/10, a full-page "Dark" ad in the N Y Times revisited a foreign affairs issue which has been led by the Times' David Sanger, the provocative charge that Iran represents an "existential" threat to the Middle East, Sanger with great care avoiding the FACT that the CHARGE is right out of the playbook of Israel, not unlike Israel's pressure on the illegitimate incoming Bush administration's hazardous decision in its first few months of 2001 to go to war against Iraq, out of deference to the insistence of Jewish interests both within that new Bush administration and in Israel, a position which confounded such principals as the new Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, as well as the new Secretary of State Colin Powell, and, most importantly, the Counter Terrorism Chief from the outgoing Clinton/Gore administration, Richard Clarke.
[ We're familiar with Mr. Clarke because in a book review of his latest work on cyberwarfare, Michiko Kakutani reminds us of his 2004 "Against All Enemies", a companion work to James Bamford's 2004 "A Pretext For War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies", which Miss Kakutani also selected for review. Both 2004 works speak directly to what follows. ]
Regarding the page A-11 "advertisement", a classic example of Jewish overreach, the piece was headlined "HOW DO WE STOP IRAN FROM DEVELOPING NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND FUNDING TERROR?", this from representatives of a country, Israel, which has and continues to terrorize a country, Palestine, which, like Iran, has never terrorized anybody in the Middle East. In fact, Iran merely intends to develop nuclear power, which is, somehow, threatening to the Jews. Here is a listing of the signatories, the mouthpiece rogues' gallery, if you will, for Netanyahu's Israel, timing this onerous and fallacious ad for the opening of the world conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty:
AIPAC (The American Israel "Public" Affairs Committee), Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (Do they have similar "Conferences" in Great Britain, France and Germany?), JCPA (Jewish Council for Public Affairs), The Jewish Federations of North America, AJC (American Jewish Committee), ADL (Anti-Defamation League), Union for Reform Judaism, Orthodox Union, The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, HADASAH, NCJW (National Council of Jewish Women), American Jewish Congress, Women's League for Conservative Judaism, B'nai B'rith International, Jewish War Veterans of the United States, CEJL (Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life).
We can remember a congenial exchange a few years back discussing with a very prominent and forthright progressive Rabbi in a major West Coast city, at a time when the United States was embroiled in one of its sporadic political challenges (not unlike the present), we were stunned to hear this gentleman hesitate when the subject arose as to his personal loyalty regarding his allegiance, to the United States, or to Israel. However, we question today as to whether his signature would be among those listed above.
William Broad and David Sanger, taking the lead, but with some acknowledgment of world concern, regarding the meeting in New York on the subject of Nuclear Non-Proliferation. Messrs. Broad & Sanger do acknowledge what is today world-wide concern with Israel, as follows:
"Iran and some other nations at the United Nations Conference, including Egypt have a different agenda: To force the region's one nuclear-weaponed state, Israel, to acknowledge its atomic arsenal, and sign on to the Non-Proliferation Treaty." - Broad & Sanger N Y Times 5/3/10
There seems to be some hope, for the Middle East.
Peter Baker has broached a foreign policy outrage in the 4/24/10 N Y Times (page A-6) that is close in venality to the Eisenhower Dulles brothers 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected Premier of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh.
"Two giant American accounting firms, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young, disclosed this week that they no longer had any affiliation with Iranian firms, becoming the latest in a string of companies to publicly shun the Islamic republic. After a similar decision by KPMG this month, that leaves none of the Big Four audit firms with any ties to Iran."
These are the same accounting firms which gave "Triple A" ratings to the worthless and misnamed toxic "derivatives" (misnamed because the term if correctly applied would indicate that "derivatives", i.e. proprietary trading, had some value). Not so. And now, these same accounting/rating firms which created the world financial crisis, probably in an effort to redeem themselves within the Jewish dominated western financial system, feel obligated to attack Iran, which Israel calls an "existential" threat because it has an enriched society of friendly people (view the Rick Steves' DVDs on Iran) with an historic past and the foresight to develop nuclear power, much as President Barack Obama has called for.
In the meantime, the Media/Press won't tell you, so we will. What follows, except for today's intransigent Israel (The intransigence began in 1948), is a mere repeat of 1993-94, when Rush Limbaugh slithered onto the scene. His radio propaganda buried the Democrats, and Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House. Limbaugh lied then, he's lieing now. And the so-called Tea Party is made up of Limbaugh and Glenn Beck listeners, egged on by Sarah Palin, and the man who would have put her a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, John Sidney McCain III. And Republicans say that Obama should move on, no longer reference the eight years of George W. Bush, who created this God-awful mess? Are you taken in by this? We're fortunate to have a man in office who can get us out of this mess, President Barack Obama. This is our great country we're talking about! We're better than this particular Republican Party of "No"! Lend a hand!
[ But keep in mind "Israel and the Occupied Territories", as does Amy Goodman -
- Clashes Follow Israeli Settler March in Palestinian Neighborhood -
In Israel and the Occupied Territories, clashes erupted in East Jerusalem Sunday after a group of Israeli settlers held a march through the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. Organizers say they called the rally to affirm Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem.
- Israeli Troops Shoot Protesters in Gaza -
Meanwhile in Gaza, two Palestinians and a Maltese activist were wounded Saturday after Israeli troops opened fire during a protest. The activist, Bianca Zamet, is a member of the International Solidarity Movement, which has long been targeted by Israeli troops.
Bianca Zamet: “I was filming myself, documenting. They shot--they shot Nidal in the leg, and they shot Hind in the stomach. We were only carrying Palestinian flags on Palestinian land. And this is something--it’s not the first time. It’s been happening, and we will continue to go, no matter what.” - DemocracyNow 4/26/10 ]
But we do have a national major fault today, which overrides our bipolar political philosophies and should be addressed. It is interesting that on the first page of their Arts section The New York Times 4/22/10 runs Janet Maslin's review of Hampton Sides' book on the assassination 4/4/68 of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by James Earl Ray, a book that includes nothing on the obvious conspiracy which existed in the killing, given J. Edgar Hoover's palpable hatred of Dr. King and the Bureau's round-the-clock surveillance of King which would have necessarily included Mr. Ray, who was primed to eliminate the Reverend at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a murder plot which was expedited on April 4, 1967 when Dr. King, in his last address at the Riverside Church in New York, related our war against Vietnam to the Civil Rights being violated of those young men subject to the draft without the connections of, say, a George W. Bush who was ushered into the Texas Air National Guard (to avoid the draft), and then, at one point, disappeared from active service, apparently disoriented from a bout with cocaine. Although the N Y Times' Ms. Maslin includes none of this (it is a subject that should be investigated), both she and Mr. Sides focus "some ancillary figures either hidden or overlooked" including an "illicit companion of Dr. King." And Miss Maslin informs us that Mr. Sides' book "arrives in conjunction with a PBS documentary" to be broadcast May 3rd. It is notable that precisely one year, to the day, following Dr. King's declaration at Riverside Church, he was felled by the shot from James Earl Ray.
All of this brings to mind a notorious coverup by the American Media/Press and journalism, from top to bottom, that has existed now for almost forty seven years, and this is for openers. Lyndon Baines Johnson was an infamous womanizer who had a long-term mistress Madelaine (Sp) Brown, with whom he fathered a son, Steven, now deceased, Ms. Brown who reported in later years that on the fateful November '63 trip to Texas Johnson confided to her that "they wouldn't have to worry about the Kennedy boys any longer."
One wonders if that is the hold which Rush Limbaugh has over today's Media/Press? There can be no other reason that our media would be so fearful of this Limbaugh character.
In addition, it is known that Johnson, outrageous as president, had attempted to order the widowed Jaqueline to Washington, under the guise of "I want to be a father to those children"!
Years ago, when Larry King had his radio talk show [if you got thru - you got on], and his guest was Jack Valenti, Johnson's 2nd banana in their nighttime antics in the Oval Office (Valenti was later given the presidency of the Motion Picture Association of American, which is why the only films coming out of Hollywood, mostly for television, depicted John and Robert Kennedy as such lackluster characters. There is one film, ABC's 1971 Missiles of October starring William Devane and Martin Sheen, which is worthwhile viewing.). To continue, when we got Valenti on the line and asked him about Ms. Brown and Steven, King hung up and then profusely apologized to the silent Valenti. This issue covers the assassination of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and much more. Perhaps we need another "Timely Exposure".
AUTHENTIC
"(key excerpts) The essential question for Israel is. .whether Netanyahu remains the arrogant rejectionist that he was in the nineteen-nineties,...
[ The PBS NewsHour moguls Howard and Arlene Schnitzer, who control the OPB franchise (Oregon Public Broadcasting), under the Schnitzers OPB is that one NPR/PBS franchise, particularly the NPR radio segment, which has been successful in leading the way removing most of the "Hard News" on NPR and PBS, again, particularly regarding Israel ("Hard News" which is so essential for an informed American public), it's the Schnitzers who early on, and with much fanfare, brought Netanyahu to Oregon! ]
...the loyal son of a radical believer in Greater Israel, forever settling scores with the old Labor e'lites and making minimal concessions to ward off criticism from Washington and retain the affections of his far-right coalition partners.
Without the creation of a viable contiguous Palestinian state. .and with East Jerusalem as its capital, it is IMPOSSIBLE to imagine a Jewish and democratic future for Israel." - David Remnick Editor The New Yorker 3/29/10.
[ In a comprehensive one hour 4/6/10 NPR interview with David Remnick on his Michiko Kakutani reviewed biography The Bridge, of President Obama (N Y Times 4/6/10), "Charlie" Rose asked not one question on Mr. Obama's singularly most courageous stand, so far, of his presidency: Confronting the outrageous behavior of Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu toward Israel's major benefactor during its brief, sixty-year existence, without which it could not have survived. The United States of America, and its gift of some $100+ billion$ of dollar$! As noted just above, Mr. Remnick himself was courageous in his stand (Quoted above) as expressed in the 3/29/10 The New Yorker. Mr. Rose might have noted Mr. Remnick's stand except for the fact that "Charlie" is a Netanyahu Jew, as he illustrated in his one hour interview with the President's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on PBS 4/20/10. Enough of "Charlie" as "the fourth Emanuel brother."
- Another Timely Exposure -
Again, The New York Times (4/20/10 page A-9) won't tell you "the rest of the story", so we will.
- Headline "MEMO FROM JERUSALEM - Mood Is Dark As Israel Marks Its 62nd Year As a Nation. A new BBC poll of how people around the world regard other countries puts Israel among those least favorably viewed, including Iran, North Korea and Pakistan."
- The Rest of the Story -
"Lebanon's Leader Rejects Israeli Accusations That Syria Gave Hezbollah Missiles
Robert Worth - Beirut - Lebanon’s prime minister has dismissed Israeli accusations that Syria had been providing Scud missiles to the Hezbollah militia in his country, comparing them to (Israel's) CLAIMS THAT IRAQ HAD UNCONVENTIONAL WEAPONS BEFORE THE AMERICAN-LED INVASION IN 2003.
The prime minister, Saad Hariri, made his comments late Monday during a state visit to Italy. They were Lebanon’s first official comments about the accusations, made last week by Israel’s president, Shimon Peres. Mr. Hariri’s comments, though aimed to quell anxiety, hinted at Lebanon’s unease over its possible role as a battleground if rumors of a regional war should be realized.
'At the start of the summer season, they make such threats,' Mr. Hariri told a group of Lebanese citizens living in Rome, in comments published Tuesday by Al Mustaqbal, the newspaper of his political movement. 'All this is similar to what (ISRAEL) SAID PREVIOUSLY ABOUT THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION IN IRAQ, THAT WERE NEVER FOUND.'
Syria and Iran are widely believed to have significantly rearmed Hezbollah since the group’s July 2006 war with Israel, which devastated Lebanon’s infrastructure and left more than a thousand Lebanese and several dozen Israelis dead. - Worth N Y Times 4/21/10
"A Few Wishes on Israel's Birthday" N Y Times 4/21/10
To the Editor:
The glum mood in Israel is encouraging in that it may be an indication that Israelis are finally waking up to the fact that they cannot continue to take American support for granted despite Israel’s deplorable and unlawful treatment of Palestinians.
Nearly half a century of unconditional American support for Israel has resulted in widespread Israeli settlement expansion and complicated prospects for Palestinian emancipation and Middle East peace. It’s time for America to take a more evenhanded approach that offers Israel more incentive to compromise on a meaningful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. - Ken Galal San Francisco 4/20/10
To the Editor:
Your article about what Israelis felt during their Independence Day does not seem to quote any Israeli Arabs. Or do they not count, even though they make up roughly 20 percent of the population?
Maybe the mood will brighten when everyone over there can celebrate Palestinian Independence Day. - Robert Haufrecht New York 4/20/10
- The Rest of the Story Continues -
RIFT WITH U.S. NOT GOOD FOR ISRAEL: EHUD BARAK
Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defense Minister, has urged Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, to end the rift with Washington over settlement policy.
This was because the crisis, which is now entering its fifth week, was damaging the Jewish state.
"We shouldn't delude ourselves," Mr. Barak said yesterday. "The growing alienation between us and the United States is not good for the state of Israel."
In his first intervention since the dispute began, Mr. Barak increased the pressure on Mr. Netanyahu by predicting that Israel would be isolated unless it ended its 43-year occupation of the West Bank.
"The world isn't willing to accept the expectation that Israel will rule another people for decades to come. It's something that doesn't exist anywhere," he said.
Despite intense pressure from the United States, Mr. Netanyahu has shown little inclination to yield to demands from President Barack Obama designed to breathe new life into peace efforts.
In an interview with ABC television in Washington yesterday, he poured cold water on the notion of any dramatic new U.S. peace plan.
He argued Israelis and Palestinians would have to negotiate towards a final settlement, not work off a new document defining the eventual parameters for a Palestinian state.
"I don't believe anyone will seriously think that you can impose peace. Peace has to come from the parties sitting down with each other, resolving their differences," he said.
"You can't end the peace negotiation unless you begin it. I am for beginning it right now," added the Israeli leader, who has been involved in a public test of wills over Jewish settlements in Jerusalem with Mr. Obama.
There is debate over whether apparently carefully placed leaks on this theme in The Washington Post and The New York Times this month augur a new approach, are meant to pressure Israel or are just a sign of U.S. impatience.
What is clear however, is that prospects for any fresh U.S. strategy are darkened by hostility between the two sides, the American spat with the Israeli government and splits in Palestinian politics.
Arab leaders have ruled out new peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians in the absence of a full settlement freeze in the West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem, a notion the Netanyahu government has rejected.
Mr. Netanyahu's intransigence is partly driven by fear of alienating the right-wing of his coalition, which is deeply opposed to making concessions to the Palestinians. - Adrian Blomfield The Daily Telegraph 4/20/10
with files from Agence France-Presse ]
- "Bibi" Ups the Ante Early -
"Israeli Premier Cancels Plan to Attend Nuclear Security Meeting in Washington
Concerns over possible questions about Israel's arsenal
JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has canceled his plans to attend the Nuclear Security summit meeting in Washington next week and will send a minister in his place, Israeli and American government officials said Thursday.
THE OFFICIAL DECLINED TO EXPLAIN THE LAST-MINUTE CANCELLATION. BUT ISRAELI NEWS MEDIA REPORTED THAT THE PRIME MINISTER FEARED THAT MUSLIM STATES WERE PLANNING ON USING THE OCCASION TO RAISE THE QUESTION OF ISRAEL’S NUCLEAR ARSENAL. ISRAEL IS WIDELY BELIEVED TO BE THE ONLY NUCLEAR ARMED POWER IN THE MIDDLE EAST, BUT IT REFUSES TO DISCUSS THE ISSUE AND HAS DECLINED TO JOIN THE NUCLEAR NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY.
But that issue could be further complicated if attending leaders insist on broadening the conversation to include Israel’s reported arsenal. Many Muslim countries, while acknowledging their concern over Iran’s nuclear program, have insisted that the entire region must be made nuclear free - clearly including Israel in the equation. The latest effort came at an Arab League meeting in Libya in late March.
THE ISRAELI NEWSPAPER HAARETZ ON FRIDAY QUOTED A SENIOR ISRAELI OFFICIAL AS SAYING, “IN THE LAST FEW DAYS, WE HAVE RECEIVED REPORTS ABOUT THE INTENTION OF SEVERAL PARTICIPANT STATES TO DEPART FROM THE ISSUE OF FIGHTING TERRORISM AND INSTEAD MISUSE THE EVENT TO GOAD ISRAEL” OVER THE NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY (...AS IF THE 12/26/08 - 1/18/09 ISRAELI MASSACRE OF GAZA WAS NOT AN ACT OF BRUTAL TERRORISM).
THE ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER’S CANCELLATION ALSO COMES AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF RECENT TENSIONS BETWEEN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND THE NETANYAHU GOVERNMENT OVER THE TERMS FOR RESTARTING PEACE TALKS BETWEEN ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS. THE UNITED STATES HAS ASKED ISRAEL TO TAKE CERTAIN STEPS, AND MR. NETANYAHU HAS YET TO RESPOND. THE MAIN DISAGREEMENT IS OVER ISRAEL’S BUILDING IN CONTESTED EAST JERUSALEM. - Bronner & Kershner N Y Times 4/9/10
- And the Followup -
"Human Rights Groups Warn Of New Powers for Israel
JERUSALEM -- A RECENTLY AMENDED MILITARY ORDER THAT ALLOWS ISRAEL TO REMOVE PEOPLE FROM THE WEST BANK if it does not recognize their legal status could lead to THE EXPULSION OF THOUSANDS OF PALESTINIANS, Israeli human rights groups warned Sunday.
The amendment -- TO A 1969 ORDER on dealings with those judged to be infiltrators of the West Bank -- was signed by military officials last October and is due to take effect on Tuesday.
In the original document, ISSUED TWO YEARS AFTER ISRAEL CAPTURED THE WEST BANK FROM JORDAN IN THE 1967 WAR, 'INFILTRATOR' was defined as a person who entered the area illegally from a neighboring Arab country. The amendment redefined the term to refer broadly to anyone who entered the West Bank 'unlawfully' or who 'does not lawfully hold a permit.' THE PERMIT REQUIRED IS NOT SPECIFIED.
- Fears of Palestinian Expulsions from the West Bank -
The chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, denounced the change. 'THESE MILITARY ORDERS BELONG IN AN APARTHEID STATE,' he said. 'Extensive in scope, they make it infinitely easier for Israel to imprison and expel Palestinians from the WEST BANK.'" - Kershner N Y Times 4/12/10
JEFFREY BROWN (PBS NewsHour): "On Friday, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled a new generation of centrifuges for enriching uranium.
And while Iran has long maintained its nuclear programs are for peaceful energy generation, the Obama administration has pushed for tough sanctions to keep it from building nuclear weapons, something that key players, notably China, have resisted.
This afternoon, President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao discussed the issue, and, according to officials, agreed to increase pressure on Iran. No details were offered.
Iran's nuclear ambitions also play into broader fears some summit attendees have about a new arms buildup in the Middle East. Israel has long been understood to have nuclear weapons, though it maintains an official policy of ambiguity, long a sticking point in the region.
Late last week, amid reports Muslim nations might make Israel's nuke program an issue, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would send a deputy in his place." - Brown PBS 4/12/10
It is significant that on page 2 - Corrections - The New York Times (4/14/10) has noted that Chinese President Hu Jintao "did not say that China supports such sanctions" against Iran even though N Y Times' David Sanger & Mark Landler (4/13/10) gave the impression that the Chinese policy as stated by its President would indicate otherwise.
[ There is a sly saying making the rounds of the United Nations: "Some describe Israel as being the United States' 51st State. Not so, reply the Israelis. 'Were it so, we'd have only TWO Senators.'" ]
We, the people of the United States, have spent ONE TRILLION DOLLAR$ of OUR TREASURY. . .enabling, supporting. .this Jewish takeover and dispossession of Palestinians from their homeland for centuries - and Palestinians did not send any Jews to Auschwitz - not one. And now we are embroiled in battles all over the globe, as Muslims, as could have been expected, have objected to this great country empowering this rogue State of Israel, top heavy with nuclear weapons, and having become the scourge of the Middle East, while we threaten and goad the historic republic of Iran, the democratically elected republic which we overthrew in 1954, and reinstalled the hated Shah!
- The great Bill Moyers with the equally thoughtful Andrew Bacevich on Moyers' 4/9/10 Journal, soon to be cancelled by PBS.
BILL MOYERS: "With me is a man with first-hand experience of war. Andrew Bacevich served 23 years, some of them in Vietnam, before retiring from the Army. He's now professor of history and international relations at Boston University. Just this week he was at a US Army War College symposium on the highly pertinent question, 'How do we know when a war is over?' His book, 'The Limits of Power,' was a best-seller and his latest, 'Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War,' comes out this summer. Andrew Bacevich, welcome back to the Journal...
ANDREW BACEVICH (near end of interview): Well, I think the president has, he's placed down this enormous bet. A bet involves 100 thousand American soldiers.
And the deterioration of circumstances, for example, if Karzai turns out to be an unreliable ally, even that will make it extraordinarily difficult for the president to now say, 'Well, I've changed my mind. I'm going to take that, I'm going to take that bet off the table.' So in that sense, the rhetoric is not at all surprising, I think. And of course, it's historically incorrect. We quit after the Mogadishu firefight in Somalia. I think that it probably was prudent to quit. That doesn't make Somalia a great place today. We quit in Vietnam, having paid an enormous cost, to try to maintain the viability of South Vietnam. So there are times actually when it makes sense to quit.
BILL MOYERS: Should we quit in Afghanistan?
ANDREW BACEVICH: I think so. I mean again, I believe that ultimately, a sound foreign policy should be informed by an enlightened understanding of one's own interests. That's what we pay people like President Obama big money to do, to advance our collective interests, what's good for this country, this people. And the perpetuation of the war in Afghanistan is not good for this country and for our people.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Because we are squandering our treasure. We are losing lives for no purpose. And ultimately, the perpetuation of this unnecessary war does, I think, serve to exacerbate the problems within the Islamic world (as we have attacked and invaded both Iraq and Afghanistan, for the Israelis), rather than reducing those problems." - Moyers Journal 4/9/10
To the Editor:
Picking a replacement for Justice John Paul Stevens is less what you call a “complex political challenge” now, since five conservatives on the court pushed through the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in January, overturning traditional campaign financing strictures.
Clearly, the Republicans will no longer be able to accuse any nominee of this president of “judicial activism,” as the Citizens United decision takes the cake. Justice Stevens’s principled dissent from the court’s unfortunate decision sums up “activist” judges: “Five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”
I trust that the president will nominate someone with character as strong as John Paul Stevens’s. - Sudie Reid-Coles Cranston R.I. 4/11/10
"Charlie" Rose has the informed Jamal Greene to begin our discussion of the Political-Judicial battle ahead to (not replace, because it is likely that John Paul Stevens can never be replaced) to fill the vacancy of Associate Justice John Paul Stevens. The truly honorable Associate Justice Mr. Stevens, who, Thank God, was able to serve some thirty-four years, compiled an historic and truly exemplary, guided by the Constitution of the United States, record. It was Justice Stevens who aptly named the 12/12/00 Bush vs Gore decision thusly: (paraphrased) The majority 5-4 decision will be known as THAT RESOLUTION which altered the character of this court from a judicial body beholden to the Constitution of the United States, revered for two centuries as the guiding beacon for free societies everywhere, to one which responds to power, rather than the rights of the individual. Justice Stevens could not have been more perceptive. In fact, he was judiciously prescient, to which the current Court attests. Justices Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas comprise the most anti-American Court majority in over a century and further, they also represent a majority Court for the suspect "Federalist Society" (interestingly, the present Solicitor General of the United States is Jewish Elena Kagan, whose successful appointment to the Supreme Court would grant that so called "Federalist" group, a six-three Court majority).
HOST CHARLIE ROSE: Justice John Paul Stevens today announced his retirement from the Supreme Court. He had been on the court 34 years. He was known as the leader of the liberal wing. He is the fourth longest serving justice in U.S. history. He was appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford, but he was hardly beholden to conservatives. The New York Times wrote that he may be the last justice from a time when ability and independence rather than perceived ideology were viewed as a crucial qualification for seat on the court.
He dissented in the famous case of Bush versus Gore saying "although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear, it is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."
Today speaking from the Rose Garden, President Obama praised Justice Stevens' contribution to the court.
[BEGIN VIDEO CLIP]
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: He has stood as an impartial guardian of the law. He has worn the judicial robe with honor and humility. He has applied the Constitution and the laws of the land with fidelity and restraint. He will soon turn 90 this month but he leaves his position at the top of his game. His leadership will be sorely missed.
[END VIDEO CLIP]
HOST: The president also said that the search for successor had begun.
[BEGIN VIDEO CLIP]
BARACK OBAMA: While we cannot replace Justice Stevens' experience or wisdom, I will seek someone in the coming weeks with similar qualities. An independent mind, a record of excellence, an integrity, a fierce dedication to the rule of law, and a keen understanding of how the law affects the daily lives of the American people. It will also be someone who like Justice Stevens knows that in a democracy powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens.
[END VIDEO CLIP]
HOST: Joining me now is Professor Jamal Greene. He teaches constitutional law at Columbia Law School. He also previously clerked for Justice Stevens. I'm pleased to have him here on this program. Tell me about Justice Stevens.
JAMAL GREENE: Justice Stevens is an amazing person. He is from a different era. And I think you get that sense the second you meet him. He has a certain gentility about him, a certain -- just basic decency that I think is -- is -- tends to be lost these days. And just in terms of his jurisprudence, I think your intro was quite right that he is -- he is an independent thinker. I think, you know, he's talked of as the liberal lion on the court, the liberal icon on the court, but he really does, I think, approach each case on a case-by-case basis. I mean he really does have an independent streak.
HOST: He had an influence beyond one vote.
GREENE: I think so. I think that's absolutely. He has been on the court for 34 years. And I think even some of the conservatives on the court are able to respect that. There is a very strong norm of seniority on the court, and he is the most senior justice by a country mile. And just the kind of institutional knowledge he has is respected by judges on both sides of the court. And of course all the current kind of liberal block of the court, where we are talking about Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer, Justice Sotomayor-- these are the last three appointees to the court, so they are the most -- most junior members at the court. They really look up to him I think as someone who is a real leader.
HOST: How will he be missed mostly?
GREENE: You know, I think this is actually going to be a little bit of inside baseball. I actually think one of the real serious ways in which he will be missed is the cert process. This is the process where the court decides which cases it is going to accept and Justice Stevens, as -- he and now Justice Alito are the only two justices who are not part of a pool where all their clerks -- all the clerks for the other justices are in the pool -- decide or they write memos for each of the cases that -- where people are applying to get their cases heard at the court.
And Justice Stevens and Justice Alito are actually the only justices who read the -- whose chambers read each of the petitions himself. And one of the things that it does, it actually gives you an independent mind about each of the petitions. And I actually think, you know, even apart from his jurisprudence, which I think is something that is going to be missed in the court, I actually think a lot of the behind-the-scenes goings-on at the court in terms of how cases get accepted is one of the ways in which he actually -- his absence will be felt quite strongly.
HOST: In terms of his jurisprudence--
GREENE: Yes.
HOST: -- where were his passions, for what issues?
GREENE: Certainly national security issues, terrorism cases. He is a World War II veteran. He was a law clerk to Wiley Rutledge, who was a major dissenter in some of the cases from World War II involving detention of what we now call enemy combatants. And I think that experience had a profound effect on him.
He has a basic sense of justice. He thinks that his job is to have a basic sense of justice. And those cases present issues of justice in the starkest possible terms. Right, these are not sympathetic characters we're talking about. But he's able to see through that. And I think he really does have a passion for those cases in part because of the way his Experiences have informed his jurisprudence.
HOST: What are the three or four cases that he wrote that were most renowned in which he wrote the majority opinion?
GREENE: Over the long career, 34 years, I think you have to say the Hamdan decision--
HOST: Yes. Exactly.
GREENE: -- which is a recent -- recent decision involving the ability of the president to establish military commissions without congressional approval. And the opinion basically says, you know, you need to get Congress' backing here, it's a separation of powers type opinion.
The opinion that gets cited the most, the most cited opinion written by Justice Stevens by far is his opinion in Chevron, which is an administrative law case, which tells us what the basic standard of review is when an agency -- an administrative agency is interpreting a federal statute, so that is a major opinion he's written.
A third -- a third case, you know, he's actually known for writing a lot of dissenting--
HOST: I was going to say that -- what are the dissents, you know?
GREENE: And so he wrote a powerful dissent of justice term in Citizens United, which is the case involving corporate campaign contributions, where the court says the first -- the corporations have a First Amendment right to engage in election expenditures. He wrote a long dissent in that case. He wrote a dissent a couple of years ago in a case called D.C. versus Heller, a Second Amendment case, big case involving gun rights, the first time the Second Amendment gets interpreted by the court in 60 years.
And he writes a sort of point-by-point rebuttal of Justice Scalia, his long-time antagonist on the court, saying you know, the original understanding of the Second Amendment was actually militia-related, not related to an individual right to bear arms. And so, those are two of certainly most recent opinions he will be remembered for.
HOST: Where was he pronounced in terms of an attitude about government separation of powers, individual liberty?
GREENE: Well, I think one case that really stands out is actually an opinion that he didn't write himself.
HOST: Yes.
GREENE: This is Lawrence versus Texas, which involved the constitutionality of a sodomy statute in Texas. Court overrules a precedent from 17 years ago, called Bowers v. Hardwick. In fact, it's written by Justice Kennedy.
This is one of the ways in which you sort of see Justice Stevens' influence in some of the other justices. Justice Kennedy writes the opinion, but he says, you know, going back to Bowers, Justice Stevens wrote a dissenting opinion, and he quotes from the dissent and says Justice Stevens was right and this should have been the governing law for the last 17 years.
And so, I think that is actually an instance where Justice Kennedy is drawing on the wisdom of Justice Stevens from actually a time before Justice Kennedy is on the court. And indeed, the same passage that's quoted in that opinion is drawn basically from an opinion Justice Stevens wrote in 1975.
HOST: How did he feel about the perception of him as a liberal judge?
GREENE: You know, I think he has always thought of himself as basically a conservative person.
HOST: Yes.
GREENE: And I think that's --
HOST: He's described himself that way in many of his profiles.
GREENE: Yeah, I know. I think that's right. And I think, I don't know that I would say that that is right as a philosophical matter in terms of the jurisprudence of the court. It is right as a matter of, you know, a conservative judge is one that takes each case one at a time. Doesn't approach cases ideologically. And I think that is what he means by conservative.
HOST: Is -- so who is the most likely judge to retire next?
GREENE: I think most people would say Justice Ginsburg.
HOST: Yes.
GREENE: She has had, you know, a history, she has had some bouts with cancer. As far as I know she is -- is very vigorous on the court. So, you know, I don't think that she is -- that, you know, my sense is that she is not particularly eager to leave the court, but if I had to put money on it, that is what I would say.
HOST: I ask the question because constitution lawyers think about these things. What judge, what change, either from retirement or death could shift the balance in the court so that decisions would have a different end?
GREENE: Well, certainly Justice Kennedy would be the first person you think of.
HOST: Right. Yeah.
GREENE: He is the .
HOST: As it was with Justice O'Connor.
GREENE: Absolutely. He's -- he's replaced Justice O'Connor as the swing justice on the court. And the term I clerked on the court was actually the 2006 to 2007 year on the court. Justice Kennedy was never in dissent in a five-four decision. So he's -- in a close case, he's always in the majority or most of the times is in the majority.
So, all these close cases we always hear about, all the close cases that come out -- come up during the confirmation hearings, these are the cases where Justice Kennedy is really deciding which direction the court goes in.
And so he is really the swing justice on the court, although I do think, you know, Justice Stevens as the senior justice of the so-called liberal block, he is the one who assigns opinions to the other justices when he's in the majority. And so the assignment of opinions actually can have an impact on the way an opinion is written and who you actually get to sign on.
You know, if you assign on an opinion to Justice Kennedy and he is kind of on the fence -- you know, he's going to write the opinion in a way that makes sure he stays in the majority. So that is a -- that's a little bit of, you know, the strategy behind opinion assignments.
HOST: Has most of the mystique of the court gone away now that we have had books written by people who've had lots of evidence and testimony from clerks and the like?
GREENE: You know, I think some of it has gone away. Although I think there is a way in which we tend to idealize courts from the past as if there weren't the same kinds of controversies.
The Supreme Court has been the subject of, you know, political controversy for most of its history. And so that's no -- that's no different. And it actually remains the case that if you compare it to the presidency and Congress, you know, more people trust the Supreme Court. More people believe in the Supreme Court, have feelings of goodwill towards the Supreme Court than other political institutions.
So, these, you know, political scientists after Bush v. Gore, which is considered the death knell to Supreme Court independence and integrity, you know, it took a year or two for opinions to go back to where they were before about the court. So I think, you know, relative to other political institutions, the court is actually doing pretty well.
HOST: Thank you.
GREENE: Thank you.
HOST: Pleasure to have you on the program. Jamal Greene is a professor at Columbia University where he teaches Constitutional Law. A graduate of Yale Law School.
- Ethan Bronner N Y Times Israel Followup 3/29/10
"As Michael Young wrote in The Daily Star newspaper of Lebanon, 'More countries than ever before see Israel as the problem.'
He added that the 'hardening perception is that Israel’s irresponsible settlement expansion plan is destroying all prospects for a mutually satisfactory accord with the Palestinians, and that the ensuing instability will harm everyone.'" - Bronner N Y times 3/29/10
[ Further Evidence -
Amy Goodman 4/2/10
"Israel is threatening to launch a new all-out offensive on the Gaza Strip after bombing several areas on Thursday. At least three Palestinian children were wounded in the Israeli strikes. Israel called the attacks a response to Palestinian rocket fire. One Palestinian rocket was fired into Israel earlier in the day, causing no injuries. Critics have warned Israel could be trying to provoke a Palestinian reaction to in turn justify a new assault on Gaza to divert attention from growing US opposition to Israeli settlement expansion on the West Bank. Earlier this week, Israel killed a Palestinian teenager and wounded several others as they took part in a nonviolent demonstration to protest discriminatory land policies. Four Palestinian teenagers were also killed in other Israeli attacks last month. Earlier today, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom warned Israel could launch 'another military operation in the near future.'" - DemocracyNow 4/2/10
And Mr. Remnick has penned "The Bridge", which Frank Rich states "portrays" the President "as steady in his blend of liberal and centrist views." - N Y Times 4/4/10 ]
- Mr. Remnick also writes of "Israeli politics" seen "in atavistic terms", i.e. lacking the characteristic advancement in societal terms [What makes this interesting is that Cox News Service published an article 3/28/10 in which a Southern Legal Resource Center in Atlanta urged self-proclaimed "Confederates" to declare themselves of a race, "Confed Southern Am", in the 2010 Census, i.e. they "won" not "lost" the Civil War, and should be duly recognized as such]. This is of particular interest in that "Charlie" Rose, on Passover 3/30/10, had the peculiar couple Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett reiterating with gusto, the tired diatribe that Iran presents a nuclear threat to the Middle East. .because they're pursuing Nuclear power for electricity(?), while Israel possesses 200+ Nuclear Weapons and refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?
The Mr. Rose's Leveretts remind of a similar, but a truly ghastly political action some nine years ago in which their ethnic brethren in a position of nearly unassailable power in United States law enforcement (Remember J. Edgar Hoover?) proposed an act of unmitigated treachery against the President of the United States William Jefferson Clinton, an esteemed public servant to this day (Read Sidney Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars.").
And all of this is but a component of the most problematic set of circumstances, political and legislative, that any president of this great nation has faced in over a century. God speed, Mr. President.
This President has been equally effective in bringing about far-reaching domestic landmarks - 2010 Health Care Reform.
- The New York Times March 24, 2010 -
The Day After
"It is worth pausing to dwell on what happened in the White House on Tuesday: President Obama, just over a year into a tumultuous presidency in which he was sometimes wrong-footed and often adrift, signed the most momentous social legislation in many years.
The health care reform law is an overdue and vital step in the construction of a social safety net, which began after the Great Depression and slowly moved forward -- often in a bipartisan manner -- until it was interrupted by the Republican Party’s radical antigovernment fervor in the late 20th century.
It was a triumph for Mr. Obama and for the Democratic leadership in Congress. If Mr. Obama draws no other lesson, it is that his early and forceful personal engagement on big issues is indispensable. He waited a perilously long time to exercise his leadership on health care, but when he did, it paid off.
It is important to keep that in mind because Mr. Obama’s victory celebration had barely ended before people were asking, “Now what?” There was speculation, in some quarters, that the energy had been drained out of Mr. Obama and his Congressional allies by the struggle against a Republican Party whose only objective seemed to be to thwart the president, no matter his objective.
But there is important business ahead -- lots of it. And while Mr. Obama deserves a break, he must build on this success, not rest on it.
First and foremost is the economy, specifically the creation of jobs. Mr. Obama offered a budget plan in February that called for cuts in discretionary spending and should have brought major Congressional action on jobs in return. After the Easter break, Congress will likely extend unemployment insurance and offer some fiscal relief to states. That may be enough for the economy to squeak through 2010, but persistently high joblessness is a plague that Congress may not confront in a comprehensive way unless Mr. Obama forces the issue.
He will also have to take the lead in improving the financial regulatory bills moving through Congress. Neither chamber’s version is adequate to fix the problems that led to the financial meltdown, and the banking lobby is working hard to render them even less effective.
Beyond jobs and financial reform -- near-term issues that will bulk large in the midterm elections -- there are longer-term issues. President Obama has promised to reform the country’s education system, and to address climate change and oil dependency by transforming the way Americans produce and use energy. In his campaign, he talked about immigration reform and restoring the rule of law to terrorist detention policies.
These are lofty objectives, and Mr. Obama may not reach them all. But the health care victory shows that big goals can be achieved -- with Mr. Obama’s personal intervention and sustained leadership.
WITH RARE EXCEPTIONS, THE REPUBLICANS ARE NOT GOING TO HELP. ANYONE WHO THINKS OTHERWISE SHOULD CONSIDER WHAT SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN OF ARIZONA SAID ON MONDAY: 'THERE WILL BE NO COOPERATION FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR.'
As shocking as that is from a man who more than once presented himself as a candidate for president, it sums up the political reality that Mr. Obama faces. Still, he should be able to sell the public at the very least on creating jobs and restraining a rapacious financial industry. The nation’s well-being depends on it." - Editorial N Y Times 3/24/10
- The American public voice -
To the Editor:
David Brooks bemoans runaway spending and questions the Democrats' ability to constrain it. But wasn't it the last Democratic president who put us on a path toward balanced budgets? And the last Republican president, working much of the time with a Republican-controlled Congress, who exploded the deficit and debt?
Mr. Brooks notes that the health care bill ''feels like the end of something.'' Maybe that's true for those who take excellent insurance plans for granted, but for many Americans this is a major step toward the most fundamental form of equality: equal access to quality health care.
Mr. Brooks is right to praise America's history of entrepreneurial freedom. Maybe now more Americans will take such capitalistic risks, knowing that they can take health insurance with them. - Bill Dawers Savannah 3/23/10
To the Editor:
The March 23 columns ''An Absence of Class,'' by Bob Herbert, and ''The Democrats Rejoice,'' by David Brooks, were a study in contrast.
Mr. Herbert rightly denounced the recent shameful and despicable conduct of Republicans and the Tea Partiers as the vote for the health care bill approached. Mr. Brooks, instead, attempted to make the case that Republicans were responsible for the economic vigor of our nation.
While many of those who owned the railroads and steel mills were doubtless Republican, it was the average Democratic laborer who drove the spikes to lay the rails and worked the mills. - Lewis J. Hardee Jr. New York 3/23/10
To the Editor:
The passing of the health care bill is neither a softhearted, softheaded ''gift of charity,'' nor the end of the liberal agenda, as David Brooks suggests, but a solid and rational basis for a new beginning.
For too long, Americans have been drunk and in denial on the magic elixir called the free marketplace. The real costs of health care were deflected by denying insurance coverage for many of the sick and the dying. As a society, we looked the other way.
Now, by outlawing such strategies, we will have to face the true costs of health care, which will probably go up, as Mr. Brooks notes. Instead of strangling us, as Mr. Brooks contends, this will stimulate the needed reforms for economic and health care efficiencies that were avoided for so long in our fog of denial. As they say in treatment of alcoholism, the first step is admitting the need for help. - Larry Deblinger Nyack, N.Y. 3/23/10
ALERT 3/15/10!
- Israeli Envoy Sees "Historic Crisis With United States" -
"The 'HISTORIC PROPORTIONS CRISIS' comments were attributed to Envoy (Israeli Ambassador to the United States) Michael Oren who clashed with Netanyahu's attempts to play down tensions with United States President Barack Obama's administration." - Reuters 3/15/10
- Above stiffed by our NBCGeneral Electric, Les Moonves' CBS & Disney ABC (?).
- Even David Brooks is aboard, with his 3/16/10 column in The New York Times, entitled "The Spirit of Sympathy":
"Group-to-group relations are more often marked by calculation, rivalry and coldness. Members of one group sometimes see members of another group as less than human: Nazi and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi, Sunni and Shiite, Israeli and Palestinian."
- And Senator Joseph I. Lieberman: “Let’s cut the family (?) fighting,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut. “It’s unnecessary; it’s destructive of our shared (?) national interest (?). It’s time to lower voices, to get over the family (?) feud between the U.S. and Israel. It just doesn’t serve anybody’s interests but our enemies’.”
- “The heart of the matter is whether the proximity talks are going to be productive, in the sense of opening a corridor to direct negotiations that will lead to a peace agreement,” said Martin Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel. - If Martin Indyk is involved we're in trouble!
The timing of the dispute could not be more awkward for the administration, coming a week before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee(AIPAC), the most influential pro-Israel lobbying group, meets in Washington. Mr. Netanyahu and Mrs. Clinton are both scheduled to speak to THE GROUP, WHICH HAS CONDEMNED THE WHITE HOUSE’S TOUGH STANCE. - Landler & Bronner N Y Times 3/16/10
- BACKGROUND -
To the Editor:
In 2001, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that the site of the Al Aqsa Mosque situated in Arab East Jerusalem is forever Israel; the U.S. was silent. In 2003, an Israeli bulldozer crushed and killed a peaceful American protester in Gaza; the U.S. refused to investigate. In 2006, Israel used illegal weaponry (much supplied by the U.S.) and disproportionate force in escalating a border incident with Lebanon into a war; the U.S. defended Israel. In 2009, Israel bombed a confined and virtually defenseless population in Gaza; the U.S. rejected the critical assessment of a world-class jurist and every NGO in the region. On March 9, Israel announced that it would continue to dispossess Palestinians of East Jerusalem and replace them with Jewish settlers. What will we do now?
What will it take for the United States to quit financing Israel's illegal and dangerous behavior and condemn it? - ESTHER NELSON Portland Ore Newhouse West Oregonian 3/21/10
- Immediate Background -
- Israeli Military Kills 4 Palestinian Teens -
Amy Goodman: In Israel and the Occupied Territories, four Palestinian teenagers have been killed and several more wounded in Israeli military attacks on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. On Saturday, two Palestinians, aged fifteen and seventeen, were shot dead near the West Bank city of Nablus. The Israeli military says it fired rubber bullets, but Palestinian doctors say the teens were killed by live ammunition. One of the victims was shot seven times. The killings came shortly after Palestinians held a protest against a Jewish settlement that’s been accused of trying to steal a vital Palestinian water well in the village of Iraq Burin. Another two Palestinians were shot dead the next day, also near Nablus. The Israeli military said they had tried to attack an Israeli soldier. Both victims were nineteen years old. Meanwhile in Gaza, thirteen Palestinians were wounded on Friday when Israel bombed Gaza’s abandoned international airport. - Amy Goodman 3/22/10
- Israeli PM Vows Ongoing Settlement Expansion -
Amy Goodman: Amidst the attacks on the Occupied Territories, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu renewed his vow to continue expanding settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. Speaking in Jerusalem, Netanyahu said he had sent the Obama administration a letter specifying his refusal to accept their call for a settlement freeze.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Our policy on Jerusalem is the same policy followed by all Israeli governments over the past forty-two years, and it has not changed. As far as we are concerned, building in Jerusalem is the same as building in Tel Aviv. These are things that we made clear to the US administration.”
Netanyahu’s vow to continue settlement building comes two days after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised him for offering what she called “useful and productive” proposals on resolving the dispute over Israeli settlements. Neither the Obama administration nor the Israeli government has released details of Netanyahu’s proposals.
- Netanyahu, Obama to Meet at White House -
Netanyahu is scheduled to meet with President Obama at the White House on Tuesday ahead of an appearance at the annual conference of the pro-Israeli government lobby AIPAC. Clinton is also scheduled to speak. Back on the West Bank, Palestinian lawmaker and physician Mustafa Barghouti said Netanyahu is deliberately undermining any remote prospects for peace.
Mustafa Barghouti: “Today Netanyahu did two major provocations. First of all, his army executed four young Palestinian civilians for no reason. They killed them in cold blood and with high-velocity bullets. And second, he declared that he’s going to continue settlement activities in East Jerusalem and in other parts of the Occupied Territories. This is a clear-cut provocation. His aim is to destroy any possibility for peace, any possibility for a Palestinian state and any possibility for a solution based on two-state solution.”
- UN Secretary-General Calls for End to Gaza Blockade, “Illegal” Settlement Building -
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has renewed calls for an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip and all settlement building on the West Bank. Speaking in Ramallah on Saturday, Ban said every Israeli settlement is illegal.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: “The world has condemned Israel’s settlement expansion plans in East Jerusalem. Let us be clear: all settlement activities is illegal anywhere in occupied territory, and this must stop. The Quartet has reaffirmed it, that position.”
The next day, Ban visited the Gaza Strip, where he said the US-backed Israeli blockade has caused “unacceptable suffering.” His visit followed the release of a statement by the Quartet of the US, Russia, European Union and UN calling for an end to Israeli settlement activity and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state within the next two years. - DemocracyNow 3/22/10
- US, ISRAEL AT IMPASSE IN SETTLEMENT DISPUTE -
The US and Israeli governments appear to remain at an impasse after two days of talks on Israeli settlement expansion in the Occupied Territories. Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu extended a stay in Washington to return to the White House on Wednesday. But Netanyahu has refused US calls for a settlement freeze, and his government even announced a new East Jerusalem settlement expansion right before the latest talks. Despite objecting to the Israeli plans, the Obama administration has not threatened any punitive measures, including the withholding of billions of dollars in US aid. At the United Nations, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reaffirmed his stance that Israeli settlements are illegal.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: “I made it clear that all settlement activity is illegal and that inserting settlers into Palestinian communities in Jerusalem is particularly troubling. This leads to tensions and undermines prospects for addressing the final status of Jerusalem. Yesterday’s announcement that final approval has been given to build twenty settlement units in Sheikh Jarrah IS UNACCEPTABLE.” - Amy Goodman DemocracyNow 3/25/10
- Informative Interlude -
"ILLEGITIMATE POLITICS
To the Editor:
In his review of Ken Gormley’s “Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr” (Feb. 21), Richard Berke slips a major historical distortion into an otherwise fair-minded piece. Berke writes: “In retrospect, it is tempting to see the Clinton impeachment as having ushered in the feral reality of politics today. . . . In reality, the case belongs on the continuum that began with the toppling of Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, continued through the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill fracas and was followed by the contested 2000 election.”
In other words, the Democrats are to blame for the ugliness of recent years -- the Clinton impeachment; the thuggish mob atmosphere during the attempted Florida recount; the poisonous, violent rhetoric of some of the recent Tea Party protests -- all of them Republican or conservative phenomena.
Here Berke is lazily accepting what is little more than a Republican political talking point devoid of any real historical substance. Of the 151 nominations between this nation’s founding and the present, 28 nominations, nearly 20 percent, have been rejected, withdrawn or postponed in the face of opposition. The Senate’s responsibility for exercising “advice and consent” on Supreme Court nominees is a constitutionally mandated responsibility and one it has always exercised. Some nomination fights (like Bork’s) have hinged on ideological conflicts, as was the case when Republicans in the Senate mounted a filibuster to prevent the liberal Abe Fortas from becoming chief justice. Other fights (like Thomas’s) have centered on the lack of judicial qualifications, as was the case with Clement Haynsworth, whom Nixon named to replace Fortas on the court. To suggest, as Berke does, that the Bork nomination was an unprecedented event that led naturally to the Clinton impeachment is a plain historical falsehood.
The Clinton impeachment was a tear in the national social contract, something closer to a coup d’état, an attempt to unseat an elected president and, as Berke correctly points out, an event that almost certainly cost Al Gore the 2000 election. It represented something entirely different and troubling: the denial, on the part of one-half of the country, of the essential legitimacy of the other half to hold power, even if it does so with a clear majority. Despite the very real doubts about the justice and accuracy of the 2000 presidential election, Democrats, starting with a statesmanlike Al Gore, never questioned George W. Bush’s right to govern, and while deploring many of his policies never challenged his right to pursue his legislative agenda. The current wave of right-wing populism -- the “birthers,” the modern-day secessionists, the Tea Partiers who espouse “nullification” (the right to disregard and oppose, even with violence, laws they consider unconstitutional), the conspiracy theorists who insist that President Obama is plotting to destroy the American system (a belief Republicans have done much to foment and little to discourage) -- are based on that same fundamental denial of the legitimacy of elected leaders with whom they disagree." - ALEXANDER STILLE N Y Times Book Review 3/14/10
The writer is the San Paolo professor of international journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Your voice can be heard. It can make a difference. The incompetent Richard Berke is no longer an Assistant Managing Editor of the N Y Times.
- MORE BACKGROUND - Past & Present
On the PBS NewsHour 3/23/10 Jim Lehrer conducted such a pro-Republican interview on the historic health care reform legislation that President Barack Obama had just managed to pass, an historic piece of governance that had defied socially responsible American presidents for over a century, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt; Mr. Lehrer's lengthy interview with John Sidney McCain III's Arizona colleague Senator Jon Kyl is inexplicable, except as seen by the color photo centered on Page 1 of the 3/23/10 The New York Times, focusing this message, in Hebrew: "Warning! A P. L. O. (Palestinian Liberation Organization) is in the White House." And Mr. Lehrer had NO Democrat representing President Obama and his administration's position in favor of this monumental accomplishment for us, the American people (we would remind our Israeli friends that this is a democracy, the United States of America, not the apartheid State of Israel.).
Notation - It is true that the next evening he had Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, but as Mr. Lehrer makes clear weekly, conducting the David Brooks & Mark Shields political exchanges, Mr. Lehrer's sentiments lie with his political colleague Brooks (Mr. Lehrer is a product of Texas Journalism!), in spite of the inanity, i.e. superficiality, of his discourse, exhibited several times weekly in the N Y Times. The absurdity of the arguments Mr. Brooks makes, in person and in his columns, reminds of the half-hour conversation of "Charlie" Rose and the Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren. Wordy in the extreme on Mr. Oren's part, but much approved by Mr. Rose, in that the both of them intend to obfuscate what is the actual intent of the criminal government of "Bibi" Netanyahu - to occupy what is left of value in Palestine.
Notably, there are other instances in which the State of Israel has inflicted damage on the United States - The Attack on the U.S.S. Liberty! And including, the morass of patently anti-Democratic and pro-Israeli propaganda, particularly on the radio dial, which has greatly expanded its Fox News outlets {Remember. Roger Ailes created the devastating Rush Limbaugh phenomena [It was this poison which ended Bill Clinton's health care reform effort in 1994!] and was a major factor enabling George Walker Bush to steal the 2000 presidential election from Albert Gore [and it was "W's" father who put the extraordinarily unqualified Clarence Thomas on the United States Supreme Court (And placed Dan Quayle a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, almost as vicious a selection as John Sidney McCain III's haphazard choice of Sarah Palin!)}. Had enough?
- First we have the position (if you can find one) of Rose & Oren (can you recall Rosen & Weissman?) nationally broadcast by "Charlie" 3/19/10
OREN: It's been an - it's been an interesting week. The United States and Israel have engaged in an intensive - negotiations. The Israeli government has met in marathon sessions to address some of the issues raised by Secretary of State Clinton in her phone call, the previous week, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and we've seen how, once again, how two friends (?) in a very close alliance can clarify differences and move forward, as you mentioned, quoting the secretary's comment. The prime minister discussed with the secretary ways in which - all parties, not just Israel, the Palestinians as well, can embark on new confidence-building measures to get these talks up and running.
That's what we want, Charlie. We want to sit opposite of table, just like you're sitting with me, opposite the Palestinians and negotiate peace.
ROSE: But the impression is, I mean, that this phone call was clearly to say: we're not happy with the way things are and we don't think you're helping with the peace process (Really, "Charlie"?).
OREN: Well, our position on Jerusalem, which is the media background to this issue, has been long established. It's not Prime Minister Netanyahu's position; it's a position that goes back to 1967. It was the position of Golda Meir. It was the position of Yitzhak Rabin (Oh? Netanyahu's virtual agent Yigal Amir killed him!). And that is that Jerusalem is the undivided capital of Israel (That's odd. Palestinians have inhabited Arab East Jerusalem for centuries!). It has the same status under Israeli law that Tel Aviv has or that Haifa has. And we have never, in any - in any way dissembled our position; it's been made clear. At the same time, the Netanyahu government has gone further than many Israeli governments; it's taken the unprecedented step, and that was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's word, unprecedented step of unilaterally freezing new construction projects in the West Bank settlements, that's outside of Jerusalem (As everyone in the world knows the issue is Palestine's capital in Arab East Jerusalem!).
Fortunately, the welcomed antithesis of these Hucksters for Netanyahu (otherwise known as the "Huns") is available, in the person of the indomitable Norman Finkelstein! Mr. Finkelstein seems to have full command of the facts, i.e. the historical record. You be the judge.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now here in studio by scholar and writer Norman Finkelstein. He’s author of a number of books on the Israel-Palestine conflict. His latest is being released this week. It’s called This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion. Norman Finkelstein is also the subject of a new documentary called American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein.
Norman, welcome to Democracy Now!
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: First, respond to what, well, both Secretary of State Clinton and the Israeli Prime Minister said, Secretary of State Clinton actually criticizing Israel. Did that surprise you?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: It didn’t really surprise me. I think one has to look at the framework of the criticism. There is an international law ruling or opinion on the question of East Jerusalem. In July 2004, the highest judicial body in the world, the International Court of Justice, it rendered what it called its advisory opinion, and it stated unequivocally that East Jerusalem is--and I’m using its words--“occupied Palestinian territory.” It’s not a question here of conflicting claims to Jerusalem, let alone an Israeli exclusive right to the East Jerusalem. The law is clear: it’s occupied Palestinian territory, because it was acquired in the course of a war, in the course of the June 1967 war. And under international law, it’s inadmissible to acquire territory by war.
I would want to add that’s the position of all human rights organizations, and it was the position of the Goldstone report. The Goldstone report repeatedly refers to East Jerusalem as occupied Palestinian territory. And Mr. Goldstone, by his own reckoning, is a Zionist, a lover of Israel. But he also respects the law, and the law is clear.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, let’s talk about the Goldstone report. You write about this extensively in the epilogue of your book. Israel and the US have both rejected that the war crimes allegations in the report. Talk about what the report is, who put together, Judge Goldstone, and what the reaction from the US and Israel has been.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: The Goldstone report was mandated by the United Nations Human Rights Council. Richard Goldstone, the distinguished international jurist, led the mission. And he--at the end, they published a quite substantial report that ran to some 500 pages, 550 pages. It covered a lot of ground. And it has to be said, it was quite devastating in its indictment of Israel. It concluded that Israel used a disproportionate force to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.
Well, Israel was outraged by the report, across the spectrum, not just the right wing, but people like Shimon Peres, who’s said to be a dove. He called Richard Goldstone a “small man” who knows nothing about international law. Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, said the Goldstone report is worse than the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and worse than Ahmadinejad. And the reaction was quite similar in the United States.
And Goldstein replied after the criticism in the US. He said, “OK, you say the report is deeply flawed. Show me where.” And to this day--and I’ve read all the critiques. There have been three major ones, one by this Israeli and American professor Moshe Halbertal, there was one by Professor Dershowitz of Harvard, and the Israelis put out just last week a 500-page rebuttal. And I tried honestly to look at it objectively, but they were very insubstantial responses. I was quite impressed by how well Goldstone has held up to the criticism. It was a very careful, cautious and judicious report. - DemocracyNow 3/23/10
- CONTINUED -
Zionist or American
A segment from Tom Friedman's "Let's Fight Over A Big Plan" in 3/17/10 N Y Times at first glance intrigues, but it's just a ploy to pull us in. A typical opening sales pitch. He then channels a Gidi Grinstein, president of one of the "Premier Israeli policy research centers". Surprise! Oh, yes. "Iran's strategy. .of asymmetric warfare by Hezbollah from South Lebanon and Hamas's from Gaza." Dare we analyze? Hezbollah counters Israel's war AGAINST South Lebanon, and Israel (12/26/08 - 1/18/09) MASSACRES Palestinians penned up in Gaza!! And respected international jurist, Judge Richard Goldstone, A ZIONIST, nails Israelis for WAR CRIMES, and Israelis call him a "self-hating Jew". Friedman has this so anti-Palestinian skewed, that it is clear that he's become a hand-maiden of this essentially criminally insane "Bibi" Netanyahu! Harsh charge, but appropriate. The Israelis killed innocent women and children, and with white phosphorous munitions. That's a war crime!
What is this report all about?
Report: US Sending “Bunker Buster” Bombs to Diego Garcia
"A Scottish newspaper is reporting the US is shipping hundreds of powerful “bunker buster” bombs overseas in preparation for a possible attack on Iran. Citing details of a shipping contract reportedly signed in January, the Sunday Herald says the US is sending nearly 400 BLU-110 and BLU-117 bombs to the occupied Indian Ocean military outpost of Diego Garcia." - Amy Goodman DemocracyNow 3/17/10
- A more balanced view, without the Zionist bias of Ms. Grinstein, the ubiquitous David Brooks or Thomas L. Friedman, is provided by Mark Perry, author of "Talking to Terrorists", which may be as valuable as James Bamford's A Pretext For War: 9/11, Iraq, and the abuse of America's intelligence agencies.
Veteran military and foreign affairs analyst and author Mark Perry reports that CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus dispatched a team of senior military officers in January to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perry reports that the briefers told Mullen that “Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing US standing in the region.”
Guest: Mark Perry, veteran military and foreign affairs analyst and author. His latest article in Foreign Policy is The Petraeus Briefing. He is author of the new book Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with its Enemies.
MARK PERRY: Well, Israel is not our only ally in the region. We have very close and strong ties with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, with all of these Arab countries. And we have troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. And if you go on the ground in these countries and you talk to the people in Iraq and Afghanistan, they’re concerned about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I mean, it’s really--it’s hard for us to believe, but if you spend any time in the region--I spent twenty years there--this is number one on everyone’s agenda. Not the war on terror, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
So it’s true. If we can solve this problem, if we can push both sides to the table, if we can come up with some kind of a solution, this helps us immensely on the war on terror. If it doesn’t, it’s another excuse for the terrorists, the Jacobins, the hardliners, the let’s-burn-it-down-and-start-over crowd to really go up against us. This is an arrow in their quiver, and we should be able to take it away.
ANJALI KAMAT: Mark Perry, your book is Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with its Enemies. What’s your assessment of the prospect for a peace process that does not include Hamas?
MARK PERRY: I think it will fail. Hamas won the January 2000 elections in the Palestinian Authority, the most transparent, honest, fair, open elections in the history of the Middle East. They didn’t win by a little bit. They won by a lot. They retain enormous credibility inside the Palestinian territories. And they can disrupt a peace process that only includes one group of Palestinians. They’re not--this isn’t a group of graduates from a charm school. These are tough-minded political people. But they’re committed to their people, they are committed to their cause, they’re committed to democracy. We should bring them into the peace process. We should induce them to sit down honestly. They’re willing to do that. They’ve expressed it many times. I don’t think, without them, that there’s much prospect for success.
AMY GOODMAN: You were once an adviser to Yasser Arafat. How have things changed or not changed since then?
MARK PERRY: That’s a good question. It’s interesting. You know, Yasser Arafat had enormous prestige and stature among his own people. He’s the one man who could have brought a peace process home, with a willing partner, like Yitzhak Rabin. If Rabin had lived and if Rabin had remained prime minister, with Arafat, I think that this would have been done by now. I know we had a problem at Camp David, but that was with Ehud Barak. With Yitzhak Rabin and with Yasser Arafat, this problem wouldn’t be there. I just--I have that confidence. He had--he could make compromises that no other Palestinian leader could, and he was willing to do it if he got his minimal requirements met. At Camp David, he didn’t. It’s a tragedy that we were so close and weren’t able to really bring this thing home. And it’s going to be more difficult now, and it’ll be more difficult as time goes on, if we don’t press both parties right now.
ANJALI KAMAT: But both parties in Israel, including under Rabin’s government, continue to build settlements. As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said, building--every government since 1967 has built settlements around Jerusalem and in the West Bank.
MARK PERRY: Yes, but Rabin had some principles that Arafat and the American administration agreed to. And that was no surprises. When the Vice President of the United States lands in Israel for a visit of friendship, don’t surprise him with 1,600 units. Make a phone call. That’s all Arafat and the administration here in Washington at the time required: no surprises. You know, when you have a person of Vice President Biden’s prestige and stature from an ally, your strongest and best friend in the world, and you insult him and humiliate him like this, it causes enormous problems. We have enemies in the world who don’t like us who don’t do this. This is supposed to be an ally of ours. I think that this is--there’s a sense that the tenor has changed here, that Israel believes it can push back on us, that we’re an ally of theirs, not the other way around. And that fundamental formula has to change. This was really a shocking thing that happened, and I think it has to be rolled back.
ANJALI KAMAT: Finally, how hard do you think the US can push? Just a few months ago, the Obama administration basically agreed that the Palestinians should agree to continued expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem as a precondition for talks.
AMY GOODMAN: Unfortunately, we’re going to have to leave that question, Anjali, for the next time we speak with Mark Perry, because we’ve just lost the satellite feed.
A REMINDER 1/27/10 - The world is being subjected to a bloody scam (and surely that includes Iraq), a conspiracy that took root in Israel on November fourth of 1995 with the assassination of soldier, statesman Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a murder carried out by an acolyte, Yigal Amir, of the present (and infamous) Prime Minister, Zionist Benjamin Netanyahu. A scurvy international band of activists from, primarily the United States (Richard Perle to Douglas Feith), but also Europe (Bernard-Henri Levy), assuming the benign pseudonym of "Neo-Cons", developed their strategy under the title "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (Israel)", the first step of which was the elimination of Saddam Hussein.
[[ The particulars of this abominable scheme were first outlined in James Bamford's groundbreaking 2004 publication A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies, and Michiko Kakutani's insightful 6/18/04 N Y Times book review. ]]
Horrifically, "A Clean Break" refers to the murder of Prime Minister Rabin, and, as he would have foreseen, reprises to multiple killings globally, including their ultimate targets, Palestinians and Iranians, but, along the way, Muslims of every caste; of course the key element of this treachery, managed by AIPAC and its fellow conspirators, the key element the blood and treasure of the United States and its innocent civilians/citizens, as in 9/11 and its aftermath.
Although the brilliant Tom Toles cartoon on the Republican wrecking of Washington (an easy scroll) says much about the destructive nature of that political party (The Party of Lincoln? Where did that offensive affront originate? Alabama? South Carolina?) recent detail provides a specific particular.
On 12/12/00 "Chief Justice" Bill Rehnquist led a 5-4 United States Supreme Court coup d'etat ["A sudden and decisive action in politics, esp. one resulting in a change of government (And what a destructive change!)"]. . Rehnquist joined by Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Sandy O'Connor and Clarence Thomas, reversing the presidential victory of Albert Gore Jr.! Fast forward ten years and George W. Bush's two Court appointees, John Roberts Jr., named "Chief Justice", joined by "Justice" Sam Alito, joined, of course, by Messrs. Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas (Did Thomas perform the "honors" at one of Rush Limbaugh's weddings?) and these five "Reinterpreted" campaign finance law, which had held firm for over a century, essentially enacting another coup d'etat, this time authorizing corporations, foreign and domestic, unlimited campaign spending in electoral politics!!! That Bush presidency [The earlier one had placed Clarence Thomas. . on the Supreme Court of the United States, and placed Dan Quayle a heart beat away from the Oval Office (Not unlike John Sidney McCain III's effort to do the same for Sarah Palin!!!)]. Had enough? Support President Barack Obama!
- Here The New York Times 1/22/10 response to the junior Roberts' gift to major corporations, foreign and domestic -
With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.
Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.
As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.
The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)
The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections -- the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.
In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.
This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.
Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.
The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.
The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.
After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.
Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.
These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy." - Editorial New York Times 1/22/10
Regarding the above would you suspect that Les Moonves' CBS would provide an in-depth and forthright analysis of this John G. Roberts Jr. 3/9/10 assault on the President of the United States who, incidentally, is a Constitutional Law scholar, in fact, has taught Constitutional Law! Chief Justice Roberts Jr. delivered his attack (of course, endorsed by Clarence Thomas) to a plant in his audience at the University of Alabama Law School. We recognize that Alabama fields great football (Joe Willie Namath comes to mind, but he was from Pennsylvania!), but Constitutional Law? That's ridiculous, counter intuitive in the extreme! Regarding Katie Couric (introduced every night by the great Morgan Freeman, but NEVER acknowledged by Ms. Couric) and Jan Crawford Greenberg's 3/10/10 analysis of Justice Roberts Jr. and President Obama's differences on this catastrophic Court decision. Did Bush vs Gore set a precedent? Is that what this is about? You be the judge.
Battle of the Branches
CBS Evening News
3/10/2010 18:33:00
NEWSCASTER KATIE COURIC: In their infinite wisdom, the founding fathers created three branches of government so there would be a balance of power. But now a battle has broken out among them. Jan Crawford is our chief legal correspondent. And, Jan, it all began on a cold night in January when all three branches were gathered under one roof.
REPORTER: That's exactly right, Katie. The president threw the first verbal punch. In his State of the Union speech he broke with tradition and lashed out at the Supreme Court for its recent decision that said corporations and unions could spend unlimited money on political ads.
PRESIDENT OBAMA IN FILE VIDEO FROM JANUARY 27, 2010: With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the flood gates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.
REPORTER: Justice Samuel Alito, also breaking with tradition, mouthed his disagreement. Yesterday the Chief Justice, responding to a student's question at the University of Alabama law school answered back.
JOHN ROBERTS, CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES: The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court, according to the requirements of protocol, has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling. To the extent the State of the Union has degenerated into a political pep rally, I'm not sure why we're there.
REPORTER: But today Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made it personal. [Statement of Harry Reid shown on screen.]
Do you think John Roberts knows or cares how people get elected? And, he said, the court is out of touch. I think we've had enough of them. I think what we need are people on that bench who have been legislators, people who are lawyers, people who are academics.
Now, these exchanges are extraordinary, but I think most Americans would not agree with Senator Reid's point that what the Supreme Court needs is legislators as justices. The court is one of the most respected institutions. It's got 61 percent approval ratings. Congress's approval ratings are now at 15 percent. Katie.
NEWSCASTER: And, Jan, I know this is unprecedented, but it also seems so, you know, unseemly.
REPORTER: Katie, I mean, to have this kind of real-time back and forth exchanges between the President, the Majority Leader and the Chief Justice is incredibly unusual and rare. You just don't see this kind of thing happen. Now, legal experts say the Chief Justice was not really out of line. He said he had no problem with President Obama criticizing the court, but it was just the venue that he was taking issue with.
NEWSCASTER: All right. Jan Crawford at the Supreme Court tonight. Jan, thanks so much. - CBS 3/10/10
- Additional material facts which the current corporate Media/Press refuses to cover! -
Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board 1987-2006 Alan Greenspan's promotion of "DERIVATIVES"
- The 3/16/03 Israeli Caterpillar military bulldozer killing of Rachel Corrie -
"Rachel Corrie, a twenty-three-year-old student from Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza seven years ago as she stood before a Palestinian home facing demolition. Today, a trial opens in Israel in a lawsuit brought by Corrie’s family against the Israeli government. The eyewitness testimony is expected to challenge Israel’s version of events with evidence that she was clearly visible to the soldiers, standing before the bulldozer in her florescent orange jacket. We spend the hour with Rachel Corrie’s family: her father Craig, her mother Cindy, and her sister Sarah." - Amy Goodman DemocracyNow 3/10/10
- Also on Amy Goodman's War & Peace -
"Israel Announces Major Settlement Expansion Amid Biden Visit
The Israeli government has unveiled plans for a new round of settlement construction in occupied East Jerusalem. Israel says it will build over 1,600 new homes in the settlement of Ramat Shlomo. The announcement came just as Vice President Joe Biden is in Israel to promote US-backed peace talks. In a statement, Biden said he 'condemned' the Israeli plan, adding, 'The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel.' Biden released the statement after attending a state dinner where he publicly praised Israeli officials. Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev defended the move on the grounds Israel doesn’t consider East Jerusalem to be occupied territory.
Mark Regev: 'In order to get the peace process back on track, this Israeli government, under Prime Minister Netanyahu, has gone further than any previous Israeli government in placing restrictions on growth in the settlements. But we have to be clear, from the point of view of Israel, Jerusalem is not a settlement. It’s our capital and will remain as such.'
Biden is visiting Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah today. Ahead of his visit, the Palestinian Authority official for Jerusalem, Adnan Al-Husseini, said Israel had announced the settlement construction to undermine peace talks.
Adnan Al-Husseini: 'The Israeli government took the decision to destruct any attempt for this peace, and this letter should be taken by the international community and the United States that they are just wasting their time. There will be no hope, there will be no result, for these negotiations.'"
- "NY Activists Protest Israeli Military Chief -
Meanwhile, here in New York, hundreds of people rallied outside a Manhattan hotel Tuesday to protest a fundraiser held by the group Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. The head of the Israeli military, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, was a featured speaker. Israeli activist Matan Cohen of the group Anarchists Against the Wall called for ending US aid to Israel.
Matan Cohen: 'We’re protesting here today at a fundraiser dinner for the Israeli army. We’re here to send a clear message to the Israeli government that its impunity has ended, that the world is watching, and that we’ll no longer stand idle as its policies of apartheid and occupation continue. We’re here to say clearly that the aid to Israel should be stopped and that the United States should no longer fund Israel’s crimes. Enough is enough.'" - Amy Goodman DemocracyNow
The insidious nature of this Israeli web of deceit in the Middle East, and in Washington, and its key players, has become more clear as its polluted character becomes more evident and the broad-based ethnic-controlled Media/Press reveals its willingness to support the pernicious Netanyahu Israel.
What has been lost of late is the recognition of the reappearance of the mythological demon Hydra, funded by the United States, the many headed serpent, in today's world the Netanyahu-led, evil State of Israel. Its background included, oft forgotten, the manipulation by the United States which generated the bloody conflict of Sunni-empowered Saddam Hussein, a ruthless dictator, against the relatively peaceful Shi'ite-led Iran, a conflict which benefited only Israel, and U.S. "Defense" corporations.
- And has the toxicity infiltrated the "very seat of government (J. Edgar Hoover's term)"? We are addressing what transpired in Washington 2/21/10 through 3/7/10 regarding chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's latest transgression (up to now) having farmed out the normal responsibilities of a responsible Chief of Staff!
In the fourth paragraph following the superb political cartoon by Tom Toles (the essence of the health care reform debate) there is reference to the gratuitous photo (by Brendan Smialowski) of Rahm Emanuel on page A-14 of The New York Times, signaling the unprecedented self-promoting campaign of Mr. Emanuel - to what end? On the Saturday 3/6/10 NPR Weekend Edition, in the portion normally allotted to Dan Schorr, Scott Simon had Harvard's David Gergen (had Mr. Gergen been a strong supporter of Henry Lewis Gates?) launching into a full-throated generic criticism of the President of the United States, but few specifics. What's going on?
- "David Gergen regularly contributes editorials with Mort Zuckerman's U. S. News & World Report, and has a 4/03/04 piece on The Israel Lobby titled 'An Unfair Attack'."
- Can this be? Rahm Emanuel: "If the President had taken my advice on health care reform & trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the country and his presidency would be a lot better off!" This is a paraphrase of an unprecedented violation of trust by a president's Chief of Staff, as discussed by Jim Lehrer, Mark Shields and Michael Gerson (formerly George W. Bush's speechwriter) on the newly-titled PBS NewsHour 3/5/10, a subject not mentioned on either the NBC Universal Nightly News, CBS Evening News or DisneyABC World News Tonight in their Friday 3/5/10 telecasts.
Here's a rundown on what's taken place!
Dana Milbank 2/21/10 Washington Post
Jason Horowitz 3/2/10 Washington Post
"Rahm Emanuel is officially a Washington caricature. He's the town's resident leviathan, a bullying, bruising White House chief of staff who is a prime target for the failings of the Obama administration."
David Broder "The Fable of Emanuel The Great" 3/4/10
"In the space of 10 days, thanks in no small part to my own newspaper, the president of the United States has been portrayed as a weakling and a chronic screw-up who is wrecking his administration despite everything that his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, can do to make things right."
Andrew Alexander Ombudsman Washington Post 3/7/10
- HANG ON!
Next Photo
Obviously, Rahm Emanuel should have checked with Tom Toles before he started trashing Barrack Obama. The problem is the Republican leadership, men like Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Dick Armey, Eric Cantor, Micheal Steele and the notably opportunist John "Country First!" Sidney McCain III. These men are traitors to their country - brought George W. Bush to power and supported him as he savaged the Nation - and are now undermining the one man who has dedicated himself to reversing the devastation, and its beginning to work! Support this President!
- Items of Note -
Re “Too Close to Home” (Feb. 6 but published 2/21/10 in the N Y Times):
I was one of the 400 people who wrote to you about what I believe is an obvious conflict of interest for Ethan Bronner. I would also like to inform you that I am a Jewish American, speak Hebrew, conscientiously read the Hebrew press and have volunteered as a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces. I also have now come to believe that the Israeli occupation is illegal, immoral and not in the best interests of the United States.
I praise you for recommending that Mr. Bronner be reassigned. But your judgment that his coverage is fair and evenhanded is not accurate. Even compared with previous Times correspondents, I believe his coverage is clearly more biased in a way that reflects the degree that he and his family are embedded in the Israeli culture.
You are correct that appearances are important. It appears that The Times does not care if its Israeli correspondent has a conflict of interest. This does not surprise me. What does surprise me is that after it became known that Mr. Bronner’s son had enlisted in the I.D.F., Bill Keller would choose to make the paper’s bias so public by summarily rejecting your advice to reassign him. - Ira Glunts Madison N Y 2/8/10
The Times held this for two weeks?
- For those of us that held out hope that a modicum of integrity would finally move The New York Times to overcome its decades of submission to the evermore blindly Zionist (under Netanyahu) State of Israel, there was disappointment to see Mr. Bronner's byline appear on the front page 2/26/10. But there is a caveat. Mr. Bronner informs The Times' readers that a Nir Barkat, the mayor of Jerusalem who made a fortune in the high-tech industry (Designing those killer drones? - Coming next), is in the process of altering the Palestinian neighborhood of Al Bustan, changing it to the Hebrew Gan Hamelec, the "King's Garden", where King David is to have written psalms, all of this to isolate Islam's third-holiest shrine, the nearby Aksa Mosque. All of this, along with the excellent reporting by Robert Worth on A-4 of the 2/25/10 N Y Times (the reckless assassination of Hammas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai) also reminds us that Jewish interests are determined to remove from Palestine centuries of peaceful Palestinian existence; this Jewish holocaust, if you will, is the causus belli of our wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc.; the raison d'etre for 9/11; and, of course, our differences with Iran, which can not understand our devotion to this rogue State of Israel. Neither Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or Pakistan were responsible for sending Jews to Auschwitz; and yet the rogue State of Israel has decided that these innocent peoples will pay the ultimate price.
With regard to Iran Neil MacFarquhar in The Times reports from the United Nations 3/4/10 that the United States proposed new sanctions against Iran include "an outright ban on certain transactions...adding the country's CENTRAL BANK (THAT'S THE EQUIVALENT OF OUR FEDERAL RESERVE!) to the onerous restrictions on their Bank Melli and Bank Saderat and that one James B. STEINBERG, the deputy secretary of state, has as his mission "eliciting a positive response" in talks this week in Beijing! And the next day THE Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Rio pressuring Brazil to join this cabal against Iran, because heavily nuclear-weaponed Israel sees it as another of its several "existential" threats. Iran, as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which Israel refuses to sign), wants to develop nuclear power. And why not! It's a sovereign state! IT HAS THAT RIGHT! But Israel is "Holocaust-Bent" on proselytizing the whole world, not to join them (they're much too egomaniacal for that), but to grant them carte-blanche in the Middle East. Through AIPAC, the ADL, we, the United States have created a monster. And the entire world has, and is, paying the consequences!
"For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides." - London Review of Books 3/23/06
Charlie Rose has General Petraeus on his program (recorded 3/3/10, on TV 3/4/10) and the General, who said he's not running for president, stated that it's "not material" whether Iranians REALLY intend to make a nuclear weapon (yet, it's in that same time frame Secretary Clinton is in South America stating the opposite). And in the March 5th (2010) N Y Times' Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem (Obviously Bronner has not been reassigned, but his bias has been acknowledged, and that is a good thing.) brings the reader a worthwhile synopsis of where things stand. . .acknowledging that "Many Israelis would like to single out Iran's energy sector because penalties of that kind are seen as more likely to deal a severe economic blow" - a clear admission that Israelis just don't like Iran. . because the nation has an eloquent elegant history...
[The first elected head of State in the Middle East, Premiere Mohammad Mossadegh (1951-53), overthrown by Eisenhower's John Foster Dulles, sec. of state, and his brother Allan Dulles, CIA]
...a likable and friendly population that is self-assured (Get Rick Steves' DVDs on Iran!), and has been at peace with its neighbors until we, the United States, facilitated the Iraq-Iran war! How shameful has our foreign policy become.
As information mounts (Omar Barghouti on "BDS - Boycott, Divestment & Sanction" against Israel) of Israeli intransigence regarding Palestine, The New York Times and Ethan Bronner (Is Rahm Emanuel involved, as well?) are hard-pressed to distract and divert the American population from this despicable use of American power to deny the Palestinians their homeland. The beginning of this week (3/7/10) featured a front page article in which Pope Benedict XVI and a Carl L. Krupp [does his lineage include the Alfred Krupp (1812-87) of German armaments?), a self described "Jewish kid from Queens (tapped a "Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great" by John Paul II...IN 2000. . .THAT'S TEN YEARS AGO! Why the front page story now (3/8/10)? Elementary! Just another example of the Jewish media blitz to block, taint, and transform the devastating detail of the ongoing record of the rogue State of Israel.
Omar Barghouti on "BDS - Boycott, Divestment & Sanction"
"So we’re reaching a stage where Israel is committing slow acts of genocide against 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. This is extremely critical, and it demands people of conscience around the world to act, and act very effectively. And the BDS movement offers them an empowering, nonviolent tool through which they can impact policy in the US, in the Western world, and certainly in Israel." - http://www.bdsmovement.net
- Examine Iran Policy -
"Recent reports (including 'U.S. statements on Iran contradictory,' Feb. 17) indicate that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's moves against Iran have not received much traction in the Islamic world.
Neither Iran's nuclear program nor its treatment of its people appeal to me. However, Tehran's resistance to American direction has support even within its own opposition's camp.
In addition, while we criticize Iran's actions against its dissidents, Iran points to our own double standard in accepting our ally Israel's equally suppressive occupation of Palestinian lands.
Even though it totally depends on U.S. support for its existence, Israel has not been a very faithful ally for the United States. Israel was the first to introduce nuclear weapon technology into the region, and without our permission; it continues to build in occupied territories against our stated policies and interests; and has even paid spies to steal our secrets.
Considering the billions we spend to maintain Israel, isn't it time that we press the policy reset button with this belligerent ally? Maybe our credibility in the rest of the region would improve and our chances of moving Iran increase." - Tom Lineham Oregonian Vancouver Wa 2/21/10
- Amy Goodman 2/22/10
"Report: Netanyahu OKed Assassination of Hamas Commander
The Sunday Times of London reports Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized in early January the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Mabhouh was found dead last month in a Dubai hotel room. According to the paper, Netanyahu personally gave Mossad chief Meir Dagan the green light for the Dubai operation. The paper also reported that the Mossad hit squad trained for the Dubai mission by secretly rehearsing in a Tel Aviv hotel. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement in al-Mabhouh’s death." - DemocracyNow 2/22/10
- Amy Goodman 2/24/10
- Palestinians Protest Israeli Decision on West Bank Shrines -
"In Israel and the Occupied Territories, the Israeli government has outraged Palestinians over a decision to include two biblical tombs in Palestinian towns on a list of Israeli heritage sites. The move sparked clashes in Hebron, where Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and stun grenades at Palestinians protesting the Israeli decision. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has warned Israel’s actions could spark what he called “a religious war.” Palestinian Public Works minister Mohammed Shtayyeh also criticized Israel.
Mohammed Shtayyeh: “This government led by Netanyahu is proving to the world and to us that it’s not interested in the peace process and ethics, but it’s interested in building settlements and confiscating the Palestinian history. This is a fabrication and confiscation of history.”" - DemocracyNow 2/24/10
AMY-GOODMAN 3/3/10
- Israel Delays East Jerusalem Home Demolitions -
IN ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, the Israeli government has delayed a plan to demolish Palestinian homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Bustan. Israeli officials are pushing to construct an archaeological park on the grounds of homes inhabited by Palestinian families for over a century. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Jerusalem’s mayor to delay the demolitions, citing concern over Israel’s international image. Orly Noy, a spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group Ir Amim, criticized the demolition plans.
Orly Noy: “We believe that any plan that involves massive demolitions of almost ninety houses in the most sensitive area, IN THE MOST EXPLOSIVE AREA OF THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT IN JERUSALEM, is extremely dangerous both to the political future of the city and to its current stability.”
- UN HUMANITARIAN CHIEF: GAZA AN “OPEN-AIR PRISON” -
"Meanwhile in the Gaza Strip, the United Nations’ top humanitarian official has accused Israel of keeping Palestinians in an “open-air prison.” John Holmes appeared on the news network Al Jazeera English Tuesday after touring Gaza.
Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes: “They’re living in a kind of open-air prison. They’re still suffering this kind of collective punishment they’ve been suffering for three years now. And it’s counterproductive. It’s counterproductive including for Israel, because it’s only breeding despair. It’s not helping their objectives, whatever they might be in Gaza. So it really needs changing, and it really needs changing very rapidly. I think that’s the main point, and we really will hope that they will reconsider the kind of attitude they’ve been adopting so far.”" - DemocracyNow 3/3/10
- Report: High Number of Birth Defects Seen in Fallujah, Iraq -
In other Iraq news, BBC News is reporting the town of Fallujah is experiencing an unusually high number of birth defects among its newborn children. One hospital doctor reported seeing two or three cases of birth defects each day, which would translate to over a thousand per year. Doctors and parents are said to widely blame US weaponry used during the two major attacks on Fallujah in 2004. The assaults killed hundreds of Fallujah residents and displaced thousands more. - DemocracyNow 3/4/10
- Israel Unveils Drones to Hit Iran -
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
TEL NOF AIR FORCE BASE, Israel (AP) -- Israel’s Air Force on Sunday introduced a fleet of huge pilotless planes that can remain in the air for a full day and fly as far as the Persian Gulf, putting Iran within their range.
The new aircraft, called the Heron TP, has a wingspan of 86 feet, making it the size of a Boeing 737 jetliner and the largest unmanned aircraft in Israel’s military.
The commander of Israel’s Air Force, Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, said the aircraft “has the potential to be able to conduct new missions down the line as they become relevant.”
Israel’s military refused to disclose the size of the new fleet or whether it was designed for use against Iran.
Israel considers Iran an enemy because of its nuclear program, missiles and repeated threats.
Israel has hinted at the possibility of a military strike against Iran if world pressure does not halt the Iranian nuclear program, despite Iranian assertions that THE PROGRAM IS FOR PEACEFUL ENDS.
And we, the United States of America, pay for this!
Israel’s Plans for 2 Sites Stir Unrest in West Bank
JERUSALEM -- Scores of Palestinians clashed with Israeli forces in the West Bank city of Hebron on Monday, a day after the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced plans to include two hotly contested sites -- a Hebron shrine and a tomb in another West Bank city -- on a list of Israeli national heritage sites. (BOTH ON PALESTINIAN LAND!)
Both sit in areas that Israel controls and that the Palestinians demand as part of the territory of a future state, and both have been focal points of past violence. Their inclusion on the Israeli list enraged Palestinian leaders and prompted the United Nations special coordinator for the region to express concern.
The Israeli military said that one soldier in Hebron was lightly wounded by rocks hurled by Palestinians. There were no reports of injuries on the Palestinian side.
On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu laid out * A $100 MILLION GOVERNMENT PLAN to rehabilitate what he called “archaeological and Zionist heritage sites,” during a special cabinet meeting held in northern Israel at Tel Hai, the scene of a 1920 battle between Arabs and early Zionist settlers.
AGAIN, THIS PAID FOR BY THE UNITED STATES!
He said he intended to include the Cave of the Patriarchs, also known as IBRAHIMI MOSQUE, the Hebron shrine revered by Jews, Muslims and Christians as the burial place of Abraham, on the list of about 150 sites. In 1994, a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, fatally shot 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers inside the shrine.
Mr. Netanyahu said he also planned to include Rachel’s Tomb, a shrine just inside the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
“People must be familiar with their homeland and its cultural and historical vistas,” he told the cabinet. “This is what we will instill in this and coming generations, TO THE GLORY -- IF I MAY SAY -- OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE.”
Mr. Netanyahu had come under pressure from Israeli rightists to include the two shrines. He said Sunday that the list of sites submitted to the cabinet was neither final nor closed.
But the announcement drew sharp criticism from Palestinian officials and the Fatah party, led by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement on Monday, “The unilateral decision to make Palestinian sites in Hebron and Bethlehem part of Israel shows there is no genuine partner for peace, but an occupying power intent on consolidating Palestinian lands.”
He added that control over archaeological and tourist sites is “part of the continuing Israeli settlement enterprise.”
In a statement on Monday, Robert H. Serry, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, said: “THESE SITES ARE IN OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY AND ARE OF HISTORICAL AND RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE NOT ONLY TO JUDAISM, BUT ALSO TO ISLAM, AND TO CHRISTIANITY AS WELL. I urge Israel not to take any steps on the ground which undermine trust or could prejudice negotiations.” - Kershner N Y Times 2/23/10
Alan Dershowitz represents to the legal profession what Sacha Baron Cohen brings to the entertainment industry (...and Cohen was infiltrated into the heretofore respectable Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...in the dead of night?) while the divorce' Orthodox Jew Joseph I. Lieberman pollutes the United States Senate. What with South Carolinians James DeMint ["If we can stop his (President Obama's) Health Care Reform, we can end his Presidency"] and Joe Wilson ("You Lie!") and Mark Sanford, ensconced in those formerly respectable bodies of the House, the Senate and a governorship, it does seem that Mort Zuckerman [for years on the John McLaughlin Report with Pat Buchanan and Eleanor Clift, but on Meet the Press? Once, twice?], it seems that "Tycoon (according to The New Yorker)", Zuckerman is unlikely to make it any worse. Then, again???
- A Brief Pause -
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The monumental Media/Press onslaught against President Obama's Health Care Reform, blatantly led by members of Congress from secessionist South Carolina who have "reasoned" that they can break this president if they can defeat responsible health care reform, no matter the cost to the country, this gross action is, at its base, the latest in a series of irresponsible Republican politics in the extreme, and all have cost this country dearly.
The collusion of Republican bias in the media, in this instance joined by the ethnic bias of the United States' newspaper of record, has never been more obvious than in the Peter Baker article December 19th of last year (2009) entitled "F. B. I. ACCUSED OF ABUSING POWER IN CLINTON INQUIRY." And yet, the shocking revelations in that twenty paragraph piece were actually exceeded by the fact that Mr. Baker and his editors were unable to find room [The item filled the top half of page A-16, including a photo of Bill Clinton and Monika Lewinsky, but failed to expose an equally important fact: The Clintons, Bill and Hillary, were virtually bystanders in Jim McDougal's Whitewater land deal (Read Sidney Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars")]; with reference to the Baker/N Y Times 12/19/09 piece: THE ITEM NEITHER INCLUDES THE NAME NOR ANY REFERENCE TO THE DIRECTOR OF THE FBI AT THAT TIME - THE ELUSIVE LOUIS J. FREEH!
It is difficult to imagine a more flagrant violation of trust in the person of the Director of the FBI. One is required to turn back the decades to the infamous J. Edgar Hoover for a match. And a further note. On page A-14 of the March 2, 2010 N Y Times is one of the largest complimentary head shots-side view seen in the N Y Times in recent years. The lone subject is Rahm Emanuel, noted elsewhere in GOPBias.org. What is his relationship with . . .Louis J. Freeh?
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Along with David Sanger [and lately, Leslie Stahl (2/14/10) on Les Moonves' 60 Minutes], Mr. Dershowitz is the most notorious of these ethnic extremists (Plus Hillary Clinton?) conflating nuclear weapons with the nuclear power that Iran needs to modernize, and has every right to develop under the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it is a signatory. . and which the Nuclear-Weaponed Israel refuses to sign.
Note to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: Surely you don't want to be in anschluss with the likes of Dershowitz, Zuckerman, Sanger, Sacha and Lieberman!
- If Iran Gets Nuclear Weapons. . .Huh?
To the Editor:
In “Iran’s Two-Edged Bomb” (Op-Ed, Feb. 9), Adam B. Lowther proposes five Pollyannaish results of a nuclear-armed Iran. Let me propose a sixth, and far more likely, hellish scenario.
The Arab regimes in the area, realizing that an American nuclear umbrella would not be completely effective, especially against dirty bombs, become more beholden to Iran, rather than to the United States. This could raise oil prices, make the Palestinians less likely to seek peace and increase the authoritarian nature of Arab regimes.
Yes, it would give the American defense industry a shot in the arm, but at an extraordinarily high cost. The risks are simply not worth it.
The Obama and Bush administrations were correct in concluding that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable. - Dershowitz N Y Times Cambridge Mass. 2/9/10
The writer is a professor at Harvard Law School(?).
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- Norman Finkelstein, the subject of "American Radical", a documentary directed by David Ridgen and Nicholas Rossier -
“American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein” is a cautiously respectful documentary portrait of a political firebrand who presents himself as a beacon of moral truth in the murk of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A scholar, author and passionate advocate of the Palestinian cause, Mr. Finkelstein, 56, is a thorn in the side of the Israel lobby.
Early in the film, directed by David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier, Mr. Finkelstein is shown at a 1982 rally in front of the Israeli consulate in New York carrying a poster urging “Israeli Nazis” to “stop the Holocaust in Lebanon,” referring to the Israeli invasion of that country. Until he was banned from traveling to Israel, he paid regular visits to Palestinian friends on the West Bank. He is a supporter of Hezbollah.
Mr. Finkelstein’s inflammatory rhetoric has earned him many POWERFUL ENEMIES, MOST NOTABLY THE CIVIL LIBERTIES(?) LAWYER ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ, whose book “The Case for Israel” MR. FINKELSTEIN HAS CALLED A FRAUD, ACCUSING THE AUTHOR OF PLAGIARISM. Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, describes Mr. Finkelstein as “poison: a disgusting self-hating Jew.” Even Mr. Finkelstein’s political ally Noam Chomsky questioned his judgment in picking some of his fights.
Born in Brooklyn, Mr. Finkelstein explains in the film that he inherited his temperament from his mother, Maryla Husyt Finkelstein. Both Maryla and Mr. Finkelstein’s father, Zacharias, were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and of concentration camps. His father was interned in Auschwitz, his mother in Majdanek.
From Maryla, Mr. Finkelstein says that he inherited the conviction that Jews have a special obligation to ease the suffering of humanity because of what was done to them, and that it is not enough to pay lip service to one’s convictions; they must be acted on. A childhood friend remembers her emotional investment in left-wing humanitarian causes as bordering on hysteria. Mr. Finkelstein recalls that as his notoriety spread, she came to feel he had taken her too literally and become a “Frankenstein’s monster” on a path toward self-destruction.
The film chronicles the controversies in which Mr. Finkelstein has become embroiled, beginning with his attack on Joan Peters’s widely praised 1984 best seller, “From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine,” which he denounced as a hoax. In a television interview after the publication of his best-known book, “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering” (2000), he declares, “A handful of American Jews have effectively hijacked the Nazi Holocaust to blackmail Europe” and “DIVERT ATTENTION TO WHAT IS BEING DONE TO THE PALESTINIANS.”!!
THE NEW YORK TIMES AND STEVEN HOLDEN OWE MR. FINKELSTEIN HEART FELT APOLOGIES, BY REVERSING THE IMPACT OF THIS KEY PHRASE, "DIVERT ATTENTION FROM WHAT IS BEING DONE TO THE PALESTINIANS"; THE CHANGE TO "DIVERT ATTENTION TO WHAT IS BEING DONE TO THE PALESTINIANS." Oh, were it so!!!
- A documentary looks at an American Jew who denounces ISRAELI NAZIS. -
The cost of Mr. Finkelstein’s outspokenness has been steep. In 2001 he left Hunter College, where he had taught for nine years, after his teaching load and salary were reduced. He was subsequently hired by DePaul University in Chicago, where he became an assistant professor of political science. But in 2007 his bid for tenure, opposed by Mr. Dershowitz -- who called him “a propagandist” and “not a teacher” -- was denied, despite strong on-campus support.
Because it is a film, “American Radical” can only begin to sketch the complicated historical and political debates that engage Mr. Finkelstein and his detractors, but it allows both sides to make their cases. In his more reflective moments Mr. Finkelstein demonstrates an acute analytical intelligence and even an inkling of humor. “Speaking as a devout atheist, thank God in his Almighty wisdom that he made us mortal,” he says.
But he also appears to be a man who reflexively rises to the bait: a strident polemicist who, however right or wrong, has chosen to travel a long, hard road. - Steven Holden N Y Times 2/11/10
Correction: February 12, 2010
A film review on Thursday about “American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein” misstated a word in a comment Mr. Finkelstein made in a television interview shown in the documentary. He said, “A handful of American Jews have effectively hijacked the Nazi Holocaust to blackmail Europe” and “divert attention from what is being done to the Palestinians” -- not “divert attention to what is being done to the Palestinians.” (ABOUT TIME!)
When, if ever, has this monstrosity been debated, in any form - The rogue nation of Netanyahu's Israel expropriating, with a virtual fifth column of subversives in the United States Senate - been debated in the Congress of these United States? NEVER! And is this scene below worthy of our ten years of blood and treasure? Or is it scurrilous propaganda for a nefarious regime!
Declaration of War?
- "Charlie" Rose PBS 2/5/10 -
True to form, as the Guardian 1/18-23/10 lays out the effort of the Brits to expose the fraud underlying their joining George W. Bush to provide Israel safer passage to controlling the Middle East, by eliminating Saddam Hussein, a Ros Atkins uses the 1/29/10 BBC program "WORLD HAVE YOUR SAY" to eliminate from the record twenty-seven year veteran of our CIA Ray McGovern's bombshell established on his 6/6/05 appearance with Margaret Warner on the Lehrer NewsHour. That revelation (within two weeks of 9/11) that Bush had ensnared Tony Blair in his plans to attack and occupy Iraq is the pesky fact which debunks the array; "The best laid schemes o' mice and men (Robert Burns 1759-96)...."; the conglomeration of books, articles, etc. which evade this betrayal of our age, as the authors distort the true heinous nature of, not 9/11, but of THE sinister conspiracy of our age which generated 9/11.
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For The Relentless Amy Goodman
- "Hamas Accuses Israel of Assassinating Top Hamas Official in Dubai -
A top operative from Hamas has been killed in Dubai. Mahmoud Mabhouh was found dead in his room in a hotel on January 20. Hamas officials accused Israel of assassinating Mabhouh and of 'moving the battlefield abroad.' His death occurred three days after an Israeli cabinet minister visited Abu Dhabi. Israel had accused Mabhouh of being involved in the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and for delivering arms from Iran to Hamas." - DemocracyNow 2/1/10
"Human Rights Group Rejects Israeli 'Whitewash' of Gaza Attack -
In Israel and the Occupied Territories, the Israeli military has taken what it calls 'disciplinary' action against two soldiers for firing on the United Nations compound during last year’s attack on the Gaza Strip. The United Nations compound burned to the ground in the attack after Israel shelled it with white phosphorus. In its report, the Israeli military defended the white phosphorus shelling, saying the soldiers are only at fault for also firing artillery shells. It’s unclear what penalties, if any, the two soldiers face. The unspecified move is the first acknowledgment by Israel of the dozens of war crimes and international law violations during the three-week assault. But Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said Israel continues to reject the war crimes allegations documented in the inquiry led by Justice Richard Goldstone.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon: 'Israel does not need any admonition from the international community. We keep our high standards on morality, and the fact that we took disciplinary actions against very high and senior officers is just the proof. The Goldstone report still is a sham and very biased, very unprofessional, and it shouldn’t be at all discussed.'
Last week Israel issued a report disputing the Goldstone report as part of a campaign to prevent its adoption at the United Nations. Yael Stein of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said the Israeli military is covering up its actions.
Yael Stein: 'This morning it was revealed that two high-ranking officers were disciplined for firing white phosphorus at the UNRWA compound. This case shows the whitewash of the report that Israel submitted. The report itself does not specify the circumstances in which those officers were acted, and therefore just the revelations today just show how extreme the case is. We think that this case shows that the military system cannot investigate itself.'" - DemocracyNow 2/2/10
- "Report: Israeli Bomb Found in Ruins of Gaza Flour Plant -
The Guardian of London, meanwhile, says it’s found evidence undermining Israeli denials of targeting a flour mill in northern Gaza. Israel rejected allegations of nearly destroying the al-Badr plant in its report last week. But UN mine experts say the remains of an Israeli aircraft bomb were found in the ruins of the plant after the Gaza assault." - DemocracyNow 2/2/10
- While much of the world is focused, and rightly so, on the indescribable damage to Haiti and the immense struggle which its surviving citizens face, the indescribably egomaniacal Israeli government sees only another opportunity to flaunt and taunt the responsible world entities which are dedicated to ending the decades-long suffering of the Palestinian people at the hands of that illicit state of Israel.
With this action the rogue Netanyahu has seized from the Palestinian West Bank a virtual buffer zone North, East and South of Jerusalem, to double the land mass of that city which is sacred to Christians, Muslims and Jews, and will be used by the illegal state of Israel as a stepping stone to engulf Maale Adumin as well; these Netanyahu Jews are insatiable.
[[ This current (2/10/10) State of Israel descends to the desecration of the sacred resting place of Muslims since before the 7th century. There is no honor in the current State of Israel. Only pronounced ignominy.
- "Palestinian Families Appeal to UN Over Israeli Construction of 'Museum of Tolerance' on Jerusalem’s Historic Mamilla Cemetery -
AMY GOODMAN: A controversy over the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s project to build a “Museum of Tolerance” on a historic Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem has gone all the way to the United Nations. Today, families defending the twelfth century Ma’man Allah or Mamilla Cemetery from desecration by Israeli authorities filed their case before the United Nations in Geneva, with news conferences in Geneva, Los Angeles and Jerusalem. The petitioners include descendants from fifteen of the oldest families in Jerusalem whose ancestors have been buried at the cemetery for centuries.
Opponents of the project have long questioned how a monument to tolerance can be built on the remains of the graves of generations of Palestinian Muslims. But the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of its construction in November 2008.
The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights is representing the families in their petition to the UN to safeguard their international human rights and urge Israel to halt construction of the museum.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, who is the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, declined our invitation to come on the program, but sent a statement saying, quote, “The Museum of Tolerance project is not being built on the Mamilla Cemetery. It is being built on Jerusalem’s former municipal car park, where every day for nearly half a century, thousands of Muslims, Christians and Jews parked their cars without any protest whatsoever from the Muslim community.”
Well, in response to criticism that the construction on the cemetery grounds has resulted in the disinterment of graves and human remains, Rabbi Hier added, quote, “The Israeli Antiquities Authority has confirmed that there are no bones or remains on the site, which is currently undergoing infrastructure work. Remains found on the site, which have now been reinterred in a nearby Muslim cemetery were between 300-400 years old. No remains from the 12th century era were found,” he wrote.
This resoundingly fallacious sophistry uttered by the "Founder and Dean of the" so-called "Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance", the Rabbi Marvin Hier, is a classic example of the hypocrisy which emanates today from Zionist Benjamin Netanyahu's State of Israel. The ongoing damage rendered to the world today by this cabal is catastrophic. Read on.
Well, I’m joined now by one of the petitioners whose ancestors were buried at the Mamilla Cemetery. Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, the Department of History, and the author of a number of books, including Sowing Crisis: American Dominance in the Cold War in the Middle East and Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood.
Michael Ratner is also with us, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
We welcome you both.
RASHID KHALIDI: Thanks, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Professor Khalidi, members of your family are buried there? Explain.
RASHID KHALIDI: This is a cemetery where people have been buried since the twelfth century. People who fought with Saladin in the Crusades are buried there. In fact, one of the descendants of one of the leading figures in the twelfth century is buried in that cemetery. And contrary to what Rabbi Hier said, that parking lot was built over a cemetery, part of it. And so, the Israeli authorities are basically pushing ahead with the desecration of a cemetery that they have been, unfortunately, slowly nibbling away at for over three decades. We and other families are taking action as a group of families to try and stop this, after other families failed in the Israeli Supreme Court.
AMY GOODMAN: The fact that he said this has been a parking lot that no one has protested for years?
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, many protests were made. There were protests made from the early ’60s, when the first of these desecrations started. That’s false. And the fact that it was desecrated in the ’60s doesn’t mean that it’s right to desecrate it further. What happened in the 1960s was that part of the cemetery was paved over for this parking lot. What they have now done is to dig down and disinter four layers, according to the chief archaeologist for the Israeli Archaeological Authority, four layers of graves. There are more probably beneath those, according to his report, which was suppressed in the submissions to the Israeli Supreme Court.
AMY GOODMAN: And that they’re saying there are no bodies buried there?
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, the chief archaeologist’s report contradicts what Rabbi Hier says. I would go with the chief Israeli archaeologist over the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, frankly.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you met with the dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center?
RASHID KHALIDI: I have not had that pleasure, no.
AMY GOODMAN: They’ve had no direct contact with Palestinian families like yours, then?
RASHID KHALIDI: No, nor did Muslim religious authorities have anything to do with the reinterment, wherever it is, of the remains, whatever they are.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
RASHID KHALIDI: We have no idea where these people were reburied. They claim they were reburied. We, families of people--there are fifteen families, sixty people, who have ancestors in that cemetery. We’re the petitioners. Nobody ever told us where these remains were reburied. I mean, imagine if, 400 years ago, you had ancestors in a cemetery, and somebody came along and said, “We’re going to build whatever it is there,” dug them up and buried them somewhere else without telling you where. This is what they’ve just done, according to his statement.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, you’re the president of Center for Constitutional Rights that’s working with the families to file these petitions. You just came back from there. You visited the site.
MICHAEL RATNER: Yeah, I mean, I was really shocked by what I saw. I went into West Jerusalem, and I see a wall that’s probably twenty-five feet high, surrounded by surveillance cameras, which is where they’re building this so-called Museum of Tolerance. Right up to the edge of it, you see Muslim graves, Palestinian graves, all around it. And within even the part of the cemetery that still exists, which is only a few acres, because the Israelis have paved over other parts or built a park, it’s been desecrated. And every time they, Muslim people, attempt to fix it, it’s desecrated again. And within the site itself, I mean, the archaeologist that Rashid referred to called this an archaeological crime. This is an Israeli archaeologist. And you see they took out bones in cardboard boxes, relatives of the ancestors of the people on this petition--
RASHID KHALIDI: Descendants.
MICHAEL RATNER: Descendants. And they have no sense of where those people are. And the archaeologist said there’s at least 2,000 other graves under this site. So, to hear the rabbi from the Simon Wiesenthal Center talk about “there’s no bones, there’s no bodies under here” is just--it’s just a lie. That’s all I can say. That’s what it is.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Khalidi, what is the Center for Human Dignity, the Museum of Tolerance, that’s being built?
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, as best I understand it, from what they’ve written, it’s an extension of the museum that exists in Los Angeles. And it’s pretty grotesque, to my way of thinking, to be building something that’s labeled a museum of tolerance against the protests of the people buried in a cemetery. IT IS THE OLDEST MUSLIM CEMETERY, PROBABLY, IN ALL OF PALESTINE. IT MAY GO BACK TO THE SEVENTH CENTURY, BUT IT CERTAINLY GOES BACK TO THE TWELFTH CENTURY. I mean, one of the descendants of one of the people buried there has an ancestor who is from the twelfth century. We don’t know how many other people in Jerusalem may have ancestors buried there. My sense is that even more people are going to come forward now that these press conferences have taken place.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what are you demanding?
RASHID KHALIDI: We are asking that this be treated as a Heritage site, which is what it is. The fact that it’s still being desecrated, not just by this museum, but by vandalism of the remaining tombs, is a scandal. This is a very, very important Heritage site. And so, one of the things we’re demanding is that it be treated as such. And we’re going to UNESCO and other bodies, asking that they do their duty.
Secondly, we’re asking that there be a reinterment under religious supervision, with the families knowing where their people have been reburied within the cemetery.
And finally, that this project, this grotesque project, be stopped. There have been offers to move the museum elsewhere. At one stage, the mayor of Jerusalem even suggested that it be moved elsewhere. Today I read that a Palestinian has offered to give land right near the wall that they’ve built right through the middle of Jerusalem for the museum to be built there. So a museum for tolerance can be built next to a forty-foot concrete barrier between different parts of the Arab East Jerusalem. So we’re asking for all of those things.
AMY GOODMAN: Center for Constitutional Rights can turn to international law, Michael Ratner?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, that’s what we do. But I do want to say something overall about what this cemetery really represented, what I saw happening there, which is to say, as Palestinians had been pushed out of Jerusalem and out of parts of the West Bank, you see--what I saw going on here is attempt to really obliterate even a Palestinian and Muslim presence in West Jerusalem by getting rid of, you know, key cultural projects, key cultural issues--I mean, key cultural places.
RASHID KHALIDI: Artifacts.
MICHAEL RATNER: Artifacts of the Palestinian and Muslim people. And so, they just want to obliterate it. And you can’t believe this is the Simon Wiesenthal Center doing it. And, yes, international law clearly protects it. It protects cultural artifacts. It protects religious freedom. And it protects--
RASHID KHALIDI: Sacred sites.
MICHAEL RATNER: Sacred sites--and discrimination. And when you look at the numbers--Israel has an obligation, as it admits, to protect sacred sites in Jerusalem. And what have they protected? Up ’til 2008--and I think probably the same figure--they protected 136 Jewish sites. Not one Muslim site.
RASHID KHALIDI: Or Christian site.
MICHAEL RATNER: Or Christian site. So when you think about what’s going on there, it’s really a public outrage. And the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which now has been given other places to build, if it insists on going on with this, you can only draw one conclusion: Let’s obliterate the Muslim presence in Jerusalem.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. I want to thank you both for being with us. And we’ll certainly continue to cover this controversy. We’ve been joined by Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies in the Department of History at Columbia University, and Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights." - DemocracyNow 2/10/10
(Note also that "Bibi", i.e. Benjamin Netanyahu, intends to engulf Ariel, under which lies one of Palestine's largest aquifers). But they are not alone. In fact, with the crucial and determinative support of AIPAC (i.e. the United States Senate) the Israelis have no restraint on their illegal activities. Imagine. A society laden with nuclear weapons...and no restraint. ]]
- "Netanyahu Says Some Settlements Will Always be Israel's
JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Sunday that several Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank would always remain part of Israel, a comment that upset the Palestinians even as the Obama administration’s Middle East envoy was trying to coax them back into peace talks.
Although Israel has long insisted on maintaining a permanent hold over certain groups of settlements, including those Mr. Netanyahu referred to Sunday, his remarks struck a jarring note on a day when the American envoy, George J. Mitchell, shuttled between Israeli and Palestinian leaders on a so-far unsuccessful mission to restart negotiations that have been stalled for over a year.
Mr. Netanyahu took the opportunity, as the photo records, of the approaching holiday of Tu Bishvat, a Jewish arbor day, to reaffirm Israel’s claim to the Etzion bloc of settlements just south of Jerusalem. 'Our message is clear,' he said during a tree-planting ceremony there. 'We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here. This place will be an inseparable part of the State of Israel for eternity.'" - Kershner Israeli Media NY Times 1/25/10
Article continues
- Trouble Here -
There would seem to be a wiring flaw at the very core of this administration, and its not the President of the United States. Time and again key tasks are not completed, whether they be positions filled, or candidates vetted. Schedules kept, or principals informed. In any event, these are responsibilities of the President's Chief of Staff. Significantly, while he is regularly mentioned by the press and ALWAYS focused by the cameras - these are the rare factors which substantiate that the man is in Washington, but leave untold whether or not he has been of service to this president and the American people. The smug Mr. Emanuel - he of the profane, expletive and obscenity-laden diatribe for all persons with whom he disagrees - he has benefited from the press this time by being supposedly subjected, on EVERY media outlet, to Sarah Palin's call for President Obama to fire Mr. Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel is so full of himself he has yet to realize that this President is faced with the most threatening political and policy issues encountered since Franklin Delano Roosevelt occupied the White House seventy five years ago, in the Great Depression, also brought about by self-serving Republicans. The self-serving Rahm Emanuel, he who served in the Israel "Defense(?)" Force, should re-chart his service to this country, the United States of America.
[[ This above edit on 2/12/2010 is most appropriate on the two hundred and first anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, i.e. a timely expose' of the modern-day canard that the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey, Roger Ailes, Sheldon G. Adelson, Glen Beck, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Judd Gregg, Haley Barbour, Sarah Palin and her erstwhile puppet master John Sidney McCain III and the Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele - That this prospective motley crew of a Republican Party ship of state; That it represents the "Party of Lincoln" shows a disgraceful contempt for the sixteenth President of the United States (1861-65).
Palestinian women tried to avoid tear gas during clashes with members of the Israeli Security (?) Forces in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on Jan. 22.
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"Israel Confronts West Bank Protests Against SECURITY (?) Barrier
NILIN, West Bank -- For more than a year, this village has been a focus of weekly protests against the Israeli security barrier, which cuts through its lands. Now, the village appears to be at the center of an intensifying Israeli arrest campaign.
Apparently concerned that the protests could spread, the Israeli Army and security forces have recently begun clamping down, arresting scores of local organizers and activists here and conducting nighttime raids on the homes of others.
Muhammad Amira, a schoolteacher and a member of Nilin’s popular committee, the group that organizes the protests, said his home was raided by the army in the early hours of Jan. 10. The soldiers checked his identity papers, poked around the house and looked in on his sleeping children, Mr. Amira said.
He added, “They came to say, ‘We know who you are.’ ”
Each Friday for the last five years, Palestinians have demonstrated against the barrier, bolstered by Israeli sympathizers and foreign volunteers who document the ensuing clashes with video cameras, often posting the most dramatic footage on YouTube.
Israel says the barrier, under construction since 2002, is essential to prevent suicide bombers from reaching its cities; the Palestinians oppose it on grounds that much of it runs through the territory of the West Bank.
While the weekly protests are billed as nonviolent resistance, they usually end in violent confrontations between the Israeli security forces and masked, stone-throwing Palestinian youths. “These are not sit-ins with people singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ ” said Maj. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli Army’s Central Command, which controls the West Bank. “These are violent, illegal, dangerous riots.”
ILLEGAL? THIS IS THE PALESTINIAN WEST BANK!
Other Palestinians are “jumping on the bandwagon,” he said, and the protests “could slip out of control.”
The protests first took hold in the nearby village of Bilin, which became a symbol of Palestinian defiance after winning a ruling in the Israeli Supreme Court stipulating that the barrier must be rerouted to take in less agricultural land. According to military officials, work to move the barrier WILL START NEXT MONTH. (REALLY?)
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Like a creeping, part-time intifada, the Friday protests have been gaining ground. Nabi Saleh, another village near Ramallah, has become the newest focus of clashes, AFTER JEWISH SETTLERS TOOK OVER A NATURAL SPRING ON VILLAGE LAND.
One recent Friday, a group of older villagers marched toward the spring. They were met with tear gas and stun grenades, and scuffled with soldiers on the road. Other villagers spilled down the hillsides swinging slingshots and pelted the Israelis with stones.
“Israel recognizes the threat of the popular movement and its potential for expanding,” said Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli anarchist and spokesman of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, which is based in Ramallah. “I think the goal is to quash it before it gets out of hand.”" - Kershner Israeli Media N Y Times 1/29/10
CONTINUED
- Amy Goodman 1/26/10: "Israeli Cabinet Minister: Goldstone Report on Gaza Is Anti-Semitic
The Israeli news agency Ynet is reporting the Israeli government is preparing an all-out attack on Richard Goldstone’s United Nations report that accused Israel of committing war crimes during its assault on Gaza. Israeli Cabinet Minister Yuli Edelstein said, “The Goldstone Report...and similar reports, are simply a type of anti-Semitism.” Ynet reports Israel will launch the attack on the Goldstone Report tomorrow, the sixty-fifth anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz. Last year the United Nations called on Israel to conduct an independent credible investigation into the war crimes allegations, but Israel has refused to establish a commission of inquiry." - DemocracyNow 1/26/10
We are all contending with an absolute and total blackout of analyses of the artifice-laden brazen schemes of the Jewish Diaspora to distract world opinion from the constant machinations and intrigues to dispossess Palestinians of a viable Palestine. Major offenders include NPR and PBS.
Message to Israelis: Palestinians, and that includes Hamas, did not send Jews to Auschwitz.
Copy Ellie Wiesel and Alan Dershowitz!
- Propaganda Intensifies -
With David Brooks, Mort Zuckerman (the owner of U. S. News and World Report making one of his rare public appearances since he feted Silvio Berlusconi's ADL reception at the Plaza on 9/23/03) and a David Faber (Anchor and Reporter at CNBC) playing the role of political analysts (Does that include Israel vs. Palestine?) it would seem that David Gregory takes his orders from the sequestered John Donald Imus Jr. This was the 1/30/10 Meet the Press, the same Sunday that Barbara Walters headed ABC's This Week, featuring Roger Ailes, in one of his also rare public appearances. In other words, Judaism ruled the day. Also, the year to come? Doubtless with the television camera-shy Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in charge.
This previously mentioned Admiral Mike Mullen, all over the tube - first with "Charlie" Rose, who considers himself the fourth Emanuel brother - and "Charlie" then followed with Stan McChrystal (whose early work was in Special Black Ops with the CIA in Iraq in the early days of "Shock & Awe") who also promoted the "surge" in Afghanistan, all of which had been preceded by the brilliant Tom Toles, addressing George W. Bush, who has been exonerated by our compromised Media/Press because he, the junior George Bush, had, eliminated Saddam, FOR ISRAEL!!!
Whether or not the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki (Is it now accepted publishing practice to describe Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu as "Radical", and what about United States Senator and divorced Orthodox Jew Joseph I. Lieberman?) whether the cleric was killed (he was not) in the recent (12/24/09) fighter jet - drone attacks in Yemen (directed by U.S. intelligence) - by 12/27/09 The Associated Press had acknowledged that this was a "secretive U. S. airstrike against suspected Al Qaeda sites in Yemen" headlined "U.S. expands war on terror to Yemen" (The N Y Times' Jack Healy and the usually reliable Scott Shane had described the action as a Yemeni operation) - the fact remains that the unrest in the Middle East is increasing, and The New York Times is an "iffy" broker, rather than a scrupulous mediator of available information.
- A CRISIS INTERJECTION 1/20/10 -
If you wondered why Israeli doctors and their emergency field hospital in Haiti were featured on Brian Williams and Katie Couric's reports from that earthquake ravaged country on the island of Hispaniola in the West Indies (thousands of miles from Israel), the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of NBC Universal is Jeff Zucker, and CBS is run by Les Moonves. Further, note the Ethan Bronner piece in the 1/20/10 The New York Times. . .which follows Bill Moyers 1/15/10 Journal.
Roust Required
1/9-10/10 Edit
Bill Moyers Journal
January 15, 2010
Fills the Breach
- EXHIBIT I
- "Courts Whittle Spending Limits In Election Law -
Legal experts and political operatives say the cases roll back campaign spending rules to the years before Watergate. The end of decades-old restrictions could unleash a torrent of negative advertisements, help cash-poor Republicans in a pivotal year, and push President Obama to bring in more money for his party". - David Kirkpatrick N Y Times 1/9/10
With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.
Congress must act immediately to limit the damage of this radical decision, which strikes at the heart of democracy.
As a result of Thursday’s ruling, corporations have been unleashed from the longstanding ban against their spending directly on political campaigns and will be free to spend as much money as they want to elect and defeat candidates. If a member of Congress tries to stand up to a wealthy special interest, its lobbyists can credibly threaten: We’ll spend whatever it takes to defeat you.
The ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission radically reverses well-established law and erodes a wall that has stood for a century between corporations and electoral politics. (The ruling also frees up labor unions to spend, though they have far less money at their disposal.)
The founders of this nation warned about the dangers of corporate influence. The Constitution they wrote mentions many things and assigns them rights and protections -- the people, militias, the press, religions. But it does not mention corporations.
In 1907, as corporations reached new heights of wealth and power, Congress made its views of the relationship between corporations and campaigning clear: It banned them from contributing to candidates. At midcentury, it enacted the broader ban on spending that was repeatedly reaffirmed over the decades until it was struck down on Thursday.
This issue should never have been before the court. The justices overreached and seized on a case involving a narrower, technical question involving the broadcast of a movie that attacked Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign. The court elevated that case to a forum for striking down the entire ban on corporate spending and then rushed the process of hearing the case at breakneck speed. It gave lawyers a month to prepare briefs on an issue of enormous complexity, and it scheduled arguments during its vacation.
Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., no doubt aware of how sharply these actions clash with his confirmation-time vow to be judicially modest and simply “call balls and strikes,” wrote a separate opinion trying to excuse the shameless judicial overreaching.
The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.
The majority also makes the nonsensical claim that, unlike campaign contributions, which are still prohibited, independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” If Wall Street bankers told members of Congress that they would spend millions of dollars to defeat anyone who opposed their bailout, and then did so, it would certainly look corrupt.
After the court heard the case, Senator John McCain told reporters that he was troubled by the “extreme naïveté” some of the justices showed about the role of special-interest money in Congressional lawmaking.
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens warned that the ruling not only threatens democracy but “will, I fear, do damage to this institution.” History is, indeed, likely to look harshly not only on the decision but the court that delivered it. The Citizens United ruling is likely to be viewed as a shameful bookend to Bush v. Gore. With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president. Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.
Congress and members of the public who care about fair elections and clean government need to mobilize right away, a cause President Obama has said he would join. Congress should repair the presidential public finance system and create another one for Congressional elections to help ordinary Americans contribute to campaigns. It should also enact a law requiring publicly traded corporations to get the approval of their shareholders before spending on political campaigns.
These would be important steps, but they would not be enough. The real solution lies in getting the court’s ruling overturned. The four dissenters made an eloquent case for why the decision was wrong on the law and dangerous. With one more vote, they could rescue democracy." - Editorial N Y Times 1/22/10
- "At his confirmation hearings in 2005, Chief Justice Roberts, then an appeals court judge, said 'adherence to precedent promotes evenhandedness, promotes fairness, promotes stability and predictability. It is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent,' he said." - Adam Liptak N Y Times 1/23/10
- "Rather’s Appeal Request Rejected by Court -
Dan Rather’s request for an appeal in his lawsuit against CBS was turned down on Tuesday, marking an apparent end to the breach-of-contract case. Mr. Rather, below, the former anchor of “CBS Evening News,” had appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, after the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court ruled unanimously in September to dismiss the $70 million lawsuit he brought against the network in 2007. CBS executives say the legal proceedings are now over. In a statement Mr. Rather said he was “disappointed.” He had been seeking damages in a claim that his contract had been breached by CBS management and his reputation had been unfairly tarnished by the network’s handling of an investigation into his report on President George W. Bush’s National Guard record. - Stelter N Y Times 1/12-13/10
- "PBS Sets New Shows
PBS will broadcast a one-hour public affairs program called “Need to Know,” to be produced by New York’s WNET.org, on Friday nights beginning May 7, the organizations plan to announce on Wednesday. The new show, to originate from WNET’s soon-to-be-opened studio at Lincoln Center, will blend field reports, FEATURES and interviews on topics including the economy, the environment, health, security and CULTURE, and will make extensive use of CLOSELY SCREENED public input generated online. No anchor or reporters have been announced. “Need to Know” will REPLACE the public affairs programs “Bill Moyers Journal” and “Now,” which end in April. As part of the remake of PBS’s news and public affairs lineup, John Wilson, who oversees TV programming, said that PBS also planned to open a Web portal in May that would AGGREGATE all of its news and public affairs content, as well as journalism from local public stations." - Elizabeth Jensen N Y Times 1/12-13/10
- AGGREGATE (( 1 )) - AGGREGATE (( 2 )) - AGGREGATE (( 3 )) >> ( Just Below )
AGGREGATE = in this case a PBS synonym for "Focus features, stiff hard news!"
We Americans are witnessing the most complete, wholesale and devastating substitution of FEATURE programming on "Public" radio and "Public" television. .eliminating HARD NEWS. .in our lifetimes - and the exorbitant costs to the public were made clear in the senatorial election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts, and the 5-4 decision of the John Roberts Supreme Court to place future elections in the hands of major corporations, whether or not foreign owned.
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Please note paragraph above photo.
Did you know that the present Chief Justice of this Supreme Court travelled to Florida in the Fall of 2000 to counsel Ted Olson in his argument before the Rehnquist Court to steal the 2000 Presidential Election from Albert Gore for George W. Bush?
** Bill Moyers Journal - as in "JOURNALISM" - a lost art & science, a concept missing these last several decades...
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.
There were hands in the air in Washington this week, but it wasn't a stickup. The new Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, appointed by Congress to find out how America got rolled, began hearings this week. These four are not the victims of one of the greatest bank heists in history - they're the perpetrators, bankers so sleek and crafty they got off with the loot in broad daylight, and then sweet talked the government into taxing us to pay it back.
Watching that scene on the opening day of the hearings, it was hard enough to believe that almost a year has passed since Barack Obama raised his hand, too -- taking the oath of office to become our 44th President. Even harder to remember what America looked like before Obama, because we've also been robbed of memory, assaulted by what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz described as a "fantastic proliferation of mass media." We live in a time "characterized by a refusal to remember." Inconvenient facts simply disappear down the memory hole, as in George Orwell's novel, "1984."
President Obama's made plenty of mistakes during his first year, and we've critiqued them frequently here on the JOURNAL, but hardly anyone talks any more about what happened in the years before. He inherited from George W. Bush the biggest financial debacle since the Great Depression, along with two unpopular and costly wars, and a dysfunctional and demoralized government.
It's important to remember those years, a time that has been characterized by the historian Thomas Frank, as "A Low, Dishonest Decade." He's here to talk about them with me. Thomas Frank is editor of the recently relaunched BAFFLER magazine, a literary journal; a contributing editor of HARPER'S; a weekly columnist for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; and the author of ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, the bestselling WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? and his latest bestseller, THE WRECKING CREW, now out in paperback. Good to have you back.
THOMAS FRANK: It's my pleasure, Bill.
BILL MOYERS: How is it that the people who are responsible for the mess that Obama inherited are getting away with demonizing him when he's only had less than a year to clean it up. Let me show you just a sample of commentators railing against the President.
RUSH LIMBAUGH: President Obama and the Democrats are destroying the US economy. They are purposefully doing it, I believe.
GLENN BECK: This is a well-thought out plan to collapse the economy as we know it.
JONATHAN HOENIG: The president has, I think if you listen to what he says, a hatred for capitalism. Where do jobs come from? They don't come from the government, they come from the profit seeking self-interest, from what I hear and see, the President never misses an opportunity to smear and [no audio] slap!
RUSH LIMBAUGH: This guy is a coward. He does not have the gonads or the spine to even stand up and accept what he's doing! All of this is his doing. He cannot even probably say, you should like this -- you may not like this, but I'm telling you it's the best thing for you, it's the best thing for me. No! He knows it's a disaster, he has to slough this off, on his previous-- or his predecessor, the previous administration.
SEAN HANNITY: It's his stimulus. It's his record deficit spending. He quadrupled the debt in a year. You know, how many more are the Democrats going to say, "Well, it's George Bush's fault"? This is Obama's economy now.
BILL MOYERS: What goes through your mind as a historian when you watch that?
THOMAS FRANK: Well, that is America for you. I mean, that is the, sort of the demented logic of our politics. Is that now-- Obama's been President for a year. And he will come before the public in the fall, you know, having to defend all of these terrible things. That's how our politics works in this country.
BILL MOYERS: But you called it demented. I mean, you know, demented means crazy, mad. Mad and crazy enough to cause us to forget the world before Obama?
THOMAS FRANK: I'll give you an example what I mean. So, I was on a radio show the other day with a tea party leader, you know, one of these protest leaders. And he seemed like a good guy. But what he did say that struck me was he said he was really against monopoly, you know? And we're laboring under all these monopolies, all these concentrated powers here in America. And what we need to do is get back to free markets. And then we can do away with that. And it was mind-blowing.
Because if you look back any further than the Obama Administration, since, I mean, 1980 in this country, we have been in the grip of, you know, of this pursuit of ever-purer free markets. That's what American politics has been about. That's what has delivered this, you know, the awful circumstances that we find ourselves in today. And to think that that's what's missing, that's what we need to get back to, is--
BILL MOYERS: That's more than nostalgia. What is that?
THOMAS FRANK: Well, that's the disease of our time. You know, that sort of instant forgetting.
BILL MOYERS: But what does it do to our politics when the very spokesmen for what some people have called a decade of conservative failure. I mean, remember before Obama, they turned a budget surplus into a deficit. They took us to war on fraudulent pretenses. They borrowed money to fight it. They presided over a stalemate in Afghanistan. They trashed the Constitution. They presided over the weakest economy in decades--
THOMAS FRANK: Not weak for everybody.
BILL MOYERS: No, no.
THOMAS FRANK: Some people did really well.
BILL MOYERS: Okay, they compiled the worst track record on jobs in decades. And they ended up with the worst stock market in decades. I mean, it was a decade of conservative failure. And yet, Obama's their villain?
THOMAS FRANK: Think of all the crises and the disasters that you've described. And I would add to them things like the, what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And the Madoff scandal on Wall Street. And, you know, on and on and on. The Jack Abramoff scandal. The whole sordid career of Tom DeLay.
All of these things that we remember from the last decade. I mean, some of them that we're forgetting. Like who remembers all the scandals over earmarking, anymore? And who remembers all the scandals over Iraq reconstruction? All that, you know, disastrous, when we would hand it off to a private contractor to rebuild Iraq. And it would, you know, of course, it would fail.
Those things have all sort of been dwarfed by the economic disaster and the wreckage on Wall Street. But I would say to you that all of these things that we're describing here are of a piece. And that they all flow from the same ideas. And those ideas are the sort of conservative attitude towards government. And conservative attitudes towards governance. Okay?
BILL MOYERS: That government is a perversion?
THOMAS FRANK: Government is-- yeah, government is a perversion. And to believe that the federal government can be operated, you know, with all of its programs, can be operated well and do things that are good for the people, is, as you say, is a perversion.
And they look at someone like Barack Obama and it makes them seethe. Because that's, you know, that's what he's trying to do. What conservatism in this country is about is government failure. Conservatives talk about government failure all the time, constantly. And conservatives, when they're in power deliver government failure.
BILL MOYERS: Not merely from incompetence, you say, but from ideology, from philosophy, from a view of the world.
THOMAS FRANK: And sometimes from design.
BILL MOYERS: From design? What do you mean?
THOMAS FRANK: Not always from design, but often. The Department of Labor, for example, the conservatives when they in office, routinely stuff the Department of Labor full of ideological cranks. And people that don't believe in the mission.
And the result is that it doesn't-- they don't enforce anything. Towards the very end of the Bush-era, the Department of Labor had been whittled down. It was a shell of its former self. And at the very end of the Bush Administration, one of the government accountability programs did a study of the Department of Labor. And, I'm smiling, because it's kind of amusing. It was like an old spy magazine prank.
They made up these horrendous labor violations around the country and phoned them in as complaints to the Department of Labor to see what they would do, okay? They responded to one out of ten of these, you know, where they called in as like, "Well, we got, you know, kids working in a meat packing plant during school hours. You know, can you, you going to do anything about that?" "No." Or you look at something like the Securities and Exchange Commission. These guys are supposed to be regulating, you know, the investment banks, okay? Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, that sort of thing. These guys were so under-funded, and not just under-funded, but you had people in charge of it who didn't believe in regulating Wall Street.
BILL MOYERS: So, they made the Securities and Exchange Commission a laughing stock, if you will. They really did.
THOMAS FRANK: Right. Well, there's these horrible stories that came out. Once Bush was out, there was a study done of the SEC, as well. These people didn't even have like their own functioning photocopiers, okay? So, we're talking about the lawyers that are supposed to be protecting us from Wall Street. And they have to go stand in line at Kinko's to do their own photocopying. And they're going up against the best paid, you know, best educated lawyers on planet Earth, who represent the investment banks. And they're supposed to be defending us.
BILL MOYERS: The curious thing about this is that you and I and my audience knows that our ancestors believed that capitalism needed to be supervised. But when the conservatives came to power, they begin to muzzle the watchdog.
THOMAS FRANK: Yeah. Well, or you know, do away with it altogether, de-fund it. Look, the beginning in the 1980s, President Reagan came to office and came to power, and you remember the kind of rhetoric that he used to use in denouncing the Federal workforce. He hated the Federal workforce. And this is an article of faith among conservatives.
There's something called the pay gap that they used to talk about a lot in Washington, D.C. Which is, back in the '50s, '60s, and up into the 1970s, Federal workers were paid a comparable amount to what people in the private sector earned. Okay? So, if you're a lawyer working for the government, you got about as much as a lawyer working in the private sector.
Not as much, because government benefits are considered to be much better. Okay. Under Reagan, you had this huge gap open up between Federal workers and the private sector. I asked around. And I found out a government attorney makes $140,000 a year on retirement. After he's been there all his life. In the private sector law firm in Washington, you'd be making $160,000 starting salary. That's first year. Right out of law school.
BILL MOYERS: So what's the consequence of this pay gap you described? Or, do we get inferior government because of it?
THOMAS FRANK: Absolutely. It keeps the best and the brightest out of government service, unless you're really dedicated to a cause.
But let me go one step further with this, Bill. When I say this is done by design, I'm not exaggerating. And this is one of the more surprising things that I found when I was doing the research for "The Wrecking Crew," is that there's a whole conservative literature on why you want second-rate people in government, or third-rate.
I found an interview with the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 1928, where he said-- this quote, it's mind-boggling to me. But he really said this. "The best public servant is the worst one." Okay? You want bad people in government. You want to deliberately staff government with second-rate people. Because if you have good people in government, government will work. And then the public will learn to trust government. And then they'll hand over more power to it.
And you don't want that, of course. Your Chamber of Commerce. And I thought, when I first read this, "That's a crazy idea. I can't believe that sentiment." And then I found it repeated again and again and again. Throughout the long history of the conservative movement. This is something they believe very deeply.
BILL MOYERS: It comes out of a definitive way of seeing things, right?
THOMAS FRANK: Yes. And we can summarize that very briefly. That the market is the, you know, is the universal principle of human civilization. And that government is a kind of interloper, if not a, you know, criminal gang. And getting in the way.
BILL MOYERS: But we saw with this collapse and this bailout, we saw the failure of that.
THOMAS FRANK: Of course.
BILL MOYERS: And yet there's no sense of contrition. What's amazing to me, and you wrote this, that the very people who brought us this decade of conservative failures, the party of Palin, Beck, Hannity, Abramoff, Rove, DeLay, Kristol, O'Reilly, just might stage a comeback.
THOMAS FRANK: I think they might. I think there's a very strong chance of that.
BILL MOYERS: After only 11 months out of power, because of the record. I mean--
THOMAS FRANK: Look, well, the stuff--
BILL MOYERS: --it's crazy.
THOMAS FRANK: --the stuff we've been talking about here today. The stuff in "The Wrecking Crew," that's all forgotten. The financial crisis had that effect of-- that stuff is now off the-- down the memory hole
BILL MOYERS: Do you really think they believe that unfettered capitalism, unregulated markets, will deliver an ideal democracy and prosperity for everybody?
THOMAS FRANK: No, I don't. I think that they believe that, and to some degree, they're sincere in that belief. But the conservative movement in Washington, I'm not talking about grassroots voters in Kansas here. I'm talking about the conservative movement in Washington. And the whole constellation of think tanks and lobby shops and not-for-profits. And, you know, newspapers and fundraisers and all of this stuff.
They believe this is an industry, okay? This is an industry that churns out this product. And one of the things that, I mean, it's one of the things that they're doing now is they excommunicate George W. Bush, deeply unpopular, so therefore, not a true conservative, right? So, that way they get to start over fresh. The problem with George W. Bush, the reason we're in such a deep hole is that we never went far enough.
As Tom DeLay has said, in his newspaper column, and I'm paraphrasing here. The problem with conservatism isn't that it was tried and failed. It's that it never really got-- we never really tried it in the first place. So, what we have to do -- and I've heard, conservatives have said this. "What we have to do is go back and deregulate all the way. We have to, you know, slash government. We have to tear that thing down. That's what it's all about."
And the amazing thing about this. This allows them to represent themselves as dissidents against the sort of established order in Washington. Even though they ran the established order for years and years and years and years.
BILL MOYERS: Here's something else that's bizarre to me. And I wonder what you think about it, as a historian. I mean, right after the failed terrorist threat of Christmas, Obama's critics went to work scrubbing what happened when the Bush White House was out to lunch in the weeks and days leading up to 9/11.
I mean, you know, there were terrorists sneaking into the country. There were warnings from the intelligence community about something-- an attack on an American city coming. And that's all been flushed down the memory hole. Giuliani goes on the air and says, "We didn't have any terrorist attacks when Bush was President."
- An Aware Citizen -
To the Editor:
It seems appropriate to point out that President Obama’s first anniversary in office is Jan. 20. It took eight years for the Bush administration to get us into the terrible situation we are in now, but the pundits are only too pleased to blame President Obama for not turning the country around in a year!
You say many independent voters in Massachusetts were discouraged at the slow pace of change, and so a blue state turned red. We expect everything to happen overnight, and when it doesn’t, we have no staying power.
We now have a president who is smart, efficient and eminently capable; let’s give him a chance to do what must be done and not expect eight years of devastation to be overturned in a year. - Helen Gray Wash Depot Conn 1/20/10
- "Issues Stand Before Israel in Joining Elite Group -
JERUSALEM -- Israel, which has catapulted in the past two decades from a minor state-dominated economy to a market-driven technology hothouse, is in the final stages of accession to the exclusive club of advanced countries, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. BUT ITS SECRETIVE WEAPONS TRADE, PATENT-BENDING DRUG INDUSTRY AND OCCUPATION OF ARAB LANDS ARE RAISING LAST-MINUTE QUESTIONS.
The secretary general of the O.E.C.D., Ángel Gurría, currently in Israel to discuss the issues with senior officials, said that he was confident they could be resolved and that Israel might miss the original target of May but would become a member this year.
But he acknowledged that Israel, unlike other small countries in the process of accession -- Chile, Slovenia and Estonia -- might face objections unrelated to the technical questions still to be answered.
“We have to keep the substantive issues on the straight and narrow,” Mr. Gurría, a former Mexican finance minister, said in an interview held after meetings at the BANK OF ISRAEL. “We should not allow technical issues to be used as masks for something that is in reality a political issue.”
That political issue is Israel’s declining international reputation because of its Gaza war a year ago and its continuing construction of Jewish housing in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. Professional staff employees of the O.E.C.D., which is based in Paris, say all 30 member states must approve the accession of a country, and it remained unclear if any would object. But the three technical issues all still needed to be solved.
The first involved the organization’s convention to combat bribery of foreign officials, which it considers one of its more significant accomplishments. Some years ago, bribes were tax-deductible in several European countries. Now, all of the organization’s members are required to fight bribery through domestic legislation and regulation.
The arms trade is notoriously filled with palm-greasing across the world, and ISRAEL IS A LARGE ARMS TRADER. It has signed the antibribery convention as part of its accession process, but the way it handles the issue is causing difficulty, O.E.C.D. officials say.
The main concern is that Israel’s Defense Ministry has the power to censor the results of any investigation of bribes paid by Israeli companies to foreign officials on the grounds that the publicity could harm Israel’s national interests. The censor can ban publication and is under no obligation to tell the authorities about the investigations. The O.E.C.D. wants both practices changed.
The second concern, regarding intellectual property rights, involves the Israeli company Teva Pharmaceuticals, one of the world’s largest producers of generic drugs. MAJOR AMERICAN AND SWISS COMPANIES have long accused Israel of insufficient regulation of the way Teva markets its products in the face of patent regulations in other countries.
Finally, the O.E.C.D. is unhappy with Israel’s definition of its territory in collating economic data. Israel includes activities in East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, both of them won in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; most of the world views those areas as occupied, BUT ISRAEL CONSIDERS THEM ITS OWN THROUGH ANNEXATION.
All three issues, Israeli Foreign Ministry officials say, are being addressed at the technical level and will be solved.
Israel’s candidacy got off to an unusual start. Mr. Gurría, the secretary general, said THAT FOUR YEARS AGO Israel’s widely admired central bank governor, Stanley Fischer, began attending O.E.C.D. functions with large studies of Israel’s economy aimed at demonstrating its readiness for membership.
“It’s the only country that’s ever done that,” Mr. Gurría said. “They were actually using O.E.C.D. regulations to modify their practices so as to qualify. In May 2007 Israel was invited to join because of its good economic management focused on knowledge, technology and education. The O.E.C.D. can gain from its membership, and so can Israel.”
The O.E.C.D.’s purposes are to bring together market-oriented democracies, promote good business and economic practices, and increase employment and international trade.
For Israel, membership would not only help it continue to modernize its economy but also fight efforts to delegitimize and ostracize it over its dispute with the Palestinians." - Bronner N Y Times 1/20/10
- BACKGROUND -
In 1983, thirty five years after the 1948 Jewish clandestine military Irgun attacked and invaded Palestine, Ronald Reagan, who had limited his military history to the back lots and sound stages of Hollywood, ordered a Marine contingent to Beirut Airport as a show of force to bolster the heavily-guarded United States Embassy in Lebanon. Results? A truck-bomb took the lives of two hundred and twenty Marines at the airport and another similar device destroyed the heavily-guarded United States Embassy, and wiped out the entire CIA station in Lebanon on, as they say, "seventeen April 1983".
In this mix University of Chicago scholar Robert A. Pape took note.
Approaching twenty seven years later Barack Obama, who should know better but is encumbered by his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and chief spokesman David Axelrod, President Obama failed in his 1/5/10 brief address to the Nation to note that the seven to ten personnel of the CIA station in Kabul, Afghanistan and their forward post in Khost Province, were killed by a Jordanian physician, Human Khalil Mohammed (i.e. Abu-Malal al-Balawi), who was so appalled by the 12/26/08 - 1/18/09 Israeli massacre of Palestinians penned up in Gaza (which killed some 1400 Gazans, mostly civilians) Doctor Mohammed feigned agreement with the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate (long one of the CIA's closest and most useful allies in the Middle East); the Doctor agreeing to work for the CIA in Afghanistan, delivering Al Qaeda leaders, thereby gaining personal access to the key CIA people in Afghanistan...
As long as our government, "encumbered" as it is by AIPAC and the likes of "Independent" United States Senator Joseph Lieberman, gives billion$ each year (1st to Israel, 2nd to Egypt to support Israel against Egypt's own interests), even as they systematically starve the citizenry of Gaza, whose only offense is that they are Palestinians and have, now for almost sixty two years, survived a vicious, unscrupulous and mendacious band of predators known as the State of Israel, all funded by "the greatest Democracy on Earth"?! IT IS PAST TIME FOR AMERICANS TO RECOGNIZE THAT WE CAN NO LONGER SACRIFICE OUR BLOOD AND TREASURE ON THE ALTAR OF A ZIONIST ISRAEL! As we learn that these men, the Jordanian Dr. Human Khalil Abu-Malal al-Balawi and the Nigerian student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab were not vicious by nature; but were simply deeply wounded by the barbarous treatment of Palestinians, by Israel, in its 12/26/08 - 1/18/09 Massacre in Gaza, as we understand their motivation we will more clearly recognize the megalomania of this Israeli cabal.
As the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu continues to flaunt his contempt for our President by expanding Jewish-only housing in Arab East Jerusalem and, now, building another Jewish-only highway in the West Bank and refusing to open passage of humanitarian goods into Gaza [ WE GIVE $3 PLUS BILLION$ ANNUALLY TO ISRAEL (and if you wondered why Egypt refused to open its border to Gaza for those peaceful international protesters who wanted to take part in the Gaza March, note who is second on the list of international recipients...of our shrinking largesse' !) ]
[[ 1/12/10 Edit - "Iranian Nuclear Physicist Assassinated in Tehran -
An Iranian nuclear physicist was assassinated today in a bomb blast outside his home in Tehran. Massoud Ali-Mohammadi was a nuclear scientist who taught at Tehran University and who might have had links to Iran’s disputed nuclear program. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Iran’s Foreign Ministry blamed Israeli and American agents. The killing comes one month after Iran accused the United States of kidnapping another Iranian nuclear scientist, Shahram Amiri, who has been missing since June when he traveled to Saudi Arabia on a religious pilgrimage." - DemocracyNow 1/12/10
- MITCHELL ISSUES LOAN GUARANTEE THREAT TO ISRAEL -
Amy Goodman: The news of the military equipment deal comes amid some tension between Israel and the Obama administration. Last week US envoy George Mitchell said Washington could penalize Israel financially to force it into making concessions to the Palestinians. Mitchell’s comments were widely criticized in Israel as well as by some of Israel’s staunchest supporters on Capitol Hill, including independent Senator Joseph Lieberman.
"Senator" Joseph I. Lieberman: “Any attempt to pressure Israel, to force Israel to the negotiating table by denying Israel support, will not pass the Congress of the United States. In fact, Congress will act to stop any attempt to do that. I don’t think we’re going to come to that point, because I think the President and his administration understand that."
Amy Goodman: In other news from the region, three Palestinians died Sunday by an Israeli tank in Gaza. Palestinians said the three men were militants who were in a field often used to launch rockets toward Israel. Meanwhile, Israel has announced plans to construct two walls along its southern border with Egypt in an attempt to prevent African refugees and asylum seekers from entering Israel. The two walls will cover a total of seventy miles. - DemocracyNow 1/11/10
- An informed and balanced voice, seldom heard in recent days, on this "SURGE" (see Toles ahead) in Afghanistan & Pakistan.
Analyst Discusses Threat To CIA
ABC National News
January 9, 2010 5:35 PM
REPORTER NICK SCHIFRIN, ABC NEWS, KABUL AFGHANISTAN: That collaboration between Al Qaeda and the Taliban on both sides of the border is what worries U.S. officials most. They are asking for help from the Pakistanis. And until they get that help, U.S. troops will be in greater danger. David.
David Muir: Nick, thank you. And so we turn to Robin Wright now, a foreign affairs analyst, who has reported extensively for the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. And, Robin, you heard the threat there, that this is revenge for the drone attack that killed their leader. We know of seven CIA drone attacks since the attack on that CIA outpost, one more today. These drone attacks will continue. So what do you make of that threat?
ROBIN WRIGHT, US INSTITUTE FOR PEACE: Well, clearly the United States is sending a strong message to the Taliban, getting a bit of its own revenge. But the reality is that the United States has to rely on these advanced predators against a force of ragtag militia that has no air force of its own, no armored corps, no advanced artillery and no satellite intelligence. And eight years after this conflict began, the United States is having difficulty holding its own.
David Muir: And, Robin, we know you were in Beirut (in 1983, under Reagan) the last time the CIA was attacked with this scope, the bombing of the embassy. You heard what the CIA Director Leon Panetta said today, defending his CIA workers on the front lines. Did you see, though, a breakdown? Or is this simply the risk that they face?
ROBIN WRIGHT: Well, clearly it's the risk they face. I think Leon Panetta is right to a certain extent. But the reality is, 27 years after the first attack wiped out almost an entire CIA station, the United States should have known better. This is a real counterintelligence failure.
David Muir: All right. Robin Wright, as always, we appreciate your analysis. Thank you. - Robin Wright 1/9/10
- Additional Historical Backup -
‘They Planted Hatred in Our Hearts’
By PATRICK COCKBURN
FOOTNOTES IN GAZA
Written and illustrated by Joe Sacco
418 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $29.95
JOE SACCO’S GRIPPING, IMPORTANT BOOK ABOUT TWO LONG-FORGOTTEN MASS KILLINGS OF PALESTINIANS IN GAZA STANDS OUT AS ONE OF THE FEW CONTEMPORARY WORKS ON THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE LIKELY TO OUTLIVE THE ERA IN WHICH THEY WERE WRITTEN.
Sacco will find readers for “Footnotes in Gaza” far into the future because of the unique format and style of his comic-book narrative. He stands alone as a reporter-cartoonist because his ability to tell a story through his art is combined with investigative reporting of the highest quality.
His subject in this case is two massacres that happened more than half a century ago, stirred up little international attention and were forgotten outside the immediate circle of the victims. The killings took place during the Suez crisis of 1956, when the Israeli Army swept into the Gaza Strip, the great majority of whose inhabitants were Palestinian refugees. According to figures from the United Nations, 275 Palestinians were killed in the town of Khan Younis at the southern end of the strip on Nov. 3, and 111 died in Rafah, a few miles away on the Egyptian border, during a Nov. 12 operation by Israeli troops. Israel insisted that the Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces were still facing armed resistance. The Palestinians said all resistance had ceased by then.
Sacco makes the excellent point that such episodes are among the true building blocks of history. In this case, accounts of what happened were slow to seep out and were overshadowed by fresh developments in the Suez crisis. Sacco, whose reputation as a reporter-cartoonist was established with “Palestine” and “Safe Area Gorazde,” has rescued them from obscurity because they are “like innumerable historical tragedies over the ages that barely rate footnote status in the broad sweep of history -- even though . . . they often contain the seeds of the grief and anger that shape present-day events (e.g. the 12/26/08 - 1/18/09 Israeli Massacre in Gaza).”
Governments and the news media alike forget that atrocities live on in the memory of those most immediately affected. Sacco records Abed El-Aziz El-Rantisi -- a leader of Hamas (later killed by an Israeli missile), who in 1956 was 9 and living in Khan Younis -- describing how his uncle was killed: “It left a wound in my heart that can never heal,” he says. “I’m telling you a story and I am almost crying. . . . They planted hatred in our hearts.”
The vividness and pace of Sacco’s drawings, combined with a highly informed and intelligent verbal narrative, work extremely well in telling the story. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how any other form of journalism could make these events so interesting. Many newspaper or television reporters understand that the roots of today’s crises lie in obscure, unpublicized events (Attack on the USS Liberty). But they also recognize that their news editors are most interested in what is new and are likely to dismiss diversions into history as journalistic self-indulgence liable to bore and confuse the audience.
In fact, “Footnotes in Gaza” springs from this editorial bias against history. In the spring of 2001, Sacco and Chris Hedges (formerly a foreign correspondent of The New York Times) were reporting for Harper’s Magazine about Palestinians in Khan Younis during the early months of the second Palestinian intifada. They believed the 1956 killings helped explain the violence almost 50 years later. PERHAPS PREDICTABLY, HOWEVER, THE PARAGRAPHS ABOUT THE OLD MASSACRE WERE CUT.
American editors weren’t the only people who found their delving into history beside the point. When Sacco returned to Gaza to search for witnesses and survivors in 2002 and 2003, with Israeli forces still occupying the area, young Palestinians could not understand his interest in past events when there was so much contemporary violence.
Sacco’s pursuit of Palestinian and Israeli eyewitnesses as well as Israeli and United Nations documentation is relentless and impressive. He details the lives of those who help him, notably his fixer Abed, and brings to life two eras of the Gaza Strip, its towns packed with refugees in the early 1950s as they are today.
It was an atmosphere filled with hate. Few Israeli leaders showed any empathy for the Palestinian tragedy. But early in 1956, the Israeli chief of staff Moshe Dayan made a famous speech at the funeral of an Israeli commander killed on the border with Gaza. What, Dayan wondered, explained the Palestinians’ “terrible hatred of us”? Then he answered his own question: “For eight years now they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home.” He added that Israelis needed to be “ready and armed, tough and harsh.”
What this meant in practice became clear as Israeli troops took over Gaza six months later. The killings in Khan Younis were relatively straightforward, according to eyewitnesses and a few survivors. The men of the town were told to line up in the main square and were then systematically shot so their bodies lay in a long row. Some who stayed in their homes were killed there.
The episode in Rafah was more complicated and took place over the course of a day, when people were summoned to a school so the Israelis could determine if they were guerrillas or soldiers. Here there were many more survivors than in Khan Younis; they describe how some were shot on their way to the school and others beaten to death with batons as they entered the school courtyard. The Israeli Army did order two officers to conduct an inquiry into the “Rafah incident,” as a top-secret communiqué called it. (The same communiqué said 40 to 60 people were killed and 20 injured.) Sacco’s researcher found no report in military archives.
Gaza has changed radically since Sacco did his research. In 2005, Israel unilaterally dismantled Jewish settlements and withdrew its military forces, although it remained in tight control of Gaza’s borders. In 2007, Hamas seized control, and in 2008-9 the enclave came under devastating Israeli attack. In this bewildering torrent of events, Sacco’s investigation into the 50-year-old killings is one of the surest guides to the hatred with which Palestinians and Israelis confront one another. - PATRICK COCKBURN & JOE SACCO N Y Times 12/27/09
While Mark Halperin (former political director of ABC News, after which he assumed a similar position with Time) while Halperin, Heilemann and our news Media/Press are salivating, along with Republicans, on destroying the Majority Leader of the United States Senate Harry Reid, the real story from "Game Change" is provided by Michiko Kakutani:
"Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write, for instance (1) that the strategist John Weaver suspected the rumor Cindy McCain had a “long-term boyfriend” in Arizona “was rooted in truth,” and that (2) the McCains “fought in front of others, during small meetings and before large events, to the amazement and discomfort of the staff.” (3) The authors say that Mrs. McCain accused the senator of ruining her life, that she never wanted him to run again for president, and that (4) “when it came time to film campaign videos of the couple, the camera crews had to roll for hours to capture a few minutes of warmth.” Page 4, 1/10/10 Arts N Y Times
Note: The appearance of Halperin & Heilemann, on Julie Chen's husband's (Leslie Moonves) 60 MINUTES with Anderson Cooper 1/10/10, also neglected these items that Ms. Kakutani noted... ]]
And here is Amy Goodman's 1/7/10 interview with George Galloway, the stalwart international citizen and famed British lawmaker - given more time he could also have covered the Israeli theft of Palestinian aquifers:
"A humanitarian aid convoy carrying food and medical supplies has arrived in Gaza nearly a month after it embarked from Britain. Members of the Viva Palestina convoy began passing through Egypt’s Rafah border crossing into Gaza on Wednesday. They’re expected to spend the next forty-eight hours distributing the aid supplies.
The convoy was delayed by more than a week following a dispute with the Egyptian government. Hours before the convoy’s entry into Gaza yesterday, an Egyptian soldier was shot dead during a clash with Palestinian protesters who had gathered along the border to protest the delay. At least thirty-five Palestinians were wounded. On Tuesday, Egyptian forces clashed with members of the Viva Palestina convoy, wounding more than fifty".
AMY GOODMAN: Egypt and Israel have been maintaining a strict blockade on Gaza since 2007, allowing only the most basic supplies to get through. Viva Palestina’s arrival in Gaza comes a year after the three-week Israeli assault that killed over 1,300 Palestinians.
British parliamentarian George Galloway led the Viva Palestina convoy. He joins us now on the phone right now from Gaza.
Welcome to Democracy Now!"
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Thank you. Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us what happened? We hear a number of people in your convoy were beaten up, were hurt, some hospitalized.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Yes, fifty-five, in fact, were injured, some of them quite severely. Ten of them had to go to hospital. All of them entered Gaza with us, but we have a collection of broken heads and plaster casts and bloodied faces and clothes.
It’s quite a testimony to the role that the government of Egypt is playing in this siege that you have just admirably described. It was entirely unprovoked. It was an attack on unarmed civilian people. And it was very frightening and brutal. And, of course, it was of a piece with the way that the Gaza Freedom Marchers were treated in the center of Cairo in the middle of the tourist season just days before.
JUAN GONZALEZ: What kind of coverage did that attack receive in the Egyptian media? And did it have any impact on the government’s decision to then let the convoy pass?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, the good news is that nobody watches the Egyptian media in Egypt. All of them watch the pan-Arabic stations like Al Jazeera, satellite stations, which have broken the censorship walls of the dictatorships in the Arab world. And so, everybody in Egypt knows what happened in that little port of Al-Arish, and the vast majority of them, I’m sure, completely disapprove of it, indeed denounce it.
The Egyptian people are entirely behind the Palestinians under siege. Unfortunately, they are ill-served by a government that is playing a quite despicable role, actually, just few yards from where I am now. The Egyptians are building what we call the wall of shame, which is being done in conjunction with the United States military, to try and choke off the tunnels, which are the only other means of bringing life into Gaza, in which sheep and chickens and petrol and gas and the other means of staying alive, other than medicine--because if I may correct something you did say in the introduction, you said we were bringing food and medicine, but we were only bringing medicine, because food is actually not allowed to come through the Rafah gate from Egypt into Gaza. Food must pass through the Israeli lines, because, of course, they say they are concerned about the safety of the food. They don’t want to cause any food poisoning in Gaza, you understand (HORRIFIC!).
AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe the condition of Gaza? It’s been a year since the Israeli assault. You were there last year also trying to bring in aid.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: It’s desperate. If I give you a tiny example only to give you an example, I’m here in quite a nice hotel, except there is no food in the hotel. There’s no food for breakfast, there’s no food for lunch. Now I make that point only to illustrate that if there’s no food in the best hotel in Gaza, imagine what the people are suffering. I’ve watched with my own eyes Palestinian women and girls in the early morning mists on top of garbage heaps, combing through the garbage heaps looking for food. In an Arab Muslim country in 2009 and ’10, it’s a absolutely scandalous situation.
And, Amy, remember why and how it came about. It’s been imposed by men. It’s not a natural disaster. It’s been imposed by men to punish the people of Palestine for voting for a party (Hamas) in a free election that the big powers, including yours and mine and Israel, don’t like. Now, I myself would not have voted for them; I’m not a Hamas supporter. But the only people entitled to choose the leadership of the Palestinians are the Palestinians themselves.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you been meeting--as a British member of Parliament, did you meet with any Egyptian leaders? And is there an explanation of why the Gaza Freedom March was kept out--they allowed in about a hundred people, but many refused under those conditions--and why the Egyptian government is stopping these peace activists from entering Gaza?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, I’m glad to say that at every stage we insisted on all of our convoy entering Gaza, and we refused to leave Al-Arish without our prisoners, six people who were being held prisoner by the Egyptian government’s forces. And we refused to accept the exclusion from Egypt of some of our convoy members, all of whom were initially excluded, but all, in the end, were let in and are with me in Gaza. So, in terms of solidarity, I’m proud of what we have achieved.
No, there’s no explanation from the Egyptian regime at all. How could there be, in a way? How do you explain to anyone that Egypt, once the heart of the Arab world, is now playing a part in building an iron wall of shame around a suffering people who are being effectively starved, they hope, into surrender, but if not into surrender, then into death?
JUAN GONZALEZ: And George Galloway, your sense of how the Palestinian leadership is regarding the policies of the United States? Now we’re a year into the Obama administration. He’s, on the one hand, attempted to reach out to the Arab world in a way the Bush administration never did, but in terms of Palestine and the conflict with Israel, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of change.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, I must tell you, Juan, as someone who, myself, on my radio shows and TV shows and so on, campaigned for the election of Barack Obama, tried very hard to persuade people on the left that they were making a kind of utopian mistake in not supporting Obama, there is a tremendous bitter disappointment here in Palestine, and indeed wider than that, at the role that President Obama is currently playing, or rather not playing. His speech in Cairo was a wonderful piece of work. It was mesmerizing. It transfixed the Arab public opinion, that finally, after the Bush years, we had some hope. But in practice, his policy--and one assumes Hillary Clinton is carrying out his policy--is exactly the same as the policy of the Bushites towards the people here. And there’s bitter, bitter disappointment about that.
AMY GOODMAN: George Galloway, we want to thank you very much for being with us, a British MP leading the Viva Palestina aid convoy. Their whole convoy did get into Gaza through Egypt, though through a great deal of conflict, with a number of the delegation beaten up. - Amy Goodman 1/7/10
- KEY BACKGROUND -
Another George, the notable but less respectable George Mitchell, until 1/1/07 the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the giant Disney ABC Corporation, this George was interviewed by "Charlie" Rose 1/7/10 {repeated 1/8/10 on an OPB, Oregon "Public" Broadcasting ["Sponsored by the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Care ("Care" for the Schnitzers?) Foundation"]} in which Mr. Mitchell made it clear (to a comforted "Charlie" Rose) that by the time Mr. Mitchell (and the United States) puts any real pressure on the Israelis (like, for example, putting into play the $ 3+ Billion$ we give Israel EVERY YEAR) (1) every trace of Palestinian presence in Arab East Jerusalem will have been removed; (2) the Palestinian population in Gaza will have been starved to death; and (3) all of the Palestinian aquifers will have been acquired by Israel.
- More next edit. (Did the Schnitzers bring Netanyahu to Oregon a few years back?).
A year ago 12/26/08 - 1/18/09, the Israelis wrought their "Massacre on Gaza - Cast Lead". Having stifled exposure and coopted protests ( Norman Finkelstein, well-versed on the years-long Israeli exploitation of Gaza, conceived the original March on Gaza), a year later the Israelis would seem to be mounting a repeat, (1) quickening their demolishing of Arab citizens houses and buildings in Arab East Jerusalem, (2) gunning down (12/26/09) three Palestinians in Nablus of the West Bank, and, expanding the perimeter, (3) planting three bombs under a Hamas vehicle in Haret Hreik Beirut, that portion of Beirut allotted to Hezbollah in the power-sharing arrangement in Lebanon. Actions have consequences, and the 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab with an explosive device sewn into his underwear, who intended to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight to Detroit with three hundred aboard on Christmas Day 12/25/09, will not be the last Islamist to attempt to answer the extremist Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee who was in Yemen in August, along with General Petraeus, overseeing the introduction of U.S. Special Operations, Green Berets and intelligence, regarding which he reported to Chris Wallace's "Fox News Sunday" on 12/27/09.
In an effort to support and maintain the radical Netanyahu government in Israel, with their absolutist radical religious policies assaulting and affronting the Islamist Middle East, the United States present government can expect a continuum of deadly attacks by the growing number of Islamists radicalized by a, one must recognize, maniacal Israel. No quantity of pro-Israel pro-Jewish propaganda can alter our recent history since the assassination of Soldier Statesman Yitzhak Rabin in November of 1995, and this database of GOPBIAS.org has that history, perhaps more consolidated than any other location on the world wide web.
- An Addendum -
The Palestinians did not kill or torture any Jews in Europe in the years leading up to and including World War II, and no amount of Jewish propaganda can convince people that they did. In fact, such propaganda only demeans whatever legitimate cause the Israelis have.
What could not be more clear today, 12/28/09 -
Once again we're squandering our blood and treasure for the State of Israel, this time to answer the tumult created in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a condition which will not subside as long as the insidious Israelis refuse to recognize the God-given rights of the Palestinians to live peaceful lives IN PALESTINE!
- Here, the original -
Next Photo
Both Admiral Mullen and General McChrystal were heavily involved first, in the "surge" in Iraq, and have now moved on to Afghanistan, supposedly with the "success" in Iraq at their backs. However, 12/8/09: "Five car bombs in Iraq are detonated simultaneously, killing over one hundred and thirty Iraqis - and seriously wounding another FIVE HUNDRED"! And, in Iran, hordes of protesters shouting "Death to the Dictator"! Steven J. Rosen's work? And when was "Merry Christmas" outlawed, and replaced by a "Happy Holidays" mandate?
We know that Rahm Emanuel arranged for the exoneration of the above Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, and laid the groundwork for dismissing the case against the rapist of a thirteen-year-old, Roman Polanski; Has he also supported the sleazy thief, Conrad Black, former owner of The Jerusalem Post?
- 12/20/09 Edit - Happy Holidays!
- Bill Moyers Journal 12/18/09 with Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect and Matt Taibbi (his father reports for NBC) of Rolling Stone make the case against Chief of Staff Emanuel, but may be too harsh against the President. It has been a goal of a series of Democratic presidents for eighty years to provide universal national health care, but for the last forty years the GOP (Grand Old Party?) has prevented same. If President Obama is successful (his primary obstacle is our Media/Press) it will be a noteworthy achievement.
- Segments of the 12/18/09 Journal -
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.
Something's not right here. One year after the great collapse of our financial system, Wall Street is back on top while our politicians dither. As for health care reform, you're about to be forced to buy insurance from companies whose stock is soaring, and that's just dandy with the White House.
Truth is, our capitol's being looted, republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that's pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It's capital. Raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were futures on the hog market.
Here to talk about all this are two journalists who don't pull their punches. Robert Kuttner is an economist who helped create and now co-edits the progressive magazine THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, and the author of the book OBAMA'S CHALLENGE, among others.
Also with me is Matt Taibbi, who covers politics for ROLLING STONE magazine where he is a contributing editor. He's made a name for himself writing in a no-holds-barred, often profane, but always informative and stimulating style that gets under the skin of the powerful. His most recent article is "Obama's Big Sellout," about the President's team of economic advisers and their Wall Street connections. It's been burning up the blogosphere. Welcome to both of you.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Rahm Emanuel, the President's Chief of Staff, was Bill Clinton's Political Director. And Rahm Emanuel's take away from Bill Clinton's failure to get health insurance passed was 'don't get on the wrong side of the insurance companies.' So their strategy was cut a deal with the insurance companies, the drug industry going in. And the deal was, we're not going to attack your customer base, we're going to subsidize a new customer base. And that script was pre-cooked so it's not surprising that this is what comes out the other side.
BILL MOYERS: So are you saying that this, what some call a sweetheart deal between the pharmaceutical industry and the White House, done many months ago before this fight really began, was because the drug company money in the Democratic Party?
ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, it's two things. Part of it was we need to do whatever it takes to get a bill. Never mind whether it's a really good bill, let's get a bill passed so we can claim that we solved health insurance. Secondly, let's get the drug industry and the insurance industry either supporting us or not actively opposing us. So that there was some skirmishing around the details, but the deal going in was that the administration, drug companies, insurance companies are on the same team. Now, that's one way to get legislation, it's not a way to transform the health system. Once the White House made this deal with the insurance companies, the public option was never going to be anything more than a fig leaf. And over the summer and the fall, it got whittled down, whittled down, whittled down to almost nothing and now it's really nothing.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, and this was Howard Dean's point this week was that this individual mandate that's going to force people to become customers of private health insurance companies, the Democrats are going to end up owning that policy and it's going to be extremely unpopular and it's going to be theirs for a generation. It's going to be an albatross around the neck of this party.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Look, there are two ways, if you're the President of the United States sizing up a situation like this that you can try and create reform. One is to say, well, the interest groups are so powerful that the only thing I can do is I can work with them and move the ball a few yards, get some incremental reform, hope it turns into something better. The other way you can do it is to try to rally the people against the special interests and play on the fact that the insurance industry, the drug industry, are not going to win any popularity contests with the American people. And you, as the president, be the champion of the people against the special interests. That's the course that Obama's chosen not to pursue.
MATT TAIBBI: The Democrats are in exactly the same position that the Republicans were in once the Iraq War turned bad. All the Republicans have to do now is sit back and watch the Democrats make a disaster out of this health care effort. And they're going to gain political capital whether they're in the right or not. And I think it's a very- it's a terrible thing for the party.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Well, my co-editor, Paul Starr in the editorial in the current issue of "The Prospect" takes exactly that position. Don't be too hard on Obama, he inherited a really difficult situation and we're making incremental progress. If we could've done better we would've. Paul and I disagree about that. I mean, I think one of the challenges of a president is to transform the reality rather than just work within its parameters. I think the other problem, frankly, is that those of us who consider ourselves progressives invested so much in this remarkable figure, Barack Obama. And we read our own hopes into him. We saw him as a potentially great president. We saw this as a potentially transformative moment, I certainly did, where he could've chosen to be the kind of president Roosevelt was. And it turns out that's not who he is characteralogically and that's not how he chose to play the moment.
ROBERT KUTTNER: We're going to have to do that anyway. In other words, these fights never end. We're going to have to go back and make a fight another day. And hopefully, that won't be 20 years from now. Hopefully, it will be six years from now. I think if this bill goes down it's going to be even harder to get the kind of legislation we want because the Republicans are really going to be on the march. So, the Democrats are really between a rock and a hard place here, because if it loses, there's one set of ways the Republicans gain. If it wins, there could be another set of ways that the Republicans gain. AND THIS IS ALL BECAUSE OF THE DEAL THAT OUR FRIEND, RAHM EMANUEL STRUCK BACK IN THE SPRING OF PASSING A BILL THAT'S A PRO-INDUSTRY BILL THAT DOESN'T REALLY GET AT THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS.
ROBERT KUTTNER: Corporate, yes, sorry. That's too kind. THEY'RE CORPORATE DEMOCRATS WHO WERE PUT ON THAT COMMITTEE BECAUSE RAHM EMANUEL FELT THAT THERE'S NO BETTER PLACE THAN THE HOUSE FINANCIAL SERVICES COMMITTEE IF YOU WANT TO SHAKE DOWN WALL STREET, TO PUT IT BLUNTLY. - BMJ 12/18/09
As the new year of 2010 approaches, in which unbelievably, the Media/Press informs us that the unscrupulous political party which brought this nation and, in fact, the Western financial world, to the brink of disaster - and now, that same band of scoundrels opposes any and all attempts to right this battered ship of state and the damaged rest of the world (EXCEPT ISRAEL); that this notorious Republican political party from Rush Limbaugh, through Alan Greenspan and Dick Armey to John Boehner and Mitch McConnell AND John Sidney McCain III -
Michael Sokolove had this piece in the 11/8/09 The New York Times Magazine on the "folksy" Dick Armey whose home is ninety acres just north of Dallas, Texas: "For most of the last half-dozen years, he has worked in the lobbying shop of the giant law firm DLA Piper while also serving as chairman of FreedomWorks, a nonprofit organization that in 2008 paid him $550,000.
When I asked Mark McKinnon, a political strategist and former consultant to George W. Bush, how he would explain Armey’s resurgence on the national stage, he replied: “Armey and FreedomWorks have been the invisible hand behind much of the recent conservative activism around the country. He taps into the innate fear most Americans have about government activism and overreach.”
Interestingly, this so-called FreedomWorks began with the billion$ of Sheldon G. Adelson
"He told the crowd that day in North Carolina, “Nearly every important office in Washington, D.C., today is occupied by someone with an AGGRESSIVE DISLIKE FOR OUR HERITAGE, OUR FREEDOM, OUR HISTORY AND OUR CONSTITUTION.”"
That this dishonorable and unprincipled band of thieves STANDS TO INCREASE THEIR NUMBER IN THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES! HORRENDOUS!
The Phenomenal Paul Krugman - Nobel Laureate 12/21/09
- A DANGEROUS DYSFUNCTION
" The Senate, the filibuster and paralyzed government.
Unless some legislator pulls off a last-minute double-cross, health care reform will pass the Senate this week. Count me among those who consider this an awesome achievement. It’s a seriously flawed bill, we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it, but it’s nonetheless a huge step forward.
It was, however, a close-run thing. And the fact that it was such a close thing shows that the Senate -- and, therefore, the U.S. government as a whole -- has become ominously dysfunctional.
After all, Democrats won big last year, running on a platform that put health reform front and center. In any other advanced democracy this would have given them the mandate and the ability to make major changes. But the need for 60 votes to cut off Senate debate and end a filibuster -- a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule -- turned what should have been a straightforward piece of legislating into a nail-biter. And it gave a handful of wavering senators extraordinary power to shape the bill.
Now consider what lies ahead. We need fundamental financial reform. We need to deal with climate change. We need to deal with our long-run budget deficit. What are the chances that we can do all that -- or, I’m tempted to say, any of it -- if doing anything requires 60 votes in a deeply polarized Senate?
Some people will say that it has always been this way, and that we’ve managed so far. But it wasn’t always like this. Yes, there were filibusters in the past -- most notably by segregationists trying to block civil rights legislation. But the modern system, in which the minority party uses the threat of a filibuster to block every bill it doesn’t like, is a recent creation.
The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” -- threatened or actual filibusters -- affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.
Some conservatives argue that the Senate’s rules didn’t stop former President George W. Bush from getting things done. But this is misleading, on two levels.
First, Bush-era Democrats weren’t nearly as determined to frustrate the majority party, at any cost, as Obama-era Republicans. Certainly, Democrats never did anything like what Republicans did last week: G.O.P. senators held up spending for the Defense Department -- which was on the verge of running out of money -- in an attempt to delay action on health care.
More important, however, Mr. Bush was a buy-now-pay-later president. He pushed through big tax cuts, but never tried to pass spending cuts to make up for the revenue loss. He rushed the nation into war, but never asked Congress to pay for it. He added an expensive drug benefit to Medicare, but left it completely unfunded. Yes, he had legislative victories; but he didn’t show that Congress can make hard choices and act responsibly, because he never asked it to.
So now that hard choices must be made, how can we reform the Senate to make such choices possible?
Back in the mid-1990s two senators -- Tom Harkin and, believe it or not, Joe Lieberman -- introduced a bill to reform Senate procedures. (MANAGEMENT WANTS ME TO MAKE IT CLEAR THAT IN MY LAST COLUMN I WASN’T ENDORSING INAPPROPRIATE THREATS AGAINST MR. LIEBERMAN.) Sixty votes would still be needed to end a filibuster at the beginning of debate, but if that vote failed, another vote could be held a couple of days later requiring only 57 senators, then another, and eventually a simple majority could end debate. Mr. Harkin says that he’s considering reintroducing that proposal, and he should.
But if such legislation is itself blocked by a filibuster -- which it almost surely would be -- reformers should turn to other options. Remember, the Constitution sets up the Senate as a body with majority -- not supermajority -- rule. So the rule of 60 can be changed. A Congressional Research Service report from 2005, when a Republican majority was threatening to abolish the filibuster so it could push through Bush judicial nominees, suggests several ways this could happen -- for example, through a majority vote changing Senate rules on the first day of a new session.
Nobody should meddle lightly with long-established parliamentary procedure. But our current situation is unprecedented: America is caught between severe problems that must be addressed and a minority party determined to block action on every front. DOING NOTHING IS NOT AN OPTION -- NOT UNLESS YOU WANT THE NATION TO SIT MOTIONLESS, WITH AN EFFECTIVELY PARALYZED GOVERNMENT, WAITING FOR FINANCIAL, ENVIRONMENTAL AND FISCAL CRISES TO STRIKE. - Paul Krugman 12/21/09
Again, were there a John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Edward R. Murrow, or an Eric Severeid in our midst, such a preposterous and devastating farce would be unthinkable!
And there is another facet to this scheme, by the GOP and their confederates in the media, a plot which seems destined to duplicate the conspiracy of a decade ago in which a cabal of Jewish Americans (Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rosen and Weissman etc.) usurped the power of the United States to occupy Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein FOR ISRAEL! Today, ten years later, we've expanded our footprint into Southwest Asia, to quell those Muslim countries of Afghanistan and Pakistan, newly alarmed by the positions taken by that intensely malignant cancer in the Middle East, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and Avignor Lieberman. Once again we're squandering our blood and treasure for the State of Israel, this time to answer the tumult created in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a condition which will not subside as long as the insidious Israelis refuse to recognize the God-given rights of the Palestinians to live peaceful lives IN PALESTINE!
[ NPR's Talk of the Nation 12/16/09 produced a classic example of "Public Radio Propaganda" as host Neal Conan, Ted Koppel ("NPR's Senior News Analyst") and David Sanger (whose latest book Koppel unabashedly promoted), Sanger, one of the most aggressive of The New York Times' reporters who, particularly on Iran, has that Persian nation threatening Israel with nuclear weapons; that's the Israel which is brimming with nuclear weaponry and refusing to sign the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The shared ethnicity of Messrs. Conan, Koppel and Sanger (who describe Israel as a "Democracy" even though its Palestinian Christian and Arab citizens are confronted on every side by "legal" apartheid restrictions), that shared ethnicity should disqualify this threesome.]
It was obvious what had forced Mr. Conan's 12/16/09 broadcast with Ted Koppel and David Sanger. His permitting, two days before (12/14/09), the notable Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Paul Nitze Professor of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and the National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, when the NSA title meant something, allowing Mr. Brzezinki to appear on TOTN - FOR TWENTY MINUTES!
Here some segments...
MR. BRZEZINSKI: Well, basically, President Obama has recast the way America should approach the world. And I think in doing so, he has also helped enormously to improve America's standing in the world. He, in effect, has recommitted America to collective security and not to unilateral actions. He hasn't disowned the necessity of war sometimes, but he has made it very clear that America should avoid pursuing single, solitary wars without international support.
He has urged a process of reconciliation with the Islamic world. He has articulated the need for greater commitment to the achievement of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He has committed the United States to an effort to find, if possible, a peaceful solution to the challenge posed by Iran. I could go on and on and on, but basically, all of that cumulatively meant that American foreign policy, was in some fashion, re-linked to the fundamental dynamics of the 21st century.
TALK SHOW CALLER: Hello and thank you. What a privilege. I wondered Dr. Brzezinski, now, as we know that China wants the oil that could come from Russia through a pipeline through Afghanistan, as we know that Iran wants to build nuclear energy generation sites, as we know that Afghanistan has a lot of opium poppies, what are the chances that we could work with China, with Russia, with Iran to provide electrification and modernization in western and southern Afghanistan? And what are the chances we can work with pharmaceutical companies around the planet to make a market for the opium in Afghanistan for palliative care among the developing - of the developed world where people are dying in pain? And I'm interested in your response to this possible answer, to issues of Afghanistan including modernization, electrification and an actual market for the opium and working with China, with Russia and with India. Thank you.
NEAL CONAN: Jeff, thanks very much. And let me ask you about - the one we've not focused on at all yet is Iran. And more evidence over the weekend, if more were needed, that Iran appears to be - its nuclear ambitions include nuclear weapons and that's the direction it seems to be going no matter what the international community says or does.
MR. BRZEZINSKI: Well, we don't know how true this so-called evidence is. As you know, there are a lot of parties (ISRAEL!) that are interested in the United States and Iran not reaching an agreement. So we have to be absolutely certain that this is not a repetition of the Iraq case when there was also a lot of parties (ISRAEL!) that wanted us to go to war with the Iraq and kept insisting that there is evidence that the Iraqis already have nuclear weapons.
I think the picture with Iran is more mixed. I think there are reasons to be suspicious, but we don't have enough reasons to be conclusively convinced that they're actually actively seeking nuclear weapons. The last comprehensive U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that currently, they are not. Secretary Gates recently said that he didn't think that Iran would have any effective nuclear arsenal before 2014.
The head of the Mossad in Israel echoed him so far as that date is concerned. And that leads me to the basic conclusion that if we wanted negotiations to succeed, we have to do two things: One, be patient and not to try to force the issue immediately, because if we do it's a prescription for failure. Secondly, to the extent possible we should be negotiating not just about the nuclear problem, which is a very serious and complex problem, but we should always be negotiating about regional security (And Israel Quiescent!) in which we'd have a common stake and maybe even about financial economic arrangements (We give Israel a minimum of $3.5 Billion$ every year!). If we do that, there's a greater chance of quid pro quos emerging from the different negotiating tables. And I think that's in our interest.
December 19, 2009
- FBI ACCUSED OF ABUSING POWER IN CLINTON INQUIRY
BY PETER BAKER
WASHINGTON -- A former DIRECTOR of the Secret Service said Friday that the F.B.I. had engaged in an “abuse of power” by trying to pressure him to “give us the president” during the investigation of President Bill Clinton’s interactions with Monica Lewinsky a decade ago.
The official, Lewis C. Merletti, who headed the former president’s protective detail and later became the agency’s director, said in an interview that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had grilled him just days before Mr. Clinton left office in a last-ditch effort to prove that his Secret Service agents had covered up and even facilitated extramarital flings.
Mr. Merletti said that the F.B.I. alleged that he and Mr. Clinton had concocted this deal: in exchange for Mr. Merletti’s stonewalling questions about Ms. Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton would not only appoint him director of the Secret Service but would also provide him women for sexual encounters.
“They said to me, ‘You’re the last person who can give us the president, and you’re going to give him to us,’ ” Mr. Merletti recalled. He called it “disgraceful” and said of the F.B.I., “They became involved in a political game, and in the end they tarnished themselves beyond belief.”
The new book, “The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr,” written by Ken Gormley, a law professor at Duquesne University, and published by Crown, re-examines the scandals and investigations that marked Mr. Clinton’s presidency and adds new details to the public understanding of them. Mr. Gormley secured unusual cooperation from nearly all of the main players, including Mr. Clinton, Mr. Starr and Ms. Lewinsky.
As first reported by Politico, the book quotes Ms. Lewinsky as saying that she believed Mr. Clinton did lie under oath to a grand jury and asserts that the former president, while he was Arkansas’s governor, did have a romantic affair with Susan McDougal, his onetime Whitewater partner who went to jail rather than testify against him. - Baker N Y Times 12/19/09
- THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS GROUNDBREAKING "THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE: CLINTON VS STARR" AND THIS PETER BAKER ARTICLE IN THE 12/19/09 N Y TIMES IS THREE-FOLD - (1) NO MENTION ON THE TIMES' FRONT PAGE, (2) NO MENTION ON THE TIMES' PAGE 2 "INSIDE THE TIMES" INDEX, AND, MOST SIGNIFICANTLY (A DEAD GIVEAWAY!) (3) THE NAME OF THE FBI DIRECTOR AT THE TIME...IS MISSING...ONE WOULD HAVE TO NOTE THE ETHNICITY OF ONE LOUIS J. FREEH, LAST SEEN ON NATIONAL TELEVISION INTRODUCING THE PRESENT ATTORNEY GENERAL, ERIC HOLDER.
There are those who take issue with the earlier characterization of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a "con artist", that it's disrespectful of an Admiral who has risked his life for his country. Our Constitution makes clear that the President of these United States is the Commander in Chief. It is also clear that we have a military led by men who have conspired to force President Obama's hand regarding our policy in Afghanistan, and what this foreign policy manipulation foretells is indistinguishable from the prior eight years in which, perhaps, our worst president began this catastrophe by withdrawing from that very locale, from which 9/11 originated.
The reputable reporter David Martin spelled out on the 10/30/09 CBS Evening News the details of our military leaders publicly coercing this president to align himself with their plans for Afghanistan, not surprisingly identical to those of the man President Barack Obama defeated in 2008, John Sidney McCain III (do you recall how Five-Star General Douglass MacArthur was fired by President Harry Truman?).
David Martin: The White House is not happy with the way senior military leaders, beginning with Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen have handled the debate over Afghan strategy, boxing the president in with their public statements. Two days after the president held his first meeting on Afghanistan, Mullen was telling Congress he agreed with McChrystal.
David Martin: Even before that, General Petraeus, the overall commander for the region, gave an interview in which he strongly backed McChrystal's assessment. As for McChrystal, he publicly dismissed a much more limited strategy favored by Vice President Biden.
On Afghanistan Conundrum
To the Editor:
Thomas L. Friedman argues that President Obama’s Afghanistan policy will succeed only if we are successful in nation-building (“May It All Come True,” column, Dec. 6). It’s worse than that. There is no nation to build.
Afghanistan is a loosely aligned collection of tribal constituencies. Its people are largely illiterate. The so-called central government does not control the countryside and is corrupt.
How are Americans in a relatively short period of time going to create from this raw material a state capable of ensuring its own security?
We are also fighting the wrong enemy. The Taliban, no matter how alien to our values, pose no threat to the United States. Al Qaeda has no significant current presence in Afghanistan.
In short, we are sending a lot of soldiers at enormous cost to fight an enemy that is somewhere else, with the de facto mission of propping up a narco-state. This makes no sense. - Boyd Hight Los Angeles 23/6/09
The writer was a deputy assistant secretary of state during the Carter administration.
To the Editor:
Re “Obama’s Logic Is No Match for Afghanistan,” by Frank Rich (column, Dec. 6):
To Mr. Rich’s cogent arguments I add two further considerations not evident in recent administration policy discussions. The first, voiced by numerous Afghanistan experts, is the danger that an American troop escalation will increase the appearance of an American occupation and drive ordinary Afghans into the hands of the Taliban.
The second is the related danger that a rise in the number of Muslims killed in Afghanistan will radicalize ever-larger numbers of formerly nonextremist Muslims in countries around the world.
Robert Wright (“Who Created Major Hasan?” Op-Ed, Nov. 22) gives this argument new focus and urgency, noting that the men who carried out the Fort Hood and Little Rock shootings both referred to the American military’s killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a large number of innocent civilians. He fears that we may see more such incidences of domestic terror, with no way to protect ourselves.
These dangers should be borne in mind by those who formulate and put into effect our nation’s policy. - Donna Wulff Providence RI 12/7/09
The writer is associate professor of South Asian religions, Brown University.
- Wishing you a grand & glorious two hundred and thirty-third celebration of our Declaration of Independence - July 4th of 2009! - And the battle continues!
To Recognize the Forty-sixth anniversary
of the Assassination of President
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
- We'll continue in the mode of reverence for John Kennedy, who, had he survived, would have set a tone which would have precluded a Richard Nixon, a Ronald Reagan and both a George H. W. Bush and a George W. Bush, largely because President Kennedy would have chosen the diplomatic path to settle the Vietnam conundrum [which Eisenhower had rejected by canceling the 1954 all-Vietnam plebiscite - and LBJ had precluded by simulating the 1964 North Vietnamese Gulf of Tonkin attack (this was publicized by the Senator-Statesman Wayne Morse, which Michael Beschloss has yet to acknowledge)] all of which has altered our nation's history for the worst! - 12/7/09 Edit - The sixty-eighth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, "A Day of Infamy!" - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We continue with 12/11/09 Edit, to the 12/15/09 Edit.
Next Photo
Noting the comfort of those pictured above, contrasted today (10/28/09) with the bloody mayhem across the globe in Islamic Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan - and the loss of young American life and limb, blood and treasure, for those pictured above? - - - Yes - Although it began in 1948 with the attack by the Irgun, a militant underground Zionist group, on a co-mingled Palestine where Jews, Palestinian Muslims and Christians lived in harmony, side by side.. ..although it began in Palestine in 1948, a terrible turn occurred on November 4, 1995, when an acolyte of the Israeli madman Benjamin Netanyahu, Yigal Amir, when Yigal assassinated the Israeli soldier-statesman, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. That was the beginning of "The Plot Against America" (fully detailed ahead in this GOPBias.org) - a virtual title provided by the over-rated Jewish American novelist Philip Roth - the actual title provided by a conspiratorial collection of Jewish Americans, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, and Jewish Europeans, like Bernard-Henri Levy, all clandestine activists in - "A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing The Realm, Israel", the first step of which was the elimination of Saddam Hussein.
- An interjection to account for events almost fifteen years later, one of which was breathtaking both for what occurred, and its exclusion from the United States newspaper of record, The New York Times, with "All the News That's Fit to Print".
* On Sunday 11/8/09, sensing an opportunity, Benjamin Netanyahu, the sanity and character challenged (and uninvited) Prime Minister of Israel flew to Washington to ignite and fuel a political conflagration from the 11/5/09 Fort Hood shooting, and enhance his (Netanyahu) stature (recently damaged by his incendiary 9/14/09 address to the United Nations), hopefully to generate an inferno which would preclude a thoughtful and reasonable decision by the President regarding our continued policies in Southwest Asia and, not incidentally, in the Middle East. Remarkable and, as yet unreported, Mr. Netanyahu was stiffed by the White House - no photo op, no news conference, no Rose Garden - Netanyahu had to settle for a meeting with "Jewish" leaders. A Turning Point? But these will alarm Israel. *
- Israeli Army goes social networking -
"PR - A new unit uses sites like Facebook and Twitter" to recruit and train soldiers
By GWEN ACKERMAN, Bloomberg News
A new Israeli army unit formed to help fight the nation's public-relations war is recruiting and training soldiers for the virtual battlefields of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. - Ackerman Bloomberg 12/6/09
- In David Brooks' 11/10/09 column, analyzing the shooting at Fort Hood, and the narrative which it produced, this sentence will cause alarm:
"It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the 'struggle against Islam' is the central feature of American foreign policy". And Mr. Brooks could have added that that feature has been the Israeli-dominated American theme for six decades! Although Mr. Brooks intended the opposite, the fact is that more and independent thinking will see that our unquestionable support of Israel is the glaring weakness of our foreign policy.
Item: The President's Fort Hood Memorial words - "No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts".
Israel's 12/08 - 1/09 massacre in Gaza.
Item: The President's Fort Hood Memorial words - "No just and loving God looks upon them with favor."
Again, Israel's 12/08 - 1/09 massacre in Gaza.
There are several segments from a 12/9/09 Ethan Bronner article, datelined Jerusalem (in the N Y Times, of course), which contribute to understanding that seminal disregard for non-Jews in the Middle East, which sentiment the Israelis utilize to subdue and displace over time the Palestinians, the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Syrians - and, actually, the Americans who have provided the blood and treasure for this Israeli conquest of Palestine.
This piece has to do with one individual, the now-23-year-old Sergeant Gilad Shalit of the Israeli "Defense" Forces (the "shy, bookish Sergeant")! As the United States years ago changed our "War" Department to the "Defense" Department, the Israeli military, formed to conquer Palestine (and render adjoining nations defenseless and subservient) and, essentially, control the whole of the Middle East as their objective.
Ethan Bronner: "But sociologists, politicians and religious scholars say that rescuing captives has deep Jewish and Israeli roots, and that the mix of familial intimacy here, A RELENTLESS AND WELL CONCEIVED CAMPAIGN BY THE FAMILY AND A MEDIA CULTURE IN OVERDRIVE has placed Sergeant Shalit, a shy, bookish 23-year-old, at the heart of nearly every Israeli Jew (Does he carry a gun?)."
This does much to explain the 12/26/08 - 1/18/09 Israeli massacre in Gaza. To Israelis, those of us who are not Jewish, are not human. Incredible, but true.
- And another notable divorced Orthodox Jew, the famous gadabout Joseph I. Lieberman, as he celebrates Hanukkah -
To the Editor:
Re “Lieberman Says He Can’t Back Current Health Bill” (news article, Dec. 14): Senate Democrats should force Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and his Republican allies to filibuster the health care bill throughout the holiday season rather than letting them hold the American people hostage to their tactics.
Moreover, the filibusters should be shown live in public hospital emergency rooms throughout the United States, so that the uninsured people waiting for primary care can understand exactly who is preventing them from obtaining affordable health insurance. (Better yet, make the filibusters take place in emergency rooms, but the Capitol Police might object.) - Jonathan Ezor West Hempstead N Y 12/14/09
- More about the Senator -
WHAT MAY HAVE BEEN MISSED BY THE MEDIA/PRESS ON THAT FIRST OF THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES ON FRIDAY 9/26/08 WAS JOHN MCCAIN'S RETELLING OF HIS HOPED-FOR PAIRING WITH THE DIVORCED ORTHODOX JEW JOE LIEBERMAN. AN ANALYSIS OF 9/11, AN ANALYSIS THAT EXCLUDED THIS FACTOR - THE "NEO-CONSERVATIVES" (READ JEWISH AMERICAN/EUROPEAN) PRESSURE, WHICH HAD BEEN RESISTED BY THE CLINTON/GORE ADMINISTRATION, AN ANALYSIS WHICH EXCLUDED THE NEO-CONSERVATIVE PRESSURE ON GEORGE WALKER BUSH TO ATTACK, INVADE AND OCCUPY IRAQ TO REMOVE SADDAM HUSSEIN (WHO ISRAELIS SAW AS A THREAT TO THEIR DESIRED CONTROL OF THE LEVANT, AND THEN THE MIDDLE EAST), ANY ANALYSIS WHICH EXCLUDED THAT PRESSURE IS PURE PROPAGANDA.
HAVING LOST THE 2000 REPUBLICAN PRIMARY TO THE JUNIOR BUSH, JOHN MCCAIN COULD SEE THAT HIS ACQUISITION OF THE PRESIDENCY REQUIRED THE SUPPORT IN 2008 OF THE MOST EXTREME SEGMENT OF THE JEWISH LOBBY (AIPAC, ADL, ETC). HOW BETTER TO GAIN THEIR BEHIND-THE-SCENES BACKING THAN JOINING WITH JOE LIEBERMAN. HENCE, MCCAIN'S ATTEMPT TO SELECT LIEBERMAN AS HIS RUNNING MATE. THIS FACT ALONE SHOULD CAUSE AMERICANS TO QUESTION MCCAIN'S HONOR AND JUDGMENT.
OF ALL THE JEWISH AMERICANS IN THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS JOE LIEBERMAN IS PERHAPS THE LEAST HONORABLE. HE WAS KNOWINGLY USED BY RIGHT-WING REPUBLICAN WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR., TO DEFEAT THE HONORABLE DEMOCRAT LOWELL WEICKER, SIMPLY BECAUSE MR WEICKER HAD THRASHED BILL BUCKLEY EARLIER IN A NOTABLE DEBATE ON OUR WAR AGAINST VIETNAM. SELECTED BY ALBERT GORE AS HIS RUNNING MATE IN 2000, TO RECOGNIZE THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF JEWISH AMERICANS IN THE UNITED STATES AND BREAK THE EXISTING ETHNIC BARRIER THAT HAD PRECLUDED THEIR INCLUSION ON A NATIONAL PRESIDENTIAL TICKET, LIEBERMAN REPAID MR. GORE BY SABOTAGING THE GORE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IN ITS CRITICAL FINAL WEEKS TO MAKE WAY FOR THE BUSH/CHENEY HIDDEN AGENDA TO OCCUPY IRAQ, AT THE BEHEST OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL. HAVING LOST IN THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY IN CONNECTICUT, LIEBERMAN RAN AS AN "INDEPENDENT" TO RETAIN HIS SENATE SEAT, AND THEN JOINED GEORGE BUSH AND THE REPUBLICANS TO SUPPORT THE DISHONORABLE CAMPAIGN OF ISRAEL TO CONTROL ALL OF PALESTINE AND, ULTIMATELY, THE MIDDLE EAST.
- Amy tracks "Bibi"...
- Israel Revoking Record Number of Jerusalem Residency Permits for Palestinians -
"In Israel and the Occupied Territories, new figures show the Israeli government revoked more residency permits for Palestinians in Jerusalem last year than in any year on record. The Israeli human rights group HaMoked says more than 4,500 Palestinians were stripped of their residency in 2008. The average number of revoked residency permits had previously been around 200 per year." - Amy Goodman 12/3/09
One would think that the ubiquitous President of the famed Council on Foreign Relations (formerly controlled by Henry Kissinger) that the present president Richard Haass would have something to say about "Bibi" Netanyahu in that this particularly virulent Prime Minister is the predominant force of evil which generates this bloodshed.
Perhaps the forty-sixth anniversary reminder of November 22, 1963 will inspire our Media/Press, if not the Congressional leadership, the hangers-on and members of the Republican Party (the sordid lot of Mitch McConnell, Hailey Barbour, Dick Armey, Michael Steele!) who pollute the national dialogue on the principles of this great nation and the policies which we painstakingly develop to address the challenges of our time. Were John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Edward R. Murrow and the likes of Eric Sevareid among us they would be appalled by the blatant racism among us, AND the deference paid to the mad puppet-master of the Middle East AND the United States, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. How is it that his name never crosses the lips of, for example, Scott Simon, Dan Schorr or, for that matter, Sylvia Poggioli?
The designing of information on the corrupt State of Israel taints not only critical planning for a peaceful Middle East, but, also, the formulation of workable policies for the rest of the world. The degree of misinformation which distorts any and all efforts to resolve international challenges boggles the mind. From Iran's "nuclear weapons programs" (Israel has a 200+ nuclear arsenal, but has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty while Iran's focus is peaceful Nuclear Energy) to Israel's demand for compensation from Argentina for an attack years ago on a Synagogue and its Jewish neighborhood, the investigation of which by our own FBI concluded that it was the result of an Argentinian political squabble, the deference to present-day Israel is formidable. But it must be confronted.
Nothing is more illustrative of the twisted entity the Media has become than its presentation of the vicious attack on Mumbai, India November 26-29, 2008, in which ten gunmen killed more than one hundred and seventy. The N.Y. Times 11/19/09 has a television "Review" on page C-8 entitled "Using Tapes and a Timeline To Trace the Mumbai Massacre", a title that would seem to indicate an indepth analysis of "Terror in Mumbai", the HBO film which the Television Review writer Mike Hale records as "The first 360-degree view of terrorism" - "that's the promise the writer (and narrator) Fareed Zakaria makes at the beginning"... In fact, the program which Mr. Hale and The Times is reviewing and promoting does nothing of the sort. Mr. Hale continues, and gratuitously promotes another television program, Wednesday 11/25/09, same subject, on "Secrets of the Dead" the day before Thanksgiving, thereby, hopefully [for the funding mechanism and OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting)] assuring a large audience. What we have here is a major distortion of a significant event, and its meaning. Even the online from the NYTIMES.com/television archive omits the pertinent information.
It was a brutal attack, and it may have generated the vicious Israeli massacre against Gaza 12/26/08 - 1/18/09. But these broadcasts have excluded an accurate raison d'etre, if you will, why they occurred, which has been included in GOPBias.org since the event, as even Christopher Hitchens could determine!
The "Terror in Mumbai" was to be expected, even tho long delayed, a response to the 1948 Irgun attack on Palestine and the series of incremental dispossessions against the Palestinians, the methodical stripping of their lands and lives, i.e. the why of the "Terror in Mumbai", as well as the ongoing animosity between Muslim Pakistan and Hindu etc. India. The actual prime target of the Mumbai attack was the newly renovated five story headquarters ("Nariman House") of Chabad Lubivitch in India, again, one of the many "outreach" devices which Orthodox Jews maintain around the world to proselytize the uninitiated and Sabbatize the wayward. Think Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman and New York assemblyman Dove Hikind, who represents Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, and was in Arab East Jerusalem last week (11/18/09) laying a "cornerstone" for Jewish-only apartments in what the rest of the world legally classifies as "Occupied Palestinian Land". As Jewish interests continue to mount disinformation campaigns to conceal the truly corrupt nature of the State of Israel, particularly under Netanyahu and Lieberman, the United States policies toward the Middle East, Southwest Asia and, indeed, the rest of the world, will have the hollow ring of the artificial, not the solid, clarion call of our Liberty Bell.
Item - Don't bother with the grinning, unhinged and shallow Martin Sheen portrayal of John Kennedy in the PBS/OPB "Kennedy" presentation 11/21/09. If it were worthwhile it would not appear on today's PBS. For the, if you will, "Liberty Bell production" find the 1974 Viacom produced by ABC "Missiles of October" with William Devane as John Kennedy and Martin Sheen as Robert Kennedy. An accurate and superb film, largely because of John Kennedy the man, and his dedication to having the public process on record, for his constituents, the American people.
The brutality of the "Terror in Mumbai" has been exceeded many times over by that perpetrated against the Palestinian people now for over sixty years, and just a year ago, with the sickening brutality against Gaza (that "Terror in Mumbai" lasted only three days) with a three-week mechanized land, air, sea three-pronged Israeli military massacre against 1.3 million Palestinians penned in that narrow Strip; Decent populations around the world said "ENOUGH"! Thus the worldwide revulsion spawned "The Gaza Freedom March"! Now, even this principled protest has been compromised by the bloody hand of AIPAC, a grotesque outgrowth, now of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Why I resigned from the Gaza Freedom March coalition:
The original consensus of the International Coalition to End the Illegal Siege of Gaza was that we would limit our statement to a pair of uncontroversial, basic and complementary principles that would have the broadest possible appeal: the march to break the siege would be nonviolent and anchored in international law. I agreed with this approach and consequent statement and decided to remove myself from the steering committee in order to invest my full energies in mobilizing for the march.
During the week beginning August 30, 2009 and in a matter of days an entirely new sectarian agenda dubbed "the political context" was foisted on those who originally signed on and worked tirelessly for three months. Because it drags in contentious issues that--however precious to different constituencies--are wholly extraneous to the narrow but critical goal of breaking the siege, this new agenda is gratuitously divisive and it is almost certain that it will drastically reduce the potential reach of our original appeal. It should perhaps be stressed that the point of dispute was not whether one personally supported a particular Palestinian right or strategy to end the occupation. It was whether inclusion in the coalition’s statement of a particular right or strategy was necessary if it was both unrelated to the immediate objective of breaking the siege and dimmed the prospect of a truly mass demonstration. In addition, the tactics by which this new agenda was imposed do not bode well for the future of the coalition’s work and will likely move the coalition in an increasingly sectarian direction.
I joined the coalition because I believed that an unprecedented opportunity now exists to mobilize a broad public whereby we could make a substantive and not just symbolic contribution towards breaking the illegal and immoral siege of Gaza and, accordingly, realize a genuine and not just token gesture of solidarity with the people of Gaza. In its present political configuration I no longer believe the coalition can achieve such a goal. Because I would loathe getting bogged down in a petty and squalid public brawl I will not comment further on this matter unless the sequence of events climaxing in my decision to resign are misrepresented by interested parties. However I would be remiss in my moral obligations were I not humbly to apologize to those who, either coaxed by me or encouraged by my participation, gave selflessly of themselves to make the march a historic event and now feel aggrieved at the abrupt turn of events. It can only be said in extenuation that I along with many others desperately fought to preserve the ecumenical vision that originally inspired the march, but the obstacles thrown in our path ultimately proved insurmountable. - Norman Finkelstein 11/20/09
- Norman Finkelstein establishes his credentials.
"Associated" with all the world's agony of the last ten years - George W. Bush!
Lehrer NewsHour's Judy Woodruff 11/26/09
JUDY WOODRUFF: In other news today: An ongoing inquiry into Britain's decision to go to war in Iraq revealed the U.S. focused on Iraq just hours after the 9/11 attacks. The former British Ambassador to the U.S. Sir Christopher Meyer, testified that he spoke with then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about it on September 11.
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER, former ambassador to the United States: She said, 'Well, there is no doubt it's -- this has been an al-Qaida operation.'
But, at the end of the conversation, it's: 'We're just looking to see whether there could possibly be any connection with Saddam Hussein.'
And that was the very first time, on the day itself, that I heard the name of the Iraqi leader mentioned in the context of -- of -- of 9/11.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Meyer also said that former Prime Minister Tony Blair failed to use his influence with then President Bush to stall the rush to invade Iraq. - NewsHour 11/26/09
RAY McGOVERN (27-year CIA analyst on 6/6/05 Lehrer NewsHour): "I would go back to an earlier conversation, and this happened on the 20th of September 2001, and this happened nine days after 9/11. This involved Tony Blair, who was in Washington having dinner with the President. How do we know about this? We know this because Christopher Meyer, the UK ambassador was there at that dinner. What does he say? The conversation went like this. President Bush: 'Uh, Tony. Uh, we're going into Afghanistan in a week or two, but that won't take long and we get out of there and we're going right into Iraq. Are you with me, Tony? Are you with me?' And Christopher Meyer says 'My goodness, it was really, and Tony was really sort of nonplussed, but he said 'Yes sir, I'm with you Mr. President.' (Margaret Warner tries to interrupt, but Mr. McGovern continues) So that goes back (a flustered Ms. Margaret Warner) "Mr. McGovern, speed up!" (Mr. McGovern) "so that goes back to 2001" (Ms. Warner) "We're almost out of time. Get to the next part!" (Mr. McGovern) "Okay, that's it." (Ms. Warner, almost shouting) "So, it's not about Iraq, it's about Afghanistan!" (Mr. McGovern) "Well, no. This has to do with Iraq. What the President said to Tony Blair, on the 20th of September (2001) according to the UK ambassador who was there, is 'We're going into Afghanistan in a couple of weeks. It won't take us long there, and we're going right into Iraq right after that. Are you with me?' And Tony Blair said 'Yes!'"
We can begin by revisiting James Bamford's A Pretext for War, pp. 270-350, which details the elaborate Israeli-Jewish American hoax (Saddam with nuclear WMDs) used to justify the invasion and generate public support. From Michiko Kakutani's 6/18/04 review:
"What he does focus on is the role that Israel has played in shaping American policy. Mr. Bamford contends that 'the blueprint for the new Bush policy' on the Middle East 'had actually been drawn up five years earlier by three of his top national security advisors' (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) for the Israeli prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu (who rejected the plan), and that when they entered office in January 2001, all these hawks needed was 'a pretext' for war against Iraq. Citing a report from the British newspaper The Guardian, Mr. Bamford adds that the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit set up by Mr. Feith, 'forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon's office in Israel,' which 'was designed to go around the country's own intelligence organization, Mossad.'"
In brief, not only did the George W. Bush administration (including "Condi" Rice) virtually cancel, i.e. "Short-change", their effort in Afghanistan 'WHERE 9/11 ORIGINATED', but they also (Pgs. 2 & 21 11/29/04 N Y Times), in "Report on Bin Laden Escape - A new report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says Osama bin Laden's escape from American forces in Afghanistan in 2001 laid "the foundation for today's protracted Afghan insurgency.". . .But they, the Bush & Cheney & McCain administration, in such a rush to remove Saddam for Israel, allowed Bin Laden to flee!
" Senate Report Explores Bin Laden's 2001 Escape"
By Scott Shane
WASHINGTON -
As President Obama vows to “finish the job” in Afghanistan by sending more troops, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has completed a detailed look back at a crucial failure early in the battle against Al Qaeda: the escape of Osama bin Laden from American forces in the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001, but three months after 9/11.
“Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,” the committee’s report concludes. “But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide.”
The report, based in part on a little-noticed 2007 history of the Tora Bora episode by the military’s Special Operations Command, asserts that the consequences of not sending American troops in 2001 to block Mr. bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan are still being felt.
The report blames the lapse for “laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.”
The committee report, prepared at the request of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the committee’s Democratic chairman, concludes unequivocally that in mid-December 2001, Mr. bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, were at the cave complex, where Mr. bin Laden had operated previously during the fight against Soviet forces.
THE NEW REPORT SUGGESTS THAT A LARGER TROOP COMMITMENT TO AFGHANISTAN MIGHT HAVE RESULTED IN THE DEMISE NOT ONLY OF MR. BIN LADEN AND HIS DEPUTY, BUT ALSO OF MULLAH MUHAMMAD OMAR, THE LEADER OF THE AFGHAN TALIBAN. MULLAH OMAR, WHO ALSO FLED TO PAKISTAN IN 2001, HAS OVERSEEN THE RESURGENCE OF THE TALIBAN. - Scott Shane 11/29/09
Note: (1*) The Prior History - (2*) "Since 1948... - (3*) "The June 8, 1967 attack on the USS Liberty... - (4*) The Ultimate in Israeli Propaganda, configured 9/26/09 by Mark Landler in Washington.
- Much more to come!
- This next step is framed by the 11/20/09 David Brancaccio and Maria Hinojosa NOW program on Traumatic Brain Injury survivors from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, men and women who require 24/7 around the clock care which neither our government nor the Veterans Affairs Administration are able to provide (what with the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and, now, Pakistan - all generated by the 1948 Jewish attack on Palestine) leaving those surviving American families the choice of abandoning their loved ones, or assuming the awesome responsibility for their round-the-clock medical and psychological care.
Moyers Out? NewsHour Gutted?
Mark Shields? David Brooks?
Bank of America In Charge?
- The New York Times 11/30/09 - lower half page B-3 in Business? If ever there was a Times "All the News That's Fit to Print" article that belonged on the Front page, this is it. The American people have been subjected to a double-whammy! First this "HD Hoax" in television, whereby glossy ads take precedence over subject matter, particularly hard news, and now the further reduction of that precious hard-news category, whether it's by a gluttonous Comcast or an anemic PBS. Where's today's Orson Welles (1915-1985)?
In The Times' article, by one Elizabeth Jensen (the link to which appears below) [Incidentally, where is Elizabeth Brackett who, when the Republicans (Newt Gingrich? Rush Limbaugh?) stole Congress in '94, Ms. Brackett, on the NewsHour while Lehrer was enjoying the holidays, 'splained how Republican talk shows replaced the estimable Tom Foley with the irreparable Mr. Gingrich. We need her back in action!], they leave to the 15th paragraph - the key.
"...the show (i.e. NewsHour) has recently 'attracted several million$ of dollar$ more in corporate financing - including Bank of America underwriting to be announced Monday.'"
"BILL MOYERS IS ENDING HIS WEEKLY FRIDAY SHOW AT THE END OF APRIL, AND PBS CANCELED THE COMPANION 'NOW on PBS', WHICH WAS HAVING TROUBLE RAISING PRODUCTION FUNDS."
This is alarming. David Brancaccio & Maria Hinojosa with their 11/20/09 program on Traumatic Brain Injury have just given the American public one of the most significant programs on the most formidable controversy facing President Obama and our military EVER. And PBS has canceled them?
Another key segment from this alarming article:
"Beginning December 7th (The Appropriate Date For This announcement) Mr. Lehrer's name will not be on the program, for the first time since 1976. Instead it is being renamed 'PBS NEWSHOUR,' WHICH PROMPTED A NEW STREAMLINED LOGO AND GRAPHICS. MR. LEHRER WILL HAVE A REGULAR CO-ANCHOR; ON THE FIRST PROGRAM IT WILL BE MS. GWEN IFILL!"....This may call for a REVOLUTION!!
STRESSING THE WEB, 'NEWSHOUR' BEGINS AN OVERHAUL!
Here a sample of the Brancaccio & Hinojosa 11/20/09 program: "THE PENTAGON ESTIMATES THAT AS MANY AS ONE IN FIVE AMERICAN SOLDIERS ARE COMING HOME FROM WAR ZONES WITH TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURIES, MANY OF WHICH REQUIRE ROUND-THE-CLOCK ATTENTION."
An Alert editorial in the 11/23/09 N Y Times brings into focus this coming monumental decision by the President vis-a-vis the array of the military pressures from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral "Mike" Mullen, through future presidential candidate General Petraeus, to General McChrystal [who has "strategized" the clandestine (the White House has been the last to hear this one) Blackwater assault on Pakistan's sovereignty - refer to 11/24/09 DemocracyNow] and, finally to John Sidney McCain III who, in his over-the-top attack on Health Care Reform said: "Bernie Madoff went to prison for selling this turkey (last two words paraphrased)". In fact, it was "Country First" McCain who wanted to sacrifice our nation, putting Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the "Oval Office". "Country First"?
On Scott Simon's NPR Morning Edition 12/5/09 Mr. Judd Gregg and Mr. Simon enjoyed themselves as the New Hampshire Senator laughingly expanded the McCain characterization of Health Care Reform as a Madoff Ponzi scheme (a continuation of South Carolinian Senator James DeMint who began the Republican effort to end the Obama presidency by rejecting the desparately needed national Health Care Reform. And some say the media is not driven by a Pro-Republican virus?)
Here a continuing example of legitimate "Country First" action, unlike the fraudulent John McCain (whose record of crashes should have washed him out of naval aviation, whose failure to wrap his arms around his body broke both arms on ejection, and whose circumstances of release by the North Vietnamese are classified by the United States Navy!) Ms. Goodman is 100% total patriot!
- Ms. Goodman 12/4/09 - The quantity and caliber of HardNews is diminished -
- Comcast Reaches Deal for Majority Stake in NBC Universal -
"The nation’s largest cable television company Comcast has struck a deal to buy a majority stake in the television and movie giant NBC Universal from General Electric. If approved, the merger would give Comcast control of the NBC network, the Spanish-language Telemundo, cable channels including MSNBC, dozens of local television stations and the Universal film studio. Media democracy advocates have widely criticized the merger.
Jeff Chester, head of the Center for Digital Democracy: “This is a real political litmus test for the Obama administration. Frankly, they should just have their FCC and their Department of Justice, or FTC, say no to this deal. There’s nothing in the Comcast-NBCU mega-deal that will benefit the public interest, consumers or competitors. The Obama administration has a chance now to put its foot down and say ‘no more media consolidation in the United States.’”" - Amy Goodman 12/4/09
As is often the case, the day after President Obama's monumental 12/1/09 speech regarding military policy vis-a-vis Afghanistan and Pakistan (and "monumental" is appropriate - not since John Fitzgerald Kennedy have we had a President whose intellect, vision and propitious wisdom can so carry the moment). But the task at hand is huge. And Ms. Goodman finds a way to address it.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re here in the new Printing Press studios and joining us in New York, along with Andrew Bacevich in Boston BU professor, here in New York is independent journalist and fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security, Nir Rosen. He has covered Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. His latest articles cover the current state of the U.S. occupations in both countries, Iraq and Afghanistan. They appear in the Boston Review. Nir Rosen, welcome to Democracy Now! Your thoughts after the West Point address of President Obama announcing the surge of 30,000 troops? Though that is not it, because his General Stanley McChrystal wanted 40,000, he is pushing for NATO to supply the rest and they are saying it will be in the range of 5000. Of course we do not know the military contractors that will accompany all of these soldiers.
NIR ROSEN: Well, it is really no surprise. Even if Obama hadn’t wanted to escalate the troops, he is under so much political pressure that he would of had to, but I would have at least liked to hear the words Kashmir and Palestine. If we are talking about Al Qaeda and the whole reason for why we are in Afghanistan allegedly is this threat from Al Qaeda which has been severely exaggerated, then at least understand their motives. Their chief motives are the Indian occupation of Kashmir, the Israeli and American backed occupation of Palestine. These are the motives. If your goal is to weaken Al Qaeda, understand their motives, address their grievances. This is not some James Bond villain the wants to attack the U.S. for no reason. These people who have grievances, the same grievances that have been troubling people around the world for decades. They were once explained using a secular Marxist nationalist discourse, today it has become a more religious discourse; but the grievances have remained the same. So why, if your goal is to weaken Al Qaeda, are you attacking the Taliban? The Taliban being a local movement with a very limited and unsophisticated ideology. Al Qaeda exists to much larger extent in Pakistan yet there are no American troops in Pakistan, so why do you need such a huge military footprint in Afghanistan were there is no Al Qaeda really if they are coming in from Pakistan? In Pakistan you do not have this American presence and yet you have been relatively successful. There been no attacks on America thanks to intelligence, interdiction, heightened security. Al Qaeda isn’t really a threat. You have a couple of hundred relatively unsophisticated guys. They used their A team on September 11 and it was tragic, but it wasn’t that significant and didn’t really affect the U.S. What affected the US was the American response internally and abroad. Al Qaeda isn’t really a big deal, but even if you think it’s a big deal, even if you think this is a huge threat that really deserves so much of our resources, understand their grievances and address them. If your remove Palestine and Kashmir, you’d have way less people in the world who support Al Qaeda, who want to join it. Instead, what we are doing is increasing the occupation of a Muslim country. Although Obama mentioned the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, he mentioned Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, what about the American occupation of Afghanistan? What about all the innocent people who being killed there today thanks to American counter-insurgency, counter terrorism operations only further increasing ethnic tensions? You are going to have a civil war in Afghanistan between Tajiks and Pashtuns at some point. It is going more and more in that direction.
AMY GOODMAN: Comment, Nir Rosen, on what you think, if you were standing at West Point last night, what you would have been saying?
NIR ROSEN: I would have mentioned Palestine and Kashmir and the history of American support for dictatorships in the Middle East and the Muslim world as the cause for this Al Qaeda phenomenon, for this resentment of the U.S. and I would have...
AMY GOODMAN:And the actions you announced?
NIR ROSEN: This is impossibly naïve and would require a revolution in the way America does business, but stop supporting dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and elsewhere, stop supporting the Pakistani dictatorships or quasi-dictatorship, STOP SUPPORTING THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE. Be perceived as a fair player in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Stop killing Muslims and Muslims will not want to kill you. It is really very easy.
For all the stars of ranking generals and admirals in Washington, it turns out there’s still a higher grade -- “senior mentor.” These are retired brass enjoying lucrative compensation as part-time Pentagon advisers, who, in most cases, also draw V.I.P. pay from companies seeking defense contracts. The mentor cohort has quietly grown in recent years from a handful to at least 158 ranking retired officers -- 80 percent of whom hire on at the same time with defense contractors.
There is nothing illegal about the double-dipping. But few people in Congress or elsewhere knew about it until now because there is no requirement to tell anyone, even the Pentagon. As Pentagon advisers, mentors are paid hundreds of dollars an hour for offering counsel to former colleagues on war games and other specialties. As defense contract consultants, they can make considerably more. It’s time to closely manage the retirees’ good deal, documented in a report by USA Today.
Defense specialists in the Senate are proposing that ethics rules be written at least to mandate financial disclosure to avoid conflicts of interest. More than that may be needed. The Air Force has just directed that financial statements be required from mentors who might “potentially influence procurement decisions.”
The military and its mentors insist that weapons hawking is unlikely under existing rules, and that the dual role represents a wise investment in expertise needed to burnish the officer corps and maintain national security. “The taxpayers are getting a steal,” declared a retired admiral while declining to disclose his clients.
A steal it may be. Transparency will only secure the mentors’ presumed virtue, not harm it.
Federal regulations require part-time employees paid at executive rates to file disclosure reports. But the senior mentors are not covered because they are hired as consultants, not employees. This may not qualify as Catch-22 in the world of Captain Yossarian, nor “the acquisition of unwarranted influence” that President-and-General Dwight Eisenhower foresaw in the military-industrial complex. But it’s time Congress and the Pentagon made sure and got a handle on retired brass who sell their advice to both parts of the complex. - Editorial N Y Times 11/23/09
- Brancaccio & Hinojosa NOW 11/20/09 -
The Pentagon estimates that as many as one in five American soldiers are coming home from war zones with traumatic brain injuries, many of which require round-the-clock attention.
But lost in the reports of these returning soldiers are the stories of family members who often sacrifice everything to care for them.
This week, NOW reveals how little has been done to help these family caregivers, and reports on dedicated efforts to support them. - NOW 11/20/09
The worldwide chaos which the 1948 Irgun attack on a peaceful Palestine has metamorphed into a challenge of the age. This refusal to recognize and publicize the pernicious ruin which our capitulation to the madness of Israel has caused, has, in itself created a holocaust which must be confronted, and a factor sharing the source of this poison is the Republican Party.
- Frank Rich in the 11/22/09 N Y Times:
- Her fifteen minutes will not be over anytime soon.
After the Palin-McCain ticket lost, conservative pundits admonished her to start studying the issues. If “Going Rogue” and its promotional interviews are any indication, she has ignored their entreaties during her months at liberty. Last week, Greta Van Susteren chastised Oprah for not asking Palin “one policy question,” but when Barbara Walters did ask some, Palin either recycled Dick Cheney verbatim (Obama is “dithering”) or ran aground. Her argument for why “Jewish settlements” should be expanded on the West Bank was that “more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” It was unclear what she was talking about -- unless it was the “rapture” theology that requires the mass return of Jews to settle the Holy Land as a precondition for the return of Christ.
The discredited neocon hacks who have latched on to Palin as a potential ticket back into power have their work cut out for them. But it’s better for Palin’s purposes to remain as blank a slate as possible anyway. Some of her most ardent supporters realize that she’ll drive still more independent voters away if she fills in too many details. And so Matthew Continetti, the author (himself of the Weekly Standard) of the just-published “Persecution of Sarah Palin” and her most persistent cheerleader after William Kristol (also Weekly Standard), wrote in The Wall Street Journal that her role model for 2012 should be Bob McDonnell, the new Republican governor-elect of Virginia, who won on “a bipartisan, center-right approach.”
Yet among Republicans she still ties Mitt Romney in the latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with 65 percent giving her serious presidential consideration, just behind the 71 for her evangelical rival, Mike Huckabee. The crowds lining up in the cold for her book tour are likely to be the most motivated to line up at the polls in G.O.P. primaries. They don’t speak the same language as Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner or, for that matter, McCain. They are more likely to heed Palin salesmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh than baffled Bush administration grandees like Peter Wehner, who last week called Palin “a cultural figure much more than a political one” on the Web site of the establishment conservative organ Commentary. - Frank Rich 11/22/09
Brian Stelter in 11/22/09 N. Y. Times
- "Pundit Stakes Out a More Activist Role in Politics"
A Sample -
"For the diffuse tea party movement that taps into anti-government sentiments, 'the media guys are the closest things we even have to a leader,' said Adam Brandon, the vice president for communications at FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group." (Mr. Stelter might have warned us that FreedomWorks is funded by Israeli "Advocate" Sheldon G. Adelson - note next Planning the Disaster link just below)
- This man is an equal Media/Press threat to the nation as is Rush Limbaugh.
- Health Care Reform -
To the Editor:
“The Drug Industry Cashes In” (editorial, Nov. 18) correctly points out that the drug industry’s price escalations threaten to make a mockery of its deal with the Senate Finance Committee and the Obama administration.
I remember well how President John F. Kennedy responded to the announcement made by Roger Blough, chairman of United States Steel, that the company had increased the price of steel, contrary to what President Kennedy thought was Mr. Blough’s promise not to do so.
His public condemnation of the steel industry and the businessmen who ran it was followed by swift action that resulted in a rollback of the price increases. It also sent a message to the nation as a whole: that this president was to be taken seriously.
What we need from President Obama is less rhetoric and tougher action. - John Viteritti N Y Times Southold N Y 11/18/09
** - From Jerusalem, the ever-reliable Israeli Isabel Kershner presents Netanyahu's next move, WITH OUR MONEY! "Israel Moves Ahead on Plans to Expand Settlement in Disputed Part of Jerusalem.
JERUSALEM -- Israel said Tuesday that it had advanced plans to expand a Jewish district of Jerusalem in territory that was captured in the 1967 war and that the Palestinians claim as part of their future state. The move is likely to further complicate the Obama administration’s faltering efforts to restart peace talks.
The news that the building plans had moved closer to approval drew a sharp response from the White House, which has declared reviving the talks to be a major goal. Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, issued a statement saying the administration was “dismayed” and asking both parties to avoid unilateral actions that could “pre-empt, or appear to pre-empt, negotiations.”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton recently generated a furor among Palestinians and other Arabs by praising as “unprecedented” an offer by Israel to slow down, but not stop, construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Arab countries worried that the administration was backing off its previous insistence on a complete freeze, but Mrs. Clinton denied that, saying that she was offering “positive reinforcement” for policies that headed in that direction.
The move comes as the Palestinians have put forward a plan to seek the United Nations Security Council's recognition of a Palestinian state, without Israel’s agreement, in the lands Israel won in 1967. Palestinian officials said they were pursuing the idea in an attempt to break the impasse in peace talks.
That initiative suffered a setback on Tuesday, just days after it surfaced. The Palestinians have called for European backing, but Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden, which holds the European Union presidency, told reporters in Brussels that a bid for international recognition of a state not yet formed would be “somewhat premature.”
The United States and Israel have already signaled their disapproval of the Palestinian initiative. A State Department spokesman, Ian C. Kelly, said Monday that the United States supported “a Palestinian state that arises as a result of a process between the two parties.”
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has warned that a unilateral move by the Palestinians would “unravel” existing agreements and could lead Israel to respond with unilateral steps (Netanyahu INVENTED "UNILATERAL" moves against Palestine!).
But the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, told reporters in Cairo on Tuesday that the proposal had the backing of Arab countries and that the deadlock in the peace process left the Palestinian leadership with no option but to try a different course.
“We feel we are in a very difficult situation,” Mr. Abbas said. “What is the solution for us? To remain suspended like this, not in peace? That is why I took this step.” Aides have said that Mr. Abbas, who said recently that he did not wish to run again for the Palestinian leadership, is dispirited by the lack of movement in the peace process.
Disagreements over settlement building are in large part the reason that the negotiations, which have been stalled for months, have not resumed. The Palestinians demand a complete freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank and the parts of Jerusalem taken over by Israel in 1967; the Israelis have rejected that, but recently offered to restrain settlement growth.
The Obama administration at first insisted on a full Israeli settlement freeze, but later seemed to accept an Israeli offer to curb construction, a position that has put the Palestinian president in a difficult position.
Israel says it is willing to hold off new settlement projects for several months, but insists on allowing the completion of about 3,000 housing units already in various stages of planning and construction in the West Bank. IT REFUSES TO INCLUDE JERUSALEM IN ANY FREEZE.
The 900 housing units that Israel said on Tuesday had moved closer toward approval are in addition to those homes. They are in Gilo, an area in southern Jerusalem considered by Israel to be a neighborhood of the city and by the Palestinians and * MUCH OF THE WORLD * to be a settlement that violates international law. Israel claims sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, having annexed the parts it captured from Jordan in the 1967 war.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said the Palestinian Authority “strongly condemns” the decision to advance the construction in Gilo.
The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said he “deplores” the decision to expand Gilo, reiterating in a statement on Tuesday his position THAT SETTLEMENTS ARE ILLEGAL.
THE PLANS FOR GILO STILL REQUIRE FINAL AUTHORIZATION, ACCORDING TO A SPOKESMAN FOR JERUSALEM'S CITY HALL. - Kershner N Y Times 11/18/09
What will be President Barack Obama's response? **
In his Tuesday 11/10/09 introduction of General Electric's NBC Universal (soon to be combined with Comcast!) coverage describing those invited to the Memorial Service at Fort Hood, Texas, also the headquarters of "Three Corp", Brian Williams featured in his list of guests "including, but not limited to, John McCain...". Among the commentators were Jim Miklashevski and Medal of Honor recipient Jack Jacobs. One can recall that when John Donald Imus Jr. was at his propaganda peak Brian Williams, Jack Jacobs and John McCain were his featured guests and subjects, along with anyone and everyone who could steal votes away from Vice President Albert Gore! The highlight of the televised memorial was the President's poignant portrayal of the fallen.
The Fort Hood shooting will make it all the more difficult for the President to defy this military and pro-Israeli policy demand that thirty thousand more American troops will be sent to Afghanistan, a policy that literally began with the stolen presidential election by George W. Bush and company in 2000. Misplaced in the archives is an Imus-MSNBC program following 9/11 in which the host was concerned about an ongoing investigation into the validity of that 5-4 Republican Court decision, i.e. whether it could be challenged, and Imus was assured that 9/11 rendered, politically, that 12-12-00 Court vote moot.
- Dedicated Voices -
The New York Times, Front Page, Lead Article 11/12/09 -
"ENVOY EXPRESSES DOUBT ON FORCES FOR AFGHANISTAN
Ambassador's Stance Is at Odds With Top Commander's
WASHINGTON - The United States ambassador to Afghanistan, who once served as the top American military commander there, has expressed in writing his reservations about deploying additional troops to the country, three senior American officials said Wednesday.
The position of the ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general, puts him in stark opposition to the current American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who has asked for 40,000 more troops." - Elisabeth Bumiller & Mark Landler 11/12/09
And a note: Ambassador Eikenberry's service to this nation has been exemplary, 2005 to 2007 the top military commander in Afghanistan and, earlier, 2002 to 2003 responsible for training Afghan security forces. Prior to his informing the public his aide Matthew Hoh had resigned and made a significant appearance on the NewsHour, the transcript of which is coming up.
* This controversy enveloping Afghanistan, and Pakistan, spreads throughout the Middle East. The plot thickens. Having been rebuffed by Washington, Israeli Prime Minister flew to Paris (reported by Steven Erlanger 11/12/09) to the open arms of Nicolas Sarkoz-e-e-e, who claims he has demanded Netanyahu freeze all settlement activity in East Jerusalem (Never happen UNTIL we freeze those billion$ to Israel!). The president of France left his wife to marry a model, is actually Jewish, and most unlikely to be an honest broker in any pact involving Israel.
And this may be significant. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, according to Elisabeth Bumiller, "unleashed a torrent" on Thursday 11/12/09 in response to Ambassador Eikenberry's voicing opposition to the additional war plans of General McChrystal (Gates should be known as the War Secretary - and had no problem with his military leaders advertising their calls for additional troops in Afghanistan), i.e. Mr. Gates stood silent as the McChrystal/McCain propaganda campaign for a virtual doubling of this bloody military escalation in Afghanistan, which reminds of General Douglas MacArthur who felt he knew more about our foreign policy than President Harry Truman. President Obama is the Commander in Chief! And all the while, Israel under Netanyahu and Lieberman are showing contempt for their Palestinian prisoners held hostage. *
To the Editor:
If President Obama decides to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, it’s now his war. And our presidents, once it’s their war, have found it nearly impossible to let go.
We paid an awful price in Vietnam -- in our lives and their lives -- to try state-building in a quagmire. The lesson: It is almost impossible for an occupying power to build a nation.
Generals are trained to carry out missions. Statesmen must look outside the box to question the mission itself. Schools we can build, but not states or nations. - John Bohstedt Knoxville Tenn. 11/11/09
The writer is professor emeritus of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
To the Editor:
My response to “3 Obama Advisers Lean Toward Plan for 30,000 More Troops for Afghanistan” (news article, Nov. 11) is this: “Don’t do it, Mr. President! You will lose my vote and stain your presidency if you send even 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan.”
No one has shown that this war or the one in Iraq is making America safer. In fact, evidence is to the contrary as American attacks help our enemies recruit more people to their cause.
President Hamid Karzai’s corruption is a good excuse to get out now. Let’s not spill more blood on this illegitimate and unwinnable war. - L. Michael Hager Washington 11/11/09
The writer is former director general of the International Development Law Organization in Rome.
Editorial Note: Mr. Hager is referring to the Veterans Day 11/11/09 Elisabeth Bumiller & David Sanger piece in which War Secretary Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen (note Admiral Mullen in the title paragraph of GOPBias.org) call for more troops in the ungovernable Karzai Afghanistan, the piece headlined "Obama Wants Afghans and Pakistanis to commit to War Plan, officials Say" subhead "Top Advisers Lean Toward More Troops". This is clearly an example, what with Bumiller & Sanger involved, of a N Y Times equivalent of a "Push-Poll", in which the articles purpose is not to inform, but to mold opinion. Sanger, particularly, is known for this equivalent to propaganda. Have either one of them EVER penned a piece on the struggles of Palestinians under Israeli occupation?!
- Afghanistan Unveiled -
In a week of horrific news, it was good to hear at the end of it that Obama is dissatisfied with the four Afghanistan options he has been weighing so far. The more time he deliberates, the more he is learning that he’s on a fool’s errand with no exit. After Karzai was spared a runoff last month and declared the winner of the fraud-infested August “election,” Obama demanded that he address his government’s corruption as a price for American support. Only days later the Afghan president mocked the American president by parading his most tainted cronies on camera and granting an interview to PBS’s “NewsHour” devoted to spewing his contempt for his American benefactors.
Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and, until recently, a State Department official in Afghanistan, could be found on MSNBC on Thursday once again asking the question no war advocate can answer, “Do you want Americans fighting and dying for the Karzai regime?” Hoh quit his post on principle in September despite the urging of colleagues, including our ambassador there, Karl W. Eikenberry, that he stay and fight over war policy from the inside. But Hoh had lost confidence in our strategy and would not retract his resignation. Now he has been implicitly seconded by Eikenberry himself. Last week we learned that the ambassador, a retired general who had been the top American military commander in Afghanistan as recently as 2007, had sent two cables to Obama urging caution about sending more troops.
We don’t know everything in those cables. What we do know is that American intelligence continues to say that fewer than 100 Qaeda operatives can still be found in Afghanistan. We also know that the Taliban, which are currently estimated to number in the tens of thousands, can’t be eliminated. As McChrystal put it to Filkins, there is no “finite number” of Taliban, so there’s no way to vanquish them. Hence his counterinsurgency alternative, which could take decades, costing untold billions and countless lives.
Perhaps those on the right are correct about Hasan, and he is just one cog in an apocalyptic jihadist plot that has infiltrated our armed forces. If so, then they have an obligation to explain how pouring more troops into Afghanistan would have stopped Hasan from plotting in Killeen. Don’t hold your breath. If we have learned anything concrete so far from the massacre at Fort Hood, it’s that our hawks, for all their certitude, are as utterly confused as the rest of us about who it is we’re fighting in Afghanistan and to what end. - Frank Rich 11/15/09
- Complete 11/15/09 N Y Times column -
To the Editor:
Re “Call White House, Ask for Barack,” by Thomas L. Friedman (column, Nov. 8):
Mr. Friedman is advocating what some Israelis want and no Palestinian wants: a perpetuation of the status quo, and for the United States to “just get out of the picture.” He claims that we Americans want peace more than the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Certainly that is not true of the Palestinians, who are suffering horribly in Gaza and are oppressed and deprived of freedom and human dignity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Most thinking Israelis -- including Ehud Olmert, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, all conservatives -- have recognized that a continuation of the status quo will be a catastrophe for Israel, as a single nation continues to evolve between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. With a majority of Arab voters, Israel will soon cease to be a Jewish state, or else be forced to become a truly apartheid regime.
Instead of waiting for Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas to beg us, which won’t happen, America needs to put forward on our own initiative a plan for two states, perhaps based on the Arab initiative, which calls for diplomatic and economic recognition of Israel within its secure borders, side by side with Palestinians in a viable and contiguous state.
As President Obama and other world leaders know, a quiescent America will bring nothing but catastrophe. - President Jimmy Carter Atlanta 11/8/09
- - The respected Israeli historian Ilan Pappe' records the end of harmony.
That Israeli strategy, or cancer if you will, turned more ugly by the American presidential election of 2000 in which one of the finest Vice Presidents in American history, Al Gore, was defeated by a scurrilous 5-4 United States Supreme Court vote. As a result, with the full backing of our Media/Press, perhaps the worst president of this country since Warren Gamielal Harding was in the White House. Unfettered by the Bush/Cheney regime, the "A New Strategy" developed a blood-thirsty appetite at the end of Bush/Cheney, and from 12/26/08 to 1/18/09 wrought a mechanized hell (including burning white phosphorus munitions) upon the 1.3 million Palestinians penned up by Israel in Gaza. Fifteen hundred Gazans, mostly civilians, were killed, more were grievously wounded - thirteen Israelis died, including three civilians.
- - The respected University of Chicago historian Robert A. Pape answers Israeli-American complaints regarding suicide bombers, whether in vehicles or on foot, or planted Improvised Explosive Devices, IEDs.
Item: As if the prelude wasn't enough (two thoughtless wars, the first against Iraq, and, now, against Afghanistan) a California Congressman Howard Berman arranged (11/3/09) a United States House of Representatives' 334 to 36 vote AGAINST JUDGE RICHARD GOLDSTONE'S CLASSIC, YET BALANCED, REPORT ON THE 12/08-1/09 ISRAELI MASSACRE OF GAZANS IMPENNED, BY ISRAEL, IN THE GAZA STRIP. JUDGE GOLDSTONE IS ONE OF THIS WORLD'S MOST RESPECTED JURISTS, A JEW, AND A ZIONIST! In response to Congressman Berman's heretical statement that the judge's report was "irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy" - - -
It must surely occur to every loyal American citizen that this sixty year coddling of Israel has brought our country to the brink of disaster. Think about it. The 5-4 Supreme Court decision of 12/12/00, which knowingly put in office a presidency dedicated to the war against Iraq, installed a candidate for the worst presidency in our history!! GAVE FULL REIGN TO AN AM-RADIO DOMINATED PRO-REPUBLICAN MEDIA/PRESS!! AND NOW, HAS UNLEASHED ON THE WORLD THE MEGALOMANIACAL REGIME OF BENJAMIN NETANYAHU AND AVIGDOR LIEBERMAN - who have just called for the shredding of the international criminal code to legitimize the Israeli war crimes of 12/26/08 to 1/18/09 against the Palestinian population, which the Israelis have virtually imprisoned in the Gaza Strip.
- - - "Judge Goldstone issued a four-page open letter to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, listing 16 instances in which he said the House resolution had distorted the findings or wording of his report. While the House had every right to weigh his report, he wrote, the resolution included 'serious factual inaccuracies and instances where information and statements are taken grossly out of context.'" - Neil MacFarquhar N Y Times (P. A-15) 11/5/09
Item: On the tainted 11/5/09 Lehrer NewsHour which acknowledged the shooting at Fort Hood, Texas - the largest military base in the world - Jeffrey Brown, interviewing James Kitfield of the National Journal, heard, but quickly bypassed, one of the most significant statements made by a reporter in the last several years: "BUT, YOU KNOW, BECAUSE THE ARMY WAS NOT ANTICIPATED TO BE FIGHTING TWO WARS FOR THIS LONG PERIOD -- IN FACT, THE ALL-VOLUNTEER FORCE WAS NEVER ANTICIPATED TO BE SORT OF A WARTIME, YOU KNOW, FULL WARTIME, PROLONGED WAR FORCE. IT WAS GOING TO BE -- FROM ITS INCEPTION WAS DESIGNED TO SORT OF BE THE CORE AROUND WHICH YOU WOULD MOBILIZE AND THEN REINSTATE THE DRAFT."!! - James Kitfield NewsHour 11/5/09.
Were Mr. Brown not tainted by his affiliation, he would have immediately acknowledged and explored with Mr. Kitfield this stunning revelation and, perhaps, related this information both to the near political anarchy which the United States faces, AND THE ACTUAL ANARCHY THE WORLD FACES AS A DIRECT RESULT OF THE RECKLESS AND CONFISCATORY LAND AND DOMINION GRAB WHICH THE INSATIABLE ISRAELIS HAVE VISITED UPON THE MIDDLE EAST!
IS THAT WHY THOSE RABBIS AND BLOOMBERG ARE SO CONTENT? ASK THEM!
Because of the domination of the American media, with which the giant corporations mold the character (actually, the lack of same) of "News" and "Journalism", the public is unaware of the horrendous impact which the likes of Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh have on politics and policy (see Paul Krugman, which follows after the great Max Cleland). The God-awful 11/5/09 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, THE LARGEST MILITARY BASE IN THE WORLD sends a three-part message - (1) We cannot escape the consequences of supporting, literally providing the life blood and treasure, for such as Netanyahu/Lieberman's Israel. (2) Our military, pursuing the dictates of couples like John McCain and Joe Lieberman, is broken. (3) And that military is ill-advised, as the following NewsHour interview 10/29/09 with former Marine captain and State Department official Matthew Hoh explains, ill-advised to involve itself in a 35-year-old civil war in Afghanistan.
The cost of lives, limbs (These are our precious veterans and their families!) and treasure todate is horrendous, all because of insatiable Israel, and an appalling waste. It reminds of the thoughtless Confederate South Carolina April 12, 1861 attack on the Union's Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, which started the Civil War. The carnage born by our dedicated young men and women! The former United States Senator Max Cleland, defeated by the draft dodger (so common among Republicans) Saxby Chambliss in 2002, has the voice that needs be heard -
“EVERY day I was in Vietnam, I thought about home. And, every day I’ve been home, I’ve thought about Vietnam.” So said one of the millions of soldiers who fought there as I did. Change the name of the battlefield and it could have been said by one of the American servicemen coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan today. Wars are not over when the shooting stops. They live on in the lives of those who fight them. That is the curse of the soldier. He never forgets.
While the authorities say they cannot yet tell us why an Army psychiatrist would go on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas, we do know the sorts of stories he had been dealing with as he tried to help those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan readjust to life outside the war zone. A soldier’s mind can be just as dangerous to himself, and to those around him, as wars fought on traditional battlefields.
War is haunting. Death. Pain. Blood. Dismemberment. A buddy dying in your arms. Imagine trying to get over the memory of a bomb splitting a Humvee apart beneath your feet and taking your leg with it. The first time I saw the stilled bodies of American soldiers dead on the battlefield is as stark and brutal a memory as the one of the grenade that ripped off my right arm and both legs.
No, the soldier never forgets. But neither should the rest of us.
Veterans returning today represent the first real influx of combat-wounded soldiers in a generation. They are returning to a nation unprepared for what war does to the soul. Those new veterans will need all of our help. After America’s wars, the used-up fighters are too often left to fend for themselves. Many of the hoboes in the Depression were veterans of World War I. When they came home, they were labeled shell-shocked and discharged from the Army too broken to make it during the economic cataclysm.
So it is again, with too many stories about veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan ending up unemployed and homeless. Figures from the Department of Veterans Affairs show that 131,000 of the nation’s 24 million veterans are homeless each night, and about twice that many will spend part of this year homeless.
We know of the recent failures at Walter Reed Medical Center, where soldiers were stranded in substandard barracks infested with rats while awaiting treatment. I was in Walter Reed myself at that time seeking counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, which, ignited by a barrage of Iraq headlines and the loss of my United States Senate seat, had simply consumed me.
I never saw it coming. Forty years after I had left the battlefield, my memories of death and wounding were suddenly as fresh and present as they had been in 1968. I thought I was past that. I learned that none of us are ever past it. Were it not for the surgeons and nurses at Walter Reed, I never would have survived those first months back from Vietnam. Were it not for the counselors there today, I do not think I would have survived what I’ve come to call my second Vietnam, the one that played out entirely in my mind.
When I was wounded, post-traumatic stress disorder did not officially exist. It was recognized as a legitimate illness only in 1978, during my tenure as head of the Veterans Administration under President Jimmy Carter. Today, it is not only recognized, but the Army and the V.A. know how to treat it. I can offer no better testament than my own recovery.
Weeks before the troubles at Walter Reed became public in 2007, my counselor put it to me simply. “We are drowning in war,” she said. The problems at Walter Reed had nothing to do with the dedicated doctors and nurses there. The problems had to do with the White House and Congress and the Department of Defense. The problems had to do with money.
When we are at war, America spends billions on missiles, tanks, attack helicopters and such. But the wounded warriors who will never fight again tend to be put on the back burner.
This is inexcusable, and it comes with frightening moral costs. There are estimates that 35 percent of the soldiers who fought in Iraq will suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. I’m sure the numbers for Afghanistan are similar. Researchers have found that nearly half of those returning with the disorder have suicidal thoughts. Suicide among active-duty soldiers is on pace to hit a record total this year. More than 1.7 million soldiers have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine that some 600,000 of them will have crippling memories, trapped in a vivid and horrible past from which they can’t seem to escape.
We have a family Army today, unlike the Army seen in any generation before. We have fought these wars with the Reserves and the National Guard. Fathers, mothers, soccer coaches and teachers are the soldiers coming home. Whether they like it or not, they will bring their war experiences home to their families and communities.
IN HIS POEM “THE DEAD YOUNG SOLDIERS,” ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, WHOSE YOUNGER BROTHER DIED IN WORLD WAR I, HAS THE SOLDIERS IN THE POEM TELL US: “WE LEAVE YOU OUR DEATHS. GIVE THEM THEIR MEANING.” UNTIL WE HELP OUR RETURNING SOLDIERS GET THEIR LIVES BACK WHEN THEY COME HOME, THE PROMISE OF RESTORING THAT MEANING WILL GO UNFULFILLED. - Max Cleland N Y Times 11/7/09
Max Cleland, the secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission, was a Democratic senator from Georgia from 1997 to 2003. He is the author, with Ben Raines, of “Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove.”
- Another Voice... As Urgent -
Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque -- and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied.
The key thing to understand about that rally is that it wasn’t a fringe event. It was sponsored by the House Republican leadership -- in fact, it was officially billed as a G.O.P. press conference. Senior lawmakers were in attendance, and apparently had no problem with the tone of the proceedings.
True, Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, offered some mild criticism after the fact. But the operative word is “mild.” The signs were “inappropriate,” said his spokesman, and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as Rush Limbaugh, said Mr. Cantor, “conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful.”
What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.
The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?
But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.
When Hofstadter wrote, the right wing felt dispossessed because it was rejected by both major parties. That changed with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right.
Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security (Tying it to the Dow).
But something snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.
Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.
Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.
In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions.
In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.
And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing -- but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.
THE POINT IS THAT THE TAKEOVER OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY BY THE IRRATIONAL RIGHT IS NO LAUGHING MATTER. SOMETHING UNPRECEDENTED IS HAPPENING HERE -- AND IT’S VERY BAD FOR AMERICA. - Paul Krugman 11/9/09
The world is outraged. Here a portion of Netanyahu's 9/14/09 brazenly and inconceivably mendacious response to the United Nations. What is not included is Netanyahu's demand for a change in the international criminal code, to accommodate the 12/08-1/09 Israeli massacre in Gaza. More on Netanyahu next edit.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU 9/14/09: A democracy legitimately defending itself against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered, and given an unfair trial to boot. By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice... The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza, the same UN that promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us - my people, my country - of being war criminals? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. For acting in a way that any country would act. With a restraint unmatched by many. What a travesty. Ladies and gentlemen, Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report provides a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?
- Talk about a "travesty"! Words fail us! Note the inimitable Norman Finkelstein, whose parents survived the Holocaust, note Mr. Finkelstein ahead on Amy Goodman 9/16/09!
In that Bush/Cheney were in such a rush to leave Afghanistan for Iraq, to placate Israel [And included in that unholy placation the Bush/Cheney regime, so focused on Iraq as to dismiss the mounting evidence provided by numerous sources that Al Qaeda was planning an attack on the key New York City-Washington, D.C. hub (The Pentagon! The White House!), i.e. rendering the nerve centers of these United States defenseless! Hence, 9/11/01!], these United States are now faced with an implacable Islamic force which does not trust us having observed, first-hand, our refusal to challenge Israel under any circumstance!
An interjection of the bottom line on the United States versus Afghanistan and Pakistan. WHY ARE WE THERE?
JIM LEHRER: Next tonight, we continue our ongoing conversations on Afghanistan.
Tonight, it's with an official dissenter to U.S. policy.
Judy Woodruff is in charge.
JUDY WOODRUFF 10/29/09: After five months serving with the State Department in Afghanistan, Matthew Hoh became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest against American policies there.
In his September 10 letter of resignation, revealed this week in "The Washington Post," the former Marine captain said: "I fail to see the value or worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditure of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war."
Hoh's resignation was greeted more in sorrow than in anger by the State Department. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke said -- quote -- "We took his letter very seriously because he was a good officer."
Mr. Hoh joins us now.
MATTHEW HOH: Thank you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Thank you for being here.
So, is it your view that the U.S. should just get out?
MATTHEW HOH: Of course it's impossible to wave a magic wand and be gone from there. However, I do believe we are involved in a 35-year-old civil war.
I believe we are not the lead character in that war, that it's an internal conflict. I believe that 60,000 troops in Afghanistan do not serve to defeat al-Qaida and do not serve to stabilize the Pakistan government.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What is it that has given you the confidence to know this? What did you see in Afghanistan?
MATTHEW HOH: Sure.
Well, before I went, I studied quite a bit about it, I read a lot of its history, particularly the late '70s and in the Soviet-Afghan war. Additionally, I have many friends and colleagues who have served in Afghanistan.
I went there with some ideas that this didn't sit well with me about what we were doing there, but I wanted to contribute. When I got there, however, serving in the east and in the south, the similarities were the same.
What I found, we were fighting people who were fighting us only because we're occupying them or because we are supporting a central government that they view as occupying them.
Most importantly, I think I listened to as many Afghans as possible because my role as a political adviser was to work with the Afgha...(break in transcript)
- Inexplicably the balance of these phrases missing on NewsHour transcript.
- Bystanders in a civil war? -
JUDY WOODRUFF: You say, Matthew Hoh, that what you see is a civil war going on; the U.S. is a bystander. But what it looks like to many Americans, as they look, is that it's the Afghan government being attacked, the Afghan people being attacked by the Taliban, by elements of al-Qaida. How can we be sure which is right?
MATTHEW HOH: Sure.
First of all, al-Qaida does not exist in Afghanistan. I think there's plenty of evidence to that fact. And the way the country works, it's so localized there. It's what I refer to and other people refer to as valleyism. They're concerned with their...
JUDY WOODRUFF: Valleyism?
MATTHEW HOH: Valleyism, yes, so if you take the idea of nationalism, shrink it down to a much smaller level.
These are folks who live within communities of 100 to 500 people. And that's -- I don't want to say where their world ends, but that's what they're concerned with. And they have never had a central government there that has done any good, that has never -- that has delivered services to them. And they have never had a central government that has brought them anything. It's only taken.
And, so, to them, whether it was the Najibullah, the Rabbani, the Taliban, or the Karzai government, they're all one in the same. And particularly in the east, where they're fighting us and the south, where they're fighting us, those folks there don't make up the people who are the central government.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, the argument, though, by as you know, by General Stanley McChrystal, who's in charge over there for the military, by John McCain, who's very much in favor of the U.S. staying, is that, if the U.S. leaves, Taliban takes over, and al-Qaida's going to come back.
MATTHEW HOH: I don't believe al-Qaida will come back.
I believe that, since 2001, al-Qaida has evolved. They have turned into, as I like to say, an ideological cloud that exists on the Internet and recruits worldwide. They -- if you look at the attacks al-Qaida has been successful with over the last seven, eight years, including attacks on 9/11, they weren't conducted by Afghans or Pakistanis.
And a lot of the preparation and training, it took place in Western Europe or even here in the United States. So, I don't think al-Qaida has any interest in ever tying itself again to a geographical or political boundary. I think they're content to exist as they have evolved. And they are a threat, and they should be our priority. We need to defeat them.
But, again, 60,000 troops in Afghanistan does not defeat al-Qaida.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What about the Taliban?
MATTHEW HOH: The Taliban, we chased them out of power in 2001, like we rightfully should have.
However, what you have in Quetta now, I believe, is just the remnants of that. And while the Quetta Shura Taliban, as we refer to them, is a threat, and is a threat to the Karzai government, I don't believe they are a threat to the United States.
And, furthermore, I don't believe that they would be able to retake Kabul, particularly if we ensure that there was no Pakistani support for them if we left Afghanistan.
- The risks of more U.S. forces -
JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you think would happen, though, if President Obama did give General McChrystal the troops he wants or a significant increase in the number of troops?
MATTHEW HOH: I believe it's only going to fuel the insurgency. It's only going to reinforce claims by our enemies that we are an occupying power, because we are an occupying power.
And that will only fuel the insurgency. And that will only cause more people to fight us or those fighting us already to continue to fight us.
JUDY WOODRUFF: You don't think there's any argument the U.S. can make to the Afghan people that we're there to -- as we have been, to promote democracy, that could change their view of what you say is...
MATTHEW HOH: Sure.
JUDY WOODRUFF: ... is -- that we're an occupying force?
MATTHEW HOH: I was up in east of the country, up in Kunar and up in the Nuristan areas, just where we lost eight soldiers a couple weeks ago.
The brigade combat team that was there for a year, in one year's time, they dropped about a half-million pounds of ordnance off aircraft, and they shot about 50,000 rounds of indirect fire and artillery.
Now, on the other hand, they all spent probably about $160 million to $180 million in development money over the course of a year. This is in an area of 4.5 million people. If, after eight years of war, you have done these kinds of things, and people aren't coming around, I don't think they're ever going to come around.
I think we have to realize that, sometimes, people don't like us and don't want to be like us. And we have to accept that. And then we have to engage them politically and work with them that way.
- Corruption in Afghanistan -
JUDY WOODRUFF: One of the other points you make, Matthew Hoh, is about corruption in the Karzai government. You were very blunt in writing that Karzai is advised by drug lords. And you went into some detail about that.
The other argument, though, on that is that, well, that's just endemic in that culture, that the U.S. has to be prepared to accept a certain amount of corruption when you're dealing with these people.
MATTHEW HOH: I think that would be true if we weren't sacrificing our young men and women in support of that regime.
The idea that we're losing somebody's son or somebody's husband is dying to support a regime that's profiting off of our aid money is criminal. It's wrong. And, furthermore, you know, I know a lot of people speak about the Taliban receiving financing through opium and everything. There are a lot of us who believe that they receive just as much money through our own development money we're spending there.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Last thing I want to ask you is, some people have said it all sounds very good, but you were only there in Afghanistan for five months. You're relatively young, what, 37?
MATTHEW HOH: Thirty-six.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Thirty-six years old.
MATTHEW HOH: Yes.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Who are you to say what the United States should be doing, when there are others who have been there longer, studied it for years, and so forth?
MATTHEW HOH: Sure. And I wish people would refute what I'm saying. I have seen that criticism, but I have not seen anyone tell me why it's not a civil war.
I have not seen anyone tell me how stabilizing the Afghan government will defeat al-Qaida. I have not heard anyone tell me how keeping 60,000 troops, or 80,000, or 100,000 troops in Afghanistan will stabilize Pakistan. So, I haven't heard the answers to those questions.
As for the criticisms about my age or that I was only there for five months, I was there for five months. I was in two parts of the country. I worked with as many local people as I could. And I listened as much as possible.
At that point, what I wrote -- first off, what I wrote in my resignation letter, there's not a novel or unique thought in that. Those are thoughts shared by military officers and State Department officers as well. My concern is not how are we fighting this war, but why are we fighting this war.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Matthew Hoh, thank you very much for coming in to talk with us. We appreciate it.
MATTHEW HOH: Thank you, Judy. - NewsHour 10/29/09
- Response to 10/18/09 The New York Times Magazine -
To the Editor:
Dexter Filkins' article ["His (McChrystal's) Long War"]
What is missing from Dexter Filkins’s article (and General McChrystal’s thinking) about Afghanistan is analysis of the ultimate question: What is the point? The answer is, I suppose, that we must deny Muslim terrorists a base from which to attack us. But America does not have the resources or the political will to go nation-building in every failed Muslim state in the world.
This is Vietnam all over again. Once again we are at war in a small, distant country whose people and customs we do not understand. Once again we are told by the experts that we must spend more blood and money to “win the war,” whatever winning means -- to define it would demonstrate its impossibility. Once again we are told that we can “win the war” if we just send enough young Americans to be maimed and killed and spend enough dollars in the faraway battlefield. It was all wrong then, and it is all wrong now. - Robert L. Dunn Corte Madera Calif. 11/1/09
The insufferable David Brooks, who makes his predecessor Bill Safire appear noble (reporter Safire concealed from the American people Ariel Sharon's plan to generate the Intifada by using armed Israelis to restrict Palestinians from their sacred Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem) David Brooks has written another obscene column questioning the "tenacity", "the conviction" of President Barack Obama with reference to "Lincoln and Churchill." Brooks is a man who backed draftdodgers George W. Bush and Richard Cheney! And he's questioning President Barack Obama? We refuse to present his 10/30/09 "The Tenacity Question". The man does not deserve the space.
- Here a reader's response.
To the Editor:
David Brooks’s column seems to presume that a military solution in Afghanistan is appropriate. This is also prevalent among those who wage war for a living -- whether fighting or building and selling armaments.
The military requests what it requires to achieve military objectives, whether those objectives resolve greater problems or not. That’s tactical -- and that’s the military’s job.
The president’s job is to carefully weigh our national interests and then order the tactics necessary to achieve them. It is refreshing to have a president actually invest time and intellectual effort, circumspectly formulating a plan of action and not just surrounding himself with “the smartest military experts” or “retired officers.”
If the solution truly is military, so be it. If not, we shouldn’t send our kids off to die for it. Tenacity is appropriate only when one is on a proper course -- not heading toward a cliff. - David L. Wolf Waterford Mich. 10/30/09
Our following edit - Who is the Commander in Chief? Surely not John McCain!!
(11/3/09 edit) CBS Evening News 10/30/09 -
KATIE COURIC: Now turning to the war in Afghanistan, President Obama held another strategy meeting today, this time with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A decision whether to send more troops is still days, perhaps weeks away, and the military now acknowledges that just getting more troops to Afghanistan would take a long time. From the Pentagon, here's David Martin.
DAVID MARTIN: General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, has told the Pentagon it would take more than a year to get all the troops he's asking for on the ground and in the fight against the Taliban. The first brigade could not arrive until January or 2010. And after that, the need to build facilities to house more troops would limit him to just one additional brigade every three months. If the president were to grant McChrystal's full request of 40,000 troops, it would be 2011 before they all got there. That's bad news for the war since McChrystal has warned it could be lost in the next 12 months. But it also means the president has plenty of time to decide whether to give McChrystal all the troops he wants.
The White House is not happy with the way senior military leaders, beginning with Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen have handled the debate over Afghan strategy, boxing the president in with their public statements. Two days after the president held his first meeting on Afghanistan, Mullen was telling Congress he agreed with McChrystal.
MIKE MULLEN, JOINT CHIEFS CHAIRMAN: ... all having heard his views and having great confidence in his leadership, a properly resourced counter insurgency probably means more forces.
DAVID MARTIN: Even before that, General Patraeus, the overall commander for the region, gave an interview in which he strongly backed McChrystal's assessment. As for McChrystal, he publicly dismissed a much more limited strategy favored by Vice President Biden.
GENERAL STANLEY McCHRYSTAL: A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sided strategy.
DAVID MARTIN: That Afghan decision is the president's first moment of truth as Commander in Chief. It's also shaping up as a watershed in his relations with senior military leaders. David Martin, CBS News, the Pentagon. - 10/30/09
- Media/Press Analysis? -
There is a John Harwood who is all over the Media/Press, associated with Politico, did a column called THE CAUCUS in the 11/2/09 N Y Times, has been on Washington Week, and elsewhere. In other words he's been around long enough to know that our Media/Press is ALWAYS pro-Republican. Particularly now. Whatever the political story the networks ALWAYS focus the Republican opposition, to whatever the Obama administration is calling for. And then the press asks "How is it that Obama's poll numbers have fallen?" Mr. Harwood himself calls on a "Will Feltus, a Republican specialist...using data from (Joe?) Scarborough Research"! Mr. Harwood's piece is titled "If Fox Is Partisan, It Is Not Alone". We're not sure that Harwood intended this - but EVERY NETWORK PROVIDES A REPUBLICAN SLANT. No wonder these Rabbis are so comfortable!
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman
- "The Defining Moment" 10/30/09
O.K., folks, this is it. It’s the defining moment for health care reform.
Past efforts to give Americans what citizens of every other advanced nation already have -- guaranteed access to essential care -- have ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, usually dying in committee without ever making it to a vote.
But this time, broadly similar health-care bills have made it through multiple committees in both houses of Congress. And on Thursday, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, unveiled the legislation that she will send to the House floor, where it will almost surely pass. It’s not a perfect bill, by a long shot, but it’s a much stronger bill than almost anyone expected to emerge even a few weeks ago. And it would lead to near-universal coverage.
As a result, everyone in the political class -- by which I mean politicians, people in the news media, and so on, basically whoever is in a position to influence the final stage of this legislative marathon -- now has to make a choice. The seemingly impossible dream of fundamental health reform is just a few steps away from becoming reality, and each player has to decide whether he or she is going to help it across the finish line or stand in its way.
For conservatives, of course, it’s an easy decision: They don’t want Americans to have universal coverage, and they don’t want President Obama to succeed.
For progressives, it’s a slightly more difficult decision: They want universal care, and they want the president to succeed -- but the proposed legislation falls far short of their ideal. There are still some reform advocates who won’t accept anything short of a full transition to Medicare for all as opposed to a hybrid, compromise system that relies heavily on private insurers. And even those who have reconciled themselves to the political realities are disappointed that the bill doesn’t include a “strong” public option, with payment rates linked to those set by Medicare.
But the bill does include a “medium-strength” public option, in which the public plan would negotiate payment rates -- defying the predictions of pundits who have repeatedly declared any kind of public-option plan dead. It also includes more generous subsidies than expected, making it easier for lower-income families to afford coverage. And according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, almost everyone -- 96 percent of legal residents too young to receive Medicare -- would get health insurance.
So should progressives get behind this plan? Yes. And they probably will.
The people who really have to make up their minds, then, are those in between, the self-proclaimed centrists.
The odd thing about this group is that while its members are clearly uncomfortable with the idea of passing health care reform, they’re having a hard time explaining exactly what their problem is. Or to be more precise and less polite, they have been attacking proposed legislation for doing things it doesn’t and for not doing things it does.
THUS, SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN OF CONNECTICUT SAYS, “I WANT TO BE ABLE TO VOTE FOR A HEALTH BILL, BUT MY TOP CONCERN IS THE DEFICIT.” THAT WOULD BE A SERIOUS OBJECTION TO THE PROPOSALS CURRENTLY ON THE TABLE IF THEY WOULD, IN FACT, increase the deficit. But they wouldn’t, at least according to the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates that the House bill, in particular, would actually reduce the deficit by $100 billion over the next decade.
- The Required Lieberman Expose' -
Joseph Lieberman, who Al Gore wisely chose as his Vice Presidential candidate (to keep him in line for what Mr. Gore knew would be a severely challenged term of office), has a, to say the least, a checkered past (a divorced Orthodox Jew) and the strongest of ties to the right-wing Republican Bill Buckley, now deceased, has a newly discovered friend in Bob Schieffer, who's younger brother Tom, was named Ambassador to Japan, by George W. Bush! Mr. Schieffer has Mr. Lieberman, Joe not Avigdor (although there is little difference), on the 11/1/09 Face the Nation Leslie Moonves' CBS flagship Sunday Talk Show.
On AM Radio's The Ed Schultz Show 11/2/09 (Mr. Schultz also has a daily television program on MSNBC) Schultz also labeled Joe Lieberman, correctly, the "whore" on Health Care Reform. Sixty eight percent (68!!) of Connecticut's population favors Single-Payer Health Insurance, but Lieberman ignores that, preferring the bonus he receives from the Health Care Industry!
- A return to the great Paul Krugman -
Or consider the remarkable exchange that took place this week between Peter Orszag, the White House budget director, and Fred Hiatt, The Washington Post’s opinion editor. Mr. Hiatt had criticized Congress for not taking what he considers the necessary steps to control health-care costs -- namely, taxing high-cost insurance plans and establishing an independent Medicare commission. Writing on the budget office blog -- yes, there is one, and it’s essential reading -- Mr. Orszag pointed out, not too gently, that the Senate Finance Committee’s bill actually includes both of the allegedly missing measures.
I won’t try to psychoanalyze the “naysayers,” as Mr. Orszag describes them. I’d just urge them to take a good hard look in the mirror. If they really want to align themselves with the hard-line conservatives, if they just want to kill health reform, so be it. But they shouldn’t hide behind claims that they really, truly would support health care reform if only it were better designed.
For this is the moment of truth. The political environment is as favorable for reform as it’s likely to get. The legislation on the table isn’t perfect, but it’s as good as anyone could reasonably have expected. History is about to be made -- and everyone has to decide which side they’re on. - Paul Krugman 10/30/09
Editor's Note: PBS's Frontline finally broached the financial collapse, "The Warning" 10/20/09. GOPBias.org exposed same on 4/13/09 edit.
DemocracyNow
- October 23, 2009 -
- The Goldstone Report -
- Goldstone Challenges Obama to Explain Gaza Inquiry Objections -
As the US challenges Sri Lanka, the head of a UN inquiry into the US-backed assault on Gaza is challenging the Obama administration to explain why it’s worked to minimize the inquiry’s findings that Israel committed multiple war crimes. In an interview with Al Jazeera, Judge Richard Goldstone said the White House had raised “concerns” about the report but hasn’t explained them.
Judge Richard Goldstone: “It seems to be still developing. It’s been ambivalent, I think. The Obama administration joined our recommendation calling for full, good-faith investigations, both in Israel and in Gaza, but said that the report was flawed. But I have yet to hear from the Obama administration what the flaws in the report that they’ve identified are. I mean, I’d be happy to respond to them, if and when I know what they are.”
Last week the US voted against a UN Human Rights Council resolution endorsing the report’s recommendations that both sides of the Gaza conflict probe war crimes allegations or face international prosecution. The resolution has been forwarded to the Security Council, where it’s expected to face a US veto. - DemocracyNow 10/23/09
- Joint Israeli/United States War Games Against Iran? -
- US, Israel Stage Joint Air Drill -
The US, meanwhile, has launched a joint air force drill with the Israeli military. The drill has been described in Israel as a preparation for an attack on Iran. US Navy Rear Admiral John Richardson said the exercises would aid the Obama administration’s revamped missile defense program.
US Navy Rear Admiral John Richardson: “This exercise is not directly related to recent announcements about ballistic missile defense in Europe, but the lessons and the insights that we gain from this exercise will certainly relate to developing that capability.” - DemocracyNow 10/23/09
Is this the work of the "A New Direction For America" claimant (N Y Times 10/22/09 A-24) by Peter Baker, who lauds Rahm Emanuel with his article "Film Celebrates Emanuel as Democrats' Dynamo" crediting Mr. Emanuel with the 2006 Democratic takeover of Congress. Think about that. The United States had managed to survive perhaps the worst six years since the Civil War, and Baker and film director a Karen Price are crediting this one individual Rahm Emanuel, who we have heard from before. Yes, he may be a man who relishes "Push(ing) people to a level (to which) they've never been pushed", but, as Chief of Staff is he also responsible for these items above in Amy Goodman's 10/23/09 report? Does Mr. Emanuel view those of us who are not Jewish, but gentiles, as heathens? Does that include Palestinians? Is this why those Rabbis appear so self-satisfied? And is that why Bloomberg is smirking?
In the next series of reports, led by the color photo of Bush - Cheney - in consultation with Rush Limbaugh - followed by explanatory paragraphs - i.e. connecting the dots - there is also the 10/1/09 Associated Press item, datelined Jerusalem, a destination of the link "Reference to Goldstone Report". This paragraph:
"Stung by a damning U.N. report alleging war crimes in Gaza, Israel is taking extraordinary steps to fend off potential international prosecution of its political and military leaders, hiring high-powered attorneys, lobbying Western governments and launching a public relations blitz."
It would seem that the above Associated Press color photo, in the N Y Times, of a breakfast 10/18/09 at the Borough Park, Brooklyn Jewish Council, peopled by a lineup of solipsistic characters, was not what Israel had in mind. But who knows?
Several days later The New York Times 10/20/09 had two articles of interest - on A-4 Ethan Bronner quoted Ari Shavit, a columnist for Haaretz - "As Israel gets stronger, its legitimacy is melting away". Mr. Bronner. It was to be expected. That was no war in Gaza; that was a massacre of Palestinian civilians, 1400 of them. Here's Avi Shlaim, noted and respected Israeli historian, 1/14/09:
AMY GOODMAN: Israel calls Hamas "terrorist." What is your definition of "terror"?
AVI SHLAIM: My definition of "terror" is the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. And by this definition, Hamas is a terrorist organization. But by the same token, Israel is practicing state terror, because it is using violence on a massive scale against Palestinian civilians for political purposes. I don't hold a brief for Hamas. Hamas is not a paragon of virtue. Its leaders are not angels. They harm civilians indiscriminately. Killing civilians is wrong, period. That applies to Hamas, and it applies equally to the state of Israel.
But there are two points I would like to make about Hamas, and that is--the first point is that it was elected in a fair and free election in January 2006. It was an impeccable election, monitored by a number of international observers, including President Jimmy Carter. So it is not just a terrorist organization. It is a democratically elected government of the Palestinian people and the representative of the Palestinian people in Gaza, as well as the West Bank.
And the second point that I would like to make is that since coming to power, Gaza has moderated its political program. Its charter is extreme. Its charter denies the legitimacy of a Jewish state. The charter calls for an Islamic state over the whole of historic Palestine. The charter has not been revived, but since coming to power, the leadership of Hamas has been much more pragmatic and stated that it is willing to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the state of Israel for twenty, thirty, forty, maybe even fifty years.
Thirdly, Hamas joined with Fatah, the rival group, the mainstream group, on the West Bank in a national unity government in the summer of 2007. That national unity government lasted only three months. Israel, with American support, helped to sabotage and to bring down that national unity government. Israel refused to deal with a Palestinian government which included Hamas within it. And shamefully, both the United States and the European Union joined in Israel in this refusal to recognize a Hamas-dominated government, and Israel withdrew tax revenues, and European Union withdrew foreign aid, in a shameful attempt to bring down a democratically elected government.
So, I do not defend Hamas, but I think that it hasn't received a fair hearing from the international community, and Israel has done everything to sabotage it all along.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Shlaim, you say it's done everything to sabotage it, except at the beginning, when you say it supported Hamas to weaken Fatah, which it now supports.
AVI SHLAIM: Indeed. Israel has always played the game of divide and rule. This is a very good tactic in times of war, to divide your enemies and pick them off one by one. No one can complain about that. But divide and rule isn't a good tactic in times of peace. If your aim is to achieve peace with the Arabs, then you should want unity among the Palestinians and unity in the Arab world. But Israel continued to play this game of divide and rule.
Hamas emerged in the course of the First Intifada in the late 1980s. It is the Islamic resistance movement. The mainstream movement, Fatah, was led by Yasser Arafat. And Israel gave tacit encouragement and support to the Islamic resistance in the hope of weakening the secular nationalists led by Yasser Arafat. It was a dangerous game to play, because the end result of this game was that Hamas emerged as the strongest Palestinian political party.
And Israel helped Hamas inadvertently in another way, because Fatah signed the Oslo Accord with Israel in 1993. It expected the Oslo Accord to lead to a two-state solution. And yet, Israel, after the election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, reneged on the Israeli side of the deal. So, the Oslo Accord, the Oslo peace process wasn't doomed to failure from the start. It failed because Israel, under the leadership of the Likud, reneged on its side of the deal. So that left the Palestinians with nothing but misery and poverty and frustration and ever-growing Israeli settlements on the land. And it was this context that led to the success of Hamas at the last elections. So Israel has a lot to explain in the rise to power of the Hamas movement.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Avi Shlaim, we only have a minute, but I want to ask you where you see the solution at this point. Barack Obama will be president on Tuesday in just a few days. Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State.
AVI SHLAIM: The solution--this is a political conflict, and there is no military conflict to--there is no military solution to this conflict. The only solution lies in negotiations between Israel and Hamas about all the issues involved. President-elect Obama is a very impressive man and a very intelligent man and a very fair-minded man. He hasn't demonstrated any courage in the course of this crisis. He hasn't taken any position. He hasn't called for an immediate ceasefire. So the first step is an immediate ceasefire, and the next step would be negotiations between all the sides about restoring the ceasefire and then moving on to stage two, which is a political settlement to this tragic hundred-year-old conflict.
AMY GOODMAN: And Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who said in her confirmation hearing yesterday she wouldn't negotiate with Hamas?
AVI SHLAIM: Yes, but there are other signs from the Obama campaign that they would be willing to consider low-level, indirect contacts with Hamas. And one has to be grateful for small mercies, so small, minor, low-level contacts with Hamas could lead to a proper dialog in due course. So I remain optimistic that sanity and rationality would take over in American foreign policy after the dreadful last eight years. - Amy Goodman with Avi Shlaim 1/14/09
Two pages later on A-6, still the 10/20/09 edition of N Y Times [A-5 was a full-page ad (nine of which appeared in the 28 page first section of the national edition)] David Sanger in a 16 paragraph piece was, again, trying to convince his readers that Iran is on the brink of producing a nuclear weapon! He left to the 15th paragraph the facts: "So far Iran is NOT known to have enriched fuel beyond five percent, the level needed for reactors. Enrichment at NINETY PERCENT OR MORE is needed for a sophisticated weapon."
Beyond all of this is the 10/19/09 David Chen piece "Giuliani Stokes Fears Of a Thompson Victory" with which our lead color photo of the haughty and insolent Brooklyn Rabbis is associated. They may well have learned of the Netanyahu & Lieberman Israeli Regime's 10/20/09 decision to "delegitimize" the United Nations Report on the 12/08-1/09 Israeli massacre of 1400 Palestinian citizens penned up by Israel in Gaza!
- World Briefing -
MIDDLE EAST - Israel: Panel to Fight U.N. Report
The prospect of Israeli officials facing war crimes trials abroad led the Israeli government to form a committee on Tuesday to deal with the international legal consequences of a United Nations report on the Gaza war. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised a battle to “delegitimize” the report’s findings and instructed government officials to draft proposals for changing INTERNATIONAL LAWS of war to take into account “the expansion of terrorism in the world.” - REUTERS 10/21/09
Additionally, such charlatans as Alan Dershowitz and Ellie (that's his given first name) Wiesel have joined Robert L. Bernstein with his 10/20/09 N Y Times OP-ED distortion of the continual, certainly since June of 1967, murder and disposition of Palestinian life and property, WITH IMPUNITY!
- Crossfire: A Rights Group and Israel
To the Editor:
Few would disagree with Robert L. Bernstein’s contention that Israel offers a more free and open society to its citizens (both Jewish and Arab) than almost any country in the Arab world. Yet the situation in the West Bank and Gaza is starkly different.
Failing to make the distinction between Israel and the territories helps Mr. Bernstein’s argument, but is ultimately a disservice to the countless human rights organizations -- Human Rights Watch included -- that rightly condemn the unjust treatment of Palestinians living under unwanted and illegal Israeli control. - Scott Leo New York 10/20/09
To the Editor:
Re “Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast” (Op-Ed, Oct. 20):
As present chairwoman and past chairman of the board of Human Rights Watch, we were saddened to see Robert L. Bernstein argue that Israel should be judged by a different human rights standard than the rest of the world.
Mr. Bernstein, as a founder of Human Rights Watch, has had ample access over the years to make his argument that we should not be reporting on Israeli conduct because Israel is a democracy. As recently as April, the full board of directors heard -- and rejected -- Mr. Bernstein’s proposal that Human Rights Watch should focus our research and reporting resources on closed societies.
After careful consideration, we and other members of our board stressed that democracies, too, commit serious abuses, with the United States’ “war on terrorism” and Israel’s conduct in Gaza just the latest examples. We reaffirmed our conviction that it is essential to hold Israel to the same international human rights standards as other countries. To do otherwise would be a violation of our core principle that human rights are universal.
As long as open societies commit human rights abuses, Human Rights Watch has a vital role to play in documenting those violations and advocating to bring them to an end. - Jane Olson Jonathan Fanton New York 10/20/09
To the Editor:
I disagree with Robert L. Bernstein on several counts. First, Human Rights Watch has issued dozens of reports and statements on human rights abuses in other countries in the region in the last two or three years, many more than on Israel. Second, the notion that democracies somehow get a free pass on human rights is absurd. Genocides have occurred in democratic societies, and lesser abuses are common; they are no less deplorable. The abuses of war and occupation are particularly troubling given the power imbalances and the lack of redress by the occupied.
Mr. Bernstein also repeats accusations about Iran as if this whitewashes Israeli conduct. Plainly, Israel has been abusive and should be held accountable, especially given its dependence on the United States. Crying that the “other guy” is worse is the ploy of a schoolyard bully. - John Tirman Cambridge Mass 10/20/09
The writer is executive director of the M.I.T. Center for International Studies and, obviously, close to Noam Chomsky.
To the Editor:
We wholeheartedly share the concerns expressed by Robert L. Bernstein, a founder of Human Rights Watch, about the direction that the organization -- which should be one of the world’s leading human rights groups -- has taken.
Human Rights Watch was founded more than 30 years ago with the admirable aim of protecting dissidents from oppressive regimes, but today its leaders have lost sight of its original ethos. Nowhere is this more so than in regard to the Middle East.
In a region dominated by regimes that violate human rights in horrendous ways, Human Rights Watch has instead chosen to single out Israel for condemnation, often using highly unreliable witnesses to do so.
Not only has it failed to allocate proper resources to monitoring the dictatorships that are rife throughout the region, but senior Human Rights Watch officials even recently went to Riyadh to raise funds from people associated with the Saudi regime, emphasizing the group’s work demonizing Israel while doing so.
In order that Human Rights Watch can once again fulfill the role for which it was created, we call upon its board members to institute a full independent review of the organization for which they are responsible. - Elie Wiesel Alan Dershowitz New York 10/20/09
The writers are, respectively, the Nobel Peace laureate and the law professor at Harvard University, and are members of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor, based in Jerusalem. This letter was signed by five other board members.
HARD TO CONTEMPLATE WIESEL IN THE COMPANY OF DERSHOWITZ. Again, obviously, they have joined with Netanyahu & Lieberman, both Joe and Avigdor.
Almost two years ago GOPBias.org posted this summation of the desperate circumstances created for the United States, and the world, by the usurpation of Washington power by Bush/Cheney/McCain (in color). A most pernicious aspect of that Republican coup (12/12/00 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court) was the Israeli assumption that they could rely on the power of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) to manipulate the force and treasure of the United States, to first remove Saddam Hussein, and then subdue a vibrant Iran, which the Israelis saw as obstacles to their control of The Levant - lands bordering the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea - Lebanon (fronting Syria and Syria fronting Iraq and Iran).
There are several factions at play in recent weeks leading up to a stunning report in the Friday 10/16/09 The New York Times by a Sharon Otterman [i.e. not Isabel Kershner, Steven Erlanger, David Sanger, or Mark Landler (Mr. Landler had even been with Ms. Clinton when she spoke - it appears below as referenced to a Portland, Oregon television newscast!), etc.] -
- "U.N. Official Endorses War Report About Gaza" -
"A Palestinian effort to formally endorse the findings of a United Nations report on war crimes committed during the Gaza war last winter received a strong statement of support on Thursday from the top United Nations human rights official, Navanethem Pillay.
Opening a two-day meeting in Geneva of the Human Rights Council, Ms. Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, told the 47-member council that she concurred with the report’s recommendations and its call for 'urgent action to counter impunity.'" - Sharon Otterman N Y Times 10/16/09
Missing Is Reference to Goldstone Report
- Intermediate Background from Amy Goodman -
- UN Takes Up Gaza War Crimes Report -
Amy Goodman 10/15/09: The UN Human Rights Council is expected to open discussion today on the findings of a UN inquiry that accused Israel of a series of war crimes during its three-week assault on the Gaza Strip. The session occurs just days after widespread Palestinian outcry forced the Palestinian Authority to reverse its backing of US and Israeli demands for an indefinite delay to addressing the report at the United Nations. It also comes one day after the UN Security Council took up the report’s findings. On Wednesday, the Palestinian representative to the UN, Riyad Mansour, said the report’s reception heralded an end to Israeli impunity in attacking Palestinians.
Riyad Mansour: “The culture of impunity that Israel--allowed Israel to get away with murder for the last sixty years is no more. We are entering a new culture of accountability, and this process is not a short process. It’s a long process, but we are all determined to defend international law, international humanitarian law, and to bring the criminals to face justice.”
Around 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the assault, compared to thirteen Israelis, a ratio of 100-to-one.
- Israel Continues E. Jerusalem Home Demolitions -
Amy Goodman 10/15/09: In other Mideast news, Israel continues to demolish Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem. On Monday, Israeli troops destroyed the home of Amjad, an East Jerusalem father of three children.
Amjad: “In the morning I sleep inside. The soldiers come and take me. They bring the dog. ‘What do you want?’ I tell him. ‘I have a problem in my heart.’ ’It’s not my problem,’ he tells me. ‘Go outside.’ But I don’t want to go. Five soldiers take me, they brought me out. They take my phone and my--[inaudible]. You know, she tells me, ‘No, we don’t want.’ And we see, after, they broke the house. Now I have two problems: I don’t have any place to sit, I have three children.”
Over 200 Palestinian homes have been demolished in East Jerusalem and the West Bank this year, displacing at least 520 Palestinians.
- Groups: 335 Palestinians Unlawfully Jailed -
Amy Goodman 10/15/09: Meanwhile in Israel, two human rights group have released a report documenting what they call the unlawful imprisonment of some 335 Palestinians in Israeli jails. The groups B’Tselem and HaMoked say Israel is violating international law by holding the prisoners without charge or trial for years on end. The 335 figure could be substantially conservative; there are an estimated 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails. - Amy Goodman DemocracyNow 10/15/09
** Note That Rupert Murdock's Wall Street Journal Poses A Threatening Iran! Recent Revelations Dispute Murdock's Provocative Report!
- Report: US Considers Rewriting Intel Report on Iranian Nuke Program -
The Wall Street Journal reports US spy agencies are considering rewriting a 2007 intelligence report that asserted Iran halted its efforts to build nuclear weapons in 2003. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate reflected the combined judgment of all sixteen American intelligence bodies. The report found with “high confidence” that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Since then, German, French and British intelligence agencies (And don't forget the Israelis!) have all disputed the conclusions of the 2007 NIE. The Journal reports the White House could use a new report to galvanize wider international support for sanctions against Iran, which maintains its nuclear program is for civilian purposes. - Amy Goodman 10/16/09 **
- UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Backs Goldstone Report -
Amy Goodman 10/16/09: The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to launch investigations of alleged war crimes in Gaza to help rebuild trust and support peace. Navi Pillay said she backed the findings in the Goldstone report that accused Israel of war crimes and deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza.
Navi Pillay: “Let me take this opportunity to reiterate my support for the recommendations of the fact-finding mission, including its call for urgent action to counter impunity. I encourage the Council and the broader international community to give full consideration to the fact-finding mission’s report. I also wish to underscore the necessity for all parties to carry out impartial, independent, prompt and effective investigations into reported violations of human rights and humanitarian law in compliance with international standards.”
The UN Human Rights Council will soon vote on whether to forward the Goldstone report to the UN Security Council. - DemocracyNow 10/16/09
- Reference to Goldstone Report
Leading up to the above we have General Electric NBCUniversal filling its role as spoiler, here in the person of Ann Curry { - For years the post was held by John Donald Imus Jr. and, in fact, he has returned to the airwaves on 10/5/09, maybe he's back as pillager in chief, ripping Democrats [no one was more responsible for that 5-4 Court decision, than Imus, who relentlessly savaged Albert Gore] Ms. Curry disparaging Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (Has she forgotten who was the last Secretary of State - Condoleezza Rice!)}
One on one: Hillary Clinton
NBC NIGHTLY NEWS
10/12/2009 17:53:00
NEWSCASTER ANN CURRY: Concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions have Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Moscow tonight where she is to meet with Russia's president about what specific forms of pressure he would agree to if Iran doesn't prove its nuclear program is peaceful. Over the weekend, Secretary Clinton sat down with NBC News in Switzerland and offered a glimpse into the administration's current debate over the way forward in Afghanistan. And we asked her why, with U.S. troops dying there, a decision is still weeks away.
SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: Well, first of all, every one of those deaths and all of the injuries of any of our men and women in uniform weighs heavily on all of us who are sitting around the table in the situation room. And what is going on in this analysis is the kind of deep, stripped down investigation of assumptions. Because when we make this decision, and when we recommend to the president what we believe he should do, we're going to be all in and we're going to do everything we can to be successful.
** ANN CURRY (Directed by Don Imus?): At this very important moment in history, the Washington Post writes about you, quote: She is largely invisible on the big issues that dominate the foreign policy agenda, including Afghanistan and Iran. Why are you not more out in front on these very important issues of our time? **
CLINTON: Well, I, you know, honestly don't have any reaction to something like that which is so at variance with what I do every day.
CURRY: What do you say to the people (Curry! Name them!) who are concerned that you have been marginalized, having to fight against being marginalized?
CLINTON: I just, you know, Ann I find it absurd.
CURRY: So you're not?
CLINTON: I find it beyond any realistic assessment of what I'm doing every day. I believe in delegating power. You know, I'm not one of these people who feels like I have to have my face in the front of the newspaper or on the TV in every moment of the day. I would be irresponsible and negligent were I to say, oh no, everything must come to me. Now, maybe that is a woman's thing. Maybe I'm totally secure and feel absolutely no need to go running around in order for people to see what I'm doing. It's just the way I am.
CURRY: I can't help (Sure you can, Ann, except for the executives who control you, and hate President Obama!) but think nine months into this administration, having campaigned so fiercely to be president yourself, that there can't be moments for you where you wish you could make the decisions yourself.
CLINTON: I have to tell you it never crosses my mind.
CURRY: Never?
CLINTON: No, not at all. I am part of the team that makes the decisions.
CURRY: Will you ever run for president again? Yes or no?
CLINTON: [Laughs.] No.
CURRY: No?
CLINTON: No, no. I mean, this is a great job. It is a 24/7 job and I'm looking forward to retirement at some point.
CURRY: Until that point, her busy agenda includes a planned trip to Pakistan by the end of this year.
Over the next few days The Obama Effect made itself felt all over the globe (which the Nobel Committee had predicted) and on the West Coast an entity of Texas-based Belo Corporation, the Portland, Oregon television station KGWHD-TV included in its local newscast that Ms. Clinton on her first visit to Moscow under the Obama administration, in meetings with Russia's foreign minister and president said that "both sides agree Iran (as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) Iran is entitled to peaceful nuclear energy", a major announcement that somehow escaped the attention of the major news networks, and The New York Times (including Mark Landler).
2009 Nobel Peace Prize Award
to President Barack Obama
" THE QUESTION WE HAVE TO ASK IS WHO HAS DONE THE MOST IN THE PREVIOUS YEAR TO ENHANCE PEACE IN THE WORLD. AND WHO HAS DONE MORE THAN BARACK OBAMA? " - THORBJOERN JAGLAND,chairman of the Nobel Committee. - Oslo Norway 10/9/09
- Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco - Frank Rich 10/11/09
THOSE of us who love F. Scott Fitzgerald must acknowledge that he did get one big thing wrong. There are second acts in American lives. (Just ask Marion Barry, or William Shatner.) The real question is whether everyone deserves a second act. Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.
Let’s be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 -- when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq -- bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued.
FRANK - THE NAMES!
To the reader - Please note the name Steven J. Rosen (partner of Kieth Weissman) in this link, exclusive to The Jerusalem Post. And an aside to Daniel Pipes. There is nothing "distinguished" about Rosen, Weissman, your Middle East Forum -- or the Hoover Institution.
- Back to Frank Rich -
Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess -- even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.
But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was “the central front in the war on terror” when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.
To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.
What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.
Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.
He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent bystander: “I think the reason why we didn’t do a better job on Afghanistan is our attention -- either rightly or wrongly -- was on Iraq.” As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”
Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page to assert that “we have no choice” but to go all-in on Afghanistan -- rightly or wrongly, presumably -- just as we had in Iraq. Why? “The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse,” they wrote. “The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again.”
This shameless argument assumes -- perhaps correctly -- that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 -- and we did so at the Three Amigos’ urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 -- even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we’re being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.
To make the case, the Amigos and their fellow travelers conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda much as they long conflated Saddam’s regime with Al Qaeda. But as Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post reported on Thursday, American intelligence officials now say that “there are few, if any, links between Taliban commanders in Afghanistan today and senior Al Qaeda members” -- a far cry from the tight Taliban-bin Laden alliance of 2001.
The rhetorical sleights of hand in the hawks’ arguments don’t end there. If you listen carefully to McCain and his neocon echo chamber, you’ll notice certain tics. President Obama better make his decision by tomorrow, or Armageddon (if not mushroom clouds) will arrive. We must “win” in Afghanistan -- but victory is left vaguely defined. That’s because we will never build a functioning state in a country where there has never been one. Nor can we score a victory against the world’s dispersed, stateless terrorists by getting bogged down in a hellish landscape that contains few of them.
Most tellingly, perhaps, those clamoring for an escalation in Afghanistan avoid mentioning the name of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, or the fraud-filled August election that conclusively delegitimized his government. To do so would require explaining why America should place its troops in alliance with a corrupt partner knee-deep in the narcotics trade. As long as Karzai and the election are airbrushed out of history, it can be disingenuously argued that nothing has changed on the ground since Obama’s inauguration and that he has no right to revise his earlier judgment that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity.”
Those demanding more combat troops for Afghanistan also avoid defining the real costs. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the war was running $2.6 billion a month in Pentagon expenses alone even before Obama added 20,000 troops this year. Surely fiscal conservatives like McCain and Graham who rant about deficits being “generational theft” have an obligation to explain what the added bill will be on an Afghanistan escalation and where the additional money will come from. But that would require them to use the dread words “sacrifice” and “higher taxes” when they want us to believe that this war, like Iraq, would be cost-free.
The real troop numbers are similarly elusive. Pre-emptively railing against the prospect of “half measures” by Obama, Lieberman asked MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell rhetorically last week whether it would be “real counterinsurgency” or “counterinsurgency light.” But the measure Lieberman endorses -- Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s reported recommendation of 40,000 additional troops -- is itself counterinsurgency light. In his definitive recent field manual on the subject, Gen. David Petraeus stipulates that real counterinsurgency requires 20 to 25 troops for each thousand residents. That comes out, conservatively, to 640,000 troops for Afghanistan (population, 32 million). Some 535,000 American troops couldn’t achieve a successful counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, which had half Afghanistan’s population and just over a quarter of its land area.
Lieberman suggested to Mitchell that we could train an enhanced, centralized Afghan army to fill any gaps. In how many decades? The existing Afghan “army” is small, illiterate, impoverished and as factionalized as the government. For his part, McCain likes to justify McChrystal’s number of 40,000 by imbuing it with the supposedly magical powers of the “surge” in Iraq. But it’s rewriting history to say that the “surge” brought “victory” to Iraq. What it did was stanch the catastrophic bleeding in an unnecessary war McCain had helped gin up. Lest anyone forget, we still don’t know who has “won” in Iraq.
Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is poorer, even larger and more populous, more fragmented and less historically susceptible to foreign intervention. Even if the countries were interchangeable, the wars are not. No one-size surge fits all. President Bush sent the additional troops to Iraq only after Sunni leaders in Anbar Province soured on Al Qaeda and reached out for American support. There is no equivalent “Anbar Awakening” in Afghanistan. Most Afghans “don’t feel threatened by the Taliban in their daily lives” and “aren’t asking for American protection,” reported Richard Engel of NBC News last week. After eight years of war, many see Americans as occupiers.
Americans, meanwhile, want to see the fine print after eight years of fiasco with little accounting. While McCain and company remain frozen where they were in 2001, many of their fellow citizens have learned from the Iraq tragedy. Polls persistently find that the country is skeptical about what should and can be accomplished in Afghanistan. They voted for Obama not least because they wanted a new post-9/11 vision of national security, and they will not again be so easily bullied by the blustering hawks’ doomsday scenarios. That gives our deliberating president both the time and the political space to get this long war’s second act right. - Frank Rich N Y Times 10/11/09
There is chaos in the Middle East, much of which dates to the 1948 beginning of the Jewish conquest of Palestine. That fact is well covered by GOPBias.org. A recent evolution of that forced creation of Israel occurred on September 11, 2001, with the attacks on New York, the Pentagon and, except for the bravery of passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, the White House. What has been buried in the Media/Press for years is the recognition that even our war against Iraq was a manipulation by the JewishAmerican dominated Congress of the United States. While GOPBias.org has pieced together much of the puzzle a segment of the 10/6/09 CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and Lara Logan articulated, perhaps for the first time on an instrument of our Media/Press, that one of the catastrophic policies of the Bush/Cheney administration was responsible.
Afghanistan: The Road Ahead
CBS National News
10/6/2009 18:39:00
NEWSCASTER: [Osama] Bin Laden is still in hiding somewhere in the mountains, either in Afghanistan or in Pakistan's tribal region. The locals won't give him up, not even with a $50 million bounty on his head. Tora Bora was a missed opportunity for the U.S., but it wasn't the last. From Kabul, here's Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Lara Logan.
LARA LOGAN: The fall of Kabul, Afghanistan in 2001 was greeted with jubilation, the momentum then with the U.S. But reluctant to commit its own troops, the U.S. allowed Osama Bin Laden to escape from the Tora Bora mountains. Then, what many here see as the gravest error of all.
Afghans were wary as the U.S. turned its attention to invading Iraq, and they were right. Everything from reconstruction and aid to the fight itself suffered as the U.S. shifted its resources and its focus away from Afghanistan and the commitment it had made to the Afghan people (And from those Afghan people, to the Bush/Cheney/Israeli war against Iraq.). Not surprisingly, Afghan support for the war began to fade.
LARA LOGAN TO ABDULLAH ABDULLAH, AFGHAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: What was lost in Afghanistan with the U.S. focusing on Iraq?
ABDULLAH: THE GREATEST OPPORTUNITY, THE BEST OPPORTUNITY FOR THE STABILIZATION OF AFGHANISTAN!
LARA LOGAN: That lost opportunity has lead the U.S. into a fight that would have been unimaginable eight years ago when the Taliban collapsed in disarray. Back then, valleys like this in northeastern Afghanistan were peaceful.
The U.S., believing their enemy was defeated, put few military assets on the ground. Another grave mistake. Now even the most remote mountains are killing grounds for determined Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, no longer afraid to stand and fight whenever they choose. Year after year the U.S. blindly claimed success and failed to adjust its strategy or admit its enemy was getting stronger.
The fighters it faced became proficient in small unit tactics which they learned from studying U.S. troops. That can be seen in this Taliban propaganda video which shows how the Taliban execute an attack on a small U.S. combat outpost. Loaded with ammunition, Taliban fighters climb to the highest reaches of these mountains. They began their assault before first light using the type of overwhelming fire usually used against them by the U.S. Their commander is so certain of victory that he orders his fighters to open fire on the jets when U.S. air support is called in.
Taliban, stay in your places, he commands. If the jet comes down again, shoot the rotors.
With a huge fire raging, the Taliban wait for survivors to stumble out. Twelve Afghan soldiers captured, three U.S. Marines killed.
The U.S. counter attack, and three days later the abandoned post was recaptured. But forcing an American withdrawal was a victory for the Taliban, a sign of how far they've come since the U.S. thought they were defeated.
COL. JAMES KRAFT, CMDR., COMBINED JOINT SPECIAL OPERATIONS: Defeat is a very strong word. Will you ever defeat an insurgency in total?
LARA LOGAN: Will you?
KRAFT: Well, it's chall - I think you got to get it to a moderate level of chaos, a level that's accepted.
LARA LOGAN: An acceptable level of chaos may not be what the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan hoping to achieve, but it may be how success is measured, if it's enough to stop Al Qaeda from threatening the U.S. again. - Lara Logan, CBS News, Kabul 10/6/09
* On THIS day, October 9, 2009, in which United States President Barack Obama is awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, a selection lauded by past recipients of this worthy award, men like South Africa's Nelson Mandella and Bishop Desmond Tutu and American President Jimmy Carter, it is significant to note the position of the Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, THE spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu -
MIDDLE EAST - Israel: Foreign Minister Scoffs at Prospects for Peace -
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Thursday that it was unrealistic to expect to reach a final peace agreement with the Palestinians soon. He made the remarks in an interview with Israel Radio hours before meeting with the Obama administration’s special representative to the region, George J. Mitchell. Challenging the American and Palestinian position that calls for talks on the core issues of the conflict, Mr. Lieberman said only “a long-term intermediate agreement” that “left the tough issues for a much later stage” was possible. Mr. Mitchell said the White House remained “deeply and firmly committed” to “an early re-launch of negotiations.” - Kershner N Y Times 10/9/09
- Furor Sends Palestinians Into Shift on U.N. Report -
JERUSALEM -- Faced with a torrent of criticism at home and abroad, the Palestinian leadership abruptly reversed course on Wednesday by endorsing a Security Council debate on a United Nations report accusing Israel of possible war crimes in Gaza.
The report, produced by a panel of investigators led by an internationally respected jurist, Richard Goldstone, found extensive evidence that both Israel and Palestinian militant groups took actions amounting to war crimes during last winter’s Gaza war.
But after pushing for the United Nations Human Rights Council to endorse the report and forward it to the Security Council, the Palestinians relented to American pressure last week and agreed to drop the issue for six months. Both the United States and Israel had warned that pursuing the accusations would abort attempts to revive the peace process.
Now the Palestinians are grappling with a domestic and regional uproar, with angry street protests at home and condemnation pouring in from Doha to Damascus.
- And rightly so! -
“The level of public protest is unprecedented,” said Ghassan Khatib, director of the Palestinian Authority’s media center. “I do not remember any situation before when the leadership was so unpopular,” he said, speaking by telephone from Ramallah in the West Bank.
Mr. Khatib said there was a feeling among Palestinian leaders that “they have to reconsider” their approach. With the Human Rights Council out of the picture for the time being, he said, they are seeking other avenues to advance the Goldstone report.
Yasir Abed Rabbo, a close adviser of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, said Wednesday that the leadership had erred.
“We have the courage to admit there was a mistake,” Mr. Abed Rabbo, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told the official Voice of Palestine radio. In an attempt at damage control, he added that the mistake could be “repaired.”
- The sooner, the better! -
Mr. Abed Rabbo was the first senior Palestinian official to speak out publicly against the deferral of the vote on the report. There was no immediate comment from Mr. Abbas, who was in Rome on Wednesday.
At the United Nations, the Palestinian Observer Mission immediately endorsed a move by the Libyan delegation to hold a Security Council discussion on the issue and the Palestinian foreign minister, Riyad al-Maliki, was due in New York late Wednesday to press the matter.
“Accountability is the first order of business for all of us, including the Americans,” said Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador, when asked about the Palestinian leaders’ reversal. “That is what is impeding the peace process.”
The Security Council agreed Wednesday to move up its monthly debate on the Middle East to Oct. 14 from Oct. 20, and the report will be the focus of that discussion although not officially listed on the agenda. Several Arab ambassadors said they recognized the futility of trying to pass any kind of resolution because the United States would veto it immediately.
- Nobel Peace Prize! Do your work! -
The Libyan ambassador, Abdurrahman Mohamed Shalgam, said that the judicial aspects of the report could start in Geneva, but that Libya, a current Security Council member, wanted an open debate to give the issue momentum. That could help spur peace, he said, because the decision to delay in Geneva had deepened the already acrid split between the main Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas.
“The atmosphere on the ground is not helpful,” Ambassador Shalgam said.
In Gaza, posters appeared on walls on Wednesday calling Mr. Abbas a traitor and saying he should be consigned to “the trash heap of history.” Gaza is controlled by Hamas, the militant Islamic group that is the Palestinian Authority’s main rival.
A Hamas official, Salah Bardawil, said in a statement that his group would join Egyptian-mediated reconciliation talks with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah movement, to take place in Cairo this month, only if Mr. Abbas apologized to the Palestinian people for the so-called debacle around the United Nations report.
Hundreds of Palestinians demonstrated in Ramallah on Tuesday against the leadership’s conduct and called on Mr. Abbas and other officials to resign.
Even Mr. Abbas’s own government has been critical. In a statement released by the Palestinian cabinet on Monday, the ministers reaffirmed their position of late September, which called for the Human Rights Council to adopt the Goldstone report, and said it was “unacceptable” for such efforts to be undermined.
Apparently distancing himself from the events at the Human Rights Council, Mr. Abbas ordered the establishment of a committee over the weekend to investigate how the deferral of the vote came about, but that failed to quell the storm.
Mr. Abbas finds himself squeezed on several fronts. The Obama administration is pressing the Israelis and the Palestinians to resume peace negotiations, but has not managed to persuade the Israelis to freeze settlement construction in the West Bank. The Abbas administration had made a building freeze a condition for renewed talks.
Last weekend, Hamas took credit for a release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons. Israel freed 20 female security prisoners in exchange for a videotape of an Israeli soldier who has been held captive since being seized in a raid by Hamas and other groups in June 2006.
In another sign of Palestinian restiveness, there has been simmering violence in the past few days in East Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority, Hamas and the Islamic Movement of Israel all accuse Israel of provocations at a site holy to both Jews and Muslims, and Israel is accusing the Palestinians of fanning the flames.
All this underlines the challenges facing George J. Mitchell, the Obama administration’s special Middle East envoy, who was expected to arrive in the region late Wednesday to continue efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. - Kershner & MacFarquhar N Y Times 10/8/09
- Sideline -
- Marking eight Years of the Afghan War -
To the Editor:
Re “Top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan Rejects Scaling Down Military Objectives” (news article, Oct. 2):
You report that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has again spoken out, this time in London, against the possible modification of our commitment in Afghanistan. In his request for 40,000 more troops, the general rejects any suggestion that our efforts be more targeted at Al Qaeda, as opposed to the larger goal of defeating the Taliban.
What’s going on here? Why is an American general, no matter how honorable and brilliant, allowed to advocate national policy outside the walls of the White House?
Yes, it’s a free country, but there’s only one commander in chief, and he should be able to keep his options open without undue pressure from generals in the field. - Alan Goldfarb Fremont, Calif. 10/2/09
- Under US Pressure, Palestinian Authority Drops Demand for Vote on Gaza Report -
Amy Goodman 10/5/09: The Palestinian Authority is being denounced for agreeing to defer a vote in the UN Human Rights Council on the Goldstone report, which criticized Israeli troops for “targeting and terrorizing civilians” during the assault on Gaza. The Palestinian Authority made the decision after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to encourage him to withdraw support for the report. The vote would have forwarded the Goldstone report to the UN Security Council, which in turn could have referred Israel to the International Criminal Court. The Palestinian Authority has been widely criticized by many Palestinian leaders and the families of the victims of the Gaza assault. Palestinian economy minister Bassem Khuri resigned on Saturday to protest the Palestinian Authority’s decision.
Mustafa Barghouti, independent Palestinian lawmaker: “It is totally unjustified. It is frustrating and disappointing. There was a majority in the Council of Human Rights that would have approved this report. This report would have finally took away the feeling of impunity of Israel in front of international law and would have held the Israeli establishment accountable for the war crimes that took place in Gaza.”
- Bill Van Esveld of Human Rights Watch criticized the Obama administration’s actions. -
Bill Van Esveld: “Due to American pressure, strong pressure from Washington, the Palestinians have withdrawn their request that the UN act on the Goldstone report...What the US has effectively done is sent a strong signal that Israel doesn’t need to investigate itself, because that was the recommendation of the Goldstone report.”
- Israeli Official Cancels Trip to UK Fearing Arrest -
Amy Goodman 10/5/09: In other news, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports Israel’s Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon recently canceled a planned trip to Britain for fear of being arrested there. Ya’alon is the former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. He is one of several current and former senior Israeli officers whom pro-Palestinian groups have sought to put on trial over the assassination of senior Hamas commander Salah Shehadeh in 2002. The attack also killed fourteen civilians.
- Abbas Faces Calls to Resign over Goldstone Report -
Sharif Abdel Kouddous 10/6/09: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is coming under intense criticism for supporting the postponement of a United Nations vote which could have led to the prosecution of Israel for war crimes during its assault on Gaza. On Monday, a senior member of Hamas called for Abbas’s resignation. Mahmoud al-Zahar told Al Jazeera that Abbas was guilty of “a very big crime against the Palestinian people” for supporting to defer endorsing the Goldstone report. Thirty-two Palestinian groups in Europe also called on Abbas to immediately step down from office. Al Jazeera reports the upcoming Fatah-Hamas talks in Egypt may also be in jeopardy. - DemocracyNow 10/5-6/09
- Immediate Background -
The Associated Press: Israel taking extraordinary steps to block prosecution of military, political leaders.
JERUSALEM (AP) -- 10/1/09
Stung by a damning U.N. report alleging war crimes in Gaza, Israel is taking extraordinary steps to fend off potential international prosecution of its political and military leaders, hiring high-powered attorneys, lobbying Western governments and launching a public relations blitz.
Israel has dismissed the U.N. investigation into its winter offensive in the Gaza strip as biased, but its latest moves show it is clearly concerned.
The U.N. report appears to have energized pro-Palestinian groups that have hoped for years to bring Israelis before courts in countries that recognize the concept of "universal jurisdiction" - trying people for crimes unrelated to their own territory or nationals.
Most recently, British activists attempted this week to have Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak arrested during a trip to Britain for war crimes connected to his role in the Gaza war. Barak was untouched - but only because the court that considered the request ruled that he enjoyed immunity as a Cabinet minister.
But the incident raised the prospect that Israelis might find it increasingly difficult to travel to European countries that recognize universal jurisdiction.
The U.N. report issued last month by Richard Goldstone, a Jewish judge from South Africa and experienced war crimes prosecutor, accused the Israelis of using excessive force and endangering civilians. - AP 10/1/09
Of Israel
- The Ever-Slippery David Brooks -
To the Editor:
I was encouraged by David Brooks’s analysis of the current faint power of right-wing talk jocks.
I overlooked his deftly blaming what power they do have on “cynical Democrats,” “lazy pundits” and “slightly educated snobs.” How convenient to put responsibility for the poisoning of public discourse by conservative extremists on the Democrats.
But he lost me when he implied that Rush Limbaugh had never had any real influence, ignoring any role Mr. Limbaugh may have had in neutralizing the Clinton administration or in promoting the Bush election and re-election.
But his final judgment is right: the Republican Party is losing support. That’s because it chooses to be the voice of complaint rather than an agent of accomplishment. - William R. Nye N Y Times Brooklyn 10/2/09
ACTUALLY, AMONG PROMINENT UNIDENTIFIED JEWISH AMERICAN COVERT SUPPORTERS OF ISRAEL, THE MOST EFFECTIVE (BECAUSE OF THE FREQUENCY OF HIS APPEARANCE ON THE AIRWAVES) MAY BE THE HOST OF "TALK OF THE NATION", NEAL CONAN, I.E. ISRAEL'S CIP (CHIEF ISRAELI PROPAGANDIST IN THE UNITED STATES.)!
- On Brooks' hero Ronald Reagan -
There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.
“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.
So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.
But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it -- whether or not it’s good for America.
To be sure, while celebrating America’s rebuff by the Olympic Committee was puerile, it didn’t do any real harm. But the same principle of spite has determined Republican positions on more serious matters, with potentially serious consequences -- in particular, in the debate over health care reform.
Now, it’s understandable that many Republicans oppose Democratic plans to extend insurance coverage -- just as most Democrats opposed President Bush’s attempt to convert Social Security into a sort of giant 401(k). The two parties do, after all, have different philosophies about the appropriate role of government.
But the tactics of the two parties have been different. In 2005, when Democrats campaigned against Social Security privatization, their arguments were consistent with their underlying ideology: they argued that replacing guaranteed benefits with private accounts would expose retirees to too much risk (imagine what would have happened to Social Security during the Bush/Cheney financial system collapse of the last two years).
The Republican campaign against health care reform, by contrast, has shown no such consistency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim -- based mainly on lies about death panels and so on -- that reform will undermine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party’s traditions and with what conservatives claim to believe.
* Think about just how bizarre it is for Republicans to position themselves as the defenders of unrestricted Medicare spending. First of all, the modern G.O.P. considers itself the party of Ronald Reagan -- and Reagan was a fierce opponent of Medicare’s creation, warning that it would destroy American freedom. (Honest.) In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to force drastic cuts in Medicare financing. And in recent years, Republicans have repeatedly decried the growth in entitlement spending -- growth that is largely driven by rising health care costs. *
But the Obama administration’s plan to expand coverage relies in part on savings from Medicare. And since the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama, it has become the passionate defender of ineffective medical procedures and overpayments to insurance companies.
How did one of our great political parties become so ruthless, so willing to embrace scorched-earth tactics even if so doing undermines the ability of any future administration to govern?
The key point is that ever since the Reagan years, the Republican Party has been dominated by radicals -- ideologues and/or apparatchiks who, at a fundamental level, do not accept anyone else’s right to govern.
Anyone surprised by the venomous, over-the-top opposition to Mr. Obama must have forgotten the Clinton years. Remember when Rush Limbaugh suggested that Hillary Clinton was a party to murder? When Newt Gingrich shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those Medicare cuts? And let’s not even talk about the impeachment saga.
- Scorched-earth tactics and America's future. -
The only difference now is that the G.O.P. is in a weaker position, having lost control not just of Congress but, to a large extent, of the terms of debate. The public no longer buys conservative ideology the way it used to; the old attacks on Big Government and paeans to the magic of the marketplace have lost their resonance. Yet conservatives retain their belief that they, and only they, should govern.
The result has been a cynical, ends-justify-the-means approach. Hastening the day when the rightful governing party returns to power is all that matters, so the G.O.P. will seize any club at hand with which to beat the current administration.
IT’S AN UGLY PICTURE. BUT IT’S THE TRUTH. AND IT’S A TRUTH ANYONE TRYING TO FIND SOLUTIONS TO AMERICA’S REAL PROBLEMS HAS TO UNDERSTAND. - PAUL KRUGMAN 10/5/09
- Italy: Berlusconi Is Found Liable -
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi shared responsibility for corruption by his company Fininvest in a 1990s battle to buy a publishing company, a judge said Monday in an explanation of a court ruling over the weekend. A Milan administrative court had ruled that Fininvest must pay $1.1 billion to a rival media company, CIR, for bribing a judge in a 1990s battle to buy Italy’s biggest publisher, Mondadori. “I am literally shocked,” Mr. Berlusconi said Monday. “This ruling is beyond belief. This is a huge judicial blunder.” - Reuters 10/6/09
- Israel: Official Cancels Trip to Britain -
Moshe Yaalon, a government minister and former army chief of staff, has canceled a trip to Britain, fearing he could be arrested on war crimes charges. Mr. Yaalon was scheduled to speak at a charity fund-raiser in London next month. His spokesman, Alon Ofek-Arnon, said Monday that Mr. Yaalon had avoided traveling to Britain for years because of attempts by activists to have him charged, under the principle of universal jurisdiction, in connection with the 2002 assassination of a Hamas leader in Gaza in which civilians also died. Mr. Yaalon “will not lend a hand to those trying to delegitimize Israel,” Mr. Ofek-Arnon said. Palestinian activists tried to have the defense minister, Ehud Barak, arrested when he was in Britain last week, but Mr. Barak was on an official visit and was granted immunity. - Kershner N Y Times 10/6/09
- Gaza: Harsh Words From Hamas -
Hamas leaders stepped up their verbal assault of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, saying they no longer considered him a Palestinian after he agreed to suspend efforts to pursue Israel for possible war crimes in Gaza. Syria abruptly postponed Mr. Abbas’s planned visit to Damascus, in what appeared to be the first diplomatic fallout from his decision to suspend a campaign to push for war crimes prosecutions in connection with last winter’s Gaza war. - AP 10/6/09
- The Media Versus Dan Rather - An Early Outrage!
Late development: "Rather's CBS suit dismissed"
What is unconscionable in this 9/30/09 Bill Carter N Y Times report? The name of the long-time principal adversary of Mr. Rather, one of the most principled and courageous reporters in the history of CBS, and during the period when CBS news set the standard for excellence in broadcast journalism. The name of Mr. Rather's antagonist is the B-grade actor Les Moonves, otherwise known as the husband of knockout Julie Chen, which, in turn, answers the question of why the pathetic B-grade "sitcom" Big Brother11 was given multiple placements weekly on CBS recently. It's Ms. Chen's show. Maybe these multiple placements were necessary to keep her at the megalomaniac Moonves' side.
In any event, the invective visited on Mr. Rather for his exposure of George W. Bush's non-performance in the Texas Air National Guard (a dereliction of duty likely caused by incapacitation due to cocaine - Mr. Bush had been placed at the head of the line of those seeking the Guard to avoid the draft) was ill-deserved. Mr. Rather's fortitude, along with that of his producer Mary Mapes, is an example (Mr. Rather was similarly undaunted during Watergate) of a Fourth Estate that disappeared during the eight years of Bush/Cheney and shows no signs of resurfacing. Today broadcast journalism is a mere extension of the Republican Party.
- The Mark of Dan Rather -
Israel Versus Iran
To the Editor:
Substitute the words “Al Qaeda” for “Iran,” and one understands very quickly why the Leveretts’ proposal to work with Iran is so wrong.
Iran and Al Qaeda are unapologetic sponsors of terror, responsible for the deaths of thousands around the world. They cannot possibly be compared to China during the Nixon era, as the Leveretts suggest, when China was largely a poor nation of peasants and was not training international death squads.
If we shudder at the idea of sitting down with Osama bin Laden, then negotiating with Iran should make us equally nauseated.
Iran, like Nazi Germany, is simply a bully. It senses weakness acutely, and when we beg the Iranians to negotiate, even after they have violated prior agreements, we simply encourage more aggression.
The United States’ only recourse is to lead a coalition of the willing (Britain, Australia, Poland and Israel come to mind) to impose a blockade or take military action. Nothing short of that has any chance of success. - Ari Weitzner New York 9/29/09
Were we to substitute "Israel" for Iran - "Israel, like Nazi Germany, is simply a bully. It senses weakness acutely, and when we beg the Israelis to negotiate, even after they have violated prior agreements, we simply encourage more aggression."
- It is so obvious! -
To the Editor:
The Op-Ed article by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett urging that the United States pursue a new relationship with Iran based on a comprehensive framework of security and economic cooperation was a welcome injection of sanity into the mix of ultimatums, threats and defiance that have so far marked the exchanges over Iran’s nuclear policy.
It is surprising, however, that although the Leveretts point out Iran’s understandable fear of American encirclement, they do not mention the Iranians’ much more justifiable fear of an Israeli attack.
If we expect the Iranians to refrain from developing a nuclear weapon, they must be assured of reciprocal restraint by Israel, which already has an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
A solution to the current standoff that is too seldom mentioned is a nuclear-free Middle East. A treaty based on such a solution would enhance the security of the entire region, including Iran and Israel. - Rachelle Marshall - Stanford Calif. 9/29/09
NPR, NATIONAL "PUBLIC" RADIO, HAS GONE TOO FAR! On Monday 9/28/09 "Talk of the Nation's" Neal Conan, in collusion with the Deputy Editor of the Washington Post editorial page, Jackson Diehl, fabricated the actual history of Israel versus the Palestinians!
- First, Conan & Diehl -
NEAL CONAN, host: Time now for the Opinion Page. Last December, when Israel invaded the Gaza Strip, Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl was among many who predicted that it would fail to either topple Hamas or eliminate its ability to fire missiles at Israeli cities. And worse, the inevitable bloodshed would subject Israel to another round of international outrage.
Last week, in an op-ed in the Post, Diehl concluded that he was mostly right, but that Israelis draw very different lessons from the conflict with important implications for a possible strike on Iran. And that piece was published amid reports of Iran's secret nuclear facility near Qum, and tests over the weekend of a ballistic missile with range to reach Israel.
Jackson Diehl is deputy editorial page editor, as well as a columnist, and joins us now from a studio at the Washington Post. Nice to have you with us today."
Mr. JACKSON DIEHL (Deputy Editorial Page Editor, Washington Post): My pleasure.
CONAN: And we have to note, to start, that the Hamas government remains in power in Gaza, as you predicted, and does indeed retain the capability to fire mortars and rockets into Israel whenever it wants (Note Israeli historian Avi Shlaim interview which follows.).
Mr. DIEHL: It does. But one thing has changed that's very important from the Israeli point of view, which is that Hamas is no longer firing missiles at Israel, and that seven or eight years before that invasion of Gaza took place, they fired 4,000 missiles and 4,000 mortar shells at towns in southern Israel. In the last four or five months, there've been maybe two dozen such firings. So from the Israeli point of view, there's been an enormous short-term change, even though all of the big strategic objectives weren't accomplished.
CONAN: And short-term change from the Israeli perspective is worth it?
Mr. DIEHL: Short-term change is, from the Israeli perspective, the most that can be accomplished in many of their conflicts with the states around them, in particular Iran. The Israeli point of view is that they can never come to terms with Iran, that Iran and its allies - which include, of course, Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon - will never accept Israel's existence (Huh?).
So the most you can expect from the Israeli point of view is to achieve a kind of short-term peace with them, a short-term respite from conflict that you establish through deterrence. And so from their point of view, even a very costly conflict that buys you a few months of peace and quiet is worth it.
CONAN: And...
Mr. DIEHL: Because that's the most you can do.
CONAN: And that would seem to be the definition of the war with Lebanon earlier, as well.
Mr. DIEHL: That's right. In 2006, after a series of incidents along the border, Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon (which followed Israeli killings along that border). It was a very costly conflict. A lot of Israeli civilians were killed in rocket attacks by Lebanon against Israel, and, of course, many people were killed in Lebanon. But the result of that campaign was that there have been three years of quiet along the border. There have been very few incidents. And Israel's basically been at peace with Lebanon for three years.
Now, they don't expect that continue. Once again, Hezbollah has amassed another very large arsenal of rockets in southern Lebanon. And from the Israeli point of view, it's only a matter of time before there's another conflict. But again, they've bought that time (This is an appropriate positioning for placement of the history of suicide bombing!).
CONAN: This - another difference between the war in Lebanon and the one in Gaza, both occurred during the Bush administration, but the second one, well, U.S. officials were opposed to it.
Mr. DIEHL: Yeah. They thought it was a bad idea. Just as they thought the Israeli attack on the Syrian reactor in 2007 was a bad idea. The Bush administration didn't tell Israel not to do either of those things, but it both cases, they said, you know, we think that's a bad idea and you're going to regret it. And we're worried about what the consequences will be. Well, in both cases, from the Israeli point of view, they feel like they've been vindicated.
They got what they wanted in Gaza, which was an end to the rocket attacks. There were no larger diplomatic consequences. There was no larger war, and same with Syria in 2007. They bombed a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor that had been supplied by North Korea. The fears that this would start some kind of war between Israel and Syria or some other larger conflict were unfounded, and they feel like, again, once again, they were vindicated in not listening to Washington.
CONAN: There is another side of the fallout from Gaza, though. That international condemnation just a couple of weeks ago, a U.N. commission headed by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone condemned, quote, "a deliberately disproportional attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population," and some harsh things to say about the Hamas side, too. But nevertheless, Israel is a state, and Hamas, not quite.
Mr. DIEHL: That's right. But from the Israeli point of view, that condemnation has really been not a major setback. They're used to being condemned by the United Nations. The United Nations Human Rights Council, which was what appointed this commission, has spent most of its time condemning Israel over the last two or three years. And the fact is that these reports and condemnations end up having very little impact because the commission itself has been discredited. The Bush - the Obama administration already has dismissed this Goldstone report.
* Here the DemocracyNow 9/30/09 report on the Goldstone analysis. *
- Judge Defends Gaza Inquiry Alleging Israeli War Crimes -
In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council held a one-day debate Tuesday on a recent inquiry finding Israel committed a number of war crimes in its assault on the Gaza Strip. The head of the inquiry, Judge Richard Goldstone, said all but one of the individual Israeli attacks examined by investigators had no military purpose.
Judge Richard Goldstone: “We detail a number of specific incidents in which Israeli forces launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal consequences. These were, with only one exception, where the facts establish that there was no military objective or advantage that could justify the attacks.”
Around 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, most of them civilians. Goldstone rejected Israel’s claim that it was targeting “terrorist infrastructure” in Gaza.
Judge Richard Goldstone: “If ‘infrastructure’ were to be understood in that way and become a justifiable military objective, it would completely subvert the whole purpose of international humanitarian law built up over the last hundred years and more. It would make civilians and civilian buildings justifiable targets. These attacks amounted to reprisals and collective punishment and constitute war crimes.”
Goldstone’s report also accuses Palestinian fighters of committing war crimes in firing rockets at nearby Israeli towns and urges both sides to conduct investigations or face prosecution by the International Criminal Court. Meanwhile, the Obama administration encouraged Israel to conduct a probe of the allegations but repeated its view that the report is “biased” against Israel.
Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner: “Although we disagree sharply with many of the report’s assessments and its recommendations and believe that it is deeply flawed, we recognize Justice Goldstone’s distinguished record of public service and his efforts to promote global justice.”
- Groups Urge UK Arrest Warrant for Israeli Defense Minister -
Meanwhile in Britain, a coalition of Palestinian groups is calling on a British court to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak. Barak is in London for talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The groups say Barak should be arrested for his role in directing the Israeli attack on Gaza. - DemocracyNow 9/30/09 *
Mr. Diehl (cont): And, you know, the Israelis would point out that in spite of all the international condemnation, they've suffered no real diplomatic consequences. Most Arab states are ready to upgrade relations with Israel at this point, once the peace process begins again. The Palestinian authority in the West Bank is about to renew peace negotiations with Israel, and, in fact, has gotten much stronger since the war than it was before.
So again, the international program and diplomatic consequences that a lot of people worried about at the beginning of this Gaza operation haven't come to pass, so far as Israelis are concerned.
CONAN: One of the places they were most concerned about - the Israeli government at the time - was Egypt, which, of course, has the other side of the border with Gaza.
Mr. DIEHL: Right. And Egypt has basically cooperated with Israel in a quiet way for several years in maintaining a blockade on the Gaza Strip and not allowing Hamas to import, have a regular commerce with the outside world while they pressure Hamas to make some political concessions. And after the war, Egypt came under a lot of pressure. There were public statements by Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and others, demanding that Egypt open the border, that it change its relationship with Hamas. Well, Egypt held firm, and the situation today remains the same as it was before the war. There is a blockade on Gaza in which Egypt cooperates.
CONAN: We're talking with Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post about an op-ed he wrote which talked about the lessons Israelis draw from the Gaza invasion last December. There's a link to the op-ed piece at our Web site. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. And this is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
And, of course, the subtext of all of this is another thing, that there is a new administration in Washington, and the crisis this time is not with Gaza or with Lebanon or even with Syria, but the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran.
Mr. DIEHL: That's right. And again, the same kind of Israeli thinking can come into play there. From the Israeli point of view, there's no long-term victory. There is no accord to be made. There's only short-term successes. So a bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear sites is something that everyone agrees would, at best, be a short-term success. I think Secretary of Defense Gates said over the weekend they could maybe delay the program by one to two years.
For everyone but the Israelis, that's not a very big benefit. It would be much preferable to try and strike some kind of long-term deal with Iran, or in some way or other persuade Iran to abandon the program itself. But from the Israeli point of view, a one to two-year delay in the Iranian program (Note the Scott Ritter Report which follows!) might be seen as a benefit and, in fact, the best that you can hope for if you're looking at it from the Israeli government's point of view.
CONAN: But there is a great deal more at risk, it would seem, there. For one thing, the Iranians just test fire the missile that could reach Israel. For another thing, the United States would be deeply involved in this. The Iranians would certainly see the United States, if there was an Israeli attack, as complicit.
Mr. DIEHL: Yeah. The Israelis are going to have an awful lot to think about. They have the Iranian missiles that can reach Israel. There are the Hezbollah missiles in southern Lebanon, and the Hamas missiles in Gaza, which almost certainly would be brought into a play if there were an Israeli attack on Iran.
But I think most of all, what the Israelis will think about is their relationship with the United States. They knew that when they invaded Gaza, it was not going to put their relationship with the United States at risk. They knew when they attacked the Syrian reactor that even if the Bush administration disagreed with them, it was not going to put their relationship at risk. And they also know that if they launch an attack on Iran, it is expressly against the wishes of the American president. And that brings American troops and American interests in the Middle East into harm's play or draws them into a war, that will put their relationship with the United States at stake. So I think their calculations are going to be much more complicated in this case.
CONAN: And this would involve - presumably, they are talking to officials in the Obama administration, presumably to the president himself.
Mr. DIEHL: Well, yeah. Those conversations have been going on for years already, back and forth, about Iran. What is the best way to deal with Iran? Is a military attack possible? Can Israel carry out that military attack? It's been widely reported at the end of the Bush administration that the Israeli government asked to be sold material, certain kinds of bombs and other material it would need to carry out the attack on Iran. It was denied those requests by the Bush administration.
Conversations, no doubt, are continuing here in the Obama administration about just what the feasibility is and what the alternatives are. And by the way, it's worth noting that so far as it goes for now, Israel is saying both publicly, and so far as I know in private, that they would like to see sanctions tried against Iran. They are not advocating, for the moment, military action as a first recourse.
CONAN: And, indeed, there's a meeting scheduled for later this week, where the P5+1 - that's the permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany - will be meeting with Iranian officials to discuss Iran's nuclear ambitions and what it plans to do about them. And indeed, the discovery of that facility at Qum, reported in the newspapers last week, that's going to bear heavily on a decision by those states to impose sanctions if they do.
Mr. DIEHL: That's right. And it's - of course, it's - revelation of that facility last week was very clearly an attempt by the United States and other countries to gain some kind of leverage over Iran by showing them that we are capable of discovering their secret facilities by bringing them under pressure from the international community and hopefully forcing them to make some concessions. And by the same token, these missile firings over the weekend are sort of Iran's answer to that and its own attempt to gain leverage over these negotiations by showing that they have real bargaining chips.
* Messrs. Conan & Diehl are surely familiar with the extensive annotated history of Israel/Palestine compiled by expert Norman Finkelstein, and they should reference it, key points of which are available on GOPBIAS.org.
CONAN: And so the game goes on. The decision, as far as I understand it, most American officials say Iran could be expected to get a nuclear weapon in one to three years - as soon as one, and no longer than three.
Mr. DIEHL: That's right. And, of course, this hidden facility, the scary thing about it is if it had not been discovered by American intelligence. It was due to go online early next year. It could have produced material for a bomb in a year. So, in theory, if there's another facility out there that we haven't found yet that was in a same stage of construction a year from now, Iran could have the material for a bomb without the world even being aware of it.
CONAN: Jackson Diehl, thanks very much for your time today.
Mr. DIEHL: My pleasure.
CONAN: Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor and a columnist at the Washington Post. He joined us from a studio at the newspaper's office here in Washington, D.C. We have a link again to his op-ed. It's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION.
And this is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.
- NOW, THE ACTUAL HISTORY -
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest right now, 1/14/09, is Oxford University Professor Avi Shlaim. He teaches international relations at Oxford University. He's speaking to us from Oxford right now, leading authority in the world on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
We've had a number of debates here on Democracy Now!, Professor Shlaim, over the past weeks about what's happening in Gaza and those who support the Israeli military continually say that in 2005, three years ago, Israel pulled out of Gaza entirely. You have a different picture of what happened under Ariel Sharon in August of 2005. Explain how you see the withdrawal of Israeli military at that time.
AVI SHLAIM: President Bush described Ariel Sharon as a man of peace. I've done a great deal of archival research on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and I can honestly tell you that I have never come across a single scintilla of evidence to support the view of Ariel Sharon as a man of peace. He was a man of war, a champion of violent solutions, a man who rejected totally any Palestinian right to self-determination. He was a proponent of Greater Israel, and it is in this context that I see his decision to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza in August of 2005.
The withdrawal was officially called the unilateral Israeli disengagement from Gaza. I would like to underline the word “unilateral.” Ariel Sharon was the unilateralist par excellence. The reason he decided to withdraw from Gaza was not out of any concern for the welfare of the people of Gaza or any sympathy for the Palestinians or their national aspirations, but because of the pressure exerted by Hamas, by the Islamic resistance, to the Israeli occupation of Gaza. In the end, Israel couldn't sustain the political, diplomatic and psychological costs of maintaining its occupation in Gaza.
And let me add in parentheses that Gaza was a classic example of exploitation, of colonial exploitation in the postcolonial era. Gaza is a tiny strip of land with about one-and-a-half million Arabs, most of them--half of them refugees. It's the most crowded piece of land on God's earth. There were 8,000 Israeli settlers in Gaza, yet the 8,000 settlers controlled 25 percent of the territory, 40 percent of the arable land, and the largest share of the desperately scarce water resources.
Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw from Gaza unilaterally, not as a contribution, as he claimed, to a two-state solution. The withdrawal from Gaza took place in the context of unilateral Israeli action in what was seen as Israeli national interest. There were no negotiations with the Palestinian Authority on an overall settlement. The withdrawal from Gaza was not a prelude to further withdrawals from the other occupied territories, but a prelude to further expansion, further consolidation of Israel's control over the West Bank. In the year after the withdrawal from Gaza, 12,000 new settlers went to live on the West Bank. So I see the withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005 as part of a unilateral Israeli attempt to redraw the borders of Greater Israel and to shun any negotiations and compromise with the Palestinian Authority.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Avi Shlaim, Israel says the reason it has attacked Gaza is because of the rocket fire, the rockets that Hamas is firing into southern Israel.
AVI SHLAIM: This is Israeli propaganda, and it is a pack of lies. The important thing to remember is that there was a ceasefire brokered by Egypt in July of last year, and that ceasefire succeeded. So, if Israel wanted to protect its citizens--and it had every right to protect its citizens--the way to go about it was not by launching this vicious military offensive, but by observing the ceasefire.
Now, let me give you some figures, which I think are the most crucial figures in understanding this conflict. Before the ceasefire came into effect in July of 2008, the monthly number of rockets fired--Kassam rockets, homemade Kassam rockets, fired from the Gaza Strip on Israeli settlements and towns in southern Israel was 179. In the first four months of the ceasefire, the number dropped dramatically to three rockets a month, almost zero. I would like to repeat these figures for the benefit of your listeners. Pre-ceasefire, 179 rockets were fired on Israel; post-ceasefire, three rockets a month. This is point number one, and it's crucial.
And my figures are beyond dispute, because they come from the website of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. But after initiating this war, this particular table, neat table, which showed the success of the ceasefire, was withdrawn and replaced with another table of statistics, which is much more obscure and confusing. Israel--the Foreign Ministry withdrew these figures, because it didn't suit the new story.
The new story said that Hamas broke the ceasefire. This is a lie. Hamas observed the ceasefire as best as it could and enforced it very effectively. The ceasefire was a stunning success for the first four months. It was broken not by Hamas, but by the IDF. It was broken by the IDF on the 4th of November, when it launched a raid into Gaza and killed six Hamas men.
And there is one other point that I would like to make about the ceasefire. Ever since the election of Hamas in January--I'm sorry, ever since Hamas captured power in Gaza in the summer of 2007, Israel had imposed a blockade of the Strip. Israel stopped food, fuel and medical supplies from reaching the Gaza Strip. One of the terms of the ceasefire was that Israel would lift the blockade of Gaza, yet Israel failed to lift the blockade, and that is one issue that is also overlooked or ignored by official Israeli spokesmen. So Israel was doubly guilty of sabotaging the ceasefire, A, by launching a military attack, and B, by maintaining its very cruel siege of the people of Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Israel calls Hamas "terrorist." What is your definition of "terror"?
AVI SHLAIM: My definition of "terror" is the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. And by this definition, Hamas is a terrorist organization. But by the same token, Israel is practicing state terror, because it is using violence on a massive scale against Palestinian civilians for political purposes. I don't hold a brief for Hamas. Hamas is not a paragon of virtue. Its leaders are not angels. They harm civilians indiscriminately. Killing civilians is wrong, period. That applies to Hamas, and it applies equally to the state of Israel.
But there are two points I would like to make about Hamas, and that is--the first point is that it was elected in a fair and free election in January 2006. It was an impeccable election, monitored by a number of international observers, including President Jimmy Carter. So it is not just a terrorist organization. It is a democratically elected government of the Palestinian people and the representative of the Palestinian people in Gaza, as well as the West Bank.
And the second point that I would like to make is that since coming to power, Gaza has moderated its political program. Its charter is extreme. Its charter denies the legitimacy of a Jewish state. The charter calls for an Islamic state over the whole of historic Palestine. The charter has not been revived, but since coming to power, the leadership of Hamas has been much more pragmatic and stated that it is willing to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the state of Israel for twenty, thirty, forty, maybe even fifty years.
Thirdly, Hamas joined with Fatah, the rival group, the mainstream group, on the West Bank in a national unity government in the summer of 2007. That national unity government lasted only three months. Israel, with American support, helped to sabotage and to bring down that national unity government. Israel refused to deal with a Palestinian government which included Hamas within it. And shamefully, both the United States and the European Union joined in Israel in this refusal to recognize a Hamas-dominated government, and Israel withdrew tax revenues, and European Union withdrew foreign aid, in a shameful attempt to bring down a democratically elected government.
So, I do not defend Hamas, but I think that it hasn't received a fair hearing from the international community, and Israel has done everything to sabotage it all along.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Shlaim, you say it's done everything to sabotage it, except at the beginning, when you say it supported Hamas to weaken Fatah, which it now supports.
AVI SHLAIM: Indeed. Israel has always played the game of divide and rule. This is a very good tactic in times of war, to divide your enemies and pick them off one by one. No one can complain about that. But divide and rule isn't a good tactic in times of peace. If your aim is to achieve peace with the Arabs, then you should want unity among the Palestinians and unity in the Arab world. But Israel continued to play this game of divide and rule.
Hamas emerged in the course of the First Intifada in the late 1980s. It is the Islamic resistance movement. The mainstream movement, Fatah, was led by Yasser Arafat. And Israel gave tacit encouragement and support to the Islamic resistance in the hope of weakening the secular nationalists led by Yasser Arafat. It was a dangerous game to play, because the end result of this game was that Hamas emerged as the strongest Palestinian political party.
And Israel helped Hamas inadvertently in another way, because Fatah signed the Oslo Accord with Israel in 1993. It expected the Oslo Accord to lead to a two-state solution. And yet, Israel, after the election of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, reneged on the Israeli side of the deal. So, the Oslo Accord, the Oslo peace process wasn't doomed to failure from the start. It failed because Israel, under the leadership of the Likud, reneged on its side of the deal. So that left the Palestinians with nothing but misery and poverty and frustration and ever-growing Israeli settlements on the land. And it was this context that led to the success of Hamas at the last elections. So Israel has a lot to explain in the rise to power of the Hamas movement.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Avi Shlaim, we only have a minute, but I want to ask you where you see the solution at this point. Barack Obama will be president on Tuesday in just a few days. Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State.
AVI SHLAIM: The solution--this is a political conflict, and there is no military conflict to--there is no military solution to this conflict. The only solution lies in negotiations between Israel and Hamas about all the issues involved. President-elect Obama is a very impressive man and a very intelligent man and a very fair-minded man. He hasn't demonstrated any courage in the course of this crisis. He hasn't taken any position. He hasn't called for an immediate ceasefire. So the first step is an immediate ceasefire, and the next step would be negotiations between all the sides about restoring the ceasefire and then moving on to stage two, which is a political settlement to this tragic hundred-year-old conflict.
AMY GOODMAN: And Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, who said in her confirmation hearing yesterday she wouldn't negotiate with Hamas?
AVI SHLAIM: Yes, but there are other signs from the Obama campaign that they would be willing to consider low-level, indirect contacts with Hamas. And one has to be grateful for small mercies, so small, minor, low-level contacts with Hamas could lead to a proper dialog in due course. So I remain optimistic that sanity and rationality would take over in American foreign policy after the dreadful last eight years.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Avi Shlaim, thank you very much for being with us. Professor Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at Oxford University, served in the Israeli military--among his books, Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace--known as one of the leading authorities in the world on the Israel-Palestine conflict and Arab-Israel conflict. Among his other books, The Iron Wall.
FOR THE RECORD 9/28/09 - To the Jewish/American-dominated Media/Press and their spineless sycophantic (i.e. fawning parasitic) surrogates: (1) Israel has a +200 nuclear weapon arsenal, but has refused to sign the required (by international law) Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. (2) Israel views Iran as an "existential" threat to its ultimate goal of controlling the Middle East, which might be compromised were Iran able to produce electricity by way of nuclear power. (3) The Iranians, since 1948, have observed and now understand the insatiable, ingrained avaricious nature of these Israelis. As such, is it surprising that Iran would secure its nuclear power development facility underground and protected from Israel's extensive spying and sabotage operation (the most sophisticated in the Middle East) protected by Iran's Revolutionary Guard and located under Iran's sacred city of Qum? (4) Our Media/Press needs finally, with this notorious Netanyahu/Lieberman regime empowered in Tel Aviv, to recognize Israel as the ultimate source of much of the bloody chaos on the planet today.
Note: (1*) The Prior History - (2*) "Since 1948... - (3*) "The June 8, 1967 attack on the USS Liberty... - (4*) The Ultimate in Israeli Propaganda, configured 9/26/09 by Mark Landler in Washington.
Note No. Two - on (4*).
- "FOR Michael B. Oren, the hardest thing about becoming Israel’s ambassador to the United States was giving up his American citizenship, a solemn ritual that involves signing an oath of renunciation. He said he got through it with the help of friends from the American Embassy in Tel Aviv who “stayed with me, and hugged me when it was over.”
- "Born in upstate New York, raised in suburban New Jersey and educated at Columbia and Princeton Universities, Mr. Oren considers himself genuinely American. But having lived most of his adult life in Israel -- serving multiple tours in the Israeli Army, once as a paratrooper during the 1982 Lebanon war -- he also considers himself genuinely Israeli."
Question - Did he serve with Rahm "three fingered" Emanuel?
- "FOR the past two decades, Mr. Oren has mixed scholarship with public service."
Declaration - It may be that servicing Israel is not public service.
Editor's Note: The prior Conan/Diehl exchange may be an example of the interview Amy Goodman had with Naomi Klein 9/14/09 -
Amy Goodman: Explain why the Toronto International Film Festival is celebrating Tel Aviv.
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, this is a very--this is a controversial question. Cameron Bailey, the co-director of the festival, says that it was entirely his decision, that there was no political interference, and we take him at his word. He’s very respected in the film community. But what we are saying is that, whether knowingly or not, this decision fits in with a campaign, a very aggressive campaign, that has been launched by Israel’s Foreign Ministry to use culture really as a weapon to distract attention from the occupation and from the allegations of war crimes in Gaza, but even before the Gaza attack.
And what’s interesting is that in--Toronto has been selected to test market something that is called “Brand Israel,” the rebranding of Israel. And this is because Toronto has really been a kind of a battleground. It has a very strong Palestinian community and solidarity community. It also has a very large and active Jewish community. And it’s been a battle zone. So, actually, Canada has more Israeli diplomats than any other country in the world, because this--including the United States--despite our relatively small population (Canada), because the Israeli government sees Canada as a very important battleground, as a very important testing ground. So Toronto has been selected to sort of test-drive this rebranding campaign for Israel.
And, you know, it’s not our imagination; it’s not a quiet conspiracy. We’ve read about this in the New York Times and Reuters reports. And I’ll just give you one example. A couple of months after the attack on Gaza, as we remember, this was really a turning point in terms of world opinion with regards to Israel. There were protests around the world. In London, there were an estimated 100,000 people in the streets condemning Israel’s actions. Opinion polls were showing a plummeting of support. And more and more people were starting to talk about using tactics like the tactics that were used against South Africa during the apartheid years, saying that there has to be strategies beyond just talk. And so, it was in this context that a top official in Israel’s Foreign Ministry said--and this was quoted in the New York Times--“We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater company exhibits. This way, you show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.”
And so, this has been playing out at a lot of cultural festivals, and you’ve covered this on the show before. The Paris Book Fair, which is an enormously important book festival, had a special spotlight on Israel for its sixtieth birthday a couple of years ago. The Turin Book Fair also did. But this--and there were protests- -but they were much quieter than what’s happened now in Toronto, and that’s because of Gaza, I would say. It’s because now, because of the year that we’re in, because of the continued impunity for Israeli war crimes, people are drawing a line and saying this is no time to celebrate.
To the Editor:
Re “In Push to Get Mideast Talks, Obama Pivots” (front page, Sept. 23):
I’m quite sure that in the Middle East, President Obama’s decision to back away from his earlier demand for a freeze on Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank will be seen as something other than a graceful “pivot.”
Israelis and Arabs alike will see it as a cave-in, with the difference being that the Israelis will cheer while the Arabs will be outraged.
If President Obama cannot even get Israel to stop seizing land from Palestinians and building Jewish-only enclaves on it, it’s hard to see how his supposed new focus on such issues as “the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the borders of a future Palestinian state” can possibly get anywhere. And if he’s not willing to stick to his position on what ought to be a comparatively easy issue, it’s hard to believe that he’s really serious about these much more contentious ones.
Even if Americans choose to give him the benefit of the doubt, Arabs probably won’t. To them, this will seem just another reason not to trust American claims of impartiality in Middle Eastern affairs, providing them with another excuse not to offer concessions of their own. - Eric B. Lipps Staten Island 9/23/09
- Israel and the Gaza War -
To the Editor:
Re “The Gaza Report’s Wasted Opportunity,” by David Landau (Op-Ed, Sept. 20):
The only missed opportunity regarding the report by Richard Goldstone was Israel’s illogical refusal to meet with the United Nations commission headed by a respected South African jurist who also happens to be Jewish and a Zionist.
Irrespective of the intention and the Israeli motive, the report concludes that Israel committed “war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.”
International humanitarian law is the only law binding the world community to some type of law about war. Palestinians will welcome any change to that law so long as it takes into consideration protection of a population that has lived under more than 40 years of a foreign military occupation. - Daoud Kuttab Ramallah, West Bank 9/20/09
The writer is a Palestinian journalist.
The key to today's 9/29/09 edit is the monstrous lie, that Iran is pursuing the deadly path of Israel, which has created a nuclear weaponed arsenal that threatens the entire Middle East and is a blight on the civilized world. In answer to this threat the Good Lord, once again, brings forth authoritative truth in the person of seasoned nuclear arms expert Scott Ritter, interviewed today by DemocracyNow.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Iran test-fired two long-range missiles Monday, just days before Iranian officials are due to meet with the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany to discuss a range of issues, including its nuclear program. Western powers condemned the Iranian test as “provocative” and “deeply destabilizing.” Iranian officials said the missiles were tested as part of an annual military drill and bore, quote, “no connection whatsoever with the nuclear program.”
Monday’s missile tests follow Iran’s disclosure last week of a second uranium enrichment plant. On Friday morning, President Obama, along with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, accused Iran of building a secret nuclear fuel plant.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Good morning. We are here to announce that yesterday in Vienna, the United States, the United Kingdom and France presented detailed evidence to the IAEA demonstrating that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been building a covert uranium enrichment facility near Qum for several years.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: French President Sarkozy warned that Europe and the United States would tighten sanctions against Iran unless it halted its nuclear program.
PRESIDENT NICOLAS SARKOZY: [translated] Everything must be put on the table now. We cannot let the Iranian leaders gain time while the motors are running. If, by December, there is not an in-depth change by the Iranian leaders, sanctions will have to be taken.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Iran, however, refuted Western fears and said its nuclear activities are purely peaceful. This is Iranian delegate Mansour Salsabili addressing the UN General Assembly Saturday.
MANSOUR SALSABILI: The delegation of the Islamic Republic of Iran would like to put on record that these allegations, fears and concerns are totally untrue and without any foundations. Iran’s nuclear activities are, and always have been, for peaceful purposes and therefore pose no threat, pose no threat whatsoever. The IAEA reports bear witness to the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear activities.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, my next guest was a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s. Scott Ritter is the author of Iraq Confidential and Target Iran. His forthcoming book is called Dangerous Ground: America’s Failed Arms Control Policy from FDR to Obama. His latest article appears in The Guardian newspaper in London; it’s titled “Keeping Iran Honest,” where he warns against, quote, “politically motivated hype.” Scott Ritter joins us right now from Albany, New York.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Scott.
SCOTT RITTER: Thank you very much.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Begin by explaining why do you call it “politically motivated hype”?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, I think the answer is quite obvious. Look, on Thursday, this coming Thursday, the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China are going to sit down with Iran, ostensibly to discuss, you know, how to break through this impasse that exists between the Western countries and Iran concerning its nuclear program. But the Obama administration has come to a, you know, preordained conclusion that there’s nothing that can be done about Iran’s nuclear program, that Iran either has to get rid of it all, or there’s nothing to discuss about. That’s not much of a--much of a discussion.
Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has a complete inspection regime conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It’s not been found to be in noncompliance. And yet, here we are condemning Iran for doing its job, declaring a facility, inviting inspectors in. And the conclusion it’s reached from this? That they’re producing nuclear weapons. This is politically motivated hype designed to create a situation this coming Thursday that will find the United States unable to reach any sort of agreement with Iran about its nuclear program.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: In his comments, President Obama said, “Iran is breaking the rules that all nations must follow.” You write that he’s technically and legally wrong. Why?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, again, Iran is bound by its agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency. These agreements are between Iran and the IAEA. You cannot compare Iran’s arrangement with the IAEA with any other nation, so it’s an absurd argument to begin with.
Second of all, Iran’s agreements with the IAEA are--you know, the current agreements go back to 2003 period, where Iran, in exchange for Europe and the United States recognizing the legitimacy of Iran’s nuclear aspirations--that means to enrich uranium for peaceful energy uses--Iran would voluntarily agree to what’s called the additional protocol of inspections, as well as what’s known as the Subsidiary Agreement. The Subsidiary Agreement requires Iran to declare any facility at the time that it intends to produce it, create it, to build it, as opposed to the old agreement, which said Iran must declare this facility 180 days prior to the insertion of nuclear material. Iran said, “We will abide by this additional protocol of inspections and the Subsidiary Agreement on a voluntary basis, until which time the Parliament of Iran ratifies these new agreements.” These have never been ratified, so this was a voluntary submission on the part of Iran.
In 2007, Iran withdrew from this voluntary arrangement, citing the noncompliance of its partners--Europe, the United States--in recognizing the legitimacy of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s not in violation of anything. Iran is in compliance, and the IAEA has stated this. The IAEA has said that the fact that Iran was in compliance with the old Code 3.1, the Subsidiary Agreement, the old Safeguards Agreements, means that you can’t find them to be in noncompliance with this new set of arrangements.
The key here isn’t the technicality of the legal documents; it’s about the diversion of nuclear material. And the IAEA has a 100 percent accounting for the totality of Iran’s nuclear material. So, even if Iran produces this new facility, which, by the way, is not in operation and won’t be in operation for over a year, no nuclear material has been diverted, there still is a full material balance, and the IAEA is in complete control of the situation. Iran is not in violation.
This is not a reason to panic. This is much ado about nothing. But again, we come back to the original premise: this is about political hype, the United States hyping up a capability in Iran which doesn’t exist, and that is the capability to produce nuclear weapons.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And the issue of Israel reserving the right to launch a preemptive military strike against nuclear facilities in Iran, how does that play into the upcoming talks and how Iran is reacting right now?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, it’s not just the issue of Israel reserving the right, the issue of the United States reserving the right. Remember, President Obama said that the military option is not off the table. Now, if you’re the Iranians and you make a decision that you strategically require an additional source of energy, such as nuclear energy, to supplement your domestic energy usage so that you free up your oil production and gas production for exportation, so you can earn money, this is a big deal. This isn’t insignificant. And so, you’re building this capability. Israel and the United States say they want to bomb it. What do you do?
Well, the first thing you do is you build redundancy, and that’s what this new Qum facility represents. It’s redundancy. It’s a backup to the Natanz primary facility. Again, it’s been declared, no nuclear material has been diverted. But it’s there as a backup. The second thing you do is you fire off missiles in a warning that you have an inherent right and capability of self-defense.
Israel launched a massive air exercise last year, in which it demonstrated the ability to fly hundreds of aircraft, you know, the distance necessary to strike targets in Iran. The United States is carrying out exercises with Israel as we speak. You know, the bottom line is it’s the United States and Israel which are the more aggressive of the players here. Iran is not an aggressor. Iran has not attacked anybody. Iran is simply trying to do that which it is legally allowed to do: produce enriched uranium for the purposes of nuclear power. It’s Israel, which, by the way, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, claims it will never be a signatory and has a massive nuclear weapons capability--it’s Israel and the United States which are creating a crisis out of nothing.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And what would you like to see happen right now, in terms of the talks coming up on Thursday? This is the first direct talks between the US and Iran in more than thirty years. What would you like to see happen? And what ultimately can come out of this?
SCOTT RITTER: Well, I’d like to see diplomacy succeed. The bottom line is, the more the United States and Iran talk with one another, the less likely it is that the two will engage in hostile actions against one another. But you can’t have diplomacy if it’s a one-way street. If the talks open up with the United States providing a whole list of demands that Iran must accede to or else the talks will fail, then the talks are doomed to fail.
The United States--you know, here we have a president who says he wants to get rid of nuclear weapons in the world today, and he recognizes that a key aspect of this is a viable, valid nuclear nonproliferation treaty. But for a treaty to be viable and valid, it must be applicable to all powers. That means that when Iran signs the treaty, Iran must not only abide by the treaty, but also to be able to operate fully within the context of the treaty. And Article IV of this treaty clearly allows Iran to have the right to enrich uranium for the use--for use in nuclear power. The United States, in citing the law, must be willing to abide by the law, not only in terms of its own actions, but also to allow Iran full obligations and rights under the law.
If this isn’t what’s going to happen, then these talks are doomed to fail. I want these talks to succeed. And I’m hopeful that the Obama administration right now is carrying out pre-game posturing but, once it comes time to sit down at the table, will actually let the tools of diplomacy work, which means it has to be a two-way street.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Iran fired these two long-range missiles on Monday. Why do you think that it did that just days before these talks? It’s a sensitive situation.
SCOTT RITTER: Well, I think the answer is obvious. Iran is making it clear that it has its own deterrence capability, that at a time when the United States and Israel and France and Great Britain and others are calling the Qum facility evidence of a covert nuclear weapons facility, raising the specter of a nuclear weapons-armed Iran, creating an emergency-type environment where people are talking about the need and requirement for a preemptive strike, Iran is saying, “You do so at your own peril.” The bottom line is, if Iran is struck, Israeli cities will be struck in return with Iranian missiles, not equipped with nuclear weapons, but with conventional weapons. Iran is simply saying, “We are a sovereign state with our own inherent capabilities for self-defense. And if you attack us, you do so at your own risk.” Is this the ideal situation? No. But then again, it’s not Iran that started this game of saying, “We’re going to bomb you.” Iran is simply saying, “If you choose to attack us, we can and will defend ourselves.”
Again, this is an argument or discussion we shouldn’t be having. If the Obama administration was responsible here, they’d de-emphasize this hype, this politically motivated hype, and deal with the reality that there is no nuclear weapons program in Iran, that the newly declared Qum facility is not a threat to international peace and security, and that when Iran and the United States sits down this coming Thursday, that we will--you know, the United States hopes to find a way out of this morass, that we hope to find a way to peacefully coexist with Iran, an Iran that has a nuclear energy program fully monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Unfortunately, that’s not the premise going forward, and then you get both sides behaving in a precipitous and irresponsible manner. The Iranian missile launch is precipitous, it’s irresponsible, but it’s in keeping with the trend that all parties are participating in.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Scott Ritter, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Scott Ritter was a UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He’s the author of several books, Iraq Confidential, Target Iran. His forthcoming book is called Dangerous Ground: America’s Failed Arms Control Policy from FDR to Obama.
FOR THE RECORD 9/28/09 - To the Jewish/American-dominated Media/Press and their spineless sycophantic (i.e. fawning parasitic) surrogates: (1) Israel has a +200 nuclear weapon arsenal, but has refused to sign the required (by international law) Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. (2) Israel views Iran as an "existential" threat to its ultimate goal of controlling the Middle East, which might be compromised were Iran able to produce electricity by way of nuclear power. (3) The Iranians, since 1948, have observed and now understand the insatiable, ingrained avaricious nature of these Israelis. As such, is it surprising that Iran would secure its nuclear power development facility underground and protected from Israel's extensive spying and sabotage operation (the most sophisticated in the Middle East) protected by Iran's Revolutionary Guard and located under Iran's sacred city of Qum? (4) Our Media/Press needs finally, with this notorious Netanyahu/Lieberman regime empowered in Tel Aviv, to recognize Israel as the ultimate source of much of the bloody chaos on the planet today.
Note: (1*) The Prior History - (2*) "Since 1948... - (3*) "The June 8, 1967 attack on the USS Liberty... - (4*) The Ultimate in Israeli Propaganda, configured 9/26/09 by Mark Landler in Washington.
Note No. Two - on (4*).
- "FOR Michael B. Oren, the hardest thing about becoming Israel’s ambassador to the United States was giving up his American citizenship, a solemn ritual that involves signing an oath of renunciation. He said he got through it with the help of friends from the American Embassy in Tel Aviv who “stayed with me, and hugged me when it was over.”
- "Born in upstate New York, raised in suburban New Jersey and educated at Columbia and Princeton Universities, Mr. Oren considers himself genuinely American. But having lived most of his adult life in Israel -- serving multiple tours in the Israeli Army, once as a paratrooper during the 1982 Lebanon war -- he also considers himself genuinely Israeli."
Question - Did he serve with Rahm "three fingered" Emanuel?
- "FOR the past two decades, Mr. Oren has mixed scholarship with public service."
Declaration - It may be that servicing Israel is not public service.
The 9/25/09 pm edition -
Often With Surrogates
- Margaret Warner's Opening - Jim Lehrer's 9/24/09 NewsHour
JIM LEHRER: The U.N. Security Council held a rare summit today to work toward eliminating nuclear weapons. There were also new calls to confront Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs.
Margaret Warner has our lead story report.
MARGARET WARNER: President Obama chaired today's meeting of the 15-member Security Council, a first for an American president. And 14 of the 15 council members were represented by heads of government, a rare occurrence.
The sole item on the agenda: passage of a resolution affirming the goals of nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation and committing to work more aggressively to achieve them.
U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Now, the draft resolution has been adopted unanimously...
MARGARET WARNER: The president laid out the stakes in stark terms.
BARACK OBAMA: Just one nuclear weapon exploded in a city -- be it New York or Moscow, Tokyo or Beijing, London or Paris -- could kill hundreds of thousands of people, and it would badly destabilize our security, our economies, and our very way of life.
Once more, the United Nations has a pivotal role to play in preventing this crisis. The historic resolution we just adopted enshrines our shared commitment to the goal of a world without nuclear weapons.
MARGARET WARNER: In turn, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev also warned of the risk of nuclear terror. He pointed to the ongoing negotiations between Russia and the U.S., holders of the world's largest nuclear stockpiles.
DMITRY MEDVEDEV, president , Russia (through translator): We've repeatedly stated and reiterated our readiness to move forward to reduce the number of delivery vehicles of strategic defensive arms more than threefold. Our proposals have been tabled in the negotiations we've been holding with the U.S.
MARGARET WARNER: Chinese President Hu Jintao reaffirmed China's policy of no first use of nuclear weapons, but he said the countries with the largest arsenals should take the lead.
The resolution adopted today did not mention Iran and North Korea by name. Even so, those two nations were central to the discussion.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Iran and North Korea have made a mockery of international efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons development.
NICOLAS SARKOZY, president, France (through translator): At this very moment, Iran, since 2005, has flouted five Security Council resolutions. I support the extended hand of the Americans, President Obama. We must bring these dialogue proposals.
But what has it brought the international community? Nothing at all. Just more enriched uranium, more centrifugal machines. And then we have North Korea, and here it's even better. North Korea has been acting in defiance of all Security Council decisions since 1993. They pay no attention whatsoever to what the international community has to say.
MARGARET WARNER: Sarkozy (Sarkozy himself is of Jewish heritage and not an honest broker!) and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the time is fast approaching when harsher sanctions should be imposed against Iran.
In response, Iran issued a statement that said it would take part in "serious and constructive" negotiations, but it said, "Futile and illegal demands of the past years that have proven to be of no avail should be abandoned."
In an interview in today's Washington Post, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his nation would allow its nuclear experts to meet with U.S. and other officials as a confidence-building measure. The U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany are due to meet Iranian negotiators for talks about Iran's nuclear program on October 1st.
As for what the future holds, President Obama acknowledged the difficulties of ridding the world of nuclear weapons.
BARACK OBAMA: Words alone will not get the job done.
MARGARET WARNER: He and many of the leaders around the table left for the Group of 20 economic summit in Pittsburgh this afternoon.
JIM LEHRER (And Mr. Lehrer, himself, is of Jewish heritage and also, therefore, not an honest broker!): Judy Woodruff spoke with Margaret at the U.N. earlier this afternoon.
- Common themes, big differences -
JUDY WOODRUFF: Margaret, hello. This was an historic meeting of the U.N. Security Council. What else can you tell us about the scene, about what took place?
MARGARET WARNER: Well, it was quite a scene, Judy. Before the world leaders actually arrived, it was like a gigantic networking scrum of diplomats and former diplomats, celebrities who have been involved in anti-nuclear weapons work, Ted Turner, Queen Noor, and most especially, four former cabinet secretaries and senators, Henry Kissinger, Bill Perry, Sam Nunn, and George Shultz, who famously, two-and-a-half years ago, wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal called "Towards a Nuclear-Weapons-Free World," and they have actually met with President Obama on this subject.
But then, once President Obama came in, he made a quick tour of the room, shook a lot of hands. And then just, I would say, about a minute-and-a-half or two before he was scheduled to start, President Sarkozy finally made his grand entrance, got halfway through the room and had to sit down.
But once they started, it was very business-like. President Obama gave a quick opening statement. He called for a vote on the resolution. And it was done -- clearly pre-cooked -- in -- I think it was four or five minutes.
But then after that, as the leaders all had their five minutes each to talk, that's when you saw that, despite common themes, there are significant differences.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Elaborate on those differences for us. What do you mean?
MARGARET WARNER: Well, the most -- they have different views about how to even work toward a nuclear-free world and who should take what steps first. But the most significant and immediate one was, of course, over Iran, and you could see it in some of the clips that we ran in my taped piece there.
I mean, Britain and France are very eager -- apparently in private as much as they are in public -- to move toughly against Iran if it doesn't respond soon to the offer that's on the table. China and Russia are still reluctant.
And so, tellingly, though the Americans had hoped that in this resolution, which is very, very broad, it would reference Iran and North Korea, that in fact, in the end, it does not.
- U.S. push for nuclear-free world -
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, since they're not specifically mentioned -- Iran and North Korea -- what exactly, Margaret, is the U.S. trying to accomplish with this?
MARGARET WARNER: Well, Judy, it's a very broad goal. I mean, one, President Obama has said he'd ultimately like to get to a nuclear-free world, but in the meantime, they really want, as you and I talked about last night a little bit, they want to strengthen the international community's ability to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and technology, arms, material.
And several of the leaders, you heard them say today, we really are at a turning point. Suddenly, this nuclear club is about to balloon and mushroom out of control, perhaps even to non-state actors, as Gordon Brown said.
So it's a complicated resolution, and it's many parts. It is mostly setting up the framework for a number of arms negotiations and meetings that are coming up next year on all these topics. I'd say the most important one is that they seem to agree that both the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, need to be strengthened. And they are going to re-open the so-called NPT next year.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So there may be more meat on the bones than it appears?
MARGARET WARNER: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I mean, this was not a, you know, decision-taking or action-taking meeting. But it was getting all of -- to say the Security Council is at a common point about the threat that's out there and broadly what needs to change.
As you can see, there are really sort of three legs of the stool. The nuclear weapons states agree to start cutting their arsenals more aggressively. Everyone agrees that there should be no new nuclear state.
And, finally -- and this is what you heard a lot from the president of Uganda and other non-permanent members -- they said, you know, the developing world needs nuclear energy technology. And the -- the nuclear powers agree that something has to be done to share that technology, that civilian energy use, much more broadly with the rest of the world, with international safeguards.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Margaret, looking back at this whole week, what would you say that the United States has achieved, has accomplished here?
MARGARET WARNER: I'd say in two areas. One was getting this resolution today. And the other was yesterday getting President Medvedev of Russia to say publicly that he would consider sanctions against Iran.
The U.S. came into this week wanting to come up with a united front, as it and Russia and China and Germany and France and Britain head into this crucial October 1 meeting with the Iranians. And so, apparently, President Medvedev came into the meeting. Somebody who was there said he came, you know, essentially ready to play. He was ready to talk about the whole Iran issue.
And he did express, as he has before to President Obama, that he sees a threat from both their weapons development and their missile development. And though Obama advisers insist there's no quid pro quo sought for President Obama's decision last week to change the whole missile defense system in Europe, President Medvedev did say -- and reporters hearing -- that that was certainly a rational decision.
And so -- and then apparently, at the end, interestingly, after they'd had this meeting, before they came to the press, Medvedev asked for a private one-on-one with President Obama, and literally everyone left the room for five minutes, and just they talked with the interpreters. I asked one person if he knew what was said, and he said, "Yes, but I won't tell you."
JUDY WOODRUFF: Margaret Warner, wrapping up the week for us at the United Nations. Thank you, Margaret.
MARGARET WARNER: Thanks, Judy.
- The Rahm Emanuel & Charlie Rose Backup (Speaking of non-honest brokers...) -
JIM LEHRER: And still to come on the NewsHour tonight: the Pittsburgh summit; and the success of "The Lost Symbol."
That follows analysis of the continuing confrontation over Iran's nuclear program. Last night, President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, discussed with Charlie Rose on PBS the options Iran faces.
RAHM EMANUEL, White House Chief of Staff: Iran has a choice to make whether they want to be a responsible member of the international community and what are the enticements to be part of that or one that's more of a pariah.
CHARLIE ROSE: Does that choice have to be made and how will it be expressed before there is serious engagement between the United States and Iran?
RAHM EMANUEL: You work on both levels simultaneously. They know there are consequences -- there are opportunities to being a member of the international community, and there's consequences to acting as a state that doesn't take the responsibilities as a member of the international community.
CHARLIE ROSE: What is our message to the Israelis if they decide they want to take military action at some point?
RAHM EMANUEL: That I wouldn't do, even though I would like to do it, but that's that.
CHARLIE ROSE: What would you like to say?
RAHM EMANUEL: No way. That is -- that is not something I'm going to comment on here.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK. But the message to Iran: If, in fact, you show, which is a condition, if, in fact, you show that you want to be a part of the community of nations, we're prepared to engage you on all bilateral relationships that exist, whether it has to do with you stopping enriching nuclear fuel...
RAHM EMANUEL: A nuclearized Iran is a threat to the region and...
CHARLIE ROSE: Everybody knows that. Everybody knows that.
RAHM EMANUEL: But as the president was quite clear in both bilat meetings, as well as he's been in his communication to the Iranian government, they have a choice to make. They know the opportunities of those choices and the consequences of those choices.
And they will -- but what will not happen is, as the president said, merely talking for the sake of talking. They know, as Yogi Berra once said, when you get to a fork in the road, take it. They're coming upon that place where they have to take -- choose what type of country they're going to be.
CHARLIE ROSE: OK, now, how do they make that choice? I just want to stay with -- what's the choice they have to make?
RAHM EMANUEL: Well, Charlie, maybe -- Charlie, maybe you need to get them here to talk. That's not my responsibility, to represent the Iranian people, because...
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes, but it is to communicate what you think the choice that the government has to make in order to be engaged by the United States.
RAHM EMANUEL: Right. Well, it's not just -- it's not engagement for the sake of engagement.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
RAHM EMANUEL: It's they understand that, as it relates to a nuclear Iran, what are the consequences of that choice? Now, they know what they have to do. They know what the P5-plus-one is expecting.
CHARLIE ROSE: They know because we've told them?
RAHM EMANUEL: It's been...
CHARLIE ROSE: Been communicated to them?
RAHM EMANUEL: They are aware of the issues that are at play, but it's not just a issue. There's a series of issues that relate to what -- the opportunity of what engagement means and the opportunity of being a country that is not engaged and is acting...
CHARLIE ROSE: And it also has to do with Israeli-Palestinian issues?
RAHM EMANUEL: A whole host of issues that -- and there's a whole host of issues -- they understand them. They, as you know, communicated once a willingness with the United States to discuss the range of issues, both in the region and their role in that.
CHARLIE ROSE: Do you think they could be helpful on Afghanistan, the Iranians?
RAHM EMANUEL: Well, there's no -- yes, they can. They could be helpful. As you know, there's -- Secretary Holbrooke participated in an international conference earlier in the year in which they attended.
CHARLIE ROSE: And could they have...
RAHM EMANUEL: And they have interests there, as well, in a stable Afghanistan.
CHARLIE ROSE: Oh, they're very interested in that, and they are not a friend of the Taliban.
RAHM EMANUEL: You know the history as well as I do.
* It was notable on camera that Mr. Emanuel took the seat directly behind Mr. Obama, a seat reserved for our Secretary of State! This is not the first time that Rahm has insulted Ms. Clinton since the president appointed her and the United States Senate approved her appointment! *
- Bottom Line From David Kay -
JIM LEHRER: You can see all of Charlie's interview by going to a link to his Web site from ours, which, of course, is newshour.pbs.org.
Now, for more on the confronting and engaging of Iran, we go to Ray Takeyh. He advised the Obama administration on Iran policy earlier this year. He's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is "The Guardians of the Revolution: Iran's Approach to the World."
And David Kay, he was the U.N.'s chief nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s. He led the search for weapons of mass destruction after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 for the Bush administration. He's now a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
David Kay, so, you take those words from Rahm Emanuel and all the other words that were spoken at the U.N. and around the U.N. in the last few days, what's changed, if anything?
DAVID KAY: I'm not sure very much has changed. I mean, what you -- the most immediate change has been a new Iranian diplomatic initiative of trying, offering up their scientists, which has been a demand of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, for years, to talk to the Iraqis -- the Iranian scientists directly, and they have refused.
JIM LEHRER: And that came in the interview with the Washington Post. Ahmadinejad said that, yes.
DAVID KAY: That's correct. And his second one was he would like to have the U.S. supply him uranium, enriched to 20 percent, for a reactor that is run at the University of Tehran. This is a reactor, incidentally, that the United States supplied under the Eisenhower Atoms for Peace program in the mid-1960s, and then it was fueled with high-enriched uranium.
These are, in my view, stratagems, stratagems of engagement, that will, in fact, over time make it very difficult if we -- it's going to be hard not to pick up the offer to talk to Iranian scientists. After all, at the depths of the Cold War, this was one of the things we did with the Soviet Union, and over time it bore fruit.
But to do that at the same time, you go ahead with new sanctions, I think is going to be very hard. That's the game the Iranians play. They understand seams.
JIM LEHRER: Seams?
DAVID KAY: Seams in our diplomacy.
- Diplomacy without concessions -
JIM LEHRER: Is that what you -- you see it the same way, Mr. Takeyh?
RAY TAKEYH, Council on Foreign Relations: Yes, I would agree with that, with one provision. I think the scientist meeting is a little less than meets the eye, because I think the scientists are supposed to meet to figure out how to get the enriched uranium and have a discussion -- sort of a track two discussion among the scientists, as opposed to answering about Iran's nuclear infractions and its past misdeeds...
JIM LEHRER: And it shouldn't be accused with an inspection.
RAY TAKEYH: Right. That's right.
JIM LEHRER: It's not going to be an inspection, the same kind of thing that David Kay did, yes.
RAY TAKEYH: It's a meeting of scientists, not the IAEA scientists...
DAVID KAY: That's correct.
RAY TAKEYH: ... but the different category of scientists. I think the Iranian strategy is becoming apparent, as David suggested, namely to offer tactical accommodations, such as the meeting of scientists and offer of engagements, which is broad-based and rather inconclusive, without making any sort of concessions on the basics of the nuclear program, its size, its scope, and its past activities.
And this actually could succeed, in the sense there's no possible way the United States is not going to engage Iran. We have said we're going to meet on October the 1st. And that process...
JIM LEHRER: That's already scheduled?
RAY TAKEYH: That's already scheduled. And the question is, can Iranians drag out that process in a rather inconclusive way by making slight modifications?
JIM LEHRER: So I'm going to ask you the impossible question. What in the world are they up to? I mean, what does this add up to? I know you don't know what they're up to. Nobody does. But what does it look like they're up to, just delaying things?
RAY TAKEYH: Yes, I think it's a tactic to advance the program and sort of create facts on the ground, and once you create facts on the ground, suggest those facts are irreversible. So if they can continue to advance the program while continuing to have these inconclusive talks, then you have certain situations come about which they will suggest, "We're not going to talk about what we have already, but we talk about future arrangements." Meantime, the program expands in size and sophistication.
JIM LEHRER: And, meantime, the program continues. And where do you think it is right now, David Kay? The question everybody wants to know is, where are they?
DAVID KAY: How long will it take them?
JIM LEHRER: How long will it take for them to have a bomb?
- Two years away from a bomb -
DAVID KAY: Well, I think one weapon, one device, which is not necessarily really a weapon, one device that would explode somewhere in a desert, they're probably two years away from being able to do it. But one device is not significant in terms of really anything in terms of a program. You've got to have a warhead that will work on a missile, that is small enough to work on a missile, and that is dependable.
As I've said several times, you can't Photoshop out a missile that doesn't go off that has a nuclear warhead headed for any place in the Middle East. I think they're 10 years away from having that sort of military program, so I think we have time. But I'm convinced that they're headed -- that's the direction they're going on. They want to gain time.
JIM LEHRER: Is there any question in your mind that that's where they're headed?
RAY TAKEYH: The nuclear weapons program?
JIM LEHRER: Yes.
RAY TAKEYH: No. I think the IAEA has suggested some of the experiments they have conducted, some of the missile technologies they have developed, the mysterious computer lab with sort of a data regarding nuclear weapons designs, and the fact that the country that is rich in oil and natural gas is spending an inordinate amount of money on nuclear programs, while it doesn't actually have an indigenous uranium capacity.
JIM LEHRER: Now, you say "they," of course, the Iranians.
RAY TAKEYH: That's right.
JIM LEHRER: Fit Ahmadinejad into this. What kind of power does he exercise after all of the stuff still going on, the protests over his election?
RAY TAKEYH: I think he's actually strong internally, in terms of the fact that the category of individuals who are in power in Iran has narrowed. The regime has gone through some degree of ideological purges, so more moderate elements and reformist elements have been excised from power, so he's actually in a more commanding situation.
He's probably, in my opinion, the second most important person in Iran, despite the fact that he came to power with electoral irregularities and deficiencies. His position is -- in terms of institutions of Iran, is rather strong.
JIM LEHRER: Second only to Khamenei, the...
RAY TAKEYH: That's right, the supreme leader, yes.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that, that when Ahmadinejad speaks, he speaks for Iran?
DAVID KAY: I think the evidence that we have available -- and we ought to be frank. There's a lot about Iran we don't know. There's no foreign service officer, no member of the intelligence community serving today who has ever served in Iran.
It's an order of magnitude different than, for example, the Soviet Union, where we had a large number of Americans who had served there. We know very little about a very opaque political process. But on the basis of the evidence we have, I think, yes, he's in a strong position.
- Sanctions 'rather irrelevant' -
JIM LEHRER: All right. Finally, when they talk about sanctions, and increasing sanctions, and maybe the Russians might go along, and maybe they won't, but President Obama is determined to increase the sanctions, what kind of sanctions would actually hurt Iran?
RAY TAKEYH: Well, the kind of sanctions that would hurt Iran are the kind of sanctions that would hurt the population of Iran, which has its own difficulties in terms of restricting the amount of petroleum that the country imports. I mean, what you're talking about is cutting people's heating oil in winter and other such impositions on its banking system, financial system.
JIM LEHRER: And that could be done by a multinational...
RAY TAKEYH: I don't see that happening. As a matter of fact, there was the French foreign minister that disparaged that particular sanction, perhaps unbeknownst to his own president.
Also, the sanctions issue is rather irrelevant, because this particular Iranian regime doesn't put premium on economic growth. They put premium on strategic gain. So even if you manage to successfully impose a sanctions regime on them that is coercive and painful, it is unlikely to change their fundamental nuclear objectives.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that, David?
DAVID KAY: I think that's right.
JIM LEHRER: OK.
DAVID KAY: And one difficulty of the fuel oil or gasoline sanction on them that very few people think of, but what happens when the Iranians turn to their next door neighbor, the Shia government in Iraq, and say, "We'd like to have some gasoline from you"? You know, perfectly possible move, because what it would embarrass and hurt the most is the U.S. relationship with the Iraqis.
So I think there are a lot of ways out. I think that's a non-starter. I actually think, if you look at Ahmadinejad's statements at the U.N., what he has really done is made it very difficult for the U.S. to get a coalition that includes the Chinese and the Russians and even the Germans, who have a very different policy than the French, to go along with really tough sanctions at the same time that on the table we have an offer to engage our scientists, we have an offer to, you know, come in and help us with a medical reactor, isotope reactor.
I think these are things that are going to be seen by states that don't want to endorse tough sanctions as an opening. Let's engage the process.
JIM LEHRER: So, gentlemen, are you saying they're winning this game?
RAY TAKEYH: Iranians have been winning this game since 2005. They have managed to advance their program with impunity. Everybody, since 2005, every nation has changed its red lines, including the United States. The one country that has not has been the Islamic Republic of Iran.
DAVID KAY: Jim, if you looked at the number of red lines in the desert that have been crossed since 2005, you'd have a pink desert line between us and the Iranians. We have drawn so many red lines that have been obliterated by a really smart, tactically smart Iranian foreign policy.
JIM LEHRER: So we continue to draw lines, they're going to continue to turn pinker, is that what you're saying?
DAVID KAY: I think that's where we are.
JIM LEHRER: OK. Gentlemen, thank you very much.
- WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS THIS RELENTLESS JEWISH EFFORT, NOW WORLD WIDE (SARKOZI IS JEWISH) TO CRIPPLE IRAN'S EFFORT TO ESTABLISH A NUCLEAR POWER SOURCE, WHICH, UNDER THE TERMS OF THE NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY IS PERMITTED - BUT OPPOSED BY ISRAEL, WHICH HAS A NUCLEAR WEAPON ARSENAL, BUT REFUSES TO SIGN THE NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY!
The 9/23/09 pm edition -
At this critical time there are several manifestations of media colluding with opposition forces within the government. The most noticeable of course, is the Republican Party repeat of savaging a newly elected Democratic President, the first instance Bill Clinton in 1993, their target now in 2009 Barack Obama. An expose' of the earlier Media/GOP sabotage used Mr. Clinton's goal of universal health care, in which, incredibly, a Rush Limbaugh, little known at that time, replaced the estimable Speaker of the House Tom Foley with the incorrigible Newt Gingrich. That outrage is fully detailed by the brilliant, fully annotated "The Clinton Wars", authored by Sidney Blumenthal. In September of 2009 the full record of the onslaught against Mr. Obama has yet to be analyzed and detailed, but the framework is evident and available.
The present media fiasco over President Obama's effort to provide a non industry-dominated health care is self evident. But several manifestations of media colluding with opposition forces within the government are less obvious, e.g. this case of the military (do you recall Democrat Harry Truman having to dismiss Republican five star General Douglas MacArthur, because MacArthur campaigned rather openly to cross the border into China in the Korean War, in direct contradiction to the order of the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States) the person of the top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley A. McChrystal overseeing the leaking to the media his classified report of the thousands of additional troops needed in Afghanistan (McChrystal had also been part of the military leadership covering up that Pat Tillman had been killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan, an incident for which the "decider", the draft dodger George W. Bush medaled the truly brave trooper Tillman).
Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a legitimate target for an investigation of the source of this CLASSIFIED assessment, Admiral Mullen provided the fodder, i.e. the focus of the 9/21/09 Margaret Warner Lehrer NewsHour "coverage" with which Ms. Warner badgered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a pointed effort to pressure President Obama and his lead Foreign Policy principal, the President having been headlined by the 9/21/09 N Y Times - "Obama Cautious on Troops" with a subhead "President Obama expressed skepticism about sending more troops to Afghanistan...". In other words, Ms. Warner, who we have seen before, has, as an obvious purpose, the embarrassment of the President of the United States, and the resultant likely promotion of a constant campaign for John Sidney McCain III, and the turncoat Senator Lieberman, Joe, not Avigdor the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Israel, Joe was McCain's first choice for Vice President. Don't be confused. Albert Gore's primary reason for putting Joe on the ticket in 2000 was to break the religious barrier, but also to keep Lieberman under wraps. Gore did not trust him, and his suspicions proved correct. Just Tuesday, 9/22/09, Lieberman, the "independent" senator (independent of all but Israel) sponsored legislation to heighten the nation's terror alert from coast to coast. In tandem with John McCain's blistering of President Obama's sensible awareness of the likelihood of Afghanistan becoming worse than Iraq and Vietnam, Lieberman sees the possibility of a McCain-Lieberman GOP ticket in 2012. It is a truism. Joseph I. Lieberman's only allegiance is to Israel. Which brings us THE subject for our age. Certainly since 1948.
- Amy Goodman Notes Hamas Progress Toward Palestinian/Israeli Peace -
Amy Goodman: Obama’s comments come as Hamas has renewed its acceptance of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. In a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh writes, “We would never thwart efforts to create an independent Palestinian state with borders [from] June 4, 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital.” Israel has rejected a full withdrawal to the 1967 borders and is seeking to retain the large settlement blocs that carve up the West Bank. Meanwhile, on the West Bank Israeli troops shot dead an unarmed Palestinian motorist just hours before Tuesday’s talks. The Israeli military said the victim had failed to stop at a military checkpoint.
- Israeli Historian Details Israeli History -
Amy Goodman's partner ANJALI KAMAT: And President Obama yesterday, while speaking, spoke about the need for restraint on settlements. Previously, his language included a call for a complete freeze. Diana Buttu, I wanted to ask you, do you think it was right for Mahmoud Abbas to come here for talks? He’s been criticized by Hamas, by the various groups in the West Bank and Gaza, for coming to these talks.
DIANA BUTTU: He was criticized by everybody. It wasn’t just Hamas. He was criticized by his own party, as well, by all political parties within Palestine, because the view was that this was the first time ever that there was a real push on the part of the US administration, on the part of the Europeans, to make settlements the focus. And so, coming to a meeting without having guarantees that there is going to be a settlement freeze, and not just a freeze, a dismantlement of these settlements, then many feel that he erred and that he’s walked away with virtually nothing.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did he do it?
DIANA BUTTU: I think he was under a lot of pressure. This is a president who does not have the weight of years of lobbying and diplomacy in Washington, but instead is a president who rules over a very divided area. And so, I think with a lot of pressure brought to bear by the US administration, he caved.
AMY GOODMAN: Avi Shlaim in Boston, as you look at what happened in New York, the meeting of Obama, Abbas and Netanyahu, the significance of it, what do you think needs to happen right now?
AVI SHLAIM: The significance of the meeting is that it indicated personal commitment by the American president to pushing forward the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. We’ve had a peace process for decades, but it’s been a process rather than an actual outcome of peace. So, that is the significance of the meeting. It is an attempt by the American president to kick-start the peace process, which has been dormant for eight or nine years.
But it didn’t achieve anything, except the handshake between the Israeli and the Palestinian leaders. And they’ve already started blaming each other. I allocate the blame of the--for the failure fairly and squarely to Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israelis are saying that the Palestinians are stalling and delaying. This is completely and utterly preposterous. It is Israel, by its policy of settlement expansion, which is the main obstacle to any real progress.
And the Israelis have refused to agree to total settlement freeze, which is what President Obama has asked for. And therefore it is clear what he should do next, which is make American support, economic, military and diplomatic support for Israel, conditional on a complete settlement freeze.
ANJALI KAMAT: Avi Shlaim, you’ve been following Israeli-Palestinian relations for several years now. What hope do you hold out for the possibility of real US pressure on Israel, given the power of the pro-Israel lobby over Congress? Stephen Walt, the co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, says in a recent Washington Post op-ed, “Obama and special envoy George Mitchell are negotiating with one hand tied behind their backs, and Netanyahu knows it.”
AVI SHLAIM: One thing is clear: the asymmetry of power between Israel and the Palestinians is such, it is so great that the two sides would never come to an agreement on final status between them. America has to address the balance between Israel and the Palestinians.
The Palestinians have made enough concessions. When they signed the Oslo Accord back in 1993, they agreed to give back their claim to 78 percent of mandatory Palestine, and they settled for a state on the remaining 22 percent of mandatory Palestine--that is, Gaza and West Bank. So the Palestinians cannot make any more concessions.
** If we are going to have a settlement of this hundred-year-old conflict, America has to push Israel into a settlement. That is what no American president has done in the past, partly, as you say, because of the power and influence of the Israel lobby. But the fact that no American president has exercised the full leverage that is available to him doesn’t mean that it cannot be done. It can be done.
America gives Israel money--to be precise, $3 billion a year. It gives Israel arms. And it gives Israel advice. Israel takes the money. It takes the arms. And it rejects the device. So what President Obama needs to do is to make American economic aid and military aid to Israel conditional on Israel taking note of American wishes for the settlement of this conflict. **
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Shlaim, what you’re saying is extremely significant, given who you are, leading scholar, renown in Israel and around the world, served in the Israeli military, now you teach at University of Oxford in Britain. Do you support the BDS movement, the Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement against Israel?
AVI SHLAIM: I do not support the academic boycott of Israel, because I reject it in principle. I’m a believer in free speech, including free speech for Israeli academics. So I’m, in principle, opposed to an academic boycott of Israeli academics and Israeli universities.
** On the other hand, I do support economic sanctions against Israel, because what it is doing is illegal. It is acting illegally. The settlements on the West Bank are illegal, all of them, without any exception, and therefore it is quite right and justified for the American community to--for the international community to put pressure on Israel, to apply pressure on Israel to end the occupation.
And America is, of course, the leading actor within the international community, but there is also European Union, the twenty-seven members of European Union. They also ought to apply economic sanctions against Israel, because Israel has a highly beneficial trade association agreement with EU. And the preamble to this agreement says that Israel must respect the human rights of the Palestinians within its territory, within--under Israeli occupation. Israel systematically violates the human rights of the Palestinians, and therefore EU would be fully justified in suspending this trade agreement until Israel abides by its obligations to respect human rights. **
ANJALI KAMAT: Well, on that note--
AVI SHLAIM: And we have--last week, we had an important report by the UN Human Rights Council, led by Judge Richard Goldstone, an inquiry into the Israeli war in Gaza last December. And it found that there was a pattern of Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, not one or two, but a systematic pattern of war crimes. And the conclusion is that Israeli commanders should face individual criminal responsibility.
It is perfectly reasonable for the American president to turn to Benjamin Netanyahu and say, “This report is very disturbing. It reveals unacceptable behavior on the part of Israel and on the part of Hamas. This is no way to behave, if your aim is peace. And we would like to see a definite change in the pattern of Israeli behavior towards the Palestinians.”
ANJALI KAMAT: Well, Diana Buttu, the US did respond to Judge Goldstone’s report that Professor Shlaim mentioned. The US ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said the White House had serious concerns about the report’s focus, excessive focus, on Israel. Given this, can you respond to the US response to the UN report? And also, you’ve had long experience working with negotiations. Do you believe the US can be an honest broker?
DIANA BUTTU: At this point in time, I don’t think so. I think that the US has taken the role of being Israel’s lawyer, as some have put it in the past. But I think that that can be changed.
The question is, is whether the United States is going to focus on upholding human rights and international law, and as Professor Shlaim has mentioned, the two are intricately linked. The issue of Israeli settlements and the way that Israel has flied in the face of international law vis-à-vis the settlements, its treatment of the Palestinian is also a violation of law. And so, the question becomes whether the United States is going to step forward and use the tools that it has to actually effect pressure on Israel.
In the past, when Oslo was signed fifteen years ago, Israel was actually the primary beneficiary of the signing of these agreements. Thirty-four countries established diplomatic relations with Israel. It managed to get economic contracts and ties with countries all around the world, including in the Arab world. And so, Israel has always been a beneficiary of these so-called talks, but it’s never really felt the stick of actually violating international law. So, for me, given the past history of the United States in the way that it’s operated in the past, it has, in fact, been Israel’s lawyer, but I think there is something positive that can come. I think that--
AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds.
DIANA BUTTU: --if the Obama administration looks forward and starts to really use that stick, then I think we can move forward.
AMY GOODMAN: Diana Buttu, we want to thank you very much for being with us, and Professor Avi Shlaim. His new book, Israel and Palestine. - DemocracyNow 9/23/09
The 9/16/09 pm edition, which follows, describes Naomi Klein's report of the Toronto Film Festival extraordinary protest against its Spotlighting of Tel Aviv, Israel. Interestingly, that protest was followed in but two days by a 9/18/09 N Y Times article by Ethan Bronner and a Dina Kraft - a lengthy eighteen paragraph piece extolling the virtues of Tel Aviv, with "an undulating skyline of shimmering architecture", but without juxtapositioning their hoped-for "Barcelona of the Middle East" for its 1.5 million languishing Jewish population versus the 1.3 million Palestinians, being starved under Israeli occupation in Gaza, having been subjected to bombardments that have left only six percent of its ancient aquifer with potable water, BY THE DESIGN OF ITS ISRAELI OCCUPIERS! Mr. Bronner and Ms. Kraft are not familiar with Israeli historian Ilan Pappe - and, also by design, neither are the editors of The New York Times, the functionaries of the Anti-Defamation League, the "konspiratsia" of AIPAC, nor the Holocaust activist Ellie Wiesel. These Jewish pressure groups are powerful. For example, Mr. Wiesel is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Our question. When has Ellie EVER promoted peace?! "For as you sow, ye are like to reap."
- Amy Goodman Has A Message for Netanyahu's Israel -
Amy Goodman: Obama to Meet with Netanyahu and Abbas.
The White House has announced President Obama will hold a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in New York on Tuesday. The meeting was scheduled after US special envoy George Mitchell left Israel with no deal on a resumption of peace talks in the region. Talks have been stalled since Israel invaded the Gaza Strip last December. Abbas has repeatedly said that talks will not restart until Israel commits to a complete freeze of settlement building in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Amy Goodman: Israeli Troops Kill Two Palestinians
In Gaza, two Palestinians died after being shot by an Israeli tank Sunday. Israel claimed the men were planting explosives near the Israeli-Gaza border.
Amy Goodman: UN Body Urges Israel to Allow Nuclear Inspections
Overriding Western objections, a United Nations nuclear conference passed a resolution Friday directly criticizing Israel and its secret nuclear weapons arsenal. The UN body voted to urge Israel to accede to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and place all Israeli nuclear sites under UN inspections. The resolution cited “concern about the threat posed by the proliferation of nuclear weapons for the security and stability of the Middle East.” Israeli delegate David Danieli denounced the vote as “openly hostile to the state of Israel” and accused Iran and Syria of “creating a diplomatic smoke screen” to cover up their “pursuit of nuclear weapons.”
David Danieli: “The delegation of Israel deplores this resolution, which serves no purpose of the IAEA and its general conference. The state of Israel will not cooperate in any matter with this resolution, which is only aiming at reinforcing political hostilities and division lines in the Middle East region."
Iranian delegate Ali Asghar Soltanieh praised the UN vote.
Ali Asghar Soltanieh: “This is a very good news and a triumph of the oppressed nation of Palestine, that their voice was heard in the international community, in the IAEA, and action was made to let them know that they are not left alone, homeless, bombarded by Israelis, and being deprived from any basic rights.”
The UN meeting also adopted a resolution last week calling for a Mideast free of nuclear weapons in a near-consensus vote. Israel was the only nation to vote against the measure. - DemocracyNow 9/21/09
Post Script - Gaza Water Supply Nears Collapse
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the International Committee of the Red Cross is warning Palestinians could lose access to a safe water supply at any moment. The warning follows a UN report showing Gaza’s underground water system is on the verge of collapse. The system is Gaza’s only source of drinking water. Just five to ten percent of the aquifer is currently fit for human consumption. - Amy Goodman 9/18/09
An article by Bill Carter in the 9/19/09 N Y Times (Mr. Carter on 10/5/09 will have his mettle tested by the return, with all his baggage in tow, of John Donald Imus Jr. to the airwaves in the lead role of defending the Netanyahu & Lieberman regime, now in the crosshairs of the United Nations AND the rest of the civilized world, as reported by Amy Goodman in the above declaration). Ms. Goodman has the last word, but first Carter and The Times.
- Networks Deplore Fox Ad On Coverage of Protests -
The hostility between the Fox News Channel and its television news competitors, usually barely submerged, exploded into open recriminations Friday over a newspaper advertisement in which Fox accused its competitors of missing the story of the so-called antitax protests in Washington last Saturday.
One of Fox’s main prime-time commentators, Glenn Beck, had been vocal in supporting the event and had a two-hour special on the air Saturday during the event. But Fox News executives generally argue that Mr. Beck is what they label “programming” and not news, because his show is an opinion program.
The heated level of rhetoric was unusual in what is a frequent crossfire between CNN and Fox News. A senior CNN executive acknowledged that the network had never before confronted Fox so openly. Later Friday, CNN ran its own promotional ad on the air saying “Fox News: Distorting Not Reporting.”
Kris Coratti, a spokeswoman for The New York Post, said in an e-mail response that while the paper, a Murdoch rag along with The Wall Street Journal, had a policy of not accepting advertising based on false claims, it was the paper’s judgment that “Fox News was expressing its opinion on how its competitors covered the story in an ad to promote itself.”
- Accused of Promoting the antitax gathering, not just covering it. -
As for Fox News, no executive would respond to questions about the ad. A spokeswoman cited a statement from Michael Tammero, the vice president for marketing, as Fox’s only response. Mr. Tammero did not address the specifics of the coverage provided by the other networks, but seemed to try to expand the accusations to include a contention that Fox’s competitors had given insufficient attention to events of interest to conservative viewers. - Bill Carter 9/19/09
- Again, Amy Goodman and DemocracyNow: Fox News Producer Caught Rallying Anti-Obama Protesters
The website Huffington Post has revealed a producer for Fox News helped rally the crowd during last weekend’s anti-Obama protest in Washington. Video from the rally shows Fox News producer Heidi Noonan raising her arms to urge protesters to cheer louder. Fox News acknowledged Noonan had made a mistake and said she was disciplined. The protest had been heavily promoted by Fox News, especially by anchor Glenn Beck. - DemocracyNow 9/21/09
Skewers Max Baucus
- A 'Winner's? Curse' -
Uwe E. Reinhardt, a Princeton economist, has a gloomy forecast in assessing Senator Max Baucus's health care proposal. Mr. Reinhardt, writing Friday on the Economix blog says the Baucus plan gives insurance industry almost everything it could have wanted. But he describes a potential "winner's curse".
Because the Baucus plan does little to control runaway medical costs, Mr. Reinhardt says, insurers will still need to raise premiums year after year to keep up - fueling the rising fury of a public that, under Baucus rules, would be forced by a federal mandate to buy the increasingly expensive insurance. (Mr. Reinhardt dismisses the proposed insurance alternative, from new non-profit cooperatives, as "mice that roar.")
"So imagine, if you will, solid-middle-class Harry and Louise, sitting at their kitchen table and beholding the latest premium notice from their friendly private health insurer," Mr. Reinhardt writes. "The private health insurance industry will find itself to be the proverbial flak catcher, and the public's clamor for a public health plan can not be denied."
P.S. - President Obama will, finally, demonstrate to Congress their public responsibility, and that combination of President Obama and the Democratic Party will carry the day.
-- 9/16/09 pm edition. The presentation of real news in real time is complicated by the palpable bias in journalism today, for which this website is titled, bias which saturates the depiction of the most important stories of our time. As an example, the 9/9/09 President Barack Obama address to a Joint Session was one of the most remarkable, salient, forthright, direct and candid addresses to the Congress of the United States in eighty years. But to the US Media/Press it was business as usual. Mr. Obama was faced with, after eight years of Bush/Cheney, the collapse of the financial system and the worst recession since The Great Depression. As is recognized by all, with the exception of our journalists, he delivered one of the most remarkable, salient, forthright, direct and candid addresses to Congress in eighty years. For your referral - Obama in 2012! -
This September of 2009 is also remarkable for several unprecedented revelations about political issues, both here and abroad, normally concealed from public view. Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow on 9/14/09, interviews Ms. Naomi Klein concerning the 10-day 34th Toronto International Film Festival, one of the major worldwide presentations of film, the site this year of an extraordinary protest against Israel.
- No Celebration of Occupation: 1,500 Artists and Writers Sign Letter Protesting Toronto Film Festival Decision to Spotlight Tel Aviv -
A protest at the Toronto International Film Festival has taken center stage after a group of artists and writers signed a letter of protest against the festival’s decision to spotlight the city of Tel Aviv. Activists say the TIFF spotlight plays into Israel’s attempt to improve its global image in the wake of the assault on the Gaza Strip and the ongoing occupation of Palestinian land. Over 1,500 people have signed the letter, called “The Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation,” including Jane Fonda, Viggo Mortensen, Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte. We speak with journalist and author Naomi Klein, who helped draft the letter.
Amy Goodman: Explain why the Toronto International Film Festival is celebrating Tel Aviv.
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, this is a very--this is a controversial question. Cameron Bailey, the co-director of the festival, says that it was entirely his decision, that there was no political interference, and we take him at his word. He’s very respected in the film community. But what we are saying is that, whether knowingly or not, this decision fits in with a campaign, a very aggressive campaign, that has been launched by Israel’s Foreign Ministry to use culture really as a weapon to distract attention from the occupation and from the allegations of war crimes in Gaza, but even before the Gaza attack.
And what’s interesting is that in--Toronto has been selected to test market something that is called “Brand Israel,” the rebranding of Israel. And this is because Toronto has really been a kind of a battleground. It has a very strong Palestinian community and solidarity community. It also has a very large and active Jewish community. And it’s been a battle zone. So, actually, Canada has more Israeli diplomats than any other country in the world, because this--including the United States--despite our relatively small population (Canada), because the Israeli government sees Canada as a very important battleground, as a very important testing ground. So Toronto has been selected to sort of test-drive this rebranding campaign for Israel.
And, you know, it’s not our imagination; it’s not a quiet conspiracy. We’ve read about this in the New York Times and Reuters reports. And I’ll just give you one example. A couple of months after the attack on Gaza, as we remember, this was really a turning point in terms of world opinion with regards to Israel. There were protests around the world. In London, there were an estimated 100,000 people in the streets condemning Israel’s actions. Opinion polls were showing a plummeting of support. And more and more people were starting to talk about using tactics like the tactics that were used against South Africa during the apartheid years, saying that there has to be strategies beyond just talk. And so, it was in this context that a top official in Israel’s Foreign Ministry said--and this was quoted in the New York Times--“We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater company exhibits. This way, you show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.”
And so, this has been playing out at a lot of cultural festivals, and you’ve covered this on the show before. The Paris Book Fair, which is an enormously important book festival, had a special spotlight on Israel for its sixtieth birthday a couple of years ago. The Turin Book Fair also did. But this--and there were protests- -but they were much quieter than what’s happened now in Toronto, and that’s because of Gaza, I would say. It’s because now, because of the year that we’re in, because of the continued impunity for Israeli war crimes, people are drawing a line and saying this is no time to celebrate.
The Lehrer NewsHour and Gwen Ifill's 9/15/09 mockery of what we've just read, with the ready complicity of the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, whose affront to his American audience should create a groundswell demand for an immediate halt to the three to four billion$ we give EACH YEAR to the Netanyahu & Lieberman regime. Those monie$ are desperately needed by the American people NOW, as we face our most severe recession since the Great Depression. It is an outrage were we to continue funding such an unworthy "friend" as present day Israel.
- U.N. Finds Evidence of War Crimes in Gaza Fighting -
GWEN IFILL: Now, a strongly worded U.N. report on the Israeli campaign in Gaza. The report focuses on last December's 32-day air and ground campaign in Gaza. The Israeli military offensive followed years of rocket attacks launched into southern Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian militants. Different accounts place the number of Palestinian casualties at or around 1,400, including an undetermined number of civilians. The Israeli government reported 13 Israelis killed during the three weeks of fighting, 10 of them soldiers. The report concludes that Israel deliberately targeted civilians by launching military operations against homes, factories, schools and hospitals in a deliberate policy of disproportionate force. The 574-page report focuses primarily on what it calls grave breaches by Israeli forces, including willful killing, torture, or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and extensive destruction of property. The Israeli government did not cooperate with the investigation. The report also determined that Palestinian militant groups violated international law in part because they failed to distinguish between military targets and the civilian population. Israeli officials said today the final report is one-sided, a farce of a human rights fact-finding commission. Hamas also criticized the report, saying it was equating the victim and the aggressor. The report and its recommendations will be presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva later this month.
I spoke with Justice Richard Goldstone, who led the U.N. fact-finding mission, from the United Nations earlier this evening. Justice Goldstone, welcome. We saw what your report's conclusions were today, but what was the impetus for it?
- Impetus for the report -
RICHARD GOLDSTONE, U.N. Human Rights Council: Well, the impetus for it was really the resolution in January of the Human Rights Council which became seized of the issue and called for a fact-finding mission to be dispatched urgently to the region to investigate violations, alleged violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, the law of war. And that's where the origin is to be found.
There was then some debate about the terms of the mandate, and eventually I was given a mandate, together with three fellow members of the fact-finding mission, which we considered to be even-handed and which would allow us to look at all relevant facts and circumstances and allegations in the context of the military operations at the beginning of the year.
GWEN IFILL: The term "even-handed" is the problem that Israel has with the conclusions in the report. Your criticism of Israel seems so much harsher than that of the Palestinians. Why is that?
RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, you know, the allegations against the Palestinian armed groups relate to the firing of rockets and mortars, and there isn't much dispute -- there isn't any dispute that they fired those rockets and mortars.
What we looked into was the effect on the civilian population of southern Israel, who were at the receiving end of those rockets and mortars. That was the issue.
In respect to alleged war crimes committed by the Israel Defense Force, it was a lot more complicated. There were 36 incidents we had to look into, some of them disputed. Many cannot be disputed.
So, you know, I don't believe that one can sort of count words or count chapters and say, well, the report deals in X number of pages or X number of words with rockets and mortars in comparison into Y or Z number of pages or chapters dealing with Israeli violations.
GWEN IFILL: You say that you investigated 36 separate incidents. Without Israel's cooperation in getting to the bottom of this, how could you reach a fair conclusion?
RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, we had a lot of information to go on. Firstly, we were in Gaza for a number of days. We were able to see with our own eyes what physical damage was done. We were able to hear and see many of the victims who were affected by it, and I'm talking about a lot of women and children and men who lost loved ones, who were injured themselves.
They know what happened to them. And we were able to make an assessment of the credibility with which they spoke to us.
And we had a lot of information that came from Israel, both from the government -- there was a long 160-odd page report from the Israeli government giving their version. We took that fully into account in making our finding. And we had wonderful information, both written and, more important, oral. We had witnesses from important Israeli and Palestinian nongovernmental organizations.
So, really, we had a pretty full picture. Obviously, it would have been preferable to have been able to have as interlocutors members, senior members of the Israeli government and defense force, but obviously we had to do the best we could without that. And the ball's now in their court.
If we've got facts wrong, if they want to contradict them, well, that's absolutely their right. But I find disappointing a simple rejection of the report on grounds that don't begin to deal with the merits or the facts.
- The next step -
GWEN IFILL: Did your investigation lead you to conclude that there are individuals who should be held culpable either on the Israeli or the Palestinian side of this?
RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, that wasn't part of our mandate. We looked into the question as to whether violations, war crimes, violations of human rights law were committed. It would be up to a criminal investigator, a prosecutor, hopefully in Israel, hopefully in the Gaza, to look into the question of individual guilt. That wasn't part of our agenda.
GWEN IFILL: But you have recommended reparations be paid to people who suffered?
RICHARD GOLDSTONE: That's correct.
GWEN IFILL: Why is that? And who would pay it, if there's no one to point the finger at?
RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, it's a question of government responsibility and possibly the international community. But reparations for victims would be relevant even without establishing the guilt of any particular individual.
GWEN IFILL: So what happens with this now? It goes to the U.N. Security Council, it goes to a war crimes tribunal, and what if Israel chooses not to cooperate in the next step?
RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, you know, we've done our work. We've established to the best of our ability and, I would suggest, in an even-handed manner. We've established the facts or some of the facts that are relevant.
We didn't look into every incident, obviously. We had three short months to do our work. And we chose 36 incidents in Gaza to look into.
But the recommendation is that the Israeli authorities and the Gaza authorities should themselves have open public investigations, and there have been none today. The Israeli investigations have been by the military. There have been secret inquiries. That doesn't satisfy -- certainly doesn't satisfy any reasonable, objective observer.
So we've recommended that the Security Council should require domestic investigations, if they're not held in an appropriate manner, to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court.
GWEN IFILL: Justice Richard Goldstone of the U.N. fact-finding mission, thank you so much.
RICHARD GOLDSTONE: A pleasure.
** Israel's response to the report **
GWEN IFILL: We get the Israeli response now from Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States.
Welcome, Mr. Ambassador.
MICHAEL OREN, Israeli Ambassador to the United States: Gwen, hello.
GWEN IFILL: Just heard Justice Goldstone say the ball is in your court. What about this report is right, and what about it is wrong?
MICHAEL OREN: Well, let's begin by first expressing Israel's regret for all civilian casualties, whether on the Israeli side or on the Palestinian side. Israel does its utmost to avoid inflicting civilian casualties during military operations. This contrasts us very fundamentally, profoundly with Hamas and Gaza, which does its utmost to maximize civilian casualties on the Israeli side and exults in civilian casualties on its own side, declaring them as martyrs.
The operation in Gaza last winter followed years in which Israel was subjected to rocket fire, over 7,000 rockets fired into southern Israel. At one point, almost a million Israelis were under rocket fire, rockets that were deliberately targeted at our neighborhoods, at our nursery schools, at our hospitals (Evidence!).
And it followed the evacuation of Gaza, in which Israel evacuated 9,000 of its civilians, uprooted its settlements, pulled out its army bases in an attempt to create peaceful conditions along the Gaza border with Israel, and in return it just got this murderous rocket fire (A rewrite of Ariel Sharon's history!).
Ultimately, Israel had no choice but to summon its civilian army and to defend itself. We had appealed to the U.N. for relief. Israeli leaders begged Hamas to extend a cease-fire (And Hamas did. See Avi Shlaim!). All we got was aggression. We had no choice but to defend ourselves here, Gwen.
GWEN IFILL: Why didn't Israel participate, cooperate, tell its side of the story to this U.N. commission?
MICHAEL OREN: Well, first of all, the Human Rights Commission has condemned Israel more frequently than all other nations in the world combined, more than Libya, more than North Korea, more than Saudi Arabia. It's hardly an impartial body. This is the same Human Rights Commission that completely ignored Hamas rocket fire into Israel over the course of four years.
The mandate of the commission said that Israel was guilty of war crimes, said nothing about Hamas in the actual mandate. Even one of the judges involved in the commission had published a letter accusing Israel of unwarranted aggression.
And then, finally, the commission itself, the report, the investigation took place under the auspices of the Hamas-run government in Gaza. Hamas actually picked the witnesses for this commission. So Israel basically was the equivalent of being summoned to a court in which its guilt was already presumed, in which one of the jurors had already declared Israel guilty, and which the witnesses for the prosecution were, in fact, the murderers.
I can't think of any country in the world which would participate in such a farce of justice.
GWEN IFILL: There were also some Israelis, NGOs, nongovernmental organization representatives, the father of an Israeli soldier who's being held, who were flown to Geneva to testify before this committee. Do you not accept their testimony at all?
MICHAEL OREN: I don't know anything about their testimony. The report just came in this afternoon. It's 570 pages long. Israel is a democracy. Israelis have a right to speak out in any forums that they want to. This was an Israeli government decision not to participate, not to cooperate with an investigation which we thought was deeply, deeply biased against us from the very beginning.
- Israel's internal investigations -
GWEN IFILL: Even if you felt it was biased, now it's out there and it says things like you're guilty of war crimes, torture, a grave breach of the Geneva Convention, how do you wipe that slate clean?
MICHAEL OREN: I don't think we have to wipe the slate clean. I think you look at the mandate of this investigation. You saw the way it was conducted, under whose auspices it was conducted.
Israel has deeply investigated its conduct of this operation. We have an open judiciary, a free judiciary. We investigated numerable complaints of irregularities. The army was cleared of virtually all of them (Oh?). In the few cases where it wasn't cleared, they're being thoroughly investigated and even prosecuted.
GWEN IFILL: But Justice...
MICHAEL OREN: There is a clear record established by Israel of the way the campaign was conducted and the immense efforts that were taken to avoid civilian casualties, including leaf-letting civilian areas, making hundreds of thousands of phone calls, sending MSS messages to areas that were about to be attacked to civilians, sort of sacrificing the element of surprise, risking our own soldiers' lives in order to minimize those civilian casualties. All that is a matter of record.
GWEN IFILL: Pardon my earlier interruption. Justice Goldstone said that those internal investigations were not independent and therefore not reliable.
MICHAEL OREN: This is an independent judiciary of a democratic country. I think that, once you start establishing the precedent that democratic countries can't investigate themselves, I think you've got a problem.
I think this report creates a problem not just for Israel, but for all free democracies in the world. It's a victory for terror. It is a major setback for any country, democratic country that is having to face war against an un-uniformed terrorist organization in a densely populated civilian area. I don't think the United States would like to see a similar report mounted against its conduct of its operations in Afghanistan.
GWEN IFILL: Now, Hamas wasn't particularly excited about the contents of this report, either. They felt that it equated the aggressor with the victim. Is there any way that you feel that the two of you might at least agree on this point, that maybe this report is not worth the paper it's printed on? Or do you believe that this is a starting point for a deeper conversation and investigation about the conflict?
MICHAEL OREN: I don't think so. I think that there are discussions going on in Jerusalem tonight between President Obama's special envoy, Senator Mitchell, representatives of the Israeli government, to get peace talks back on track between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the same Palestinian Authority who was overthrown violently by Hamas (In an election supervised by the UN!) in Gaza. I think that is where the discussions should take place, not in a one-sided, biased report whose conclusions were foregone.
GWEN IFILL: Do you believe in any way this report could affect those talks?
MICHAEL OREN: I think it can only harm the ability of free democracies in the world to defend themselves.
GWEN IFILL: Ambassador Michael Oren from the state of Israel, thank you very much.
MICHAEL OREN: Thank you, Gwen.
Collaboration of Interviewer & Interviewee
Perhaps Since Watergate!
Much as the above information is selectively redacted by our commercial media, and the so-called public Media, so it is also excised from the BBC. A pattern?
Once again, on 9/16/09, Amy Goodman's DemocracyNow fills the breach, this time with the inimitable Norman Finkelstein -
AMY GOODMAN: A United Nations fact-finding mission has found Israel, quote, “punished and terrorized” civilians in its three-week assault on Gaza earlier this year and cited strong evidence that Israeli forces committed “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions. More than 1,400 Palestinians, about a third of them women and children, were killed in the assault. Thirteen Israelis died.
The 575-page report came at the end of a six-month inquiry and was based on dozens of interviews and investigations. The inquiry was led by Judge Richard Goldstone, the former chief prosecutor of the international courts for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Judge Goldstone said Israel deliberately attacked civilians and failed to take precautions to minimize loss of civilian life.
JUDGE RICHARD GOLDSTONE: We came to the conclusion, on the basis of the facts we found, that there is strong evidence to establish that numerous serious violations of international law, both humanitarian law and human rights law, were committed by Israel during the military operations in Gaza. The mission concluded that actions amounting to war crimes and possibly, in some respects, crimes against humanity were committed by the Israel Defense Force.
AMY GOODMAN: Judge Goldstone also said there was evidence that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes by firing rockets into southern Israel.
JUDGE RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Turning to the Palestinian armed groups, there is no question that the firing of rockets and mortars was deliberate and calculated to cause loss of life and injury to civilians and damage to civilian structures. The mission found that these actions also amount to serious war crimes and also possibly crimes against humanity.
AMY GOODMAN: Judge Goldstone’s report will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council later this month. The investigators recommended that the UN Security Council should call on Israel and the Palestinian authorities to launch their own investigations into the conflict within three months. If either side failed to do that, the council should refer the matter to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in The Hague within six months.
Israel, which had refused to cooperate with the investigation, claimed Goldstone’s investigation was biased against Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held consultations with top government officials last night. A senior Israeli staffer told Ha’aretz newspaper, quote, “The goal is to avoid a slippery slope which would lead Israel to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”
Well, Norman Finkelstein joins us here in our firehouse studio, the author of a number of books, including The Holocaust Industry, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and Beyond Chutzpah. His forthcoming book about Israel’s assault on Gaza is due out at the end of the year, on the first anniversary of the attack.
We welcome you to Democracy Now! Now, this report has just really come out hours ago. Perhaps you’re among the few people outside those who have written the report who have actually read the majority of its contents. Talk about the significance of this.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, the report is the last in a large number of reports that have been issued on the Gaza massacre. There were two significant reports issued by Amnesty International, five reports issued by Human Rights Watch, and a whole slew of Israeli-based human rights organizations have issued reports. But this was the most awaited report of all of them. It was commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council. And Richard Goldstone, as you mentioned in your own introductory remarks, is a significant international figure, legal figure.
So the report basically is consistent with the findings of the other human rights organizations, that Israel targeted civilians, Israel targeted civilians who were carrying white flags, Israel systematically targeted the Palestinian infrastructure. The findings were consistent with those of the other human rights organizations: Israel is guilty of a very significant number of war crimes. And also, the findings which were--other reports, the same conclusions, that the Palestinians were not using hospitals to hide Hamas officials. There’s no evidence that the ambulances Israel targeted were carrying Hamas militants or ammunition. And most significantly, in terms of the coverage during the Gaza massacre, the report found, as did Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, there’s no evidence whatsoever--and I would want to underline that--there’s no evidence whatsoever that Hamas was guilty of human shielding. But on the other hand, there is significant evidence, actually copious evidence, that Israel was guilty of human shielding.
AMY GOODMAN: But on other issues, of Palestinian militants committing crimes against humanity.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: The report found that the Palestinians were guilty of war crimes because of its indiscriminate and intentional firing on civilians in Israel. I’m not trying to make any apologies, but I want to get the facts right. The Goldstone report, like the Amnesty report and the others, you have to look carefully at the proportions. About nine-tenths--literally, about nine-tenths of the Goldstone report, like the Dugard report, like the Amnesty report, about nine-tenths was devoted to Israeli war crimes; about one-tenth was devoted to Palestinian war crimes. And you have to understand why, because you have to look at the comparable damage. The ratio of killings was about a hundred to one: about--exactly thirteen on the Israeli side, about fourteen hundred on the Palestinian side. If you look at the damage, the damage is actually quite astonishing. Israel just systematically blasted everything in sight and reduced it to rubble, whereas on the Israeli side they say that several houses were damaged and one was almost completely destroyed. So if you look at the facts, the facts on the ground, the proportions in the reports, including the Goldstone report, are correct. It’s about ten to one.
And that’s why yesterday’s--or today’s headline in the New York Times is so misleading. It’s like a Pravda headline. It says the Goldstone report finds both sides guilty of war crimes. Well, that’s technically true, but an accurate headline would have read, “Goldstone reports Israel guilty of massive war crimes and also faults Hamas.” That’s what a true headline would have read.
** The 9/16/09 Neil Conan Ken Rudin Talk of the "NATION" (EVERYTHING on TOTN is carefully screened) is as invalid as is Michael Oren on the Middle East. South Carolina's James DeMint is on tape - "if we can stop him on health care, we'll break him, this will be his Waterloo (paraphrased)"! Closing the time frame during the President's Health Care address to the Congress, the South Carolinian Joe Wilson (never heard from before) shouts "You Lie". Unprecedented! And yet, Conan, Rudin, NPR's Mara Liasson and some commentator from South Carolina, see THIS as "business as usual", not directly connected, and not particularly notable. Outrageous! **
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation and has claimed the UN Human Rights Council that ordered it was biased against Israel. This is some of what the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson, under the direction of the Bar Bouncer Avigdor Lieberman, Yigal Palmor had to say about the inquiry.
YIGAL PALMOR: This fact-finding mission was established in sin. This is why Israel was unable to cooperate with it. The resolution, in virtue of which the commission was established, was so extreme in its phrasing and in its prejudging of any conclusion that all European countries and other democratic countries did not support it. It was adopted with the support of human rights models such as Libya, Bangladesh, Cuba. This, of course, has no moral value whatsoever. So we didn’t feel that this was binding in any way.
In spite of everything I’ve just said, Israel is going to study this report and to examine it very carefully, as we have with all the national and international human rights reports. We are taking this seriously, and we are committed, as always, to abide by international law.
AMY GOODMAN: Israel’s response to the Goldstone report. Your response, Norman Finkelstein?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, Richard Goldstone is a very respected jurist, and he also has a long record of being very supportive of Israel. If I’m not mistaken, he sits on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem board of directors.
Now, when the UN Human Rights Council asked Goldstone to chair the mission, originally his mandate was just to investigate Israeli crimes. He himself said he couldn’t fulfill that mandate, unless it was modified and included crimes on all sides. The Human Rights Council said, “Fine. We’ll modify the mandate, and we’ll accept your terms.” At that point, Richard Goldstone accepted to head the mission.
So you have to ask yourself the question: if what the gentleman said were true, why did Goldstone accept? If it were so biased, he always had the option of saying no. Why would a well-known supporter of Israel have accepted that mandate if it were biased against Israel?
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think, Norman Finkelstein, are the limitations of the report?
** NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: The main limitation of the report is it’s all cast in the language of violations of the laws of war. And the fundamental fact about what happened in Gaza is it wasn’t a war. There was no war in Gaza. That’s the main misunderstanding about what happened there. In fact, one of Israel’s leading strategic analysts, he said--after what happened in Gaza, he said the one mistake Israelis are making is that there was a war there. He said there was no war. There were no battles in Gaza.
The picture is fairly clear. Israel flew about 3,000 sorties over Gaza. Every plane came back. None was damaged. None was downed. There was no fighting in Gaza. If you read the reports that were issued by the--the testimonies of the Israeli soldiers, the one consistent theme in all of the testimonies was they never met any Hamas militants, they never engaged in any battles. Some of the Israeli soldiers expressed exasperation: “We came here to fight. We’re not fighting anyone.” There was no--there were no battles. There were no Hamas militants in the field. The basic fact was, as a couple of Israeli soldiers said--one of them said, “This was like PlayStation, a computer game.” Another Israeli soldier said, literally--I’m quoting exactly, almost word for word--he said, “It was like a child with a magnifying glass burning ants.” That’s what Gaza was like.
One soldier after another, literally--I wish listeners would just bring up the report. It’s called “Breaking the Silence.” And then, under--enter under the search mechanism, just enter the word “insane.” One soldier after another after another after another said Israel used insane amounts of firepower. Insane amounts of firepower. There were no soldiers, no battles, but they’re using insane amounts of firepower. One soldier said--two soldiers, actually, talked about how the ground was trembling because of all the bombing and all of the missiles and all of the rockets. Another said that “We were told--even though we were firing in the distance, we were told to evacuate the houses we were in, because the shaking from the distance was going to cause the house to collapse over our heads.”
It was a massacre in Gaza. And you don’t really see that, because they’re measuring everything against what they call the laws of war. But you’re applying laws of war to a massacre. There was no war there. **
AMY GOODMAN: Israel called the attack Operation Cast Lead. It’s interesting, Judge Goldstone’s daughter was interviewed on Israeli army radio. She spoke in Hebrew. And she responded about her father. She described him as a Zionist who loves Israel. She said that “My father took on this job, because he thought he’s doing the best thing for peace for everyone and also for Israel.” The significance of this report now? The UN Human Rights Council will meet the day after Yom Kippur--
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: --in about two weeks, to meet specifically in a special session on this report.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: And what does this mean for Israel? The quote of the Israeli official to Ha’aretz, saying, “We don’t want to be put into the International Criminal Court.”
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I personally don’t think that’s yet going to go very far, because the US has effective power to block it.
What’s significant about the report, in my opinion, and what’s significant about what happened in Gaza, I think it marks a major turning point. It’s like the Sharpville massacre in South Africa. Now, Sharpville is not Soweto, but Sharpville was a turning point. Richard Goldstone is a liberal. Richard Goldstone is very supportive of Israel. And it’s now marking the breakup of liberal Jewish support for Israel. And as we both know and as all of your listeners know, Jews are overwhelmingly liberal in their sentiment. Seventy-nine percent of Jews in the last election voted for Obama. And what you’re seeing now is the breakup of Jewish support for Israel.
You saw during the Gaza massacre you had some of the old-timers like Alan Dershowitz, Michael Walzer, characters--Martin Peretz, characters like that, you know, kind of comical figures coming out supporting Israel. But if you looked at the younger Jewish--the younger Jewish constituency--bloggers like Matt Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and so forth--they all opposed the Gaza massacre from almost like day one or day two. And then you had significant defections, like Andrew Sullivan, who--not Jewish, but still a significant figure, who also came out against the Gaza massacre.
So I think now what you’re seeing, especially with the Goldstone report, especially with his stature, especially because he’s Jewish, especially because he’s a liberal, what it’s signaling now, is the breakup of Jewish support and liberal support--and those are basically the same thing--the breakup of liberal Jewish support for Israel.
AMY GOODMAN: Norman Finkelstein, I want to thank you for being with us, just recently back from Gaza, visited in June. Norman Finkelstein has written a number of books--among them, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and Beyond Chutzpah. His forthcoming book about Israel’s assault on Gaza is due out on the first anniversary of the attack, on December 27th.
-- 9/14/09 am edition. Find - "public option". Coming next: The Plot Against America. Philip Roth? Dexter Filkins (8/6/06)? James Bamford (2004 - A Pretext For War)?
No! This Brian Ross purported expose' of FBI Director Louis Freeh may be that evidence which establishes that the informed speculation over the last decade regarding September 11, 2001, has been verified - that the 9/11 attack was generally known, in advance, by key individuals in the Bush administration, i.e. Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz - who were pushing for the elimination of Saddam Hussein, and would somehow use a 9/11 as the motivation for an invasion of Iraq, but were caught off guard by the severity of the attack. In that the Ray McGovern/Margaret Warner exchange confirms, along with testimony by Bush's first Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that the first meeting of Mr. Bush's Principals was dominated by Iraq, it becomes clear that there was no logical or foreign policy reason to take this country to war, EXCEPT a clandestine plot to use the resources of the United States to eliminate what Israel viewed as an obstacle to its plan to control the Levant, AND an oil resource for the Israelis to facilitate their development.
of the Last Half-Century
- ABC World News Tonight 9/10/09 -
NEWSCASTER: Tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. President Obama is going to observe a moment of silence marking the time that each attack occurred. Since that day, though, a nagging question has remained. Could the attacks have been prevented? A top FBI operative says he knows the answer and he's speaking out for the first time. Here's our Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross. Brian.
BRIAN ROSS: That's right. He's coming out of the shadows for the first time to tell ABC News the FBI had hijack ring leader Mohammed Atta in its sights in 2001, but shifted focus to an easier case.
"As a highly praised undercover operative for the FBI for the last 13 years, he was known as Mohammed. His real name is Elie Assaad, a 36-year-old native of Lebanon."
ELIE ASSAAD: I gave 13 years and maybe now is the time people to understand what I did.
BRIAN ROSS: Eight years after the 9/11 attacks, Assaad is now going public for his account of how he says he and the FBI missed a chance to stop the hijackers.
BRIAN ROSS TO ELIE ASSAAD: You could have stopped the attacks?
ELIE ASSAAD: Yes, I could - I'm not 100 percent. I'm 90 percent positive.
BRIAN ROSS: In early 2001 the FBI sent Assaad to infiltrate this small mosque outside Miami. There, he says, he spotted and even recorded conversations with the man later identified as 9/11 hijack leader Mohammed Atta, as well as several others in his group.
BRIAN ROSS TO ELIE ASSAAD: You saw them?
ELIE ASSAAD: Yes, and even I prayed in the mosque, the private mosque, and I went to certain private meetings.
BRIAN ROSS: But Assaad says over his objections, the FBI told him to leave Atta alone and instead to set up and sting two men that he calls wannabe terrorists. Assaad says while he was posing as a bomb maker - he's the one on the right [referring to file video being shown] - and producing weapons for the wannabes, the real terrorists were left alone.
RICHARD CLARKE, FMR. NATIONAL SECURITY OFFICIAL: This is yet another example of the way the system broke down prior to 9/11. And if the system had worked, we might have been able to identify these people before the attacks.
BRIAN ROSS: Shortly after the attacks, Assaad says he identified Atta as the man the FBI told him to leave alone.
ELIE ASSAAD: I was very angry. I was very upset.
BRIAN ROSS: You were that close.
ELIE ASSAAD: It confirmed that my suspicions - were correct. I was right. I was 100 percent right.
BRIAN ROSS: Assaad says the FBI agents have his reports and his tapes documenting what he saw, BUT NONE OF THAT EVER MADE ITS WAY INTO THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT. And tonight the FBI's only comment was to decline to comment.
NEWSCASTER: All right. Our Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross, thanks to you.
the hope still lives, and the
dream shall never die."
- EMK -
- President Barack Obama -
We've lost the last of a band of heroic political giants - Senator Edward Moore "Teddy" Kennedy - and one of them, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the equal of her brothers, and the September 12th spectacle on the Capitol Mall of thousands of decent Americans mislead by national AM radio, headed by such charlatans as Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and speakers such as former House of Representatives MAJORITY LEADER Republican Dick Armey (Does this not tell you about the Republican Party??) now in the employ of Sheldon G. Adelson and guest of Judy Woodruff on Lehrer!!. . .that "demonstration" makes mandatory our need for a new "Band of brothers and sisters" to continue the battle. A starting point could be the full-page ad in the 9/10/09 N Y Times for YesWeStillCan.org, page A-17.
The presidential address to the Congress of the United States - On this ninth day of the ninth month of the ninth year of the 21st Century President Barack Obama delivered an historic presentation to the people and their democratically elected representatives - establishing, finally, the one remaining missing pillar required "in order to form a more perfect Union" - Universal Health Care - opposed for decades by the same enemy of the state, think Republican congressman Joe Wilson, Republican Governor Mark Sanford, Republican Lindsey Graham's Republican Senate mate James DeMint, all from South Carolina (Senator Graham described the President's address as "A Disaster!", although at the time he may not have realized that the "Disaster" related to the Republican Party, not to the President of the United States!), in the tradition of Strom Thurmond! And true to form David Brooks joins the cacophony, emphasis on the "Phony" which David Brooks has evidenced before. This is surely the most artful column that the insidious David Brooks has written about President Barack Obama, save one, "Speech To the Delegates" that he wrote heralding Obama's 365 to 173 electoral victory over John McCain. This time Mr. Brooks associates the President of the United States with The Dime Standard. Mr. Brooks was devastated by McCain's overwhelming defeat. You see, John McCain is one of the best friends of Israel, aside from Joe Lieberman, who was McCain's first choice for VP, a firm supporter even as this Benjamin Netanyahu and Isador Lieberman regime rules!
Yes, we're at war with the same enemy of the United States, the state which fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12th of 1861; confronted this great nation at Ford's Theater in Washington on April 15th of 1865; in Dallas, Texas on November 22nd of 1963; in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4th of 1968; in Los Angeles on June 6th of 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel; in Washington on June 17th of 1972 at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate; in Washington on November 4th of 1980 after Bill Casey, Ronald Reagan's campaign manager and soon to be Director of the CIA, Casey had arranged for the Iranian hostages (under Eisenhower we had overthrown the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran Mohammed Mossadegh, thereby violating the principle of national sovereignty) the hostages to be held until Reagan was inaugurated, thus ensuring Jimmy Carter's defeat and humiliation; in Washington on November 8th of 1988 after George W. Bush pushed the scurrilous Lee Atwater Willie Horton ad which, along with the press suppression of George Herbert Walker Bush's longtime affair with his "aide" Jennifer Fitzgerald, buried the Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis.
And in 1994 we had the spectacle of the Rush Limbaugh campaign replacing the distinguished Speaker of the House of Representatives Tom Foley, with the insidious Newt Gingrich, and Republican congresspersons taking over the House, canceling any hope for Health Care Reform, peopling the leadership with such unfaithful marital hypocrites as Henry Hyde of Illinois and Bob Livingston of Louisiana, and setting the stage for the United States Supreme Court December 12th of 2000 Rhenquist, O'Connor, Kennedy, Scalia & Thomas' presidential coup, negating Vice President Albert Gore's presidency, and installing the Bush/Cheney regime in our White House, for the most resolutely destructive eight year period, financially, Constitutionally and politically - in our entire history.
What has been completely forgotten is that THE leading influence on media "Leaders" of NBC (Tim Russert was a classic example), CBS and ABC, i.e. John Donald Imus Jr., Mr. Imus catered to, for example, Ralph Nader and Bill Bradley, virtually dedicating his program in 2000 to the defeat of Albert Gore, and the election of George W. Bush! And now Imus is back, October 5th, thanks to the man who put Limbaugh on the national scene in the beginning, the creator of FOX, Roger Ailes. There are other media problems in place. In the Pacific Northwest there is Oregon Public Broadcasting, OPB, with a management determined to restrict national and international news, particularly that which details the remarkably monumental turnaround of a collapsing financial system inherited from Bush/Cheney, and the heroic step-by-step process to finally, after three decades, put in place health care reform, including the pivotal public option, which this most promising of nations deserves. OPB blocks evidence of both positive progress by the Obama administration, and the negative position of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. In that the regime of Netanyahu & Lieberman is totally anti Middle East, anti world peace, there is zero information of substance on Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Health Care Front
To the Editor:
The president clearly stated that waiting for health care reform was not an option. That includes waiting for a “public option.”
It is essential that President Obama stand firmly behind those elected representatives willing to take the health of their constituents to heart. The longer Republicans (and some Democrats) drag their feet and try to thwart true choice, the more Americans will suffer and, in some cases, die.
Acceding to the wishes of the health care industry is not “compromise”; it is an unconscionable abdication of our elected officials’ responsibility to serve the best interests and will of the American people.
We can no longer afford to limp along with half-measures. IF CONGRESSIONAL RECONCILIATION IS THE ONLY PATH TO EFFECTIVE REFORM, THEN CIRCUMSTANCE DEMANDS IT.
Future generations will thank the brave and principled legislators who rose to the occasion and did what was necessary to insure the health, well-being and security of the nation.
Harlan J. Brothers East Haven, Conn., 9/7/09
To the Editor:
Re “Obama to Speak Before Congress on Health Care” (front page, Sept. 3):
You quote an anonymous White House aide as saying that President Obama will do almost anything it takes to get a deal on health care. My response to Mr. Obama is this:
If you forgo meaningful health care reform by omitting a robust public option -- which was, by the way, a compromise in the first place for a single-payer system -- you will lose credibility with Democrats and Republicans alike.
No one will believe that you mean what you say as you will have flip-flopped egregiously on one of the most important issues facing us today. I am a Democrat who maxed out in financial support for you and who worked hard to get you elected. If you do this, if you protect the profits of private industry against the interests of the American people, I will not support you again.
I actually met you, spoke to you face to face and trusted you. I was filled with optimism at your election, as were millions of Americans who are now wondering how this could happen.
Katie Jacob Birmingham, Mich., 9/5/09
- Amy Goodman Weighs In On Health Care Reform -
“California’s Real Death Panels”--Data Reveals California’s Private Insurers Deny 21% of Claims...
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama begins his final drive for healthcare reform tonight with a prime-time, nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress.
Heavy negotiations are underway on Capitol Hill as lawmakers return from August recess. So far, legislation has been approved by three House committees and another in the Senate without any Republican support. Negotiations continue in the Senate Finance Committee, where Chairman Max Baucus of Montana is pressing for a bipartisan deal with his so-called “Gang of Six” senators.
Speculation remains over whether the President will insist on a “public option,” a government-backed insurance plan that would compete with the private sector. Obama met with Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid at the White House yesterday to discuss strategy on the legislation. Speaking to reporters afterwards, House Majority Leader Pelosi said, for now, a public option is a key component to legislation passing in the House.
REP. NANCY PELOSI: On the public option, I believe that a public option will be essential to our passing a bill in the House of Representatives, because, as the President has said--and I listened to him very carefully--he believes that the public option is the best way to keep the insurance companies honest and to increase competition in order to lower cost, improve quality, retain choice--if you like what you have, you can keep it--and expand coverage in a fiscally sound way, that it saves money. And that’s why--uh, he said, if you have a better idea, put it on the table. And so, if somebody has a better idea of how to do that, put it on the table. For the moment, however, as far as our House members are concerned, the overwhelming majority of them support a public option.
AMY GOODMAN: The insurance industry has spent millions of dollars lobbying against the public option, and it’s unclear if a bill that includes it could pass in the Senate. A possible compromise would be a provision that would “trigger” a public option only if private insurers are deemed to have not provided suitable care. Another proposal would leave the public option out altogether and replace it with a system of nonprofit cooperatives.
Many are looking to President Obama’s speech tonight for answers. His address comes after an August recess consumed by raucous town halls and talk of government-run “death panels.”
Well, the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee has just released new data that reveals more than one of every five requests for medical claims for insured patients, even when recommended by a patient’s physician, are rejected by California’s largest private insurers. The group says this amounts to very real death panels in practice daily in the nation’s biggest state.
The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee represents 86,000 registered nurses in all fifty states. Chuck Idelson is the communications director for the group. He joins me here in San Francisco from the studios of Link TV.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Chuck.
CHARLES IDELSON: Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about this data that you’ve just released.
CHARLES IDELSON: Well, this is data that the insurance companies have always wanted to hide, and it’s just now become available. It documents that the insurance companies have denied, in California alone, 45 million claims since 2002, and in the first half of this year alone, their rates continue to skyrocket. Some of these rates ranged as high as 40 percent for UnitedHealthcare’s PacifiCare. And other large, giant insurers like Blue Cross, Health Net, CIGNA, Kaiser were all in the range of 30 percent. So it shows a clear pattern of very high denials by the very insurance companies that people depend upon to assure that they get care they need when they need it.
National Nurses Organizing Committee
- Or Rush Limbaugh!
- Insight regarding Media/Press vs Obama administration -
Requiring Constant Vigilance!
- Two items from 9/4/09 -
* Jim Lehrer on 9/3/09 -
Lehrer: The Parliament of Iran has approved most of President Ahmadinejad's new hard-line cabinet. The voting included a defense minister whose choice drew international criticism. Ahmad Vahidi was allegedly behind the bombing of a Jewish center in Argentina in 1994. That attack killed 85 people. Lawmakers also endorsed a health minister who's the first female cabinet member since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
- A Michael Slackman in N Y Times 9/4/09
"Iran’s new government will include Ahmad Vahidi as defense minister. Mr. Vahidi is wanted by Interpol on charges that he helped organize the bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Argentina in 1994 -- charges that Iran says are part of a Zionist plot to undermine the government. The cabinet will also have its first female minister since the 1979 revolution, Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, who will oversee health."
Our own FBI under Louis Freeh thoroughly investigated this Jewish charge and refuted it, acknowledging that a squabble within the Argentine government organized the bombing to embarrass another political faction.
* New York Times front page 9/4/09 -
James McKinley Jr. and Sam Dillon with Houston byline -
"President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening.
The uproar over the speech, in which Mr. Obama intends to urge students to work hard and stay in school, has been particularly acute in Texas, where several major school districts, under pressure from parents, have laid plans to let children opt out of lending the president an ear."
As if the above was not enough for an incoming Democratic administration, nationally there has never been such a dearth of legitimate substantive political news and, simultaneously, an unprecedented spike in pro-Israeli thrust propaganda, world wide in the Media/Press. In the United States it is so pronounced that NPR is now known as our National Platform for Republicans, and the associated PRI as well as the recent and current BBC, are recognized as Public Radio Israel, information sources which distort even the post-1948 June 1967 Israeli war in which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and Syria's Golan Heights, to begin its conquest of the rest of Palestine. This culminated in the 12/26/08 - 1/16/09 merciless brutal land-air mechanized slaughter of the Palestinian people, 1.5 million penned in the virtual prison of Gaza (This website, gopbias.org, has innumerable references which expose the long-range Jewish fixation to occupy the entire Levant, surely the most threatening-to-world-peace obsession on the planet today. Alert!). A more brief and recent synopsis from President Jimmy Carter.
* As this item establishes, the worldwide structure of Jewish propaganda unprecedented since the British Mandate, and designed to produce total Israeli control of the Levant, is self evident. En Garde! Surprisingly, the current Rick Steves TV travelogue is filled with lush Israeli, seemingly tropical, scenes, with no questions as to the source of the aquifers required to transform Israeli desert into paradise. That's water from Occupied Palestine which Palestinians have used for centuries for their figs, their olive groves. One of the larger aquifers is known now as Ariel, as in Ariel Sharon.
All of this also brings to mind an extension of the issue. On Thursday, 9/3/09, Neil Conan devoted his first hour to our war against Afghanistan, which, in itself, is unusual. With the exception of one Ken Rudin, who is called the "Political Junkie" by Conan and monopolizes that first hour every Wednesday, subjects and guests are regularly given the first forty minutes, or the last twenty, of that first hour. The exception on 9/3/09 was Conan, Richard Haass, chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, formerly Henry Kissinger's neighborhood, and Ted Koppel, described by Neil as the "Senior News Analyst for NPR", a title which Scott Simon, who controls NPR's Saturday show Weekend Edition, has bestowed on the 94 year old Dan Schorr. Frankly, all these men have something in common that should cause our Media/Press to question their bona fides. And more specifically, what follows is an "incident" that would have AIPAC, the ADL, and Netanyahu-Lieberman (both the American and the Israeli), Richard Haass and Ted Koppel, SILENT! Rare, indeed! And what is their reaction to this item?
Anecdotally, this produces strange occurrences in the media, as we now move to "Teddy's" highest priority in his last years - meaningful health care reform. From the midst of the television programming celebrating Unites States Senator Edward M. Kennedy's life appeared a promo from the Lehrer NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown that for Monday 8/31/09 the program would feature "the architect for the (health care reform) public option!" Mr. Lehrer had been away, perhaps not approved the subject, so the 8/31 program instead featured a Trudy Lieberman from the Columbia Journalism Review, a Roger Sergel from ABC News (Disney) and a Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for "Excellence" in Journalism! - And these people talked for fifteen minutes, and the audience knew no more about the particulars of Health Care Reform being debated, than they knew at the beginning of the program! But God works in mysterious ways. The 9/1/09 Lehrer program featured Mr. Brown interviewing Yale's Jacob Hacker on the indispensable ingredient for successful Health Care Reform - the public option. The combination of Mr. Hacker and Doctor Howard Dean make clear that the public option is mandatory -
JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, Jeffrey Brown has the latest of our conversations about health care reform.
JEFFREY BROWN: In our previous conversations, we have sought the views of a leading hospital CEO, the head of a major health insurer, a former-executive-turned-critic of the insurance industry, and a writer who studied the health systems of other countries.
Tonight - One of the earliest and leading proponents of the so-called public plan, which has become such a focal point in the contentious debate over health care reform -
Jacob Hacker is a professor of political science at Yale University and a fellow at the New America Foundation.
Let me ask you first to define the term. That -- that will help us get started. What exactly do you mean by a public plan?
JACOB HACKER: A public plan is pretty simple to understand.
It's a -- a plan that would be modeled after the Medicare program that Americans are familiar with and like. It would be available to those Americans who didn't have good coverage from their employer. It would also be available to workers who worked in the smallest firms. And it would be made available through some kind of new insurance-purchasing exchange, through which people could get access to both private health insurance plans and this new public plan.
JEFFREY BROWN: And why is it necessary? What -- what -- how does -- how does it do something that you see lacking in the system that we have now?
JACOB HACKER: I like to talk about the three B's of -- of the public plan, that it will be a backup for people who don't have secure coverage today and who want to have a broad choice of doctor, because a Medicare-like plan can provide a very broad choice of doctors and hospitals.
Second, it's going to be a benchmark for private insurance plans. You know, the private insurance market has gotten increasingly consolidated over the last two decades. And, in many parts of the country, 94 percent of local markets, according to the AMA, there really isn't effective competition for private insurers.
And, finally, it's going to be a cost-controlled backstop. That means that it's going to be able to be one of the levers for bringing down costs over time, both by creating a check on private insurers and by innovating in the delivery of and -- and payment for care.
- Public option could keep costs down -
JEFFREY BROWN: But what's the evidence, or is there evidence -- is there evidence that a government-run insurance plan could hold down costs any more than private insurers do now?
JACOB HACKER: Well, there's two sorts of evidence that are pretty telling in this regard.
First of all, over the last 15 years or so, the Medicare program, for all the complaints about it, has actually restrained the rate of increase of per capita costs, cost per person, better than have private insurance plans.
And, in fact, this is -- this is what we find, too, in other countries that have a larger role for the public sector. They have done a better job controlling costs. But the second piece of evidence is -- is a pretty clear one.
When the Congressional Budget Office first looked at a public health insurance plan, when it was estimating the cost of the competing proposals in the House, it estimated that the public health insurance plan could save on the order of $150 billion over 10 years, relative to not having that public health insurance plan in the mix.
JEFFREY BROWN: The -- the main criticism, of course, is that it will crowd out the private sector.
Now, how do you respond to that? Because, in part, what you're saying is that -- that that's in part is what it is intended to do, I guess, to undercut the private -- private insurers to some degree. So, how does it -- how does it do that without ending their role in our system?
JACOB HACKER: Well, I don't think this is going to -- to crowd out the private insurers in any significant way. It will create competition for the private insurers.
I mean, what we're contemplating right now and what our political leaders are contemplating right now is basically requiring that Americans get private health insurance. What people like me who want to have a public health insurance plan are saying is that those -- those private insurance plans, which, right now, have so much of the market, should have to fight for those new customers.
You know, I think that, if you have the public and the private plans competing with each other on a complete level playing field -- no special subsidies for the -- for the public insurance plan, no special subsidies for the private plans, you're going to have a situation in which both the public plan and the private plan -- plans are pressed to improve their operation and focus on value over time.
The Congressional Budget Office, which I mentioned earlier, says that about 10 to 12 million Americans would end up in the public health insurance plan, which is less than 5 percent of the U.S. population. At the same time, the Congressional Budget Office says that more people will have private insurance after reform than before it.
So, the -- the important point is that there be competition. And the worry about crowd-out, it seems to me, is more a defense of having private insurers be in charge of the situation, as they are now. But we know where that has gotten us, toward ever-escalating cost and declining coverage.
- Slow move towards public option -
JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you cited the CBO numbers of the people that might join a plan like this.
What -- what do you see? I mean, I have seen different estimates of how many people might join something like this. How large a percentage of the health care system do you think this government-run plan might become?
JACOB HACKER: Well, the first thing I would say is that -- that we need to move slowly, in terms of making the public health insurance plan available to larger employers.
So, it's, I think, smart to start out by saying that only people who don't have coverage now who are in the -- who are working for the smallest firms have access to this new public health insurance plan. Now, if it's working well, if the level playing field is working, if insurers are being pressed to improve their value, but the public health insurance plan is also providing better customer service and better -- and better services over time, then I think it should be something that should be available more broadly.
I don't have a good estimate of exactly how large the public health insurance plan will be or should be. I think the point is that people are going to vote with their feet.
But I do know that the public health insurance plan is not going to swamp private insurance plans. They are a very resourceful set of companies. I mean, they have over 170 million customers today. They have brand loyalty. They control many local markets.
I think we should be worried about whether or not the public health insurance plan is going to have the ability to come into those markets right away and be able to push for lower prices, for lower premiums, for better service, and for better treatment of customers immediately.
JEFFREY BROWN: But, at the same time, I mean, you know, of course, that there's a lot of people out there who see this as a kind of end-run toward a -- a single-payer plan, and that that's -- the way they look at it is that folks like yourself, that's where you want to get to anyway.
JACOB HACKER: Well, all I can say is that I think that, for most people who work for larger employers, the private health insurance system works pretty well, that we know that private health insurance doesn't work well for people who are in small and low-wage firms. And it clearly doesn't work well for people who don't have health insurance at all today.
So, the idea of creating this new exchange, which, I should say, WILL LET PEOPLE HAVE A CHOICE between public health insurance and a range of private plans, is to try to fix those parts of the employment-based market that just aren't working right now, to make sure that everyone in the United States has health security.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right. So, the big question now, as we sit here today, where there doesn't seem to be the votes for something like this, it's become the focal point for opposition, how central to reform is the public option?
You know now there's a debate about whether it might be delayed, whether there might be a kind of trigger mechanism to put it in later on. If it's dropped, does that end reform, in your view, or is that one way to go?
- Only option with guarantees -
JACOB HACKER: Well, I think we have seen many, many reports of the death of the public plan. And, each time, they have, to paraphrase Mark Twain, proved greatly exaggerated.
It's a bit like those silent movie classics, "Perils of Pauline," where the heroine gets strapped to the tracks, and, at the last minute, the protagonist shows up and saves her from the -- the onrushing train. So, I'm not sure whether the public plan is really on the ropes this time around.
Every time we have a big debate about it, we keep coming back to the fact that it's the only option that will provide a guarantee of a backup, a benchmark on private plans, and a real cost-control backstop. And I worry that, if we don't embrace the public plan in some form, we're just going to come back to the table a few years from now, with skyrocketing costs making it impossible for us to fulfill the commitments that we have made in health reform.
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, but let me try that one more time. Are we at the point close -- where we're close, or even at the point where it's a make-or-break for progressives, who want to see something done?
JACOB HACKER: Yes, progressives definitely see this as a decisive issue. There are a large number in -- in Congress who say they will not vote for reform if it does not contain a public plan.
And, at the same time, I think there's lots of people who -- in the country as a whole, who don't quite understand what -- why this is such a big issue. I mean, after all, this is a choice between public and private insurance. The majority of Americans in surveys say that, if it is a choice, it's something they support.
And, really, we're -- there's a lot of people wondering, is this just about the insurance industry's opposition to this issue, or is there something else that's behind this sort of knee-jerk opposition to the idea of having real competition between a public plan and private plans for these people who don't have coverage today and -- and for workers in the smallest firms?
JEFFREY BROWN: All right, Jacob Hacker of Yale University, thank you very much.
JACOB HACKER: Thanks so much for having me.
Paul Krugman
- Missing Richard Nixon 8/31/09 -
Many of the retrospectives on Ted Kennedy’s life mention his regret that he didn’t accept Richard Nixon’s offer of a bipartisan health care deal. The moral some commentators take from that regret is that today’s health care reformers should do what Mr. Kennedy balked at doing back then, and reach out to the other side.
But it’s a bad analogy, because today’s political scene is nothing like that of the early 1970s. In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.
No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.
But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.
As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.
Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to “approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.” No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.
So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?
Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around -- as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” -- has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?
- On the degradation of our political system.
But there’s another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.
We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s.
And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That’s especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon’s day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.
That spending fuels debates that otherwise seem incomprehensible. Why are “centrist” Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota so opposed to letting a public plan, in which Americans can buy their insurance directly from the government, compete with private insurers? Never mind their often incoherent arguments; WHAT IT COMES DOWN TO IS THE MONEY.
Given the combination of G.O.P. extremism and corporate power, it’s now doubtful whether health reform, even if we get it -- which is by no means certain -- will be anywhere near as good as Nixon’s proposal, even though Democrats control the White House and have a large Congressional majority.
And what about other challenges? Every desperately needed reform I can think of, from controlling greenhouse gases to restoring fiscal balance, will have to run the same gantlet of lobbying and lies.
I’m not saying that reformers should give up. They do, however, have to realize what they’re up against. There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president -- but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system. - Paul Krugman 8/31/09
- The Indomitable Katharine Q. Seelye Prevails -
A new survey finds that whether someone believes controversial statements about the health care overhaul depends on that person’s political affiliation.
The survey, conducted in mid-August for Indiana University, says that when looking at statements that the Obama administration says are myths, Republicans tend to believe the statements and Democrats tend to disbelieve them.
Independents, however, could go either way, believing some and not believing others, so their responses seem to be good indications of where the administration has succeeded and where it has failed.
Here are the statements that independents believed and disbelieved, with assessments of each statement provided in parentheses by Aaron Carroll, director of the university’s Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research, which helped design the survey with the university’s Center for Bioethics.
Clear majorities of independents believe these statements:
* the federal government will become directly involved in making personal health care decisions for the public (Myth) Medicare does not make such decisions now!
* health care will be rationed (Debatable?)
* taxpayers will be required to pay for abortions (Myth)
* waiting time for services like surgery will increase (Debatable?)
* small businesses will be hurt (Nothing to indicate this is so); In fact, the opposite is likely!
* a public option that competes with private insurance companies will be too expensive for the nation to afford (Myth; if anything, a public option will bring costs down);
* a public option will actually increase premiums for those with private insurance (No evidence to suggest this would happen). RIDICULOUS!
At the same time, majorities of independents do not believe these statements:
* the government will make the elderly decide how and when to die (Myth) ABSURD!
* millions of Americans will lose their current health insurance (Such change is prohibited);
* private insurance or employer-sponsored insurance will be eliminated (Myth);
* a public option will put private insurance companies out of business (Myth);
* illegal immigrants will be covered (Myth);
* the elderly will have to undergo euthanasia counseling every five years (Myth) HUH?
* the overhaul will cover more people by making cuts to Medicare (Debatable; there are no cuts in Medicare benefits but the administration proposes to squeeze “waste” from the program).
“The bottom line is that people who are for reform are losing the message war,” Dr. Carroll said. “Some of the things that people believe are factually untrue and some are debatable, but many people believe them to be true anyway.”
There was one item that majorities of both parties and independents agreed to be true -- that limiting the amount of money awarded in malpractice cases would decrease the cost of health care. This item, however, is not in any of the bills. Lawmakers have said it was too contentious to add to big legislative packages that already contained several contentious elements.
- And Ms. Seelye identifies the perpetrators - the "perps"! -
- Sheldon G. Adelson's FreedomWorks - Tea Party "Patriots" - "National Taxpayers Union" - The AYN RAND (Alisa Rosenbaum) CENTER, chaired by Alan G. Greenspan? - Katharine Seelye N Y Times 9/1-2/09
Yet, with less than eight months in office to grapple with the most serious threat to our democracy since the Great Depression - the last time a Republican administration truly menaced the very soul of the Founding Fathers vision - the Republicans led by such disparate figures as Rush Limbaugh and the media darling David Brooks -
- Brooks' 9/1/09 N Y Times column "The Obama Slide - No newly elected president has fallen this fast." Here paragraphs eight and nine -
"The public has soured on Obama’s policy proposals. Voters often have only a fuzzy sense of what each individual proposal actually does, but more and more have a growing conviction that if the president is proposing it, it must involve big spending, big government and a fundamental departure from the traditional American approach.
Driven by this general anxiety, and by specific concerns, public opposition to health care reform is now steady and stable. Independents once solidly supported reform. Now they have swung against it.
AS THE VETERAN POLLSTER BILL MCINTURFF HAS POINTED OUT, PUBLIC ATTITUDES TOWARD OBAMACARE EXACTLY MATCH PUBLIC ATTITUDES TOWARD CLINTONCARE WHEN THAT REFORM EFFORT COLLAPSED IN 1994." - David Brooks N Y Times 9/1/09
- We've heard from David Brooks before -
On the day following David Brooks' declaration that "public opposition to health care reform is now steady and stable", The New York Times published two letters dated August 30, 2009 indicating that Mr. Brooks may be (as is usually the case) out of step with the American people, which then poses this question: Why is he all over television, and in the Times? True, he's replacing Bill Safire (AKA Safir). But Safire had respect for his opposition as does the current N Y Times Editorial Page as evidenced by the letters to the editor. Brooks is, of course, Jewish. But so are Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof, and they did manage to fire Bill Kristol! As the letter states the Sunday Times recognizes that "it has become inescapably clear that Republicans are unlikely to vote for substantial reform this year."
- Looking to Save Health Care Reform -
To the Editor:
Re “Majority Rule on Health Care Reform” (editorial, Aug. 30):
You are certainly correct that “it has become inescapably clear that Republicans are unlikely to vote for substantial reform this year,” and you are also correct to warn against further delays and compromises with a party determined to use the health care debate as a partisan tool to destroy the Obama presidency, as Senator Jim DeMint was foolish enough to admit publicly.
But the reconciliation process may not be the best solution because of the procedural hurdles that the opponents of reform can be counted on to raise. A better solution would be for President Obama to try to get the necessary votes for cloture.
The president must exert strong leadership and make it clear to the Democratic caucus in general and the Blue Dog Democrats in particular that for the sake of their party, the country and the future of the Obama administration, they must vote for cloture so that a bill that will accomplish substantive reform can have an up-or-down vote on the floor.
If the Blue Dog Democrats then feel that they must vote against the final bill so that their campaign contributors in the health care industry will not be angry at them, then that is their choice. This plan would enable President Obama to present the country with a real and coherent reform that could be enacted with 51 votes and to avoid a reconciliation process fraught with difficulties and imponderables.
But it depends on the Democrats’ realizing what a catastrophe it would be for the country and for their party if there were no reform or a reform in name only that did not accomplish its purpose. - Michael Ossar Portland, Oregon, 8/30/09
To the Editor:
America should hope that all Democratic senators read and heed your editorial suggesting how their party can enact President Obama’s signature health care reform. Clearly, most aspects of it fit within the rubric of “budget reconciliation.”
Nearly every domestic issue facing the nation is affected by health care costs -- whether it is the fiscal well-being of struggling icons like General Motors; the competitive position of producers of goods and services that have to vie for orders with producers in countries whose governments relieve them of employee health care costs; the individual health insurance costs that are sucked from other consumer spending; or the uncontrollable cost of health care driven by transfer of unpaid medical care of the uninsured to the bills of the insured.
The editorial sagaciously warns that this is the moment. America must hope -- YES, DEMAND -- that pursuit of campaign contributions does not steal this historic opportunity. - Sharon Morrison Whitefish, Montana, 8/30/09
The writer is from Senator Max Baucus' home state!
From Within
The centerpiece of today's (8/26/09) edit is Russ Mitchell's 8/23/09 interview with Howard Dean, a medical doctor who, more clearly than most, can describe in detail, why the "Public Option" is the linch-pin, the requisite component, the sine qua non of health care reform to bring about a halt in the current rise in cost which could bankrupt our nation. We've just witnessed eight years of Republicanism writ large. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman spells it out further on AND, obviously, Republicans, even in the guise of Olympia Snowe (up for reelection next year, 2010) are still determined to stack the deck with a so-called "trigger" which, with the GOP, always includes a permanent trigger lock designed to preclude the public option!
- The front page of The New York Times 8/24/09 is headlined "Obama Team Lacking MOST Of Top Players"! Familiarity with administrations of this modern era tells us that the major responsibility of the Chief of Staff of the president, is primarily, directly THAT TASK, seeing to it that those positions are filled in a timely fashion. Regardless of the difficulty THIS is what Rahm Emanuel was hired to do and his lack of performance is a disgrace! Couple this with his petty blocking of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's choice of a close aide in the person of Sidney Blumenthal, and we have a defect in an otherwise quality White House.
This affects everything in the Obama White House, and when it is joined with having miscreants ("depraved" - Random House Dictionary) like the benign appearing Dick Armey, former Republican Party House Majority Leader (Mr. Armey is completely exposed by a substantive Judy Woodruff NewsHour 8/13/09 interview ahead, the devastating effect of which Steve Inskeep tried to smooth over with a restoration interview with Armey on NPR 8/28/09) now in the employ of billionaire Sheldon G. Adelson whose purpose in life, like the current Republican Party including John McCain, is now that of the notorious South Carolina Senator and team mate of Lindsey Graham, James DeMint, who stated that were Republicans able to defeat President Obama on his health care reform it would be Obama's Waterloo - the destruction of his presidency - no matter that it would be a critical blow to Obama's efforts to resuscitate our financial system, brought to the brink of ruin by eight years of Bush/Cheney!
Further, the reliable Robert Pear had a recent lengthy piece on the failure of the Obama administration to even select a Medical Chief - so alarming that the strong West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller stated: "It's a big problem. I can't explain it." - and is a direct commentary on Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel! What the hell has he been doing? Certainly not serving President Obama. AND THAT'S RAHM'S JOB! Who has he been serving? That is, besides himself, which has always been his number one client! And this issue relates directly to the difficulty of responsible Democrats to develop and back responsible Health Care Reform!!
And as you hear Republicans casually throw around statements of "trillions of dollars" regarding Obama's health care efforts, it is well to remember that when George W. Bush took office the public debt stood at $3.4 trillion. When President Obama was inaugurated in January that figure stood at $6.3 trillion, and that was BEFORE he saved the financial system from collapsing!
- THIS ENDS THE ARGUMENT ON HEALTH CARE REFORM! -
With Medical Doctor Howard Dean
On Needed Health Care Reform
- CBS Evening News 8/23/09 -
NEWSCASTER RUSS MITCHELL: What will not go away while the president is on vacation is the health care debate. Howard Dean is the former Head of the Democratic Party, a former governor and a medical doctor. I spoke with him earlier today about his prescription for national health care reform.
"There has been a lot of piecemeal health care legislation passed over the years. But how optimistic are you, first of all, that we're going to see a comprehensive health care bill passed in this session of Congress?
HOWARD DEAN, FMR. CHAIRMAN, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL PARTY: I'm pretty optimistic. The president staked his administration on it. I think Congress really wants to do it. This bill's already passed four out of the five committees that it has to pass. So I'm pretty optimistic that we will have real health care reform by the time we're done.
NEWSCASTER: We're hearing the words public option a lot. For those Americans who still don't fully understand what that means, can you quickly give us a definition of public option?
DEAN: Sure. It's very simple. It's the ability of Americans to choose between a private, for-profit health insurer, or a government public health insurance option like Medicare. It's essentially allowing people under 65 to buy into Medicare if they prefer not to be in the private health insurance market. And Medicare can't be taken away from you if you get sick. And it moves wherever you do, and it stays with you if you have a job or if you don't have a job. So it's a lot to recommend it.
NEWSCASTER: The president has hinted that he may take the public option off the table if it means getting a bill passed or not. You are against that. Why?
DEAN: Well, I think if you want real health care reform, you have to have a public option for the people to choose from. It gives people employment - insurance even if they don't have employment. It cuts out a lot of the return on equity and the huge CEO salaries that you're paying for when you pay premiums to a private health insurer. But some people will prefer to stay in the insurance market, the private health insurance market, because they like their coverage. And that's fine, too. That's the nice thing about the president's bill. You get to choose.
NEWSCASTER: We've seen people across the country very angry at what they call a flawed government takeover of health care. They're concerned about the cost as well. In fact, if you look at the president's poll numbers, they have dropped as far as his handling of this health care issue has gone. What is your advice for the president?
DEAN: Stick to it. You know, people value strong leadership, and I still think Bill Clinton's got the best political mind in America. And he said a couple of times last weekend, you know, once the president signs this bill, his numbers will go right back up again. The president set out to reform health care. I think he intends to finish the job and I think he's just hoping that Republicans will help. But if they won't, we can do it ourselves.
NEWSCASTER: Governor Howard Dean, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it.
DEAN: Russ, thanks for having me on.
- Obama Team Lacking MOST Of Top Players -
WASHINGTON - As President Obama tries to turn around a summer of setbacks, he finds himself still without most of his own team. Seven months into his presidency, fewer than half of his top appointees are in place advancing his agenda.
Of more than 500 senior policymaking positions requiring Senate confirmation, just 43 percent have been filled -- a reflection of a White House that grew more cautious after several nominations blew up last spring, a Senate that is intensively investigating nominees and a legislative agenda that has consumed both.
While career employees or holdovers fill many posts on a temporary basis, Mr. Obama does not have his own people enacting programs central to his mission. He is trying to fix the financial markets but does not have an assistant treasury secretary for financial markets. He is spending more money on transportation than anyone since Dwight D. Eisenhower but does not have his own inspector general watching how the dollars are used. He is fighting two wars but does not have an Army secretary.
“There’s every reason to be concerned,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader. “The president deserves to have his full complement of staff in the different agencies.” - Peter Baker N Y Times 8/24/09
- Full 20 paragraph 8/24/09 article -
- The Addendum -
You may be puzzled by all the attention focused on Attorney General Eric Holder's selection of Special Federal Prosecutor John Durham. After all, everyone knew that the Bush White House criminally abused its captives (Jose Padilla is a prime example) whether or not they were connected to crimes against the United States. What the Bush/Cheney and Republican crowd fear most, as do men like Rahm Emanuel and Charlie Rose, is THE MAJOR CRIME OF THE CENTURY AGAINST THE UNITED STATES being exposed. That is the reason for all the Media/Press attention. Note link to answer below - Emanuel was a member of the I.D.F.
{ What Barack Obama's Attorney General Holder should be focusing is the British effort to uncover the undeniable evidence, the record of our going to war against Iraq, at the insistence of Israel [we hope to post the courageous speech of the singularly iconic United States Senator Edward Moore "Teddy" Kennedy (February 22, 1932 - Washington's birthday - August 25, 2009), Mr. Kennedy's speech opposing our war against Iraq], but using the blood and treasure of the United States and Great Britain. }
- Amy Goodman DemocracyNow 8/28/09 -
- Carter - All Israeli Settlements Should Be Removed -
"Former President Jimmy Carter and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu visited the construction sites of the Israeli separation wall in the West Bank and criticized Israel’s settlements in the region. Carter and Tutu are both part of The Elders, an organization of former global leaders trying to pressure Israel and the Palestinians to relaunch peace talks."
Jimmy Carter: “Although it’s very important now to stop all the settlement building and expansion in all of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, that’s just a first step. The final step will have to be for all Israeli settlements to be removed from Palestine. And let there be an independent nation here on this land where we’re standing side by side in peace with Israel be the ultimate goal.”
- And three of the major websites involved
gazafreedommarch.org
AUPHR.org
West Coast - PDXJustice.org
- "Staff Chief Wields Power Freely" by Peter Baker and Jeff Zeleny N Y Times 8/16/09 -
WASHINGTON -As White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel was the one to bring the hammer down on Sidney Blumenthal.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wanted to hire Mr. Blumenthal, a loyal confidant who had HELPED HER PROMOTE "THE IDEA" (Are Baker & Zeleny trying to rewrite history? It was fact! Led by propagandist Rush Limbaugh, the Republican RightWing used a corrupt national radio spectrum to overthrow a legitimate Democratic House, that of William Jefferson Clinton and Spokane's Tom Foley. And when Jim Lehrer's Elizabeth Brackett revealed same on a later NewsHour, Lehrer dropped her from his program for several years. The world knows the actual truth, thanks to Sid Blumenthal's scrupulously documented eight hundred and twenty-two page true reality check - "The Clinton Wars". And it is remarkably predictive of today's challenge to the Obama presidency and to desperately needed health care reform! Note the preceding Russ Mitchell 8/23/09 exchange with former Chairman of the Democratic Party and Medical Doctor Howard Dean.)...of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” more than a decade ago. But President Obama’s campaign veterans still blamed him for spreading harsh attacks against their candidate in the primary showdown...with Mrs. Clinton last year (Rahm must have dictated this to Baker & Zeleny.).
So Mr. Emanuel talked with Mrs. Clinton, said Democrats (Joe Lieberman?) informed about the situation, and explained that bringing Mr. Blumenthal on board was a no-go. THE BAD BLOOD AMONG HIS COLLEAGUES (Nonsense! This is all about Mr. Emanuel!) was too deep, and the last thing the administration needed, he (Emanuel!) concluded, was dissension and drama in the ranks. In short, Mr. Blumenthal was out (H-m-m-m! Did you know Emanuel was a member of the I.D.F., the Israeli "Defense" Force?).
Perhaps nothing illustrates how far Mr. Emanuel has come than that conversation last month. Sixteen years ago, it was Mrs. Clinton, then first lady, who helped have Mr. Emanuel demoted as a senior official in Bill Clinton’s White House after he ruffled feathers with his aggressive style. Now all these years later, it is Mr. Emanuel telling Mrs. Clinton what she cannot do as a member of the cabinet.
* - Sidney Blumenthal's classic "The Clinton Wars" IS THE POLITICAL READ FOR THE BOTTOM LINE ON LIMBAUGH - GINGRICH - AND THE GOP! An absolute must for current and immediate past national politics! - *
Seven months after moving into his office in the West Wing, Mr. Emanuel is emerging as perhaps the most influential White House chief of staff in a generation. But with his prominence in almost everything important going on in Washington comes a high degree of risk.
As the principal author of Mr. Obama’s do-everything-at-once strategy, he stands to become a figure of consequence in his own right if the administration stabilizes the economy and financial markets, overhauls the health care system and winds down one war while successfully prosecuting another.
If things do not go well -- and right now Mr. Obama’s political popularity is declining, his health care legislation is under conservative assault, the budget deficit is at an eye-popping level and Afghanistan remains volatile -- it is Mr. Emanuel whose job will be on the line before Mr. Obama’s.
[ There is earlier evidence that Mr. Emanuel, not unlike Rush Limbaugh, is more about himself than about the country, these United States, that have given him and his brothers so much. ]
“He’s about to be tested; he’s spinning a lot of plates over there and he breaks a lot of china,” said Joel Johnson, a close friend and fellow veteran official of the Clinton White House. “They’ve had some good success early on, but they’ve got a number of major pieces of the agenda in the queue, and it’s going to be really difficult.”
The caricature of Mr. Emanuel as a profanity-spewing operative has given way to a more nuanced view: as a profanity-spewing operative with a keen understanding of HOW TO EMPLOY POWER ON BEHALF OF A NEW PRESIDENT [Again, nonsense! This is all about Mr. Emanuel who, if memory serves, will spend his vacation in Montana, lining up a retirement spread which will equal Tom Brokaw's, funded by big business interests (General Electric!) which he also served in his career!]...with relatively little experience in Washington.
"At times, it seems as if Mr. Emanuel is White House chief of staff, political director, legislative director and communications director all rolled into one. He has fingers in almost every decision, like who gets invited to social events at the White House and how to shape economic and foreign policy."
(And) Mr. Emanuel casts his net widely, from lawmakers and LOBBYISTS to journalists and CORPORATE EXECUTIVES (Might these include the network of pharmaceutical and health insurance factions which have funded opposition to the public option?). When he took over the chief of staff’s office -- an office that, he makes a point of telling visitors, is eight square feet larger than the vice president’s -- he brought a telephone list of 6,000 names that crashed White House software. - Baker & Zeleny 8/16/09
- Full 55 paragraph 8/16/09 N Y Times article -
Big Pharma & Predatory
Health Insurance
It’s never a contest when the interests of big business are pitted against the public interest. So if we manage to get health care “reform” this time around it will be the kind of reform that benefits the very people who have given us a failed system, and thus made reform so necessary.
Forget about a crackdown on price-gouging drug companies and predatory insurance firms. That’s not happening. With the public pretty well confused about what is going on, we’re headed -- at best -- toward changes that will result in a lot more people getting covered, but that will not control exploding health care costs and will leave industry leaders feeling like they’ve hit the jackpot.
The hope of a government-run insurance option is all but gone. So there will be no effective alternative for consumers in the market for health coverage, which means no competitive pressure for private insurers to rein in premiums and other charges. (Forget about the nonprofit cooperatives. That’s like sending peewee footballers up against the Super Bowl champs.)
Insurance companies are delighted with the way “reform” is unfolding. Think of it: The government is planning to require most uninsured Americans to buy health coverage. Millions of young and healthy individuals will be herded into the industry’s welcoming arms. This is the population the insurers drool over.
- Why the insurers and the drug industry are smiling. -
This additional business -- a gold mine -- will more than offset the cost of important new regulations that, among other things, will prevent insurers from denying coverage to applicants with pre-existing conditions or imposing lifetime limits on benefits. Poor people will either be funneled into Medicaid, which will have its eligibility ceiling raised, or will receive a government subsidy to help with the purchase of private insurance.
If the oldest and sickest are on Medicare, and the poorest are on Medicaid, and the young and the healthy are required to purchase private insurance without the option of a competing government-run plan -- well, that’s reform the insurance companies can believe in.
And then there are the drug companies. A couple of months ago the Obama administration made a secret and extremely troubling deal with the drug industry’s lobbying arm, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. The lobby agreed to contribute $80 billion in savings over 10 years and to sponsor a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in support of health care reform.
The White House, for its part, agreed not to seek additional savings from the drug companies over those 10 years. This resulted in big grins and high fives at the drug lobby. The White House was rolled. The deal meant that the government’s ability to use its enormous purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices was off the table.
The $80 billion in savings (in the form of discounts) would apply only to a certain category of Medicare recipients -- those who fall into a gap in their drug coverage known as the doughnut hole -- and only to brand-name drugs. (Drug industry lobbyists probably chuckled, knowing that some patients would switch from generic drugs to the more expensive brand names in order to get the industry-sponsored discounts.)
To get a sense of how sweet a deal this is for the drug industry, compare its offer of $8 billion in savings a year over 10 years with its annual profits of $300 billion a year. Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration, wrote that the deal struck by the Obama White House was very similar to the “deal George W. Bush struck in getting the Medicare drug benefit, and it’s proven a bonanza for the drug industry.”
The bonanza to come would be even larger, he said, “given all the Boomers who will be enrolling in Medicare over the next decade.”
While it is undoubtedly important to bring as many people as possible under the umbrella of health coverage, the way it is being done now does not address what President Obama and so many other advocates have said is a crucial component of reform -- bringing the ever-spiraling costs of health care under control. Those costs, we’re told, are hamstringing the U.S. economy, making us less competitive globally and driving up the budget deficit.
Giving consumers the choice of an efficient, nonprofit, government-run insurance plan would have moved us toward real cost control, but that option has gone a-glimmering. The public deserves better. The drug companies, the insurance industry and the rest of the corporate high-rollers have their tentacles all over this so-called reform effort, squeezing it for all it’s worth.
Meanwhile, the public -- struggling with the worst economic downturn since the 1930s -- is looking on with great anxiety and confusion. If the drug companies and the insurance industry are smiling, it can only mean that the public interest is being left behind. - Bob Herbert N Y Times 8/18/09
- And the public get's it! -
To the Editor:
Re “ ‘Public Option’ in Health Plan May Be Dropped” (front page, Aug. 17):
Reports that the Obama administration is about to abandon a government-run option in reforming the American health care system are deeply discouraging to everyone except the troglodytic right.
It amounts to a near complete surrender to the forces that profit from the dysfunctional system we now have, forces that for decades have ridiculed or ignored the enormous evidence from other Western countries that a government-run alternative is essential. Where one does not exist, health care becomes, as here, selective, ruinously expensive and inefficient; ordinary human greed conquers all. Only when the profit motive is challenged by a deep sense of public ethics is there anything resembling affordable and universal health care.
For the Obama administration to abandon, under pressure from the Republican Party and the aptly named Blue Dogs, the only system that has ever been shown to deliver universal care of any kind at a bearable cost is more than a national tragedy. It adds to the evidence given us by our responses to the economy, global warming -- virtually every major issue involving money, prejudice, class and the character of our other institutions -- that the American political system has become so twisted, over time, that it is no longer capable of rational behavior, or the rational fitting of means to ends.
Daniel Knapp Mill Valley Calif. 8/16/09
To the Editor:
Supposed bipartisanship is a poor excuse for the Democratic Party, elected to reform, to be folding like a lawn chair on the “public option” proposed by President Obama. There are no Republicans who will vote for anything that benefits the average American at the expense of big business.
The Democratic Party seems not to notice that while it may not have the votes in the House or Senate, it has the votes of about 70 percent of the American people in favor of a public option. If this fails, there will be no significant change in health care, as we now pay dearly for it and will continue to do so.
David Walker North Dartmouth Mass. 8/17/09
To the Editor:
The argument that a public option would pose a threat to private insurers only serves to demonstrate the ultimate power of such an option to cut costs for both individuals and small businesses.
Joseph P. Cannavo Flushing, Queens 8/17/09
The writer is a doctor and is unit chief and medical director of the chemical dependency unit at Flushing Hospital Medical Center.
To Answer Our Shoddy Media/Press
- Here's the fabled Judy Woodruff with the notorious fraud Dick Armey on Jim Lehrer's 8/13/09 Lehrer NewsHour, with Lehrer in attendance!
JUDY WOODRUFF: As the fight over reforming health care spreads from here in Washington, D.C., across the rest of the nation, we hear now from advocates on both sides of the issue.
Former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey is chair of FreedomWorks, a conservative group that has rallied protestors at health care town hall meetings (AGAINST HEALTH CARE REFORM!).
And Richard Kirsch is the national campaign manager of Health Care for America Now, a liberal group which has urged its supporters to turn out at the meetings.
Thank you both for being here. We thank you for being part of this discussion.
And, Dick Armey, I'm going to come straight to you on the basics. You believe that there should be some form of reform of health care, health insurance, but a more limited form than what the president favors.
DICK ARMEY, FreedomWorks (FUNDED BY THE DISREPUTABLE LAS VEGAS BILLIONAIRE SHELDON G. ADELSON!): Yes, I do. And we go back to things I've argued for, tort reform is -- estimates now as much as $100 billion of just sheer abject waste, which, by the way, is a hardship...
JUDY WOODRUFF: Tort reform, for those people who don't know the legal term, means...
DICK ARMEY: Well, lawyers suing doctors and that which causes doctors to order up extra procedures on behalf of patients that are not needed medically, but they need them in case they end up in a courtroom.
I watch this process. The thing that breaks your heart about that is, especially with older folks, to be subjected to extra procedures that are not medically necessary is a very difficult burden for them to carry when they're already oftentimes quite fragile and the procedures themselves can be quite a stressful experience for them.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So tort reform would be an important change for the system (with an assist from the clueless Woodruff, Armey changes the subject to tort reform!)?
DICK ARMEY: That would be a good place to start.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Would that be enough, Richard Kirsch?
RICHARD KIRSCH, Health Care for America Now: That's not the problem Americans face, Judy. Basically, what Americans face is a problem of they don't have a guarantee of good health care they can afford.
Three out of five of the personal bankruptcies in this country are because of medical costs, and most of those people have insurance, but the insurance isn't there when they need it, because if they get seriously ill, it stops paying.
Did you know that premiums in the last decade have gone up four times as fast as wages? People can't afford to get health coverage.
And so we have this tremendous sense of insecurity, and what people need is a guarantee of good, affordable coverage at work or, if they don't -- if they're not at work, to have that coverage there, too. And what we're talking about is basically saying to America: You have good coverage that you can afford.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And you're saying provide that how?
RICHARD KIRSCH: Provide that very simply. What the reforms that we're looking at do two things. First of all, they say, if you're at work, your employer is going to continue to provide coverage at work, or -- and the coverage is going to be good, because there are going to have to be a specified set of good benefits, and if you don't have coverage at work, you're going to go into a new health insurance marketplace where you're going to have a guaranteed choice of coverage that's affordable based on what you earn. It's very simple.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Why isn't that a system that would work?
DICK ARMEY: Well, the biggest problem that they have with this -- this sounds great. I mean, I have to tell you, you're warming my heart.
RICHARD KIRSCH: It is great.
DICK ARMEY: But the fact of the matter is there is a large and growing number of Americans who are actually reading the bills that have come through the House and they just don't believe that. They see this (with my help!) as a hostile government takeover of all health care, where they will be forced into a government-run program, and their health care lives will be managed by the government, just as today's the case in Medicare.
If you're over 65 years old in America today, you have no choice but to be in Medicare. Even if you want out of Medicare, you have to forfeit your Social Security to get out of it. Even if you're a Christian Scientist, you have to give up your Social Security. That's pretty heavy-handed, and people fear that (WHAT IS THIS MOUTHPIECE TALKING ABOUT?).
JUDY WOODRUFF: What about this charge?
RICHARD KIRSCH: Well, I mean, I think what Dick Armey just said is absolutely to the point. He doesn't think Medicare should exist. Basically, Medicare is the system that provides a guarantee of good coverage for seniors in this country.
It is, in fact, what is meant -- your old age means you don't have to worry about not getting the health care you need. That's the same thing we need to do for everybody in this country, but we need to do it in a system that provides choices between regulated private insurance or public insurance. And the point is, we need that guarantee for people to have affordable health coverage.
DICK ARMEY: Let me just be clear about something. I have no problem with Medicare. I was talking to my minister (WHAT?) just last night about it. If you want to voluntarily be a part of it, bless your heart, I'm proud for you. I want you to have it.
But I do have a problem is forcing people in it and be given very, very punitive government sanctions against anybody who would say, "I don't want to be in that program."
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, let's address...
DICK ARMEY: You should have a right to say no to the government and say, "I don't want to be a ward of the state."
JUDY WOODRUFF: What about this very point? He's saying that, under the plan or the plans that are moving through Congress, people would be forced into government health care, either Medicare or some other...
RICHARD KIRSCH: First of all, THAT'S TOTALLY UNTRUE. Under the plans that are being introduced and passed by so far three committees in the House and one in the Senate, people at work would keep their coverage at work, but the coverage would change in the following ways.
Your employer's coverage would have to meet certain minimum standards, so the benefits would have to be good, and the employer would have to pay for a decent amount of your coverage. So that's private insurance at work.
And if you then don't get private insurance at work, what you would do is go into a new health care marketplace where you would choose from multiple private insurance plans, not government plans, private insurance plans, and one new public insurance plan.
That's not a government takeover of anything. It is government regulation so we're sure that health insurance works for you.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What's wrong with that...
DICK ARMEY: There's nothing wrong with his story as he tells it. But the fact of the matter is, even the Congressional Budget Office says 100,000 -- or 100 million Americans will lose their -- their...
RICHARD KIRSCH: That's not what they say.
DICK ARMEY: ... their employer-provided insurance. The Congressional Budget Office...
RICHARD KIRSCH: That's not what they say.
DICK ARMEY: This is not quarreling with me.
RICHARD KIRSCH: The Congressional Budget Office actually did an analysis of the House bill. And what it said is, under their bill, the number of people who will be -- not lose their private insurance. The number of people, mostly uninsured people now who will go into the public plan will be 9 million. That's the number in the analysis of the House bill.
DICK ARMEY: Well...
RICHARD KIRSCH: That's the facts. That's what it says.
DICK ARMEY: Well, so we have a difference of information here. But I have to tell you, if you take a look at the unrest that you see brewing in America today, it's precisely because the American citizenry at large does not believe what the government and agents of the government are telling them.
- A public option -
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, let me come back to Richard Kirsch. You -- I understand your point, a big part of your point is that you think insurance companies today have too much power, too much say over what kind of care people get, how much they pay. Explain that to us. What's the problem?
RICHARD KIRSCH: The analogy is pretty simple. You wouldn't be allowed to sell a car that would kill people or a toy that would choke a child. Why should you be allowed to sell an insurance policy that doesn't actually provide good care?
We want to have a system where, when you have health insurance, it means it covers the benefits you need, and you can afford it, and it doesn't stop paying when you have a serious illness.
And we also want to be sure that insurance companies can't continue to deny care, to delay payments, to increase their profits. You know, insurance company executives made $690 million in the last decade of the 10 top companies. That's just not right.
DICK ARMEY: There are 1,300 insurance companies in America today. I'm free to choose from among them, except that the government restricts me from buying across state lines. Remove that barrier and let people be free to purchase insurance wherever they find it in the state.
Can you imagine if we passed a law in Michigan that says you can't buy a car that's made in Alabama? That would be outrageous.
RICHARD KIRSCH: That's not what we're saying.
DICK ARMEY: But that's what we're doing now, so there's plenty of opportunity. And I can fire my insurance company; I can't fire the government. And when the federal government gets control of your health care and exercises the power of the state to punish you, should you try to get out of it and go some place else, you're in real difficulty.
And let me tell you. I can tell you that, because I'm over 65 years old. I know you don't believe that, but it's true. And I have no place to go (Dick! There's always Sheldon G. Adelson!). Either I go to Medicare or I go without.
JUDY WOODRUFF: There's also discussion -- very quickly, Congressman Armey -- about a so-called nonprofit insurance cooperative, which would not have as much power as the government option would. Would you be willing to accept something like that?
DICK ARMEY: Well, you know, it's really funny. I always kind of laugh at these folks, because we have talked about risk pooling and voluntary risk pooling operations on the private sector through private initiative and they've been blocked in Congress by the advocates of single-payer.
Now they say, if the government sponsors the risk pool, this would be akin to Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac. We call it Fanny Med.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So it wouldn't be -- it wouldn't be acceptable?
DICK ARMEY: No, it's a government-sponsored operation, and government-sponsored operations generally malfunction.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What about you and your group, Richard Kirsch?
RICHARD KIRSCH: Right. Medicare has lower inflation...
JUDY WOODRUFF: Would you be willing to go along with a nonprofit cooperative idea?
RICHARD KIRSCH: No, because that's not a public option, because it doesn't have the ability to lower costs and keep insurance companies honest. Co-ops are very nice, but we need...
JUDY WOODRUFF: So here's one thing both of you agree on, but for different reasons.
RICHARD KIRSCH: Neither of us want a co-op, but the difference is, I think we need a public option. People choose private insurance, but we need a plan that will keep private insurance companies honest and make them compete.
AMA data, American Medical Association data, found that 94 percent of the markets in this country are highly concentrated by Department of Justice standards. That means you don't have effective choice. Want to lower costs and keep those insurance companies honest? We need a public option.
- Anger at town halls -
JUDY WOODRUFF: Congressman Armey, what about all the attention that's being given right now to these town meetings around the country? A lot of people angry. Are these a healthy way to reach the best outcome for the country, or is reason being drowned out?
DICK ARMEY: Well, I don't -- I was in Congress for 18 years (and now I'm on the Adelson gravy train!). I had at least four seasons of town hall meetings every year, and town hall meeting are exciting things. People should come up. They go to a town hall meeting because they have something that's a matter of concern to them.
Think about this. This is one-sixth of the entire economy, and probably the most critically important sector of the economy to you and me is, does Mom get the right health care? Do I get it? Do my children get it? And they're fearful about it.
Now, here's the problem. If I were to tell you that I bought an insurance policy for my family and didn't read it, you would consider me a terribly imprudent person. And yet they go to the town hall meeting and the congressman says, "I haven't read the bill," and that's very disconcerting to them.
JUDY WOODRUFF: How do you see these town meetings?
RICHARD KIRSCH: Well, for the most part they've been really...
JUDY WOODRUFF: You're encouraging your folks to...
RICHARD KIRSCH: We're telling our folks, encouraging our folks to go, and civil discourse, and asking questions, and having real debate is great. Sometimes people are coming in shouting and not listening; that's not what this is about.
But more and more, we're seeing press reports around the country of meetings that are civil, that people are listening to each other. There's a lot of myths and lies being told about this legislation. But if people can ask questions and get those questions answered, it's great. That's what democracy is about, and we'd love to see more of it.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What's your sense today, quickly, of how this is going to turn out?
RICHARD KIRSCH: I'm quite sure the president is going to sign a bill that guarantees good, affordable health care coverage for everyone in this country this fall.
DICK ARMEY: I think the health care bill as it presently is presented out of the work of these committees in the House will not be able to obtain the votes in the House -- floor of the House because too many voting members of Congress will have heard too much dissension from their constituents back home and they won't dare vote for it.
JUDY WOODRUFF: We hear you both loud and clear. Richard Armey, Richard Kirsch, thank you both.
RICHARD KIRSCH: Thank you.
DICK ARMEY: All right.
+ What follows also answers the phony Rich Lowry and his 8/14/09 "A populist revolt from the grass roots". He's the lesser-talented successor to William F. Buckley's reign running NationalReview.com!
ANSWERS!
- Republican Death Trip -
“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.
Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”
So, how’s it going?
Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.
This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.
Right now, the charge that’s gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. It’s a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican -- yes, Republican -- of Georgia, who says that it’s “nuts” to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.
And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for “advance directives” for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. That’s exactly what was being proposed -- and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.
Yet the smear continues to spread. And as the example of Mr. Gingrich shows, it’s not a fringe phenomenon: Senior G.O.P. figures, including so-called moderates, have endorsed the lie.
Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is one of these supposed moderates. I’m not sure where his centrist reputation comes from -- he did, after all, compare critics of the Bush tax cuts to Hitler. But in any case, his role in the health care debate has been flat-out despicable.
Last week, Mr. Grassley claimed that his colleague Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor wouldn’t have been treated properly in other countries because they prefer to “spend money on people who can contribute more to the economy.” This week, he told an audience that “you have every right to fear,” that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”
Again, that’s what a supposedly centrist Republican, a member of the Gang of Six trying to devise a bipartisan health plan, sounds like.
So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years -- the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia -- are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.
The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.
So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.
What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.
What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage -- passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.
So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell. - Paul Krugman 8/14/09
- Although we coined the phrase "Republican bias in the Media/Press" some forty years ago, we could not imagine the events of the last two decades...
...particularly the cavalier vote of the infamous five Republican appointed members of the United States Supreme Court; William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy, Justices who handed the Presidency of the United States to George Walker Bush, a man who had the most suspect background of any presidential candidate since Warren Harding, thus denying the presidency of the actual winner, Albert Gore, whose political record and personal background qualified him for that high office, qualifications for our highest office exceeded by few men since our Founding Fathers!
- Indeed, we did not foresee the newsprint of the LAST TEN DAYS!
Silence A Cable TV Feud"
It was a media cage fight, televised every weeknight at 8 p.m. But the match was halted when the blood started to spray executives in the high-priced seats.
For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.
It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with "a neutral perspective"(?) to help bring it to at least a temporary end.
At an OFF-THE-RECORD SUMMIT meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose* asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.
Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.
In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).
“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said.
The rapprochement -- not acknowledged by the parties until now -- showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.
“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”
The parent companies declined to comment directly on the details of the cease-fire, which was orchestrated in part by Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, and Gary Ginsberg, an executive vice president who oversees corporate affairs at the News Corporation.
Mr. Olbermann, who is on vacation, said by e-mail message, “I am party to no deal,” adding that he would not have been included in any conversations between G.E. and the News Corporation. Fox News said it would not comment.
Civility was not always the aim of Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly, men who, in an industry of thin skins, are both famous for reacting to verbal pinpricks. Both host 8 p.m. programs on cable news in studios a few blocks apart in Midtown Manhattan.
The conservative-leaning Mr. O’Reilly has turned “The O’Reilly Factor” into a profit center for the News Corporation by blitzing his opponents and espousing his opinions unapologetically. He found his bête noire in the liberal-leaning Mr. Olbermann, the host of MSNBC’s “Countdown,” who saw in Mr. O’Reilly a regenerating target he nicknamed the “Bill-o the Clown.”
The 6-foot-4 Mr. Olbermann started sniping regularly at the also 6-foot-4 Mr. O’Reilly in late 2005, sometimes making him the subject of the “Countdown” segment, the “Worst Person in the World.” Mr. O’Reilly was also a stand-in for the perceived offenses of the top-rated Fox News channel, a place that many Democrats now perceive to be a Republican Party in exile.
By punching up at his higher-rated prey, Mr. Olbermann helped his own third-place cable news show. “Honestly, I should send him a check each week,” he remarked to a reporter three years ago.
Fox noticed. Mr. Murdoch remarked to Esquire last year that “Keith Olbermann is trying to make a business out of destroying Bill O’Reilly.” Mr. O’Reilly refused to mention his critic by name on the “Factor,” deeming him a “vicious smear merchant,” but he regularly blamed Mr. Zucker for “ruining a once-great brand,” NBC.
In late 2007, Mr. O’Reilly had a young producer, Jesse Watters, ambush Mr. Immelt and ask about G.E.’s business in Iran, which is legal, and which includes sales of energy and medical technology.
G.E. says it no longer does business in Iran.
Mr. O’Reilly continued to pour pressure on its corporate leaders, even saying on one program last year that “If my child were killed in Iraq, I would blame the likes of Jeffrey Immelt.” The resulting e-mail to G.E. from Mr. O’Reilly’s viewers were scathing and relentless.
The messages hit nerves on both sides. Mr. Immelt remarked to MSNBC staff members last summer that he would “never forgive Rupert Murdoch” for Fox’s behavior, according to two people who were present. In private phone calls, the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, told NBC officials to end the attacks.
In February, Mr. Zucker told Newsweek what he had told Mr. Olbermann privately: “I wish it weren’t so personal.” The previous year, Mr. Murdoch said that Mr. O’Reilly “shouldn’t be so sensitive” to the attacks lobbed by MSNBC.
Over time, G.E. and the News Corporation concluded that the fighting “wasn’t good for either parent,” said an NBC employee with direct knowledge of the situation. But it wasn't until the closed-door Microsoft session hosted by Mr. Rose that a rapprochement was proposed, sealed with a handshake between Mr. Immelt and Mr. Murdoch (Mr. Rose did not respond to a request for comment.)
The details of the peace plan were left to Mr. Zucker and Mr. Ginsberg, who agreed that hosts on Fox and MSNBC would resist lobbing mortars at each other or their parent companies, according to two employees with direct knowledge of the agreement.
The agreement has already been strained recently by the Fox host Glenn Beck, who called President Obama a racist.
But like any title fight, the final round could not end without an attempted knockout. On June 1, the day after the abortion provider George Tiller was killed in Kansas, Mr. Olbermann took to the air to cite Mr. O’Reilly’s numerous references to “Tiller, the baby killer” and to announce that he would retire his caricature of Mr. O’Reilly.
“The goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air,” he said.
The next day, Mr. O’Reilly made the extraordinary claim that “federal authorities have developed information about General Electric doing business with Iran, deadly business” and published Mr. Immelt’s e-mail address and mailing address, repeating it slowly for emphasis.
Then the attacks mostly stopped.
* Shortly after, Phil Griffin, the MSNBC president, told producers that he wanted the channel’s other programs to follow Mr. Olbermann’s lead and restrain from criticizing Fox directly, according to two employees. At Fox News, some staff members were told to “be fair” to G.E. *
The executives at both companies, it appears, were relieved. “For this war to stop, it meant fewer headaches on the corporate side,” one employee said.
"They've won their respective constituencies." Said a former member of MSNBC's senior staff. "They don't need to do this anymore, really."
Tensions still simmer between the two networks, however, and staff members have been unwilling or unable to stop the strife altogether. But for now, the daily back and forth has quieted. - Brian Stelter N Y Times 8/1/09
- "Charlie Rose" to Appear On Bloomberg Channel -
“Charlie Rose,” the long-running interview program that is SYNONYMOUS with PBS, is getting a second home: Bloomberg Television.
In a deal that is expected to be announced on Thursday, Bloomberg will rebroadcast Charlie Rose’s show in prime time AROUND THE WORLD. The arrangement marks one of Bloomberg’s boldest steps yet to REFASHION its PROGRAMMING to better compete with CNBC and other channels.
The pact will take effect in September, Bloomberg officials said Wednesday.
* The one-hour program will continue to be syndicated to PBS affiliates in the United States, as it has since 1991; the editions will be replayed the next evening on Bloomberg.
The Bloomberg rebroadcast “gives me an additional audience and a global reach,” Mr. Rose said in a telephone interview Wednesday. He has taped the show from Bloomberg’s studios since 1994.
Andrew R. Lack, formerly of NBC News and CBS News and now the chief executive of Bloomberg’s multimedia group, spoke of Mr. Rose’s show as a “GLOBAL CONVERSATION.”
“As the Bloomberg brand grows, Charlie as a brand is going to grow too,” Mr. Lack said.
Bloomberg closed its foreign-language operations this year and established a single English-language channel around the world. Reports at the time said the company was seeking to turn around the unprofitable TV unit.
Adding “Charlie Rose” in prime time will immediately bolster the channel, which is perhaps better known for its lively graphics than for individual programs. The rebroadcast will be shown at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. in most time zones. It will also be broadcast by Bloomberg Radio.
Known for fostering in-depth discussions about politics, international affairs, science and culture, Mr. Rose has interviewed seemingly all of the world’s thought leaders. Next week, for example, he said he had secured an exclusive TV interview with the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak ahead of Mr. Mubarak’s visit to the United States.
Mr. Rose said he had no intention of ending his syndication arrangement with PBS. He said the rebroadcast by Bloomberg would benefit all parties.
As a public television program, “Charlie Rose” is underwritten by corporate sponsors and viewers. The messages from underwriters will still be seen on the Bloomberg broadcast, the network said. The network will also sell its own advertisements on the rebroadcasts.
Mr. Rose said Bloomberg’s rebroadcast rights stemmed from his long association with Mr. Lack. “To have Charlie effectively everywhere on our air is going to be a great asset for us,” Mr. Lack said.
Bloomberg says it will sometimes enhance the previous night’s PBS broadcast with archival interviews, graphics or other additions.
"As a producer, you always want a second cut," Mr. Lack said jokingly. "This is a nice way for us to do that." - Brian Stelter N Y Times 8/6/09
The next Stelter article, 8/8/09, spelled out additional damning information:
"The deal extends beyond the prime-time hour that Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly occupy. Employees of daytime programs on MSNBC were specifically told by executives not to mention Fox hosts in segments critical of conservative media figures, according to two staff members. The employees requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters.
The executives had sought for years to tamp down the attacks by Mr. Olbermann and Mr. O’Reilly, to little success. Mr. Olbermann often portrayed the higher-rated Mr. O'Reilly as a clown and condemned comments on Fox programs. Mr. O'Reilly's assaults were less frequent but more ferocious toward General Electric, once even blaming "the likes of Mr. Immelt" for the killing of soldiers in Iraq.
Frustrated by the refusal by NBC’s chief executive, Jeffrey Zucker, to halt the attacks on Mr. O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, personally instructed Mr. O’Reilly’s program to aim at Mr. Immelt, people familiar with the situation said.
In July, after Mr. Olbermann condemned Fox’s Glenn Beck for letting a guest assert that a terrorist attack in the United States might be a good thing, Mr. Beck booked a segment about General Electric and declared that a “merger between General Electric and the Obama administration” was “nearly complete.” - Brian Stelter 8/8/09
Our Founding Fathers & Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
- A memorial to the power of endurance -
His monument is easy to miss - and I did for 12 years, the length of his tenure in the White House. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial doesn't dominate the mall or command a view of the tidal basin. While Hollywood often camps out on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the FDR remains off the beaten path, curled up around the softball fields of West Potomac Park.
But I don't know that any of the great monuments in the nation's capital speak so eloquently to the anxieties of these times. The FDR Memorial not only reminds us that if the issues that confront us are tenacious, they are not original ... and it offers extraordinary counsel for those who haven't given up the fight.
Twenty-one Roosevelt quotes are carved in the 4,500 tons of carnelian granite that architect Lawrence Halprin hauled in from South Dakota because, the Washington Post noted in 1997, the reddish stone so closely resembled the rock FDR selected for additions to the family home at Hyde Park, N.Y.
In those 559 words, Roosevelt returns time and again to the imperative of social justice, the depravity of war, the spiritual value of work, and the rejuvenating power of hope.
Several of the quotes are so timely ("The test of our progress," Roosevelt said in his Second Inaugural Address, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little") that it is daunting to realize they were voiced in the '30s and '40s, and selected -- by a committee co-chaired by Oregon's Mark Hatfield -- in the '90s.
But the words that followed me through the memorial last week are the ones that hang at the entrance to the 7.5-acre site. In the life-sized sculpture at this end of the park, Roosevelt sits in his wheelchair, upright but alone, seemingly disabled by the task before him, the granite wall -- and the words of his wife, Eleanor -- towering above him:
"Franklin's illness ... gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons - infinite patience and never-ending persistence."
The threats Roosevelt faced put the quest for universal health care into perspective: He was challenged by the ravages of a great depression and a gruesome world war. Part of the genius of Halprin's design is the reminder of how long FDR labored to find the tools and words he employed to meet those threats.
The twisting granite wall that frames the memorial is 800 feet long. At every bend in the road, the water that Roosevelt loved works its will on the stone. Each time you turn a corner, you are met by another bread line, another surprise attack, another reason for a fireside chat ... and the next term Roosevelt needed to wrap his arms around the problem.
Far from wearing the president down, that journey transformed Roosevelt, as H.W. Brands writes in "Traitor to His Class," from a "Hudson Valley patrician into a champion of the common people of America." The Roosevelt you find deep in the memorial is far bigger than life, almost regal in the bronze cape, the master of ... ah, yes, that Scottish terrier at his feet.
As he is schooled in the need for "infinite patience and never-ending persistence," I can't imagine a better place for Barack Obama to seek the perspective of history, and the reminder that the best monument to any president is the efforts he makes to wed the "great arsenal of democracy" to the 12 words that are the FDR Memorial's parting shot:
Freedom of speech.
Freedom of worship.
Freedom from want.
Freedom from fear. - Steve Duin Oregonian 8/2/09
Emphasis On Humility
There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.
That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters -- some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” -- have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.
Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.
And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.
So this is something new and ugly. What’s behind it?
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, has compared the scenes at health care town halls to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000 -- the demonstration that disrupted the vote count in Miami and arguably helped send George W. Bush to the White House. PORTRAYED AT THE TIME AS LOCAL PROTESTERS, MANY OF THE RIOTERS WERE ACTUALLY G.O.P. STAFFERS FLOWN IN FROM WASHINGTON.
But Mr. Gibbs is probably only half right. Yes, well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs. Key organizers include two Astroturf (fake grass-roots) organizations: FreedomWorks, run by the former House majority leader Dick Armey*, and a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.
The latter group, by the way, is run by Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain. Mr. Scott was forced out of that job amid a fraud investigation; the company eventually pleaded guilty to charges of overbilling state and federal health plans, paying $1.7 billion -- yes, that’s “billion” -- in fines. You can’t make this stuff up.
But while the organizers are as crass as they come, I haven’t seen any evidence that the people disrupting those town halls are Florida-style rent-a-mobs. For the most part, the protesters appear to be genuinely angry. The question is, what are they angry about?
There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.
Now, people who don’t know that Medicare is a government program probably aren’t reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.
That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.
And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.
Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.
Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the “angry white voter” era in America. Indeed, voters who can be swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear are a declining share of the electorate.
But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.
And if Mr. Obama can’t recapture some of the passion of 2008, can’t inspire his supporters to stand up and be heard, health care reform may well fail. - Paul Krugman 8/7/09
*But Bankrolled by the notorious Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon G. Adelson!
A question for Messrs. Landler & Sanger, front page N Y Times 7/23/09 - "Clinton Speaks of Shielding Mideast From a Nuclear Iran" - your characterization of Ms. Clinton's remarks in Thailand regarding Iran. First paragraph - "...if the country defied international demands that it not seek a nuclear WEAPONS program (U.S. might answer with extended "defense umbrella")." So far legitimate.
By the second paragraph (of a 20-paragraph article) the theme becomes "its NUCLEAR ambitions could be countered militarily...". Are you gentlemen implying that the pursuit of nuclear POWER in Iran is prohibited? Iran may well consider the present state of Israel as an "existential" threat to their existence what with Israel's history in Palestine since June of 1967, and the aggressively hostile, i.e. bellicose present government of Netanyahu & Lieberman - and Iran's sense of Israel, with this history and today's developments, is logical. Israeli history can not be discounted.
Our question gentlemen. Is your ethnicity, your allegiance, and that of the owner of The New York Times, involved in your mischaracterization of Iran? And have you ignored the United States coup, under Republican President Eisenhower in 1953, which removed the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh?
This is a particularly opportune time for a fair and just settlement of the sixty-plus years of Middle East bloody turmoil. Do your part.
But three days later, 7/27/09, David Sanger, in his eagerness (seen, on occasion, on Gwen Ifill's Washington Week) to nail Iran, does a solo piece in The New York Times as follows:
"Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Iran’s leaders on Sunday that if they were seeking nuclear weapons, “your pursuit is futile,” and ruled out explicitly the possibility that the Obama administration would allow Iran to produce its own nuclear fuel, even under intense international inspection [Was this provocation by Ms. Clinton generated by the questioning of David Gregory on his Meet the Press, who has been trying to emulate his hero Don Imus, or is it another example of Sanger's appetite to militarily confront Iran? You could visualize Sanger salivating as the tenor of the broadcast was sure to galvanize the Iranians. They have Israel threatening an airstrike, and the Jewish Sanger interpretation of the broadcast as closing the door on Iranian nuclear power which, as the article itself admits, is a right granted to signatories of the internationally recognized Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, WHICH ISRAEL HAS REFUSED TO SIGN, EVEN THOUGH THE ISRAELIS HAVE 200-PLUS NUCLEAR WEAPONS AT THE READY!].
- And The Article Adds To The Provocation! -
While the Obama administration has often said that it would not allow Iran to possess a nuclear weapon, some officials have hedged slightly when asked whether they could envision a situation in which Tehran, as part of a broader deal, might be permitted to produce its own nuclear fuel, called a fuel cycle in the nuclear industry. Reformers and hard-liners in Iran have said the country should produce its own fuel and have argued that it has that right as a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
But President George W. Bush had argued that Iran forfeited that right by conducting secret nuclear activities for 18 years. In contrast, Mohamed ElBaradei, the departing head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a nonproliferation watchdog, has argued that the best way to avoid a confrontation is to allow Iran a token of nuclear fuel capacity, under toughened inspection rules to assure that fuel is not diverted for weapons. ON SUNDAY, MRS. CLINTON SEEMED TO SIDE WITH THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION." - N Y Times 7/27/09
We have seen, from the prior link ("This is a particularly opportune time") the general outline of the United States invasion of Iraq, and some of the particulars of how Great Britain became involved! Here are two 7/31/09 articles which cover the present British investigation of the leadin to our war against Iraq - and a third item on the country, Israel, for which the war was designed, and clandestinely dedicated.
- The Iraq inquiry must not back down -
- Sir John Chilcot should not ignore evidence that British officials plotted with their US counterparts to topple Saddam
Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian newspaper
"So, says Sir John Chilcot, his Iraq inquiry will be "as open as possible", though some hearings would be held behind closed doors for reasons of "national security" or to allow "more candour". But he and his "independent" committee would not shy away from criticism or placing blame if they found mistakes were made.
Do not underestimate the ability of ministers and officials -- former and serving -- and the mandarin classes to dodge questions and, if they cannot avoid pointing to mistakes, blame the system rather than individuals.
Crucial to the inquiry is not only why things went so wrong after the 2003 invasion of Iraq but what the public and parliament were not told. There is the legal advice of the attorney, Lord Goldsmith, of course, about which we now know a lot, though not all.
Then there is the key issue of what Tony Blair and his officials told the Bush administration privately in the two-year run-up to the invasion. The Butler inquiry into the use and abuse of intelligence in the decision to go to war had a narrow remit. It was provided with many documents it did not publish, or even refer to, because Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary, believed they were not relevant to his remit. Chilcot was a member of the Butler committee.
Many documents have been leaked over the past few years. Many include correspondence between British diplomats in Washington and Downing Street. They show that British officials were in effect plotting with their US counterparts to prepare for war despite their misgivings. It seems quite clear that Blair had decided he would join the US in any invasion. The only question was how best to engineer it. British officials had doubts about the legality of what was in effect a decision to topple Saddam Hussein, come what may.
According to a classified meeting of one meeting at Downing Street in July 2002 -- nearly a year before the invasion -- Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, told the assembled group, including Blair, that he felt after a recent visit to Washington that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".
Will Chilcot question the participants about the extraordinary material in these documents? Or will he succumb to Whitehall's practice of not commenting on leaks -- or asking others to comment on them? Maybe I am doing Chilcot a disservice. He will have to be watched closely." - The Guardian 7/31/09
- "Britain's Iraq Inquiry Opens With a Vow to Be 'Rigorous" -
By John F. Burns N Y Times
LONDON -- After years of delay, a wide-ranging public inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq war opened on Thursday with a pledge from its chairman that it would be unsparing in examining the causes and conduct of Britain’s involvement, and in assigning blame where necessary.
“We are determined to be thorough, rigorous, fair and frank,” Sir John Chilcot, a 70-year-old retired civil servant, said in an opening statement that appeared aimed, at least in part, at critics who contended that the investigation could become another whitewash of actions by those who led Britain to war, including the prime minister at the time, Tony Blair.
“The inquiry is not a court of law, and nobody is on trial,” the inquiry chairman said. “But I want to make something absolutely clear: This committee will not shy away from making criticism.”
Sir John said the panel planned to hold hearings and summon documents dealing with every phase of the war, from the decisions that preceded military action in Iraq to their aftermath. The purpose will be “to establish as accurately as possible what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned,” he said.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed the five-member inquiry panel last month with a formal statement that it would not be assigning blame for events in Iraq. In the face of a public outcry, Mr. Brown quickly backed down, but the panel, judging by the chairman’s statement, appeared set on establishing its independence.
Signaling that the panel would not rely solely on senior officials like Mr. Blair who had long rehearsed their justifications for the war, the chairman said it might also call “junior officials with vital evidence about the ways their managers and leaders acted,” and would encourage testimony from families of some of the 179 British soldiers who died in Iraq.
Sir John’s insistence that the panel hold as many of its hearings in public as possible, and allow live television coverage -- another break with Mr. Brown’s original stipulation of closed hearings -- presented the possibility that some of the more contentious sessions would take place in the prelude to a general election that must be held by June.
The panel’s chairman said the panel’s task was “huge,” setting the earliest date for its report for the end of 2010, or possibly 2011. That led Michael White, an editor at the newspaper The Guardian, to write that “the daily drip-drip attrition of public evidence will open another flank” against Mr. Brown’s Labour Party during the spring campaign.
Sir John suggested that the panel would also to look into the ways in which the relationship between Mr. Blair and President George W. Bush had contributed to Britain’s decision to join the Iraq invasion.
“The Anglo-American relationship is one of the most central parts of this inquiry, and how that was conducted is something we need to get a very strong understanding of,” he said.
War critics have complained about Mr. Brown’s choice of a former civil servant as the inquiry’s leader, instead of a well-known public figure with established independence from the government. Sir John held a succession of top security-related posts before retiring in 1997, including the top civil service job in the Northern Ireland Office.
The inquiry follows two earlier, narrowly based investigations of the war, the last completed only 16 months after American and British forces invaded Iraq in March 2003. Those inquiries were widely judged in Britain to have given the Blair government too easy a passage on the war, which many critics here regard as Britain’s worst foreign policy blunder since the Suez invasion in 1956.
The first inquiry, in 2003, looked into the death of David Kelly, a British weapons expert who committed suicide after the Blair government identified him as the source for a BBC report that accused the government of inflating intelligence reports on Saddam Hussein’s supposed stockpile of chemical and biological weapons in the prelude to the war. The inquiry, by Lord Hutton, a senior judge, found Mr. Blair and his officials blameless.
A second inquiry, by Lord Butler, a former cabinet secretary, investigated the Blair government’s uses of intelligence in justifying British involvement in the war. The inquiry found that “more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear,” and that the government’s judgments had stretched available intelligence “to the outer limits.” - JOHN F. BURNS 7/31/09
- MIDDLE EAST Israel: Report on Gaza War
An Israeli government report released Thursday insisted that “incessant” Hamas rocket attacks forced Israel to attack Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, countering charges of war crimes but acknowledging that more than a dozen criminal inquiries are under way.
The 160-page report was the first comprehensive Israeli government study of the offensive in December and January.
It was an attempt to answer charges from Palestinians, the United Nations, and human rights groups that Israeli forces committed war crimes and violated international law during the three-week operation.
The Israeli government said the report was not meant to be an “assertion of infallibility,” but rejected the charges one by one, attributing extensive damage and casualties to WARTIME MISTAKES! - Associated Press 7/31/09
It wasn't a war - it was a mechanized, land and air massacre of Gazans, mostly civilians!
Iran's Mortal Enemy Israel -
- Gates Discusses Arms Deal in Iraq and Israel -
"Defense Secretary Robert Gates has arrived in Iraq on an unannounced trip. Gates is meeting Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and discussing possible arms deals. Iraq has expressed interest in purchasing F-16 multirole fighter jets built by Lockheed Martin. On Monday, Gates also discussed arms deals while in Israel. At a news conference, Gates said, “We will continue to ensure that Israel has the most advanced weapons for its national defense.” On July 1, Israel formally submitted a letter outlining its intention to buy the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also made by Lockheed Martin.
- Military May Expand Role of Contractors in Afghanistan -
As President Obama escalates the presence of US troops in Afghanistan, the military may hire a private contractor to provide full-time security at dozens of bases there and protect vehicle convoys traveling in the country. The Army published a notice on July 10 notifying security contractors that it was considering a contract for “theater-wide” security. Robert Gates has called private contractors “vital” to supporting US bases in Afghanistan, contradicting earlier claims that he intended to decrease their presence in US military operations and despite continued controversy over the conduct of private contractors in Iraq. - DemocracyNow 7/28/09
- And On 7/27/09!
- Israel: All Options on Iran Are Still on the Table -
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Mideast envoy George Mitchell have arrived in Israel for a new round of talks with the Israeli government. National Security Adviser James Jones and Special Mideast Adviser Dennis Ross head to Israel in the coming days. Gates’s visit was partially aimed at dissuading Israel from taking any military action against Iran and buying time for US diplomacy to bear fruit.
Gates said he hopes Iran will respond by September to the Obama administration’s offer for talks on its nuclear program.
Robert Gates: “The President has been quite clear that this is not an open-ended offer to engage. We’re very mindful of the possibility that the Iranians would simply try to run out the clock. I think that the President is certainly anticipating or hoping for some kind of response this fall, perhaps by the time of the UN General Assembly.”
After meeting with Gates, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak refused to rule out an Israeli attack on Iran.
Ehud Barak: “We clearly believe that no option should be removed from the table. This is our policy. We mean it. We recommend to others to take the same position, but we cannot dictate it to anyone.”
The Obama administration and Israel are also said to be close to a deal on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Washington will reportedly allow some settlement projects in advanced stages of construction to be completed, but Israel would freeze all other building for an as-yet-undetermined period of time. Meanwhile, the Israeli government has revealed that more than 300,000 Jewish residents now live in settlements in the West Bank, an increase of 2.3 percent since January.
- Worldwide Rallies [Generated By World-Wide Jewish Diaspora!] Condemn Iran’s Treatment of Opposition Protesters -
Protests were held in over eighty cities Saturday calling on the Iranian government to release all opposition activists arrested after last month’s disputed presidential election. In New York, Navid Hazeghi helped organize the protest.
Navid Hazeghi: “The goal today is to ask from the United Nations to send a delegation in Iran and investigate the crimes and the violations of human rights that took place in Iran in the protests after the vote of the 12th of June.”
- July 28, 2009 -
A notice for one Aluf Benn in Tel Aviv, Israel, which The New York Times placed on their OP-ED page 7/28/09, Mr. Benn being the "Editor at Large" at Haaretz - "Why Won't Obama Talk To Israel?"
For openers, maybe it's because your population elected, once again, "Bibi" Netanyahu, whose vicious rhetoric in 1994 compelled one of his acolytes, Yigal Amir, to assassinate a legitimate Israeli soldier-statesman Yitzhak Rabin.
Or is it because the insatiable, insufferable Israelis and their reckless, confiscatory 40-year grab of Palestinian's water and land is the direct cause of God-awful conflicts from one end of the world to the other - conflicts in which defenseless innocents have had to resort to the most God-awful means of retaliation imaginable. Mr. Benn is so self-blinded by his irrational Zionism that he, unknowingly, exposes the movement of which he is an integral part, as the "editor at large" of Haaretz:
"Here (in Israel) we are TAUGHT (by whom?) that Zionist determination and struggle - not guilt over the Holocaust - brought Jews a homeland." What about the $100 billion$ to $200 billion$ provided by the United States taxpayer???
Mr. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., by publishing this unintended expose' by Aluf Benn, has gifted the world. This may well be a public service which more than matches his father's publishing breach - blocking the investigation of Watergate.
We dutifully read the N Y Times Wednesday, 7/29/09, to see if any of the multitude of Jewish Americans, who correctly consider The Times their newspaper, would comment on Mr. Benn's OP-ED. Zero. But, predictably, Tom Friedman appeared (hoping that Tom Watson's character would rub off on Tom Friedman - NO WAY!) and, as usual his piece was all about himself, in which he informed us that he was in Afghanistan during the Open Championship (we call it the British Open), but neglected to tell us that the horrendous turmoil there is a direct result of the Jewish invasion of Palestine in 1948, and the Israeli policies since. He went on to write "Golf is all about individual character." Great opportunity, but lost. Mr. Friedman could have continued. ."That's what's missing in the current regime of Netanyahu & Lieberman in Israel - character". Could have, but didn't. Would have been an apt response to Mr. Benn. [Tom Friedman is well known for hanging up on broadcaster Amy Goodman, who exhibits great character, week after week, year after year, Monday through Friday.]
Mr. Benn's complete 7/28/09 OP-ED - Link of Why Won't Obama Talk to Israel?
- In West Bank Hills, Settlers Send Defiant Message To Obama -
By Ethan Bronner
NERIA, West Bank -- In this land of endless history and ethereal beauty, several thousand Jewish settlers gathered on a dozen West Bank hills with makeshift huts and Israeli flags over several days this week to mark an invented anniversary and defy the American president, conveying to his aides visiting Jerusalem what they thought of his demand for a settlement freeze.
Eleven tiny settler outposts were inaugurated, including one next to this settlement in the rugged Samarian hills. A clearing encompassing a generator and a hut with a corrugated metal roof and a ritual mezuza on its doorpost now bears the name Givat Egoz. This is how nearby Neria, with 180 families, got its start 18 years ago.
“We are rebuilding the land of Israel,” Rabbi Yigael Shandorfi, leader of a religious academy at the neighboring settlement outpost of Nahliel, said during the ceremony. “Our hope is that there will be roads, electricity and water.” The message to President Obama, he said, is that this is Jewish land. He did not use the president’s name, but an insulting Hebrew slang for a black man and the phrase “that Arab they call a president.”
None of the hundreds gathered -- mostly couples with large families, but also armed young men and teenagers from other outposts -- objected. Yitzhak Shadmi, leader of the regional council of settlements, said Mr. Obama was a racist and anti-Semite for his assertion that Jews should not build here, but Arabs could.
Mr. Shadmi said the ceremonies across the West Bank this week honored a moment in 1946 when Zionists established 11 settlements in the northern Negev of Palestine in defiance of the British rulers before Israel was created. It was important for the new outposts to be established while Washington’s emissaries were visiting, he said. George J. Mitchell, the special envoy for the Middle East, who is pressing the settlement freeze, was in the West Bank at the start of the week.
The national security adviser, James L. Jones, and a White House adviser on the region, Dennis B. Ross, held meetings in Jerusalem on Wednesday as part of the negotiations, which also include attempts to get Arab governments and Palestinians to reciprocate if the Israelis agree to the freeze.
“We wanted to do this while they were here,” Mr. Shadmi said. “We’re saying, ‘Mitchell, go home.’ ”
When the settlement of Neria was created in 1991, it had a similar purpose. Yossi Dermer, spokesman for the settlement, said it was known slyly to intimates as “the James Baker settlement” because it was set up to convey a message of defiance before a visit by James A. Baker III, secretary of state for the first President George Bush.
Because West Bank settlements officially require Israeli government approval and the new outposts did not obtain it, the Israeli police have dismantled several of the new ones already. But just as quickly, they are being rebuilt, sometimes a bit bigger. At nearly every outpost, the ruins left by past police actions lie next to newly built huts.
“We’ll build and build, and every time they destroy it we will build bigger and better and prettier,” asserted Tirael Cohen, a 16-year-old girl who lives at Ramat Migron, an extension of the unauthorized Migron outpost, not far from Ramallah, a large Palestinian city in the West Bank. Ruined corrugated metal and pieces of wood were strewn on the ground nearby.
Tirael has lived at Ramat Migron for a year and a half with 10 other girls, and, at a religiously modest distance away, 10 boys live in a separate structure. The girls cook, the boys build and maintain, and all study at nearby religious academies.
About 40 religious girls from within Israel and West Bank settlements spent three days at Ramat Migron last week in what they called “spiritual preparation” for coming battles over the land.
On the outside wall of the kitchen is a rabbinical quotation about the need to redeem the land of Israel. It says “bare mountains and deserted fields cry out for life and creation,” and adds: “An internal revolution is taking place here, a revolution in man and the earth. These are the true pains of salvation.”
The Migron outpost itself is expected to be taken down because it is built on land that, according to a court case, belongs to private Palestinian families. Centuries-old olive trees dot the landscape.
The Obama administration is hoping to help establish a Palestinian state in nearly all of the West Bank next to Israel. One major challenge is what to do with the 300,000 Israeli Jews who have settled here over four decades, often at their government’s urging.
Many could be incorporated into Israel through a border adjustment; others say they would move if compensated. But some, like these outpost settlers, say they will never move because they believe they are fulfilling God’s plan with every hut they put up. They are likely to be a major stumbling block to any attempt to find a two-state solution.
- New Outposts spring up as a rebuke to the emissaries sent by Washington -
At the Neria outpost celebration, Noam Rein, a father of 10, looked out across the hills at Ramallah and called its presence “temporary.”
He added: “The Torah says the land of Israel is for the Jewish people. This is just the beginning. We will build 1,000 homes here. The Arabs cannot stay here, not because we hate them, but because this is not their place.”
Among the religious leaders who spoke at the ceremony, Rabbi Yair Remer of Harasha, a nearby outpost, noted that Thursday was the Ninth of Av, a Jewish day of mourning commemorating the destruction of the ancient temples. He suggested that the best way to cope with the tragedy of Jewish history was to do what the young builders of this outpost were doing.
“The land rejoices because its children are returning to her,” he said, referring to Jewish settlers, making no mention of the 2.5 million Palestinians here.
Tirael, the teenager from Ramat Migron, put it another way: “I believe that every inch of this land is us, our blood. If we lose one inch, it is like losing a person.” - Ethan Bronner
WITH CHARACTER!
- An Incoherent Truth - By Paul Krugman
Right now the fate of health care reform seems to rest in the hands of relatively conservative Democrats -- mainly members of the Blue Dog Coalition, created in 1995. And you might be tempted to say that President Obama needs to give those Democrats what they want.
But he can’t - BECAUSE THE BLUE DOGS AREN’T MAKING SENSE.
To grasp the problem, you need to understand the outline of the proposed reform (all of the Democratic plans on the table agree on the essentials.)
Reform, if it happens, will rest on four main pillars: regulation, mandates, subsidies and competition.
By regulation I mean the nationwide imposition of rules that would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on your medical history, or dropping your coverage when you get sick. This would stop insurers from gaming the system by covering only healthy people.
On the other side, individuals would also be prevented from gaming the system: Americans would be required to buy insurance even if they’re currently healthy, rather than signing up only when they need care. And all but the smallest businesses would be required either to provide their employees with insurance, or to pay fees that help cover the cost of subsidies -- subsidies that would make insurance affordable for lower-income American families.
Finally, there would be a public option: a government-run insurance plan competing with private insurers, which would help hold down costs.
The subsidy portion of health reform would cost around a trillion dollars over the next decade. In all the plans currently on the table, this expense would be offset with a combination of cost savings elsewhere and additional taxes, so that there would be no overall effect on the federal deficit.
So what are the objections of the Blue Dogs?
- On health care, the Blue Dogs aren't making sense -
Well, they talk a lot about fiscal responsibility, which basically boils down to worrying about the cost of those subsidies. And it’s tempting to stop right there, and cry foul. After all, where were those concerns about fiscal responsibility back in 2001, when most conservative Democrats voted enthusiastically for that year’s big Bush tax cut -- a tax cut that added $1.35 trillion to the deficit?
But it’s actually much worse than that -- because even as they complain about the plan’s cost, the Blue Dogs are making demands that would greatly increase that cost.
There has been a lot of publicity about Blue Dog opposition to the public option, and rightly so: a plan without a public option to hold down insurance premiums would cost taxpayers more than a plan with such an option.
But Blue Dogs have also been complaining about the employer mandate, which is even more at odds with their supposed concern about spending. The Congressional Budget Office has already weighed in on this issue: without an employer mandate, health care reform would be undermined as many companies dropped their existing insurance plans, forcing workers to seek federal aid -- and causing the cost of subsidies to balloon. It makes no sense at all to complain about the cost of subsidies and at the same time oppose an employer mandate.
So what do the Blue Dogs want?
Maybe they’re just being complete hypocrites. It’s worth remembering the history of one of the Blue Dog Coalition’s founders: former Representative Billy Tauzin of Louisiana. Mr. Tauzin switched to the Republicans soon after the group’s creation; eight years later he pushed through the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act, a deeply irresponsible bill that included huge giveaways to drug and insurance companies. And then he left Congress to become, yes, the lavishly paid president of PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry lobby.
One interpretation, then, is that the Blue Dogs are basically following in Mr. Tauzin’s footsteps: if their position is incoherent, it’s because they’re nothing but corporate tools, defending special interests. And as the Center for Responsive Politics pointed out in a recent report, drug and insurance companies have lately been pouring money into Blue Dog coffers.
But I guess I’m not quite that cynical. After all, today’s Blue Dogs are politicians who didn’t go the Tauzin route -- they didn’t switch parties even when the G.O.P. seemed to hold all the cards and pundits were declaring the Republican majority permanent. So these are Democrats who, despite their relative conservatism, have shown some commitment to their party and its values.
Now, however, they face their moment of truth. For they can’t extract major concessions on the shape of health care reform without dooming the whole project: knock away any of the four main pillars of reform, and the whole thing will collapse -- and probably take the Obama presidency down with it.
Is that what the Blue Dogs really want to see happen? We’ll soon find out. - Paul Krugman 7/27/09
At this time - 6/8/09 - there are three items to be focused - and a fourth 6/14-21/09, the major effort by the Netanyahu/Lieberman regime and AIPAC to fabricate Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons - and deny Palestinians their own land for an unimpaired state with historic Arab East Jerusalem as its capital.
[ To these major items must be added I - The effort by the reckless Republicans (President Obama was elected by an overwhelming 365 electoral votes!). .from Alabama, South Carolina and loser John Sidney McCain III's Arizona (and his insultingly abominable VP selection of Sarah Palin)!. .their effort to malign the exemplary SEVENTEEN YEAR history on the bench of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor' and II - the opposition to the public option, i.e. federally mandated health care, as part of critically needed national health care reform.
- - ** There are two recent developments (neither one of which is unexpected) that demand comment. .and action. They are equally critical.
*(1) The major domestic issue at this time was the central theme of the 2008 Democratic campaign - Universal Health Care for all Americans. And that policy, supported by the American people 365 to 173 (that was the margin of victory for Obama/Biden over McCain/(Sarah) Palin!), is now being challenged by the Republican Party through their dominating Republican-biased Media/Press, which is led by Rush Limbaugh and the Roger Ailes' Fox "news". Showing his contempt for our electoral process the Senator from South Carolina James DeMint [his counterpart in the state which started the Civil War, Lindsey Graham (We can remember when Mr. Graham was in the House impeaching Bill Clinton, Graham on National Television describing Monica Lewinsky as that "poor innocent young girl" when, in fact, she had already broken up two homes as a babysitter, seducing the two husband/fathers). Senator Graham has now mounted an effort to delay the certain confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Judge Sotomayor so as to make it more difficult for the full Court to analyze several important submissions which have forthcoming time lines] Senator DeMint in a call to arms with other conservative Republicans (subservient to Rush Limbaugh!) stated "IF WE WERE ABLE TO STOP OBAMA ON THIS (HEALTH CARE) IT WOULD BE HIS WATERLOO (June, 1815) AND IT WOULD BREAK HIM!"
Had there been any doubt, their strategy is clear. These people are shameless! Having subjected the American people to eight years of our worst administration in history, for which the American people, i.e. you - us - everyone - children - grandchildren, all will "Pay the Piper" for several generations; THAT Party has now dedicated itself to destroying the one opportunity which has arisen to painstakingly, finally fulfill the inspired vision of our Founding Fathers. The Time Is Now! Health Care For All!
*(2) The major foreign policy issue confronting the United States, as it has been continuously since 1948, is the relentless determination of the Israeli "government", whichever is in power, to remove/subjugate all Palestinians from Palestine. Amy Goodman and DemocracyNow.org introduce the latest offense:
- Israeli Settlers Attack Palestinian Land -
"In Israel and the Occupied Territories, Israeli settlers have destroyed or damaged several areas of Palestinian land in ongoing attacks in the West Bank. On Tuesday, Israeli settlers damaged Palestinian trees with saws, one day after more than 1,500 olive trees were set ablaze. Palestinian farmer Mohamad Rajab of the Burin village says the attacks have continued for several days.
Mohamad Rajab: “As we arrived, we looked at the land, and there were five or six settlers cutting the olive trees. Some were cutting, others were damaging, using hand-held saws. When they saw us, they fled. The Palestinian coordination force came and found all these trees damaged. If we had waited another hour, we would have found everything destroyed. There are more than 200 olive trees. Yesterday, they burned some thirty other olive trees. A week ago, they burned another twenty olive trees, and a month ago they burned two-and-a-half acres of wheat.”
The settler attacks came in apparent response to Israel’s announcement that it will begin removing unauthorized outposts established without official Israeli government consent. But Israel has defied US calls to freeze settlement activity and ignored Arab offers of peace in return for ending the occupation of Palestinian land. Although the Obama administration says it opposes the settlements, it hasn’t proposed any suspension of the billions of dollars in US aid to Israel." - DemocracyNow 7/22/09
The New York Times 7/20/09 describes the current existing circumstance in some detail. It is well to remember that the American taxpayer to date has provided Israel some $TWO HUNDRED BILLION$, with no restrictions, since 1967, to pursue this unconscionable, outrageous Israeli policy. Why? There is change elsewhere!
- "France: Sarkozy Calls for Negotiations Between Israelis and Palestinians -
President Nicolas Sarkozy, after talks with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, called Tuesday for an international conference to restart negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, an Élysée Palace official told Agence France-Presse. Mr. Sarkozy said that the current impasse “plays into the hands of the extremists” and that “strong initiatives” were required to bring the parties together at the highest level. France has also summoned the Israeli ambassador to demand a halt to Jewish settlement activity in East Jerusalem, said Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. - Steven Erlanger N Y Times 7/22/09
- Israel Rejects U.S. Call to Hold Off on Development -
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Sunday an American call to hold off on a planned Jewish housing development in East Jerusalem, saying Israel’s sovereignty over the disputed city could not be challenged.
Mr. Netanyahu issued the statement because State Department officials had raised concerns over the project with Israel’s new ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, during discussions last week on a range of issues. The American officials suggested that going ahead with the development now would cause problems in negotiations toward a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I would like to re-emphasize that united Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people and of the State of Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Our sovereignty over it cannot be challenged; this means -- inter alia -- that residents of Jerusalem may purchase apartments in all parts of the city.”
Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter, said the Netanyahu government had gone public with the issue to try to pre-empt further American efforts to stop Jewish building in East Jerusalem. Mr. Netanyahu noted in his statement that there were Arabs living in the predominantly Jewish western part of the city, adding, “We cannot accept the idea that Jews will not have the right to live and purchase in all parts of Jerusalem.”
Israel captured the eastern part of Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day war. It annexed East Jerusalem, which contains sites holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims, as well as many Palestinian neighborhoods, and built a series of Jewish neighborhoods in and around it to solidify its claim. It has also built scores of West Bank settlements.
- Netanyahu defends a planned development in East Jerusalem -
As Washington seeks to help create a Palestinian state, it has challenged Jewish settlements in both areas and demanded a freeze on further building. Israel has been seeking a compromise. The Obama administration’s Middle East envoy, George J. Mitchell, is expected here in a week for more meetings on the issue.
* The East Jerusalem property in question, to be developed into a 20-unit complex, was bought by a Miami-based businessman, Irving Moskowitz, in 1985. He has long supported Israeli and Jewish housing in East Jerusalem. From 1987 to 2002, he rented the existing building there to the paramilitary border police. Recently the municipality granted permission for the housing development to proceed. *
The property is in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Palestinian area that also has foreign consulates and Israeli government buildings.
At Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting, the head of the Shin Bet security services, Yuval Diskin, said that Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules in Gaza and opposes Israel’s existence, has been buying property in East Jerusalem and broadening its base here and that the Palestinian Authority had set up an intelligence network aimed at preventing Palestinians from selling their property to Israelis.
The chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, told Israel Radio that instead of defending the Moskowitz development, Mr. Netanyahu should be preparing Israel to make peace. “He knows very well that there will never be peace between Palestinians and Israelis without East Jerusalem being the capital of the Palestinian state,” Mr. Erekat said. - Ethan Bronner N Y Times 7/20/09
- Netanyahu’s Talk of Peace Finds Few True Believers! -
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM -- In the weeks since Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, finally accepted the principle of a Palestinian state, with qualifications, there has been deep skepticism about his sincerity.
On the Palestinian side, aides to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, have called Mr. Netanyahu’s grudging endorsement of Palestinian statehood, under international pressure, a disingenuous public relations exercise.
But even senior officials and prominent figures of his conservative Likud Party have been busy explaining, privately and publicly, why they think there is not likely to be a Palestinian state any time soon, in ways that raise even more questions about the current government’s commitment to reaching a final peace accord.
And Mr. Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, the 100-year-old historian and staunch right-wing ideologue, told Israel’s Channel 2 News on July 8 that his son had set conditions he knew the Palestinians would never be able to accept.
Saeb Erekat, a senior Abbas aide and veteran Palestinian negotiator, said stopping settlement construction, as the Americans have demanded, was “an Israeli obligation, not a Palestinian condition.” There can be no compromise, he added. “Either they stop or they do not,” he said. - Isabel Kershner N Y Times 7/20/09
- PROPOSED MARCH ON GAZA!
"- Finkelstein and Benjamin - Found enthusiasm in Gaza for a demonstration at the Erez border. Demonstration planned for last week of 2009. Idea would be international forces coming into Gaza through Egypt would join people in Gaza in Mile-Long March to the Erez border crossing, drawing inspiration from Gandhi -
Also would want to coordinate with Israeli peace demonstrators to have them meet us on the Israeli side. Some people who have already signed the draft statement include - Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, John Duggard, Avi Shlaim, one of Gandhi’s grandchildren, John Berger, Mustafa Barghouti, Diana Buttu, etc. Would like to try to sign up Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Bishop Tutu - at least as honorary grand marshals. - normanfinkelstein.com 7/13/09
With reference to Judge Sotomayor (above), when one hears from Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, from the Deep South State of Alabama, question the "fairness" of this Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sotomayor, who, incidentally, has a "rich history" of SEVENTEEN years on the bench from trial to appellate Judge - when the Senator from Alabama (he now calls himself "Jeff" Sessions) implies that Judge Sotomayor has a "prejudice" when she makes her decisions - and when, Lindsey Graham, the Senator from South Carolina (which broke with the Union, started the Civil War and still believes they won), this man who fills Strom Thurmond's seat, has the effrontery to indolently lean on his elbow and slur to this public citizen who has accomplished almost two decades of laudable judicial service - "Unless you have a complete meltdown, you're going to be confirmed ("now let's see if my buddy Beauregard from Alabama can generate that meltdown")!" One might ask "how is it that these losers from South Carolina and Alabama (To repeat, President Obama annihilated the worst GOP ticket in scores of years, the pairing of John Sidney McCain III and Sarah Palin), even so, how is it that Sessions, Graham and McCain are given so much time on television? The answer is simple. General Electric owns NBCUniversal, Disney owns ABC, Leslie Moonves runs CBS, and PBS is literally funded and controlled by such trusts as the Annenberg Foundation, The Annenberg School of Journalism at USC, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Such coverage gives Republicans, no matter how reprehensible, positive coverage across the spectrum. It provides the license for a South Carolina Senator to advise Judge Sotomayor that although such a character as Kenneth Starr may have supported her approach and decisions, Lindsey Graham remains adamant. What she has written and said "has bugged the hell out of me (Lindsey Graham)"!
- Parsing the Sotomayor Hearings -
To the Editor:
Re “Judge Focuses on Rule of Law at the Hearings” (front page, July 14):
It is disingenuous to paint Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s commitment to bring a unique point of view to the court as evidence of racial bias, as leading Republican members of Congress have done.
Proponents of a diverse bench believe that pursuit of the objective truth requires the input of many different kinds of people. We cannot allow the nation’s highest court to become blinded by a myopia brought about by racial, class and gender homogeneity. The upper-class white male is not a tabula rasa (a clean slate) from which verdicts come untainted by circumstance of birth.
The court will be all the better for a panoply of viewpoints and backgrounds on the bench. - James Vonder Haar Chicago, 7/14/09
To the Editor:
Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, speaks nonsense when he says that “politics has no place in the courtroom.”
First, despite their claims to the contrary, Republicans no less than Democrats want politics in the courtroom. The two sides differ only over its content: conservative for the Republicans, liberal for the Democrats.
Second, and more fundamentally, law and politics are inextricably linked, particularly in the Supreme Court. The cases coming before the justices reflect politics, and the process by which the justices resolve them is permeated by politics. Also, their key decision-making tool -- the Constitution -- is an inherently political document open to interpretation that inevitably mirrors the political values of the interpreter.
The two parties ought to drop their hypocrisy and admit the truth that Alexis de Tocqueville recognized almost two centuries ago: that “scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.” - Gerard Fitzpatrick Collegeville Pa 7/14/09
The writer is a professor of politics at Ursinus College.
To the Editor:
Republican senators are calling Judge Sonia Sotomayor to task for allowing her “identity” to guide her legal judgment.
Contained in their objection is the assumption that while this Hispanic woman has an identity, the average white Republican senator does not, and that his race, class and ethnic background play no role in his work.
Do we accept the idea that wealthy, educated white men are a blank slate, while anyone else comes freighted with unpleasant baggage? - Denise Wilbur Hopewell N.J., 7/14/09
To the Editor:
Senator Lindsey Graham’s comment to Judge Sonia Sotomayor that “unless you have a complete meltdown, you’re going to get confirmed” may seem to be a generous statement. I do not believe it was.
It was not only demeaning to suggest that anyone would have a “meltdown” during a judicial confirmation hearing, but it was also unflattering to women in general, and a laughable suggestion directed toward such a formidable candidate. - Susan McHale Greenwich Conn. 7/14/09
To the Editor:
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was quoted as saying, “Umpires don’t make the rules: they apply them. ... It is a limited role.”
It has been noted that in every important case, Chief Justice Roberts has sided with the strong against the weak, the corporate against the individual and the rich against the poor. Surely if he were a baseball umpire, all of the close plays would be decided in favor of the Yankees. - Lonnie Hanauer West Orange N.J. 7/12/09
- And from an awakened Maureen Dowd -
"Republican Lindsey Graham read Sotomayor some anonymous comments made by lawyers about her, complaining that she was “temperamental,” “nasty,” “a bit of a bully.” Then he patronizingly lectured her about how this was the moment for “self-reflection.” Maybe Graham thinks Nino Scalia has those traits covered.
But the barbed adjectives didn’t match the muted performance on display before the Judiciary Committee. Like the president who picked her, Sotomayor has been a model of professorial rationality. Besides, it’s delicious watching Republicans go after Democrats for being too emotional and irrational given the G.O.P. shame spiral.
W. and Dick Cheney made all their bad decisions about Iraq, W.M.D.’s, domestic surveillance, torture, rendition and secret hit squads from the gut, based on false intuitions, fear, paranoia and revenge.
Sarah Palin is the definition of irrational, a volatile and scattered country-music queen without the music. Her Republican fans defend her lack of application and intellect, happy to settle for her emotional electricity.
Senator Graham said Sotomayor would be confirmed unless she had “a meltdown” -- a word applied mostly to women and toddlers until Mark Sanford proudly took ownership of it when he was judged about the wisdom of his Latina woman.
And then there’s the Supreme Court, of course, which gave up its claim to rational neutrality when the justices appointed by Republican presidents -- including Bush Sr. -- ignored what was fair to make a sentimental choice and throw the 2000 election to W.
Faced with that warped case of supreme empathy, no wonder Sotomayor is so eager to follow the law." - Maureen Dowd 7/15/09
II - And to return to the opposition to critically needed health care reform, opposition keynoted 7/2/09 by Senator Joe Lieberman's announcement, ignored by our "traditional media" as it seeks to protect the divorced, but Orthodox, Lieberman, a scoundrel in the sights of DemocracyNow for almost a decade -
- Lieberman Opposes Public Health Proposal -
Amy Goodman 7/2/09: As Democrats advance a proposal for some form of public healthcare, former Democrat turned independent Senator Joseph Lieberman has announced he’s likely to oppose it. In an interview with the New Haven Independent, Lieberman said he is “skeptical” of a public health option both “in substance” and in its likelihood to attract congressional support. Lieberman has been a top recipient of healthcare industry donations, taking in more than $1.8 million over his congressional career. - Amy Goodman 7/2/09
- The major factor which for Senator Lieberman ensured his decision -
- Report: Health Industry Employing Hundreds of Ex-Gov. Officials -
Amy Goodman 7/6/09: Here in the United States, the Washington Post is reporting the nation’s heath care industry has hired more than 350 former government officials and members of Congress to sway health care reform efforts on Capital Hill. According to lobbying records, three out of every four major health care companies have at least one former government insider on the payroll. Nearly half held positions under key committees and lawmakers including Senators Max Baucus and Charles Grassley. Baucus is chair of the Senate Finance Committee which is largely steering health care reform efforts. Baucus’s aides recently held a meeting with a group of lobbyists that included two of his former chiefs of staff. The Washington Post says the health care industry is now spending $1.4 million dollars a day on lobbying, totaling $126 million dollars in the first fiscal quarter. - Amy Goodman 7/6/09
- "And The Great Paul Krugman On Health Care Reform" -
The Congressional Budget Office has looked at the future of American health insurance, and it works.
A few weeks ago there was a furor when the budget office “scored” two incomplete Senate health reform proposals -- that is, estimated their costs and likely impacts over the next 10 years. One proposal came in more expensive than expected; the other didn’t cover enough people. Health reform, it seemed, was in trouble.
But last week the budget office scored the full proposed legislation from the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). And the news -- which got far less play in the media than the downbeat earlier analysis -- was very, very good. Yes, we can reform health care.
Let me start by pointing out something serious health economists have known all along: on general principles, universal health insurance should be eminently affordable.
After all, every other advanced country offers universal coverage, while spending much less on health care than we do. For example, the French health care system covers everyone, offers excellent care and costs barely more than half as much per person as our system.
And even if we didn’t have this international evidence to reassure us, a look at the U.S. numbers makes it clear that insuring the uninsured shouldn’t cost all that much, for two reasons.
- Yes, we can reform health care. -
First, the uninsured are disproportionately young adults, whose medical costs tend to be relatively low. The big spending is mainly on the elderly, who are already covered by Medicare.
Second, even now the uninsured receive a considerable (though inadequate) amount of “uncompensated” care, whose costs are passed on to the rest of the population. So the net cost of giving the uninsured explicit coverage is substantially less than it might seem.
Putting these observations together, what sounds at first like a daunting prospect -- extending coverage to most or all of the 45 million people in America without health insurance -- should, in the end, add only a few percent to our overall national health bill. And that’s exactly what the budget office found when scoring the HELP proposal.
Now, about those specifics: The HELP plan achieves near-universal coverage through a combination of regulation and subsidies. Insurance companies would be required to offer the same coverage to everyone, regardless of medical history; on the other side, everyone except the poor and near-poor would be obliged to buy insurance, with the aid of subsidies that would limit premiums as a share of income.
Employers would also have to chip in, with all firms employing more than 25 people required to offer their workers insurance or pay a penalty. By the way, the absence of such an “employer mandate” was the big problem with the earlier, incomplete version of the plan.
AND THOSE WHO PREFER NOT TO BUY INSURANCE FROM THE PRIVATE SECTOR WOULD BE ABLE TO CHOOSE A PUBLIC PLAN INSTEAD. THIS WOULD, AMONG OTHER THINGS, BRING SOME REAL COMPETITION TO THE HEALTH INSURANCE MARKET, WHICH IS CURRENTLY A COLLECTION OF LOCAL MONOPOLIES AND CARTELS.
The budget office says that all this would cost $597 billion over the next decade. But that doesn’t include the cost of insuring the poor and near-poor, whom HELP suggests covering via an expansion of Medicaid (which is outside the committee’s jurisdiction). Add in the cost of this expansion, and we’re probably looking at between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion.
There are a number of ways to look at this number, but maybe the best is to point out that it’s less than 4 percent of the $33 trillion the U.S. government predicts we’ll spend on health care over the next decade. And that in turn means that much of the expense can be offset with straightforward cost-saving measures, like ending Medicare overpayments to private health insurers and reining in spending on medical procedures with no demonstrated health benefits.
So fundamental health reform -- reform that would eliminate the insecurity about health coverage that looms so large for many Americans -- is now within reach. The “centrist” senators, most of them Democrats, who have been holding up reform can no longer claim either that universal coverage is unaffordable or that it won’t work.
The only question now is whether a combination of persuasion from President Obama, pressure from health reform activists and, one hopes, senators’ own consciences will get the centrists on board -- or at least get them to vote for cloture, so that diehard opponents of reform can’t block it with a filibuster.
THIS IS AN HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY -- ARGUABLY THE BEST OPPORTUNITY SINCE 1947, WHEN THE A.M.A. KILLED HARRY TRUMAN’S HEALTH-CARE DREAMS. WE’RE RIGHT ON THE CUSP. ALL IT TAKES IS A FEW MORE SENATORS, AND HELP WILL BE ON THE WAY. - Paul Krugman 7/6/09
On Health Care Reform - The Public Option!
SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER: I'm pleased to welcome Mr. Wendell Potter to the committee today. He is a former insurance executive who is going to tell us about some of the tactics insurance companies use to keep insurance in the dark. I have a special respect for him, simply because he's doing something I think very courageous and very brave.
BILL MOYERS: Until last year, Wendell Potter was head of corporate communications for Cigna -- the country's fourth largest health insurance company. Altogether Potter spent nearly 2 decades playing for the side that has opposed health care reform from the Clintons forward... he sat on policy committees, crafted executive messages, cajoled the press and witnessed firsthand the promises made... and broken!
BILL MOYERS: You were still working for Cigna?
WENDELL POTTER: I went home, to visit relatives. And I picked up the local (Tennessee) newspaper and I saw that a health care expedition was being held a few miles up the road, in Wise, Virginia. And I was intrigued. I borrowed my dad's car and drove up 50 miles up the road to Wise, Virginia. It was being held at a Wise County Fairground. I took my camera. I took some pictures. It was a very cloudy, misty day, it was raining that day, and I walked through the fairground gates. And I didn't know what to expect. I just assumed that it would be, you know, like a health-- booths set up and people just getting their blood pressure checked and things like that.
But what I saw were doctors who were set up to provide care in animal stalls. Or they'd erected tents, to care for people. I mean, there was no privacy. In some cases-- and I've got some pictures of people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement. And I saw people lined up, standing in line or sitting in these long, long lines, waiting to get care. People drove from South Carolina and Georgia and Kentucky, Tennessee-- all over the region, because they knew that this was being done. A lot of them heard about it from word of mouth.
There could have been people and probably were people that I had grown up with. They could have been people who grew up at the house down the road, in the house down the road from me. And that made it real to me.
It was absolutely stunning. It was like being hit by lightning. It was almost-- what country am I in? I just...it just didn't seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States. It was like a lightning bolt had hit me.
WENDELL POTTER: You know, certainly, I knew people, and I talked to people who were uninsured. But when you're in the executive offices, when you're getting prepared for a call with an analyst, in the financial medium, what you think about are the numbers. You don't think about individual people. You think about the numbers, and whether or not you're going to meet Wall Street's expectations. That's what you think about, at that level. And it helps to think that way. That's why you-- that enables you to stay there, if you don't really think that you're talking about and dealing with real human beings.
BILL MOYERS: Did you go back to corporate headquarters and tell them what you had seen?
WENDELL POTTER: I went back to corporate headquarters. I was trying to process all this, and trying to figure out what I should do. I did tell many of them about the experience I had. And the trip. I showed them some pictures I took while I was down there. But I didn't know exactly what I should do.
You know, I had bills of my own. And it was hard to just figure out. How do I step away from this? What do I do? And this was one of those things that made me decide, "Okay, I can't do this. I can't keep-- I can't." One of the books I read as I was trying to make up my mind here was President Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage."
And in the forward, Robert Kennedy said that one of the president's, one of his favorite quotes was a Dante quote that, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality." And when I read that, I said, "Oh, jeez, I-- you know. I'm headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something."
BILL MOYERS: What was it, the great truth contained in Michael Moore's "Sicko"?
WENDELL POTTER: That we shouldn't fear government involvement in our health care system. That there is an appropriate role for government, and it's been proven in the countries that were in that movie.
You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom. We have huge numbers of people who are also just a lay-off away from joining the ranks of the uninsured, or being purged by their insurance company, and winding up there.
And another thing is that the advocates of reform or the opponents of reform are those who are saying that we need to be careful about what we do here, because we don't want the government to take away your choice of a health plan. It's more likely that your employer and your insurer is going to switch you from a plan that you're in now to one that you don't want. You might be in the plan you like now.
But chances are, pretty soon, you're going to be enrolled in one of these high deductible plans in which you're going to find that much more of the cost is being shifted to you than you ever imagined.
BILL MOYERS: I have a memo, from Frank Luntz. I have a memo written by Frank Luntz. He's the Republican strategist who we discovered, in the spring, has written the script for opponents of health care reform. "First," he says, "you have to pretend to support it. Then use phrases like, "government takeover," "delayed care is denied care," "consequences of rationing," "bureaucrats, not doctors prescribing medicine." That was a memo, by Frank Luntz, to the opponents of health care reform in this debate. Now watch this clip.
REP. JOHN BOEHNER: The forthcoming plan from Democratic leaders will make health care more expensive, limit treatments, ration care, and put bureaucrats in charge of medical decisions rather than patients and doctors.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL: Americans need to realize that when someone says "government option," what could really occur is a government takeover that soon could lead to government bureaucrats denying and delaying care, and telling Americans what kind of care they can have.
SEN. JON KYL: Washington run healthcare would diminish access to quality care, leading to denials, shortages and long delays for treatment.
REP. JOE WILSON: How will a government run health plan not lead to the same rationing of care that we have seen in other countries?
REP. TOM PRICE: We don't want to put the government, we don't want to put bureaucrats between a doctor and a patient.
BILL MOYERS: WHY DO POLITICIANS PUPPET MESSAGES LIKE THAT?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, they are ideologically aligned with the industry. They want to believe that the free market system can and should work in this country, like it does in other industries. So they don't understand from an insider's perspective like I have, what that actually means, and the consequences of that to Americans.
They parrot those comments, without really realizing what the real situation is.
I was watching MSNBC one afternoon. And I saw Congressman Zach Wamp from Tennessee. He's just down the road from where I grew up, in Chattanooga. And he was talking-- he was asked a question about health care reform. I think it was just a day or two after the president's first-- health care reform summit. And he was one of the ones Republicans put on the tube.
And he was saying that, you know, the health care problem is not necessarily as bad as we think. That of the uninsured people, half of them are that way because they want to "go naked."
REP. ZACH WAMP: Half the people that are uninsured today choose to remain uninsured. Half of them don't have any choice but half of them choose to, what's called, go naked, and just take the chance of getting sick. They end up in the emergency room costing you and me a whole lot more money.
WENDELL POTTER: He used the word naked. It's an industry term for those who, presumably, choose not to buy insurance, because they don't want to. They don't want to pay the premiums. So he was saying that half... Well, first of all, it's nothing like that. It was an absolutely ridiculous comment. But it's an example of a member of Congress buying what the insurance industry is peddling.
BILL MOYERS: Back in 1993, the Republican propagandist, William Kristol, urged his party to block any health care proposal, in order to prevent the Democrats from being seen as the quote, "generous protector of the middle class." But today, you've got some Democrats who are going along with the industry.
Max Baucus, the senator from Montana, for example, the most important figure right now in this health care legislation that's being written in the Senate. He's resisted including a public insurance option in the reform bill, right?
WENDELL POTTER: That's right.
BILL MOYERS: Why is the industry so powerful on both sides of the aisle?
WENDELL POTTER: Well, money and relationships, ideology. The relationships-- an insurance company can hire and does hire many different lobbying firms. And they hire firms that are predominantly Republican and predominantly Democrat. And they do this because they know they need to reach influential members of Congress like Max Baucus. So there are people who used to work for Max Baucus who are in lobbying firms or on the staff of companies like Cigna or the association itself.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, I just read the other day, in THE WASHINGTON POST, that Max Baucus's staff met with a group of lobbyists. Two of them had been Baucus's former chiefs of staff.
WENDELL POTTER: Right.
BILL MOYERS: I mean, they left the government. They go to work for the industry. Now they're back with an insider status. They get an access, right?
WENDELL POTTER: Oh, they do, they do. And these lobbyists' ability to raise money for these folks also is very important as well.
Lobbyists, many of the big lobbyists contributed a lot of money themselves. One of the lobbyists for one of the big health insurance company is Heather Podesta, the Podesta Group, and she's married to Tony Podesta, who's a brother of John Podesta.
BILL MOYERS: Who used to be the White House chief of staff.
Note full program http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/transcript4.html. . - GOPBias.org 7/11/09
- - - Amy Goodman Brings Us Up To Date On The Other Major Items -
- 11 Killed in Iraq Bombing -
"In Iraq, at least eleven people were killed Wednesday in bombings in Baghdad and Ramadi. The Baghdad attack struck the Shia neighborhood of Sadr City, while in Ramadi a suicide bomber hit a police convoy.
- July Toll Equals Deadliest Month of Afghan Occupation for Foreign Troops -
In Afghanistan, the death toll for foreign troops this month has equaled its highest of any month since the US-led invasion of 2001. One American and two Turkish soldiers died on Wednesday, bringing July’s foreign troop toll to forty-six so far.
- Bagram Prisoners Stage Mass Protest -
In other news from Afghanistan, prisoners at the US-run Bagram military jail have been staging a mass protest over the past two weeks against their indefinite captivity. According to family members and attorneys, dozens of prisoners have refused to leave their cells since July 1st. News of the protest comes one day after it was revealed a group of Guantanamo Bay prisoners staged a two-week sit-in last month.
- Admin Drops Reliance on Torture-Induced Statements -
The Obama administration will no longer rely on statements obtained through torture in the case of Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohamed Jawad. The American Civil Liberties Union is currently challenging Jawad’s indefinite jailing. The administration has fought the case, but on Wednesday said it won’t challenge a defense motion to rule out Jawad’s coerced statements. The ACLU says Jawad was abused, threatened, and deprived of sleep in US custody. His case has received further scrutiny because it’s believed he was jailed when he was twelve years old. ACLU attorney Jonathan Hafetz said, “We commend the government for halting its reliance on evidence obtained through torture…. Now it is time to send Jawad home to Afghanistan because there is no credible evidence against him.”
- Viva Palestina Aid Convoy Arrives in Gaza -
A group of around 100 US peace activists have arrived in the Gaza Strip carrying humanitarian aid. The activists are part of the group Viva Palestina, which conducted another aid mission from Europe earlier this year. On Wednesday, the group entered Gaza through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. The convoy includes the former Democratic Congress member Cynthia McKinney. McKinney’s entry comes just over a week after her deportation from Israel for trying to reach Gaza by sea. She was one of twenty-one activists kidnapped by the Israeli military in international waters as they tried to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.
- Israeli Soldiers Describe Abuses in Gaza Assault -
Meanwhile in Israel, a group of twenty-six soldiers who took part in the three-week Israeli assault on Gaza have come forward with testimony on the disregard for Palestinian civilian life during the attack. The testimony was gathered by the Israeli peace group “Breaking the Silence,” which says soldiers were instructed to “shoot first and worry later.” Soldiers described witnessing several war crimes, including the use of Palestinians as human shields. One Israeli soldier identified as Amir said Israeli soldiers opened fire in Gaza at will.
“Amir”: “At any obstacle, any problem, we open fire and don’t ask questions. Even if it’s firing in the dark, aimed at unknown target, firing when we don’t see, deterrent fire, no problem with that, etc. A vehicle that’s in the way, crush it; a building in the way, shell it. This was the spirit of things that was repeated throughout the training.”
- PA Bans Al Jazeera -
Meanwhile in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority has banned the satellite network Al Jazeera for airing what it calls false statements about Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. This week, Al Jazeera quoted a Palestinian official as saying Abbas conspired with Israel to assassinate Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 2003. Arafat died the next year. The PA has accused Al Jazeera of spreading “sedition and false reports.” Conny Mus of the Foreign Press Association criticized the ban.
Conny Mus: “We urge them to reconsider this decision, because the Palestinian Authority themselves are in favor, and stated that clearly in their institutions, for the freedom of the press, and this is a clear violation. And we really hope that they will stop these practices immediately.” - DemocracyNow 7/16/09
- 4 US Soldiers Killed; Ambassador Vows US Military Action “for Months to Come” -
"Underscoring the continued US combat role, four US soldiers were killed late Monday in fighting in Baghdad. In an interview with Reuters, US Ambassador Christopher Hill said the US military occupation will continue unimpeded.
US Ambassador Christopher Hill: 'After June 30, with the US out of--US combat forces out of the cities and villages, localities, we’ll still be in Iraq. We’ll still have a very robust number of US troops in Iraq. And, in fact, those troops will not begin to withdraw from Iraq until probably several months from now, probably in the context, you know, the beginning of the year, and then until August of 2010. That’s when you’ll start seeing major reductions in US forces. So, there are going to be a lot of US combat capabilities in Iraq for months to come.'
- Ahead of US Meeting, Israel Annexes New West Bank Land, Announces New Settlement Construction -
The Israeli government has announced plans to expropriate a new swath of the occupied West Bank. Israel says it will take fifty-four square miles of Palestinian land, including shoreline near the Dead Sea. Palestinians will have forty-five days to contest the seizure in an Israeli court. A Palestinian cabinet minister called the move Israel’s single largest land takeover since it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war. The Israeli government, meanwhile, has authorized the construction of new homes in the West Bank settlement of Adam. The building plans are the latest in Israel’s rejection of President Obama’s call to stop settlement expansion. They come on the eve of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s visit to Washington for talks with US officials. Obama has so far refused to apply any meaningful pressure on Israel, including the suspension of billions of dollars in annual US aid.
- Israel Threatens Free Gaza Aid Ship in International Waters -
Meanwhile, a ship trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza from Cyprus has been threatened by Israeli violence in international waters. The sailing is the Free Gaza movement’s first since it aborted an attempt in January after the Israeli navy threatened to shoot the civilian passengers on board. That sailing had come just weeks after an Israeli navy vessel deliberately rammed another of its boats, almost forcing it to sink. Before it left Cyprus on Monday, Free Gaza movement founder Huwaida Arraf said her group is undeterred.
Huwaida Arraf: 'We do not constitute any threat to Israel’s security, and that we just want to get to the people of Gaza. And so, if they attack us, which they have threatened to do on previous occasions, and even this time they have informed the Cypriot authorities that they will not let us enter, then we hope it’s clear to the international community that this is a deliberate attack, and we hope it also opens their eyes to the policies of Israel, which have nothing to do with security. It has to do with punishing an entire population, and we just can’t accept this.'
- The sailing comes as the International Committee of the Red Cross has criticized the Israeli blockade of Gaza. -
On Monday, the Red Cross said Israel’s restrictions are crippling reconstruction efforts." - DemocracyNow 6/30/09
[ The New York Times editorial page, 6/30/09, for the first time in memory, is devoted in its entirety to one subject, the end of "six bloody, ruinously costly years", & "the end in sight to the American occupation of Iraq." We pray. It continues with "the Iraq war - an unnecessary war - has diverted critically needed resources away from Afghanistan, the real front in the war on terrorism." FROM THE BEGINNING! And the editorial expresses hope that the Iraqis are able "to reduce the chances the country will unravel as American troops leave." But we have done great damage, and it has cost us billion$.
The same day, 6/30/09, a Lisa Mullens on NPR's "The World" stated "Iraq was not always the site of an American war." What is so outrageous regarding both the N Y Times' editorial and Lisa Mullens' utterances on The World (her segment dealt with the history of Iraqi poetry) is that she knows well, as does the entire editorial staff of The Times (including Bill Keller and owner "Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.") is that this country was the proxy patsy of the bellicose Israel, documented by James Bamford's A Pretext For War, and substantiated by the "Three Major Items" link above. This historic scam and this monstrous damage to the people of Iraq is detailed in the Times' editorial. Let's hope that knowing the cause gave the writers pause. Perhaps they will rethink what this rogue nation of Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and its attitude toward Iran. Israel has proved itself to be a threat to the entire world. It has been said that the primarily Jewish American Madoff Ponzi scandal is retribution for the historically damaging wars, first against Palestine that doubled in June of 1967, and then against Iraq, which actually began with the stolen 2000 election and the inauguration of George W. Bush. Who knows? God works in unknown ways, to which we mortals are not privy.
- Howard W. French on Dennis Ross & David Makovsky -
"It is the common occupational hazard of the nonfiction writer to have events move beyond the scope of one’s work by the time of publication.
This is a particular risk in the field of diplomatic writing, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the shifting and unpredictable sands of the Middle East, where conventional wisdoms come and go as quickly as national unity governments. Washington’s longtime Middle Eastern diplomatic negotiator (more like Jewish American activist) Dennis Ross and the former journalist (more like Israeli propagandist as executive editor of The Jerusalem Post) David Makovsky have written a book that reaffirms such caution as well as any in recent memory.
Only time will tell whether President Obama’s approach succeeds, but it has already bypassed some of the notions most central to Mr. Ross and Mr. Makovsky’s writing. Here one thinks especially of the series of unusually strong statements in which Mr. Obama has very publicly pressured Israel to halt all settlement activity in the occupied West Bank, calling it illegitimate.
For its part, “Myths, Illusions, and Peace” begins with a lengthy attack on the diplomatic concept of linkage, which the authors initially define, in ways that seem somewhat overstated, as “the idea that if only the Palestinian conflict were solved, all other Middle East conflicts would melt away.”
The authors’ formulation attempts to debunk the notion that resolving the Palestinian question could pay dramatic dividends elsewhere, whether in dealing with Iran’s rising power and influence in the region or in defusing rage around the issue that ostensibly fuels Islamic radicalism more broadly. Curiously, though, late in the book, Mr. Ross, who has served until recently as special adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, and Mr. Makovsky themselves seem to at least partially allow for this.
* The book begins and ends with scathing evaluations of the neoconservatives who drove policy under President George W. Bush and whose disengagement from the region and “fatalistic optimism,” the authors assert, did “great damage to America’s standing in the Middle East.” *
Its greatest intellectual energy, however, is expended attacking the so-called realists, who believe, the authors say, that the United States has been “too close to Israel,” and for whom, in what sounds like another overreach, “it is largely inconceivable that Israel could have a case or that the Arabs and Palestinians might not be living up to their side of the bargain.”
The authors go on to denounce “the realist concept of external blueprints, of pressuring Israelis while offering inducements to the Palestinians,” as “strangely divorced from reality.”
The authors rely excessively for foils on John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a political scientist at Harvard, who wrote “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” (2007) and who are cited frequently. But with the warnings in “Myths, Illusions, and Peace” about pressuring Israel, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Obama administration’s initial moves in the Middle East would also fall under the authors’ realist banner.
For many readers another issue that will arise is one of balance. Mr. Ross has led a distinguished career that is all the more remarkable for his staying power in Washington during both Democratic and Republican administrations -- as a high-level Middle Eastern troubleshooter, envoy and policymaker. (He was recently transferred to the National Security Council.) AT VIRTUALLY NO POINT IN THIS BOOK, HOWEVER, ARE ISRAELI ACTIONS DEPICTED AS PROBLEMATIC OR TROUBLESOME.
The closest the authors come to this is a passage describing mounting Palestinian disbelief in the peace process, in which they write, “They saw Israeli obligations under Oslo flouted -- prisoners not released, withdrawals not taking place as scheduled, and the status of the territory constantly being changed to Israeli advantage, in effect prejudging the negotiations and their purpose.”
Elsewhere, speaking of an increase in the Israeli settler population on the West Bank from about 5,000 around the time of the Camp David accords in 1977 to over 300,000 now, the authors employ a counterfactual, saying “things could have been different if the Arabs had chosen a more pragmatic course.”" - Howard W. French N Y Times 7/8/09 ]
**07.01.2009 The Daily Star By Richard Hall
"BEIRUT: A coalition of activists belonging to various Palestinian solidarity organizations are planning an international march in Gaza aimed at ending the blockade of the territory. The event will aim to bring thousands of demonstrators from around the world to march alongside Gazans as they breach the blockade imposed upon the population since the election of Hamas in 2006.
“This march draws inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi,” said a draft statement of purposes and principles written by the “Coalition to End the Illegal Siege of Gaza,” obtained by The Daily Star. “Those of us residing in the United States also draw inspiration from the civil rights movement,” it added.
The statement also outlines plans for the march, which will take place on January 1, 2010. “We will march the Long Mile across Erez checkpoint alongside the people of Gaza in a nonviolent demonstration that breaches the illegal blockade,” it said, adding that “We conceive this march as the first step in a protracted nonviolent campaign … If we bring thousands to Gaza and millions more around the world watch the march on the internet, we can end the siege without a drop of blood being shed.”
Professor Norman Finkelstein, a political analyst and author of several books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, is one of the organizers of the march. “We want to send over several thousand people from around the world to march alongside several hundred thousand Gazans,” he told The Daily Star.
Finkelstein hopes that large numbers of international activists and world leaders will attend the march, and as a result, prohibit a violent response from Israeli authorities. “If the likes of Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky, Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela are at the head of the march; if behind them are students holding high signs of the schools from which they hail - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge; if behind them are the ill and the lame, the young and the innocent of Gaza; if behind them are hundreds of thousands of others, unarmed and unafraid, wanting only to enforce the law; if around the world hundreds of thousands are watching the internet to see what happens - Israel can’t shoot,” he said.
“The first formal organizational meeting of the coalition is set for July 13,” said Finkelstein. “We hope then to create an umbrella steering committee. Right now the working group consists of individuals who belong to organizations that have been active on the Israel-Palestine conflict such as CodePink.”
Members of the coalition are now contacting Palestinian solidarity groups around the world in preparation for the march." - Richard Hall The Daily Star Beirut 7/1/09 **
Amy Goodman 6/15/09 (here challenging the slippery David Makovsky on his theme that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons):
"David Makovsky, joining us now from Washington, DC, is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, considered a pro-Israeli think tank, and was formerly executive editor of the Jerusalem Post (note following Pipes/Rosen article in Jerusalem Post).
AMY GOODMAN: On what evidence are you basing Iran developing nuclear weapons? And when do you think they will have them by?
DAVID MAKOVSKY: Look, I mean, the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, issued a report in February that said--and we’re not talking about American intelligence; this is the International Atomic Energy Agency based in Vienna that’s run by a fellow, an Egyptian, former diplomat named Mohamed ElBaradei--that says that Iran has enriched over a thousand--I think it’s 1,010 kilograms--of nuclear fuel. My understanding is, once they get to 1,500 kilo, they are then able to take that low-enriched uranium and process it into high-enriched uranium.
Now, of course, the big obstacle is that the IAEA inspectors are at the Natanz enrichment plant. So it’s not like Iran just goes from, you know, step one to step two. There’s clearly--they would have to throw out the inspectors, which would create an international incident. But, I mean, people are thinking of this as somehow a replay of the Iraq war, and this is what the Americans say (that Israel and Jewish Americans posited Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons), but America doesn’t have evidence. The reports are coming out of Vienna from this thirty-seven-nation international organization governing board called the IAEA."
- Ever the diplomat, Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council and the author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States, responds to Makovsky -
Trita Parsi: I think what David is saying is quite right. This is a report from the IAEA saying exactly this. But I think also David is right when he says that it’s not so, that just because they have low-enriched uranium that automatically means that they have the material to be able to build a bomb. They would have to enrich it further, above 90 percent, in order to do so. And they can’t do so without kicking out the inspectors.
So, essentially what David is spelling out is not evidence that there is a weapons program. If they had kicked out the inspectors, if they had started to engage in reprocessing this, then I think one would be able to make a much starker case, stronger case, that there is evidence of a weaponization program. But that has not been seen. And the IAEA has essentially over and over again said that they have no evidence that such a highly enriched uranium processing has taken place in Iran.
- AND
Trita Parsi: And I think you’re right, David, but the question is, do they have a weaponization program? No one is saying that they have a weapon. But if one says that there is a weaponization program, then one has to come up with the evidence to show that not only do they have low-enriched uranium, which they, according to the NPT (Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty), are entitled to have, but they’re actually going beyond that. And that’s where I think you’re right: it’s not just about the facts; it’s also about how we interpret it. But also, where do we draw the line, in which we say objectively, this can be considered a weaponization program and this is not a weaponization program?
Well, it’s not that quickly. I mean, just for Natanz to be able to reconfigure the centrifuge would take somewhere between three to six months. And then, one has to assume that everything would work perfectly fine in order for them to be able to have enough material for an actual bomb, highly enriched uranium. So we’re not talking about a short order, in the sense of a couple of days or a couple of minutes or hours. This would still take a considerable amount of time, which would provide the international community with many, many different options to be able to prevent weaponization in Iran (And as we have noted elsewhere in GOPBIAS.ORG, were the Iranians to use a nuclear weapon it would mean their instant annihilation. In the Middle East it is not the Iranians ingrained with the mentality for war, it is the Israelis.).
And more than anything, I think part of the answer actually lies in what David said. The more inspections and verification we have in place in Iran, the greater the opportunity will be for the IAEA and the international community to have transparency and be able to detect any wrongdoing in Iran at the earliest possible stage. And I think the wisest step right now is to move towards that, because if we are setting our goals and our objectives at a level in which our objectives essentially are unfeasible, we will continue to repeat the pattern of the Bush administration, in which they wanted maximalist objectives and they essentially achieved none of them. - DemocracyNow 6/15/09
Why would any responsible American newspaper, except for unbridled Republican Party bias, agree to publish OP-ED pieces 6/19/09 by two of the most notoriously discredited Jewish Americans, Charles Krauthammer and Paul Wolfowitz, on a day in which the Obama administration is deeply engaged in an effort to distance itself from the history of United States Republican Party malfeasance in which in 1953, under Eisenhower, it arranged the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mossedegh and then, under Nixon, placed the cudgel-wielding autocrat Reza Pahlavi on the Iranian throne as Shah, whose blood-thirsty policies brought on this Iranian Revolution, the hostage crisis 1979-80, which, in the skewing of events, put Ronald Reagan in the White House. President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and various aides are involved in this most sensitive issue, to encourage Iranians to view the United States as a friendly power, no longer subservient to the Israelis [particularly the present regime of Netanyahu & Lieberman (even so, General Electric NBC Universal had "Bibi" Netanyahu scheduled for the 6/21/09 anti-Edward R. Murrow, David Gregory's Meet the Press)] and Mr. Obama has expressed a willingness to work with these 2009 Iranian leaders and quell the AIPAC Jewish American effort to repeat their successful scam of ten years ago, led by the equally notorious Joseph I. Lieberman, which labeled the Iraqis under Saddam Hussein as possessing WMD's!
To the Editor:
A poll conducted in Iran by an American company three weeks before the Iranian election showed President Ahmadinejad had a 2 to 1 lead.
We have no facts to support nor do we have the right to assume the Iranian election results are anything but fair. I applaud President Barack Obama for his tactful responses to the demonstrations in the streets of Iran and to the many voices crying "fraud."
The same poll also showed the people of Iran overwhelmingly want more democracy, more freedom and an expanded relationship with the West. We must trust the Iranians to make their own way toward their own goals without interference from us.
We made a terrible mistake when we supported the Shah of Iran over a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953. That ill-fated policy led to decades of hostility and distrust between the people of Iran and the U.S. Let us not repeat that mistake. - JAN COBB Wilsonville Oregon 6/23/09
Regarding Messrs. Wolfowitz and Krauthammer, the former's piece (he is now a "visiting scholar" at the suspect American Enterprise Institute) is actually more about rehabilitating himself and George Schultz (holed up in the Stanford University Hoover Institute with Condoleezza Rice) by changing the subject to the Philippines, while the latter, Krauthammer, merely repeats the AIPAC mantra that Iran is the great threat to peace, but makes no mention of the sixty years of Israeli aggression, which is now compounded by a nuclear arsenal of over two hundred nuclear weapons at the ready.
Also notable for 6/21/09, Leslie Moonves' Bob Schieffer had, for the first time ever, the entire full half-hour of Face the Nation for an on-camera, on-the-set, John Sidney McCain III - NO ONE ELSE IN SIGHT! A first for Sunday "News" programs! And Disney ABC's George Stephanopoulis gave Lindsey Graham, Lieberman's (Joe not Avigdor) buddy, face time on This Week, while David Muir of World News Saturday accepted a Michael Horowitz to diss Iran. What a surprise!
Editor's Note: We have had complaints that GOPBIAS.ORG has been too critical of some political factions - e.g. AIPAC, particular American-European Jewish individuals (i.e. neocons), network television entities, et cetera. In fact, it is really impossible to adequately describe. It's like the "subtle" racist fiasco 2009 United States Golf Association Open which the USGA futilely staged to award Phil Mickelson his fourth major title (he finished in a three-way tie for 2nd, much to the chagrin of Southerner Johnny Miller) - Tiger Woods has legitimately won fifteen majors - and a Larry Dorman in the NY Times 6/18/09 stretched credulity to the breaking point equating Mickelson to the great Arnold Palmer (Dorman does have Tiger Woods in the right class with Jack Nicklaus). Where to begin?
Our nation and its people, and the world at large, have been subjected to one of the most devastating political crimes in the last century by the scheming machinations of a thoughtless, brutal band of Israeli agents, masquerading as United States citizens, as they took this country to war, for Israel, and inspired, i.e. created the hatred of Islamists throughout the Middle East against the West, and are now involved in a similar scheme to use the United States to subdue Iran, which the Israelis and their agents in AIPAC see as their last obstacle in their lust to rule the Levant.
To Control the Middle East
Amy Goodman 6/22/09 - Israel to Allocate $250 Million for West Bank Settlements
"In other news, Israeli army radio is reporting Israel plans to allocate $250 million over the next two years for settlements in the occupied West Bank, despite pressure to halt settlement activity from the Obama administration. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman met with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last week and rejected calls for a freeze on the settlements, which are considered illegal under international law.
Avigdor Lieberman: 'I think, and I say again, settlements are not an obstacle to achieve peace. We know that even before ’67, before we even established even one settlement, the situation was the same.'
[[ - Regarding the settlement issue, Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke on 6/14/09 "in which he artfully blew smoke in the eyes of his American interlocutors." This from the 6/22/09 N Y Times in an article by a Tony Judt. More from Mr. Judt: "It is not by chance that Netanyahu chose to deliver this speech at Bar-Ilan University, the heartland of rabbinical intransigence where Yigal Amir learned to hate Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before heading off to assassinate him in 2005." [This is a direct quote from the 6/22/09 N Y Times newspaper - Either Mr. Tony Judt author of Fictions on the Ground is careless, or The New York Times is careless with a significant OP-ED. Mr. Amir killed the great Yitzhak Rabin in November of 1995 which the "Neocons" used as "inspiration" to develop their "A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing The Realm (Israel)", the first step of which was the elimination of Saddam Hussein.] Mr. Judt is the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University and the author of "Postwar" and "Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century." The article is worth reading, for Mr. Judt's perspective, and the detail it provides. But as with any dissertation on the Middle East vis-a-vis Israel and its successful, up to now, Israeli quest for Palestine, the source must be considered. ]]
- Whatever the case, these three letters, the first from the totally discredited Abe Foxman, the second from an informed and balanced third-party observer, Charles D. Smith, and the last from a responsible Jewish American afford the reader a valid perspective of the facts on the ground sixty years after the 1948 Jewish invasion of Palestine.
To the Editor:
“Fictions on the Ground,” by Tony Judt (Op-Ed, June 22), is the real work of fiction, past, present and future.
Israelis settled in the West Bank because it was deemed part of the historic home of the Jewish people and because the Arabs and the Palestinians rejected opportunities for peace with Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967. The territory in legal terms was undecided because the Palestinians from 1947 rejected the United Nations resolution dividing the land into Arab and Jewish states.
Saying -- as Mr. Judt does -- that Israel will never give up the settlements ignores the fact that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to dismantle 80 percent of the settlements at Camp David; that his successor, Ariel Sharon, dismantled all of the settlements in Gaza; and that Israeli leaders have repeatedly indicated that most of the settlements will go if there is peace, and those held will be part of a swap for Israeli territory.
Settlements are not an obstacle to peace if there is serious peacemaking, peace-teaching and compromise from the other side. As for fictions -- as Mr. Judt has made clear in his writings, his problem is not with Israeli settlements, but with Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state. - Abraham H. Foxman National Director Anti-Defamation League New York 6/22/09
To the Editor:
Tony Judt provides a realistic assessment of both the illegality of settlements in international law as well as the collusion of Israeli governments of all tendencies to support them.
As he points out, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu government’s sudden support of a Palestinian state is meaningless because the settlements would remain, something no Palestinian leader could accept. This will enable Mr. Netanyahu and his supporters in this country to claim once again that there is no partner for peace.
While not all Palestinian factions openly accept Israel’s existence, Fatah does.
But Mahmoud Abbas could never accept Mr. Netanyahu’s supposedly sincere offer because the bypass roads for Jews only and the carefully placed settlements would ensure that no viable Palestinian state could be created -- precisely what Israeli rightists and their American lobbies intend.
After all, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon assured President George W. Bush of his support for a Palestinian state in April 2004, he referred to Palestinians in the West Bank having what he called “transportation contiguity,” meaning tunnels beneath Israeli bypass roads to settlements that only Israelis could use. That constitutes a viable state? - Charles D. Smith San Diego 6/22/09
The writer is a professor of Middle East history at the University of Arizona.
To the Editor:
Tony Judt does a wonderful job of clarifying why all the “settlements” are illegal and stand in the way of peace in the Middle East, and of explaining how the small but significant political constituency in Israel prevents meaningful change from taking place.
He rightly calls on the United States to change its stance but neglects to point out how a small but significant constituency in this country plays a similar role. Some of us, presumed to be part of that very constituency, certainly hope that President Obama will disregard the wrongful wishes of that constituency and put the United States on the right side of this issue once and for all.
For the sake of Israel and the wider world, expansion of settlements must stop, and all of them must be dismantled. - Howard Rubinstein Brooklyn 6/22/09
Amy Goodman 6/22/09:
- Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki challenged Lieberman’s claim.
Riyad al-Maliki: 'With the continuation of the settlement activities, it will be impossible to create a viable, contiguous Palestinian state on the ’67 borders. Nobody shares with Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman this view that the construction of settlement activities in occupied Palestinian territories has no connection to the peace process or has no influence to the achieving a peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis.'
- Shiite Mosque Attacked in Iraq, 73 Die
"In Iraq, at least seventy-three people died Saturday when a suicide bomber struck a Shiite mosque near Kirkuk. It was the deadliest attack in Iraq in more than a year. Another fifteen people died today in a series of bomb attacks in Baghdad.
- Two US Soldiers Die in Rocket Attack on Bagram Air Base
"In Afghanistan, two US troops were killed Sunday when Bagram Air Base came under a rocket attack. Six other people were injured.
- US Admits Afghan Air Strike Killed At Least 26 Civilians
"Meanwhile, an internal US military investigation into a US air strike on May 4th has confirmed that US forces killed at least twenty-six Afghan civilians and possibly as many as eighty-six. The military released the internal report on Friday but withheld making public a video from the attack despite an earlier promise from Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of US Central Command. - DemocracyNow 6/22/09
Amy Goodman 6/23/09:
"The Supreme Court also decided Monday not to take the case of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, who sought compensation from former members of the Bush administration after she was publicly revealed to be a secret operative. Plame is the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Plame filed the lawsuit, alleging that the Bush administration outed her in retaliation for her husband’s accusations that President Bush lied about Iraq’s alleged efforts to purchase uranium from Niger. Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington criticized the Supreme Court for not agreeing to hear the case. Sloan said, 'This is a setback for our democracy. This decision means that government officials can abuse their power for political purposes without fear of repercussion.'
- Canadian Firms Sued for Investing in Israeli Settlements -
"Two Canadian firms have been accused of committing war crimes by assisting in the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The Palestinian village of Bil’in has filed a lawsuit against two companies based in Quebec: Green Mount International and Green Park International. The suit is said to mark the first time a private company has been sued for investing in Israeli settlements, which are considered illegal under international law. - DemocracyNow 6/23/09
- Jim Lehrer's Judy Woodruff 6/23/09 with the chairman of the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry and Lieberman/McCain cohort South Carolina's Senator Lindsey Graham (he occupies the Strom Thurmond seat), Graham, who said he'd beat Michael Phelps in a 100 meter freestyle if the Democrats took North Carolina in the 2008 election.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Up until today, President Obama's response to the developments in Iran had drawn fire from congressional Republicans. As we just saw, the president responded to that.
And now we hear from two members of the U.S. Senate, Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Senators, thank you both for being with us.
Senator Graham, I'm going to start with you, because your name came up today at that news conference. You have been saying until now that the president has been timid and passive in his comments. What did you make of what he said today?
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), South Carolina: I thought he was very strong today. And the reason I said that is because it's what I believe. I think he's right on Iraq. I think he's been good on Afghanistan. And with Senator Kerry's help, we're going to do some good things in Pakistan.
But the president believes that he can sit down with this regime and negotiate to end Iran's ambitions to pursue a nuclear weapon. I hope he can. But this regime has lost credibility with its people, with the world at large, and France, Germany and England came out strong.
I think the president did today what I was hoping he would do before because he is the leader of the free world, not me. His voice does matter. He's an eloquent spokesman for freedom, and I think what he said today will penetrate in Iran, and I'd like to see the U.N. Security Council, led by us, condemn the Iranian regime. I'd like to see more sanctions.
And I'd like to see the president continue to speak out about freedom in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, because he is such a strong voice for these ideas. So that was my criticism.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Senator Kerry, did you hear something materially different from the president today?
SEN. JOHN KERRY (D), Massachusetts: I think the president has been absolutely square on and correct in his statements about Iran.
You know, there's a difference between politics and statesmanship. And the president has to be a statesman and the leader of our nation in terms of foreign policy.
At the beginning of your show, you talked about how BBC and Voice of America and public statements are being used by the Iranian government to distract -- those were your words in the reporting -- to distract from the real cause here.
The president has been sensitive to that, but anybody who believes that the president has been less than forceful on this is simply ignoring history.
He went to Cairo. And in Cairo, he made a major speech about democracy, about Iran, about how we will stand up to Iran. He has been clear about the questions raised about this election. And no one in the world doubts where the United States of America is with respect to this election or where the president is.
But this has to be about Iranians and Iran. This is Iran's moment, not America's. And I think the president has played it absolutely correctly. He's been clear now about what is at stake. And I think he's allowed the Iranians to define this moment of history in Iranian words, in Iranian actions. And that is really the power of it.
- Measuring Obama's response -
JUDY WOODRUFF: Senator Graham, in saying today, the president did, that he said he has been entirely consistent and he said he did not want to become a foil for the Iranian leaders, for them, in other words, to conveniently use the U.S. What about that?
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Very unpersuasive to me. The Iranian regime has accused the BBC, CNN, and any other news organization of being a pawn of Israel. They're going to say these things no matter what we do. And it's unpersuasive to me.
Ronald Reagan spoke up when the government of Poland oppressed the workers, and it mattered. The pope spoke up, and the people behind the Iron Curtain were encouraged by that. I think the president was timid, quite frankly.
He wants to negotiate with this regime. And this disturbance in Iran has sort of thrown a wrinkle in the game plan. And I think the best way for our country to be stronger and safer and the world to be better off is to stand with the protesters, not to pick the leader of Iran, but to let them know we hear what they're saying.
They've got the signs in English. And what the president said today was much better than what he said earlier. And words do matter. So I think history would say that those who speak up for freedom at a time when it matters are going to get a better result than trying to play this parlor game of wondering if our enemies will use our words against us. This regime will use everybody's words against us, including their own people.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Senator Kerry?
SEN. JOHN KERRY: Well, if I could comment on that, you know, Lindsey is simply not acknowledging what the president said. I went back and reread his statement of last week over the weekend to see whether or not I thought that, in fact, it ought to be strengthened.
And I read it. I felt that he had, in fact, said everything that was appropriate at that time about the elections, about doubts about the elections, about where our support stood, about the condemnation of the violence, as well as his hopes for the freedom and aspirations of the democracy movement. He said all that last week.
The fact is, this tough rhetoric, the rhetoric that inserts the United States in the middle of this, has been tried. We saw eight years of it. And you know where we went from? We went from a president of Iran who believed in a dialogue between civilizations and in dealing with the problem of Israel to a president who denounced everything the United States did, denied the Holocaust, and condemned and talked about the annihilation of Israel.
We went from a president of Iran who was ready to engage on Iran's nuclear program to one who asserted the rights of Iran to simply go ahead and build a program. In other words, we went backwards as a consequence of the kind of rhetoric that Lindsey is talking about. We also cannot ignore the history of Iran. In Iran...
- 'Meddling' in Iranian affairs -
JUDY WOODRUFF: Let me -- let me -- I'm going to interrupt you there and ask Senator Graham just to comment on what you just said.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Well, you know, here's my big problem, is that the president says we're not going to meddle in internal Iranian affairs. It's never meddling when you stand up for people who take to the streets, this young lady who got killed on behalf of freedom.
The people who've been meddling is the Iranian regime, who sent IEDs into Iraq to kill American troops and innocent Iraqis, who've now turned on their own people. You're never meddling.
Ronald Reagan and the pope weren't meddling. They were doing what the free world needs to have done: lead. And this president hasn't been leading; he's been following other nations of the free world.
He did much better today. And I want my country, my president to lead on things like this, to stand up to this regime, and let them know they will not be rewarded by this behavior, they will be punished in the eyes of the world. And today is a new start.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Senator...
SEN. JOHN KERRY: You know, Lindsey is a great pal of mine. And he and I honestly get along really, really well.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: We are good friends, but we obviously don't agree.
SEN. JOHN KERRY: But I have to tell you something. There is a tried and traditional Republican tactic in this city which is to sort of set up a red herring, set up a straw man and knock it down.
To ignore that this president of the United States, unlike George Bush over eight years, went to Cairo, gave a New Year's announcement to the Iranians congratulating them on the New Year, has already initiated major initiatives involving himself in their lives and hopes and aspirations, to ignore that this president went to Cairo and gave a speech that reverberated into the elections of Lebanon and clearly has inspired a younger generation to already seek some of the things they're doing today is just to kind of set up something that is absolutely unnatural, not real, and kind of knock it down. This president -- and ignore history.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Let me ask you both...
SEN. JOHN KERRY: This president did what he had to do in terms of stating America's hopes and aspirations for the region, for Iran specifically, for democracy, and he is carefully calibrating what he has to say and do now in order to act like a statesman, not the leading political voice of the United States.
- Call for sanctions -
JUDY WOODRUFF: Senator Graham, let me ask you about a point -- I believe Senator Kerry has referred to this -- I know that others have -- and that is the argument that, if he were to align himself very closely with the protesters, the president would, in effect, give them false hope that he could change things when, in fact, he's not in a position to do that.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: You know, that's the point. And I guess when Ronald Reagan went to the Berlin Wall, he didn't say, "You know, let's think about this wall." He said, "Tear it down. And I'll negotiate with you, but I'm going to negotiate with you speaking truth to power."
In Cairo, I wish he would have said that this Iranian regime has had blood on its hands and be more forceful. This is not about Cairo; this is about now. This is about the people in the streets that are literally dying.
So what I hope we can do is do more than talk. Why don't we take a U.N. resolution, lead it, author it, condemn this regime for the way they treated their people and the way they fostered terrorism, take it to the Security Council of the United Nations, and ask for a vote?
Why don't we call for tougher sanctions on this regime, because it will help the people down the road? Even though it may hurt now, it will help them later.
We can do what -- I can't promise you an outcome, but I can promise you this, that as the leader of the free world, the president of the United States, when he speaks, people listen. And we need to not only speak more forcefully; we need to act more forcefully. This is a chance, in my opinion, to change history for the better.
- Nuclear tensions worsening -
JUDY WOODRUFF: Senator Kerry, in just a minute I want to ask you to respond to that, but also to this point, that the president, in dealing, in leaving the door open to potentially dealing with the regime in power, that this puts him, it puts advocates like you in a position you really don't want to end up being in.
SEN. JOHN KERRY: Well, I mean, look -- well, inevitably, I mean, this regime is not a regime that any of us in the United States if we had our choices would choose to deal with. It's like what Bill Perry said about North Korea. You have to deal with the country as it is, not as the country that you wish it was. You know, we don't have that luxury.
What we have to do is deal with the power center that is. Richard Nixon sent Henry Kissinger to deal with Mao Zedong. It didn't sit well with his own party, but it changed our relationship with China. Gorbachev went to Reykjavik and sat down with Gorbachev, the evil empire, and came out with an agreement on nuclear weapons. It wasn't the government he wanted to deal with.
Obviously, this is not the government that we like or appreciate. No one has any doubts about where America stands with respect to President Ahmadinejad. But we have to go forward here.
And I don't think the president has walked back on any of America's hopes and aspirations. You know, you can't sort of pick and choose what the reality is. The fact is that the president in Cairo was bold, speaking on Egyptian ground, where there are issues about democracy, and spoke loudly and clearly about the hopes of people in the region to be able to express their views, have the governments of their choice, reach their aspirations. It was a bold and historic speech which never happened in the eight years of George Bush.
Now you can sit there and have all the tough rhetoric in the world that you want and you can go backwards. You know, with North Korea, when George Bush came in, we had only about two nuclear weapons. We had television cameras in the nuclear reactor. We knew where the rods were. And we had limited their nuclear program.
After all the tough rhetoric, they're in the double digits of nuclear weapons. We don't have any television cameras. We don't know what they're doing in there, in the nuclear reactor. The rods are out, and the centrifuges are growing.
We are worse off. We are in a more dangerous world as the consequence of those like Dick Cheney who just chose rhetoric. We need diplomacy and intelligent statescraft.
And I think no one in the world doubts where the United States of America is with respect to Mr. Ahmadinejad and Iran. This is a moment of history. The president, I think, has calibrated his comments.
And it's interesting. Only the politicians are throwing their barbs and a couple of pundits. The vast majority of experts, of people who really live and breathe Iranian policy, are all saying that the president has calibrated this correctly.
Tomorrow, the Foreign Relations Committee will have a working roundtable on this topic. And I think people will see why this is, in fact, the right way to approach the question of Iran and our security interests.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Can I just add one thing?
JUDY WOODRUFF: We're going to -- very quick, Senator. We have to wrap it up.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: Thank you. Experts do not change history. It's people who are willing to die and take to the streets that change history.
No one saw this coming. It has now happened. We have a chance to change history. This regime has lost credibility in terms of us negotiating with it and leading its own people. And we need to get into this fight with the words that will change things, and go to the U.N., and hold this regime accountable, not back off, not be timid, not be passive.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Senator Graham, Senator Kerry, thank you both.
SEN. JOHN KERRY: Thank you very much.
Interesting that Lehrer, along with all other network hosts, ALWAYS gives the last "comment" to the Republicans. . and that Graham is prompting a reference to international law - but only with reference to Iran. Israel continues to be in violation of international law since its June 1967, attack on Palestine. In January of this next year the great Norman Finkelstein is spear-heading an international march in Gaza to demonstrate that Israel's occupation of Gaza, and the siege which insures that occupation, is illegal as are the checkpoints, the wall, even the declaration that they have a Jewish State. Watch for details.
Clouding the Regulatory Issue for Greenspan
- Have you heard of Brooksley Born?
"The most promising reform would be to give the Federal Reserve, the National Economic Council or the president’s Council of Economic Advisers the ability to collect and analyze financial intelligence and do emergency planning. REGULATORS FAILED TO PREVENT THE FINANCIAL COLLAPSE NOT BECAUSE THEY LACKED ADEQUATE POWERS BUT BECAUSE THEY LACKED INFORMATION, A CULTURE OF INQUIRY AND A CONTINGENCY PLAN." - Dick Posner N Y Times 6/25/09
Richard A. Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, is the author of “A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent Into Depression.”
- This is Dick Posner, in a feeble effort to SHIELD ALAN GREENSPAN!
Amy Goodman 6/24/09
- Report: Israel Authorizes 300 New Settlement Homes -
"In Israel and the Occupied Territories, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has reportedly authorized the construction of 300 new homes in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz is reporting the housing units will be built near the Talmon settlement in an outpost initially established even without Israeli government approval. The new construction would conflict with the Obama administration’s public call for a freeze on Israeli settlement expansion. President Obama, however, has refused to apply any meaningful pressure on Israel by withholding some of the billions in annual US aid. He’s also refused to call for the settlements’ complete dismantlement, even though they’re widely considered illegal under international law." - DemocracyNow 6/24/09
America’s political scene has changed immensely since the last time a Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with a straight face that the U.S. health care system is O.K. And if surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, voters are ready for major change.
The question now is whether we will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993.
And yes, I mean Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans -- Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! -- hoping that someone still cares.
The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What’s more, they overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that Republicans denounce most fiercely as “socialized medicine” -- the creation of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers.
Or to put it another way, in effect voters support the health care plan jointly released by three House committees last week, which relies on a combination of subsidies and regulation to achieve universal coverage, and introduces a public plan to compete with insurers and hold down costs.
Yet it remains all too possible that health care reform will fail, as it has so many times before.
I’m not that worried about the issue of costs. Yes, the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimates for Senate plans were higher than expected, and caused considerable consternation last week. But the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance -- even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts. Furthermore, Democratic leaders know that they have to pass a health care bill for the sake of their own survival. One way or another, the numbers will be brought in line.
The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by “centrist” Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. I use scare quotes around “centrist,” by the way, because if the center means the position held by most Americans, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.
What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.
Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don’t seem able to explain their reasons in public.
Thus Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska initially declared that the public option -- which, remember, has overwhelming popular support -- was a “deal-breaker.” Why? Because he didn’t think private insurers could compete: “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the day.” Um, isn’t the purpose of health care reform to protect American citizens, not insurance companies?
Mr. Nelson softened his stand after reform advocates began a public campaign targeting him for his position on the public option.
And Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota offers a perfectly circular argument: we can’t have the public option, because if we do, health care reform won’t get the votes of senators like him. “In a 60-vote environment,” he says (implicitly rejecting the idea, embraced by President Obama, of bypassing the filibuster if necessary), “you’ve got to attract some Republicans as well as holding virtually all the Democrats together, and that, I don’t believe, is possible with a pure public option.”
Honestly, I don’t know what these Democrats are trying to achieve. Yes, some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex -- but who in politics doesn’t? If I had to guess, I’d say that what’s really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run America.
But this fantasy can’t be allowed to stand in the way of giving America the health care reform it needs. This time, the alleged center must not hold. - Paul Krugman 6/22/09
- The 5/2-3/09 latest annual Washington, D.C. convention of AIPAC -
- The Daniel Pipes article on Steven J. Rosen in The Jerusalem Post -
- The June 8, 1967 attack on the USS Liberty - "The Attack On The Liberty: The Untold Story On Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault On A US Spyship" -
Capitol Hill - October 2003 - It's an historic occasion. An independent blue-ribbon commission is to release its findings from an investigation into the internationally explosive 36-year old attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967 that left more than 200 US Naval personnel killed or wounded. The commission consists of a former ambassador of the US to Israel; a US Naval Rear Admiral and former head of the US Navy Legal Division; a Marine General, America's highest ranking recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and a former asst. commandant of the US Marines; a US Navy Four Star Admiral, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former chief of Naval Operations in World War II, a hero, and the only Naval Admiral to have commanded both the Pacific and Atlantic Fleets. Interestingly, this naval admiral was John Sidney McCain II.
Findings - That the attack on the USS Liberty carried out by Israeli forces was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American naval vessel and kill her entire crew; that Israel committed acts of murder against American citizens in an act of war against the United States; that the attack included the machine-gunning of stretcher bearers and life rafts; and that the Lyndon Johnson White House deliberately prevented the United States Navy from coming to the defense of the Navy ship. Never before, in American naval history, has a rescue mission been canceled when an American ship was under attack. In addition, surviving crew members were later threatened with Courts Martial, imprisonment or worse if they talked with anyone about what had happened to them, and they were abandoned by their own government.
- James Scott - author of "Attack On The Liberty" -
- Synopsis -
"On June 8, 1967, as war raged between Israel and its neighbors, an American spy ship, the U.S.S. Liberty, eavesdropped on communications off the coast of Egypt. When Israeli fighter jets and reconnaissance planes flew overhead, the Liberty’s crew assumed that the ship’s identifying markings and American flag would be visible to the pilots in the clear skies above. After as many as eight passes over a period of nearly nine hours, fighters suddenly opened fire and began strafing and napalming the Liberty, which had only four machine guns for defense. When the air attack ended, Israeli torpedo boats appeared and scored a direct hit. By the time the assault was over, 34 crewmen had been killed and 171 wounded, two-thirds of the crew. Only heroic efforts by the officers and crew saved the ship from sinking.
Back in Washington, news of the attack on the Liberty was received with a mixture of shock and outrage. Many in the Pentagon, State Department and in Congress demanded that Israel be held accountable for the unprovoked assault in international waters. The Johnson Administration initially responded by threatening Israel but soon softened its attitude. Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War, as it became known, was a source of pride to many American Jews, whose support was crucial to an administration mired in an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. With the death toll mounting daily in Vietnam, the attack on the Liberty was pushed to the back pages of the nation’s newspapers, and ultimately all but forgotten.
James Scott is a journalist and the son of a surviving Liberty officer. In this riveting book, he recounts the story of the horrifying attack and the tremendous impact it had on the lives of the crew. He puts the attack in context, showing how political considerations trumped the demands for justice from the survivors and their supporters in the military and in Congress. Drawing on new interviews and recently declassified documents in both the United States and Israel, he demonstrates that Israel’s initial insistence that the attack was a mistake caused by misidentification of the ship is implausible. He documents, for the first time, the fact that at least one Israeli pilot correctly identified the Liberty during the attack and that others inside Israel’s chain of command were aware of the ship’s identity as the assault unfolded. His descriptions of the crew under fire and their frantic work to save the ship are dramatic and unforgettable. Scott takes readers into the conference rooms at the White House where the most senior officials in the government debated how to respond to the attack and then eventually devised a plan to protect Israel from public outrage. He shows the debate inside the Israeli government over whether to punish the attackers, and reveals the widespread disbelief many American leaders had with Israel’s explanation.
The Attack on the Liberty is the finest account yet of this tragedy, and a remarkable tale of men under fire in an incident that remains bitterly disputed after more than forty years." -
- James Bamford - author of "A Pretext For War: 9/11, Iraq, and the abuse of America's intelligence agencies:
“The country should be grateful to James Scott for this very courageous book.”
William F. Buckley Jr's National Review
When an abortion provider in Wichita, Kan., was killed, the predictable chorus pointed fingers at Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. After all, O'Reilly had said that George Tiller was a "baby killer" and had railed against the doctor's late-term abortion practice for years. He must be to blame! No one bothered to ask whether Tiller's accused murderer had ever watched O'Reilly, or to ponder whether a militant pro-life extremist really needed a talk-show host to tell him anything he didn't already know about one of less than a dozen doctors in the country who still performed third-trimester abortions.
But, never mind. Such details don't matter when you're trying to delegitimize people.
Now we have James von Brunn. He is an 88-year-old loon, considered a dangerous nut even within the dangerous-nut community. He took his gun and shot up the Holocaust Museum and murdered a guard. Reporting suggests that von Brunn wanted to fulfill his revenge fantasies against the Jewish-neocon globalist cabal, which apparently outsources much of its work to the Bush family. A 9/11 truther, convinced that the bagel-snarfing, string-pulling Jooooooooooozzz are behind everything, von Brunn is the kind of fanatic the zombies who talk to themselves at the bus station would give a wide berth.
But, of course, we have Sarah Palin to thank for von Brunn. So says some genius at the Daily Kos. A competing braniac at the Huffington Post says, "Thank you very much Karl Rove and your minions." Pretty much the entire media establishment is comfortable labeling von Brunn as a member of the "far right." Putting aside other objections to that nomenclature, if von Brunn is a member of the far right, then it would be helpful and journalistically responsible if the press would start calling Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, et al., moderates and centrists.
That won't happen, because the whole point of these exercises is to paint the right as an undifferentiated blob of evil.
Never mind that von Brunn isn't a member of the far right. Nor is he a member of the far left, as some on the right are claiming. He's not a member of anything other than the crazy caucus. Von Brunn's True North is conspiratorial anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. He's not a member of the Christian Right. In fact, he denounces Christianity -- just as Hitler did -- as a Jewish plot against paganism and Western vigor. Nor is he a capitalist. Again, just as Hitler did, he hails socialism as the solution to the West's problems.
Still, if we are going to play this game where we take the words of politicians and pundits, compare them to the words of murderers and psychopaths, and then assign blame accordingly, then let's blame the New York Times, Chris Matthews, left-wing blogs everywhere and the academics who penned "The Lobby" (which blames a fifth column of Israel loyalists for our troubles).
After all, for years, mainstream liberalism and other outposts of paranoid Bush hatred have portrayed neoconservatives -- usually code for conservative Jews and other supporters of Israel -- as an alien, pernicious cabal. "They have penetrated the culture at nearly every level from the halls of academia to the halls of the Pentagon," observed the New York Times. "... They've accumulated the wherewithal financially (and) professionally to broadcast what they think over the airwaves to the masses or over cocktails to those at the highest levels of government."
NBC's Matthews routinely used the word "neocon" as if it was code for "traitor." He asked one guest whether White House neocons are "loyal to the Kristol neoconservative movement, or to the president?" Von Brunn may have wondered the same thing, which is why he reportedly had the offices of Bill Kristol's "Weekly Standard" on his hit list.
Unhinged Bush-hater Andrew Sullivan insists that, "The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right." Leading liberal intellectual Michael Lind warned about the alarming fact that "the foreign policy of the world's only global power is being made by a small clique" of neoconservative plotters.
Even with Bush out of the picture, some see the problem emerging again. Just this week, Jeremiah Wright, the president's longtime mentor and pastor, whined that, "Them Jews aren't going to let him talk to me."
Maniacs like von Brunn connect dots that aren't there because that's what paranoid anti-Semites do. What's the left's excuse? - Jonah Goldberg 6/13/09
Reach Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online, via e-mail at jonahscolumn@aol.com.
Amy Goodman 6/16/09 on former President Jimmy Carter -
- Carter: Netanyahu Blocking Peace with Palestinians -
"Former President Jimmy Carter has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of setting up new obstacles to peace with the Palestinians. On Sunday, Netanyahu said for the first time he could accept a two-state solution, but only if the new Palestinian state had no army and no control of its airspace and borders. Jimmy Carter spoke during a stop in Jerusalem.
Jimmy Carter: 'My opinion is that he raised many new obstacles to peace that had not existed under previous prime ministers. He still apparently insists upon expansion of existing settlements. He demands that the Palestinians and other Arabs recognize Israel as a Jewish state, although there are 20 percent of the citizens here who are not Jews. This is a new demand. President Obama, in his speech, called for two states, and I’m glad Prime Minister Netanyahu accepted that concept.'
Earlier today, Jimmy Carter visited Gaza for the first time since the Israeli invasion.
Jimmy Carter: 'It’s very distressing to me. I have to hold back tears when I see the deliberate destruction that has been wracked against your people. I come here to the American school, which was educating your children, supported by my own country, and I see that it’s been deliberately destroyed by bombs from F-16s made in my country and delivered to the Israelis.'
Jimmy Carter is scheduled to meet Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh later today." - DemocracyNow 6/16/09
Amy Goodman 6/16/09: Campaigners Urge Caterpillar to Halt Bulldozer Sales to Israel.
"Shareholders of the company Caterpillar have rejected an effort by human rights activists to stop the firm from selling bulldozers to Israel to be used to demolish homes in Gaza and the West Bank. At the company’s annual meeting last week, dissident shareholders submitted a resolution calling for a review of Caterpillar sales to militaries with poor human rights records, including Israel. The Israeli activist Matan Cohen of the group Anarchists Against the Wall attended the shareholders’ meeting.
Matan Cohen: 'Caterpillar has been arguing for years that they’re not responsible for what their clients are doing with their products. And we made a very simple case. As a recent ruling in the United States court in the state of New York said, if you are willfully blind to what your clients are doing with your products, you are as legally culpable as they are. Hence, we demanded Caterpillar stop providing Israel its services and stop giving them D-9 bulldozers with which Israel has been demolishing homes, constructing the separation wall, and uprooting olive groves on a day-to-day basis.'" - DemocracyNow 6/16/09
Amy Goodman 6/17/09:
- Carter: Gaza Residents Are Treated 'More Like Animals than Like Human Beings'
Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that Palestinians in Gaza were being treated 'more like animals than human beings.' Carter made the comment after touring the Gaza Strip for the first time since the Israeli attack.
Jimmy Carter: “Tragically, the international community largely ignores the cries for help, while the citizens of Gaza are treated more like animals than like human beings.”
- Jimmy Carter also called for an investigation into war crimes committed by Israel -
Jimmy Carter: “There is no explanation. The responsibility for this terrible human rights crime lies in Jerusalem, in Cairo, in Washington, and in the capitals of Europe, throughout the international community. This abuse must cease. The crimes committed against you must be investigated. The walls must be brought down, and the basic right of freedom must come to you.”
- 1979 State Dept Ruling: Israel Settlements "Inconsistent with International Law” -
Amy Goodman 6/17/09: Meanwhile, new attention is being paid to a State Department opinion issued during Jimmy Carter’s administration regarding Israeli settlements. In 1979, a State Department legal adviser issued an opinion that stated the establishment of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories is “inconsistent with international law.” The opinion cited Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The legal opinion has never been revoked or revised. On Tuesday, Israel’s newly appointed ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, claimed that Israel does not have the ability to halt all settlement building.
Michael Oren: “This is a country of law, and citizens of the state of Israel have rights under that law. And if a person has purchased a house, if a person has taken out a contract for building a house, if a corporation is involved in a construction activity, the Israeli government does not have the right under Israeli law to stop them. And if it tries to, they will appeal to the (Israeli) supreme court, and my guess is, the supreme court will view in favor of those appellants.”
The future of the Israeli settlements is expected to be discussed at today’s meeting in Washington between Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Lieberman lives in the West Bank settlement of Nokdim. - DemocracyNow 6/17/09
This paragraph appears (B-3) in the Business section of the 6/16/09 N Y Times: "In Italy, Mr. Berlusconi, the prime minister, has used an interview on one of his own television channels to accuse Mr. Murdoch of mounting a personal attack through a newspaper owned by the News Corporation, his global media empire." Regarding Mr. Berlusconi in Italy, and Rupert Murdoch everywhere else (it is common knowledge the damage Murdoch's Fox, directed by Roger Ailes, has wrought here in the United States) and it reminds us of the CBS Evening News the day before hosted by Jeff Glor 6/15/09, a program with Jewish American Richard Roth describing the election turmoil in Iran, which Israel, stockpiling 200+ nuclear weapons, has labeled as a threat to the Middle East - followed on the telecast by Mr. Glor personally interviewing the most dangerous Israeli Prime Minister since Ariel Sharon, Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu (who sees himself as an historic figure and, as such, fills the screen), a man who clearly has NO intention of EVER making peace with the Palestinians, and we give this unscrupulous fraud in Israel, in excess of THREE BILLION$ DOLLAR$ EVERY YEAR, FOR DECADES!!
- An Associated Media-Bias Factor -
As the Obama administration works to rescue the financial sector from the reckless/disastrous eight years of Bush/Cheney/McCain, we have the deadly chorus of Republicans John Boehner, Richard Shelby, Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor (all led by Rush Limbaugh) risking our nation's recovery for their own self-serving political interests - and supported by such right-wing Republican "think" tanks as The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and AEI, the American Enterprise Institute - and ALL of the above given overwhelming "news" coverage on ABC-Disney, General Electric NBC Universal and, of course, Leslie Moonves' CBS which ousted Dan Rather from network television, along with the rising John Roberts.
* 5/22/09 - Israel has proved itself, particularly with its 12/26/08 - 1/18/09 Gazan Massacre, to be a rogue state, and a menace to the entire world. This website has the record of that sordid sixty year history, in large part paid for by the treasure and blood of the United States of America, seen by Israeli targets as the major supporter of this Jewish cabal. From within, this nation has been imperiled by AIPAC and associated Jewish American cliques in the press and the media at large, and it is that reality which Gopbias.org is dedicated to address.
5/24/09 - This latest manifestation of Jewish intransigence is particularly problematic. The new Israeli "government" of "Bibi" Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, the former a virtual draft dodging loudmouth (brings to mind our Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush) when likened to the memory of his nemesis soldier-statesman Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the latter a professional bar room bouncer - this pair, with their arsenal of nuclear weapons, is surely the most virulent in that "state's" history. But that truth is embargoed by our Media/Press. At the end of the week in which the once-again Israeli prime minister met in Washington with a gracious President Barack Obama, by the end of the week "Bibi" was back in Israel vowing that Jerusalem was the capital of the Jewish State (That is a theocracy!) and indivisible forever. So much for peace with the Palestinians, with the surrounding Arab states, and Persian Iran. And not a mention on the week's end television programs - ABC Disney's World News Tonight, General Electric/NBC Universal Nightly News, Leslie Moonves' CBS Evening News or PBS's Lehrer NewsHour, Gwen Ifill's Washington Week, WGBH OPB's (the suspect Oregon Public Broadcasting) Foreign Exchange or Bill Moyers' Journal. On Saturday NPR's Weekend Edition there was mention of Netanyahu's visit to Washington, but his alarming declaration Friday (5/22/09) from Israel was excluded by Scott Simon (another NPR Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep or All Things Considered Robert Siegel - they do have catchy names for their programs), Daniel Schorr, an Ari Shapiro who invoked Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, etc. At Gopbias.org we call that ERA, Ethnicity Run Amok, the arrogant variety originated by John Donald Imus Jr.! *
[ National Public Radio, NPR, lost its integrity when it fired, without cause (He was the best host/reporter on radio!)...when it fired Bob Edwards. ]
- A Middle East View on Israel
To the Editor:
Re “Israelis Say Obama Is Ignoring Old Understandings on Settlement ‘Freeze’ ” (news article, N Y Times, June 4):
Let us remember first that the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem are occupied territories under international law and Security Council resolutions. Time and again, building settlements in occupied territories is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which blandly states that “the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
Neither the Geneva convention nor its commentaries recognize or use alternatively the natural growth or physical-extension qualifier to justify the transfer of parts of the occupying-power population into the occupied territories. This makes sense since two wrongs do not make a right.
Given the number of Israeli settlers now in the occupied territories, any weaseling to facilitate new settlements will only complicate the negotiations and undercut the fair resolution of the problem. - Hussein Mubarak Consul General of Egypt New York 6/5/09
- George Mitchell's On It! -
U.S. Envoy Reassures Palestinians -
George J. Mitchell, President Obama’s Middle East envoy, assured Palestinians on Wednesday of Washington’s commitment to a state of their own, calling its establishment the only viable solution to their conflict with Israel. Mr. Mitchell, speaking after talks with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, urged both sides to meet their obligations under a 2003 “road map” that commits Israel to halting settlement expansion and Palestinians to reining in militants. Mr. Abbas, after his talks with Mr. Mitchell, made no comment to reporters. But Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement that the United States had “made clear its intention to reinvigorate Middle East peace talks.”
Mr. Mitchell met with Israeli leaders Tuesday and said it was “beyond any doubt that the United States’ commitment to the security of Israel remains unshakeable.” Mr. Mitchell went to Israel amid a rare public dispute over settlement activity. The Obama administration has called for a halt to all settlement activity, but Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, insists that building within existing settlements should be allowed. - REUTERS 6/10/09
National Review Jonah Goldberg
- Winding Up The Lunatics - The Big Hate
Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s -- a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.
But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.
There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.
Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.
And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.
Exhibit A for the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism is Fox News’s new star, Glenn Beck. Here we have a network where, like it or not, millions of Americans get their news -- and it gives daily airtime to a commentator who, among other things, warned viewers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency might be building concentration camps as part of the Obama administration’s “totalitarian” agenda (although he eventually conceded that nothing of the kind was happening).
But let’s not neglect the print news media. In the Bush years, The Washington Times became an important media player because it was widely regarded as the Bush administration’s house organ. Earlier this week, the newspaper saw fit to run an opinion piece declaring that President Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself,” and that in any case he has “aligned himself” with the radical Muslim Brotherhood.
And then there’s Rush Limbaugh. His rants today aren’t very different from his rants in 1993. But he occupies a different position in the scheme of things. Remember, during the Bush years Mr. Limbaugh became very much a political insider. Indeed, according to a recent Gallup survey, 10 percent of Republicans now consider him the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today,” putting him in a three-way tie with Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich. So when Mr. Limbaugh peddles conspiracy theories -- suggesting, for example, that fears over swine flu were being hyped “to get people to respond to government orders” -- that’s a case of the conservative media establishment joining hands with the lunatic fringe.
It’s not surprising, then, that politicians are doing the same thing. The R.N.C. says that “the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals.” And when Jon Voight, the actor, told the audience at a Republican fund-raiser this week that the president is a “false prophet” and that “we and we alone are the right frame of mind to free this nation from this Obama oppression,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, thanked him, saying that he “really enjoyed” the remarks.
Credit where credit is due. Some figures in the conservative media have refused to go along with the big hate -- people like Fox’s Shepard Smith and Catherine Herridge, who debunked the attacks on that Homeland Security report two months ago. But this doesn’t change the broad picture, which is that supposedly respectable news organizations and political figures are giving aid and comfort to dangerous extremism.
What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s -- that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”
And that’s a threat to take seriously. Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril. - Paul Krugman 6/13/09
Amy Goodman 6/9/09: The New York Times is coming under intense scrutiny over its recent coverage of what former Guantanamo prisoners have done after their release. On May 21, the Times ran a front-page story titled “1 in 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds.” Since publication, the Times has had to backtrack from the article’s most serious claims. On Sunday, the paper’s public editor wrote that the article was “seriously flawed and greatly overplayed.” The public editor said the article failed to distinguish between former prisoners suspected of new acts of terrorism--more than half the cases--and those supposedly confirmed to have rejoined jihad against the West. Had only confirmed cases been considered, one in seven would have changed to one in twenty.
Amy Goodman 6/10/09: "At least thirty-five people have been killed in a car bombing in the southern Iraqi city of Bathaa. The attack struck a Shiite market district earlier today. The bombing comes as the Iraqi government has announced it will proceed with a referendum on a security pact calling for the withdrawal of all US troops by the end of 2011. If the referendum fails to pass, US forces would be required to withdraw within one year of the vote, which could come within the next few months."
"The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is reporting Egypt and Saudi Arabia have given the US a two-year deadline for an agreement on brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace. The two countries have spearheaded the Arab League peace plan that offers Israel normalized relations in return for its full withdrawal from the Occupied Territories and the creation of a Palestinian state there. Despite his pledge to pursue a peace deal, President Obama has refused to fully endorse the Arab offer, only its provision regarding Arab recognition of Israel. On Tuesday, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said he would welcome a change in the US position.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh: 'There is information that the American representative, Mitchell, will make Israel responsible for the war in Gaza and building settlements. This is a new balance in the American stand.'
A full withdrawal from the Occupied Territories would require the dismantling of large Israeli settlements that carve up the West Bank. But President Obama has only called on Israel to meet its pledge to halt the settlements’ growth. The Arab insistence on a two-year deadline is seen as a move to encourage Obama to take meaningful steps to pressure the Israeli government, including the withholding of billions in US aid." - DemocracyNow 6/10/09
- Mitchell Redux - NOW IS THE TIME! - Mitchell Redux Needed!
From Palestine To Anywhere Else!
- Shift the Focus Away From Netanyahu & Lieberman -
To the Editor:
Re “The Exodus Obama Forgot to Mention,” by André Aciman (Op-Ed, June 9):
Mr. Aciman hits the nail on the head. President Obama, in his comprehensive speech in Cairo, did not say anything about the estimated 800,000 Jews who were forced to leave Arab countries for refuge in Israel and other lands that would welcome them.
I, too, find it strange that our president mentioned Arab refugees without acknowledging the fact that Jews throughout the Arab world have been victims of anti-Semitism since long before Israel became a state in 1948.
BUT. . .NOT. . .VICTIMIZED. . .IN. . .PALESTINE!!!
The president and his advisers need to understand that to be an honest broker in forging peace between Israel and the Palestinians, one has to be honest in reminding everyone of historical fact.
RABBI Reuven H. Taff Sacramento 6/9/09
[[ But The Israelis Are Particularly Vulnerable ]]
And Ms. Fike's Got It!
To the Editor:
It is tragic that Jews were forced out of Egypt so many years ago. André Aciman, however, does not mention that the Palestinians were forced out of what had been their lands and homes in Palestine.
It is interesting that Mr. Aciman says Jews had lived peacefully and were integrated into Egyptian society until they were forced out about 50 years ago. It is obvious that there was a direct connection to what was happening in Palestine/Israel, with the great catastrophe being endured by the Palestinians who had been forced from their homes.
This is not to say that the treatment of the Jews in Egypt was justified; two wrongs do not make a right. But in the interest of accurate reporting and to better understand the whole situation, it is essential to include all of the relevant facts. - Sarah Fike Berkeley 6/9/09
By Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes
LOS ANGELES -- In 1992, Ariel Zev Emanuel, a young operative with the struggling InterTalent agency, had a problem with the rent on a $639-a-month walk-up in the city’s modest Fairfax district. The landlord took him to court seeking eviction, and won.
Today, Mr. Emanuel has a $10 million home in the Brentwood neighborhood; a pipeline to the White House through his brother Rahm, its chief of staff; and a sprawling new talent agency of his own design, called William Morris Endeavor Entertainment.
As Hollywood stories go, that is a good start. But it needs a third act.
Long known as a hardball player of considerable skill, Mr. Emanuel, 48, has emerged in the last six weeks as the pre-eminent power player in a Hollywood that has often bemoaned the sunset of colorful moguls from an older generation, including Michael Ovitz and David Geffen.
As the co-chief executive and principal architect of William Morris Endeavor, formed in late April by the merger of Mr. Emanuel’s Endeavor with the venerable William Morris Agency, Mr. Emanuel has finally stepped into their shoes -- assuming he can hold his venture together. He spent much of the last week in mixers meant to help hundreds of wary colleagues from the newly joined agencies get comfortable with one another.
Hollywood, meanwhile, is still struggling to get comfortable with Mr. Emanuel and his aspirations -- and to figure out exactly what makes him tick.
“It’s about respect,” offered J. C. Spink, a young producer who, with his business partner Chris Bender, has been a protégé of Mr. Emanuel’s. “With nine out of 10 people, if not more, they tend to be in this business for respect.”
Others queried in the last week mentioned power, money, an itch to surpass the Creative Artists Agency, and, most intriguing, a surge of ambition that came with the return of Mr. Emanuel’s brother Rahm, a former Clinton adviser, to the White House with President Obama. “ARI WANTS AN EMPIRE,” SAID ONE ASSOCIATE, WHO INSISTED ON ANONYMITY TO PROTECT HIS RELATIONSHIP.
If empire is indeed being born here, it is being shaped by a restless achiever who hungers for the bold stroke -- as when Mr. Emanuel and three colleagues in 1995 started Endeavor with a nighttime raid on their own office files at International Creative Management -- even when that leaves a mess to be cleaned up afterward. In the case of their I.C.M. caper, James A. Wiatt, then president of the agency, caught and fired the four before they could quit.
Even hardened observers of Hollywood’s coarse ways were stunned when Mr. Emanuel and his colleagues dumped dozens of Morris agents and parted ways with Mr. Wiatt, who had since become the Morris chairman, less than a month after the merger was approved. Mr. Wiatt, 62, had expected to continue as chairman for perhaps a year, but has decided to leave in the coming months.
(Mr. Wiatt declined to comment and Rahm Emanuel did not respond to queries for this article.)
Even as Mr. Wiatt opted out, Mr. Emanuel’s temper flared in negotiations with NBC over the drama “Medium,” which was created by one of his clients, Glenn Gordon Caron. The spat, which broke out when the network balked at financial terms, concluded with “Medium” moving to CBS and Mr. Emanuel threatening Marc Graboff, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, with personal ruin, according to three people with knowledge of the incident. Mr. Graboff declined to comment; an Emanuel colleague insisted the threats were not personal.
“Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of Ari Emanuel, especially now that his brother is running the White House,” said one television executive, who asked for anonymity to preserve harmony with him.
Mr. Emanuel is now pushing toward a next step that will involve an alliance with a still-to-be-formed investment firm. The goal is to put financial firepower behind the agency, new capital that could, for instance, allow partners or clients of William Morris Endeavor to finance media start-ups or its own productions.
To that end, Joseph Ravitch, an investment banker formerly at Goldman Sachs, and Jeffrey A. Sine, from UBS Warburg, have been working quietly for months to assemble a firm and a fund that would involve William Morris Endeavor and Mr. Emanuel. Prior to the merger, Goldman considered organizing a purchase of Endeavor. But a deteriorating economy, coupled with a growing sense that William Morris was vulnerable, led instead to talks -- with Mr. Ravitch advising Endeavor -- that resulted in the current merger.
(Neither Mr. Ravitch nor Mr. Sine returned calls for this article; Mr. Emanuel declined to be interviewed.)
But people who have been briefed on the financial enterprise said Mr. Ravitch expects to have it up and running this year, giving William Morris Endeavor access to perhaps the most sought-after commodity in show business: Fresh capital.
Too, Mr. Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell, a fellow co-chief of William Morris Endeavor, have been spending time, on the golf course and off, with Theodore J. Forstmann. A friend of both, the private investor controls IMG, a powerhouse sports and media agency that produces lucrative events like fashion shows and golf tournament programming.
Despite widespread speculation about an alliance or merger between the new agency and IMG, no formal ties are likely in the near future, according to people who are involved with each agency and spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging relationships.
If past is prologue, Mr. Emanuel’s approach to growth will be anything but conventional.
Two years ago, in a speech at a gala for the Lab School of Washington and Baltimore, which presented him an award for outstanding achievers with learning disabilities, Mr. Emanuel described his idiosyncratic business style as being rooted in a struggle with dyslexia.
Captured in a video now posted on YouTube, a nervous Mr. Emanuel said that dyslexics, if they overcome their disability at all, do so by inventing a path of their own. The effort “actually provides them with insight to find inventive solutions to life and in business that others when they’re in those situations probably never find,” Mr. Emanuel said.
Mr. Emanuel boasted in the video that he now reads scripts for clients like Larry David and Martin Scorsese. More, even Mr. Scorsese would be at home in a state-of-the-art screening room in Mr. Emanuel’s house, purchased four years ago for $9.85 million, as a 10-year-old Endeavor was coming into its own. (As for that Fairfax district eviction, Mr. Emanuel, who had irked the landlord by trying to use his security deposit for his last month’s rent, moved out before any sheriff showed up.)
Mr. Emanuel’s dominance within Endeavor -- universally acknowledged, though he had no formal title and shared control with three other members of a permanent governing group -- was built around a client list that is unusually scattershot.
It includes those with long-time connections, like the writers John Altschuler and David Krinsky, a team who had started many years before at InterTalent and later helped produce the animated “King of the Hill,” and the actor-filmmaker Peter Berg, who was Mr. Emanuel’s roommate at Macalester College in Minnesota. They are matched by a roster of movie stars as eclectic as Mark Wahlberg, Michael Douglas and Sacha Baron Cohen. Then come writer-producers like Greg Daniels (“The Office”) and Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing”), and a grab-bag of performers and media types whose common threat might simply be that they are interesting to know.
In this last category, Mr. Emanuel has represented the documentary filmmakers Michael Moore and Errol Morris, “Tonight Show” host Conan O’Brien, basketball star Shaquille O’Neal and interviewer Charlie Rose.
A year ago, Mr. Rose, on his television show, moderated a freewheeling session with the brothers Rahm, Ari and Ezekiel Emanuel, a renowned bioethicist who described his brothers as being driven by an ethos: “What are you doing today to make the world better?”
In Ari’s case, that has meant driving a hybrid Prius and electric Tesla, keeping the roof of his home lined with solar panels and serving as a director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Action Fund.
But Mr. Emanuel has also undertaken less high-minded ventures. For instance, he became one of the biggest shareholder in, and a consultant to, Tablemax Holdings -- a small Las Vegas-based company that makes electronic gambling tables (“Caribbean Stud Poker”) for Indian casinos and other gambling operations.
“I do actually believe it’s going to come through,” said Gavin Polone, a Hollywood producer who was recruited as a fellow investor by Mr. Emanuel. Mr. Polone joined the agent in guaranteeing millions of dollars in bank loans for the company, which has been struggling in the tough economic climate.
Another foray involves Live Nation, the concert company whose proposed merger with Ticketmaster is under review by federal antitrust regulators. Mr. Emanuel is on the Live Nation board, but directors of the combined companies have not yet been named.
Mr. Emanuel’s position will be complicated by the merger of Endeavor, which had no significant music business, with William Morris, a music powerhouse whose performer clients will find their fortunes affected by deals with the new concert company.
But Michael Rapino, chief executive of Live Nation, said he did not see a potential conflict of interest in Mr. Emanuel’s evolving roles. “We hope he would find time to continue to be a member,” he said.
Mr. Rose, a friend who describes himself as “the fourth Emanuel brother,” acknowledged that something about Mr. Emanuel’s status has changed in recent weeks.
“It seems to have kicked to another level,” Mr. Rose said. “A convergence of things has enabled him to be seen at a more commanding height.” - N Y Times 6/10/09
Nothing could be more clear. These two men - Ariel Zev Emanuel & Rahm Emanuel - are in their separate ambitions, but not driven by public service. While this trait may be common in the film and television worlds (as evidenced by today's "entertainment and network news") in government, particularly in the White House, this is catastrophic for us, and for the rest of the world.
Amy Goodman 6/12/09: Former President Jimmy Carter is renewing criticism of the US-led boycott of the elected Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Speaking on a visit to Syria, Carter said the US and Israel should drop their refusal to deal with a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas. Carter also called for a prisoner exchange that would see the return of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in Gaza for some of the more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails.
Jimmy Carter: “I don’t believe there’s any possibility to have peace between Palestinians and Israel unless Hamas is involved directly in harmony with Fatah. My hope is that we could soon see some agreement between Hamas and Israel with the release of Shalit and an equivalent release of prisoners that Israel is holding of Palestinians.”
Amy Goodman 6/2/09: United Nations human rights investigators have entered Gaza to probe possible war crimes and other violations of international law during Israel’s military assault on Gaza last December. Israel has refused to cooperate with the investigation. The UN team is headed by South African jurist Richard Goldstone.
Judge Richard Goldstone UN Investigator: “On behalf of the four members of the fact-finding mission sent here by the United Nations to do a fact-finding with regard to not only the military campaign in December and January in the past few months, but also to look at any violations of international human rights law, of international humanitarian law.”
Amy Goodman: The actions of the Israeli army during the twenty-two-day assault on the Gaza Strip earlier this year are back in the spotlight with the arrival of the UN delegation in Gaza this Monday. The fifteen-member team will be investigating whether possible war crimes and other violations of international law during Israel’s military assault. It’s headed by South African judge Richard Goldstone, who was the former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Israel opposes the investigation, denies the delegation visas, forcing them to enter Gaza through the Egyptian-controlled Rafah crossing.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak met with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York Monday and said the UN should investigate Hamas’s rockets and not alleged war crimes by Israel. He later told reporters Israel would not cooperate with the investigation.
Human rights groups and Palestinian officials say over 1,400 Palestinians, including over 900 civilians, were killed in what Israel calls “Operation Cast Lead.” Israel disputes the figures, claiming less than 300 civilian deaths. The Israeli Defense Forces-led investigation concluded last month there was no evidence of serious misconduct by its troops.
I’m joined now by the renowned Israeli journalist Amira Hass, regular columnist for Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper. She has spent more than a decade living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank, the only Israeli journalist to do this, and returned to Gaza this year a few days after the official end of Israel’s assault. She spent the next four months living in Gaza, documenting accounts of the war and its aftermath.
Amira Hass joins us in the firehouse studio now.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
AMIRA HASS: Hi.
Amy Goodman: It’s great to have you with us. The latest news of the UN delegation, headed by the jurist Richard Goldstone of South Africa, being denied visas, so they’re going through the Rafah border controlled by Egypt.
AMIRA HASS: This is not the first delegation and the first investigation committee that has been denied Israeli cooperation. There was one by the Arab League that came in February and also did not receive any cooperation on the Israeli part. And it’s very strange. If they didn’t have anything to hide, if the Israelis didn’t have anything to hide, they would have gladly cooperated and given information to those very esteemed jurists, who have been--who have done a lot of important work dealing with other investigations all over the world. John Dugard led the other delegation, the first delegation of the Arab League. John Dugard is South African, just as Richard Goldstone is. And Richard Goldstone is also a Jew. And it is quite telling, or it is even incriminating, the Israeli refusal to cooperate with them.
Amy Goodman: What do you think they’re hiding?
AMIRA HASS: The truth. The truth that it was not an attack against the military threat, because the military threat that Hamas poses is very minor. Israel, for years, has had the need to exaggerate the Palestinian military threat. It served not only Israeli needs, it very often served also internal Palestinian needs, to exaggerate their own threat to Israel, because that’s how they could maybe get more popularity in the Arab world, outside and inside the Palestinian community. So both--this exaggeration served both parties.
And, of course, Israel wants to hide--Israel built a presentation of the reality, not--it didn’t allow the reality to come out easily, the reality of indiscriminate attacks against civilians, mostly civilians. I was there for four months. I found it hard to find--I mean, the majority of people that I met, bereft families, people whose houses were destroyed, people whose houses were occupied by the army, people who were victims to missiles, attacks either by drones or helicopters, or bombs dropped, or being killed or wounded by bombs dropped by war jets. I found it hard to find Hamas--direct Hamas activists, let alone combatants or people who are known to be combatants. There is no way to hide this--there is no way that the Israeli figures about casualties is correct.
I mean, I asked the Israeli army to give me their list of--which they say about 700 casualties that they claim, or 1,000--I don’t remember now. They refused to give me their list. I wanted the list to check name by name and then to compare with the list that Palestinian human rights organizations compiled and to see where the differences are. And they said they could not give me the list, because this would disclose their sources. In one specific question about two women who were killed in short--by short range from a tank, I asked, “Are these two women included in your list of casualties?” I didn’t get an answer. So, the Israeli refusal to cooperate with information is very telling.
It’s true that also Hamas are not telling much. But by being there, of course, you learn a lot. They don’t tell much, because I think they don’t want to tell that--or they don’t want to break the myth that they could stand up against the Israeli army. They could not the Israeli army. And this is not shame. I mean, the discussion is whether one should--whether if you want to get to liberate the Palestinians from the Israeli occupation, whether the armed struggle or the--I call it the symbolic armed struggle, is indeed the way. This is the discussion. They have not--when you look at their abilities, when you look at their--the weapons that were smuggled in, those who sent them weapons did not send them sophisticated weapons at all. And there is no way they could stand up against the Israeli army. And this is something that the Israelis--both the Israelis and Hamas, I think, want to hide.
Amy Goodman: And Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, meeting with Ban Ki-moon Monday, saying the UN should investigate Hamas’s rockets, not the alleged war crimes by Israel?
AMIRA HASS: I think that they have--I mean, everybody was talking about the rockets, and I think that the--let me ask you, you know the city of Sderot (in Israel), right? You are familiar with this. Do you know Ben-e. . . Have you ever mentioned in your program the village Bani Suhaila? How many people know about Beit Hanoun? How many people knew about Abasan? All these--how many people know--knew about Zeitoun? All these Palestinian neighborhoods and villages which were a victim of Israeli attacks. We only know about Sderot.......
Amy Goodman: Your evaluation, assessment of President Obama so far on the Israel-Palestine conflict, as he heads now to the Middle East, first to Saudi Arabia, then to Egypt?
AMIRA HASS: It’s--
Amy Goodman: And then to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
AMIRA HASS: Yeah. My evaluation, it’s--so far I see more hope invested in him than I see real inclinations to pressure Israel. I mean, all the statements that were said so far are encouraging, in the sense that he understands or his administration understands that there must be a way out of this deadlock. But there must be measures taken, such as freeze of sales of arms to Israel, freeze or stoppage of all support, financial support for Israel (The US gives Israel a minimum of 3 billion$ every year!) as long as it continues to build in the settlements. So these things are yet to be seen. - DemocracyNow 6/2/09
To the Editor:
Re “Arab Nations Say Israel Must Make the Next Gesture” (news article, June 3):
The immediate imperative is an American gesture signaling a genuine determination to resolve the Arab- Israeli conflict. This could be accomplished by including the following in President Obama’s speech in Cairo on Thursday:
“The United States is fundamentally adopting the substance of the 2002 Arab peace initiative as re-endorsed in 2007 and committing that we will devote all appropriate resources and make every possible effort to expeditiously bring about the realization of two viable, independent, mutually non-hostile states, Palestine and Israel, sharing Jerusalem as their capital, based on the pre-1967 division.”
The absence of such a gesture will reveal a fundamental vacuity in the president’s message. - Ed Martin New York 6/3/09
This following letter is a staggering rearrangement of the factual foundation of the sixty year Israeli military conquest of Palestine, but it is the theme of Netanyahu/Lieberman regime in Israel, and strongly supported by our own Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, now also engaged in a behind-the-scenes effort to undermine Connecticut's great Senator Chris Dodd! We do appreciate this letter from Mr. Krulwich. It makes clear the full scope of the lie these people live and breathe.
To the Editor:
Let’s remember that Israel is the only country that gave land to the Palestinians for their autonomous rule. Jordan and Egypt did not do so during the 19 years that they controlled the West Bank and Gaza, but Israel did so by withdrawing from Gaza four years ago. The Palestinian response was not peaceful coexistence, but missiles and terror.
Settlements are not the problem here. Israel has destroyed settlements and displaced its citizens from their homes in Gaza. But the Palestinians didn’t build peaceful towns in the settlements; they used them as missile launching pads.
The world needs to avoid distractions, like settlements and border details, and focus on Arab willingness to live in peace. Peace means no missiles, no terror, no kidnappings.
Until the Arabs are willing to accept peace, Israeli overtures will go the same way as the Gaza withdrawal. - Bruce Dov Krulwich Beit Shemesh, Israel 6/3/09
Is is likely that Mr. Krulwich is among those Israelis who have benefited from the advanced Israeli military occupation.
Judy Woodruff on Lehrer NewsHour
JIM LEHRER: Judy Woodruff has more on the president's speech.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And for that, we get four views.
Rami Khouri is an editor-at-large of the Daily Star Newspaper in Lebanon. He's also the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut.
Abderrahim Foukara is the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for Al Jazeera Arabic.
Sumaiya Hamdani is an associate professor of history at George Mason University, where she founded the school's Islamic studies program and served as its director until last year.
And As'ad AbuKhalil is a professor of political science at California State University at Stanislaus.
Thank you, all four, for being with us.
And I'm going to turn to you first, Rami Khouri in Beirut. You are there in a part of the Muslim world the president was referring to, was directing his remarks today to. Did he reset the relationship as he said he wanted to do?
RAMI KHOURI, Daily Star Newspaper: At the rhetorical level, I would say yes. Rhetorically, he's been very well-received. There was a lot of good, positive vibes here and among many people that I've talked to.
But it was rhetoric. And people are happy to hear him talk about a variety of issues around the region, to look at the Middle East and the Arab-Asian region, which he calls the Muslim world, but it's really the Arab-Asian region that we're talking about.
And he talked with a lot of nuance and identified a lot of different issues that are important to people, recognized some historical traumas that people have suffered here, acknowledged a lot of the grievances that people are talking about.
There are a lot of good vibes, good feelings, good rhetoric. But none of it has been translated into serious policy yet.
But it was a speech, and people take it for what it is, which is setting out some American principles. We've yet to see a translation of those principles into real serious policies. But people are patient with Obama, they like what they're hearing from him, for the most part, and we have to wait and see if he follows it up.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Abderrahim Foukara here in Washington, what did you hear?
ABDERRAHIM FOUKARA, Al Jazeera Arabic: Well, what I heard, just like we heard from Rami, on the level of the rhetoric, the philosophy of the speech, if you will, which is, "I've come to you, to the Muslim world, to try and repair whatever damage has been done in relations between the Muslim world and the United States not just over the past eight years, but over a long period of time."
That, obviously, rang very true. And it got very positive reactions to it, whether in the Middle East proper, if you will, or in other parts of the Muslim world, like Pakistan and Afghanistan.
On the level of policy, it was always expected that many of the things that he would say would be controversial. He said some very positive things about Israel and Palestine, which matters a lot to Arabs and Muslims. The issue of Palestine in the Muslim world was seen as being almost synonymous with his call for better relations between the United States and the Muslim world.
But you get people in places like Afghanistan or Pakistan, for example, who say, "OK, he's come to us with his message of peace, but there are U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and there are civilians being killed there by American forces."
More emphasis, more detail! -
JUDY WOODRUFF: So he addressed -- and these were items, Sumaiya Hamdania -- again, you're based here in Washington -- that he has addressed before, but today much more emphasis, much more detail.
SUMAIYA HAMDANI, George Mason University: I was very impressed with the speech, actually, and I was impressed with the speech for a lot of reasons. I think, first and foremost, the quality of the speech was one that was very different from the previous administration and, I think, for most administrations, U.S. administrations. Obama was speaking to an audience, as opposed to at an audience. And...
JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you mean?
SUMAIYA HAMDANI: By which I mean that he engaged the audience in terms that resonated with them. For example, whereas most U.S. presidents and policymakers have spoken in terms of freedom and democracy, much of his speech was really about justice, which is a concept around which political discourse is built in many over other parts of the world, including the Islamic world.
And I think that he also was able to engage the audience in terms of what was particular to their culture and heritage. But at the same time, what made it universal, in the introduction to his speech.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, let me -- I'm going to interrupt you there, because I want to bring in Mr. AbuKhalil out in California. As'ad AbuKhalil, from your perspective, how different were the words today from what we've heard from this president and from any president before?
AS'AD ABUKHALIL, California State University at Stanislaus: Not much, if you judge it by substance and not by style. In fact, if you judge it by the context, you have to remember that some of the positive reception to this speech in the Arab world is particularly because he is not George W. Bush, who is mightily loathed and despised throughout the Middle East and by Arabs and Muslims.
But you have to remember, just before the speech, he met with the Saudi king, he paid him tributes, and he praised his wisdom. And then he came to Cairo and then he also praised the Egyptian president, refused to label him for the dictator that he is.
And then we are expected that a nice-delivered speech, well-crafted, is going to sway Muslim-Arab public opinion? It's going to take much more than that.
More importantly, there are serious contradictions in the speech itself. On the one hand, he gave some lofty remarks about democracy and human rights, which were words that were uttered before by George W. Bush. But in the same speech, he also praised the Saudi king, the head of a kingdom which still practices rituals of public beheadings in the public square and which also still endorses the same fanatical ideology that inspires al-Qaida terrorists around the world.
He spoke about the Palestinian grievancaes, but in very bland and very general terms. He spoke very specifically about who was doing what to the Israelis, but when he spoke about Palestinian suffering, it was as if the Palestinians had for decades been suffering from successive hurricanes and tornados, as if the Israelis are blameless for what happened to them.
'Major contradictions' in policy -
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, you bring up a number of different points. And let me come back to Rami Khouri. On the point that he went to Saudi Arabia, the fact that both that government and the Egyptian government are repressive governments in different ways, did that undermine what President Obama was saying in any way?
RAMI KHOURI: Oh, of course it did. Among many people in the region, especially democracy and human rights activists, and any reasonable political observer would say that.
But at the same time, I think people looked at this speech as simply an American setting out of certain principles. It was not a situation where they expected Obama to embarrass his host or come up with new policies.
But I agree with As'ad: There are major contradictions. And there's others that I can add to his list. For instance, only mentioning Iran in the context of nuclear bombs and threats, talking about the Islamic world, and the first of his seven points is violent extremism. I mean, if you're really serious about engaging people, you don't make violent extremism the first point you raise in terms of dealing with the Islamic world.
So there are several issues that the Americans still have to resolve. And the schizophrenia the U.S. is still following is clear, in terms of trying to engage Iran and Syria, but boycott Hamas and Hezbollah. That doesn't work.
So there's still confusion in Washington, but there's also a signal that Washington is trying to deal with this confusion and sort it out and to engage on a more mutually beneficial terms. And mutual rights and mutual interests, I think, was the key phrase in his speech.
If he actually pursues that, then we have, perhaps, something useful starting to happen. But there's no evidence of it yet in a serious way.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Sumaiya Hamdani, what about this? Do the contradictions override anything positive out of this speech?
SUMAIYA HAMDANI: I would -- my colleagues are putting Obama's speech or putting his feet to the fire much more than I would. I listened to the speech as a speech by an American president. I listened to it for what kind of rationale he would provide for the kinds of policies -- rather than specific policies, but the rationale for the kinds of policies he would pursue. And I listened to the speech, I have to admit, as an American Muslim.
And on all of those levels, I found the speech impressive, in the sense that, again, he engaged the audience in terms that made sense to them.
I think with regard to, for example, the Palestinian issue, the fact that a U.S. president talked about the humiliation that Palestinians suffer under occupation -- I think those words are very important, because those are words the Palestinians have used to talk about their experience as displaced people, as refugees, as people trapped in the kind of Bantustans (South African apartheid) that exist in the occupied territories. And American presidents have not addressed them in terms that they themselves have used to describe their condition.
Israel, Hamas and Iran -
JUDY WOODRUFF: Let me bring in Abderrahim Foukara here. So is President Obama saying things in a way that could lead to something different happening in these relationships or not?
ABDERRAHIM FOUKARA: Well, I mean, it depends what you see as the pivot of whatever is going to happen in relations between the United States and the Muslim world. If you see the Israeli-Palestine issue as the pivot, he obviously -- he said something very interesting about Hamas, because the issue of Hamas ever since the latest war on -- Israeli war on Gaza, the issue of Hamas has been really central in public opinion and the fashioning of public opinion in the region.
And he said something very positive about Hamas. He said that there are a lot of Palestinians who actually are very sympathetic to Hamas, and he talked about resistance, although he put resistance in, basically, the context of violent resistance, as he called it. But nonetheless, he made this parallel between Hamas and resistance to the occupation of Israel...
JUDY WOODRUFF: As opposed to terrorism.
ABDERRAHIM FOUKARA: ... as opposed to Hamas being just a terrorist organization, as the previous administration called it.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Professor AbuKhalil, is that not significant that he talked about Hamas in that context?
AS'AD ABUKHALIL: I mean, not necessarily significant, because basically what he said, we basically saw that there was an election in Palestine and some Palestinians voted for Hamas. I mean, of course, by the standard of the previous administration, which refused to recognize the results of free election, that was a change.
But more importantly, is he going to be able to support the free election of people in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, in Palestine and elsewhere in the region? There are no indications of that. The United States continues its solid support and selling of weapons to some of the worst dictators in the region.
I mean, it's true he may be softening his discourse towards Iran or Hamas or these groups, but it doesn't change the reality of American foreign policy.
As was said previously, he mentioned Iranian nuclear weapons without any word about the big elephant in the room, which is the arsenal, the nuclear arsenal of Israel in the Middle East, which is a matter of big concern to Arabs in the region. Unless he assumes that Arabs find Iranian nuclear weapons to be deadly, but when it's in the hands of the Israelis it seems to be harmless, for that reason, so...
JUDY WOODRUFF: Let me ask, Rami Khouri, what about that?
RAMI KHOURI: Well, he made an allusion to the Israeli weapons, but it was not clear. He said something like, I know some people are worried about double standards.
But, again, we're getting some really fine rhetoric and some really impressive principles. And this is why Americans are so -- American values are so admired in this region. The basic values he articulated are terrific. And it's great for an American president to say these things in Cairo and to come to the Arab world.
I think his intent and his compassion are clear. He seems to be a credible person. People believe him; they like him. And this is a very good potential starting point. He is resetting the clock in a way. It's a new beginning, which is the title of the speech.
But I think the new beginning cannot just be rhetorical. The policies are often still contradicting the rhetoric. But I think we've got to give him some time. To be fair, we've got to give him some time.
And there are indications, appointing Mitchell, sending envoys to Syria, dropping the negotiation criteria with Iran, there are small signals of change that might come. But we're still -- I think this is -- it's like the third inning of a game.
Progress on Israel-Palestine issue -
JUDY WOODRUFF: Professor Hamdani, that's a theme we're hearing from the four of you, and from several of you, and from other critics around, that there should be more concrete action. But what more concrete could have come today than what the president said, realistically?
SUMAIYA HAMDANI: I think realistically not much. I mean, as he himself said in a speech, one speech does not make a big difference.
But I think what he did do in the context of a speech -- and an important one at that -- was to engage his audience and create this potential for common understanding and mutual interest.
One of the things that impressed me about the speech was that, unlike many political pundits and many authors of the contemporary scene in the Islamic world, he attempted to transcend what has been a kind of accepted "othering" of Islam.
He talked about the sort of debt that world civilization has to Islam. And in doing that, I think he transcended the sort of clash of civilization paradigm that has become so accepted.
And I think, in talking about Islam as to, quote, "a part of America," he went beyond the "othering" of Muslims in the West, which I think was also very important.
JUDY WOODRUFF: There's so much to chew over here. Let me finally come back to you, Abderrahim Foukara, here in Washington. What do we look for next after this speech, to know whether there was any meaningful effect from it?
ABDERRAHIM FOUKARA: First of all, can I just quickly say one thing that will definitely rub people the wrong way in the region is the fact that he talked about Palestinians killing Israelis, but he didn't talk a lot about Israelis killing Palestinians, especially in the context of the latest Israeli war on Gaza?
Now, he's on the record as saying that he wants the Israelis to deal with the settlement issues. The Israelis have said no. And faced with that, the administration has clearly said, Look, this is just the beginning of the conversation. It's not the end of it.
And I think, if there's any progress or benchmark for progress, it's going to be what he can do to force the Israeli government to do what he says he wants the Israelis to do with regard to the creation of a Palestinian state.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And on the Muslim side?
ABDERRAHIM FOUKARA: On the Muslim side, he said some very positive things in terms of the divisions that exist...
JUDY WOODRUFF: I mean, what has to happen? What do we look for as a sign that this speech has had some effect?
ABDERRAHIM FOUKARA: Well, that's really the crux of it. It's, let's be frank. What Arabs and Muslims want progress on is the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Now, if the Muslims and Arabs can coalesce in a way that actually helped him push the Israelis and translate his vision and translate Palestinian aspirations into a state, that's the way you judge it, I think.
JUDY WOODRUFF: All right. Much, much to talk about. Thank you all for being with us. Abderrahim Foukara, Professor Sumaiya Hamdani here in Washington, Rami Khouri in Beirut, and Professor As'ad AbuKhalil in California, thank you all.
An intellectual who presented uncomfortable facts about his country.
"Jerusalem - Amos Elon, an Israeli essayist and author who examined his society’s flaws and myths, explored some of its greatest figures and became for many years its most renowned public intellectual, died Monday in Italy, where he had made his home since 2004. He was 82.
His wife, Beth, said the cause was leukemia.
The author of nine books, Mr. Elon rose to international fame in the early 1970s after the publication of 'The Israelis: Founders and Sons,' an affectionate but unsparing portrait of early Zionists. Israel’s founders, he argued, had failed to properly acknowledge the people living on the land that the Zionists had come to reclaim. They had embarked on 'a national and social renaissance in their ancient homeland,' he wrote, but 'were blind to the possibility that the Arabs of Palestine might entertain similar hopes for themselves.'
Such a critique is fairly common today, even in Israel, but it was rare then, particularly coming from the pen of an Israeli. Mr. Elon’s ability to step outside his society’s heroic narrative and present uncomfortable facts and perspectives in learned yet accessible prose set him apart. Appearing just as Palestinian nationalism was beginning to assert itself, the book fell on fertile ground.
At the time a correspondent and columnist for Haaretz, the liberal Israeli daily newspaper, Mr. Elon found his work on international best-seller lists and his thoughts in demand from European and American broadcasters. He left the newspaper (returning some years later before leaving again) and devoted himself to his books and to writing essays, some appearing in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and especially The New York Review of Books.
A trim man with straight hair, a smooth face and unforgiving eyes framed by large horn-rimmed glasses, Mr. Elon had a severity of manner and, having been born in Vienna, a deep attachment to German culture. Widely admired, he was not an easy man to love. As Ari Shavit, a writer for Haaretz, said of him in the introduction to an interview with Mr. Elon in 2004, 'a devotee of human rights but not overflowing with brotherly love.'
Mr. Elon was born in 1926 and moved with his family to Palestine in 1933. He studied law and history at Hebrew University and Cambridge. By the 1940s he was a member of the prestate Tel Aviv intelligentsia.
Hired by Haaretz, he rose quickly at the paper in the 1950s by focusing on topics others neglected -- notably on what he termed 'the second Israel,' meaning the poor Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants often overlooked by the country’s European founders. In short order the newspaper sent him to Paris as its correspondent, then to Bonn and later to Washington, where he met his American-born wife, Beth. They have one daughter, Danae Elon, a documentary filmmaker who lives in New York. He is also survived by a sister, Chaya Matarasso of Israel.
Fluent in German, Hebrew and English, Mr. Elon wrote for publication in all three, offering fresh perspectives not only on Israel, but also on its perceptions of the outside world and on European culture.
Tom Segev, who followed in Mr. Elon’s footsteps by becoming a Haaretz columnist and an iconoclastic best-selling writer of books that came to be called 'new history,' said Mr. Elon’s book on Germany, 'Journey Through a Haunted Land: The New Germany' (1967), was as much of a shocker to many Israelis as his books on Israel because it portrayed a vibrant, self-questioning society to readers who tended to see it only through its Nazi past.
His most recent book, 'The Pity of It All,' published in 2002, was a portrait of German Jewry from the mid-18th century until the rise of Hitler. German Jews are known in Israel as yekkes, a Yiddish term of derision and affection that suggests punctiliousness and a touch of cultural snobbishness, and coming from that world, Mr. Elon said, he wanted to set the record straight and write of its depth and richness.
'They were really the first free Jews. And the first Europeans,' he told Haaretz in the 2004 interview. 'And they built a civil society and believed obsessively in Bildung, which is self-improvement through the fostering of social concerns.'
An earlier book was a penetrating but admiring biography of Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism.
Mr. Elon owned a house in Italy, and five years ago he moved there permanently, selling his Jerusalem apartment and prompting a debate in Israel on what it meant that a cultural giant and social critic could simply leave.
'The move smacked of a man saying, in effect, ‘I am withdrawing to civilized Tuscany,’ ' said Amnon Rubinstein, a law professor, author and former government minister. 'There was a feeling that he felt he no longer belonged.'
In the Haaretz interview, Mr. Elon said he had grown weary and angry at what he considered the growing influence of religion and a heightened focus on military power in Israel, especially after the capture of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war.
Asked if he felt alienation, he replied: 'Not alienation. Disappointment.'
As to whether he missed the story he had written about so forcefully, Mr. Elon said he took comfort from the Tuscan landscape: 'It’s so beautiful that it melts your heart. So in the few years I have left, I want to look at this view most of the days of the year. On the other days, I’ll come to Israel and get mad.'" - Ethan Bronner 5/26/09
Palestinians Mark 61st Anniversary of Al-Nakba -
Amy Goodman DemocracyNow: In Israel and the Occupied Territories, Palestinians marked the 61st anniversary of Al-Nakba Thursday, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Palestinians maintain their national aspirations despite more than six decades of dispossession and occupation.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas: “We are clinging to our national beliefs to establish our own independent state with Jerusalem as its capital and the right of return for refugees in the framework of a just and agreed solution based on UN Resolution 194.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, is set to meet with President Obama at the White House on Monday. - Amy Goodman 5/15/09
Israeli Perspective - Israel Institute for National Security Studies
"A few months after coming into office, the strategic political approach of the new Obama administration towards Israel and the Palestinian issue is becoming clearer. Although it has not yet been fully solidified, this approach does not augur well for the Netanyahu government and the political positions it represents. While thus far the administration has not yet announced an official new peace plan, several recent utterances create a picture that might appear unfriendly, perhaps even threatening, from the perspective of the current Israeli government.
President Shimon Peres' recent visit to the United States, before the arrival of Prime Minister Netanyahu and of other heads of state from the region, is exceptional, at least in terms of diplomatic protocol. Beyond his status as the president of the State of Israel, Peres has a unique international standing. More than any other formal representative of Israel, he is seen as a political moderate and personally identified with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Israel probably intended thus to present Prime Minister Netanyahu as a leader truly seeking to promote the Middle East peace process. If the US administration were convinced that this message is authentic - so it was probably hoped in the Prime Minister's Office - Netanyahu would be granted the heartfelt and warm reception the administration bestows on its favorites. The US administration apparently identified this intention and chose not to cooperate with the plan. Instead, it tended to minimize the media attention and the visit's public impact.
A sequence of public utterances and media reports by fairly senior officials in the US administration, none of which was officially denied, also clearly indicates that a cloud is hovering over the relations between the two states, which might be flagrantly visible during Netanyahu's visit to the US and in his meetings with administration leaders, including President Obama:
1. National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones has made it clear that the administration links its policy towards Iran and its nuclear advances to developments towards a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Netanyahu government will likely not endorse such linkage. Gen. Jones' previous appointment was Special Envoy for Middle East Security. His mission was to work out the security arrangements necessary for the "two states for two peoples" vision to materialize. According to many media reports, he wrote a report highly critical of Israel's positions and policies on the Palestinian issue and argued that Israel defines its security interests in a future two-state solution too broadly. According to Jones' report, these interests do not require Israeli military presence in the territories, as Israel holds. Instead, NATO forces can be deployed.
2. The statement by the US that it expects Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: although similar statements have been sounded from various US officials in the past, now, especially considering the dialogue the Obama administration hopes to conduct with Iran, this statement is more worrisome. This position of the administration, if it is pursued more assertively, might legitimize to an extent Iran's claim that the issue of Iran's nuclear activity must be discussed in tandem with the Israeli nuclear option.
3. President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, stated at the recent AIPAC convention that this is the moment of truth for Israel, that the two-state solution is the only solution and that the United States is committed to it, and that all parties to the conflict must fulfill their obligations, as difficult as that might be. This statement was made before a pro-Israel forum, after senior officials in Netanyahu's government have voiced explicit disagreement with the two-state vision, and after the prime minister deliberately avoided openly embracing this vision.
Various circumstances make it easier for President Obama to present Netanyahu with a tough and critical policy towards Israel. The conflict itself is in a sustained period of relative calm. This calm is attributed first and foremost to the deterrence Israel managed to achieve vis-à-vis Hamas through Operation Cast Lead. Beyond that, the activity of Israel's security forces throughout the West Bank largely paralyzes the capabilities of terrorist organizations. The US administration may thus try to undermine Israel's main argument, also expressed in its comments to the Roadmap, that it cannot make progress in the peace process as long as there is no calm in the field of security.
Moreover, there is clear improvement in the work of the Palestinian security apparatuses, especially those trained by Gen. Keith Dayton of the United States military. The security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority during Operation Cast Lead (This is the factuous title which the Israelis attached to their three-week armored massacre of Gazans!), acknowledged by IDF Chief of Staff Ashkenazi, gives the option of security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority much more strategic weight than before. The US administration can now claim, and with some justification, that if the two-state vision is implemented, the Palestinians will cooperate with Israel on an even broader level than at present against the extremist forces among the Palestinians?
In the area of domestic politics, President Obama has succeeded in reaching a stable and powerful status within the American political system. A considerable part of the Jewish community in the US supports him, as well as his political and economic moves. The president may thus conclude that it is time to put his fist on the table and put forward a clear American plan for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, even if it is not acceptable to Netanyahu's government. If indeed the president decides to act intensively to implement the two-state vision, he can expect broad international support for these efforts. The vast majority of international actors, especially in Europe, massively support the drive to promote the two-state solution.
Furthermore, President Obama can expect moderate Arab countries to "upgrade" the Arab League's peace plan (also known as the Arab Initiative), so that it could become more acceptable to Israel. Even in its present form it receives fairly wide support among Israelis. Formulations that are more palatable to Israel, especially on the issue of the right of return, would no doubt make it very attractive to large segments of Israeli public opinion. If Arab states show their willingness to cooperate with Israel on Iran in return for Israel's willingness to soften its position on the Arab Initiative, it is quite likely that the plan would become widely accepted by the Israeli public.
Finally, the US administration might speculate that Prime Minister Netanyahu has a fairly positive public image in Israel and commands a stable government. Precisely because he is perceived as a hawk, he has the ability to "make history" and lead Israel to a far-reaching settlement of the prolonged conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In any case, if there will be extremist factions in the Israeli governing coalition that are not able to accept such flexibility in Netanyahu's position, they will have to leave the government and would thus enable Netanyahu to form a new, broad and stable coalition predicated upon considerably more moderate positions, compared to the current government. This would be the administration's response to Netanyahu's possible claim that he cannot make progress on the Palestinian issue because of domestic political problems.
It is quite possible that President Obama's administration will choose to confront Prime Minister Netanyahu with positions that are incompatible with those hitherto stated by his government. If the president decides to use the means of influence and pressure at his disposal to convince Israel to accept his dictates, a possible Israeli-US confrontation of an unknown scale, intensity, and aftermath might ensue." - Zaki Shalom 5/18/09
Since 1948 this world has been ravaged by an incomprehensible belief within a segment of the international Jewish community that God has ordained a Jewish domination of the Levant, those lands bordering the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. To Jews that entitled them to invade a peaceful Palestine in 1948. An inevitable consequence of such a wretched policy occurred in November of 1995 when the peace-seeking Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an acolyte of his radical political opponent Benjamin Natanyahu, who today is once again a Prime Minister of Israel. Incredibly, these overreaching bellicose Jews used the murder of legitimate soldier-statesman Rabin to devise a new plan entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (Israel)", the first step of which was the elimination of Saddam Hussein, who they saw as an obstacle to their ultimate objective, now the domination of the entire Middle East. A critical subtext of that target was that the effort would be made utilizing not the resources of the State of Israel, but, via the chicanery of AIPAC and the Jewish members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, the blood and treasure of the United States.
How to manage that? It would have to be the conspiracy of the century! In brief, the operation began with a break-in of the Niger Embassy in Rome over the lengthy 2000-2001 New Years holiday [This is a "Black Ops" about which both Rahm Emanuel and Charlie Rose have been fully briefed], facilitated by the Italian Special Forces, SISMI, under their Prime Minister Berlusconi (awarded an honor several years later by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League). It was the beginning of an epic scheme, and quietly evaded by the foremost NPR political reporter in Europe, Italian Silvia Poggioli, '68 Harvard. She may have been trained by NPR's Mara Liasson, or vice versa (Liasson may have left Roger Ailes and Fox and Bill Kristol and Brit Hume?). In sum, all of what is outlined here is stated more clearly elsewhere in Gopbias.org, and with the necessary attribution. From there a fabrication was documented that Saddam Hussein was seeking Uranium ore from Niger for Nuclear Weapons, the fabled WMD's, which was then used to generate support for the joint U.S.-Brit invasion and occupation of Iraq. To monitor the planning and execution stage two members of AIPAC, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were assigned to assure that the project was on track to be completed and they were regularly required to inform the Israelis in detail, i.e. not unlike the Soviet Union's KGB which, in the 1930's and 40's when they were stealing classified info on the atomic bomb from the United States, the KGB would have described Rosen & Weissman as "konspiratsia".
[[ Having successfully manipulated the United States to eliminate Iraq as an obstacle to Israeli plans, Israel will now attempt a repeat vis-a-vis Iran. "Israel Ties Two Nations to Iran's Uranium."
Jerusalem (AP) - Venezuela and Bolivia are supplying Iran with uranium for its nuclear program, according to a secret Israeli government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.
The two South American countries are known to have close ties with Iran, but this is the first allegation that they are involved in the development of Iran’s nuclear program, considered a strategic threat by Israel.
“There are reports that Venezuela supplies Iran with uranium for its nuclear program,” the Foreign Ministry document states, referring to previous Israeli intelligence conclusions (the Foreign Ministry is directed by Avigdor "The Bouncer" Lieberman).
It added, “Bolivia also supplies uranium to Iran.”
The report did not say where the uranium was from...
[ A long-delayed (FIVE YEARS!) report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was finally released 6/5/08 as Republicans Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska joined all eight Democrats to definitively record that George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell knowingly falsely reported that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda (in fact, they were enemies) and had WMDs (in fact, he had none, no programs to obtain same, and the story of the "yellowcake" from Niger, was known to have been fabricated, as established by Ambassador Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger, and also by James Bamford's 2004 A Pretext For War). Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said the report shows the administration knowingly 'led the nation to war on false premises.' ]
...There was no immediate comment from officials in Venezuela or Bolivia about the report.
The three-page document was prepared in advance of a visit to South America by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, declined to comment on the report.
Bolivia has uranium deposits. Venezuela is not currently mining its own estimated 50,000 tons of untapped uranium reserves, according to an analysis published in December by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. - NY Times 5/26/09
DemocracyNow was quick to respond: "The Bolivian and Venezuelan governments are dismissing Israeli accusations they’ve supplied uranium for Iran’s nuclear program. On Monday, a leaked Israeli intelligence document said both Bolivia and Venezuela have aided Iran’s nuclear development. Bolivian Presidential Minister Juan Ramon Quintana ridiculed the charge.
Juan Ramon Quintana: 'Really, it forms part of the anthology of stupidity. If there’s something that characterizes our policy as a government, it’s the policy of peace.'
Bolivia says it hasn’t produced uranium in more than twenty-five years." - Amy Goodman 5/27/09 ]]
(The info parameters which are self-imposed by our Media/Press (i.e. censorship) prohibit the following material regardless of its import.)
The Jerusalem Post - Standing with Steven J. Rosen
Byline: Daniel Pipes - Lion's Den
HIGHLIGHT: His (Rosen) efforts to stymie Iranian Nuclear ambitions [[ambitions limited to nuclear power, i.e. ELECTRICITY!]] began 15 years ago. The writer (Pipes) is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
Unquestionably, hiring Steven J. Rosen to become part of the Middle East Forum was my most difficult decision since I founded the organization in 1994.
On the one hand, this 23-year veteran of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he served as director of foreign policy issues, offered an unparalleled opportunity to give the forum a presence in Washington policy-making circles where we hitherto had been absent. At AIPAC, he was responsible for relations with the State Department, the National Security Council and other Executive Branch agencies. His accomplishments are legion.
The Washington Post noted that "Rosen helped pioneer 'executive-branch lobbying,' a style of advocacy that was not wide spread when he began it in the mid-1980s, but is now a routine complement to the more traditional lobbying of Congress." The New York Times called him "brilliant, energetic and one of [AIPAC's] most influential employees, with wide-ranging contacts within the Bush administration and overseas." National Public Radio's intelligence correspondent found that he "helped shape [AIPAC] into one of the most powerful lobby groups in the country." According to Haaretz, writing about Rosen just after he left AIPAC, he "is not merely another AIPAC official; in the eyes of many, he is AIPAC itself."
In addition, Rosen has an academic background, having taught at several universities (Pittsburgh, Brandeis, Australian National), headed Middle East issues for the RAND Corporation, and co-authored a best-selling textbook, The Logic of International Relations. So he would fit right in our think tank.
On the other hand, he (along with his AIPAC colleague Keith Weissman) stood accused by the Bush administration of breaching the ominously-named Espionage Act of 1917, and faced criminal charges that could have landed him in jail for years. Although he was not accused of spying, his (and our) opponents reveled in calling him an "accused spy"; and, of course, we worried about the ramifications for us if he were found guilty.
During extensive consultations with the MEF's board of governors, I found a consensus on wishing to bring on board so formidable an analyst [[at Gopbias.org we would call him propagandist ]] in his hour of need mixed with apprehension about the criminal case.
TWO DEVELOPMENTS resolved the dilemma for us in September 2008. Our study of the government's case convinced us of its injustice, shoddiness, arbitrariness, hollowness, and futility [[Bush administration arranged incompetence]]. Certain of Rosen's innocence, the lawsuit against him would not stop us from hiring him. Second, world events kicked in. Seeing the Iranian drive to get the bomb as the single greatest danger both to the Middle East and to the United States (in the latter case, via electromagnetic pulse), we realized that the outgoing Bush administration would not take steps to stop the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons, and that Barack Obama, with his soft approach to Iran, would likely win the election.
Accordingly, the MEF in October 2008 began funding Rosen to work on ways to stop the Iranian march to nuclear weapons. He is ideal for the job, having begun efforts to stymie Iranian nuclear ambitions [[?!]] 15 years ago - long before these became a general concern. Working behind the scenes, for example, he initiated efforts to develop leverage over Tehran through graduated economic sanctions by securing two presidential orders in 1995, followed by the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 which laid the foundation for all subsequent efforts to bring economic pressure to bear against the Iranian government. He has been active in this arena ever since.
Following the inauguration, the MEF brought Rosen formally on board as a visiting fellow. In his brief time in this capacity, he initiated a Washington Project with his influential Weblog, "Obama Mideast Monitor", and a new publication series called The Policy Forum. Notably, Rosen's blog started the chain of events that caused Charles Freeman to withdraw his name for consideration as chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
Then, on May 1, came the welcome news that the US Department of Justice had dropped its case against Rosen and Weissman. In the words of The Washington Post, this decision amounted to "a stunning vindication" for them. Beyond that, it confirms the limits of arbitrary and prejudicial government actions.
I congratulate Rosen and Weissman and, now that he is unburdened with legal woes, look forward to Steve's taking up the Iran portfolio with his full attention and renowned effectiveness. - The Jerusalem Post 5/12/09
** The New York Times, on the first page of every issue, as part of its brand (Founded in 1851?), claims - "All The News That's Fit to Print"! Not believable. Not in June of 1972, and not the last half of May in 2009. On the Media page (B-4) of the 5/25/09 issue a Richard Pe'rez-Pen'a scribes, on the full top-half of the page, a convoluted article "'splaining" how The Times "missed Watergate", omitting the several daily contentious sessions in which the editorial board stiffed the break-in and the criminality associated with the Nixon White House. Also, in that 5/25/09 issue the lead editorial ("The Test Ban Treaty") attempts to shift the nuclear weapons controversy away from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which the nuclear weaponized Israel has refused to sign, even as the non-weaponized Iran is a signatory. This Monday, May 25, 2009 issue is also part of a significant N Y Times pattern in that it does not include Israeli Prime Minister "Bibi" Netanyahu's explosive 5/22/09 statement that Jerusalem is, and will remain, the indivisible capital of the Jewish State...and also omitted the imprudent 5/24/09 statement by our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen on the George Stephanopoulos Sunday DisneyABC program This Week from the now prominent "Newseum", on PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, in D.C.!...that he, Mullen, agreed with the provocative Israeli statements on non-weaponized Iran:
STEPHANOPOULOS: And the chief of staff to Israel's defense minister, General Michael Herzog, has said that Iran could actually have its first nuclear weapon by the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011. Do you agree with that?
MULLEN: Well, I think you make certain assumptions about what they can do. Most of us believe that it's one to three years, depending on assumptions about where they are right now. But they are moving closer, clearly, and they continue to do that. And if you believe their strategic intent, as I do, and as certainly my Israeli counterpart does, that's the principle concern.
- - Might this be the result of a reinvigorated Daniel Pipes & Steven J. Rosen? See prior Daniel Pipes article "Standing with Steven J. Rosen" in The Jerusalem Post - -
Amy Goodman 5/28/09: Report: Israel Taking Vast Majority of West Bank Water - A new World Bank study says Israel is now drawing four times as much water as Palestinians from a critical shared aquifer in the Occupied West Bank. Palestinians are taking just one-fifth of the water supply amidst a fifth consecutive drought this year.
Amy Goodman 5/21/09: - Gaza War Crimes Probe to Hold Public Hearings - A United Nations commission says it’s facing obstacles from the Israeli government ahead of its probe of alleged war crimes during Israel’s three-week assault on Gaza earlier this year. The commission is probing allegations of war crimes committed by both Israeli forces and Hamas fighters. But inquiry head Richard Goldstone says his team will likely have to enter Gaza through Egypt, because Israel has refused to cooperate.
Richard Goldstone: “It would have been our wish to start there, to visit southern Israel, Sderot, to go into Gaza through the front door to go to the West Bank, which is also included in our mission. I made a number of approaches to the Israeli ambassador in Geneva, even a direct approach to Prime Minister Netanyahu, but we’ve really received no official response.”
Goldstone says his team plans on holding public hearings for Gaza residents to share their testimony. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed during the Israeli attack, most of them civilians. Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said Israel will ignore the inquiry’s mission.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon: “We have shown the UN all the documents, all the data, and I think we put this issue behind us. And certainly, there should never be a moral equivalency drawn between terrorists and those who fight terrorism. And any attempt to try to single out Israel and to investigate this preposterous suggestion of war crimes is just ridiculous, and of course Israel will not cooperate with such an idea.” - DemocracyNow 5/21/09
Lehrer NewsHour's Host: On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is going to meet with the president at the White House. Are the reports correct that President Obama's going to press him to endorse enthusiastically a two-state solution between the Palestinians and Israel?
David Axelrod, White House Senior Adviser: I'm not going to preview what the conversation will be. Everyone knows what the president's position is.
The president believes strongly in a two-state solution. He believes strongly that all the parties need to live up to previous commitments. And he wants to be deeply engaged in a constructive way in this process.
The prime minister will bring his own thoughts on these issues, and I expect they'll have a very candid and productive discussion.
Jim Lehrer: It is likely that they will discuss the growing reports that Prime Minister Netanyahu is interested in resolving the Iranian nuclear issue before he gets to the two-party-state thing and that will be a matter of discussion, as well, on Monday?
David Axelrod: Well, I think that the threat that Iran poses is something that's a concern of everyone. A nuclear Iran, a weaponized, nuclear Iran is a concern the president has spoken about.
Obviously, the Israelis are deeply concerned about that. I'm sure it will be a topic of discussion.
And I think the president -- it will be an opportunity for the president to talk to the prime minister about everything that we are doing and intend to do to try and head off that looming threat.
"Obama and Netanyahu to Meet in Washington -
Amy Goodman: President Barack Obama is meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington today. Obama is expected to ask Netanyahu to freeze Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, while Netanyahu is expected to stress that 'time is running out' for stopping Iran’s nuclear program. The meeting comes as reports emerge that Israel has begun constructing a new settlement in the northern West Bank for the first time in twenty-six years. Tenders have been issued for twenty housing units in the new Maskiot settlement, and contractors have arrived on site to begin foundational work. The Israeli Peace Now movement called the move proof that 'Netanyahu is not ready to commit to a two-state solution' and is striving to 'prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.'" - Amy Goodman 5/18/09
...and, it must be stated, Jewish Americans Jim Lehrer and Margaret Warner present (5/18/09) the most fulsome discussion, from their perspective, of Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu's trip to Washington to meet President Obama, the foundation having been laid by the annual AIPAC convention.
Jim Lehrer: President Obama made his first major moves into Middle East politics and diplomacy today. He met with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the White House. The focus was on making peace with the Palestinians and curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Here is some of what the president and prime minister said after their talks.
BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: Well, listen, I first of all want to thank Prime Minister Netanyahu for making this visit. I think we had an extraordinarily productive series of conversations.
One of the areas that we discussed is the deepening concern around the potential pursuit of a nuclear weapon by Iran. It's something that the prime minister has been very vocal in his concerns about, but is a concern that is shared by his countrymen and women across the political spectrum.
We are engaged in a process to reach out to Iran and persuade them that it is not in their interest to pursue a nuclear weapon and that they should change course.
But I assured the prime minister that we are not foreclosing a range of steps, including much stronger international sanctions, in assuring that Iran understands that we are serious. And, obviously, the prime minister emphasized his seriousness around this issue, as well. I'll allow him to speak for himself on that subject.
We also had an extensive discussion about the possibilities of restarting serious negotiations on the issue of Israel and the Palestinians. We have seen progress stalled on this front, and I suggested to the prime minister that he has an historic opportunity to get a serious movement on this issue during his tenure.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, Israeli Prime Minister: We share the same goals, and we face the same threats. The common goal is peace (Bibi!). Everybody in Israel, as in the United States, wants peace (except "Bibi" & Avigdor). The common threat we face are terrorist regimes and organizations (AIPAC!) that seek to undermine the peace and endanger both our peoples.
In this context, the worst danger we face is that Iran would develop nuclear military capabilities. Iran openly calls for our destruction, which is unacceptable by any standard. It threatens the moderate Arab regimes in the Middle East. It threatens U.S. interests worldwide.
But if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it could give a nuclear umbrella to terrorists, or worse, it could actually give terrorists nuclear weapons, and that would put us all in great peril.
So in that context, I very much appreciate, Mr. President, your firm commitment to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear military capability and also your statement that you're leaving all options on the table.
[ Amy Goodman: A joint American/Russian commission has concluded the proposed U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe would be ineffective against the types of Iranian missiles that it was purportedly aimed to stop. The Bush administration launched the program under the pretense it would protect Europe against Iran, but it's widely seen as a first strike weapon. The commission of U.S./Russia scientists bolsters that perception. In the report to the East/West Institute, scientists say Iran is highly unlikely to develop a nuclear tipped missile, and the proposed defense shield wouldn't be able to stop one anyway. The scientists say Iran is YEARS AWAY from producing a nuclear warhead, and could only do so with major and highly-visible foreign assistance. It also notes that Iran would be further unlikely to launch an attack because doing so would assure its own destruction through U.S. retaliation. - DemocracyNow 5/20/09 ]
I share with you very much the desire to move the peace process forward. And I want to start peace negotiations with the Palestinians immediately. I would like to broaden the circle of peace to include others in the Arab world.
BARACK OBAMA: We're going to take a couple of questions.
We're going to start with you, Steve.
JOURNALIST: Mr. President, you spoke at length, as did the prime minister, about Iran and its nuclear program. Your program of engagement, policy of engagement, how long is that going to last? Is there a deadline?
BARACK OBAMA: You know, I don't want to set an artificial deadline.
The one thing we're also aware of is the fact that the history, of least, of negotiations with Iran is that there is a lot of talk, but not always action and follow-through.
We should have a fairly good sense by the end of the year as to whether they are moving in the right direction and whether the parties involved are making progress and that there's a good-faith effort to resolve differences.
JOURNALIST: Mr. President and Mr. Prime Minister, can you each react to King Abdullah's statement of a week ago that we really are at a critical place in the conflict and that, if this moment isn't seized and if a peace isn't achieved now, soon, that in a year, year-and-a-half, we could see renewed major conflict, perhaps war? And do you agree with that assessment?
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: I think we have to seize the moment. And in my 59 years in the life of the Jewish state, there's never been a time when Arabs and Israelis see a common threat the way we see it today (OMINOUS!) and also see the need to join together in working towards peace, while simultaneously defending ourselves against this common threat.
JOURNALIST: Mr. President, the Israeli prime minister and the Israeli administration have said on many occasions -- on some occasions that only if the Iranian threat will be solved they can achieve real progress on the Palestinian track. Do you agree with that kind of linkage?
BARACK OBAMA: If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians -- between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: We want to move peace forward, and we want to ward off the great threats. There isn't a policy linkage, and that's what I hear the president saying...
[ Classic Bibi mendacious switch. . .with characteristic silent Media/Press accomplice! ]
...and that's what I'm saying, too. And I've always said there's not a policy linkage between pursuing simultaneously peace between Israel and the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world and trying to deal with removing the threat of a nuclear Iran.
There are causal links; the president talked about one of them. It would help, obviously, unite a broad front against Iran if we had peace between Israel and the Palestinians. And conversely, if Iran went nuclear, it would threaten the progress towards peace and destabilize the entire area and threaten existing peace agreements.
So it's very clear to us. I think we actually -- we don't see closely on it. We see exactly eye to eye on this...
[ Repeats above! ]
...that we want to move simultaneously and in parallel on two fronts: the front of peace and the front of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear capabilities.
[ Why does Netanyahu insist on denying Iran nuclear power? Because, this shallow man sees himself as an historic figure, as Makovsky notes further on. Bibi is a menace to us all. ]
On the front of peace, the important thing for me is to resume negotiations as rapidly as possible. And my view is less one of terminology, but one of substance.
So I think the terminology will take care of itself if we have the substantive understanding.
JIM LEHRER: Margaret Warner continues our lead story coverage.
MARGARET WARNER: And for more on this meeting and the lengthy comments to reporters afterwards, we're joined by Robert Malley, who served as special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs. He's now the Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group.
And David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (Another "think tank" funded by Haim Saban, or Sheldon G. Adelson?), he is co-author of a forthcoming book "Myths, Illusions and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East."
Welcome to you both.
Rob Malley, let's start with you. What did you make of what we just saw? This is the first time these two men have met as leaders. What do you make in what we saw and also what you've heard from some of the players afterwards?
ROBERT MALLEY, International Crisis Group: I think the first remarkable thing in the choreography of this encounter, this long, 33-minute meeting with the press, is that for the first few minutes they're not talking to the press.
They're talking to each other as if they wanted to show that the meeting went so well, they wanted an encore, they wanted to continue it, because they didn't have enough time to go through it. And I think they really wanted to project the image that the meeting had gone extremely well.
But to be serious, this is not a marriage made in Heaven. There are serious differences between the two sides. And, in fact, by the end of the segment, we heard those differences appear clearly. And it's as if each one spent those 30 minutes one side saying, "Well, Netanyahu agrees with me," and then Netanyahu saying, "No, no, no, Obama agrees with me," trying to paper over differences that are not really germane today, but are likely to become more relevant in the months to come.
MARGARET WARNER: Is that how it looked to you, a little bit of trying to paper over differences here?
DAVID MAKOVSKY, Washington Institute for Near East Policy (Whose Policy(?)): Well, I think the choreography is worth noting. I mean, in 20 years of covering these things, I've never seen this sort of format, where they don't have the kind of point-counterpoint of press conferences, but have it more informal.
And Rob's right. They were looking towards each other. The body language, I think, was positive. Of course, you know, these things only go so far.
But I think Netanyahu was very -- there are two points that stuck out for me on the atmospherics, which is, apart from the fact that he was looking at Obama and Obama was looking at him, he kept on focusing on Obama as the great friend of Israel at a time there've been some questions about Obama's commitments to Israel.
He was the one who said, "He's a great friend of Israel. He's a great leader," and he was extremely effusive. I've never seen him so effusive at such a gathering.
And the second element that was kind of interesting is he's -- being no stranger to the media, he often talks about the shortcomings of the Arab states. But in this context, he tried to say, no, the Arabs and Israel are together, in terms of dealing with Iran, Arabs being part of a regional solution. So he wanted to show that he himself is really part of the solution and not part of the problem.
MARGARET WARNER: So, Rob Malley, they went into this meeting with this supposed difference in priorities, with, as you said, Netanyahu wanting to focus on, how do you curb Iran? And the president saying, we have to pursue the peace track at the same time. At the end, Netanyahu said, "We see eye-to-eye on this linkage." Do they?
ROBERT MALLEY: They don't. And, in fact, even as both sides explained what their position was, in President Obama's first answer, when he was asked, "What about the Israeli position that you first have to move on Iran before attacking the peace process?" He says, "If there's any relationship, it goes the other way around."
The truth is, both sides know -- and I think they knew this before they got into the meeting -- that they're going to have to work seriously on Arab-Israeli peace and seriously on Iran each for its own sake.
And a lot of what we were hearing before was sort of the preliminaries, but they knew that that would be the outcome. But it was just a very interesting sequence, where, again, Benjamin Netanyahu says, after (our just) having heard the opposite of what he's been saying for the last few weeks, (Bibi says) "it's exactly what I meant." - -What a charlatan, a fraud, the Israeli Limbaugh - The most threatening presence in the Middle East!
MARGARET WARNER: So is Israel committed to pursuing the peace process vigorously, as the prime minister said?
DAVID MAKOVSKY: Well, Netanyahu was very...
MARGARET WARNER: Because that isn't what was advertised going into the meeting.
DAVID MAKOVSKY: Right. Right. No, I mean, the expectations were plunged lower than the Dead Sea, which is like the lowest point on Earth, so to beat those expectations weren't hard.
But I think, to be fair here, I do think that Netanyahu's kind of embrace of the idea of the regional Arab world, their role, is new. Basically, he's saying that every step that the Israelis take towards the Palestinians, the Arabs will take towards Israel. And that's what Senator Mitchell is trying to do, to incentivize Israel in the settlements...
MARGARET WARNER: The special envoy that...
DAVID MAKOVSKY: ... the special envoy who's working on this issue. And I know, in the briefing, he did with the Israeli press this afternoon, after this event, he was very enthusiastic about this new regional role of the Arab states.
And so I think there are some advantages here. I think, though, on the settlements issue, the differences here are going to remain.
MARGARET WARNER: With President Obama saying, absolutely, you have to stop settlements?
DAVID MAKOVSKY: And Netanyahu saying, there has to be a committee to look at the implementation of both sides, how they have implemented the roadmap. By the way, the roadmap calls for a two-state solution.
MARGARET WARNER: Which are the words that Prime Minister Netanyahu could not utter, Rob. How significant was that? Why can't he say it?
ROBERT MALLEY: He can't say it for domestic political reasons. He has a coalition that doesn't want him to say it. And so he figures, why should I use this word, which is going to create problems for me at home, when it really won't make a difference in reality whether I say them or not?
And in all fairness, we've had an Israeli prime minister, the outgoing one, who did say he wanted a two-state solution. We didn't get it. We got settlement expansion. We had two wars.
So the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu may not today say "two states," I don't think is really the issue. The issue is, as both said, what's going to be the outcome? Will we have Arab-Israeli peace? And what Netanyahu says today or doesn't say is not going to be particularly relevant at the end of the day.
DAVID MAKOVSKY: Can I just say on...
MARGARET WARNER: Now, Iran -- well, let me switch to Iran before we run out of time, because that's the other huge agenda item here. What did you make of that exchange on Iran?
DAVID MAKOVSKY: I thought that was the news of the day, in many ways, because for the first time I had heard President Obama talking about a clear timetable for negotiations with Iran. He said that we'd have to reassess at the end of the year. Netanyahu later...
MARGARET WARNER: And perhaps go to -- and go to tougher sanctions?
DAVID MAKOVSKY: Go to tougher sanctions. And Netanyahu said to the Israeli media after that session that, in their one-on-one session, the first hour of their two-hour meeting was almost all taken up by the Iranian issue.
So I think that the key thing is that Israel is not trying to block the United States from having a dialogue with Iran, and Israel would probably be the happiest country if it's resolved peacefully.
I think President Obama was smart by trying to bring Netanyahu in a little bit on his thinking, and -- because he knows that, if he keeps Israel in the dark, Israel will think the worst and might, you know, go off and militarily attack Iran if this dialogue breaks down.
But as Rob pointed out before, their argument isn't about today. Their argument is, what if dialogue fails? Then what?
MARGARET WARNER: So how long do you think Israel or Prime Minister Netanyahu will give President Obama on this negotiation track before at least considering possibly a military option?
ROBERT MALLEY: I think it's very hard to imagine Israel going alone on a military option against Iran, not only because of technical reasons, logistical reasons, but also because of what it would do to their relationship with the U.S. at a time when they would be facing a real existential threat after attacking Iran.
So I don't really give too much weight to that possibility, but I think, as David said, on all of the issues they discussed today, the seeds have been planted for either a possible disagreement in the future or for at least a real debate.
What do you do about Iran if engagement doesn't work? What do you do with the Palestinians when you get into final-status negotiations? What do you do about settlements? What do you do about Syria?
There are issues that they do not see eye-to-eye on. It doesn't mean that there's going to be confrontation, but it means that the moment of truth has not yet arrived.
MARGARET WARNER: Do you agree that Prime Minister Netanyahu would not consider military action against Iran?
DAVID MAKOVSKY: I disagree. I think that Netanyahu has told his top aides -- my understanding, in private meetings -- that history has brought him to be the leader to stop a second Holocaust against the Jewish people. I think he believes it to the very fiber of his soul. - The man's a menace to us all!
And his father is a leading historian. HE SEES HIMSELF AS A HISTORIC FIGURE. Right now, everyone is in agreement that dialogue is the way to go. And like I said, Israel is not trying to stop the United States. The issue is, what if it fails? And I believe, if it fails, that Israel will attack Iran; I do think so.
MARGARET WARNER: And so, looking ahead, who will make the next move? Do you expect, briefly, to see Prime Minister Netanyahu now call on the other Arab states and the Palestinians and really try to gin something up?
ROBERT MALLEY: He's called for immediate negotiations. The Palestinians have said they won't start until settlements are frozen and until Netanyahu accepts a two-state solution. I think that means the ball is going to remain in America's court.
It's up to Barack Obama to decide -- and he has a series of meetings coming up and a big speech in Cairo -- how he's going to move this process forward. Nobody knows better than he does right now the gaps that have to be bridged.
MARGARET WARNER: So does George Mitchell walk away from this meeting with any more cards to play, bottom line?
DAVID MAKOVSKY: Yes, because the speech in Cairo on June 4th is the next big event, as I see it. And how that American speech is given -- the last big speech was by George Bush in 2002 -- is going to create a flurry of diplomatic activity, and visits, and phone calls that you just cannot imagine.
And that threat on how to give that speech is going to mean that a lot of people want to get their say in. And I think Mitchell is going to say, "OK, what are you going to do to help me so we can help shape this speech in the right way?"
That's his big card to play. So I think, between now and June 4th, there's a lot of flurry of activity.
MARGARET WARNER: All right, we'll see. David Makovsky, Rob Malley, thanks.
ROBERT MALLEY: Thank you.
DAVID MAKOVSKY: Thank you. - Lehrer NewsHour 5/18/09
Netanyahu Refuses to Endorse Two-State Solution, Presses Obama on Iran
At a White House meeting Monday, Israel’s new prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu refused to endorse a two-state solution or to agree to President Obama’s request to halt the construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank. Obama and Netanyahu held a press conference Monday after their private meeting.
President Obama: “Now, Israel is going to have to take some difficult steps, as well. And I shared with Prime Minister the fact that, under the road map and under Annapolis, there’s a clear understanding that we have to make progress on settlements, that settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward. That’s a difficult issue. I recognize that. But it’s an important one, and it has to be addressed. I think the humanitarian situation in Gaza has to be addressed.”
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel doesn’t want to govern the Palestinians, but he did not endorse an independent Palestinian state.
Binyamin Netanyahu: “I want to make it clear that we don’t want to govern the Palestinians. We want to live in peace with them. We want them to govern themselves, absent a handful of powers that could endanger the state of Israel. And for this, there has to be a clear goal. The goal has to be an end to conflict. There will have to be compromises by Israelis and Palestinians alike. We’re ready to do our share. We hope the Palestinians will do their share, as well.”
After the meeting, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat criticized Netanyahu’s comments.
Saeb Erekat: “Unfortunately, Mr. Netanyahu failed to mention the two-state solution, failed to mention agreements signed, failed to mention his commitment to stop settlement activities. And the only thing he mentioned was Palestinians entitled to govern themselves by themselves. How can I govern myself by myself as a Palestinian with his occupation going on on my neck on the hour, every hour, with his roadblocks segregating our towns and villages and refugee camps?”
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Obama also discussed Iran on Monday.
Binyamin Netanyahu: “But if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it could give a nuclear umbrella to terrorists, or worse, could actually give terrorists nuclear weapons. And that would put us all in great peril. So in that context, I very much appreciate, Mr. President, your firm commitment to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear military capability and also your statement that you’re leaving all options on the table.”
President Obama told Netanyahu that his administration may back a new set of sanctions against Iran.
President Obama: “We are engaged in a process to reach out to Iran and persuade them that it is not in their interest to pursue a nuclear weapon and that they should change course. But I assured the Prime Minister that we are not foreclosing a range of steps, including much stronger international sanctions, in assuring that Iran understands that we are serious.”
Since 1948 this world has been ravaged by an incomprehensible belief within a segment of the international Jewish community that God has ordained a Jewish domination of the Levant, those lands bordering the Eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. To Jews that entitled them to invade a peaceful Palestine in 1948. An inevitable consequence of such a wretched policy occurred in November of 1995 when the peace-seeking Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by an acolyte of his radical political opponent Benjamin Natanyahu, who today is once again a Prime Minister of Israel. Incredibly, these overreaching bellicose Jews used the murder of legitimate soldier-statesman Rabin to devise a new plan entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (Israel)", the first step of which was the elimination of Saddam Hussein, who they saw as an obstacle to their ultimate objective, now the domination of the entire Middle East. A critical subtext of that target was that the effort would be made utilizing not the resources of the State of Israel, but, via the chicanery of AIPAC and the Jewish members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, the blood and treasure of the United States.
How to manage that? It would have to be the conspiracy of the century! In brief, the operation began with a break-in of the Niger Embassy in Rome, facilitated by the Italian Special Forces, SISMI, under their Prime Minister Berlusconi (awarded an honor several years later by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League). It was the beginning of an epic scheme, and quietly evaded by the foremost NPR political reporter in Europe, Italian Silvia Poggioli, '68 Harvard. She may have been trained by NPR's Mara Liasson, or vice versa (Liasson may have left Roger Ailes and Fox and Bill Kristol and Brit Hume?). In sum, all of what is outlined here is stated more clearly elsewhere in Gopbias.org, and with the necessary attribution. From there a fabrication was documented that Saddam Hussein was seeking Uranium ore from Niger for Nuclear Weapons, the fabled WMD's, which was then used to generate support for the joint U.S.-Brit invasion and occupation of Iraq. To monitor the planning and execution stage two members of AIPAC, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were assigned to assure that the project was on track to be completed and they were regularly required to inform the Israelis in detail.
[ It is noteworthy that this scheme also depended upon and included the theft of the 2000 American presidential election (the 5-4 Supreme Court decision which ended the Florida recount and negated the Albert Gore victory), and equally as God-awful, that the participants from day one of the George W. Bush presidency ignored the many warnings that Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the United States. Hence, 9/11. And of equal note. The John McCain effort which created the heralded 9/11 Commission of Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton prohibited an investigation of circumstances prior to 9/11, thereby excluding the "why"? ]
Obviously such information regarding preparation for war is highly classified, and some brave souls with both the position in intelligence and loyalty to the United States forced charges against Messrs Rosen & Weissman. It is the outrageous dismissal of those charges, timed to precede the annual conference of AIPAC at the "Washington Convention Center, symbolically about equally close to the White House and the Capitol", this dismissal invigorated the AIPAC conference. It is also significant that this decision was actually set weeks ago when former FBI Director, Louis Freeh (who was knowledgeable of the Israeli conspiracy to take the U.S. to war against Iraq) reemerged on national TV to introduce Eric Holder as the successful prospective Obama Attorney General. What is never made public is that, for example, our present major challenge in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as the lingering threat in Iraq, all include the religious component which, of course, dates to 1948, the military establishment of the State of Israel in a predominantly Muslim land. King Abdullah II of Jordan has made that clear.
[ Israel, with both its provocative nuclear weaponed arsenal and its sixty year history of clandestine threats to the entire Middle East, forty years ago engaged in a less successful effort which interrupted its ongoing series of military attacks to expand its control including the confiscation of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, all to consolidate additional Muslim lands, to buttress its conquest beyond its original 1967 borders. The failure was outlined in a 5/10/09 segment of Leslie Moonves' 60 Minutes by Steve Kroft entitled: Was The Perfect Spy A Double Agent? Was Ashraf Marwan Israel's Greatest Spy Or Was He A Double Agent? Israelis, and their Jewish American supporters have a pronounced affinity for the clandestine, whether here or abroad and, on occasion, that obsession bites back, as it did in Mumbai, India. And it is also true that even The New York Times can recognize the danger, and print the whole story as it did in the 5/12/09 Isabel Kershner article, presented shortly. In any event, Egyptian Ashraf Marwan, to the eternal embarrassment of Israel (i.e. if Israelis can be embarrassed), Mr. Marwan was a double agent, and on June 27, 2007, Israeli agents threw him off the balcony of his upper floor suite in London, as a warning, to the world. In our next edit we'll have segments of the transcript. ]
(CBS) Sometimes history is shaped by unknown people who operate in the shadowy world of espionage. And this story of war, deception and murder has a plot worthy of a John le Carre novel.
Thirty-five years ago, the armies of Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against the state of Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Militarily, it ended in a stalemate, but in practical terms the war changed the map and the politics of the Middle East.
At the center of it all is a little known story about one man who played a major role in the outcome. Strangely enough, he's a hero in both Egypt and Israel, considered by each of these former enemies to be their greatest spy ever.
The question is: who was Ashraf Marwan really working for? And who finally murdered him in London?
The first stories in the London papers were sketchy at best: a mysterious Egyptian had been found dead outside his London apartment under questionable circumstances. The name Ashraf Marwan meant nothing to most people in Britain - just another rich Arab who owned hotels and a part of a soccer team.
But to bestselling author Howard Blum, who came across Marwan while writing a book on the Yom Kippur War a few years back, and to students of the Middle East, Marwan was much more: an arms dealer with connections to a half a dozen intelligence agencies and a secret player on the world stage.
"What went through your mind when you found out that Marwan was dead? Did you believe he'd been murdered?" 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft asked Blum.
"Yes, I believed very much that he was murdered. My next question was by whom," he replied.
"And that's a complicated question?" Kroft asked.
"That's a complicated question because Marwan was a complicated man," Blum said.
It's a tale rooted in nearly 40 years of history and a distant war. And as you will see, there are two different versions.
Both of them begin in 1969, not long after the Israelis routed invading Arab armies in the Six Day War, capturing the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula from the Egyptians.
Another war, to recapture the lost territory, was already brewing when a tall, elegant 26-year-old Egyptian contacted Israeli intelligence in London and offered to provide them his country's most important military secrets.
"It was, for us, something unbelievable," remembered Major General Aharon Farkash, who until recently was Israel's director of military intelligence.
"In our work of intelligence we are very, very suspicious about everything. So we try to ask difficult questions about everything that he brought. And after years we understood this is a piece of gold," Farkash told Kroft.
"In the annals of spies for Israel, where does Marwan rank?" Kroft asked Aharon Levran, who at the time was one of Israel's highest ranking intelligence officers.
"He was the best. He was the best," Levran replied.
Levran was one of only a select few with access to the information that Marwan provided.
"It was a bonanza. It was a masterpiece of information," Levran said.
"Like having somebody?" Kroft asked.
"In the bed of the ruler," Levran replied.
Actually, Marwan was in the bed of the ruler's daughter. He was the son-in-law of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Nasser's liaison to the Egyptian intelligence services.
"Why do you think he became an Israeli spy?" Kroft asked Levran.
"It was money, it was adventure. He was a special character," he replied.
The meetings took place at a London safe house near the Dorchester Hotel, under the direct supervision of the head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.
According to the Israelis, part of Marwan's motivation was a deep hatred of the Soviet Union, Egypt's major ally, military patron and chief arms supplier. But the Israelis say Marwan also demanded more than $100,000 per meeting to finance what they claim was a lavish London lifestyle that included wine, gambling and women.
"He was for sale," Kroft remarked.
"In a way," Levran acknowledged.
"And Israel paid him very well," Kroft said.
"He was worth every penny," Levran replied.
(CBS) The Mossad's codename for Marwan was "The Angel," and between 1969 and 1973 he provided the Israelis with reams of secret Egyptian documents. There were transcripts of meetings between President Sadat and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, records of their arms deals, and perhaps most important, detailed Egyptian war plans for recapturing the Sinai Peninsula.
"When Marwan spoke, the highest leaders in Israel within a matter of hours got the transcripts of what he spoke. Golda Meir read them, Moshe Dayan read them. The army chief of staff read them. And this is how they formed their opinions," author Howard Blum explained.
"We were very, very sensitive and aware about early warning of an enemy attack on Israel. From the first day, this was rule number one," Levran told Kroft.
"And you relied on Marwan to give it to you?" Kroft asked.
"Of course," Levran said.
According to the Egyptians, it was Israel's reliance on Marwan to warn them of an impending attack that allowed their army and the Syrians to amass hundreds of thousands of troops on Israel's borders in the fall of 1973, under the guise of a training exercise. In fact, the Yom Kippur War was about to begin, and the Israelis had heard nothing from Marwan.
"Who was Ashraf Marwan working for?" Kroft asked Dr. Abdel Monem Said, one of Egypt's top national security experts.
"He was officially working for the president of Egypt. But also, he was working for the security establishment of Egypt as well," Said told Kroft.
Dr. Said said it was all part of the plan.
Said told Kroft Marwan didn't work for the Israelis. "Not whatsoever," he said.
Egyptian officials refused to talk to 60 Minutes about Marwan on camera because the information is still secret.
But a number of people directed us to Said for the Egyptian side of the story, which is that Israel's greatest spy was actually a double agent.
"Top Israelis told us 'Marwan gave us the best information we have ever gotten from anyone,'" Kroft told Said.
"How you build the confidence in one of the best intelligence services in the world? You give them best information that serve your purpose," he replied.
The Egyptians' purpose was to recapture the Suez Canal and all or part of the 23,000 square miles of the Sinai Peninsula occupied by the Israelis. To do it, they needed to deceive their enemy at a crucial moment, and according to Dr. Said, Marwan was the key element in that deception.
"The Israeli know that there was Egyptians and Syrians on the ground mobilizing their forces. These forces were already in the front. They are taking offensive positions," Said explained. "It's a classic case in the books. You got all the information, but you make the wrong interpretation. And the only variable that is different was Ashraf Marwan."
"We were subjugated to this source, and we put aside information from the observation posts we were dependent on him to give us the last verdict. The last confirmation," Aharon Levran told Kroft.
Marwan finally provided that confirmation at a late-night meeting in London with the head of Mossad, just 12 hours before the fighting began. The Syrians and the Egyptians would attack on two fronts, he said, at 6 p.m. the following day, the holiest day on the Jewish year. The Israelis were totally unprepared. Most of their soldiers were already home with their families.
(CBS) But General Farkash doesn't blame Marwan; he's convinced that the plans were so secret, Marwan didn't find out until the last minute. He believes Marwan's warning gave the Israelis just enough time to mobilize the reserves and ultimately save the state of Israel.
"Our army is based on 80 percent reserve forces. And he gave us the most important piece of information to bring the government of Israel and to force us, to "force us" I call it, to call the reserve forces," Gen. Farkash said.
The reserves arrived in time in time for the Israelis to turn back the Syrian army on the Golan Heights, after sustaining heavy casualties.
But the Sinai was a different story. Marwan had told the Israelis that the war would begin at 6 p.m. It actually began four hours earlier.
The Egyptians were able to break through the Israeli defenses, cross the Suez Canal and take back part of the land it had lost six years earlier. And according to the Egyptians, Marwan's deception was crucial.
"He gave us a number of hours before the Israelis started to mobilize and come to the front. And that was enough for us to cross the Suez Canal. That is the greatest achievement," Dr. Said told Kroft.
"So, we're talking about four, five, six hours extra," Kroft remarked.
"Every hour here counts. And that was enough to make the difference," Said replied.
After three weeks of fighting, a truce was declared, with the Egyptians still controlling the Suez and part of the Sinai. Six years later, in 1979, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat would reclaim all of it for Egypt by signing an historic peace treaty with Israelis.
For his part in the war, Sadat secretly awarded Marwan Egypt's highest medal.
"He was able to hold conflicting loyalties at the same time. And that was his genius - that's what made him a perfect spy," Howard Blum said.
After the war, Marwan made a fortune selling Egyptian arms to Arab countries, and reportedly forged intelligence ties to the CIA, the British, the Libyans and the Italians.
But his role in the Yom Kippur War remained a secret until a few years ago, when some of the details began to appear in print. Marwan told friends he was concerned about his safety.
In June of 2007, the mysterious Egyptian met a mysterious end, when he fell or was thrown from the balcony of his fifth floor apartment in the Saint James district of London, not far from Buckingham Palace. Initially the death was ruled a suicide, but today Scotland Yard is investigating it as a murder.
"You think somebody threw him off the balcony? Or forced him to jump?" Kroft asked Marwan's son Gamal.
"I'm not sure what happened but what I'm sure is that he was definitely killed, 100 percent," Gamal Marwan replied.
(CBS) He says his father was lame and too weak to hoist himself over the railing. And witnesses have reported seeing two dark-complected men on the balcony moments before his plunge. Missing from the apartment was the unfinished manuscript of Marwan's memoir.
"The day my father was murdered, the book vanished. And all the tapes that my father dictated vanished as well," Gamal Marwan said.
Asked if his father was an Israeli agent, Marwan told Kroft, "Definitely not"
"You're sure of that?" Kroft asked.
"Positive. My father was a patriot," Marwan said.
"Did you talk to your father about this?" Kroft asked.
"I asked him, 'What's going on?' Okay? And, he said, 'You know what? I'm a soldier. And in war, you have to do certain things as a soldier.' Didn't make much sense at the time. Makes a lot of sense today," he replied.
Asked who would have a motive to kill his father, Gamal Marwan told Kroft, "You know, my father's main job was Egypt. And the main concept is to fool the Israelis and win the war. God knows. They have the highest motive."
When Kroft asked Aharon Levran whether he thought the Israelis killed Marwan, he told Kroft, "Never on Sunday, never. It can't be. Why should they kill him? It's only a good reason for the Egyptians to do it once they discovered that he - wasn't so good for them."
A few days after his death, the body of the man the Israelis claim as their greatest spy ever was flown to Egypt for a hero's funeral. Thousands of people turned out, including President Mubarak's son and high-ranking members of the Egyptian intelligence establishment.
President Mubarak himself issued a statement saying that Marwan was patriotic and loyal to his country, but the time was not ripe to unveil those acts.
So in the end, who did Ashraf Marwan really betray? And who finally killed him? If the truth wasn't buried with him, it is most likely buried somewhere in a top secret vault.
"It's in a lot of people's interest that we, that the world, never knows the answer to who killed Ashraf Marwan," Howard Blum said.
"Because?" Kroft asked.
"Because the damage he did and the deals that were made, I think intelligence communities all throughout the world, want to keep secret," Blum replied. - Steve Kroft 5/10/09
At Annual Meeting, Pro-Israel Group Reasserts Clout *
WASHINGTON -- The formidable political strength of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the nation’s major pro-Israel lobby, has been on decidedly intentional display here in the last few days.
But this year, Aipac’s annual conference comes after a period fraught with small anxieties for the group and its supporters.
Just days ago, the Obama administration said it was seeking the dismissal of charges that two former Aipac analysts had violated an espionage statute by improperly disseminating national security information.
The case against Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman had raised what many in the pro-Israel community in the United States regard as an unfair, even toxic question about whether the loyalty of some American Jews to Israel matches or exceeds their loyalty to the United States.
Gary Silow, a Philadelphia-area lawyer and Aipac member at the convention, said he was deeply troubled by the potential for renewed discussion of what he said was the offensive “dual loyalty” issue. In Mr. Silow’s view, “the fact that they came after Aipac was what was really disturbing.”
Like many at the convention, Mr. Silow said he was relieved at the move for a dismissal.
More than half the members of the House and Senate attended Monday night’s dinner, which featured the group’s “roll call” in which the lawmakers all rise. It is a conscious -- and effective -- effort to demonstrate the group’s influence on Capitol Hill.
Even as the charges were dismissed, the issue of Aipac’s role in the capital’s political life surfaced again in recent days with the disclosure that Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California, had been overheard in 2005 on a government wiretap offering to help reduce the charges. Ms. Harman, who has denied she intervened in the Rosen-Weissman case, was greeted with sustained applause when she appeared on Sunday morning.
The site of the conference, the Washington Convention Center, is conveniently, and symbolically, about equally close to the White House and the Capitol, the two objects of Aipac’s muscular demonstration. Along with 6,000 delegates, mostly Jewish, leaders of the two branches of government have been attending the convention to offer praise for Aipac and support of Israel, both in generally unreserved language.
The roster of scheduled guests from Sunday through the meeting’s conclusion on Tuesday included Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Senator John Kerry (whose father was Jewish), the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee; Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker who remains an important Republican voice; and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who has longstanding ties to Israel. The group also heard from the new Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (via satellite), and the new opposition leader, Tzipi Livni, and the president, Shimon Peres (in person).
Huge slides of former American presidents were displayed, and there was a murmur of disapproval when the image of Jimmy Carter appeared. Mr. Carter brokered the Camp David peace accords but has turned harshly critical of Israel since leaving office.
Speeches are scrutinized closely at Aipac events. As a presidential candidate in June 2008, Barack Obama spoke to Aipac to counter whispers in the American Jewish community that he was insufficiently committed to Israel. Mr. Obama told the group that he regarded them as “friends who share my strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, tomorrow and forever.”
Mr. Obama went on to win an estimated 78 percent of the Jewish vote, a figure higher than that won four years earlier by Mr. Kerry.
Many of the Aipac attendees are planning to fan out on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to brace lawmakers with their views. Aipac’s spokesman, Josh Block, said there were 508 appointments at Congressional offices.
The conference’s literature is filled with suggestions for lobbying as in “don’t be late” and “be direct” in making your case.
Aipac officials say the key to their success is linking their supporters across the country with their local elected lawmakers. “Relationships matter” is a slogan plastered around the convention hall. Aipac does not make political donations but encourages its members to do so.
Last year, some prominent American Jews, asserting that Aipac’s generally down-the-line support of Israeli policy was neither helpful to Israel nor wise, founded a counter group called J Street. J Street, which is only a tiny percentage of the size of Aipac, is vocal about supporting lawmakers who might disagree with some Israeli policies. Aipac officials have tried to treat J Street as if it were lint. - Neil A. Lewis 5/5/09
The 5/12/09 N Y Times seems to recognize that the arrogant Israelis may have gone too far, with their recent "election" (Jews only). The duo of Netanyahu and Lieberman (Avigdor not Joe) bodes danger for the Middle East and the rest of us.
JERUSALEM--The Israeli police on Monday closed down an official Palestinian media center that had been set up in East Jerusalem for the visit of Pope Benedict XVI, as Israel and the Palestinians competed to exercise authority in the contested part of the city.
As the pope arrived in Jerusalem, each side accused the other of exploiting his visit for political gain. Though the pope’s movements have been carefully choreographed to avoid obvious political minefields, every step and word was bound to be closely scrutinized.
Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war and annexed the territory containing some of the holiest sites for Christians, Muslims and Jews. The annexation was never recognized abroad.
Israel has hoped to fend off any open challenge to its rule over Jerusalem during the pope’s visit, while Palestinian officials said they were worried that the pope would be put into situations that implied de facto acceptance of the Israeli annexation. The Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of a future Palestinian state.
The Palestinian media center was closed on the order of the Israeli minister of internal security, citing a clause in a 1994 law banning all activity of the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem or elsewhere “in the state of Israel.” Official Palestinian activities in Jerusalem have been similarly barred in the past.
Rafiq Husseini, the chief of staff to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, said Israel was trying to keep the Palestinians’ “mouths shut about how the city has been occupied and is still occupied.” He said the Palestinians were determined to “ensure that the pope understands he is coming to an occupied city.”
Mr. Husseini was speaking at a hastily assembled news conference in the mainly Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, after the closing of the media center in the nearby Ambassador Hotel. The Israeli police stood by, but did not interfere.
“HOWEVER MANY FLAGS” THE ISRAELIS PUT UP AROUND EAST JERUSALEM, THAT “DOES NOT GIVE ISRAEL ANY SOVEREIGNTY OVER IT,” MR. HUSSEINI SAID.
He was referring to the Israeli flags flying with Vatican flags along the routes the pope was expected to travel, including in East Jerusalem.
Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said in response that it was “really sad to see how some Palestinians will do anything to politicize this visit.”
The visit, he said, “would contribute a lot more to peace if it were taken for what it is -- a pilgrimage for peace and unity.”
Mr. Palmor rejected Palestinian accusations that Israel was trying to use the pope’s presence to bolster its claim over East Jerusalem, calling them “ridiculous.”
“Nowhere during this visit will the pope be required to do something that he or the Vatican is not comfortable with,” he said.
The Rev. Peter Madros, an adviser to the Latin Patriarchate in Jerusalem, told reporters that “East Jerusalem is not Israel.”
Asked whether he condemned the closing of the media center, he said the Vatican “does not have to condemn every single Israeli action,” otherwise it would have to issue condemnations “every other day.”
Palestinian Christians now make up only about 2 percent of the population of Jerusalem, and are vastly outnumbered by the city’s Muslims and Jews. Many Christians here identify strongly with the Palestinian national struggle.
The Palestinian media center held its first event at the Ambassador Hotel on Sunday, distributing background material for the papal visit and hosting a news conference whose speakers included Mr. Husseini and the Palestinian Authority’s tourism minister, Khouloud Daibes. Isabel Kershner 5/12/09
Amy Goodman agrees -
In Israel and the Occupied Territories, Pope Benedict XVI continued his visit with a trip to Israel’s separation wall around the Palestinian town of Bethlehem. The Pope called for the establishment of a Palestinian state and decried the wall as 'tragic.'
Pope Benedict XVI: 'I have seen, adjoining the camp and overshadowing much of Bethlehem, the wall that intrudes into your territories, separating neighbors and dividing families. Although walls can easily be built, we all know that they do not last forever. They can be taken down.'"
A description from Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel: "The most obvious historical parallel to the barrier is the Berlin Wall, which was 96 miles long (155 kilometers). Israel's barrier, still under construction, is expected to reach at least 403 miles in length (650 kilometers). The average height of the Berlin Wall was 11.8 feet (3.6 metres), compared with the maximum current height of Israel's Wall -- 25 feet (8 metres)."
The 5/1/09 "Mayday" (international radiotelephone distress signal) issue of The New York Times is suitably notable for two items. On the Founder's page one Serge Schmeman, an Editorial Observer, pens a self exculpatory piece entitled "When Israel Confronted and Rejected Torture", this about a sixty year old country whose history began with an unprovoked, unwarranted attack and occupation of a peaceful Palestine, inhabited by Muslims, Christians and Jews living in harmony. And that Jewish military occupation culminated sixty years later with the 12/26/08 - 1/18/09 massacre in the Gaza Strip in which mechanized Israeli forces slaughtered 1500 Palestinian citizens, including hundreds of women and children.
In answer to the above, and the heart-rending testimony of Hala Gores which follows, is an article datelined Jerusalem by Ethan Bronner 5/4/09 which describes, if any further example of a combination of N Y Times and Israeli fallacious presentations were needed, that the present effort of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (these two men are surely the most reprehensible of Israeli politicians in its brief, but bloody, sixty year history) represents a message to the world that the Netanyahu - Shimon Peres - and Lieberman Israeli cabinet, that their plans and programs for the Middle East may be the most ominous and menacing, not only to the Middle East, but with its religious component, to the world as we know it. Only the United States, with its miraculous Obama/Biden government, is in a position to counter this worst of Israel's regimes!!!
Brings Shift on Mideast
That question, which has captivated a wide spectrum of people, from America’s Israel lobby AIPAC, to Palestinian-Americans to the Muslim world, will take center stage on Monday, when Israel’s hawkish prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has his first face-to-face meeting with Mr. Obama since he became president.
But Mr. Freeman, in a telephone interview last week, said he still believed that Mr. Obama would go where his predecessors did not on Israel. Mr. Obama’s appointment of Gen. James L. Jones as his national security adviser -- a man who has worked with Palestinians and Israelis to try to open up movement for Palestinians on the ground and who has sometimes irritated Israeli military officials -- could foreshadow friction between the Obama administration and the Israeli government, several Middle East experts said." - Helene Cooper N Y Times 5/17/09
Netanyahu to Meet Obama as U.S. Priorities Shift
By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON -- The last time Benjamin Netanyahu met an American president as Israel’s new leader, in 1996, it did not go well. Mr. Netanyahu lectured President Bill Clinton about Arab-Israeli relations, aides recalled, driving Mr. Clinton into a profane outburst after his guest left.
Mr. Netanyahu is likely to avoid a repeat of that when he meets President Obama at the White House on Monday. But the relationship between Israel and the United States has become more unsettled since Mr. Obama took office.
Israel has been rattled by signs that the Obama administration has sworn off the unstinting support of Israel that was a hallmark of the Bush years, as well as by the softer approach that Mr. Obama has taken to dealing with Iran.
Both countries regard Iran as the paramount threat in the region, but they have sharply different ways of responding: the Obama administration is asking for time to pursue its diplomatic overture to Tehran; the Israelis are warning that they will not stand by while the Iranians build a nuclear bomb.
Two weeks ago, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, held a quiet meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Israel asked the United States for benchmarks to demonstrate that its (the United States) diplomatic campaign was working.
The Israeli government, officials said, has assured the United States that it will not take military action against Iran without first consulting Washington. But it has also signaled that it will give the United States only a year or so to show that its good-will approach is getting results.
“They’re preoccupied by Iran, and no one more than the current prime minister,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel and a Middle East peace negotiator. “But the prime minister understands full well that this is a time for American-led engagement.”
The question, Mr. Indyk said, is whether Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Obama can find common ground on Iran. Without that, he said, it would be hard to imagine the Israeli government’s making progress on negotiations with either the Palestinians or its Arab neighbors.
[ Indyk supports Israel blackmailing the United States, which provides Israel with three billion$ every year?!?! ]
“There is potential for greater tensions than have existed for some time, certainly,” said Robert Malley, another veteran of Middle East peacemaking efforts. “But a collision is not inevitable.”
To try to keep the peace process alive while it reaches out to Iran, the Obama administration has been pushing for a series of more modest steps on the part of Israel and its Arab neighbors.
The special envoy for the Middle East, former Senator George J. Mitchell, has made three trips to the region since January, seeking pledges from Saudi Arabia and other countries to exchange diplomats and authorize direct flights to Tel Aviv -- steps that inch toward normalized relations. In return, he is pressing Israel to freeze the construction of Jewish settlements on the West Bank.
“The notion is that you can somehow induce the Arabs to give the Israelis an incentive,” said Aaron David Miller, a former diplomat who negotiated on Arab-Israeli issues in the Clinton administration.
Drawing in the Arab states, he said, is a way to reshape a forbidding landscape. In addition to Iran, there is a fractured Palestinian leadership and an Israeli government led by Mr. Netanyahu, who refuses to endorse the two-state solution that underpins the American-led peace effort.
Some analysts play down Mr. Netanyahu’s hawkish stance as a negotiating tactic ahead of his meeting with Mr. Obama. “I suspect he knows these are untenable conditions,” Mr. Malley said. “Those are concessions he’s putting himself in a position to make later.”
Despite Mr. Netanyahu’s rough start with Mr. Clinton, the two leaders later formed a productive relationship.
The Obama administration has fired its own warning shots. It asked Congress to make minor changes in a bill to allow aid to flow to a Palestinian unity government that would include members backed by Hamas -- a step away from a blanket refusal to deal with Hamas, which it labels a terrorist organization.
The changes ruffled lawmakers in Congress, who tweaked(?) the wording to make it more restrictive. But the episode rattled Israeli officials, who recently waged a fierce military campaign against Hamas in Gaza to stem its rocket attacks.
Adding to Israel’s qualms, a senior State Department official, Rose Gottemoeller, said at a recent conference in New York that the United States favored having Israel sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which would require it to declare and give up its nuclear arsenal (ABOUT TIME!!).
While the administration said this was not a new policy, few American officials have publicly acknowledged that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, let alone raised the prospect of getting Israel to give them up. For the most part, though, the administration has moved gingerly. Mr. Mitchell, the president’s emissary to the Middle East, has yet to give an on-the-record interview about his diplomacy.
Diplomats are closely watching two other officials with long experience and strong views on Israel: the national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, and the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
General Jones has made the case that if Israel believes that Iran is a threat to its existence, it should pursue talks with the Palestinians. Israeli officials, however, say they cannot do that unless they feel secure from the threat of an Iranian nuclear attack. And they fret that Iran is playing for time.
'They are making it too early to react until it is too late to react,(?)' said a senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he did not want to interfere with Mr. Netanyahu's visit.(?) - Mark Landler 5/15/09
NEWS ANALYSIS N Y TIMES
Away From Palestinians and Toward Iran
"The new government of Israel is seeking to reorient the country’s foreign policy, arguing that to rely purely on the formulas of trading land for peace and promising a Palestinian state fails to grasp what it views as the deeper issues: Muslim rejection of a Jewish state and the rising hegemonic appetite of Iran.
Advisers to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are drafting policy suggestions aimed at forming a framework that he plans to present to President Obama at their first summit meeting, in Washington on May 18. In addition, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman left Sunday for Europe on his first official visit, and on Tuesday, President Shimon Peres is to meet with Mr. Obama in Washington.
Such an ambitious effort to reformulate the conflict will be, by all accounts, tough to sell for two reasons.
First, even though the standard approaches have not yielded success, no alternative has emerged.
Second, the Obama administration has repeatedly backed the two-state solution, as have the Europeans. In other ways, too, this White House has seemed to be closer in outlook to Europe than the past administration was.
Israel’s effort to switch the discussion to Iran is likely to be met in Washington and in European capitals with the assertion that it is precisely because of the need to build an alliance to confront Iran that Israel must move ahead vigorously with the Palestinians as well as with the Syrians.
“President Obama views the region as a whole, and trying to isolate each problem does not reflect reality,” said a senior American official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the American policy was still in formation. “It will be a lot easier to build a coalition to deal with Iran if the peace process is moving forward.”
A senior Israeli official, who also would speak only if not named because Israeli policy was being formed, said he believed that when Mr. Netanyahu met Mr. Obama, he would acknowledge that ultimately the goal was a Palestinian state. BUT it is expected that he would say that SUCH A STATE WAS FAR IN THE FUTURE because Palestinian institutions and economic development required a great deal of work -- as well as investment from Arab states -- and that Palestinian education and public discourse needed to be more oriented toward coexistence.
Mr. Lieberman is to begin his trip in Rome, seeing Foreign Minister Franco Frattini on Monday, and then travel to Paris, Prague and Berlin for similar meetings. He is one of the most controversial senior members of the Israeli government. As a candidate, he called for a loyalty oath aimed at Israeli Arabs. In addition, his public speech has been tough, sometimes brutal. And he himself lives in a West Bank settlement.
Israel’s own diplomats view his arrival as their chief with circumspection, especially because his predecessor, Tzipi Livni, was admired by her colleagues in Europe. Whenever she went to Paris, for example, she saw not only the foreign minister but also President Nicolas Sarkozy. So far, Mr. Sarkozy has not agreed to see Mr. Lieberman this week.
“I tell people who worry about Lieberman that I worry too,” a senior Israeli diplomat said, requesting anonymity to speak freely of his boss. “But after I stop worrying I tell myself, you have to be fair, you have to give this guy a chance to express himself as the foreign minister of Israel, not just as a candidate.”
Yigal Palmor, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that Mr. Lieberman had been scheduled to meet with all 27 European Union foreign ministers this month at a summit meeting, but that Mr. Lieberman had asked for a delay so the government could come up with its policy guidelines. The European Union agreed.
It seems likely that the plan that Mr. Netanyahu will present to Mr. Obama will have a strong regional component in an attempt to fend off pressure on Israel to accept the Arab League peace plan, which calls on Israel to return to the 1967 borders as well as to accept a right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel. The new Israeli government completely rejects both.
Mr. Lieberman is one of the strongest advocates for rethinking Israel’s approach and rejecting what he views as failed past formulas. He wants tough sanctions against Iran as the first step. He told The Jerusalem Post in an interview published last week that the aim of the policy review was to make progress on Palestinian economic and political developments and “to take the initiative” in the region.
“People try to simplify the situation with these formulas: land for peace, two-state solution,” Mr. Lieberman told the newspaper. “It’s a lot more complicated.” He added that the real reason for the deadlock “is not occupation, not settlements and not settlers.” Nor, he said, is it the Palestinians. The biggest obstacle, he said, is “the Iranians.”
He, like the entire Israeli leadership, argues that since Iran sponsors Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, both of which reject Israel’s existence and seek its destruction, the key to the Palestinian solution is to defang Iran and stop it from acquiring the means to build a nuclear weapon.
Increasingly, the Arab world -- especially Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan -- seems worried about Iran as well. American officials who have recently visited those countries said that their leaders spoke about Iran in ways that were almost identical to what they heard from officials in Jerusalem. Therefore, the opportunity for a regional alliance against Iranian influence is great.
But, they say, for Arab leaders to work alongside Israel on this, even quietly, requires demonstrable Israeli movement on ending its occupation of the West Bank by freezing or reducing settlements and handing over more power to the Palestinians.
Israel dislikes that formulation, arguing that the two issues need to be addressed separately. If they are linked, it is in the opposite way from what the West says. In other words, Israel says the occupation can be ended most easily once Iran is put in its place because then there will be much less risk of Iranian weapons being used against Israel from neighboring territory. Meanwhile, Israel says it cannot be expected to freeze settlement growth entirely.
The American, European and Arab response is that for Iran to be checked, every nation needs to do its part, and Israel’s part is to work toward ending the occupation, stopping settlement construction and fostering the creation of a Palestinian state.
When a senior American official was told that the Israelis did not view the Iranian and Palestinian problems as linked, he replied simply, “Well, we do.” - Ethan Bronner 5/4/09
- Israel continues to persecute its Palestinian citizens -
Israeli writer Zvi Raanan said in a recent In My Opinion piece ("Misguided views on Israel," April 12) that he opposes discussion of Israel's "perceived past sins."
No, Mr. Raanan, the expulsion in 1948 of more than 750,000 Palestinian men, women and children, including some of my relatives -- and the killing and maiming of thousands more -- because they were not Jewish, is not a "perceived sin." It is a historical fact documented by many, including Israeli historians. It is the core injustice of the region and one that occurred within the lifetimes of many people still living today. Moreover, Israel's continuation of this ruthless policy of ethnic exclusion is at the center of today's conflict.
Raanan states that "Arabs who still live in Israel [the small remnant who were not forced out in 1947-49] are rightful citizens of Israel."
First of all, please stop denying us our name -- we are Palestinians. Secondly, we are systematically discriminated against by Israel. More than 20 Israeli laws favor Jews over Palestinian citizens of Israel. I grew up in a Christian family in Nazareth. My family had lived there for generations; I grew up with elders telling me stories of ancestors who heard in person the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
When I was 10, my family left Israel for Oregon (sponsored by relatives who lived in St. Helens) because of the oppression we faced as Christian Palestinians in the Jewish state. At the airport, I was taken away from my mom, who had no power to intercede, and placed in a small room, and there, terrified and humiliated, was strip-searched by an Israeli official. Such strip searches were common for Christian and Muslim "rightful citizens" of Israel; they still occur today.
In Israel, there are more than 50 villages inhabited by Palestinians that have been there for centuries. Israel has decreed these "unrecognized villages" and notified the families that their homes will be demolished because they were "built illegally." Thousands of homes of Palestinians who are Israeli citizens have been destroyed. Although these villagers are citizens of Israel, they receive no state services such as electricity, running water, sewer, access roads, health or educational facilities.
Similarly, thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel have been decreed "present absentees," Israel's Orwellian phrase for Palestinians whose land and homes Israel has confiscated for Jewish-only habitation.
Raanan proposes a solution to Mideast violence that he claims is "mutually beneficial" but that tilts heavily toward Israel -- at the expense of both Palestinians and Americans.
Raanan claims that a previous op-ed column by Alison Weir, director of the nonprofit group If Americans Knew, is misinformed, but fails to point out any inaccuracies in her piece ("The truth about Israel," April 5).
He also terms it "vicious," apparently because she suggests that American taxpayers stop funding Israeli brutality that, most recently, killed 1,417 Gazans in three weeks. During this period, Palestinian resistance groups killed nine Israelis, six of them soldiers -- and this occurred only after Israel had repeatedly broken the cease-fire.
While the news media focus on the one Israeli kidnapped by Palestinians (a captured soldier), they fail to report that Israel has kidnapped thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, and that 11,000 are being held in abusive Israeli prisons; the Times of London first exposed Israel's regular use of torture 30 years ago.
It is time for American taxpayers to refuse to allow our tax money to be used in Israel's failed, tragic and self-destructive policies that fund criminal actions. Only when Israel no longer has a blank check from Americans will Israeli leaders finally negotiate in good faith to find a fair and lasting peace for all the peoples of our holy land. - Hala J. Gores 5/3/09
Hala J. Gores, an American citizen, is a Palestinian Christian. She is an attorney and lives in Portland. Reach her at hala@goreslaw.com
In that same Mayday issue of The Times Isabel Kershner, a long time Times' advocate for Israel writes of "U.N. Seeks End to Razing of Homes in (Arab) East Jerusalem."
"Scores of Palestinian-owned structures are demolished every year by the Israeli authorities on the grounds that they were built without the required permits. But many Palestinians say Israel limits construction to push them out of East Jerusalem, which they claim as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
The report states that only 13 percent of East Jerusalem land is currently zoned by the Israeli authorities for Palestinian construction, and much of that is already built up, severely restricting the possibility of obtaining a permit. More than a third of East Jerusalem, meanwhile, has been expropriated for Israeli construction since 1967, according to the report, while 22 percent is zoned for green areas and public infrastructure and 30 percent remains “unplanned.”
Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war and then annexed it, after expanding the boundaries of the city into the West Bank. Israel claims sovereignty over all of Jerusalem, but the annexation has never been recognized by the United Nations or its member states." - Isabel Kershner 5/1/09
Chronologically the next item, from NPR's Weekend Edition on Saturday 5/2/09 featured David Green, sitting in for Scott Simon, analyzing the week's "News" with Daniel Schorr, which promises in its mandate NEVER to cover a story which might be objectionable to whichever cabal is ruling Israel (at Gopbias.org we call that ERA, "Ethnicity Run Amok"), and on the same day The New York Times runs an account in which Neil A. Lewis and David Johnson composed this paragraph -
"While Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman trafficked in facts, ideas and rumor, they had done so with the full awareness of officials in the United States and Israel, who found they often helped lubricate the wheels of decision-making between two close, but sometimes quarrelsome, friends."
[ U.S. Moves to End Secrets Case Against Israel Lobbyists ]
Actually, as every knowledgeable political observer knows well, Canada has been a close friend to the United States for a century, while the State of Israel has and continues to be a blight on the United States and a scourge upon the world. This decision makes clear that our judicial system has been compromised in the extreme. In fact, it's more like Israel and AIPAC and a powerful cadre of Jewish American "United States" Senators, completely direct United States policy with Israel. It's as though the Star of David flies above our Stars and Stripes.
The BBC on Wednesday, April 29, 2009, moved its conservative, pro-Israel radio propaganda machine to conservative Kokomo, Indiana to add to the national Republican AM-FM Radio Grid, led by Neil Conan's NPR (National "Public" Radio) Talk of the Nation, which has selected the FIRST ONE HUNDRED DAYS of President Barack Obama's administration to rate his presidency! That is, George W. Bush/Dick Cheney/John McCain waged war against both Iraq AND the United States for EIGHT YEARS!....
[ Baghdad Is Shaken By a Series Of Bombs - A series of bombs went off in Baghdad on Wednesday, extending a period of violence that has rattled Iraq’s government and security forces.
The pattern of Wednesday’s attacks -- including three car bombs in predominantly Shiite areas and two at a Sunni mosque -- raised fresh concern that sectarian passions could be inflamed anew.
Accounts of the death toll varied, from at least 17 people to as many as 48, with dozens wounded. So far in April, at least 300 Iraqis have been killed in bombing attacks, making it the bloodiest month since the start of the year and reversing the sharp drops in civilian deaths in January and February. - Sam Dagher and Suadad Al-Salhy N Y Times 4/30/09 ]
....The war against Iraq continues, and the Republican Radio Grid intensifies. . .AND. . .that Grid, including the BBC and National "Public" Radio, after but one hundred days (following a conclusive Democratic Party landslide of 365 Electoral Votes) dedicates its effort to destroy the Obama/Biden presidency!?!?
King Abdullah II April 24, 2009 Interview
Isabel Kershner N Y Times 4/28/09: Mr. Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister), who took office almost a month ago, has refused to endorse the notion of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel as a solution for the conflict, as many nations urge. But he says Palestinian recognition of Israel as the national state of the Jewish people is crucial for progress in any future talks.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office released a statement a week ago saying that without such recognition, “it will not be possible to advance the diplomatic process and reach a peace settlement.”
Mr. Netanyahu says his government is still formulating its foreign policy, but Palestinian officials are skeptical about his intentions. In Jerusalem on Monday, Saeb Erekat, a senior Abbas aide and veteran negotiator, said the new Israeli government must accept the idea of a “viable and sovereign” Palestinian state and stop all Jewish settlement activity in the West Bank. Instead, Mr. Erekat said, the Israelis are preparing to build in a strategic area in Arab East Jerusalem known as E1.
- DemocracyNow April 28, 2009 -
A new report has determined the Israeli government under Ehud Olmert built or issued bids for some 9,000 settlement homes for Israelis in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. The Israeli watchdog groups Peace Now and Ir Amim urged President Barack Obama to step in quickly and pressure Israel’s new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to halt further settlement expansion.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights says more than 1,000 Palestinians were killed in 2008 in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, making it the deadliest year since Israel was founded in 1948. A total 860 Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops in Gaza and the West Bank. Another 161 Palestinians were killed in factional fighting.
- An Eminent Voice in the Middle East -
Introduced by David Gregory on General Electric's NBC Universal Meet the Press 4/26/09:
King Abdullah of Jordan spent the last week here in Washington with a full agenda: meeting with the president, the secretary of state, congressional leaders and a full military arrival ceremony at the Pentagon. Before returning to Jordan on Friday, he stopped here at MEET THE PRESS for an exclusive interview.
KING ABDULLAH II: Well, I--from I think day one that I, I, I met him (President Barack Obama), a very impressive man. A lot of depth. A lot of, I think, instinctive understanding of the challenges that the world faces. And obviously I'm here in Washington to talk about relaunching negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, and Israelis and Arabs, and we had a meeting of the minds, very fruitful discussions. And I think he has a clear understanding of, of what the challenges are.
MR. GREGORY: How do you compare him to the president you worked the most with, and that's President Bush?
MR. GREGORY: Speaking about President Bush, last December he spoke about the frustration along the path of his presidency, but also the state of the Middle East as he saw it. This is what he said (AT THE SABAN CENTER).
KING ABDULLAH II: Not at all. What, what, what he's trying to say and, and what I'm trying to say is the challenge that we have in front of American public is connecting the dots. Any crisis that you want to talk about, whether it's al-Qaeda, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, all comes back to the sore, the emotional issue that is Palestine and Jerusalem. Any conflict that you pick in the Middle East today, all roads lead back to Jerusalem is probably be a better way of, of explaining it. So until you deal with the Palestinian issue it is more difficult to deal with al-Qaeda, whether it's Pakistan, all these other problems that you're facing.
KING ABDULLAH II: Well, I mean, you're always going to have extremist elements that are going to be there to, to find a, a, a platform for recruiting. But you can't really take them that seriously when the core issue, the major grievance in the Arab and Muslim world is solved. And so in Arab and Muslim minds, the most emotional aspect is the Palestinian cause and that of Jerusalem. And from there leads all the other problems.
MR. GREGORY: As you know, the president is expected to speak to the world, to the Muslim world, to the Arab world from an Arab capital some time during the first 100 days. It may slip and go beyond the first 100 days. What do you think his message should be?
KING ABDULLAH II: Well, his message has been consistent in that he is showing that America has an outreach to the Muslim and Arab world. We in, in Jordan initiated the, the Amman Message, which is an outreach of--well, actually inter-Islam to begin with, but also to Christians, Muslims and other--Jews and other faiths in the world. But I think it's never done at the level--it never has been done at the level of the president of the United States. You have the most powerful, most capable country in the world, and the message of outreach from Obama has resonated extremely well in the Arab world. But again, that's only delaying the, the, the confrontation or the, the conflict unless we solve the core issue.
MR. GREGORY: Hm.
KING ABDULLAH II: And I--every time you come up and show me an example of a, of a problem, I'm going to point you back towards the Palestinians and Jerusalem.
MR. GREGORY: What's the image of the United States in the Middle East today?
KING ABDULLAH II: Fantastic.
MR. GREGORY: Really?
KING ABDULLAH II: I, I, I, I, I want to say that I have been following, by chance, President Obama around the world. I was in England a, a day or two behind him, I was in the Czech Republic. I just come from Japan on the way here to Washington. Wherever you go, and all the leaders that I've spoken to the--in the Middle East, this president provides hope. Now, there was tremendous sympathy internationally for the United States and anger after 9/11, but today there's a collective hope that there's a new America. And a new America means new values for, for the world. What everybody believed America to stand for is what I think Obama encompasses. But how long is that goodwill going to last? And that's some of the challenges that you have.
MR. GREGORY: The new prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been very clear, and he agrees with the United States in this regard, and that is that Iran is pursuing a nuclear program, they believe. And this is what Prime Minister Netanyahu said to Jeff Goldberg in an interview of The Atlantic magazine. He said: "The Iranian nuclear challenge represents a `hinge of history' and added that `Western civilization' will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons. ... `You don't want a messianic apocalyptic cult,'" he said, "`controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.'" Do you see it that way?
KING ABDULLAH II: Well, again, let me go back to saying I think that the challenge we have here in America of connecting the dots. If you have an issue that the threat that Iran poses to Israel, which is what Netanyahu was saying, the best way of solving that problem is solving the core issue, which is the Palestinian problem and that of Jerusalem. Because that regime goes to their people to say that the reason why we have nuclear weapons, the reason that we need to, to challenge Israel is, is because of the suffering of the Palestinians and the occupation of Jerusalem.
MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.
KING ABDULLAH II: I go back to--if we, if we start solving this Israeli-Palestinian problem, it allows us to get Arabs and Muslims to the, to the negotiating table with the, with the Israelis, then there's not a problem anymore.
MR. GREGORY: Do you think a nuclear program in Iran is inevitable?
KING ABDULLAH II: There's more of an incentive for the Iranians to continue down that path when there's an argument that they want to use in front of their people that Palestinians are under occupation. I would imagine that when it comes to an economy that is suffering, like many economies are suffering around the world, a nuclear military program is extremely expensive. And if you've solved the core issue in the Middle East, I think a lot of leaders will be sort of checking their calculators to see whether it's worth to go down the military nuclear road.
MR. GREGORY: And what do you think is the best way for the United States to pursue or to persuade Iran to back away from a nuclear program?
KING ABDULLAH II: Solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
MR. GREGORY: That's it?
KING ABDULLAH II: That allows us to then solve the Israeli-Arab-Muslim problem.
MR. GREGORY: Right.
KING ABDULLAH II: There's 57 nations in the world, a third of the United Nations, that don't recognize Israeli today. So what we're doing is saying 57 nations, Iran has signed this document, believe it or not, that is saying, "Look, Israel, if you solve the Palestinian problem, if you allow us to solve the problems of Jerusalem, we all want to have peace with you."
MR. GREGORY: Do you think Iran fears an attack from Israel, fears an attack from the United States?
KING ABDULLAH II: I think all of us consider that, that--no, I think not from the United States. But the, the rogue question would be what Israel would do. And therefore, I think it is an imperative over the next month or two to start negotiations, because I think any military strike against Iraq--Iran would be extremely counterproductive and I, I don't see the outcome of that. OK, you hit Iran. What happens then? And it's the, the not knowing I think creates a lot of fears with all of us around the world.
KING ABDULLAH II: Well, what, what I'm trying to do with this book is to explain the dynamics have changed in the Middle East, and really this is our last best chance. What my late father was saying is that then there was a major opportunity slipping past. And I think 40 years later how many wars, how much death and destruction, how many Israelis, Arabs and Muslims have lost their lives. Are we prepared to go another decade? And believe you me, if we do not solve the problem today of the Israelis and Palestinians, it's only going to be a matter of time of another conflict.
KING ABDULLAH II: And I had come here to the United States to predict the war in Lebanon (Bush/Cheney/McCain in Washington) several months before, I came to predict that...(unintelligible)...was going to happen, although it took me by surprise by being two months earlier. I thought it was going to happen by the time Obama came into office. And in the next 18 months, if we don't move the process forward and bring people to the negotiation table, there will be another conflict between Israel and another protagonist. And how many people have to continue to lose their lives? And so the message of the book is basically say this is our last chance, because geographically the future of a Palestinian state is under fire. And we're now arriving at the crossroads that if we do not have a negotiator separate from Israelis and Palestinians, then there may never be a chance. So Israel has to decide, does it want to make a relationship with 57 nations or does it want to stay Fortress Israel? And how does that hurt all of us?
KING ABDULLAH II: The only way that we're going to be able to solve this problem--you--if it, if it's left to the players, the Israelis and Palestinians by themselves, we're not going to get anywhere. It can only happen if there is an American umbrella with a determined American president that is going to get the Israelis and Palestinians to sit on the table, because both sides historically have always come an excuse why not to go the last mile. And I believe that Obama understands how much this resonates. For the first time, I think Americans can clearly say that a two-state solution is in the vital national interests of the United States.
MR. GREGORY: I don't want to have you go without asking you about the fragile situation in Pakistan. The United States, this administration has said Pakistan is not doing enough to stand up to the Taliban in that northwest frontier. How concerned are you?
KING ABDULLAH II: I think Pakistan should be of tremendous concern to, to, to all of us, and these are one of a multitude of, of, of discussions that we had with the president. And again, I think that as you move towards Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation I hope in the next month or two, Arab and Muslim countries will be doing more to assist coalition forces, assist the Pakistanis in being able to deal with that threat. But people are looking for a signal of the United States. And I know that President Obama is waiting until Prime Minister Netanyahu comes here and listens to what he has to say. But if right after that visit there's not a clear understanding of how America is going to weigh in on these problems, then I think the goodwill of the United States will disappear and I think that people will start cutting their own deals.
Mr. Gregory: Coming next, insights and analysis on President Obama's first 100 days in office. Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham after this brief station break. [And not one word from either Gregory, or Goodwin, or Meacham on the Monumental just concluded interview with Jordan's King Abdullah II!
A Powerful Response To What Follows -
- Confronting the Truth -
To the Editor:
“Reclaiming America’s Soul,” by Paul Krugman (column, April 24), has powerfully answered President Obama’s political cliché that we must “move on” and not look back in dealing with the shocking conduct and crimes the government has committed on behalf of every American citizen.
I agree with the president and Mr. Krugman that our future is indeed at stake, but the country cannot reclaim its historic ideals of freedom and the rule of law until it addresses and confronts the truth of what has happened -- often concealed until it is too late by contemporary politics and passions.
It is all about looking forward with a cleansed conscience, as Mr. Krugman so eloquently argues, whatever the cost in time and energy. - William Howard Adams, Shenandoah Junction, W.Va. 4/24/09
- Reclaiming America's Soul -
Paul Krugman: “Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” So declared President Obama, after his commendable decision to release the legal memos that his predecessor used to justify torture. Some people in the political and media establishments have echoed his position. We need to look forward, not backward, they say. No prosecutions, please; no investigations; we’re just too busy.
And there are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?
No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.
And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.
What about the argument that investigating the Bush administration’s abuses will impede efforts to deal with the crises of today? Even if that were true -- even if truth and justice came at a high price -- that would arguably be a price we must pay: laws aren’t supposed to be enforced only when convenient. But is there any real reason to believe that the nation would pay a high price for accountability?
For example, would investigating the crimes of the Bush era really divert time and energy needed elsewhere? Let’s be concrete: whose time and energy are we talking about?
Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job -- which he’s supposed to do in any case -- and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.
I don’t know about you, but I think America is capable of uncovering the truth and enforcing the law even while it goes about its other business.
Still, you might argue -- and many do -- that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda.
But the answer to that is, what political consensus? There are still, alas, a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers. But these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block President Obama’s attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. The president cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any.
That said, there are a lot of people in Washington who weren’t allied with the torturers but would nonetheless rather not revisit what happened in the Bush years.
Some of them probably just don’t want an ugly scene; my guess is that the president, who clearly prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is in that group. But the ugliness is already there, and pretending it isn’t won’t make it go away.
Others, I suspect, would rather not revisit those years because they don’t want to be reminded of their own sins of omission.
- Why We Can't Let Their Abuses Slide! -
For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, MISLED THE NATION INTO A WAR THEY WANTED TO FIGHT AND, PROBABLY, TORTURED PEOPLE IN THE ATTEMPT TO EXTRACT “CONFESSIONS” THAT WOULD JUSTIFY THAT WAR. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.
It’s hard, then, not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn’t, now declare that we should forget the whole era -- for the sake of the country, of course.
Sorry, but what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions -- not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.
We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, it’s about looking forward -- because IT’S ABOUT RECLAIMING AMERICA’S SOUL. - Paul Krugman 4/24/09
To the Editor:
“Any Indictment of Interrogation Policy Makers Would Face Several Hurdles” (news article, April 23) reports that A LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA FROM SENATORS JOHN MCCAIN, LINDSEY GRAHAM AND JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN discourages the prosecution of former government lawyers who gave deeply flawed advice to the Bush administration.
You quote the letter as saying, “Moving in such a direction would have a deeply chilling effect on the ability of lawyers in any administration to provide their client -- the U.S. government -- with their best legal advice.”
That seems counterintuitive. Would not such prosecutions ensure that in the future lawyers did give their best advice, not legal fictions that served the whims and wishes of their client, the United States government (under Bush/Cheney/McCain and Lieberman!)? - Pete Bauer, South Bend 4/23/09
The writer is a former United States Army interrogator.
Remember. When Bush/Cheney, with the solid support of McCain, attacked and invaded Iraq in March of 2003, Saddam was totally isolated, under 24/7 lockdown on the ground and in the air, and would have collapsed within two years - and we would have a healthy and able armed forces and a treasury fiscally sound.
But Jewish America had intervened, directly in 1996 in Israel following the Nov. '95 assassination of the peace-seeking Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (assassinated by a Yigal Amir, an acolyte of the "new" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) and, more significantly, indirectly in the 2000 American presidential election in the guise of the Republican Party, which then placed in the White House perhaps the worst administration in our nation's history, in which the Israeli component, at the very beginning, brazenly flaunted their success and position [Ariel Sharon was "elected" Prime Minister of Israel February 6, 2001, the year following his provocative 2000 "visit" (accompanied by armed Israeli Special Forces) to Islam's most sacred site in all of Palestine, The Dome of the Rock]. It seemed we would soon see the Star of David flying above the Capitol. Also, in the process, Bush/Cheney/McCain, so fixated with the Israelis on invading Iraq that all ignored (including the Jewish American FBI chief Louis Freeh!) Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda despite numerous warnings from inside the Clinton administration, which had been Louis Freeh's target (read Sidney Blumenthaul's The Clinton Wars)! But Israel and AIPAC had another target - The Pentagon - in their sights. Thus the trio of Richard Perle - Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, among others, infiltrated the Department of Defense and focused not on an enemy of the United States, but on Saddam Hussein, who Israel saw as an obstacle to their control of The Levant. Much of this is included in the singularly informative A Pretext For War by James Bamford, references to which appear frequently throughout GOPBIAS.ORG.
Clearly, the United States and Great Britain have removed the first target of the avaricious Israelis, but we are left with the consequences for costly years to come - and the Israelis have moved on. With their recent "election" of Netanyahu & Lieberman (Avigdor, the nightclub bouncer, not Joe, the Israeli United States Senator) Israel has reached a new pinnacle of intransigence (thoughtful, balanced observers see Israel as a mortal threat to the Middle East), and DemocracyNow is on the story. But first Jim Lehrer gives us the quote of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which stirred the pot in Geneva and riled Israel and their benefactors.
Lehrer (4/20/09): "Ahmadinejad accused Israel of running a repressive, racist regime and he charged the United States and Europe created the Jewish state at the expense of Palestinians".
Ahmadinejad: Following World War II, under the pretext of Jewish suffering, and based on misusing the Holocaust, they resorted to military aggressions and made an entire nation homeless, and sent migrants from Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world and established a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine".
It would seem that President Ahmadinejad, and his translator, may be on to something.
Amy Goodman 4/22/09: "Israel’s new foreign minister is claiming the Obama administration will only pursue peace initiatives with the Palestinians if Israel gives its approval. In his first extensive comments since taking office, Avigdor Lieberman said, “Believe me, America accepts all our decisions.” The Washington Post is reporting the Israeli government is now telling the US it will condition any willingness to enter peace talks with Palestinians on US policy toward Iran. The Israeli government has long advocated military action against Iran.
The developments come as a new poll shows a majority of both Palestinians and Israelis would support a two-state solution. According to the group One Voice, 74 percent of Palestinians and 78 percent of Israelis say they would accept the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Arab East Jerusalem and Gaza alongside Israel. Palestinian leaders, including Hamas, have accepted the two-state solution. Successive Israeli governments have rejected returning Palestinian land and have instead expanded Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank while maintaining the stranglehold over the Gaza Strip."
"The Washington Post is reporting prosecutors are considering dropping charges against two former pro-Israeli government lobbyists accused of violating the Espionage Act. Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, formerly of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, are accused of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defense information to journalists and the Israeli government. The review follows a series of court rulings that prosecutors say could hinder their prospects at winning a trial, including allowing the defense to use classified information and forcing the government to prove the accused knew they would be harming the United States. Prosecutors say the review has nothing to do with the recent controversy surrounding Democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman. It was revealed this week Harman was overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent she would lobby for reducing the espionage charges in return for AIPAC support in her bid to chair the House Intelligence Committee." - Amy Goodman 4/22/09
Here segments of a 4/21/09 Neil MacFarquhar article in the N Y Times:
"President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran on Monday used the platform of a United Nations conference in Geneva on combating racism to disparage Israel as a “cruel and repressive racist regime,” prompting delegates from European nations to desert the hall and earning a rare harsh rebuke from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
As Mr. Ahmadinejad began to speak, two protesters wearing rainbow-hued clown wigs -- their statement on the tenor of the proceedings -- pelted him with red foam noses. Hustled out the door by security agents, they were soon followed by lines of stony-faced diplomats from the 23 European nations attending the conference. They walked out to the sound of some other delegates applauding Mr. Ahmadinejad.
The United States and more than a half-dozen other nations had already boycotted the gathering out of concern that it would focus on maligning Israel rather than on the global problems of discrimination, replaying the disputes that marked the first United Nations conference on combating racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001.
Years of negotiations intended to avoid just such a scenario failed, underscoring the uneasy gap that exists between the rest of the world and the West (ISRAEL) when it comes to certain issues, like whether Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians under occupation belongs at a forum on discrimination and xenophobia.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s speech prompted a chorus of condemnation. Israel recalled its ambassador to Switzerland to protest both the conference and meeting Sunday between the Swiss president, Hans-Rudolf Merz, and Mr. Ahmadinejad.
At the United Nations, Ambassador Alejandro D. Wolff, the deputy permanent representative for the United States, said the Iranians deserved better.
“It shows disregard for the organization to which he is speaking -- the United Nations -- and does a grave injustice to the Iranian nation and the Iranian people,” he said, suggesting that Iranian leaders show “much more measured, moderate, honest and constructive rhetoric when dealing with issues in the region.”
Not everyone at the conference was critical of the speech, which also wandered through topics like the economic collapse and Iraq and Afghanistan.
“If we actually believe in freedom of expression, then he has the right to say what he wants to say,” the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Zamir Akram, told The Associated Press. “There were things in there that a lot of people in the Muslim world would be in agreement with, for example the situation in Palestine, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, even if they don’t agree with the way he said it.” - MacFarquhar 4/22/09
And would that some official, country, group of states (ISRAEL!) pronounce a similar understanding to that stated by the beleaguered President of Iran:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “We will be able to experience peace and brotherhood when we all develop a more tolerant vision and improve our capacity to listen to each other. Please pay attention to this last point. They threaten us with war. The Zionist regime threatens to take military actions against us, again and again. But we do not believe in war. We think the solution to global problems should be based on humanitarian solutions, democratic solutions, based on the free votes of all nations.” - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Our next edit (it-follows), we have the expose' of Alan Greenspan, another Jewish American primarily responsible for this unprecedented global challenge left by Bush/Cheney/McCain for the truly heroic Barack Obama and his teammate Joseph Biden.
The 4/13/09 Newhouse The New Yorker has an interesting item in its opening segment The Talk of the Town by one Lizzie Widdicombe entitled True Believers - Ayn Rand, interesting because it doesn't mention Ayn Rand's real name - Alisa Rosenbaum - and because it says this about "Alan Greenspan, Rand's best-known acolyte" - "he probably stopped a lot of bad things from happening." The gathering of Alisa Rosenbaum/Alan Greenspan admirers agreed.
NOW, THE REST OF THE STORY -
She Saw It Coming
Long before the meltdown, Brooksley Born rang the alarm.
"For Brooksley Born, the temptation to say, 'I told you so' must be very strong indeed.
Born (graduate of Stanford University), ’61, JD ’64, the former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, warned as early as 1997 that unregulated trading of so-called 'over-the-counter' derivatives presented a serious threat to the financial system. In congressional testimony and in private meetings with the Fed chair (Alan Greenspan), Treasury officials and Wall Street regulators, she pushed hard against the prevailing anti-regulation opinion at the time, to no avail.
The market that finally collapsed was built on a complex web of investment contracts known only to the parties involved. There was nowhere near enough capital to back up the debt obligations contained in those contracts, so when housing values caved, they took the hedge funds with them, and the same investments that had helped drive Wall Street’s ascent contributed to its stunning reversal.
Born continued to make her case even after leaving the CFTC in 1999. In an interview in 2003, not long after the collapse of Enron, Born repeated what she had said six years earlier: that the lack of transparency in the 'dark market' was a disaster waiting to happen. By then, epically successful investor Warren Buffett was sounding off as well. In a letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in 2002, Buffett wrote 'derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.' Nobody listened.
This would make Born an interesting person to interview even if the rest of her career had been ordinary. But Born was a legal pioneer before she ever set foot in the CFTC job. In an era when few women were in the law, she rose to partner at a leading Washington, D.C., firm, helped launch public interest advocacy on a range of issues, and inspired a generation of female lawyers.
Now retired, Born had turned down several media requests to talk about her CFTC days in the wake of the meltdown in the financial sector. When I called her to ask if she would agree to be interviewed, she was reticent. Thankfully, she agreed to let us tell her story--all of it, not just the part about trying to save the economy from ruin. Her profile begins on page 40 (by Rick Schmitt).
Born did not need to point fingers--the facts surrounding the debate over regulation and the subsequent tsunami that hit the credit markets make clear who was right and who was wrong.
What struck me most about her story was not that she was prescient about the danger represented by the vast, shadowy derivatives market, but that she was so confident she was right, even though several powerful Washington figures rallied to oppose her. That requires courage, and I would have admired her stubborn conviction even if she had been proved wrong.
After all of the pain this recession has caused, I suspect she wishes she had been."
Kevin Cool
Editor March/April 2009
Stanford magazine
PROPHET and Loss by Rick Schmitt
Shortly after she was named to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 1996, Brooksley E. Born was invited to lunch by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.
The influential Greenspan was an ardent proponent of unfettered markets. Born was a powerful Washington lawyer with a track record for activist causes. Over lunch, in his private dining room at the stately headquarters of the Fed in Washington, Greenspan probed their differences.
“Well, Brooksley, I guess you and I will never agree about fraud,” Born, in a recent interview, remembers Greenspan saying.
“What is there not to agree on?” Born says she replied.
“Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don’t think there is any need for a law against fraud,” she recalls. Greenspan, Born says, believed the market would take care of itself.
For the incoming regulator, the meeting was a wake-up call. “That underscored to me how absolutist Alan was in his opposition to any regulation,” she said in the interview.
Over the next three years, Born, ’61, JD ’64, would learn first-hand the potency of those absolutist views, confronting Greenspan and other powerful figures in the capital over how to regulate Wall Street.
More recently, as analysts sort out the origins of what has become the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Born has emerged as a sort of modern-day Cassandra. Some people believe the debacle could have been averted or muted had Greenspan and others followed her advice.
[ Cassandra - A mythical character, cursed by Apollo so that her prophecies, though true, were fated never to be believed - not unlike the recent revelation that the reckless 1948 Jewish invasion of Palestine is the provenance of the turmoil which threatens the peace of the world, and any "news" that excludes this revelation and, particularly, the involvement of Rosen & Weissman Enhanced!!!, is a distraction and/or a diversion (actually, a criminal deception)!]
As chairperson of the CFTC, Born advocated reining in the huge and growing market for financial derivatives. Derivatives get their name because the value is derived from fluctuations in, for example, interest rates or foreign exchange. They started out as ways for big corporations and banks to manage their risk across a range of investments. One type of derivative--known as a credit-default swap--has been a key contributor to the economy’s recent unraveling.
The swaps were sold as a kind of insurance--the insured paid a “premium” as protection in case the creditor defaulted on the loan, and the insurer agreed to cover the losses in exchange for that premium. The credit-default swap market--estimated at more than $45 trillion--helped fuel the mortgage boom, allowing lenders to spread their risk further and further, thus generating more and more loans. But because the swaps are not regulated, no one ensured that the parties were able to pay what they promised. When housing prices crashed, the loans also went south, and the massive debt obligations in the derivatives contracts wiped out banks unable to cover them.
“History already has shown that Greenspan was wrong about virtually everything, and Brooksley was right,” says Frank Partnoy, a former Wall Street investment banker who is now a professor at the University of San Diego law school. “I think she has been entirely vindicated. . . . If there is one person we should have listened to, it was Brooksley.”
Now the great Paul Krugman exposes this Republican Party which caused so much national havoc, first in the mid-term election of 1994 (review Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars), again in the presidential election of 2000, and most problematic now, as an obstacle to our recovery from the years 2000 through 2008!
"This is a column about Republicans -- and I’m not sure I should even be writing it.
Today’s G.O.P. is, after all, very much a minority party. It retains some limited ability to obstruct the Democrats, but has no ability to make or even significantly shape policy.
Beyond that, Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats.
But here’s the thing: the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans (via Rush Limbaugh) from taking control of both Congress and the White House. And they could return to power if the Democrats stumble. So it behooves us to look closely at the state of what is, after all, one of our nation’s two great political parties.
One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the “tea parties” that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties -- antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution -- have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.
But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.
- A Republican Party That Refuses To Change -
Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.
But the charge of socialism is being thrown around only because “liberal” doesn’t seem to carry the punch it used to. And if you go back just a few years, you find top Republican figures making equally bizarre claims about what liberals were up to. Remember when Karl Rove declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to the 9/11 terrorists?
Then there are the claims made at some recent tea-party events that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in America, which follow on earlier claims that he is a secret Muslim. Crazy stuff -- but nowhere near as crazy as the claims, during the last Democratic administration, that the Clintons were murderers, claims that were supported by a campaign of innuendo on the part of big-league conservative media outlets and figures, especially Rush Limbaugh (Read Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars).
Speaking of Mr. Limbaugh: the most impressive thing about his role right now is the fealty he is able to demand from the rest of the right. The abject apologies he has extracted from Republican politicians who briefly dared to criticize him have been right out of Stalinist show trials. But while it’s new to have a talk-radio host in that role, ferocious party discipline has been the norm since the 1990s, when Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, became known as “The Hammer” in part because of the way he took political retribution on opponents.
Going back to those tea parties, Mr. DeLay, a fierce opponent of the theory of evolution -- he famously suggested that the teaching of evolution led to the Columbine school massacre -- also foreshadowed the denunciations of evolution that have emerged at some of the parties.
Last but not least: it turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires (Sheldon G. Adelson!). And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.
But that’s nothing new, and AstroTurf has worked well for Republicans in the past. The most notable example was the “spontaneous” riot back in 2000 -- actually orchestrated by G.O.P. strategists -- that shut down the presidential vote recount in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.
So what’s the implication of the fact that Republicans are refusing to grow up, the fact that they are still behaving the same way they did when history seemed to be on their side? I’d say that it’s good for Democrats, at least in the short run -- but it’s bad for the country.
For now, the Obama administration gains a substantial advantage from the fact that it has no credible opposition, especially on economic policy, where the Republicans seem particularly clueless.
But as I said, the G.O.P. remains one of America’s great parties, and events could still put that party back in power. We can only hope that Republicans have moved on by the time that happens." - Paul Krugman 4/13/09
To the Editor:
Paul Krugman hits the nail right on the head in “Tea Parties Forever” (column, April 13). The radical assault on reason and the violent rhetoric coming from the likes of the right’s mouthpieces are nothing new.
They learned long ago that they could pretend to be the party of “Real America” as long as they portrayed themselves as cowboys, and as long as their entertainers in the media -- often employed by giant corporations like News Corporation -- cast themselves as outside the “mainstream media.”
These tea parties will be attended by Americans casting either phony outrage or ignorant outrage. Either way, it represents a visual devolution in the American political scene, one most Americans will rightly express an embarrassed horror toward. Randy LoBasso, Philadelphia, 4/13/2009
BY OUR OBSEQUIOUS AND/OR SUBVERSIVE MEDIA/PRESS -
Dealing With Iran's Nuclear Ambitions
To the Editor:
Re “Realpolitik for Iran,” by Roger Cohen (column, April 13):
As Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, correctly observes, “You can’t have nine countries telling the likes of Iran nuclear weapons are dangerous for you, but we need to go on refining our arsenals.”
For President Obama to change the nuclear culture, he must take on those who focus only on the possible proliferation to North Korea and Iran while ignoring the ever-increasing danger of the already-nuclear Israel, Pakistan, India, China, France, Britain, Russia and the United States. He must also counter those who excuse the United States, which has more nuclear weapons than any country except Russia, started the nuclear arms race and is the only country to have used the weapon against another nation.
For Mr. Obama to truly change the dynamic and remove the incentive for countries like Iran to become nuclear states, he must move the nuclear powers toward real nuclear disarmament. He must begin by debunking those who for 60 years have said it’s O.K. for the United States and a select few others to have these weapons, but the rest pose a danger.
If Mr. Obama merely offers more plans to talk, proposes negligible reductions in outdated weapons systems while newer, more efficient systems are put in place, and looks the other way while countries like Israel, Pakistan and India arm themselves, that is not real change -- nor will such steps reduce the likelihood of nuclear disaster. - John E. Colbert, Chicago, April 13, 2009
To the Editor:
Roger Cohen provides a welcome breath of fresh air in an overheated debate. He draws a very important distinction between actual and virtual nuclear powers, noting that Iran is determined to have the technology though not necessarily the weapons.
By so doing, Mr. Cohen shows yet again the ability to understand where countries are coming from even if he doesn’t buy their ideology or lifestyle.
Iran lives in a neighborhood with three actual nuclear powers -- India, Israel and Pakistan. Approaching it with greater understanding of its actual security concerns is a better way to make sure it doesn’t go for a nuclear weapon, and the wiser path to moving toward a nuclear-free Middle East. - Nadia Hijab, Washington, April 13, 2009
To the Editor:
I agree with Roger Cohen’s thoughtful assessment of the current situation regarding Iran.
To threaten Iran with regime change as the Bush administration did, especially given our military incursion into Iraq to bring about regime change there, and not expect Iran to pursue a nuclear weapon defies reason.
How would we expect our government to react if we were threatened by a foreign power capable of carrying out its threats?
Mr. Cohen concludes his column by stating that President Obama “will have to get tougher with Israel than any U.S. president in recent years.” I would suggest that Mr. Obama will also have to get tougher with our own Congress, which has been too acquiescent when it comes to pressure from those (Israel) whose policies are counterproductive to achieving peace in the Middle East. - John A. Viteritti, Southold, N.Y., April 13, 2009
Following is the narrative of the informed, non-partisan world traveler Rick Steves from his wildly-acclaimed television program on Iran, which illustrates an Iran in direct contrast to that presented the world over by Israel AND made possible by the United States and its AIPAC controlled Congress.
"Hi, I'm Rick Steves--in what just might be the most surprising and fascinating land I've ever visited. We're in Iran--here to learn, to understand, and to make some friends. Thanks for joining us.
Like most Americans, I know almost nothing about Iran. For me, this is a journey of discovery. What are my hopes? To enjoy a rich and fascinating culture, to get to know a nation that's a leader in its corner of the world--and has been for 2500 years, and to better understand the 70 million people who call this place home.
We'll show the splendid monuments of Iran's rich and glorious past, discuss the 20th century story of this perplexing nation, and experience Iranian life today in its giant metropolis, historic capital, and a countryside village... Most important, we'll meet and talk with the people whose government so exasperates America. ... We'll go to Friday prayers in a leading mosque, consider the challenges confronting Iran's youth, enjoy the hospitality of a family dinner and survive the crazy Tehran traffic before experiencing the tranquility of rural life and meeting joyful school kids on a field trip.
Imagine this place at its zenith: the ceremonial headquarters of the Persian Empire. Coming here you have high expectations. Being here, they are exceeded. Iranians visit with a great sense of pride. For an American, It'd be like having Montecello, Cape Canaveral, and Mount Rushmore all rolled into one magnificent sight."
"Gigantic royal tombs, reminiscent of those built for Egyptian pharaohs, are cut into the adjacent mountainside. The scale of Darius and Xerxes' tombs is intended to dwarf the mere mortals viewing them. Each comes with huge carved reliefs displaying their battle prowess. Even today--2500 years after their deaths--they're reminding us of their great power.
As history has taught us, no empire lasts forever. In 333 BC Persepolis was sacked and burned by Alexander the Great--the Macedonian Greek who turned the tide against the Persian Empire. Ending Persian dominance, Alexander spread his Greek culture all the way to India. And Persepolis has been in ruins ever since.
Iran is an ancient and proud land with a rich culture. Traveling here, it felt like a paradox--it's contradictions difficult to understand. While our governments may be at odds, the people we met were consistently curious, generous and friendly.
I found that, like in my country, there's a tension between modern and traditional, liberal and conservative, secular and religious. Maybe we're all just struggling to defend the moral fabric of our respective societies. I've been wondering to what extent the USA/Iran tensions might be explained by caring people on both sides motivated by love and fear. And the flip side of fear is understanding.
[ Mr. Steves' observation that "there are no easy solutions to the problems confronting our two nations" is intriguing. It may well be that GOPBIAS.ORG has a partial answer - a long-needed scaling back of our blind support for Israel. This may be the time.]
I came to Iran a little nervous. I leave impressed more by what we have in common than by our differences. I've over come my fear by getting to know the Iranian people. Granted, there are no easy solutions to the problems confronting our two nations. But surely getting to know this culture is a step in the right direction. I'm Rick Steves. Happy travels...and as they say here, 'peace be upon us.'"
There may be a response unfolding to sixty years of Jewish/Israeli abuse of Palestine, that began in 1948. Associated Press reported April 4 '09 in the N Y Times that the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed a South African judge to lead a high-level mission to investigate allegations of war crimes committed by Israel during its Christmas '08 - January 18 '09 bloodbath in the Gaza Strip. Judge Richard J. Goldstone is, of course, Jewish, but he may be among the few, like Norman Finkelstein, who recognize that the sordid record is clear, that the lies need to be exposed, that they are no longer sustainable.
Glenn Greenwald began the recovery with this statement on Bill Moyers' Journal 4/3/09, with the renowned Amy Goodman at his side -
Glenn Greenwald: Look at our policy toward Israel, and this continuous blind support for whatever the Israeli government does. Something that's about to get even more harmful to our interests now that there's a very right wing extremist party with racist factions within the government in Israel. Polls show that if you ask Americans do you think the U.S. Government should be on the side of Israel, on the side of the Palestinians, or should be even-handed? Seventy percent, seven out of ten, will say that the government should be even-handed in that conflict. And yet, that is an opinion that is virtually never heard. Debates about our policy toward Israel is something that is essentially frozen out.
The next day, 4/4/09, The New York Times printed the OP-ED by George Bisharat, a professor of the revered University of California Hastings College of the Law, Israel on Trial:
Essential questions about the country's actions in the Gaza war.
SAN FRANCISCO -
CHILLING testimony by Israeli soldiers substantiates charges that Israel’s Gaza Strip assault entailed grave violations of international law. The emergence of a predominantly right-wing, nationalist government in Israel suggests that there may be more violations to come. Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians also constituted war crimes, but do not excuse Israel’s transgressions. While Israel disputes some of the soldiers’ accounts, the evidence suggests that Israel committed the following six offenses:
• Violating its duty to protect the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. Despite Israel’s 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza, the territory remains occupied. Israel unleashed military firepower against a people it is legally bound to protect.
• Imposing collective punishment in the form of a blockade, in violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In June 2007, after Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed suffocating restrictions on trade and movement. The blockade -- an act of war in customary international law -- has helped plunge families into poverty, children into malnutrition, and patients denied access to medical treatment into their graves. People in Gaza thus faced Israel’s winter onslaught in particularly weakened conditions.
• Deliberately attacking civilian targets. The laws of war permit attacking a civilian object only when it is making an effective contribution to military action and a definite military advantage is gained by its destruction. Yet an Israeli general, Dan Harel, said, “We are hitting not only terrorists and launchers, but also the whole Hamas government and all its wings.” An Israeli military spokeswoman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, avowed that “anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target.”
Israeli fire destroyed or damaged mosques, hospitals, factories, schools, a key sewage plant, institutions like the parliament, the main ministries, the central prison and police stations, and thousands of houses.
• Willfully killing civilians without military justification. When civilian institutions are struck, civilians -- persons who are not members of the armed forces of a warring party, and are not taking direct part in hostilities -- are killed.
International law authorizes killings of civilians if the objective of the attack is military, and the means are proportional to the advantage gained. Yet proportionality is irrelevant if the targets of attack were not military to begin with. Gaza government employees -- traffic policemen, court clerks, secretaries and others -- are not combatants merely because Israel considers Hamas, the governing party, a terrorist organization. Many countries do not regard violence against foreign military occupation as terrorism.
Of 1,434 Palestinians killed in the Gaza invasion, 960 were civilians, including 121 women and 288 children, according to a United Nations special rapporteur, Richard Falk. Israeli military lawyers instructed army commanders that Palestinians who remained in a targeted building after having been warned to leave were “voluntary human shields,” and thus combatants. Israeli gunners “knocked on roofs” -- that is, fired first at corners of buildings, before hitting more vulnerable points -- to “warn” Palestinian residents to flee.
With nearly all exits from the densely populated Gaza Strip blocked by Israel, and chaos reigning within it, this was a particularly cruel flouting of international law. Willful killings of civilians that are not required by military necessity are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and are considered war crimes under the Nuremberg principles.
• Deliberately employing disproportionate force. Last year, Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, head of Israel’s northern command, speaking on possible future conflicts with neighbors, stated, “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction.” Such a frank admission of illegal intent can constitute evidence in a criminal prosecution.
• Illegal use of weapons, including white phosphorus. Israel was finally forced to admit, after initial denials, that it employed white phosphorous in the Gaza Strip, though Israel defended its use as legal. White phosphorous may be legally used as an obscurant, not as a weapon, as it burns deeply (on human flesh) and is extremely difficult to extinguish.
Israeli political and military personnel who planned, ordered or executed these possible offenses should face criminal prosecution. The appointment of Richard Goldstone, the former war crimes prosecutor from South Africa, to head a fact-finding team into possible war crimes by both parties to the Gaza conflict is an important step in the right direction. The stature of international law is diminished when a nation violates it with impunity. - George Bisharat 4/4/09
To the Editor:
As a single, Canadian-educated Palestinian woman locked inside Gaza, I have very little hope for the future.
Every morning that I awake and find we have electricity, which continues to be only a few days a week, the first thing I do is get on the Internet and scan American newspapers to get a feel if Israel’s closest -- if not sometimes only -- ally is awakening to the crimes against humanity that are being carried out by Israel with American weapons against Palestinians in Gaza.
I must say I was pleasantly surprised to read George Bisharat’s Op-Ed article, which lays out in simple and clear facts what those crimes are. I applaud Mr. Bisharat for writing what most of the world already believes -- that Israel must be stopped.
Maha Mehanna, Al Rimal, Gaza, 4/4/09
The writer is a liaison officer at Handicap International.
To the Editor:
Two phenomena provide the context for the serious allegations by George Bisharat of Israeli war crimes in the Gaza war (and of Hamas war crimes for launching rockets against Israeli civilians): Israel’s settlement building in the occupied territories, and America’s continuous and substantial aid.
In the late 1970s, an extremist, Likud-led coalition began the settlement project to achieve its vision of a “Greater Israel” sovereign over all the Holy Land. This drive effectively negated the possibility of a two-state solution, as evidenced by the huge settlements in the West Bank. It consigned Palestinians to permanent underclass status and thus ensured a dynamic of endless violence.
America’s steadfast political, financial and arms support has enabled Israel to pursue its unique and destabilizing territorial expansion against the opposition of much of the international community.
These concrete exercises of power cannot be denied or dismissed. They have determined the broad course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the last three decades.
The United States has undermined its declared goal of a two-state solution by its decisive material backing of Israel. Israel’s extremists have thus won a signal victory. To believe that negotiations can now achieve a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel is to prefer illusion to reality.
Benjamin Solomon, Evanston, Ill., 4/5/09
To the Editor:
George Bisharat’s April 4 Op-Ed article was a refreshingly clear call for holding the Israeli Army accountable for the crimes that have been documented in Gaza -- a call made in the name of our collective interest as a world facing transnational problems that require international cooperation and therefore a commitment to developing international law.
Emily Crawford, Amman, Jordan, 4/4/09
The writer is the international relations coordinator for the Amman Center for Human Rights Studies.
To the Editor:
The dismissive response by much of the Israeli public to the crimes of the Israel Defense Forces invasion of the Gaza Strip has been appropriately capped by the formation of the Likud coalition that will be Israel’s next government.
It is the government that best expresses the truth of Israel today. The words and program of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman bring to an end the Israeli public relations success in hiding the colonialization process driving Israel’s militarism and ethnic nationalism.
It’s sad for many of us, and tragic for Palestinians, but the sadness and tragedy are nothing new. Only now there should be no doubt even to the casual observer.
Garth Massey, Portland, Ore., 4/4/09
An informed former journalist Alison Weir, executive director of If Americans Knew, is even more thorough in her "The Truth About Israel":
In his op-ed "If there were no Israel" (March 15), Edward Glick asks what the Middle East would look like if Israel had never existed.
Instead of answering this, however, he simply gives his own xenophobic distortion of the region today. Worse still, he doesn't explore how many of the region's real woes are attributable to Israel's violent creation 60 years ago and of its actions since.
This is as though 9/11 attackers had not only destroyed the Twin Towers but had also remained occupying Manhattan, and as though a columnist asked what New York would be like without 9/11 and went on to describe ruins, layers of dust, and traumatized, angry survivors, suggesting that Americans are inherently inferior -- sloppy, lazy, neurotic, violent citizens.
Glick asserts that without Israel "Palestinians would still be unemployed and unemployable." However, in 2007 the World Bank reported that "Palestinian businesses have the craftsmanship, ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit to succeed. They are reliable, committed and hard-working suppliers of high-quality products."
Glick states, "East Jerusalem and the West Bank would be still ruled from Amman," and goes on to claim that "the Gaza Strip would still be ruled from Cairo." However, none of this was the case for pre-Israel Palestine, which had been under the Ottomans for centuries, and then under the British. Jerusalem was undivided, and Muslims, Christians and Jews were living side-by-side without strife.
When Christian denominations could not decide who should hold the keys to Jerusalem's ancient Church of the Holy Sepulchre, they were entrusted to a Muslim family.
Into this multicultural mix came Zionist immigrants with the goal of creating a Jewish-only state -- which meant pushing out the Muslims and Christians who made up 95 percent of the population. As former Time magazine Senior Editor Donald Neff wrote, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "began as a conflict resulting from immigrants struggling to displace the local majority population. All else is derivative from this basic reality."
In Israel's founding war of 1947-49, Zionist forces committed 33 massacres and expelled 800,000 people -- many of these before Arab armies, their combined numbers smaller than Israeli forces, belatedly entered the fray.
Israel refused to allow these refugees to return, appropriating their land and wealth. United Nations analysts estimate that 80 percent of Israel's total area belonged to these refugees, stating that this extremely valuable property was "one of the greatest contributions toward making Israel a viable state."
These now-destitute Palestinian refugees filled the Middle East, forming a desperate, politically destabilizing element in post-colonial nations working to modernize. When they tried to return to their cities and farms, Israel labeled them "infiltrators," shot them and attacked the countries they came from.
Israel, fearing its neighbors might defend Palestinians' rights and wishing to maintain regional hegemony, used a combination of military attacks, divide-and-conquer tactics and great power manipulation to undermine their development. In all of its wars except one, Israel attacked first.
Since it is impossible to know what the Middle East would look like if this violent injustice had not been stabbed into its heart, a more useful effort might be to ponder present possibilities.
What would happen if Americans -- whose $7 million per day to Israel funds Israel's continued, ruthless and systemic violence not only against Muslims but also against descendants of the world's very first Christians -- finally decide to keep our money home? - Alison Weir 4/5/09
GOPBIAS.ORG has coined the phrase ERA - Ethnicity Run Amok - and it was never more evident than with the ABC "selection" of the "Roundtable" on George Stephanopoulos' This Week 4/5/09. Joining GOP heavyweight George Will were (1) Richard Haass, President of the CFR (Council of Foreign Relations, formerly directed by Henry Kissinger), (2) David Frum, the notoriously pro-Israel, anti-Democrat speech writer for George W. Bush, and (3) the notoriously anti-Iran - pro-Israel Martha Raddatz of ABC "News".
What is so manifest in this ABC selection is that the panel's subject was the wars in Iraq (which now has daily car bombings killing scores of people) and Afghanistan, the latter mishandled by the Bush administration in its rush to engage the former in its, i.e. the United States subservience to AIPAC and Israel, and the refusal of ABC to serve the American public interest by exposing AIPAC/Israel's current control of American foreign policy. That Jewish directed domination of our actions abroad (including the defamation of Iran) creates confusion within non-Jewish America. Things don't make sense. Why would Israel who's very existence began sixty years ago with a Jewish attack and invasion of a peaceful Palestine, and Israel still receives today three billion dollar$ a year, more than any other country, while our citizens are denied basic health and education support. It is inexplicable to the American people - and has unexpected consequences -
"Lately I’ve been consuming as much conservative media as possible (interspersed with shots of Pepto-Bismol) to get a better sense of the mind and mood of the right. My read: They’re apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their “leaders” seem to be trying to mold them into militias.
At first, it was entertaining -- just harmless, hotheaded expostulation. Of course, there were the garbled facts, twisted logic and veiled hate speech. But what did I expect, fair and balanced? It was like walking through an ideological house of mirrors. The distortions can be mildly amusing at first, but if I stay too long it makes me sick.
But, it’s not all just harmless talk. For some, their disaffection has hardened into something more dark and dangerous. They’re talking about a revolution.
Talking Up An Armed Revolt!
Some simply lace their unscrupulous screeds with loaded language about the fall of the Republic. We have to “rise up” and “take back our country.” Others have been much more explicit.
For example, Chuck Norris, the preeminent black belt and prospective Red Shirt, wrote earlier this month on the conservative blog WorldNetDaily: “How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?”
Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, imagining herself as some sort of Delacroixian Liberty from the Land of the Lakes, urged her fellow Minnesotans to be “armed and dangerous,” ready to bust caps over cap-and-trade, I presume.
And between his tears, Glenn Beck, the self-professed “rodeo clown,” keeps warning of an impending insurrection by saying that he believes that we are heading for “depression” and “revolution” and then gaming out that revolution on his show last month. “Think the unthinkable” he said. Indeed.
(Rush Limbaugh Is Equally Dangerous!)
All this talk of revolution is revolting, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed.
As the comedian Bill Maher pointed out, strong language can poison weak minds, as it did in the case of Timothy McVeigh. (We sometimes forget that not all dangerous men are trained by Al Qaeda.)
At the same time, the unrelenting meme (alarmist theme) being pushed by the right that Obama will mount an assault on the Second Amendment has helped fuel the panic buying of firearms. According to the F.B.I., there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year. That’s 5.5 million requests altogether over that period; more than the number of people living in Bachmann’s Minnesota.
Coincidence? Maybe. Just posturing? Hopefully. But it all gives me a really bad feeling. (Where’s that Pepto-Bismol?!)" - Charles M. Blow N Y Times 4/4/09
[[ The key occurred the second week in February. On Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday neither the Sulzberger's The New York Times (founded in 1851) nor the Newhouse's venerated The New Yorker mentioned the significance of the date.
Abraham Lincoln was not Jewish and -
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and CHERISH A JUST AND LASTING PEACE AMONG OURSELVES AND WITH ALL NATIONS."
- "a just and lasting peace" within the Middle East has been an alien concept to the Jewish diaspora since the 1948 military attack on Palestine, certainly alien here in the United States and in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The non-publication by the two major Jewish-owned newspaper/periodical information sources in this country of such a compelling occasion, is in stark contrast to Israel's commitment to celebrating the sixth decade of its capture and eventual control of Palestine, which was punctuated by the massacre of Gazans begun after Christmas '08 and continued through January 18, 2009. Interestingly the six decade period may conform to the Israeli flag, the six-pointed Star of David.
As the following material demonstrates, the 1948 Jewish attack on Palestine is the direct cause for the chaos the world is experiencing, and for the sheltering of some causative agents, e.g. George W. Bush (9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan), Alan Greenspan (creation and exploitation of derivatives) and Rosen & Weissman.
George Galloway, standout British Parliamentarian (DemocracyNow.org 4/1/09) summarizes for the world the heinous nature of Israel 12/26/08 - 1/18/09 and today, with respect to the Palestinians, frankly, since 1948!
AMY GOODMAN: A Canadian judge has upheld the Canadian government's decision last month to ban the outspoken British lawmaker George Galloway from entering the country for a speaking tour. The Respect Party leader led a humanitarian aid convoy of over a hundred vehicles to Gaza earlier last month. Dubbed “Viva Palestina”, the convoy brought in clothes, food, toys and medicine.
Canadian officials say they banned Galloway on national security grounds, saying he provided financial support to Hamas, the Palestinian political party which was elected in January 2006 and controls the Gaza Strip. Canada, like the United States, the European Union and Israel, consider Hamas a terrorist organization. Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has said those who support, promote and help terrorist organizations should not visit Canada.
George Galloway addressed his Canadian supporters and detractors through video link from New York on Monday night. He joins us here in the firehouse studio in New York.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Thanks very much.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you're not allowed into Canada.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: No, but I'm touring the United States to big audiences, north, south, east and west. I'm sitting in the British parliament, as I have done for the last twenty-two years. It's a bit odd to be branded a security risk in Canada, which I've toured many times, spoken at meetings in all the major cities there.
AMY GOODMAN: It sounds like, though, you're actually reaching more Canadians than you would have if you had gone into Canada. So, what are you doing?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, the book that's banned is always a bestseller, and the speeches that have been banned are now taking place through the internet, through the ether. And a thousand people turned up at church in Toronto on Monday night to hear me speak, and 500 last night in Mississauga. I'm speaking to Montreal tonight, all from New York. And to--
AMY GOODMAN: By video link?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Yes. And it's good quality, I think, and the sound is good, and people are buying tickets and asking questions. It's not as good as being there in person. But it just shows that it was a foolish move politically, as well as quite a dangerous one. It's a creeping problem, I think, in Canada, that their government is the last bastion of dead-end Bushism in not only North America, maybe in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did you go to Gaza?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Because after twenty-two days, the Palestinian people there were in a desperate situation. We took twenty-four ambulances, a fire engine, trucks full of wheelchairs and medicine and children's clothes and blankets for the 61,000 Palestinian families whose homes have been destroyed. And, of course, when we got there, we have to give them to the authorities there.
As it happens, I'm not a supporter of Hamas. I never have been. But I am a supporter of democracy. And if the Palestinian people elect a government, we have to respect that.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain why they're saying you provide material aid to a terrorist organization.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, is material aid ambulances and medicine and wheelchairs and nappies for children and biscuits for hungry people and tents for homeless people and blankets for them to huddle up in the wintertime under? If that's terrorism, then terrorism no longer has any meaning as a word.
AMY GOODMAN: You almost didn't get into Gaza. You were stopped. Our reporter, producer Anjali Kamat was there in Gaza. They got through, CODEPINK, the delegation. You ultimately did, but you were stopped at the border.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Yes, because we were a convoy of 350 British people, 110 British vehicles. And, of course, the Israelis put tremendous pressure on the Egyptian government as to what can go through the gate at Rafah and what must go through the Israeli-controlled gates.
That's why we're in the bizarre situation. You can take aspirin to the Palestinians through the Egyptian gate, but you can't take food. So you can't feed them, but you can give them an aspirin for the headache that they'll get as a result of being hungry. This is crazy.
This siege has to end. Gaza is like an earthquake has hit it, the difference being, if it had been an earthquake, all the governments of the world would be airlifting the means of life to the victims of that earthquake and beginning to reconstruct it. And that simply isn't happening.
AMY GOODMAN: You were criticized, George Galloway, by some Egyptian activists and groups for coordinating with the Egyptian government in order to secure your entry for the convoy into Gaza. This is Egyptian blogger and activist Hossam el-Hamalawy.
HOSSAM EL-HAMALAWY: To organize a trip supposedly in solidarity with the Palestinians, but you organize it in coordination with the local dictatorial Arab regimes in every single country who are direct participants in the Gaza siege, what this convoy did, that it might have brought aid to help the Palestinians and make them survive for one day, but they gave political capital to the Arab regimes that will allow them to continue the siege over Gaza for the rest of the year.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response, George Galloway, saying it's not only Israel that has a siege--
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, I'm very angry, actually. It's the first time I've seen that and heard that. The best people to ask would, of course, be the Palestinians in Gaza, whether or not our convoy was a good thing, rather than someone in an armchair in Cairo with the luxury of taking that point of view.
Of course, your last two questions are mutually contradictory. You said that we found it difficult to get through, and he's saying that we were collaborating with the dictatorial regime.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, that you then negotiated with Egypt.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Both of those things can't be true. We went through eight borders, 10,000 kilometers, to make the impact of the breaking of the siege. The entire Palestinian population in Gaza cheered us to the echo, and that's what matters to me. You'll always find people, as I say, from armchairs pontificating like that fool that you've just had on. When I think of the blood that we sweat to get there, it makes me very angry indeed, I must say.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is going to solve the issue there? What do you think President Obama should do? And do you think he has to play a special role?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: I think he has to, and I sort of think he will. At the risk of incurring the wrath of other armchair pontificators, I think that Barack Obama, President Obama, knows, because he's a professor, and he sat next to the late great Professor Edward Said. He knows that Palestine is the heart of the matter, that if we don't solve the Palestinian question, there will be no peace in the region, and if there's no peace in the region, there's no peace in the world, and that includes New York City, includes London.
So, he has, I think, to break from business as usual. Israel has elected a couple of monsters, actually. Netanyahu and Lieberman are the closest thing to fascists that the Israeli people have ever chosen. And, you know, we just can't go on doing business as usual with these people. We can't go on giving every dollar, every bullet, every airplane, every missile that's fired at the Palestinians to such people. We have to shift this paradigm. Now, President--
AMY GOODMAN: Does Britain take a different approach?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Not much different. But, of course, given that Britain is playing the role of following the leader in the case of the United States, if President Obama changes tack, no doubt the British will, too, on some things. The British, for example, recently resumed discussion with Hezbollah, still not allowed for US politicians. I think tomorrow they'll do the same for Hamas, because you can't choose other people's representatives for them. You've got to talk to the people that they represent.
The other voluminous evidence gathered follows. ]]
That last item of the title paragraph, "a treasury fiscally sound", would be far more likely, in spite of the costly Bush/Cheney/McCain indeterminate military ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, were it not for the headstrong arrogance of Alan Greenspan's inability to follow the methodology of his more responsible predecessor Paul Volcker and resist his, Greenspan's, demonic drive to honor the author of the fanciful, but deadly "Atlas Shrugged" Alisa Rosenbaum (AKA Ayn Rand). That venomous policy by Greenspan, inspired by his youthful association with Ms. Rand, i.e. "inspired" the introduction and promotion of non-regulated "derivatives" to the markets of the world, which, in combination with Bush's hapless wars against Iraq and Afghanistan should be the focus of every news organization in this country in that this "merger" has brought our United States back to the perilous Great Depression.
[ And here, an entre'e into "a treasury fiscally sound", regarding the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, by David Segal 3/18/09: THE SILENCE OF THE ORACLE - In his annual BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY letter, Warren E. Buffett recently urged investors to pose tough questions at the shareholders meeting in May. Here is one on the mind of some Buffett watchers: When are you going to fix Moody's?
Mr. Buffett, known as the Oracle of Omaha, owns a stake of roughly 20 percent in the MOODY'S Corporation, parent of one of the three rating agencies that grade debt issued by corporations and banks looking to raise money. In recent months, Moody's Investors Service and its rivals, Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings, have been prominent in virtually every account of the What Went Wrong horror story that is the financial crisis.
The agencies put their seals of approval on countless subprime mortgage-related securities now commonly described as toxic. The problem, critics contend, is that the agencies were paid by the corporations whose debt they were rating, earning billions in fees and giving the agencies a financial incentive to slap high marks on securities that did not deserve them. - David Segal N Y Times 3/18/09 ]
Even so, what will not be found in the conventional Media/Press, is what prompted our invasion of Iraq. It was in no way a response to 9/11. In fact, our attack on Iraq was the central theme of George W. Bush's first meeting of the Principals of his administration, i.e. National Security Adviser up through Secretary of State and Vice President, a meeting seven months prior to September 11, 2001. Our invasion of Iraq was an action devised by a collaboration of Israelis following the November 4, 1995 assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister soldier/statesman Yitzhak Rabin, a collaboration with and designed by the Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his Pentagon apparatchiks Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, with the support of various Jewish Americans within various "Defense" boards, men such as Richard Perle [All of this is chronicled in James Bamford's revelatory and striking 2004 bombshell "A Pretext For War: 9/11, Iraq, and the abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies", and was known and supported across the spectrum of Jewish Americans in the Media/Press. The New York Times' enduring hallmark Frank Rich clumsily misstitled it A Pretext Of War and the character on whose Imus In The Morning radio/tv program Rich appeared weekly (CBS' Infinity Radio and NBC's MSNBC) i.e. John Donald Imus Jr., never mentioned Bamford's book but was a strong supporter of the infamous plot from the very beginning, as was the regular Jewish political presence on The Times OP-ED page (today they have two, Brooks and Kristof - Bill Kristol was fired) Bill Safire (aka Safir) who preceded the snide chipmunk David Brooks. Jewish author Philip Roth even timed his release of a reminder of the Holocaust, The Plot Against America, to the publication of A Pretext For War. SupraSardonic? Who knows?]
The cabal was cynically ("showing contempt for accepted standards of honesty and morality") entitled by the conspiratorial Israelis "A Clean Break (a reference to the killing of the peace-seeking Prime Minister Rabin): A New Strategy For Securing The Realm (Israel)", the first step of which was the elimination of Saddam Hussein. And to assure the Israelis that our attack and invasion would take place...two members of AIPAC were enlisted to monitor and forward to Israel U.S. classified material on the specifics and progress of "Shock & Awe" and invasion plans [THIS is what the new Senate Intelligence Committee should be actively and thoroughly investigating. Call the new chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Diane Feinstein at 1-800-828-0498, and refer her to Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman who gathered highly classified information and forwarded same to the Ariel Sharon camp in Israel which has led this conspiracy to, essentially, expropriate the blood and treasure of the United States of America! And the enduring chaos of that Iraq debacle continues today.
Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow 3/10/09: At Least 25 Die in Iraq Bombing. In Iraq, at least twenty-five people died today when a suicide bomber attacked a group of tribal leaders as they left the mayor's office in the town of Abu Ghraib. Police officers, soldiers and journalists were said to among the dead. The next day the ever-present Lisa Mullins also follows-up on NPR's The World (incl WGBH-Boston & PRI, which expresses a decided pro-Israel stance): "A suicide bomber attacked a meeting of Iraqi Army officers (including several Iraqi Army commanders) and tribal chiefs in Western Baghdad (the heart of "the surge" area of Abu Ghraib). At least thirty-three people were killed, more than forty people were wounded (actually, more than sixty were killed in two days of bombings). The BBC's Mike Sargent is in Baghdad. Mr. Sargent: This was a meeting of local politicians, and officials and army officers (including two Iraqi generals) that had gathered for this conference in the Town Hall, and when they came out of the building to a street outside, and also a market, and there a suicide bomber exploded his vest killing a large number of the delegates (Iraqi Army and tribal seniors) including two senior commanders of the Iraqi Army and a number of journalists. Lisa Mullins: and this is just a couple of days since another major attack in Baghdad and in Basra to the south and Mosul in the north."
Were it not that national and international reporting is so skewed to virtually eliminate even the possibility of criticizing Israel both Nina Totenberg AND Sylvia Poggioli would have been all over this story from the very beginning - because it originated over the long 2000-01 New Year's holiday when the Niger embassy in Rome suffered a break-in in which only a few embassy file folders were missing (Pages 299 & 402-03 in James Bamford's 2004 A Pretext For War, the most feared publication by both AIPAC and the Israeli government, matching Norman G. Finkelstein's Massacre in Gaza.)]
The "news" business, and it is a business, is somewhat like its host, non-cable television. Terrific pictures, but with a major fault. They break-up. That's digital. Analog doesn't break-up, but we're discarding it for digital in June. Why? Because it's a fantastic advertising tool. Also, the "news" today, directional and cable, embargoes its two major topics (1) we went to war in Iraq to eliminate what Israel saw as a major threat to its plan to expand its power and footprint in the Middle East---
Roger Cohen has two OP-ED pieces in The New York Times. The first is "WHAT IRAN'S JEWS SAY".
Secondly Mr. Cohen answers, for example, Michael Gerson.
IRAN, JEWS AND PRAGMATISM
"What's required is American pragmatism in return, one that convinces the mullahs that their survival is served by stopping short of a bomb.
That, in turn, will require President Obama to jump over his own bonfire of indignation as the Mideast taboos that just caused the scandalous disqualification of Charles Freeman for a senior intelligence post are shed in the name of a new season of engagement and reason." Roger Cohen 3/16/09
Critically, THE other major topic is the U.S. and World financial "challenge". At the core of this impending disaster, Alan Greenspan's introduction of totally unregulated "derivatives"! And now, the Republican Party is attempting to use this debacle to force on the American people the same policies that brought us to the brink of the abyss. Fortunately the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is no longer Alan Greenspan. His successor, Ben Bernanke, has brought the same effort back to the Fed that Paul Volcker championed twenty years ago. Here's the evidence:
[In other words, Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama and Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, house Republican whip, and Representative John Boehner, Republican of Ohio and Republican house Minority leader, and Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, Minority leader of the Senate, don't know what they're talking about, and are spouting off, like the GOP Guru Rush Limbaugh, to defeat President Obama starting now, so Republicans can once again run the country as they've done this last eight years. Wake up, America!]
An article in the 3/11/09 The New York Times by the great Mark Mazzetti, "Nominee Ends Bid For Key Job In Intelligence" exposes not only the pro-Israel lobby but also the refusal of Jewish American Senators (surely the slippery Joe Lieberman and the dishonest Arlen Specter are the most notorious of this ERA - Ethnicity Run Amok) but even Charles Schumer seems to have lost his balance under Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. Time for the President to exercise his guidance. Mr. Freeman's statements are long overdue.
WASHINGTON - Charles W. Freeman Jr., the Obama administration's choice for a major intelligence post, withdrew his name on Tuesday and blamed pro-Israel lobbying groups, saying they had distorted his record and campaigned against him.
Mr. Freeman had come under sharp criticism for his past statements about Israel as well as for his association with the Saudi and Chinese governments.
Mr. Freeman's withdrawal from consideration as chairman of the National Intelligence Council came just hours after Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, vigorously defended him and said that his comments had been taken out of context.
In a message to colleagues and friends, first posted Tuesday evening on Foreign Policy magazine's Web site, Mr. Freeman blamed pro-Israel groups for the controversy, saying the "tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth."
Joshua Block, a spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group, said Tuesday that his organization had not taken a formal position on Mr. Freeman's selection and had not lobbied Congress members to oppose it (spokespersons for AIPAC can not be believed).
A former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Mr. Freeman had in recent years questioned Washington's steadfast support for Israel. He had also been deputy chief of mission at the American Embassy in Beijing. His critics unearthed past statements that they contended had seemed to support the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Critics in Congress also questioned Mr. Freeman's financial ties to China; he had served for four years on the board of the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation. He also led the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington-based group that receives financial support from the Saudi government.
In the intelligence post, Mr. Freeman would have overseen the production of national intelligence estimates, which represent the consensus of the government's 16 intelligence agencies.
Opposition to Mr. Freeman's appointment had been building on Capitol Hill, and several lawmakers said they had been lobbying the White House to withdraw its support for Mr. Freeman.
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Blair told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Mr. Freeman's strong views and "inventive mind" would be important ingredients in producing sound intelligence assessments rather than "precooked pablum judgments." - Mark Mazzetti 3/11/09
The importance of this appointment registered Friday the 13th of March '09. Judy Woodruff had in the Lehrer NewsHour studio an equally notorious Michael Gerson, George W. Bush's original speech writer, who was sacked when the American people realized they had been conned by the former Yale Rallyboy and his unbelievable phrasemaker Mr. Gerson. The mind boggled when Gerson with a straight face stated that Mr. Freeman was a man who considered the Israel Government and its leadership "conspiratorial" in nature. Since the massacre in Gaza the whole world KNOWS that Israel is "conspiratorial" through and through.
Judy Woodruff: Let me ask you all about something very different and that is the man who had been nominated to head up -- to chair the National Intelligence Council. Charles Freeman withdrew his name this week. There were charges, Michael, or he made charges, essentially, that the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is far too powerful.
Michael Gerson: I think that we were saved, in many ways, from a very scary prospect, to have a man like this who is conspiratorial in his view of the Jewish community that close to a sensitive position. That's a frightening thing. And I'm glad it didn't take place.
Judy Woodruff: Mark?
Mark Shields: I disagree with Michael. I think there's no question Charles Freeman had made statements which gave his critics and his opponents ammunition. But I think that for somebody to express as he did the very factual statement that the oppression and brutalization of the Palestinians was not only not right, but was not in the long-term interest of -- an occupation was not in the long-term interest of the state of Israel or the United States of America was speaking very truthfully. And I think that that -- he was doing a service to both Israel and to America and to peace by so doing.
The Ides of March 2009 can be the spark which begins the process, so desperately needed, to restore an equitable balance of powers lost these sixty years in the Middle East.
3/16/09 - ON TRIP TO GAZA, PARENTS OF SLAIN PEACE ACTIVIST RACHEL CORRIE REMEMBER THEIR DAUGHTER SIX YEARS AFTER HER DEATH (crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer)
- Israeli Troops Shoot US Activist in West Bank
An American activist from Oakland, California was critically injured Friday when Israeli soldiers fired a tear gas canister directly at his head during a weekly nonviolent protest against the wall in the West Bank village of N'alin (The 12-foot high concrete "separation" wall extension being constructed on ARAB land in the Palestinian village of N'alin!). Thirty-seven-year-old Tristan Anderson is the fourth member of the International Solidarity Movement to be critically injured or killed by the Israeli military since 2003.
Jonathan Pollack of the ISM: "He was shot at directly with a tear gas projectile, with an extended range tear gas projectile from about fifty to sixty meters. And the impact caused several condensed fractures to his skull and collapsation of his eye socket. He was operated on in the hospital a few hours later in critical condition, and large portions of his frontal lobe had to be removed, because it was splattered with bone fragments as a result of the impact of the tear gas canister."
During their weekly demonstrations since last April, four unarmed N'alin residents have been killed and over 400 injured by the Israeli Defense Forces.
- European Lawmakers Meet with Hamas Leader in Syria
On Saturday, a European delegation met with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus in the first announced visit of a European delegation to meet with Hamas leaders. Members of the delegation included British Parliamentarian Clare Short.
Clare Short: "We're very clear that to make progress we need to talk to Hamas, because they represent a big proportion of the Palestinian people. So we're trying, by our visit, to bring more and more parliamentarians to open up discussion with Hamas in order to move things forward in the hope that we can, in the end, get a just peace."
- Two Israeli Police Officers Shot Dead in West Bank
Two Israeli police officers were shot dead on Sunday near the settlement of Masu'a in the northern West Bank. An organization calling itself the "Imad Mughniyeh Group" claimed responsibility for the attack. (More than likely this is an action by Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beitemu Party who is now, as the prospective Foreign Minister in Benjamin Netanyahu's prospective cabinet, is claiming an advocacy for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Of all the politicians in Israel none are less likely to support a Palestinian state than Avigdor Lieberman. "Minister" Lieberman prefers a death chamber for Palestinians, as has been the Israeli prison called Gaza.)
- Taliban Bomb Kills Four US Soldiers
In Afghanistan, the Taliban has claimed responsibility for setting a roadside bomb that killed four US soldiers on Sunday. Meanwhile, the mayor of Kandahar survived an assassination attempt Sunday when a remote-controlled bomb was place on a wheelbarrow near his office. The bombing killed one person and injured six others.
3/17/09 - Tristan Anderson Remains in Critical Condition in Israeli Hospital
Hospital officials in Israel say the American activist Tristan Anderson is now semi-conscious after days under full anesthesia. Anderson was critically injured Friday when Israeli soldiers fired a tear gas canister directly at his head during a weekly nonviolent protest against the separation wall in the West Bank village of N'alin. Anderson underwent brain surgery in an Israeli hospital near Tel Aviv on Saturday. Parts of his right frontal lobe were removed. Anderson is now able to lift fingers on one hand in response to a voice command.
- Protesters Condemn Israeli Military for Shooting US Activist
Friends and supporters of Tristan Anderson held a series of protests on Monday. In San Francisco, hundreds of people marched to the the Israeli consulate. Police arrested five activists at the scene. Three protesters were arrested at a demonstration outside the Israeli consulate in Miami, Florida.
- UN Urged to Investigate War Crimes Committed in Gaza
A group of sixteen of the world's leading war crimes investigators and judges have sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calling for the United Nations to launch a full inquiry into war crimes committed during Israel's attack on Gaza. The letter's signatories include Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson. According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 1,434 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli assault, including 960 civilians. Thirteen Israelis died in the war, including three civilians killed by Hamas rockets. When will we, who fund this massacre, condemn such savagery?
- Netanyahu Offers Foreign Ministry Post to Far-Right Politician
In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has formed a pact with far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman in an attempt to a forge a right-wing government in which Lieberman would become Israel's foreign minister. Lieberman has called for laws to require Palestinians living in Israel to swear loyalty to the Jewish state or lose their citizenship. Lieberman has been condemned by many moderate Israeli and Jewish leaders. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, recently described Lieberman's run for president as an "outrageous, abominable, hate-filled campaign, brimming with incitement that, if left unchecked, could lead Israel to the gates of hell."
Ahmed Tibi, one of the few Palestinians in the Israeli Knesset: "This is the compatible of Le Pen and Joerg Haider. When those were elected, the Austrian government was isolated and boycotted mainly by Israel. It is time to call for boycotting the government and mainly boycotting Lieberman himself."
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman. Last week, he rescinded his acceptance to head the National Intelligence Council after an intense lobbying campaign by lawmakers and lobbyists who support Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Freeman has years of diplomatic experience, stints as the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and assistant secretary of defense. He's also known for criticizing the decisive US military, economic and diplomatic support that allows Israel to maintain the occupation. This is an excerpt of an interview that Freeman did on CNN, where he said he was targeted for his opinions.
CHARLES FREEMAN: I don't think that I've been in any respect excessively or unreasonably critical of Israel. I think I have been critical of Israeli policy. And the atmosphere is such in this country now that, whereas Israelis in Israel routinely criticize policies they think may prove to be suicidal for their country, those who criticize the same policies here for the same reasons are subject to political reprisal.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan Cole, can you respond? And what happened, the demise of Chas Freeman?
JUAN COLE: Well, tell me about it. You know, there is a ban on politicians in the United States being critical of Israeli policy. And if you have anything serious to do with the US Congress, in particular, it's not allowed to be critical, and you'll have a lot of enemies who will try to shoot you down, try to get you unelected if you're elected, try to get you unappointed if you're appointed. And it's a concerted effort on the part of a whole range of people. They include evangelical Christians on the right. They include right-wing Zionists in the Jewish community. It's a very odd set of alliances, but it's very effective.
AMY GOODMAN: Who shot Chas Freeman down?
JUAN COLE: Well, personally, I think it was congressional Democrats, who--you know, he was attacked by the neoconservatives, but they're not in power. And I don't think that would have mattered very much. But when people like Chuck Schumer [Puppet of Rahm "Emmanuel" (Jesus Christ?)?] --
AMY GOODMAN: The senator from New York.
JUAN COLE: --the senator from New York, began attacking Chas Freeman, and I think Nancy Pelosi had lunch with Freeman and--or, I'm sorry, with General Jones and said, "You know, you're going to have to defend this man." He was going to write the National Intelligence Estimates, or he was going to preside over the writing of the National Intelligence Estimates. Those National Intelligence Estimates have not been supportive of the Israeli line that Iran is an existential threat to Israel. They haven't been able to find any evidence of an Iranian weapons program. And so, I think the Israel lobbies are very concerned to have someone like Freeman there, who also wouldn't be sympathetic to the Israeli hard line.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, who specifically would you say was most responsible, in terms of the lobbies? And how upfront were they? As you write, lobbyists like to do things behind the scenes. They had to get a little in front of the scenes this time.
JUAN COLE: Well, I just think that, you know, if he's going to--he was going to be the one who had to go up to the Hill and defend the National Intelligence Estimates to Congress, and if there's a substantial bloc in Congress that is very suspicious of him, to begin with, who just wouldn't accept anything that he had to say on face value, then it is going to make trouble for the sixteen intelligence agencies whose intelligence is being reported. So I think he just felt that he would be undermined.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about Israel's line on Iran. What about the politics in Israel? In our headlines today, reading that Netanyahu has formed a pact with the far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman, an attempt to form a right-wing government in which Lieberman would become Israel's foreign minister. He's called for laws to require Palestinians living in Israel to swear loyalty to the Jewish state.
JUAN COLE: He's called for laws for Israelis, Israeli citizens, to have a loyalty test. These are--
AMY GOODMAN: Not singling out Israeli Arabs?
JUAN COLE: They're singling out Israeli Arabs. What I'm saying is that you said "Palestinians." I just want to make clear, these are not Palestinians on the West Bank who are not Israeli citizens. Or this is--he wants a loyalty test. This is--he's a racist, and this is a kind of Israeli McCarthyism. And it's unacceptable. And the Israeli government should be told, it's unacceptable to have someone with the views of Avigdor Lieberman in the government. It's unacceptable. The rest of the international community have to give this message to Netanyahu. You know, when you had neo-fascists arise in places like Austria, there was a strong message sent by the European community: this is not acceptable. The same thing has to be done with the Israeli right.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what effect did that have? And what effect do you think it would have here?
JUAN COLE: Well, I think that it marginalized the Austrian right, the Austrian far right. And I think that the same thing has to be done with the Israeli far right. They can't be given a pass on these things.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, the title of your book, Engaging the Muslim World--how do you think the US should do that, President Obama should do that?
JUAN COLE: Well, of course, in each case, it's somewhat different. But the main thing is that the Bush administration began by talking about crusades. It invaded two Muslim countries. It rampaged around the region, causing a lot of trouble. And it's not necessary. You know, it's an easy way to nail down certain kinds of resources, if that's what you want, but it made for bad relations with the Middle East in so many ways.
And if the United States, as I said, you know, is going to need the Muslim world more and more in the coming decades, the necessity is to use American soft power, to engage people diplomatically; if we have a dispute with them, to find a way to resolve it without arms and to go forward, you know, treating people with respect and with decency and with diplomacy. And people say, "Well, that's a trite message." Well, it hasn't been being done. You know, it can't be trite if it's not the status quo. It would be a revolution if we did this.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much, Juan Cole for joining us. Juan Cole is a historian and blogger. He's a professor of history at University of Michigan. Actually, I'll be going to Michigan this Friday night, hope to see people in Grand Rapids. Juan Cole is also the blogger who does "Informed Comment," a very popular blog online. His latest book is called Engaging the Muslim World.
Such is the power of the Jewish Lobby. With the notable exception of GOPBIAS.ORG, it is now difficult to gain critical information on any major issue regarding the Obama administration vis-a-vis the terror of the Middle East, Israel. On occasion, The New York Times will publish, in some form, critical information regarding a critical issue.
To the Editor:
'Iran Has a Third More Enriched Uranium Than Thought, Inspectors Say' (news article, Feb. 20) may leave the impression that United Nations officials said that Iran deliberately understated the amount of uranium it has enriched. In fact, the latest International Atomic Energy Agency report attributes the understatement to normal 'measurement uncertainties.' This is not uncommon in similar situations.
The same I.A.E.A. report confirms that all of Iran's enrichment-related activities 'remain under agency containment and surveillance' and that Iran has fulfilled its obligations to provide updated design information and to allow environmental samplings at its enrichment plants. The agency has determined that 'the plants have been operating as declared.'
At no point does this or any other I.A.E.A. report on Iran make any correlation between Iran's uranium-enrichment activities and nuclear bomb-making. The hypothesis on the part of some pundits that Iran's low-enriched uranium can have alternative applications is belied by the scope of the I.A.E.A. inspection regime, including the extensive use of surveillance cameras, as part of a whole range of objective guarantees regarding the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear program. In addition, the I.A.E.A. has confirmed the absence of any evidence of illicit diversion.
M. A. Mohammadi
Press Counselor
Mission of Iran to the United Nations
New York, Feb. 23, 2009
A 2/25/09 federal appeals court ruling demonstrates that the power of the Israeli Lobby has also compromised to the highest level, our judicial system -
In GOPBias.com we carried an article on this case which was numbered 1:05CR225 in the Federal District Court, but that case has become #08-4358 in the Court of Appeals. Now, according to the 2/25/09 article in the NY Times this case is "involved in only the kind of free trade in information that is a regular and protected part of policy making." The three judges who have made this recent ruling are Robert King, Roger Gregory and Dennis Shedd. The final paragraph by Mr. Lewis is as follows: "Peter Carr, a spokesman for the United States attorney's office in Alexandria, VA., which is handling the case, said, 'we are reviewing the decision and will respond in court'."
Here a reference from 2007 to this significant case - "An additional Jewish American factor is AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the lobby extraordinaire, the subject of an obscure Philip Shenon piece, on a formerly untouchable subject, in the 11/3/07 NY Times (A-14) which relates the efforts of Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman (US vs Steven Rosen & Keith Weissman case #1:05CR225 Federal District Court Alexandria, Va.) to call Condoleezza Rice and others, including Paul Wolfowitz, to substantiate Rosen/Weissman claims that their secret contacts with the State of Israel, relating classified information, were the norm this last ten years."
The current article - "A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (The tenor of the N Y Times 2/25/09 article is far more benign than the proven activities of Messrs. Rosen & Weissman.), based in Richmond, Va., ruled against the government and in favor of the defendants, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, whose trial is now scheduled for April. The appeals court also refused to entertain the government's objections to a series of formidable hurdles to a conviction put in place by the trial judge." - Neil A. Lewis N Y Times 2/25/09
All this Media/Press attention in April '09 - truly April FOOLS - on the CIA, torture memos, etc., while the story of our times is in view on the Front Page, above the fold, of the 4/21/09 The New York Times - LAWMAKER IS SAID TO HAVE AGREED TO AID LOBBYISTS. We had callers in recent months dialing the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Diane Feinstein, asking when the committee would investigate Rosen & Weissman. Perhaps the brave souls who generated this story - an expose' of an integral cog in The Israel-driven Fabrication - that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program (they are now using the same scam to generate hostility against Iran) and, therefore the Brits and ourselves were duty-bound to eliminate him - perhaps these souls will enable us FINALLY to redress the harm which the brutal and insatiable Israelis, and their supporters like AIPAC, have wrought upon this world, since 1948!
by Neil A. Lewis and Mark Mazzetti
WASHINGTON -
One of the leading House Democrats on intelligence matters was overheard on telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency agreeing to seek lenient treatment from the Bush administration for two pro-Israel lobbyists who were under investigation for espionage, current and former government officials say.
The lawmaker, Representative Jane Harman of California, became the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee after the 2002 election and had ambitions to be its chairwoman when the party gained control of the House in 2006. One official who has seen transcripts of several wiretapped calls said she appeared to agree to intercede in exchange for help in persuading party leaders to give her the powerful post.
One of the very few members of Congress with broad access to the most sensitive intelligence information, including aspects of the Bush administration’s wiretapping that were disclosed in December 2005, Ms. Harman was inadvertently swept up by N.S.A. eavesdroppers who were listening in on conversations during an investigation, three current or former senior officials said. It is not clear exactly when the wiretaps occurred; they were first reported by Congressional Quarterly on its Web site.
The official with access to the transcripts said someone seeking help for the employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, was recorded asking Ms. Harman, a longtime supporter of its efforts, to intervene with the Justice Department. She responded, the official recounted, by saying she would have more influence with a White House official she did not identify.
In return, the caller promised her that a wealthy California donor -- the media mogul Haim Saban -- would threaten to withhold campaign contributions to Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was expected to become House speaker after the 2006 election, if she did not select Ms. Harman for the intelligence post.
Ms. Harman denied Monday having ever spoken to anyone in the Justice Department about Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, the two former analysts for Aipac. Her office issued a statement saying, “Congresswoman Harman has never contacted the Justice Department about its prosecution of present or former Aipac employees.”
The statement did not, however, address whether Ms. Harman had contacted anyone at the White House or had participated in phone calls in which she was asked to intervene in exchange for help in being named chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee.
David Szady, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former top counterintelligence official who ran the investigation of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman, said in an interview Monday that he was confident Ms. Harman had never intervened. “In all my dealings with her, she was always professional and never tried to intervene or get in the way of any investigation,” Mr. Szady said.
The officials who were familiar with the transcripts, speaking on condition of anonymity because the issue involved intelligence matters, also said they knew of no evidence that Ms. Harman had intervened in the case.
One of the officials said he was familiar with the transcript of “at least one phone call” in which Ms. Harman discussed weighing in with the department on the investigation of the Aipac officials and her possible chairwomanship of the Intelligence Committee. (She did not get the post.) He identified the California donor as Mr. Saban, a vocal supporter of Israel who turned the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers into a global franchise.
The CQ article, citing unnamed present and former national security officials, said a preliminary review was halted by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales because he wanted Ms. Harman’s support in dissuading The New York Times from running an article disclosing a program of wiretapping without warrants conducted by the National Security Agency.
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement Monday that Ms. Harman called Philip Taubman, then the Washington bureau chief of The Times, in October or November of 2004. Mr. Keller said she spoke to Mr. Taubman -- apparently at the request of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the N.S.A. director -- and urged that The Times not publish the article.
“She did not speak to me,” Mr. Keller said, “and I don’t remember her being a significant factor in my decision.”
Shortly before the article was published more than a year later, in December 2005, Mr. Taubman met with a group of Congressional leaders familiar with the eavesdropping program, including Ms. Harman. They all argued that The Times should not publish.
The former officials who spoke to The Times did not know about Mr. Gonzales’s reported role nor about Ms. Harman’s contacts with The Times. Aides to Mr. Gonzales declined to comment.
A spokesman for Mr. Saban did not return telephone calls. A spokesman for Ms. Pelosi said the speaker had no comment.
The possibility that Ms. Harman might be under investigation surfaced in news reports in 2006. The CQ report provided new details, including quotations attributed to the transcripts of one of Ms. Harman’s conversations. Ms. Harman, CQ said, told the person who requested her aid that she would “waddle in” to the matter, “if you think it would make a difference.” Before ending the call, CQ reported, Ms. Harman said, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”
It is unclear when this conversation was supposed to have taken place, but Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were fired from Aipac in March 2005 and indicted a few weeks later. They were charged with violating the World War I-era Espionage Act when they shared with colleagues, journalists and Israeli Embassy officials information about Iran and Iraq they had learned from talking to high-level United States policy makers.
The trial of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman seems on track to begin in June in Alexandria, Va.
[How is it that public well-funded Nova can accept $30 (including $4.95 for shipping & handling) for a DVD of a 2/3/09 "The Spy Factory" program, but a month later, when asked why no delivery, responds that the item is on back/order and/or that deliveries won't begin until April!? Interestingly, "The Spy Factory" is a Bamford follow-up to his A Pretext For War, i.e. The Shadow Factory, a continuation of Mr. Bamford's efforts to expose the Israeli/AIPAC conspiracy which, in the process of plans to eliminate Saddam Hussein, risked a 9/11 of catastrophic proportions beyond comprehension.]
Equally destructive at this time, if not more damaging to our country, are the criminally irresponsible Republicans (It approaches treason - Mr. Obama won the national election Nov. 4th with 365 electoral votes!) who challenge President Obama's truly heroic efforts to free us from the fiscal quagmire the Republican administrations of the last twenty seven years have produced. And this observation. Except for the Media/Press promotion of these GOP hucksters (NBC Universal's David Gregory showcased Joe Scarborough and Mike Murphy on his 3/1/09 Meet the Press and played the video of GOP leader Rush Limbaugh proclaiming that the Republican Party should ensure Mr. Obama's failure, starting now) except for that television network support these Republicans would be laughed off television, if not brought up on charges of treason.
We've used the term "Heroic" referencing President Obama. And that term applies as well to his wife Michelle and her entire family. Look it up! It was the finest segment in weeks on CBS News Sunday Morning March 1, 2009. And the term is also applicable to the recent Nobel recipient, economist Paul Krugman.
Elections have consequences. President Obama's new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years. If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.
The budget will, among other things, come as a huge relief to Democrats who were starting to feel a bit of postpartisan depression. The stimulus bill that Congress passed may have been too weak and too focused on tax cuts. The administration's refusal to get tough on the banks may be deeply disappointing. But fears that Mr. Obama would sacrifice progressive priorities in his budget plans, and satisfy himself with fiddling around the edges of the tax system, have now been banished.
For this budget allocates $634 billion over the next decade for health reform. That's not enough to pay for universal coverage, but it's an impressive start. And Mr. Obama plans to pay for health reform, not just with higher taxes on the affluent, but by putting a halt to the creeping privatization of Medicare, eliminating overpayments to insurance companies.
On another front, it's also heartening to see that the budget projects $645 billion in revenues from the sale of emission allowances. After years of denial and delay by its predecessor, the Obama administration is signaling that it's ready to take on climate change.
And these new priorities are laid out in a document whose clarity and plausibility seem almost incredible to those of us who grew accustomed to reading Bush-era budgets, which insulted our intelligence on every page. This is budgeting we can believe in.
- Obama's Impressive Budget -
Many will ask whether Mr. Obama can actually pull off the deficit reduction he promises. Can he actually reduce the red ink from $1.75 trillion this year to less than a third as much in 2013? Yes, he can.
Right now the deficit is huge thanks to temporary factors (at least we hope they're temporary): a severe economic slump is depressing revenues and large sums have to be allocated both to fiscal stimulus and to financial rescues.
But if and when the crisis passes, the budget picture should improve dramatically. Bear in mind that from 2005 to 2007, that is, in the three years before the crisis, the federal deficit averaged only $243 billion a year. Now, during those years, revenues were inflated, to some degree, by the housing bubble. But it's also true that we were spending more than $100 billion a year in Iraq.
So if Mr. Obama gets us out of Iraq (without bogging us down in an equally expensive Afghan quagmire) and manages to engineer a solid economic recovery -- two big ifs, to be sure -- getting the deficit down to around $500 billion by 2013 shouldn't be at all difficult.
But won't the deficit be swollen by interest on the debt run-up over the next few years? Not as much as you might think. Interest rates on long-term government debt are less than 4 percent, so even a trillion dollars of additional debt adds less than $40 billion a year to future deficits. And those interest costs are fully reflected in the budget documents.
So we have good priorities and plausible projections. What's not to like about this budget? Basically, the long run outlook remains worrying.
According to the Obama administration's budget projections, the ratio of federal debt to G.D.P., a widely used measure of the government's financial position, will soar over the next few years, then more or less stabilize. But this stability will be achieved at a debt-to-G.D.P. ratio of around 60 percent. That wouldn't be an extremely high debt level by international standards, but it would be the deepest in debt America has been since the years immediately following World War II. And it would leave us with considerably reduced room for maneuver if another crisis comes along.
Furthermore, the Obama budget only tells us about the next 10 years. That's an improvement on Bush-era budgets, which looked only 5 years ahead. But America's really big fiscal problems lurk over that budget horizon: sooner or later we're going to have to come to grips with the forces driving up long-run spending -- above all, the ever-rising cost of health care.
And even if fundamental health care reform brings costs under control, I at least find it hard to see how the federal government can meet its long-term obligations without some tax increases on the middle class. Whatever politicians may say now, there's probably a value-added tax in our future.
But I don't blame Mr. Obama for leaving some big questions unanswered in this budget. There's only so much long-run thinking the political system can handle in the midst of a severe crisis; he has probably taken on all he can, for now. And this budget looks very, very good. - Paul Krugman 2/27/09
and Jewish
Today, recognizing the overall failure of "A New Strategy" and the danger posed for the Middle East by a continuation of a blind and bellicose Israel one Roger Cohen is risking the wrath of an array of bellicose Jewish Americans, from Alan Dershowitz to Joe Lieberman, with his 2/23/09 N Y Times OP-ED "What Iran's Jews Say."
Esfahan, Iran - At Palestine Square, opposite a mosque called Al-Aqsa, is a synagogue where Jews of this ancient city gather at dawn. Over the entrance is a banner saying: "Congratulations on the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution from the Jewish community of Esfahan."
The Jews of Iran remove their shoes, wind leather straps around their arms to attach phylacteries and take their places. Soon the sinuous murmur of Hebrew prayer courses through the cluttered synagogue with its lovely rugs and unhappy plants. Soleiman Sedighpoor, an antiques dealer with a store full of treasures, leads the service from a podium under a chandelier.
I'd visited the bright-eyed Sedighpoor, 61, the previous day at his dusty little shop. He'd sold me, with some reluctance, a bracelet of mother-of-pearl adorned with Persian miniatures. "The father buys, the son sells," he muttered, before inviting me to the service.
Accepting, I inquired how he felt about the chants of "Death to Israel" -- "Marg bar Esraeel" -- that punctuate life in Iran.
"Let them say 'Death to Israel,'" he said. "I've been in this store 43 years and never had a problem. I've visited my relatives in Israel, but when I see something like the attack on Gaza, I demonstrate, too, as an Iranian."
The Middle East is an uncomfortable neighborhood for minorities, people whose very existence rebukes warring labels of religious and national identity. Yet perhaps 25,000 Jews live on in Iran, the largest such community, along with Turkey's, in the Muslim Middle East. There are more than a dozen synagogues in Tehran; here in Esfahan a handful caters to about 1,200 Jews, descendants of an almost 3,000-year-old community.
Over the decades since Israel's creation in 1948, and the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the number of Iranian Jews has dwindled from about 100,000. But the exodus has been far less complete than from Arab countries, where some 800,000 Jews resided when modern Israel came into being.
In Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Iraq -- countries where more than 485,000 Jews lived before 1948 -- fewer than 2,000 remain. The Arab Jew has perished. The Persian Jew has fared better.
Of course, Israel's unfinished cycle of wars has been with Arabs, not Persians, a fact that explains some of the discrepancy.
Still a mystery hovers over Iran's Jews. It's important to decide what's more significant: the annihilationist anti-Israel ranting, the Holocaust denial and other Iranian provocations -- or the fact of a Jewish community living, working and worshipping in relative tranquillity.
Perhaps I have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran -- its sophistication and culture -- than all the inflammatory rhetoric.
That may be because I'm a Jew and have seldom been treated with such consistent warmth as in Iran. Or perhaps I was impressed that the fury over Gaza, trumpeted on posters and Iranian TV, never spilled over into insults or violence toward Jews. Or perhaps it's because I'm convinced the "Mad Mullah" caricature of Iran and likening of any compromise with it to Munich 1938 -- a position popular in some American Jewish circles -- is misleading and dangerous.
I know, if many Jews left Iran, it was for a reason. Hostility exists. The trumped-up charges of spying for Israel against a group of Shiraz Jews in 1999 showed the regime at its worst. Jews elect one representative to Parliament, but can vote for a Muslim if they prefer. A Muslim, however, cannot vote for a Jew.
Among minorities, the Bahai -- seven of whom were arrested recently on charges of spying for Israel -- have suffered brutally harsh treatment.
I asked Morris Motamed, once the Jewish member of the Majlis, if he felt he was used, an Iranian quisling. "I don't," he replied. "In fact I feel deep tolerance here toward Jews." He said "Death to Israel" chants bother him, but went on to criticize the "double standards" that allow Israel, Pakistan and India to have a nuclear bomb, but not Iran.
Double standards don't work anymore; the Middle East has become too sophisticated. One way to look at Iran's scurrilous anti-Israel tirades is as a provocation to focus people on Israel's bomb, its 41-year occupation of the West Bank, its Hamas denial, its repetitive use of overwhelming force. Iranian language can be vile, but any Middle East peace -- and engagement with Tehran -- will have to take account of these points.
Green Zoneism -- the basing of Middle Eastern policy on the construction of imaginary worlds -- has led nowhere.
Realism about Iran should take account of Esfehan's ecumenical Palestine Square. At the synagogue, Benhur Shemian, 22, told me Gaza showed Israel's government was "criminal," but still he hoped for peace. At the Al-Aqsa mosque, Monteza Foroughi, 72, pointed to the synagogue and said: "They have their prophet; we have ours. And that's fine." - Roger Cohen 2/23/09
Courtesy Of Norman Finkelstein
[ fully annotated ]
As Israel targeted schools, mosques, hospitals, ambulances, and U.N. sanctuaries, as it slaughtered and incinerated Gaza's defenseless civilian population (one-third of the 1,200 reported casualties were children), Israeli commentators gloated that "Gaza is to Lebanon as the second sitting for an exam is to the first -- a second chance to get it right," and that this time around Israel had "hurled [Gaza] back," not 20 years as it promised to do in Lebanon, but "into the 1940s. Electricity is available only for a few hours a day"; that "Israel regained its deterrence capabilities" because "the war in Gaza has compensated for the shortcomings of the [2006] Second Lebanon War"; and that "There is no doubt that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is upset these days....There will no longer be anyone in the Arab world who can claim that Israel is weak."[20]
New York Times foreign affairs expert Thomas Friedman joined in the chorus of hallelujahs.[21] Israel in fact won the 2006 Lebanon war, according to Friedman, because it had inflicted "substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large," thereby administering an "education" to Hezbollah: fearing the Lebanese people's wrath, Hezbollah would "think three times next time" before defying Israel. He expressed hope that Israel was likewise "trying to ‘educate' Hamas by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population." To justify the targeting of Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure Friedman asserted that Israel had no other option because "Hezbollah created a very ‘flat' military network...deeply embedded in the local towns and villages," and that because "Hezbollah nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians...to restrain Hezbollah in the future."
Leaving aside Friedman's hollow coinages -- what does "flat" mean? -- and leaving aside that he alleged that the killing of civilians was unavoidable but also recommends targeting civilians as a "deterrence" strategy: is it even true that Hezbollah was "embedded in," "nested among," and "intertwined" with the Lebanese civilian population? Here's what Human Rights Watch concluded after an exhaustive investigation: "we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages." And again, "in all but a few of the cases of civilian deaths we investigated, Hezbollah fighters had not mixed with the civilian population or taken other actions to contribute to the targeting of a particular home or vehicle by Israeli forces." Indeed, "Israel's own firing patterns in Lebanon support the conclusion that Hezbollah fired large numbers of its rockets from tobacco fields, banana, olive and citrus groves, and more remote, unpopulated valleys."[22]
A U.S. Army War College study based largely on interviews with Israeli participants in the Lebanon war similarly found that "the key battlefields in the land campaign south of the Litani River were mostly devoid of civilians, and IDF participants consistently report little or no meaningful intermingling of Hezbollah fighters and noncombatants. Nor is there any systematic reporting of Hezbollah using civilians in the combat zone as shields." On a related note, the authors report that "the great majority of Hezbollah's fighters wore uniforms. In fact, their equipment and clothing were remarkably similar to many state militaries' -- desert or green fatigues, helmets, web vests, body armor, dog tags, and rank insignia."[23]
Friedman further asserted that, "rather than confronting Israel's Army head-on," Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel's civilian population to provoke Israeli retaliatory strikes, inevitably killing Lebanese civilians and "inflaming the Arab-Muslim street." Yet, numerous studies have shown,[24] and Israeli officials themselves conceded[25] that, during its guerrilla war against the Israeli occupying army, Hezbollah only targeted Israeli civilians after Israel targeted Lebanese civilians. In conformity with past practice Hezbollah started firing rockets toward Israeli civilian concentrations during the 2006 war only after Israel inflicted heavy casualties on Lebanese civilians, while Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah avowed that it would target Israeli civilians "as long as the enemy undertakes its aggression without limits or red lines."[26]
If Israel targeted the Lebanese civilian population and infrastructure during the 2006 war, it was not because it had no choice, and not because Hezbollah had provoked it, but because terrorizing the civilian population was a relatively cost-free method of "education," much to be preferred over fighting a real foe and suffering heavy casualties, although Hezbollah's unexpectedly fierce resistance prevented Israel from achieving a victory on the battlefield. In the case of Gaza it was able both to "educate" the population and achieve a military victory because -- in the words of Gideon Levy -- the "fighting in Gaza" was
"war deluxe." Compared with previous wars, it is child's play -- pilots bombing unimpeded as if on practice runs, tank and artillery soldiers shelling houses and civilians from their armored vehicles, combat engineering troops destroying entire streets in their ominous protected vehicles without facing serious opposition. A large, broad army is fighting against a helpless population and a weak, ragged organization that has fled the conflict zones and is barely putting up a fight.[27]
The justification put forth by Friedman in the pages of the Times for targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure amounted to apologetics for state terrorism.[28] It might be recalled that although Hitler had stripped Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher of all his political power by 1940, and his newspaper Der Stuermer had a circulation of only some 15,000 during the war, the International Tribunal at Nuremberg nonetheless sentenced him to death for his murderous incitement.
Beyond restoring its deterrence capacity, Israel's main goal in the Gaza slaughter was to fend off the latest threat posed by Palestinian moderation. For the past three decades the international community has consistently supported a settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict that calls for two states based on a full Israeli withdrawal to its June 1967 border, and a "just resolution" of the refugee question based on the right of return and compensation. The vote on the annual U.N. General Assembly resolution, "Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine," supporting these terms for resolving the conflict in 2008 was 164 in favor, 7 against (Israel, United States, Australia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau), and 3 abstentions. At the regional level the Arab League in March 2002 unanimously put forth a peace initiative on this basis, which it has subsequently reaffirmed. In recent times Hamas has repeatedly signaled its own acceptance of such a settlement. For example, in March 2008 Khalid Mishal, head of Hamas's Political Bureau, stated in an interview:
There is an opportunity to deal with this conflict in a manner different than Israel and, behind it, the U.S. is dealing with it today. There is an opportunity to achieve a Palestinian national consensus on a political program based on the 1967 borders, and this is an exceptional circumstance, in which most Palestinian forces, including Hamas, accept a state on the 1967 borders....There is also an Arab consensus on this demand, and this is a historic situation. But no one is taking advantage of this opportunity. No one is moving to cooperate with this opportunity. Even this minimum that has been accepted by the Palestinians and the Arabs has been rejected by Israel and by the U.S.[29]
Israel is fully cognizant that the Hamas Charter is not an insurmountable obstacle to a two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. "[T]he Hamas leadership has recognized that its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future," a former Mossad head recently observed. "[T]hey are ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state in the temporary borders of 1967....They know that the moment a Palestinian state is established with their cooperation, they will be obligated to change the rules of the game: They will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original ideological goals."[30]
In addition, Hamas was "careful to maintain the ceasefire" it entered into with Israel in June 2008, according to an official Israeli publication, despite Israel's reneging on the crucial component of the truce that it ease the economic siege of Gaza. "The lull was sporadically violated by rocket and mortar shell fire, carried out by rogue terrorist organizations," the source continues. "At the same time, the [Hamas] movement tried to enforce the terms of the arrangement on the other terrorist organizations and to prevent them from violating it."[31] Moreover, Hamas was "interested in renewing the relative calm with Israel" (Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin).[32] The Islamic movement could thus be trusted to stand by its word, making it a credible negotiating partner, while its apparent ability to extract concessions from Israel, unlike the hapless Palestinian Authority doing Israel's bidding but getting no returns, enhanced Hamas's stature among Palestinians. For Israel these developments constituted a veritable disaster. It could no longer justify shunning Hamas, and it would be only a matter of time before international pressure in particular from the Europeans would be exerted on it to negotiate. The prospect of an incoming U.S. administration negotiating with Iran and Hamas, and moving closer to the international consensus for settling the Israel-Palestine conflict, which some U.S. policymakers now advocate,[33] would have further highlighted Israel's intransigence. In an alternative scenario, speculated on by Nasrallah, the incoming American administration plans to convene an international peace conference of "Americans, Israelis, Europeans and so-called Arab moderates" to impose a settlement. The one obstacle is "Palestinian resistance and the Hamas government in Gaza," and "getting rid of this stumbling block is...the true goal of the war."[34] In either case, Israel needed to provoke Hamas into breaking the truce, and then radicalize or destroy it, thereby eliminating it as a legitimate negotiating partner. It is not the first time Israel confronted such a diabolical threat -- an Arab League peace initiative, Palestinian support for a two-state settlement and a Palestinian ceasefire -- and not the first time it embarked on provocation and war to overcome it.
In the mid-1970s the PLO mainstream began supporting a two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. In addition, the PLO, headquartered in Lebanon, was strictly adhering to a truce with Israel that had been negotiated in July 1981.[35] In August 1981 Saudi Arabia unveiled, and the Arab League subsequently approved, a peace plan based on the two-state settlement.[36] Israel reacted in September 1981 by stepping up preparations to destroy the PLO.[37] In his analysis of the buildup to the 1982 Lebanon war, Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv reported that Yasser Arafat was contemplating a historic compromise with the "Zionist state," whereas "all Israeli cabinets since 1967" as well as "leading mainstream doves" opposed a Palestinian state. Fearing diplomatic pressures, Israel maneuvered to sabotage the two-state settlement. It conducted punitive military raids "deliberately out of proportion" against "Palestinian and Lebanese civilians" in order to weaken "PLO moderates," strengthen the hand of Arafat's "radical rivals," and guarantee the PLO's "inflexibility." However, Israel eventually had to choose between a pair of stark options: "a political move leading to a historic compromise with the PLO, or preemptive military action against it." To fend off Arafat's "peace offensive" -- Yaniv's telling phrase -- Israel embarked on military action in June 1982. The Israeli invasion "had been preceded by more than a year of effective ceasefire with the PLO," but after murderous Israeli provocations, the last of which left as many as 200 civilians dead (including 60 occupants of a Palestinian children's hospital), the PLO finally retaliated, causing a single Israeli casualty.[38] Although Israel used the PLO's resumption of attacks as the pretext for its invasion, Yaniv concluded that the "raison d'être of the entire operation" was "destroying the PLO as a political force capable of claiming a Palestinian state on the West Bank."[39] It deserves passing notice that in his new history of the "peace process," Martin Indyk, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, provides this capsule summary of the sequence of events just narrated: "In 1982, Arafat's terrorist activities eventually provoked the Israeli government of Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon into a full-scale invasion of Lebanon."[40]
Fast forward to 2008. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni stated in early December 2008 that although Israel wanted to create a temporary period of calm with Hamas, an extended truce "harms the Israeli strategic goal, empowers Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel recognizes the movement."[41] Translation: a protracted ceasefire that enhanced Hamas's credibility would have undermined Israel's strategic goal of retaining control of the West Bank. As far back as March 2007 Israel had decided on attacking Hamas, and only negotiated the June truce because "the Israeli army needed time to prepare."[42] Once all the pieces were in place, Israel only lacked a pretext. On 4 November, while the American media were riveted on election day, Israel broke the ceasefire by killing seven Palestinian militants, on the flimsy excuse that Hamas was digging a tunnel to abduct Israeli soldiers, and knowing full well that its operation would provoke Hamas into hitting back. "Last week's 'ticking tunnel,' dug ostensibly to facilitate the abduction of Israeli soldiers," Haaretz reported in mid-November
was not a clear and present danger: Its existence was always known and its use could have been prevented on the Israeli side, or at least the soldiers stationed beside it removed from harm's way. It is impossible to claim that those who decided to blow up the tunnel were simply being thoughtless. The military establishment was aware of the immediate implications of the measure, as well as of the fact that the policy of "controlled entry" into a narrow area of the Strip leads to the same place: an end to the lull. That is policy -- not a tactical decision by a commander on the ground.[43]
After Hamas predictably resumed its rocket attacks "[i]n retaliation" (Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center),[44] Israel could embark on yet another murderous invasion in order to foil yet another Palestinian peace offensive.
Norman G. Finkelstein
New York City
19 January 2009
* February 12, 2009, was the 200th anniversary of the birth of the 16th President of the United States, the truly unique Abraham Lincoln - "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." But the "Newspaper of Record", the Arthur Ochs "Slap" Sulzberger Jr's The New York Times did not mention, nor comment, in any of its several sections, or in any of its full-page ads the significance of the date of that National Edition 2/12/09, Vol. CLVIII. . . No. 54,582. Nor was the significant date mentioned in the February 9 & 16, 2009 issue of the Newhouse New Yorker! - Mr. Lincoln did not qualify. He was not Jewish. *
A Thom Hartmann who has the 9am to noon (PST) slot on Air America should have made it clear on his February 9, 2009 broadcast that the media is in the bag with John Sidney McCain III as McCain has made it clear that he's leading the conspiracy to destroy President Barack Obama A.S.A.P. to enhance McCain's stature immediately so that, behind the curtain, McCain can lend credence to the apostasy, the bloody canard, that Israel's intentions in recent years have been a legitimate and just peace with the Palestinians (the interview with Israeli citizen/professor Avi Shlaim exposes that fraud). Both McCain and his preferred vice presidential pick in 2008, Joe Lieberman, are the most prominent Israeli hawks (vultures, really) in today's Congress. For that reason the aforementioned Mr. Hartmann excoriated every Republican opposing President Obama's stimulus plan, then excoriated Obama for not making it larger - Hartmann excoriated all EXCEPT John McCain, who Hartmann wants to WIN!...the American Presidency in 2012!
[ Here a victim of Mr. Hartmann's Israel -
Amy Goodman 2/11/09: With 99 percent of the votes counted Wednesday morning in the Israeli election, Tzipi Livni's centrist Kadima Party was in first place with twenty-eight seats, while Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud Party was a close second with twenty-seven seats. They are both claiming victory but would need coalition partners to gather the sixty-one seats needed to form a government in the 120-seat Knesset. For analysis of the election results, we are joined by two guests. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti is an independent Palestinian lawmaker and democracy activist. He joins us from Washington, D.C.
Dr. Mustafa Barghouti: About Mitchell (George J. Mitchell, President Obama's envoy to the Middle East), I think that is a positive--I think the appointment of Senator Mitchell was perceived in the Middle East as a very positive step. I consider it very positive. I know Mitchell. We've met before. I know that his stand on settlements was very clear.
"And now is the change. I think after coming to the area one or two--two or three times more, it will be clear whether he--that the only recommendation can--he should make immediately is to stop settlement activities. And if that does not happen, then, unfortunately, I think the whole area would go into a complete collapse of the peace process.
I think I feel here in Washington some new trends. First of all, there is more sensitivity to the issue of settlements. I think there is more inclination to accept our view, our point of view, that Palestinians are--should be allowed to have a national unity government, and thirdly, that we should allow Palestinian democracy to be revived. You know that Israel has slaughtered the democratic transformation in Palestine by arresting our members of parliament. And if Israel is entitled to democratic elections, then I think we, as Palestinians, are entitled to that.
I believe this is just a beginning. I hope we will go in the right direction. And maybe these results of elections in Israel will show everybody the time has come for a real change in the American policy. Every value that President Obama spoke about--values of respect of human rights, of democracy, of respect for Geneva Convention, avoiding torture, justice, equality, equal opportunity--every value of those are violated by Israel." - Dr. Mustafa Barghouti DemocracyNow 2/11/09]
- Earlier reporting 2/4/09
Israel to Build New West Bank Settlement - "Meanwhile, the Israeli government has announced another new West Bank settlement expansion that will violate the US-backed road map. Israel says it will establish a new settlement to replace a settlers' outpost it hadn't approved. Up to 1,400 housing units will be built under the plan. Last month, the Israeli group Peace Now reported settlement expansion increased nearly 60 percent in 2008."
Clinton Calls for Palestinian State - "At the State Department, Middle East envoy George Mitchell returned from his first trip abroad to announce a follow-up visit later this month.
Middle East envoy George Mitchell: 'The situation is obviously complex and difficult, and there are no easy or risk-free courses of action. But I'm convinced, after a week there, that my original assessment, that with patient, determined and persevering diplomacy, we can help to make a difference and that we can assist those in the region achieve the peace and stability that people on all sides long for.'
Mitchell appeared with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who called for 'an independent and viable' Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Ten years ago, the Clinton administration was forced to distance itself from Clinton when she made similar remarks as First Lady."
Group: DirecTV Rejects Ad Critical of Israeli Occupation - "The satellite network DirecTV is being accused of censorship after reportedly refusing to air a commercial critical of US backing for Israel's attack (an unprecedented bloody, barbarous mechanized ground-air three-week slaughter of Gazan citizens IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY) on the Gaza Strip. The spot was produced by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. It lists the number of Palestinian dead from Israeli attacks and criticizes Israel for blocking aid and supplies. It then calls for cutting US military aid to Israel, concluding, 'President Barack Obama, we need a change of policy toward Israel/ Palestine.' The group says DirecTV abruptly refused to air the ad after having reached an agreement." - DemocracyNow 2/4/09
Human Rights Watch Targeted 2/16/09
Amy Goodman with Kenneth Roth: "And what are you doing on Israel and the Occupied Territories, with the latest (12/26/08 - 1/14/09) assault on Gaza?
I wanted to read you an excerpt of a piece by Mouin Rabbani, who's been very critical of Human Rights Watch in dealing with Israel and Gaza."
Mouin Rabbani: "The Middle East has always been a difficult challenge for Western human rights organizations, particularly those seeking influence or funding in the United States. The pressure to go soft on US allies is in some respects reminiscent of Washington's special pleading for Latin American terror regimes in the 1970s and 1980s (pleadings by Nixon, Reagan & Herbert Walker Bush). In the case of Israel such organizations [also] face a powerful and influential domestic constituency, which often extends to senior echelons of such organizations, for whom forthright condemnation of Israel is anathema."
And then he writes, "In the years since 2000, [Human Rights Watch] pursued a consistent--and consistently effective--formula: criticize Israel, but condemn the Palestinians. Challenge the legality of an Israeli aerial bombardment, preferably in polite, technical terms, and vociferously denounce the Palestinian suicide bomber in unambiguous language--especially when raising questions about the latest Israeli atrocity. In [Human Rights Watch] publications, explicit condemnations and accusations of war crimes were almost wholly monopolized by Palestinians. With Israeli citizenship a seeming precondition for the right to self-defense, the right to resist (for Palestinians) was for all intents and purposes non-existent."
Ms. Goodman Continues 2/17/09 - Israel Seizes 425 Acres in West Bank for New Settlement Homes -
"Israel has seized 425 acres of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank in order to build 2,500 new homes as part of a major expansion of the Efrat settlement. This settlement is particularly sensitive given that it would help complete a ring of hilltop settlements in Efrat that threaten to cut Arab East Jerusalem off from the West Bank and undermine prospects that East Jerusalem could serve as the capital of a Palestinian state."
British Lawmakers Accuse Israel of Committing War Crimes -
"Meanwhile, a team of British lawmakers arrived in Gaza on Monday (2/16/09) to conduct a fact-finding visit following Israel's twenty-two-day attack on Gaza.
British MP Edward Davey: "I think we need to get a clear message to the Israeli government, whoever it turns out to be: this sort of thing is just unacceptable. There has to be an international investigation into this, because it seems to me that war crimes have been committed."
John McCain ran the dirtiest presidential campaign in decades. Was defeated by a landslide 365 electoral votes. But Thom Hartmann wants McCain elected in 2012 because, along with Joe Lieberman, McCain is bellicose Israel's strongest supporter in our Congress, irrespective of the unprecedented savagery displayed by the Israelis in their three week blood bath on the Palestinian citizenry of Gaza.
Mr. Hartmann maintained his theme the following morning 2/10/09 with virtually no mention of President Barack Obama's, again unprecedented, wide-ranging initial Press Conference, and held in the elaborate and ornate East Room of the White House, a fitting venue for this most knowledgeable, straight forward and open exchange between the President and the Press since President Kennedy matched wits and information with the media some forty years ago. The fault that Mr. Hartmann displays is characteristic among those who enjoy unrestricted full daily access to the nation's airwaves (in Mr. Hartmann's case with advertising minutes that far exceed his programming, and the accompanying programming deference to his advertising clients). President Obama's press conference was a stellar give-and-take with the Fourth Estate not seen since JFK, and appropriate for February 9, 2009, three days prior to the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
Regarding Mr. Hartmann's John Sidney McCain III, here's McCain's "leadership" of the GOP Media/Press bias: "Were we to approve this legislation (i.e. made necessary by the eight-year rule of Bush/Cheney & John McCain) we would be committing on coming generations an act of incredible theft!"
Mr. Hartmann should also contemplate the words of Jane Hirschmann, one of the protesters in front of the building in Midtown Manhattan that houses the headquarters of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency -
Jane Hirschmann: "My parents were Holocaust survivors. And when I was a young girl, they taught me that it was important to have a Jewish homeland. But I question all that, because if getting a Jewish homeland means that you have to persecute 750,000 Palestinians and remove them from their land to get the state of Israel and then to continue for sixty years to persecute other people to control their air, their land, their sea, to control their water, to decide where they can go and when they can go, to put up barbed wire and keep them behind a wall, then I don't want my children to grow up learning that because you've been persecuted in the past, you have a right to persecute others. And that's why I'm standing here today as a Jew." - Amy Goodman DemocracyNow 2/13/09
- The Showdown Over The Stimulus -
To the Editor:
Re "Competing Bills on the Stimulus Divide Congress" (front page, Feb. 8):
President Obama is letting bipartisanship stand in the way of what's best for America.
We need a still-larger stimulus package, not one pared down to obtain the votes of a recalcitrant Republican minority that has already spurned cooperation.
We need to increase immediate aid to the unemployed and the poor and to the states, not dilute the stimulus to placate the party whose bankrupt philosophy got us into this mess.
Emphasizing once more the failed conservative theory that tax cuts cure all ills to buy support from Republicans is unnecessary and dangerous.
It is time to reject the antidemocratic notion that a Republican Senate minority has the right to veto legislation that is supported by the president and by a majority of each house of Congress. If we need to get rid of the filibuster to avoid economic collapse, so be it. But compromise with rule-or-ruin Republicans for the sake of "unity" is a sad mistake. - Mitchell Zimmerman, Palo Alto, 2/8/09 N Y Times
To the Editor:
Re "Playing With Fire," by Bob Herbert (column, Feb. 7):
For eight years, Republicans passed every spending bill George W. Bush put forward, creating the biggest deficits in our history and the current state of our economy. I have little doubt that if President Obama's economic recovery plan were for Iraq, Republicans would pass it without flinching because, of course, anyone who balked would be considered antipatriotic.
But now that the "spending" is put forth by a Democratic president for people other than the wealthy, Republicans are playing political Russian roulette with the lives of millions of Americans.
There is something "'stinking up the place," as Senator Lindsey Graham said, but it's not the economic recovery bill. - Michele Yulo, Tucker, Ga., 2/7/09 N Y Times
To the Editor:
The nation handed President Obama a big stick to carry; Congress is giving him a reason to wield it. - Byron Alpers, Shorewood, Wis., 2/9/09 N Y Times
To the Editor:
Re "2nd Pick to Run Commerce Dept. Withdraws Bid" (front page, Feb. 13):
The withdrawal of Senator Judd Gregg from consideration for the post of commerce secretary, coming on the heels of the Republican Party's overwhelming and disciplined rejection of the stimulus package, should serve as a wake-up call for President Obama's strategy of bipartisanship. It should now be clear that, for all its facile appeal, bipartisanship is a mistake for at least three reasons.
First, it assumes a willing partner, and the Republicans have made it clear that their goal is to rapidly derail this presidency rather than help build a new spirit of bipartisanship.
Second, it assumes that the solutions to the nation's ills lie somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum -- between the two parties -- whereas the reality is that our most pressing problems, from providing universal health care and sensible economic regulation, to environmental protection and labor law reform, all require more radical solutions, not weak compromises.
Third, bipartisanship of this kind undermines democracy because it thwarts the will of the people. Republican ideas and political practices were decisively rejected at the polls last November; they should not reappear through the back door.
I voted for Barack Obama and his policy agenda. I thought we won.
Let's see it enacted. - Chris Howell, Oberlin, Ohio 2/13/09, N Y Times 2/17/09
POST INAUGURATION 1/22/09 BULLETIN! GEORGE J. MITCHELL SELECTED AS Special Envoy For Middle East Peace, an early gift from the OBAMA/BIDEN ADMINISTRATION! Background follows, but the reaction from the Leslie Moonves' CBS was as though pre-planned with Bob Simon on 60 MINUTES 1/25/09 in the West Bank with the Jewish "settlers" and in Arab East Jerusalem with an Arab resident whose home is regularly occupied by Israeli soldiers, all of this to demonstrate to CBS's American audience that all of Palestine occupied in June of 1967 (during that war in which Israel conquered the remainder of Palestine that they had not taken in their initial 1948 conquest), that Israeli occupation of all of Palestine is a fait accompli. Couple this with the 1/23-26/09 major world effort to provide funds for the life necessities and reconstruction of Gaza demolished by the Israeli massacre, a broadcast WHICH THE BBC AND MURDOCH'S SKY NEWS REFUSED TO CARRY, and the phrase Jewish Conspiracy comes to mind. Abraham Foxworth and the Anti-Defamation League may scream Anti-Semitism. But the overwhelming evidence substantiates that that worn charge is no longer valid. Read on.
An associated major issue is the collapsing American financial system which eight years of Republican and Conservative rule created. As we write Rush Limbaugh and cohorts John McCain and John Boehner are doing everything they can to reverse the result of the November 4, 2008 presidential election, virtually insuring that this economic disaster will intensify and become even more costly. Country First? Hogwash!
And the effort continues with network Republican bias never more clear than the programming on the crucial Sunday morning February 1, 2009 broadcasts, with General Electric NBC Universal's Meet the Press with David Gregory quoting the Heritage Foundation and featuring Steve Forbes CEO and President of Forbes Magazine, and former John McCain adviser Mark Zandi - and CBS's Bob Schieffer with minority leader Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and David Brooks, two to one against Senator Charles Schumer.
On 2/4/09 CBS's Les Moonves, Katie Couric and Chip Reid cater to loser John McCain, whose chief economic adviser was Texan Phil Gramm who stated that this world economic collapse was imaginary, a "mental" recession, and that we're a nation of "whiners."
- Bad Faith Economics -
As the debate over President Obama's economic stimulus plan gets under way, one thing is certain: many of the plan's opponents aren't arguing in good faith. Conservatives really, really don't want to see a second New Deal, and they certainly don't want to see government activism vindicated. So they are reaching for any stick they can find with which to beat proposals for increased government spending.
Some of these arguments are obvious cheap shots. John Boehner, the House minority leader, has already made headlines with one such shot: looking at an $825 billion plan to rebuild infrastructure, sustain essential services and more, he derided a minor provision that would expand Medicaid family-planning services -- and called it a plan to "spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives."
But the obvious cheap shots don't pose as much danger to the Obama administration's efforts to get a plan through as arguments and assertions that are equally fraudulent but can seem superficially plausible to those who don't know their way around economic concepts and numbers. So as a public service, let me try to debunk some of the major antistimulus arguments that have already surfaced. Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments, write him or her off as a dishonest flack.
First, there's the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.
It's as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)
The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000 -- and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.
Next, write off anyone who asserts that it's always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.
Here's how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets -- and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.
The point is that nobody really believes that a dollar of tax cuts is always better than a dollar of public spending. Meanwhile, it's clear that when it comes to economic stimulus, public spending provides much more bang for the buck than tax cuts -- and therefore costs less per job created (see the previous fraudulent argument) -- because a large fraction of any tax cut will simply be saved.
This suggests that public spending rather than tax cuts should be the core of any stimulus plan. But rather than accept that implication, conservatives take refuge in a nonsensical argument against public spending in general.
Finally, ignore anyone who tries to make something of the fact that the new administration's chief economic adviser has in the past favored monetary policy over fiscal policy as a response to recessions.
It's true that the normal response to recessions is interest-rate cuts from the Fed, not government spending. And that might be the best option right now, if it were available. But it isn't, because we're in a situation not seen since the 1930s: the interest rates the Fed controls are already effectively at zero.
That's why we're talking about large-scale fiscal stimulus: it's what's left in the policy arsenal now that the Fed has shot its bolt. Anyone who cites old arguments against fiscal stimulus without mentioning that either doesn't know much about the subject -- and therefore has no business weighing in on the debate -- or is being deliberately obtuse.
These are only some of the fundamentally fraudulent antistimulus arguments out there. Basically, conservatives are throwing any objection they can think of against the Obama plan, hoping that something will stick.
But here's the thing: Most Americans aren't listening. The most encouraging thing I've heard lately is Mr. Obama's reported response to Republican objections to a spending-oriented economic plan: "I won." Indeed he did -- and he should disregard the huffing and puffing of those who lost. - Paul Krugman 1/26/09
- On The Edge -
A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.
It's as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened -- yet Democrats have, incredibly, been on the defensive. Even if a major stimulus bill does pass the Senate, there's a real risk that important parts of the original plan, especially aid to state and local governments, will have been emasculated.
Somehow, Washington has lost any sense of what's at stake -- of the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss, and that if we do, it will be very hard to get out again.
It's hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we're in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.
Consumers, their wealth decimated and their optimism shattered by collapsing home prices and a sliding stock market, have cut back their spending and sharply increased their saving -- a good thing in the long run, but a huge blow to the economy right now. Developers of commercial real estate, watching rents fall and financing costs soar, are slashing their investment plans. Businesses are canceling plans to expand capacity, since they aren't selling enough to use the capacity they have. And exports, which were one of the U.S. economy's few areas of strength over the past couple of years, are now plunging as the financial crisis hits our trading partners.
Meanwhile, our main line of defense against recessions -- the Federal Reserve's usual ability to support the economy by cutting interest rates -- has already been overrun. The Fed has cut the rates it controls basically to zero, yet the economy is still in free fall.
It's no wonder, then, that most economic forecasts warn that in the absence of government action we're headed for a deep, prolonged slump. Some private analysts predict double-digit unemployment. The Congressional Budget Office is slightly more sanguine, but its director, nonetheless, recently warned that "absent a change in fiscal policy ... the shortfall in the nation's output relative to potential levels will be the largest -- in duration and depth -- since the Depression of the 1930s."
Worst of all is the possibility that the economy will, as it did in the '30s, end up stuck in a prolonged deflationary trap.
We're already closer to outright deflation than at any point since the Great Depression. In particular, the private sector is experiencing widespread wage cuts for the first time since the 1930s, and there will be much more of that if the economy continues to weaken.
As the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out almost 80 years ago, deflation, once started, tends to feed on itself. As dollar incomes fall in the face of a depressed economy, the burden of debt becomes harder to bear, while the expectation of further price declines discourages investment spending. These effects of deflation depress the economy further, which leads to more deflation, and so on.
And deflationary traps can go on for a long time. Japan experienced a "lost decade" of deflation and stagnation in the 1990s -- and the only thing that let Japan escape from its trap was a global boom that boosted the nation's exports. Who will rescue America from a similar trap now that the whole world is slumping at the same time?
Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won't have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that's why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective -- to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts -- are so destructive.
So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. What matters now, however, is what he does next.
It's time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation's future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge. - Paul Krugman 2/6/09
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
The battle is joined as they say -- and here's the headline that framed it: "High Noon: Geithner v. The American Oligarchs." The headline is in one of the most informative new sites in the blogosphere called: baselinescenario.com. Here's the quote that grabbed me:
"There comes a time in every economic crisis, or more specifically, in every struggle to recover from a crisis, when someone steps up to the podium to promise the policies that -- they say -- will deliver you back to growth. The person has political support, a strong track record, and every incentive to enter the history books. But one nagging question remains. Can this person, your new economic strategist, really break with the vested elites that got you into this much trouble?"
And here's the man who asked that question. Simon Johnson is former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. He now teaches global economics and management at MIT's Sloan School of Management and is a senior fellow of the Peterson Institute. He is co-founder of that website I quoted -- baselinescenario.com -- where he analyzes the global economic and financial crisis.
Welcome, Simon Johnson to the Journal.
SIMON JOHNSON: It's a way of governing. As you said. It comes from, you know, a system they tried out in Greece and Athens from time to time. And it was actually an antithesis to democracy in that context.
But, exactly what you said, it's a small group with a lot of power. A lot of wealth. They don't necessarily - they're not necessarily always the names, the household names that spring to mind, in this kind of context. But they are the people who could pull the strings. Who have the influence. Who call the shots.
SIMON JOHNSON: I have this feeling in my stomach that I felt in other countries, much poorer countries, countries that were headed into really difficult economic situation. When there's a small group of people who got you into a disaster, and who were still powerful. Disaster even made them more powerful. And you know you need to come in and break that power. And you can't. You're stuck.
- The Same Old Song -
What's up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?
The G.O.P.'s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama's effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.
"Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all the spending in this package, we don't think it's going to work," said Representative John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who is House minority leader. Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," Mr. Boehner said of the plan: "Put me down in the 'no' column."
If anything, the stimulus package is not large enough. Less than 24 hours after Mr. Boehner's televised exercise in obstructionism, the heavy-equipment company Caterpillar announced that it was cutting 20,000 jobs, Sprint Nextel said it was eliminating 8,000, and Home Depot 7,000.
Maybe the Republicans don't think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain's economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a "mental recession."
The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.
The Republican answer to this turmoil?
Tax cuts.
They need to go into rehab.
- Why Are We Listening To The G.O.P.?
The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.
A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times's Mike McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal bailout money for the financial industry, which was handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the Republicans are to tax cuts.)
The public was told that the money would be used to loosen the frozen credit markets and thus help revive the economy. But as the article pointed out, there were bankers with other ideas. John C. Hope III, the chairman of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, in an address to Wall Street fat cats gathered at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton, said:
"Make more loans? We're not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans."
How's that for arrogance and contempt for the public interest? Mr. Hope's bank received $300 million in taxpayer bailout money.
The same article quoted Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, which Mr. McIntire described as a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele. It received $154 million in taxpayer money.
"With that capital in hand," said Mr. Pressey, "not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession, but we also feel that we'll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out."
Take advantage, indeed. That, in a nutshell, is what the plutocracy is all about: taking unfair advantage.
When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.
This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.
Why is anyone still listening? - Bob Herbert 1/27/09
It was good to see the president, ordinarily so cool, so accommodating, exhibiting some real fire the other night. It seems to have done some good.
With the economy in deep, deep trouble, and Americans suffering by the tens of millions, the Republicans spent much of the week doing their same-old, bad-faith Neanderthal two-step: trying their best to derail the economic stimulus package working its difficult way through Congress.
"This bill is stinking up the place," said Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina who not only opposed the legislation but wanted to make sure that no one would mistake him for a class act.
One of the goals of the package, of course, is to begin cleaning up the holy mess that resulted from the long, dark night of G.O.P. control in Washington. President Obama went out of his way to get a substantial number of Republicans to make a genuine effort to move the economic revitalization process along, but was rebuffed, and in some cases contemptuously.
On Thursday night, he struck back, attacking Republican intransigence and its failed policies of the past. On Friday morning, with the government reporting that nearly 600,000 more jobs had been lost in January, the president went public again, stressing how irresponsible it would be to do nothing in the face of the growing crisis.
Neither the job losses nor the president's prodding was enough to prompt much of a response from the Republicans. But by Friday evening, it appeared that a small number of G.O.P. senators, enough to assure Senate passage of a revised (and watered-down) stimulus package by a very slim margin, had come aboard.
But only a small number. Even as the report of an agreement was being circulated, Senator Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, was bad-mouthing the package on CNN. "This bill is a disaster," he said.
- The G.O.P. Still Has Much To Answer For -
It's been clear for years that the G.O.P. is a party without a heart. But its pointless obstructionism, its overall lack of any serious response to what is a clear national economic emergency, seems to indicate it's also a party without a brain.
Republicans in Washington have behaved like a milling crowd standing in the way of firefighters trying to respond to a devastating blaze. The best that can be said for the party is that a few senators seem to have been able part the crowd enough to let the rescuers begin to inch forward.
President Obama addressed Republican inflexibility on Thursday night when he said at a gathering in Williamsburg, Va., "Don't come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis." He added that without swift action on the stimulus bill, "an economy that is already in crisis will be faced with catastrophe."
The report of January's enormous job losses came roughly a dozen hours later. It was the latest in a long and hideous pattern of employment woes, much of it resulting from the G.O.P.'s obsession with destructive supply-side economic voodoo.
On the front page of The Times on Friday was an article that said the number of women on the nation's payrolls is poised to pass that of men for the first time in American history. This is not because women have been doing so well, but because men have been doing so poorly.
As I was reading the article, I thought of all the guys who used to listen to Rush Limbaugh while driving to or from work but are now tuning in from their living rooms because the benefits of the G.O.P.'s right-wing, tax-cutting ideology never trickled down to them and they are now jobless.
"Since the start of the recession," as Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, points out, "the U.S. economy has shed more jobs than the total population of Chicago."
The Republicans still don't get it. Most act as if they don't understand that in this radical economic downturn the demand for goods and services has fallen off a cliff, and that government spending is needed -- and needed quickly -- to replace a large portion of that lost demand.
The goal is twofold: to alleviate some of the enormous suffering (something that is easily understood if you have a heart), and to revive the battered economy (equally easy to understand by anyone with a brain).
Senator John McCain echoed many of his Republican colleagues on Friday when he indignantly asserted, "This is not a stimulus bill; it is a spending bill."
It was an objection that had been addressed by an incredulous President Obama on Thursday night. "What do you think a stimulus is?" the president asked, his voice rising. Spending, he said -- to laughter from his audience -- "is the whole point." - Bob Herbert 2/7/09
To the Editor:
Re "The Stimulus Advances" (editorial, Jan. 29):
There was not one single Republican vote for the stimulus package as conceived by President Obama. The Republicans voted on an ideological basis, with no thought for those who need help the most. This is not new for them.
One might have thought that they learned something from the election, but they haven't. They might also want Mr. Obama to fail, which means America fails, with them included in the sinking ship.
They were presented with a stimulus package that did the most for those who needed it the most, but it is not the poor and middle class they want to help. At least they are consistent in their misunderstanding of the present situation and of the American people. - Stanley R. Bermann, Santa Fe, N.M., 1/29/09
which rules Israel, has just appalled the world 12/26/08
by repeating the June 1967 war against Palestine, that portion which they had not conquered in 1948, in this instance against Gaza.
First fast forward to Shimon Peres and notable sympathizer David Ignatias of the Washington Post as they share the stage with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It's Mr. Peres who sees Gazans as less than human, an attitude he has shared with white apartheid South Africans. Even The New York Times was forced to publish this.
"When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill."
DAVOS, Switzerland -- Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey walked off the stage after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, during a panel discussion on Gaza at the World Economic Forum on Thursday, vowing never to return to the annual gathering.
Mr. Erdogan apparently became incensed after the moderator curtailed his response to remarks by Mr. Peres on the recent Israeli military campaign. The panel was running late, and Mr. Peres was to have had the last word, participants said.
Panel discussions at Davos are restricted to one hour, but Mr. Erdogan insisted on responding to Mr. Peres. Red-faced, and with one hand grasping the arm of the moderator, the columnist David Ignatius of The Washington Post, Mr. Erdogan turned to the Israeli president.
"Mr. Peres, you are older than me," he said. "Your voice comes out in a very loud tone. And the loudness of your voice has to do with a guilty conscience. My voice, however, will not come out in the same tone."
Resisting efforts by Mr. Ignatius to end the session, Mr. Erdogan continued, saying to Mr. Peres, "When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill."
Eventually, the prime minister gathered up his papers and departed, saying, "And so Davos is over for me from now on."
Mr. Peres pointed at the departing Mr. Erdogan and said Turkey would have reacted the same way had rockets been falling on Istanbul, participants said.
Mr. Peres called Mr. Erdogan five minutes later to apologize for any misunderstanding, saying that his words had not been directed at the prime minister personally, the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency reported.
In a news conference immediately after the panel discussion, Mr. Erdogan said he was particularly upset with Mr. Ignatius, who he said had failed to direct a balanced and impartial panel.
By all accounts, the discussion of the Gaza offensive was lively, with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations and Amr Moussa, the Arab League's secretary general, joining Mr. Peres and Mr. Erdogan. Participants said Mr. Peres was mostly alone in defending Israel's role in Gaza, and for that reason he was given the final 25 minutes to speak. Earlier, Mr. Erdogan spoke for 12 minutes about the Palestinians' sufferings.
Although Mr. Erdogan has strongly criticized Israel's Gaza offensive, his country and Israel have long enjoyed close diplomatic relations. With its strong relations with the militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza, Mr. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party has played a growing role mediating among Israel, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians. - Katrin Bennhold 1/30/09
To Lehrer NewsHour's Margaret Warner
JIMMY CARTER: Well, in the first place, it's going to have to be a step-by-step process. First of all, you're going to have to have reconciliation between the Hamas and Fatah, and that has to come about because Hamas now governs 1.5 million Palestinians who live in Gaza -- the ones that are left -- and Hamas has an undescribable support in the West Bank. Their support has grown tremendously since the attack on Gaza. So Hamas represents a large portion of the total population of Palestinians. That's the first thing.
MARGARET WARNER: Even though it did take power -- total power in Gaza through a coup, essentially.
JIMMY CARTER: Yes, but they won -- you have to remember, they won the election fairly and squarely in January of 2006. They got 43 percent of the popular vote and a majority of the members of the parliament. So they are the elected government.
And the government that now governs for Fatah in the West Bank is not an elected government. It's a rump government or an appointed government. But, anyway, that's the first thing, that is, reconciliation between the two.
And Hamas has committed to me personally and publicly that they will accept any peace agreement that's negotiated between the Palestinians and Israel provided it's submitted to the Palestinian people in a referendum and the Palestinian people approve it or either if there's a unified government formed.
So that's a very good step forward. And I think that that will go a long way toward making it possible for the United States and the rest of the world to say, "OK, let's deal with Hamas." - Jimmy Carter 1/28/09
Austria: U.N. Nuclear Chief Shuns BBC in Gaza Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, canceled interviews with the British Broadcasting Corporation over its refusal to broadcast an appeal by aid agencies for victims of Israel's offensive in Gaza, saying Wednesday that the BBC violated "rules of basic human decency which are there to help vulnerable people irrespective of who is right or wrong." The BBC, Britain's publicly financed broadcaster, says broadcasting the appeal would have damaged its impartiality. Dr. ElBaradei's outspokenness on the issue is unusual for the director of a United Nations agency whose mandate has nothing to do with humanitarian issues, but it is in keeping with his record. Dr. ElBaradei has come under criticism from the United States and some other member nations of the International Atomic Energy Agency (Is the nuclear weaponed Israel a member nation?) in the past for comments that they viewed as exceeding the agency's authority by straying from strictly technical issues.
After Obama Overture, Iran's Leader Seeks U.S. Apology
By NAZILA FATHI and ALAN COWELL
TEHRAN -- A day after President Obama struck a conciliatory tone toward Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad urged America on Wednesday to apologize for its actions toward his country over the past 60 years and said it was unclear whether the new administration was merely shifting tactics or wanted real change.
But he did not explicitly rebuff Mr. Obama's gesture. "We are waiting patiently," he said, referring to the policies of the new administration. "We will listen to the statements closely, we will carefully study their actions, and if there are real changes, we will welcome it."
The catalog of crimes, Mr. Ahmadinejad said, stretched back decades, beginning with American support for the 1953 coup that ousted the democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who ruled until he was ousted in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The list also included the shooting down of an Iran Air Airbus A300 by the United States Navy's missile cruiser Vincennes over the Persian Gulf in 1988, killing 290 people. American military commanders said at the time that the passenger plane had been mistaken for an F-14 fighter jet, and they defended the warship's actions. - Fathi & Cowell 1/29/09 N Y Times
[Factually, Mr. Ahmadinejad is too kind. The coup was designed by Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and his CIA brother Allen, as was the 1954 coup in Guatemala to oust the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz, this for United Fruit.
And the downing in 1988 of the Iran Air Airbus A300 which killed almost three hundred innocent civilians was a deliberate act by Reagan, a part of the Reagan/Casey madness which began when Mr. Casey, Reagan's campaign manager, had the American hostages held until Reagan's 1/20/81 inauguration, which was followed two years later by Reagan's ill-advised October '83 Marine Expeditionary Force to Lebanon and the 10/23/83 Marine barracks car-bombing at Beirut airport which killed 241 U.S. Marine and Navy personnel. Like his fellow Republicans George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney, Ronald Reagan also hadn't seen the blood of combat.]
This is our focus, and will remain so into the new year as the slaughter of Palestinians continues. New details in the following paragraphs, and background throughout. The difficulty is of reporters, for example on NPR, like mainstay Robert Siegel, whose ethnicity shapes their bias. And that bias extends to PBS. A recent example appeared with the 12/29/08 Lehrer NewsHour, during which Margaret Warner interviewed Sallai Meridor, Israeli Ambassador to the United States and allowed him unchallenged to equate Israeli manned and unmanned airstrikes and the virtually hapless rockets which Gazans fire in response. Here, from Riyad Mansour, United Nations Palestinian Observer: "Well, we are facing a huge offensive by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza. And there is no justification whatsoever for killing and injuring about 1,800 Palestinians during the last two days. Most of them are innocent civilians. The U.N. today, when they gave a figure of 64 among the dead, are only women and children. From the rest of the dead, there are a large number of civilians. And among the 1,400 injured, there is a large number of civilians. The Israeli occupying forces are not following international law and responding in accordance with the law of proportionality. They cannot unleash a massive military power against what some of the Palestinians are doing from the Gaza Strip. This action by Israel is criminal, is inhuman, is immoral, and it should be stopped immediately."
"Well, let me just say that it is to our record that we organized unilaterally three cease-fires as Palestinians, two of them under the leadership of President Mahmoud Abbas before Hamas took over in Gaza, and the last one, it was through the approval of Hamas after they took over Gaza (in a United Nations monitored election)."
Editor's Note: Whether a source such as Israeli President Shimon Peres, US Secretary of State "Condi" Rice, or NPR reporters Steve Innskeep or Mike Shuster, or, for that matter the Jewish French President Sarkozy, and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the theme is identical regarding Israeli slaughter of Palestinians en masse in Gaza: Deception du jour! The 12/24/08 N Y Times published a 24 paragraph article quoting both the Torah and the Talmud, several Rabbis and, of course, Abe Foxman of the ADL regarding the Bernard L. Madoff fraud/scandal concerning not massive killing, but of "cheating"...other Jews. Pictured is a handsome smiling Los Angeles Rabbi David Wolpe.
Will there be a similar soul-searching analysis of this calculated murder of Palestinians?
Certainly not! In fact, on the 1/5/09 NBC Universal Nightly News Richard Engel and Martin Fletcher compounded this Jewish monstrosity against Gazans (THEY. . .ARE. . .LOCKED. . .IN!) by calling their 1948 Jewish invasion of Palestine. . .Israel's "War for Independence"! That's not chutzpah. That's malicious evil, which also impugns our 1776-1781 War for Independence. In lockstep, NBC Universal's star Brian Williams follows four nights later (1/9/09) with "The combined death toll in this war is almost eight hundred people!" Oh, Yes! Ten Israelis, and seven hundred Palestinians, half of whom are women and children! The January 7, 2009 Amy Goodman DemocracyNow records some of the details which, in the overall, are incomprehensible. From Albert Schweitzer, 1875-1965 to Ariel Sharon 1928, Ehud Barak 1942, Ehud Olmert 1946, Natan Sharansky 1948 and Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu 1949. Talk about a decent into Sheol!
The New York Times now resists almost to prohibition any and all Letters to the Editor on the Israeli 12/26/08 - 1/15/09 mechanized slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. But they do welcome Jewish-authored OP-ED pieces on the ghastly bloodbath. Two columns on 1/14/09, one by the former "Israeli prison official turned reporter(?)" Jeffrey Goldberg, the other by Thomas L. Friedman. Mr. Goldberg wrote of a Hezbollah spokesman who argued that Jews are "a curse to anyone who lives near them." Their war on virtually defenseless Gaza is convincing much of the world that Hezbollah may be right. Friedman's column is pure, but adulterated, propaganda on the faux thesis that Israel is conflicted on Gaza/Palestine. From the very beginning in 1948 its been the Greater Israel vision at the core of Israeli policy, and Friedman has known it better than most. As The Times' 1/14/09 prevarication was "misleading" its audience across the world Amy Goodman's 1/14/09 DemocracyNow was presenting an unimpeachable Israeli source, Oxford University's Middle East authority, Professor Avi Shlaim:
- The world's leading authority, along with Norman Finkelstein, on the Arab Israeli conflict.
Amy Goodman 1/14/09: Professor Shlaim, as you look at what's happening in Gaza from your vantage point, well, many miles away in Britain, can you talk about the kind of trajectory your evaluation has taken, where you started in your thoughts about Israel and where you are now?
AVI SHLAIM: As you mentioned, I did national service in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s. And in those days, Israel was a small state surrounded by enemies, and the nation was united in face of the surrounding Arab states. We all felt total commitment to the state of Israel and to the defense of the state of Israel. The Israeli army is called the Israel Defense Forces, and it was true to its name.
But 1967, the war of June 1967, was a major turning point in the history of Israel and the history of the region. In the course of the war, Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan and Sinai from Egypt. After the war, Israel started building civilian settlements in the occupied territories in violation of international law. So Israel became a colonial power and an imperial power.
And I, for my part, have never questioned the legitimacy of the Zionist movement. I saw it as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Nor did I ever question the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I reject, what I reject totally, absolutely and uncompromisingly, is the Zionist colonial project beyond the 1967 borders. So we have to distinguish very clearly between Israel proper, within its pre-1967 borders, and Greater Israel, which began to emerge in the aftermath of the June '67 war and has completely derailed the Zionist project.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, specifically talk about Gaza, how it has developed and where it is today, right now under assault by the Israeli military.
AVI SHLAIM: In a long-term historical perspective, I would begin with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. I wrote a book, which you mentioned in your introduction, called The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. It is a history of the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948. It's a very long book, but I can summarize it for you in one sentence, that throughout its sixty years, Israel has been remarkably reluctant to engage in meaningful negotiations with its Arab opponents to resolve the dispute between them and only too ready to resort to military force in order to impose its will upon them. And the current vicious Israeli onslaught on the people of Gaza is the climax of this longstanding Israeli policy of shunning diplomacy and relying on brute military force.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break and then come back to Professor Avi Shlaim. He is professor of international relations at Oxford University, served in the Israeli military. His latest book is called Lion of Jordan. He is one of the world's leading scholars on the Arab-Israel conflict. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest right now is Oxford University Professor Avi Shlaim. He teaches international relations at Oxford University. He's speaking to us from Oxford right now, leading authority in the world on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
We've had a number of debates here on Democracy Now!, Professor Shlaim, over the past weeks about what's happening in Gaza and those who support the Israeli military continually say that in 2005, three years ago, Israel pulled out of Gaza entirely. You have a different picture of what happened under Ariel Sharon in August of 2005. Explain how you see the withdrawal of Israeli military at that time.
AVI SHLAIM (see prior paragraphs): President Bush described Ariel Sharon as a man of peace. I've done a great deal of archival research on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and I can honestly tell you that I have never come across a single scintilla of evidence to support the view of Ariel Sharon as a man of peace. He was a man of war, a champion of violent solutions, a man who rejected totally any Palestinian right to self-determination. He was a proponent of Greater Israel, and it is in this context that I see his decision to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza in August of 2005.
The withdrawal was officially called the unilateral Israeli disengagement from Gaza. I would like to underline the word "unilateral." Ariel Sharon was the unilateralist par excellence. The reason he decided to withdraw from Gaza was not out of any concern for the welfare of the people of Gaza or any sympathy for the Palestinians or their national aspirations, but because of the pressure exerted by Hamas, by the Islamic resistance, to the Israeli occupation of Gaza. In the end, Israel couldn't sustain the political, diplomatic and psychological costs of maintaining its occupation in Gaza.
And let me add in parentheses that Gaza was a classic example of exploitation, of colonial exploitation in the postcolonial era. Gaza is a tiny strip of land with about one-and-a-half million Arabs, most of them--half of them refugees. It's the most crowded piece of land on God's earth. There were 8,000 Israeli settlers in Gaza, yet the 8,000 settlers controlled 25 percent of the territory, 40 percent of the arable land, and the largest share of the desperately scarce water resources.
Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw from Gaza unilaterally, not as a contribution, as he claimed, to a two-state solution. The withdrawal from Gaza took place in the context of unilateral Israeli action in what was seen as Israeli national interest. There were no negotiations with the Palestinian Authority on an overall settlement. The withdrawal from Gaza was not a prelude to further withdrawals from the other occupied territories, but a prelude to further expansion, further consolidation of Israel's control over the West Bank. In the year after the withdrawal from Gaza, 12,000 new settlers went to live on the West Bank. So I see the withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005 as part of a unilateral Israeli attempt to redraw the borders of Greater Israel and to shun any negotiations and compromise with the Palestinian Authority.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Avi Shlaim, Israel says the reason it has attacked Gaza is because of the rocket fire, the rockets that Hamas is firing into southern Israel.
AVI SHLAIM: This is Israeli propaganda, and it is a pack of lies. The important thing to remember is that there was a ceasefire brokered by Egypt in July of last year, and that ceasefire succeeded. So, if Israel wanted to protect its citizens--and it had every right to protect its citizens--the way to go about it was not by launching this vicious military offensive, but by observing the ceasefire.
Now, let me give you some figures, which I think are the most crucial figures in understanding this conflict. Before the ceasefire came into effect in July of 2008, the monthly number of rockets fired--Kassam rockets, homemade Kassam rockets, fired from the Gaza Strip on Israeli settlements and towns in southern Israel was 179. In the first four months of the ceasefire, the number dropped dramatically to three rockets a month, almost zero. - Avi Shlaim 1/14/09
And here in the United States there are equally disturbing trends among Jewish Americans in positions of power. As the mouthy, yet ubiquitous, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania questions the integrity of President-elect Barack Obama's excellent choice of Mr. Eric H. Holder Jr. for Attorney General (Specter chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee which approved as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a Bush official who never saw an unConstitutional order by either George Walker Bush or Richard Bruce Cheney that he didn't like) many recall that Mr. Specter mounted the vicious and fallacious campaign against Anita Hill, which allowed Clarence Thomas to label the United States Senate as a lynch mob. Mr. Thomas' incendiary histrionics on national television, a spectacle engineered by Arlen Specter, placed on our Supreme Court the worst Justice in its history. Fewer American citizens know of Mr. Specter's actions which, if left in place, could have had an equally damaging result. In the dead-of-night before Senator Specter would have been required to relinquish leadership of the Judiciary Committee to the honorable Senator Patrick Leahy, a result of the 2006 biennial national election (clearly a tenuous Democratic hold in the Senate dependent on the divorced Orthodox Jew Joe Lieberman), Mr. Specter eliminated the requisite Senate approval of United States Attorneys for the various states, a catastrophic switch as the Republican Party Bush administration had just demonstrated with its attempt to replace United States Attorneys who did not endorse its political platform. Arlen Specter has a history of such indefensible actions. But then, of course, he's a Jewish American leader and, therefore, immune to criticism.
As the world listens to the sordid details of the Israeli unprecedented bloodbath in Gaza, such as the dropping of leaflets to advise Gazans to leave their homes for safety in UN schools, and then bombs the schools filled with children - and kills the driver of a UN relief truck to halt UN delivery of relief supplies - reports of such demented killings by Israel are NEVER mentioned by Talk of the Nation's (is the "Nation" the U.S. of A.?...or the State of Israel?!) host Neil Conan. Does Mr. Conan's ethnicity play a role?
[[The Israelis have just completed a month of slaughtering Palestinians penned in Gaza, but in the 1/19/09 N Y Times (the Sulzberger paper) William Kristol, also a regular with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, writes "In synagogue...there is a prayer for the state of Israel, asking the 'rock and redeemer of the people Israel' to 'spread over it the shelter of your peace' and that President Bush is one of the greatest friends the state of Israel have had in quite awhile." Is that because we give Israel a minimum of $3 billion every year and, under Bush, green-lighted the systematic murder of Palestinians? Combine this with the assignment of "Joe the Plumber" by the CEO of PajamasTV Roger Simon ("Joe" is actually Samuel J. Wurzelbacher) to roleplay a "reporter", but safely in Israel with the TV background of the hellish smoke from, e.g., phosphorus fires in Gaza, some killing children. Think of the silence of 60 Minutes Bob Simon or NPR's Weekend Edition Scott Simon on this atrocity and it becomes obvious that key Jewish Americans in the Media/Press are blinded by their faith, Judaism. Some of those fires are burning children!
Further, a 1/17/09 article in The Times (front page C-1 in The Arts) by a Patricia Cohen has an American Jewish contingent [Ivy League professors Simon Schama and Michael Walzer along with the Jewish "Wall Street powerbrokers Mort Zuckerman, Michael Steinhardt and William Ackman (missing was Aspen powerhouse Walter Isaacson)"], a contingent steeped in consternation over not the unprecedented bloodbath in Gaza, but beside themselves with "Madoff: A Jewish Reckoning", a Jewish bilking of "scores of Jewish friends and philanthropies out of billions of dollars." Oi Vey! All those billions they managed to siphon from the United States Treasury! All gone. Fellow Jewish American Alan Greenspan's mindless creation of derivatives, a hangover from his youthful heady days with Ayn Rand, aka Alisa Rosenbaum, famed author of Atlas Shrugged, Mr. Greenspan's (he's husband to NBC Universal's Andrea Mitchell) Greenspan's derivatives have just sabotaged the world's financial system but "Wall Street powerbrokers" Zuckerman, Steinhardt and Ackman are after Madoff! It's like the Media/Press protection that sheltered Louis Freeh, who was the FBI Director almost to 9/11 but never questioned by the 9/11 Commission. He was guilty of malfeasance in office! But, of course, he's Jewish American. In other words, in today's United States his ethnicity bestows immunity.
Surely, these Jewish American radicals are no longer able to restrain themselves! On his 1/22/09 Talk of the Nation Neil Conan changed the name of the program to Talk of the World and one of his first "expert" guests was none other than the truly infamous Douglas J. Feith who, along with Richard Perle, created, following the assassination of Soldier - Statesman Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November '95, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy For Securing The Realm (Israel)", the first step of which was the elimination of Saddam Hussein (refer to Chapter 10 - Situation Room, in James Bamford's A Pretext For War). Mr. Conan's inclusion of Mr. Feith without noting Feith's history is a flagrant insult to the people of the United States, and inexcusable on the airwaves of NPR, National Public Radio. Perhaps these items we've just listed would be of interest to President Barack Obama. Is his Blackberry working?]]
As we note elsewhere Martin Indyk has had ample coverage on television and in the Media/Press with the Lehrer NewsHour and the New York Times and Thomas L. Friedman, among others. Not so for a legitimate historian/analyst who lost both parents in the Holocaust, Norman Finkelstein. So here is a series of observations by Mr. Finkelstein which he managed to include in the 1/8/09 DemocracyNow regarding the bloodbath in Gaza.
Amy Goodman: We're also joined by Norman Finkelstein here in New York, leading critic of Israeli foreign policy, the author of several books, including The Holocaust Industry, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and Beyond Chutzpah.
Norman Finkelstein: Well, the record is fairly clear. You can find it on the Israeli website, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. Mr. Indyk is correct that Hamas had adhered to the ceasefire from June 17th until November 4th. On November 4th, here Mr. Indyk, I think, goes awry. The record is clear: Israel broke the ceasefire by going into the Gaza and killing six or seven Palestinian militants. At that point--and now I'm quoting the official Israeli website--Hamas retaliated or, in retaliation for the Israeli attack, then launched the missiles.
"Now, as to the reason why, the record is fairly clear as well. According to Ha'aretz, Defense Minister Barak began plans for this invasion before the ceasefire even began. In fact, according to yesterday's Ha'aretz, the plans for the invasion began in March. And the main reasons for the invasion, I think, are twofold. Number one, as Mr. Indyk I think correctly points out, to enhance what Israel calls its deterrence capacity, which in layman's language basically means Israel's capacity to terrorize the region into submission. After their defeat in July 2006 in Lebanon, they felt it important to transmit the message that Israel is still a fighting force, still capable of terrorizing those who dare defy its word.
And the second main reason for the attack is because Hamas was signaling that it wanted a diplomatic settlement of the conflict along the June 1967 border. That is to say, Hamas was signaling they had joined the international consensus, they had joined most of the international community, overwhelmingly the international community, in seeking a diplomatic settlement. And at that point, Israel was faced with what Israelis call a Palestinian peace offensive. And in order to defeat the peace offensive, they sought to dismantle Hamas."
Amy Goodman: Norman Finkelstein?
Norman Finkelstein: Well, I think the problem of Mr. Indyk's presentation is he constantly reverses cause and effect. Just as he said a moment ago that it was Hamas which broke the ceasefire, although he well knows it was Israel that broke the ceasefire on November 4th, he now reverses cause and effect as to how the present impasse came about. In January 2006, as he writes in his book, Hamas came to power in a free and fair election. I think those are his words. He then claims on your program and he claims in his book that Hamas committed a "putsch"--his word--in order to eliminate the Palestinian Authority. And as I'm sure Mr. Indyk well knows and as was documented in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair by the writer David Rose, basing himself on internal US documents, it was the United States in cahoots with the Palestinian Authority and Israel which were attempting a putsch on Hamas, and Hamas preempted the putsch. That, too, is no longer debatable or no longer a controversial claim.
Now, Mr. Indyk says that Hamas is reluctant or unclear about whether it wants to rule in Gaza. The issue is not whether it wants to rule in Gaza; the issue is can it rule in Gaza if Israel maintains a blockade and prevents economic activity among the Palestinians. The blockade, incidentally, was implemented before Hamas came to power. The blockade doesn't even have anything to do with Hamas. The blockade came to--there were Americans who were sent over, in particular James Wolfensohn, to try to break the blockade after Israel redeployed its troops in Gaza.
Amy Goodman: The former World Bank president.
Norman Finkelstein: Correct. The problem all along has been that Israel doesn't want Gaza to develop, and Israel doesn't want to resolve diplomatically the conflict. Mr. Indyk well knows that both the leadership in Damascus and the leadership in the Gaza have repeatedly made statements they're willing to settle the conflict in the June 1967 border. The record is fairly clear. In fact, it's unambiguously clear.
Every year, the United Nations General Assembly votes on a resolution entitled "Peaceful Settlement of the Palestine Question." And every year the vote is the same: it's the whole world on one side; Israel, the United States and some South Sea atolls and Australia on the other side. The vote this past year was 164-to-7. Every year since 1989--in 1989, the vote was 151-to-3, the whole world on one side, the United States, Israel and the island state of Dominica on the other side.
We have the Arab League, all twenty-two members of the Arab League, favoring a two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. We have the Palestinian Authority favoring that two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. We now have Hamas favoring that two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. The one and only obstacle is Israel, backed by the United States. That's the problem. - Norman Finkelstein 1/8/09
"Israel Bombs UN School, 40 Killed
In Gaza, at least forty Palestinians died Tuesday after Israel fired mortars at a United Nations school that was sheltering Palestinians who had been forced to flee their homes. Fifty-five Palestinians were also wounded in the attack. Doctors said all of the victims were civilians, including many children. Christopher Gunness of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency condemned the Israeli attack."
Christopher Gunness: "Over a thousand had taken refuge in this school. The Israelis had been told exactly what the GPS coordinates of the school was, of all of our facilities in Gaza. All of our facilities are very clearly marked as UNRWA facilities (Can you recall similarly marked structures being targeted by Israel in their 2006 war against Lebanon?). If there have been violations of international humanitarian law, and our response is rooted very firmly in international humanitarian law, we want there to be a full and impartial investigation."
Amy Goodman: Israel admitted to firing mortar rounds at the school but claimed its actions were justified, because Hamas militants were using the school to fire rockets. But the UN said there were no militants at the school.
John Ging, the director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency: "We very carefully vet anybody seeking shelter in our locations. We have experienced, long-serving staff who are managing those facilities. We are hugely sensitive to the integrity of our facilities at this time of conflict. And we have zero tolerance for any violations by any of the militants. And so far we've not had violations by militants of our facilities."
Israeli Army spokesperson Avital Leibovich accused Hamas of using Palestinians as human shields.
Avital Leibovich: "The fact that Hamas is putting civilians in areas where military activity takes place is horrible, I think. I think Hamas should be accountable for any civilian in those areas, which he located those warehouses, those storages of Grads (rockets) and so on."
When you are part of an organized atrocity at this time in this place, words to deceive fall from the lips as easily as do the last drops of blood from a dying child.
Amy Goodman 1/7/09: Al Jazeera reports 680 Palestinians have died in the twelve days since Israel's attack began. Over 3,000 Palestinians have been injured. The Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights reports at least 130 Palestinian children have died. The Israeli death toll stands at ten, including four Israeli soldiers who died by so-called friendly fire.
"In the deadliest attack since Israel launched its assault on Gaza twelve days ago, up to forty-two Palestinians died on Tuesday after Israel fired mortars at a United Nations school that was sheltering Palestinians who had been forced to flee their homes (Israeli leaflets advised the Palestinians their homes would be bombed.). Fifty-five Palestinians were also wounded in the attack. Doctors said all of the victims were civilians, including many children. We speak with Christopher Gunness of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
Guest: Christopher Gunness, spokesman for UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)
AMY GOODMAN: Tuesday marked one of the deadliest days in Gaza since Israel's offensive began twelve days ago, with more than 130 people killed in bombings and mortar fire. In the bloodiest attack, at least forty Palestinians died after Israel fired mortars at a United Nations school that was housing refugees. Fifty-five Palestinians were wounded. Doctors said all the victims were civilians, including many children.
Israel admitted to firing mortar rounds at the school but claimed its actions were justified because Hamas militants were using the school to fire rockets. But the UN said there were no militants at the school.
As many as 680 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its offensive on December 27th. Over 3,000 Palestinians have been injured. The Israeli death toll stands at ten, including four Israeli soldiers who died in so-called friendly fire incidents.
Meanwhile, Israel announced it would halt all attacks near Gaza City for three hours a day in order to establish a humanitarian corridor. Aid agencies have warned of a mounting humanitarian crisis for the one-and-a-half million Palestinians in Gaza who are unable to escape because of Israel's blockade. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for an immediate ceasefire to avoid a humanitarian crisis.
BAN KI-MOON: I call once again for an immediate ceasefire. In the midst of this fighting, the civilian population of Gaza faces a humanitarian crisis. Entire families have perished in the violence, including women and children, UN staff and medical workers. There are no shelters for the vast majority of the civilian population. Food and fuel supplies are insufficient. A million people have no electricity. A quarter of a million have no running water. The only answer is an end to the violence. Whatever the rationale of the combatants, only an end to violence and a political way forward, can deliver long-term security and peace.
AMY GOODMAN: Pressure is building on Israel and Hamas to accept a ceasefire deal backed by the United Nations and the United States. The plan, proposed by Egypt and France, calls for an immediate ceasefire.
We're going to go now to Gaza to speak with Christopher Gunness. He's a spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza City. We'll go to break and come back to speak with the UN representative. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We have just lost the UN spokesperson in Gaza. We're going to try to get him back later on the broadcast, but right now we're going to turn to President Obama's cabinet. [...]
We have just gotten Christopher Gunness back on the line, spokesperson for the UN Relief and Works Agency, known as UNRWA.
Can you give us the latest? Yesterday, we spoke to you when news was just breaking about two schools hit by Israeli fire in Gaza. What do you understand at this point, Christopher Gunness?
CHRISTOPHER GUNNESS: Well, at the Jabalya school, we have done an initial investigation into what took place. We are 99.9 percent certain there were no militants in the school or the compound. There was no militant activity in the school or in the school compound. If anybody, including the Israeli army, anybody, has any evidence that there were people abusing our premises, we want to know. We want to find out what went on. It's in our interest to make sure that militants do not abuse our facilities. But we're 99.9 percent certain that yesterday there were no militants and no militant activity. And there is some question for the Israeli army about was this activity in the vicinity of the compound or in the compound. And that's more clarification that we need, because if it was in the streets outside, that, of course, is different from if they were in the compound itself.
AMY GOODMAN: So, tell us who was in the school, where the--well, what is the casualty figure you have at this point?
CHRISTOPHER GUNNESS: Well, first of all, for the attack at Jabalya, we said yesterday thirty confirmed fatalities and fifty-five injured, including fifteen critically. Very sadly, overnight, ten people passed away. The fatality figure has now risen from thirty to forty. The people in the compound, over 1,300 people--by the way, some of those, many of them had been told by the Israeli army to leave their houses and move to a safe place. Of course, Gaza is unique in being a war with a fence around it. But they nonetheless came--frightened, terrified, vulnerable--to our center. They were coming to what they thought was a neutral United Nations shelter, and then the rest is history, forty people killed.
AMY GOODMAN: And tell us about this school. A school for who?
CHRISTOPHER GUNNESS: A school for young children. It's one of over twenty centers that we've set up as shelters. We had given the Israeli army the exact GPS coordinates of this building well before the conflict. We gave them the coordinates of all of our facilities in Gaza. The schools are clearly marked, like any school anywhere in the world. The famous blue UN colors (Again, this has the Isreali modus operandi, shelling UN marked facilities in Lebanon in 2006.). And, in addition, a third source of where the school was in being clearly marked and all that, one assumes that when an army is doing house-to-house fighting in an area like this, it's got more detailed maps than anybody about which building is what. So, you know, three sources--GPS coordinates, the fact that it was marked and, one assumes, very accurate IDF (Israel "Defense" Force) maps--to suggest that the IDF knew exactly what this building was.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the other school that we talked about yesterday? There were two different schools.
CHRISTOPHER GUNNESS: Well, there was an attack at a school called Asma a couple of nights back at 11:30 at night, when three refugees went out into the compound of the school. They actually went to the toilet block in order to, you know, use the facilities. On their way back at 11:30 at night, there was a direct strike on the school compound, and they were killed, tragically, in that.
So, again, we're calling for an impartial investigation. We want the facts to come out. We want accountability. If anyone is accused of violating international humanitarian law, then we want an impartial investigation, and we want those found guilty of violating IHL to be brought to justice, because ultimately a sense of justice will be one of the many elements of the bedrocks of future and durable peace. So, justice--we need justice, even though that sounds crazy as the guns are still blazing in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: It's not clear whether the attack on the Jabalya refugee camp school has led to Israel changing its position. And I want to ask Christopher Gunness of UNRWA if you see them changing their position at all in saying they're going to open a, quote, "humanitarian corridor" for three hours a day. What does that mean?
CHRISTOPHER GUNNESS: Well, I can't tell you what changed the mind of Mr. Olmert. You need to ask him yourself. What I would say was that the humanitarian corridor idea reinforces the idea of a lasting peace, because when you're feeding on an ongoing basis 750,000 people a three-hour window each day, just is not enough. And also, let me make the point that you can get the food from our warehouses, if you're lucky, to our distribution centers in Gaza down this humanitarian corridor. The reason we want a lasting peace is because people who have been bombed for the last twelve days have got to leave their shelters, leave warehouses and go and walk through the streets and pick up their food from the food distribution centers. A humanitarian corridor, in and of itself, is not enough. People have to feel secure enough to leave their houses and go and pick up this food. And that's why we say we want a lasting and permanent ceasefire.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe the situation right now on the ground in Gaza?
CHRISTOPHER GUNNESS: Well, big picture, it's terrible. I mean, you've got one million people without electricity. You've got a quarter-million people without running water. Every hospital in the Gaza Strip is running twenty-four hours a day on an emergency generator. UNRWA has enough food supplies in Gaza for days and not weeks. By anyone's book, I would say that's a humanitarian crisis. And while we, of course, will use to the fullest of our ability this idea of a humanitarian corridor, it's not enough. What we want is a permanent ceasefire.
AMY GOODMAN: And Israel is saying that this is Hamas's fault, because they are the ones who are firing rockets into Israel, and they are the ones who are embedding themselves in the civilian population in Gaza, that they're using Palestinians as human shields.
CHRISTOPHER GUNNESS: Well, I've not come on this program to defend Hamas. What I would say is we are the UN. We are neutral. And we are certainly not hoarding any of the food supplies. We condemn the rockets in the United Nations system. As Desmond Tutu once said to Ismail Haniyeh, these are an abomination. We've got to see these rockets stop.
On the other hand, we've got to see the fighting stop, because if it doesn't happen, the humanitarian crisis that's already there can only deepen, in spite of the fact that there is this humanitarian corridor idea being established. We need permanent peace, a permanent ceasefire, if people are going to leave their bombed-out shelters and come through the streets of bombed-out Gaza and pick up their supplies from our distribution center. It's a practical matter. The idea of a humanitarian corridor naturally reinforces the concept of a permanent ceasefire.
AMY GOODMAN: Christopher Gunness, I want to thank you for being with us, spokesperson for the UN Relief and Works Agency. Today, he was speaking to us from Jerusalem. - Amy Goodman 1/7/09
To cloud this massacre of Gazans, the 1/6/09 Lehrer NewsHour, hosted by the man himself (A Jewish American?), had Judy Woodruff with long-time defender of Israel Michael Scheuer blaming "a rising problem in the Muslim world with Islamic extremism (generated by the 1948 Jewish invasion of Palestine)" and Margaret Warner entertaining Martin Indyk, Director of the Saban Center (created by Jewish American billionaire Haim Saban), supporting this Israeli air/ground killing machine, eliminating Palestinians, including women and children!
Simultaneously, Thomas L. Friedman apparently quotes Martin Indyk's use of the phrase "Ground Zero" in Friedman's 1/7/09 The New York Times column touting Indyk's new book "Innocent Abroad"! NEITHER LEHRER, WARNER, SABAN, FRIEDMAN, INDYK, SCHEUER, PERLE, ETC., are innocent. They are all intimately and insidiously involved in the bloodiest organized and systematic killing, and the concealment thereof, of a people, the innocent Palestinians, in the world of today - a perfidious deadly scheme which became active sixty years ago.
Patrick Seale's Israel's Insane War - 1/2/09
"Israel's war in Gaza is an act of political insanity. It is the product of a deeply disturbed society, able neither to curb its military arrogance nor calm its profound paranoia. The consequences are likely to be painful for Israel's long-term prospects.
By radicalising the Palestinians, and by arousing great anger in the Arab and Muslim world, this savage war rules out the possibility of Israel's peaceful integration in the region for the foreseeable future. That may even be its cynical aim, since Israel wants dominance, not peaceful coexistence.
As the F-16s carry out their missions of death, the message to the world is that Israel will continue to live by the sword, as it has done for the past six decades, rather than risk the concessions and compromises which peace would require.
The war has, in fact, confirmed what had long been apparent, namely that Israel has no interest in a negotiated peace. Peace means retraction, it means ceding territory, whereas Israel is still bent on expansion. That is what the continued theft of West Bank land and the mushrooming settlements are all about, together with the demolition of Palestinian homes, the security wall, the settlers-only road network, the stifling of the Palestinian economy by over 600 checkpoints, and countless other cruel vexations." - Patrick Seale 1/2/09
January 2, 2009: And horror of horrors, this massacre is being generated by the leading candidate for the February '09 election of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the very man whose murderous electoral rhetoric in 1995 drove, essentially, an acolyte of his, Yigal Amir, to assassinate the Soldier-Statesman Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, to begin "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (Israel)", the first step of which was the United States elimination of Saddam Hussein via the costly (to us) Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax.
Much of activist Jewry around the world, but centered in Israel, speaks of evil in the world, but fails to acknowledge that very trait in conquest-driven Israel vis a vis Palestine. Now we have an unimpeachable source, the nephew of Netanyahu, Brown University student Jonathon Ben-Artzi, who stated on DemocracyNow 12/31/08 that he now recognizes among Israelis a segment which views Palestinians as less than human - i.e. branded as Aborigines in Australia, Native Americans and Colored in early America - now the conquest-driven Israelis, SINCE BUT 1948, see the early inhabitants of Palestine as less than human. And we, the citizens of the United States support that view with $3,000,000,000 every year. We are immersed in Palestinian blood.
Amy Goodman 12/31/08: Benjamin Netanyahu, the opposition leader running to head Israel in February, said Hamas openly declared its goal to eradicate the state of Israel from the face of the earth. They're aligned with Iran, that openly declares its goal to eradicate Israel from the face of the earth. You make peace with those of your enemies who are reconciled to peace. Jonathan Ben-Artzi, your response?
JONATHAN BEN-ARTZI: Well, you know, maybe someone should go to Israel and poll Jewish Israelis how many of them think Palestinians should be eradicated off the face of the earth. You'd be surprised at the results, you know? So these, you know--
"Well, when you're in Israel, people there are very--you know, I'm not a sociologist, so I would be--I would find it very hard to explain. It would be very interesting to hear someone try to explain this. But for some reason, the Israeli population, the Jewish Israeli population is very much--has a lot of hatred towards these people, although, by all accounts, I would say that they're actually very nonviolent. If instead of Palestinians we had as neighbors Irish people and we had to deal with the IRA, I think Israel would have a much rougher time. Relatively, there is so little violence coming from the Palestinians and such terrible violence coming from Israel.
You know, it's easy to say the Palestinians are targeting civilian Israelis, when you, as the Israeli Air Force, you know, you have huge one-ton bombs and you can drop that bomb into a crowded neighborhood, say you were targeting, you know, this and that person, and at the same time you also kill twenty other people, and that's--how is that called?--collateral damage. So, and then you're OK, because you targeted that one person, whereas, you know, at the same time, Israel has to remember that it does have military bases right smack in the middle of Tel Aviv, and these are also, you know, by Israel's standards, would be legitimate military targets. So if you go into that game, you might end up being the loser. So it's a very dangerous road." - Jonathan Ben-Artzi 12/31/08
A reminder - Jewish American Margaret Warner on the 12/29/08 Lehrer NewsHour accepts Israeli Ambassador to the United States Sallai Meridor's deception that (1) "over five hundred thousand Israelis are threatened (while actually a million and a half Gazans have been bombed from the air for eight straight days)" and (2) "we (Israel) don't have any grand regional aspirations."
* And it may well be that this incessant daily bombing of Palestinians is in homage to some ritual killing, not unlike the sacrificial offerings of the lives of their enemies by early primitive tribes. Only Jews would be privy to such understanding, but this unprovoked massacre of Palestinians is inexplicable, without such a theme and timing, the end of the sixty year "celebration" of the "founding" of Israel...in Palestine!
As of 1/4/09 the Israeli blitzkrieg has continued for the tenth day, intensified with tanks and heavily-armored Israeli troops blasting into Gaza proper. Such an intense air/ground assault on the million-plus Gazan inhabitants crammed into that narrow strip of land belies the Israeli claim of responding to rocket fire, with which Hamas has defended itself since 12/26/08 after Israel broke their truce by a major restriction of basic foodstuffs and fuel for the people of Gaza, and then coupled that with this 21st century air/ground killing machine. The world sees this Israeli deadly fraud for what it is - an excuse to kill more Palestinians. And with reportage compromised by the ethnicity of, e.g., CBS's Leslie Moonves and Richard Roth, ABC's Jonathan Karl and Martha Raddatz and NBC's Richard Engel and Andrea Mitchell (Ms. Mitchell has kept from us for over a year that Israel was planning both the degree and the timing of this obliteration of Gaza), and others too numerous to name. What has been in the past a respectable Fourth Estate, for example during Watergate (with one gigantic exception, The New York Times) has today morphed into a Fifth Column, and we are all, citizens of the United States as well as Palestinians, victimized by that Zionist deceit, which began sixty years ago.
Added Notation - in the last week (12/28/08-1/3/09) but two bombs in Baghdad have killed near one hundred, seriously wounding scores more. These are a direct result of sixty years of Israel killing Palestinians, and the more recent Israeli direction of the United States occupation of Iraq. When will it end?
A Gift from President-Elect Barack Obama
[[From now, 11/15/08, to the end of 2008 we will highlight major examples of "The Gaming of Politics", which may increase as the "News Media" and right-wing radio attempt to damage President-Elect Barack Obama and his administration, being formed before our eyes. Of constant concern is our relationship with Israel. To quote Dan Rather - "Have Courage." Also, there needs to be some chronology of key occurrences this past six decades which relate to the present day, e.g. the 1948 Zionist invasion of Palestine to rid that land of Palestinians.
*That outrage sixty years ago prompted this latest reaction, in India. Muslims, like Jews, have long memories, which disregard conventional wisdom. The three day siege, which began Wednesday, 11/26/08, 10pm Mumbai (Bombay) India time, and killed over 175 people bears witness to what has become a world shattering event - the 1948 Zionist attack and occupation of Palestine.
*As Christopher Hitchens wrote (www.slate.com) "The Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish disciples of Rabbi Schneerson may be relatively recent arrivals, but there have been Baghdadi Jews in Bombay since records were kept and Jews in India since before Christ, and not until this week has a Jewish place in India been attacked for its own sake, so to speak." *
The significance was not lost on the 12/2/08 The New York Times, which published on page A-6 a full-color photo captioned "Moshe Holtzberg, 2, cried out for his parents (Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, 29, from Brooklyn, and his wife, Rivka, 28, an Israeli.), who were killed last week, at a service on Monday." But this article does not mention that the "Nariman House", a five-story recently renovated headquarters of the ultra-orthodox Chabad Lubavitch movement and its Synogogue were attacked but nine minutes after the 9:21pm attack on the train station, a diversion.
The Nariman House was the second target, at 9:30pm, for the murderous band of ten. As with our 9/11 attackers these ten men did not intend to survive. Somewhere in GOPBias.com we have a thorough analysis of the history of suicide attacks, which indicate that they did not begin, nor did Hezbollah, until Zionists resorted to overwhelming fire power.
**A Robert A. Pape, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago has an eye-opening OP-ED piece 5/18/05 on Bush vs World:
"Over the past two years, I have compiled a data base of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 through 2003 - 315 in all. What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.
Before Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, there was no Hezbollah suicide campaign against Israel; indeed, Hezbollah came into existence only after the event. Some have wondered if the rise of suicide terrorism in Iraq is really such a bad thing for American security. Is it not better to have these killers far away in Iraq rather than here in the United States? Alas, history shows otherwise.
The presence of tens of thousands of American combat forces on the Arabian peninsula after 1980 (the Ronald Reagan and senior George Bush presidencies) enabled Al Qaeda to recruit suicide terrorists who in turn attacked Americans in the region (the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the attack on the destroyer Cole in 2000).
The presence of nearly 150,000 American combat troops in Iraq since 2003 can only give suicide terrorism a boost, and the longer this suicide terrorist campaign continues the greater the risk of new attacks in the United States. Understanding that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the United States and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism."**
All of the above, and what follows, relate to an event of some two thousand years ago in which an individual, Jesus of Nazareth, challenged a religion of the Middle East, Judaism, a form of worship that had become arrogant, corrupt and self-serving. Today the deadly tentacles of that regime, until 1/20/09, direct the most powerful nation on Earth and, for the last eight years, have had the service of the most malignant President of the United States in its history. The collapse of the world financial system is evident to all. Less known is that Alan Greenspan's invention and touting of "derivatives" is the fundamental fault.
The beginning of America's war against the Middle East, a God-awful result of those tentacles, was fully described with the 2004 publication of James Bamford's A Pretext For War, and Michiko Kakutani's excellent NY Times' review. Jewish American pressure on the publishing industry has prevented any and all mention of Mr. Bamford's groundbreaking analysis since. Now Ms. Kakutani has submitted her personal effort, although without acknowledging Mr. Bamford or his publication, with a lengthy fulsome review of Peter W. Galbraith's latest - UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: How War in Iraq Strengthened America's Enemies. An added note: What is truly remarkable, and, perhaps unprecedented, is that Jewish Americans number less than ten million of our over 300 million population, but, with a combination of insidious stealth and arrogance have achieved political power here that is absolute. As Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton) penned to Bishop Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887: Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
>>>> First, an individual example...
In the August 29, 2008 edition of The New York Times, devoted to Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech before 80,000 people in the packed Invesco Field arena under a mild open sky in Denver, Colorado - a speech to the convention delegates and supporters of the Democratic Party on the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s electrifying speech from the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall August 29, 1963 - in this historic 8/29/08 issue of The Times the ubiquitous and arrogant David Brooks submits the most despicable and vitriolic column of his career. This inheritor of the William Safir (aka Safire) slot makes his propaganda predecessor appear balanced by comparison. This singularly offensive composition demands exposure:
My fellow Americans, it is an honor to address the Democratic National Convention at this defining moment in history. We stand at a crossroads at a pivot point, near a fork in the road on the edge of a precipice in the midst of the most consequential election since last year's "American Idol."
One path before us leads to the past, and the extinction of the human race. The other path leads to the future, when we will all be dead. We must choose wisely.
We must close the book on the bleeding wounds of the old politics of division and sail our ship up a mountain of hope and plant our flag on the sunrise of a thousand tomorrows with an American promise that will never die! For this election isn't about the past or the present, or even the pluperfect conditional. It's about the future, and Barack Obama loves the future because that's where all his accomplishments are.
We meet today to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans, a generation that came of age amidst iced chais and mocha strawberry Frappuccinos®, a generation with a historical memory that doesn't extend back past Coke Zero.
We meet today to heal the divisions that have torn this country. For we are all one country and one American family, whether we are caring and thoughtful Democrats or hate-filled and war-crazed Republicans. We must bring together left and right, marinara and carbonara, John and Elizabeth Edwards. On United we stand, on US Airways, there's a 25-minute delay.
Ladies and gentleman, I never expected to be speaking before you today. Like so many of our speakers at this convention, I come from a hard-working, middle-class family. I was leading a miserable little life, but, nevertheless, overcame great odds to live the American Dream. My great-grandfather fought in Patton's Army, along with Barack Obama's great-grand uncles' fourth cousin once removed.
As a child, I was abandoned by my parents and lived with a colony of ants. We didn't have much in the way of material possession, but we did have each other and the ability to carry far more than our own body weights. When I was young, I was temporarily paralyzed in a horrible anteater accident, but I never gave up my dream: the dream of speaking at a national political convention so my speech could be talked over by Wolf Blitzer and a gang of pundits.
And today we Democrats meet in Denver, a suburb of Boulder, a city whose motto is, "A Taxi? You Must be Dreaming."
And in Denver, we Democrats showed America that we have cute daughters who will someday provide us with prestigious car-window stickers. We heard Hillary Clinton's ringing endorsement of "the weak-looking thin guy who's bound to lose."
We heard from Joe Biden, whose 643 years in the Senate make him uniquely qualified to talk to the middle class, whose family has been riding the Acela and before that the Metroliner for generations, who has been given a lifetime ban from the quiet car and who is himself a verbal train wreck waiting to happen.
We got to know Barack and Michelle Obama, two tall, thin, rich, beautiful people who don't perspire, but who nonetheless feel compassion for their squatter and smellier fellow citizens. We know that Barack could have gone to a prestigious law firm, like his big donors in the luxury boxes, but he chose to put his ego aside to become a professional politician, president of the United States and redeemer of the human race. We heard about his time as a community organizer, the three most fulfilling months of his life.
We were thrilled by his speech in front of the Greek columns, which were conscientiously recycled from the concert, "Yanni, Live at the Acropolis." We were honored by his pledge, that if elected president, he will serve at least four months before running for higher office. We were moved by his campaign slogan, "Vote Obama: He's better than you'll ever be." We were inspired by dozens of Democratic senators who declared their lifelong love of John McCain before denouncing him as a reactionary opportunist who would destroy the country.
No, this country cannot afford to elect John Bushmccain. Under Republican rule, locusts have stripped the land, adults wear crocs in public and M&M's have lost their flavor. We must instead ride to the uplands of hope!
For as Barack Obama suggested Thursday night, wherever there is a president who needs to tap our natural-gas reserves, I'll be there. Wherever there is a need for a capital-gains readjustment for targeted small businesses, I'll be there. Wherever there is a president committed to direct diplomacy with nuclear proliferators, I'll be there, too! God bless the Democrats, and God Bless America! - David Brooks 8/29/08
Except for Mr. Brooks' ethnicity he could not find space in any major publication or periodical. His work makes William Kristol's worthy of a Pulitzer.
>>>> Second, a societal example...
On December 26, 2008, even as they are lighting the Menorah candles of Hanukkah, the cowardly Israelis sent wave after wave, not of soldiers, but of missile airstrikes against the virtually imprisoned Palestinians in Gaza, indiscriminately killing over two hundred Gazans including Gazan police, women and children, injuring another four hundred, threatening Gazan leadership put into office by United Nations monitored elections. Such is the Israeli worldwide leadership sixty years after its invasion of a notably peace-loving Palestine. The 11/26/08 Mumbai attack on the centuries-old Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish congregation in India, and the 50 BILLION dollar fraud of Bernard Madoff may well be the retribution, the manifestation of the wrath of the Jewish Deity. Its about time.
Significantly, the unprovoked and grossly opportunistic Jewish attack coincided with Bill Moyers Journal's presentation 12/26/08 of the new film by Peter Bisanz, BEYOND OUR DIFFERENCES, which included Chief Rabbi David of the International Committee For Interreligious Relations.
Ms. Kakutani continues: In his compelling new book the scholar and former diplomat Peter W. Galbraith not only reminds us that the Iraq war has been a costly, bungled operation, but he also argues that the war has had the opposite effect of virtually everything that President Bush and his administration promised the American public it would have:
*A war intended to eliminate (what were later found to be non-existent) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq "ended up with Iran and North Korea much closer to having deployable nuclear weapons."
*A war intended to make Israel more secure has made that country more vulnerable to threats from Syria, Iran and Hezbollah.
*A war meant to boost America's global leadership "has driven U.S. prestige to an all-time low" over the last five years and alienated important allies like Turkey.
Mr. Galbraith makes a persuasive case for these arguments, using his firsthand observations on the ground in Iraq (as a staff member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later as a consultant for ABC News) and his extensive knowledge of the region to explicate the consequences that the American invasion has had on political and ethnic struggles within Iraq and on larger strategic alignments in the Middle East and wider world.
The "pretense that the surge is a success and that therefore the United States is winning the Iraq War," Mr. Galbraith contends, "is the opening salvo in a coming blame game as to who lost Iraq." He suggests that the surge has enabled President Bush to "run out the clock on his term in office so as to avoid having to admit defeat" and that running out the clock serves the interests of the Republican Party, setting up a G.O.P. story line for 2009: "When George W. Bush left office, America was winning the Iraq War. His successor -- abetted by the Democratic Congress and the faithless American people -- squandered the victory and is responsible for the consequences." - Michiko Kakutani 12/5/08 *
A broad-based significant segment of this country, in part inspired by the phenomenal election victory of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, has been reinspired by the vision of Caroline Kennedy in the United States Senate filling the seat of her uncle Robert Francis Kennedy when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is confirmed as President Barack Obama's Secretary of State. Of course this vision is not shared by the Republican Party or a formidable block of the Media/Press as evidenced by the NPR 12/17/08 Neal Conan Talk of the Nation which featured a "Political Junkie Ken Rudin" and the New York State District 18 legislator Nita Lowey who insisted that Ms. Kennedy will have to spend much time in New York "delis" to qualify for the seat, which is sometimes code for Jewish, the faith which Conan, Rudin and Lowey share. In other words, is Ms. Kennedy Jewish enough, even though she's been married to Edwin Schlossberg for twenty two years and has three children. Another obstacle could be The New York Times who on the front page of the 12/17/08 issue has Adam Nagourney slighting Caroline Kennedy, by within the first three brief paragraphs, quoting Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown stating that "upstaters" will want to see an "upstater" on the ticket. Another New Yorker takes issue with Mr. Nagourney...
To the Editor: - It astounds me that anyone can accuse Caroline Kennedy of not having "paid her dues" in American politics. In addition to quietly devoting herself to public service, she has paid not only dues but also the ultimate price anyone can: the loss of her father and uncle to political assassins.
In response to these tragedies, she has lived a productive and admirable life. Anyone who looks at her many achievements, both public and private, and fails to see a national role model needs to revamp his definitions of the words "leader" and "strength." - Abigail Meisel, New York, 12/16/08
...as do others across the country.
To the Editor:
Re "Caroline Kennedy Is Seeking Seat Held by Clinton" (front page, Dec. 16):
I am encouraged that Caroline Kennedy will seek the United States Senate seat from New York. I hope that Gov. David A. Paterson will appoint her when Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes secretary of state.
I hope that Mrs. Clinton might support that choice and urge others to do so.
Nearly a year ago, Ms. Kennedy demonstrated courage and leadership by endorsing Barack Obama for president. She did it when many Democratic Party leaders were hesitant, thinking he was too young and inexperienced and couldn't win. The same was said of her father, John F. Kennedy, who proved the politicians and pundits wrong by winning the presidency in 1960 as Mr. Obama did this year.
Last Jan. 28 in Washington, I saw Ms. Kennedy take the national political stage with her uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, to rally thousands in support of Mr. Obama at an American University rally. She demonstrated her grasp of key issues, and comfort with voters in key states during the general election campaign.
I'm confident that Ms. Kennedy, working closely with President-elect Obama, would serve New York's best interests well in the next Congress. She is a lawyer, an author of books on constitutional law, and well informed on public education matters. She grew up in a family that encouraged public service at an early age, and that commitment was fulfilled by the major achievements of John, Robert and Edward Kennedy over decades. - Herb Linnen, Washington, 12/16/08
To the Editor:
Critics of Caroline Kennedy's candidacy to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton as a senator from New York cite her lack of elective experience. But four of the most recent individuals to hold the seat had never previously been elected to anything: Robert F. Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James L. Buckley and Mrs. Clinton.
What's far more important for a senator from New York is the power to make a difference, both for New York and the country. The good will from around the world that Caroline's name and her professional accomplishments over the last 30 years bring her will help make her an effective senator. - James Spada, Boston, 12/16/08
To the Editor:
Is Caroline Kennedy qualified to be a United States senator?
What a freshman senator needs most is not necessarily political experience but a readiness to learn, character and judgment.
Thinking back over some of the newcomers I observed during my eight years on the Senate staff, I say she is eminently qualified. - James Cannon, Washington, 12/16/08
The writer served as chief of staff to Howard H. Baker Jr., the former Senate majority leader, from 1977 to 1984. And Mr. Cannon is from the Republican Party prior to Ronald Reagan whose term of office began a period of unlimited deceit coupled with no concern for the health of our nation.
However, perhaps because of the impending 12/26/08 massacre of Gazans, a Sheldon Silver, New York State's Assembly speaker stated 12/23/08 that Governor Paterson should not select Ms. Kennedy, possibly because she would have strongly condemned the Israeli action.
DemocracyNow.org 12/9/08: Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has condemned the Jewish "settlers" in the West Bank who opened fire on Palestinians last week, saying their actions constituted a "pogrom." The settlers shot and wounded three Palestinians and set fire to property after Israeli security forces evicted a Jewish group from a disputed building. Olmert said, "As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term 'pogrom' to describe what I have seen." The word "pogrom" is emotionally charged in Israel as it was often used to describe Russian massacres of Jews in the nineteenth century.
Meanwhile, Israel's leading civil rights organization, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, has broken a taboo by describing Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank as being "reminiscent of the Apartheid regime in South Africa." A spokesperson for the group said the organization decided to drop its previous reluctance to use the South Africa comparison because things are getting worse in the Occupied Territories. - Amy Goodman 12/9/08
One of the all-too-frequent previews - previews which foretell that Israel intends NEVER to relinquish any part of Palestine. The following from Amy Goodman DemocracyNow 11/21/08.
US Activist Detained in Israeli Jail Condemns Blockade of Gaza
Israel's tightened blockade of a million and a half Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is now entering its third week. On Monday, the Israeli navy seized fifteen Palestinian fishermen and three international activists off the coast of Gaza. The fishermen were released, but the activists remain in an Israeli jail. We speak to Darlene Wallach from inside the Masiyahu Prison near Tel Aviv.
Guest:
Darlene Wallach, activist detained in Israeli jail
AMY GOODMAN: Israel's tightened blockade of a million and a half Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is now entering its third week. Tel Aviv rebuffed calls Thursday from United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to reopen the crossings into Gaza for humanitarian aid. Israeli government officials cited continuing Palestinian rocket fire as the reason for closing the crossings.
Residents of Gaza are running out of essentials, like food, medicines and fuel, as a result of the almost continuous blockade imposed November 4th.
Meanwhile, the fifteen Palestinian fishermen seized by the Israeli navy off the coast of Gaza were released on Wednesday. The three international volunteers accompanying the fishermen, however, remain in a prison near Tel Aviv.
American Darlene Wallach, Italian Vittorio Arrigoni, and Scottish Andrew Muncie had arrived by boat into Gaza in late August as part of the first Free Gaza delegation. They remained in Gaza working with the International Solidarity Movement alongside Palestinian fishermen, documenting any harassment by the Israeli navy.
The three internationals are reportedly beginning a hunger strike today to protest their detention. They are also demanding the Israeli navy release the Palestinian fishing boats they confiscated this week.
US citizen in detention, Darlene Wallach, joins me now from a phone inside the prison near Tel Aviv. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Darlene.
DARLENE WALLACH: Thank you very much. Thanks for calling me.
AMY GOODMAN: Where exactly are you being held?
DARLENE WALLACH: I'm in a--it's in a men's prison, but inside the men's prison there's a compound for women. And the compound is for people who are illegally in Israel because their visa, work visas ran out. So my question is, why am I here? I was kidnapped at gunpoint by the fourth largest military in the world, and I was on a Palestinian fishing boat in Palestinian fishing waters. So it doesn't make any sense why I'm here, why I'm being held.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain exactly what you were doing and the scene when you were arrested.
DARLENE WALLACH: I was on a Palestinian fishing boat that I've been on numerous times. And we accompany the Palestinian fishing boats in their waters, where they have the international right to fish, so that the Israeli navy won't shoot and kill or arrest the Palestinian fishermen.
So what made it different this time is, it seemed to me they were specifically targeting the internationals, because they released the Palestinian fishermen to their homes. And they also confiscated the fishing boats. And the way that they arrested us was very different than how they normally arrest the fishermen. So, normally, they force the fishermen to strip to their underwear, jump in the water and swim to the Israeli navy boats. And this time they brought Zodiac boats, and the frogmen boarded each Palestinian fishing boat. And the first person taken was Andrew. I saw him being taken. And then they took the fishermen off of that boat. Then they came to the boat I was on and took me off the boat.
And so, I don't know--I didn't know what happened to the fishermen. I was very concerned about their safety and what Israel might do to them. And I'm very, very concerned about the fishing boats, because in the past what Israel does is they sink the boats or they damage the boats, like taking the engines off, or steal all the equipment. So I'm very concerned about what's going to happen to the fishing boats. That's their livelihood. I mean, they said fifteen fishermen. Well, there's more than just those fifteen that work on each boat. So the livelihood of all those people now has been destroyed. That's how many families now? And the families tend to be large. How many families now have no income, and there's no employment, because they have no fishing boats to go out on? It's really just disgusting, despicable, deplorable. And I want the world to speak out and tell Israel to stop. - DemocracyNow 11/21/08
An Ethan Bronner in the 12/19/08 N Y Times, from Jerusalem, reports (A-11) the latest permutation of Israeli Zionists in the continuous effort to spin their choke hold on the Palestinians in Gaza (while holding other thousands of Palestinians locked up in the West Bank) - interestingly, The Times also includes two photos which capture space equal that of the article, one depicting a cracked plate glass of a Sderot, Israel, market, the other photo of a one-legged Palestinian in the rubble of a demolished Jabaliya, Gazan refugee camp - i.e. Even The New York Times is registering disgust with Zionist Israel. If so, time for an exposure of AIPAC?
Ethan Bronner in Jerusalem 12/19/08 - Rockets are flying from Gaza into southern Israeli communities again. Israeli warplanes are firing missiles back, and Israel is closing the crossings through which food and fuel are supplied. The United Nations agency that feeds Palestinian refugees in Gaza says its stocks of flour are exhausted.
In other words, the six-month truce that Israel and Hamas, the militant Palestinian leaders of Gaza, agreed to on June 19 is over, although it officially expires on Friday.
Hamas officials say it was their understanding at the time that two weeks after the June 19 truce accord took effect Israel would open the crossings and allow the transfer of goods that had been banned or restricted after June 2007, when Hamas waged a violent takeover of Gaza (They were elected!).
Their job, the Hamas officials said, was to stop the rocket attacks on Israel not only from its own armed groups, but also from others based in Gaza, including Islamic Jihad and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades.
It took some days, but they were largely successful. Hamas imposed its will and even imprisoned some of those who were firing rockets. Israeli and United Nations figures show that while more than 300 rockets were fired into Israel in May, 10 to 20 were fired in July, depending on who was counting and whether mortar rounds were included. In August, 10 to 30 were fired, and in September, 5 to 10.
BUT THE GOODS SHIPMENTS, while up some 25 to 30 percent and including a mix of more items, never began to approach what Hamas thought it was going to get: a return to the 500 to 600 truckloads delivered daily before the closing, including appliances, construction materials and other goods essential for life beyond mere survival. INSTEAD, THE NUMBER OF TRUCKS INCREASED TO AROUND 90 FROM AROUND 70.*
Israeli officials acknowledged that transferring previously banned goods had been the plan, but said that there was NO SPECIFIC DATE for the increase and that it was to happen in steps. But the rockets never fully stopped.
*The well-informed and notably-balanced (therefore seldom seen) Lebanese journalist Hisham Melham made a surprise appearance on the OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting) funded Foreign Exchange with Daljit Dhaliwal 12/12/08, and described a sensible and even-handed, badly-needed triage for the disastrous Middle East which the Bush/McCain/AIPAC "policy" has created, a Melham scenario right out of President-elect Barack Obama's playbook, a scenario which President Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski have long called for, and which now is an imperative. In that we GIVE Israel OVER THREE BILLION DOLLAR$ EVERY YEAR, we have some clout. Let's finally use it.
The transcript of the Melham-Dhaliwal conversation our next edit. Ms. Dhaliwal seems to be somewhat tardy.
The United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay has accused Israel of "unprecedented and deeply regrettable" treatment of UN human rights investigator Richard Falk. Falk was deported from Israel Monday after being detained at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport for twenty hours. Falk's detention and expulsion came days after he condemned Israel's blockade of Gaza as a "flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law" and "Crime Against Humanity." We speak to Falk about his detention and expulsion from Israel. - Amy Goodman DemocracyNow 12/17/08
Guest:
Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories. He is professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and the author of more than fifty books on war, human rights and international law, including Achieving Human Rights; Crimes of War: Iraq, with Irene Gendzier; and Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East, with Howard Friel.
AMY GOODMAN: The United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay accused Israel Tuesday of "unprecedented and deeply regrettable" treatment of UN human rights investigator Richard Falk. Falk was deported from Israel Monday after being detained at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport for twenty hours. He was appointed the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories earlier this year but was denied entry because of what Israel called his "highly politicized views."
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Yigal Palmor said Falk "does not try to advance human rights, but instead comes with his conclusions ready and those conclusions are of course extreme methodic criticism of Israel and only of Israel," he said. Israel's Foreign Ministry also accused Falk of "legitimizing Hamas terrorism and drawing shameful comparisons to the Holocaust."
The professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, Richard Falk, issued a statement last week titled "Gaza: Silence is not an option" that condemned Israel's blockade of Gaza as a "flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law." He urged the UN to invoke "the agreed norm of a responsibility to protect a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity." Falk also called for an International Criminal Court investigation of Israeli military and civilian officials for potential prosecution (And Professor Falk is Jewish.).
Richard Falk is now back at home in California. He joins me now on the telephone.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Falk. Talk about what happened. When did you try to get into Israel and Gaza?
RICHARD FALK: Amy, it was about three days ago, and I came with a security person and an assistant from Geneva. They had received visas ensuring them entry, which were honored when we arrived at Ben Gurion Airport, and because they received visas and knew that I was coming, we assumed there'd be no problem with my entry, because they had ample indication--in fact, formal notification--of my itinerary. So it remains strange why they didn't either inform Geneva, where the Human Rights Council and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is located, or just deny them visas, which would have been a signal of their intention. So, somehow or other, it appears that they wanted this incident to occur.
And when I arrived, they questioned me first in the passport area and then led me, after long delays, from one place to another until the representative of the Ministry of Interior denied me entry and placed me in this detention facility prior to being expelled on the plane that took me back here to California.
AMY GOODMAN: And in that twenty-hour period, were they questioning you?
RICHARD FALK: No, they didn't--oddly, again, they didn't seem particularly interested in either exploring my views or objecting to them or doing anything substantive. They just put me in this detention facility, which is located, I think, on the periphery of the airport area and is a very coercive little experience, because I was in with five other people in a tiny room where there was barely space to stand, and it was--we were locked in this room and treated not terribly, but unpleasantly. I would put it that way. The others were there for technical infractions of immigration law of one reason or another, and most of them were waiting for lawyers. Actually, we had good camaraderie, so that was one of the sort of pleasant aspects of a generally unpleasant experience.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what your plan was in getting into Gaza and your response to the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Yigal Palmor, saying that you don't "try to advance human rights, but instead comes with his conclusions ready and those conclusions are of course extreme methodic criticism of Israel and only of Israel" and the Israel Foreign Ministry also accusing you of "legitimizing Hamas terrorism and drawing shameful comparisons to the Holocaust."
RICHARD FALK: Well, I think they're all, first of all, distortions of my real views and, secondly, part of a much wider and what I would regard as insidious pattern of trying to shift the attention from their objections to the person, rather than their argument with the facts that are the basis of mine or other people's assessment of the situation. I think I could stand very well behind the views that are contained in my report and would gladly engage in any kind of discussion of those views. But Israel has been pursuing what I call a politics of opaqueness, trying to make the realities of the occupation as obscure as possible and as speculative as possible. They've kept those who are knowledgeable inside Gaza from leaving to attend international conferences--Raji Sourani, for instance, the head of the Human Rights Centre, who had previously been allowed to attend international conferences and is a distinguished recipient of the Kennedy Center's Human Rights Award. So they've tried to keep people in who know something about the reality of the occupation and then try to keep people out, such as myself, who could report credibly on what is happening inside, and shifting that argument then to my qualifications.
Let me come to these issues that you appropriately raised. First of all, I never compared the reality of what is going on in Gaza to the Holocaust. What I did say was that the kinds of collective punishment that are being imposed on the entire people of Gaza have a resemblance to collective punishment that was imposed by the Nazis in Germany and that if this kind of circumstance is allowed to persist, it could produce a holocaust. I never suggested that what was happening was a holocaust. Same thing with the existence of crimes against humanity. I merely tried to characterize the facts as I understood them to involve this kind of massive collective punishment of every man, woman and child, regardless of their activities, as being victimized by a set of policies summarized as a siege or blockade, where some of the effects are now very well established, such as 46 percent of Gazan children are suffering from acute anemia. Very stark reality. More than 80 percent are living under the level of poverty.
So I return to the main point. I think that my whole life has been devoted, I think, to trying to tell the truth about facts that are often unpleasant, unpleasant for me to address. I really have sought, in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict, peace and justice for both peoples and have always had that view that it was possible, desirable and necessary. And that's the basis on which I've acted throughout this period as special rapporteur for the UN.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Falk, the New York Times had a piece called "UN Rights Investigator Expelled by Israel," not exactly what I would call sympathetic to you. I just wanted to read one quote from that article. It says, Richard Falk "has compared Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi atrocities and has called for more serious examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. Pointing to discrepancies between the official version of events and other versions, he recently wrote that 'only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book.'" Your response?
RICHARD FALK: Yeah. Well, that's part of this whole effort to shift the focus to me and away from the reality and, at the same time, to somehow paint me as some kind of conspiracy person or theorist, which is absolutely untrue. What is true is that I wrote the forward to the original book of David Griffin, a longtime friend of mine, which is the most prominent challenge to the validity of the official version of 9/11, and I continue to hold the view that the 9/11 Commission did not adequately address the difficult questions about what happened on 9/11 that he raised. But I haven't ever and do not now endorse any kind of conspiracy theory. All I think that is true is that the American people and the world deserve a fuller and more credible investigation of those events.
AMY GOODMAN: In December of 2006, Israel blocked the South African Archbishop and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu from investigating the killing of nineteen Palestinians in Gaza. He had a UN mandate to head a fact-finding mission to Gaza, like you did, but Israeli officials failed to grant him the necessary travel visas, saying the mission, quote, "advances a biased anti-Israel agenda."
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: We find the lack of cooperation by the Israeli government very distressing, as well as its failure to allow the mission timely passage to Israel. This is a time in our history that neither allows for indifference to the plight of those suffering nor a refusal to search for a solution to the present crisis in the region.
AMY GOODMAN: I asked the Archbishop, Archbishop Tutu, about this when I interviewed him a few weeks ago.
AMY GOODMAN: You were blocked from going into Gaza in 2006, leading a UN delegation there after the killing of a number of Palestinians.
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to be done now with the Middle East specifically, with Israel and the occupation?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: There's been some very interesting moves with the outgoing prime minister suggesting that Israel has to consider very seriously the proposal of going back to the boundaries of 1967. That's a very important initiative, if that was taken.
I think that we would have to move very quickly to lifting the embargo. The suffering is unacceptable. It's totally unacceptable. It doesn't promote the security of Israel or any other part of that very volatile region.
AMY GOODMAN: That's Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa just a few weeks ago here in New York. Of course, it was not only Tutu, not only you, Professor Falk, but news organizations writing a letter of protest to the Israeli prime minister--CNN, BBC, Reuters, New York Times, AP--for not being allowed into Gaza. What are you calling for right now, as you return home having been deported from Israel?
RICHARD FALK: Well, mainly, access for myself. I think my resignation would be giving in to Israel's unreasonable behavior and, as I say, part of this broader pattern that Archbishop Tutu's exclusion further confirms.
And, incidentally, I didn't respond to your question about Hamas. That is an absolutely untrue statement. I've condemned the firing of rockets at civilians.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Falk, we just have five seconds, so your final comment?
RICHARD FALK: My final comment is that it's important for the peace of the region that the facts of this occupation are widely known.
AMY GOODMAN: We leave it there. Thank you for joining us.
[[ Also with our next edit we will begin tracking meaningful non-partisan and legitimate efforts to bring to justice George Walker Bush and those around him who have ravaged our Constitution of the United States of America. This will begin with Bill Moyers 12/12/08 conversation with Glenn Greenwald, author of "Great American Hypocrites", possibly an ironic title in that Mr. Greenwald did not oppose the invasion of Iraq. Interestingly Mr. Greenwald was somewhat late in "analyzing" the invasion of Iraq.
(1) Remarkable. Our nation may have accomplished what Robert F. Kennedy predicted forty years ago, elected a man of color, and WHAT A MAN!, to the presidency of the United States...but Republicans, following the lead of their predecessors who began the Civil War April 12, 1861 by firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Republicans opposed the loan to GM, Ford and Chrysler to punish the autoworkers in Michigan who supported Obama, and reward Southerners who voted for McCain, a man who ran the dirtiest presidential campaign in recent history. Both the Republican opposition to aiding the big three automakers, and the despicable campaign of McCain, were supported by the broadcast networks, which now have an ingrained Republican Party core. Had the aid been approved by the Congress it is likely, according to all reliable non-partisan financial experts, that the stock market would be holding steady. But what we now have on this fateful 11/20/08 is a market Dow in the 7500 range. Today's Republican leadership in the Congress care not a whit for our United States of America. As late as 12/2/08 Lehrer's Judy Woodruff gave South Carolina Governor and "Doodles" Weaver look-alike Terry Sanford facetime to oppose the loan. A full exposure of Republican opposition is on the horizon.
On the 12/5/08 DemocracyNow Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez engage Ralph Nader for specifics which both NPR (National Platform for Republicans) and PBS (President Bush's Spokespersons) have, with due diligence, avoided.
Ralph Nader: Well, Juan, first of all, it needs to be made clear that the workers and the UAW have given up far more than what the government subsidy will come down to in dollars, if what the auto companies are asking for is accepted by Congress. They gave up huge--billions of dollars in 2007, and they're giving up more in 2008.
"And what this whole debate is lacking is any concept of numbers. For example, if this is a $34 billion so-called bailout, what is it really? Well, it's subsidized loans, or maybe they'll turn it into loan guarantees. And depending on what the government gets in return, that is a fraction of what--as Amy said, of what Citibank and the financial industries have gotten in New York.
The reason why there's so much focus on the auto companies is not just its role in the American economy, but it's public, and there are congressional hearings, where the wave of the gigantic bailout after bailout of Wall Street occurred largely on weekends in secret meetings between the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, and the goliaths on Wall Street. And these were sweetheart deals. Citibank got a huge sweetheart deal with very, very little reciprocity.
Now, if the Congress is going to move to save the domestic auto industry, they're going to do it as taxpayers, as shareholders, as creditors, and they will drive a hard bargain. And as a result, the taxpayer can get preferred shares, they can get warrants, so that if the companies recover, the taxpayer gets not just the money back, but a huge surplus. I mean, Ford Motor Company stock now is around $2.60. If Ford modestly recovers, it could go to $20. And, of course, those Treasury warrants and preferred shares would come out very, very handsomely, as they did in the Chrysler bailout when Iacocca turned it around in 1980 and '81.
So, what I think should be done is for the government to say, 'OK, you want our help. We are going to own a part of you. We are going to be creditors and restructure you; remove the board of directors and the executives that are deemed not to be performing over the years; put people who know how to produce fuel-efficient, emission-controlled safe motor vehicles in place; and reform the whole area of shareholder rights,' because the government will be a shareholder. And since the government is effectively an insurer, they can move to apply the principle of insurance and loss prevention and produce motor vehicles and alternative transit, mass transit, that will damage less people on the highway and the environment. So, I call it government capitalism, where the government plays the role of a shareholder, the role of a creditor, the role of an insurer, and restructures the entire industry." - DemocracyNow 12/5/08 with Ralph Nader
Playing Politics With the Auto Bailout
To the Editor:
Re "Senate Abandons Auto Bailout Bid After G.O.P. Balks" (front page, Dec. 12):
The Senate Republicans' (McConnell, Specter, Shelby) rejection of a bailout for America's Big Three automakers confirms a suspicion that many working- and middle-class Americans already had -- Republicans care little for the majority of citizens who suffer from economic crises.
For decades, Republicans have supported corporate efforts to earn profits without accountability to working Americans. Profits and bonuses rose before the decline, often by eliminating domestic production -- and jobs -- while switching operations overseas.
Yet when some of our biggest domestic employers need help -- employers that actually produce something tangible, unlike Wall Street -- Republicans choose to preach rather than do something constructive. Their actions betray American workers and sabotage an already fragile economy.
Yes, the automakers have a lot to learn, but surely not at the expense of our economic viability. It is almost inconceivable that Republicans would risk destroying some of the nation's few remaining manufacturing giants just to teach the unions a lesson. - Barry Moskowitz, New City, N.Y., 12/12/08
To the Editor:
Let it be known to the millions of people about to be out of work, to the millions of people who will find themselves on the wrong end of obtaining financing of any sort despite their good credit and to the millions of Americans who will have to pay billions more later when we finally do bail out the auto industry, that Senator Mitch McConnell refused to budge because his political goals were more important than an exercise of statesmanship in a time of crisis.
When, as in most crises, only bad decisions were on the table, he chose the worse of the two. Let it be known. - Robert D. Sichta, Barneveld, Wis., 12/12/08
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. and his reporters Stephen Labaton, David M. Herszenhorn, Carl Hulse, Micheline Maynard, Louise Story, David Sanger, Leslie Wayne, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bill Vlasik, etc., composed miles of newsprint plus text online, assisted by enumerable editors, to cover this so-called "Bailout" of Detroit automakers and the UAW, so-called because the core of the "controversy" is a flagrant sub rosa demand by southern Republican Senators Dick Shelby of Alabama, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky that the agreement virtually eliminate the UAW which, as Ralph Nader has stated, has already contributed more to this effort than any other party. What was left out of the various NY Times reports was that the three Republican states - Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee - EACH RECEIVED FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLAR$ - from Honda (Ala.), Toyota (Ky.), Nissan (Tenn.) - to locate NON-UNION assembly plants in the respective anti-union Southern states. This is a prime example of the Gaming of Politics which we cite at the beginning. Also, so much for "All the News That's Fit to Print"!
An earlier warning - DemocracyNow 11/21/08: "Stocks plunged on Wall Street Thursday for a second straight day. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell to its lowest level in eleven years. The S&P 500 is now more than 52 percent below its October 2007 record high, making the current bear market the second biggest on record. The current decline is exceeded only by the 83 percent drop between 1930 and 1932." - - Background - The great Paul Volcker was replaced by Alan Greenspan, the inventor and proponent of "derivatives", in 1987. Reagan's work!
"Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz has publicly claimed he pushed Barack Obama not to allow former President Jimmy Carter to speak at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Dershowitz told Shalom TV, 'Barack Obama had to make a choice between his Jewish supporters and his anti-Israel supporters like Jimmy Carter, and he did not choose Jimmy Carter... It was a good decision, a wise decision, a moral decision.' Dershowitz has harshly criticized Carter for publishing the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." - Amy Goodman 11/21/08 Mr. Dershowitz has unleashed the Furies!
Ms. Goodman's exposure of Alan Dershowitz (This twisted self-righteous, but vicious, man has persecuted one of the few outspoken, but honest, Jewish Americans to challenge AIPAC, Norman Finkelstein.), his railing against President Carter; but his past exoneration of the cunning Claus von Bulow who poisoned his wealthy wife, "Sunny", to live in luxury with his mistress, reveals a sordid quality among some Jews who actually believe they are God's "Chosen People".
The late November targeting of the new Indian headquarters of the ultra-Orthodox Chabad Lubovitch "movement" reminds of the Jewish National Fund advertisement in the 11/9/08 The New York Times Magazine, the feature article of which is After the Imperial Presidency (the George Walker Bush regime). The slogan of this JNF is "for ISRAEL forever". But what kind of ISRAEL? The ironies abound. The focus of the Bush Imperial Presidency began with the planning for the attack, invasion and occupation of Iraq, for ISRAEL!
> > > At the close of Gwen Ifill's 12/5/08 Washington Week the correspondents remarked that even as President-elect Barack Obama's agenda was full, he wasn't expecting the addition of the three-day attack on India's financial center, to which Ms. Ifill added it was like George Bush's early presidency not anticipating Iraq. Whoa! In fact, when Bush convened his first meeting of the Principals, it was ALL about Iraq, as we know from his first Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill. < < <
The page 18 JNF ad in the 68-page magazine is well placed, and alarming for its message:
HONOR A JEWISH SOLDIER
"Herman Margulis was the first American GI to cross from Luxembourg into Germany in the Battle of the Bulge.
As a testament to his bravery his son David purchased a plaque in Herman's honor at "Ammunition Hill"(?) in Jerusalem, site of the pivotal 1967 battle that made possible the reunification of the city.
As a tribute, Jewish National Fund is erecting a Wall of Honor at "Ammunition Hill". Individual plaques can be purchased to honor Jewish men and women who served or serve in the military of any country". - Sheldon G. Adelson Money?
Supposedly, there is a forthright effort in Israel to pursue a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To date, there is little evidence that the Jewish occupants of Palestine have EVER, honestly and/or forthrightly, intended any solution that did not mandate full Jewish control of the Levant.
>>>>>> Ms. Goodman's information on Mr. Dershowitz must now lead to a national open debate on this near-classified subject - should the state of Israel continue to determine United States policy in the Middle East. This issue colors and distorts any and all major reporting which includes Jewish Americans. On November 9, 2008 the lead segment, the cover story, of the CBS Sunday Morning, a must when Charles Kuralt hosted, aired a "salute" to a "civilian", the notorious Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon G. Adelson, who had financed "5 day, 4-star, all-expense paid vacation" trips to his Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, for injured military from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, recovering veterans from the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. God knows these men and women deserve every service we can provide. But Seth Doane's story should also have given CBS's audience some information on Mr. Adelson's many so-called "Freedom" ventures, the funding of hard-right political actions which brought about the war against Iraq, and the bankrolling of right-wing AM radio programming by, for example, Dennis Prager and Dennis Miller, which the American people were hard-pressed to overcome in this recent quadrennial election. Instead, the newcomer to Leslie Moonves' CBS crew showcased Adelson's use of his hotel in Las Vegas, "the largest in the world", with no hint of his involvement in the effort essentially mandating George Walker Bush's invasion of Iraq (see references to James Bamford's A Pretext For War). This is but an opener to the influence of Jewish Americans on United States foreign policy in support of the hard-line faction of Israel's political makeup.
CBS Evening News followed two weeks later with this seemingly innocuous report from Postville, Iowa on the bankruptcy of a kosher meat processing plant, same reporter, same whitewash, in this case of Jewish father and son - Aaron and Sholom Rubashkin - whose one family business earned $300 million annually, but on the backs of the illegal immigrants who were recruited and forced to work for below scale wages, unpaid overtime and in a plant fraught with safety violations.
TOWN IN TROUBLE
CBS EVENING NEWS
11/23/2008 18:45:00
NEWSCASTER: For months now we have been following the deepening troubles of tiny Postville, Iowa, population 2,200. Now, the shutdown of the town's main employer following a federal immigration raid has Postville this weekend at the point of desperation. Here's Seth Doan:
RADIO DJ, NOT ID'D: Good morning, it's Sunday, November 23rd, you are listening to member-supporter KPDL 89.1 Postville.
REPORTER: Postville, Iowa was just decorated with holiday cheer, but looks can be deceiving.
MAYOR BOB PENROD, POSTVILLE, IA: In the last few weeks it's really gone downhill dramatically.
REPORTER: With empty streets and shuttered shops, this small town is facing economic calamity. Mayor Bob Penrod is taking steps this weekend to declare a state of emergency here. But it's not a natural disaster, rather, one that's man made.
PENROD: If we don't get some assistance from the state and federal government, we're going to be in deep trouble financially.
REPORTER: That's how Jeff Bohr and his wife Holly feel.
JEFF BOHR, RESIDENT OF POSTVILLE, IA: We were okay for a week or two weeks, but now we're going into the third week and we're just struggling to survive.
REPORTER: Earlier this month Jeff and Holly's employer Agriprocessors, a kosher meat processing plant, suspended operations and filed for bankruptcy protection. Once the town's largest employer, this was just the latest in a string of setbacks for the company and for Postville. It all started May 12th, when hundreds of federal immigration authorities raided Agriprocessors and arrested 389 workers. Many, like Erma Rucal, [spelling not verified] were undocumented immigrants. Six months later she still wears a tracking anklet and waits for a court date.
There are a lot of people in the US who frankly wouldn't have a lot of sympathy for you.
They don't understand the poverty that we know in Guatamala, she tells me. I've never hurt anyone. All I want to do is work. She says she paid $14,000 to smuggle her 14-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter to the US. They say even though they are minors, they worked at the plant along with their mother. Do you sometimes wish you had not come to the United States?
BOY, NOT ID'D: Yeah, but it's the only place where you can make something for your life.
REPORTER: With no income, they rely on the charity of local churches, also now feeling the pinch.
REV STEPHEN BRACKETT, ST PAUL LUTHERAN CHURCH: Now we have the plant stopping production, possibly closing, in a horrible economic situation.
REPORTER: Jeff, who's worked at the plant for 18 years, and Holly, there for 14, have not yet been laid off. So each night they return to see if the plant will reopen the following day.
BOHR: It's going to be a sick feeling everyday coming up here.
REPORTER: This night there is more bad news. No work again. Even the security guard just comes out of habit.
SECURITY GUARD, NOT ID'D: That's like us, people think we're getting paid 'cause we're security. We aren't getting paid either.
REPORTER: They have no idea what they'll do with Christmas around the corner, never mind a mortgage payment due on the first.
BOHR: I'm actually afraid to turn the TV on and see what company is asking for a bailout or foreclosing or bankruptcy every day. 'Cause it's going to eventually catch up to each and every one of us.
REPORTER: It's caught up to you.
BOHR: Yeah, it's caught up to us just a little bit quicker.
REPORTER: Because the story of Postville could be the story of many more parts of America in months to come. Seth Doan, CBS News, Postville, Iowa. - 11/23/08
Mr. Doan and his editors neglected to mention that Sholom Rubashkin was arrested on federal criminal conspiracy charges, and that both he and his father Aaron are facing state criminal charges. In addition, N Y Times' Steven Greenhouse reported 12/5/08 on A-28, that Sholom is in jail awaiting a trial on felony charges of bank fraud, harboring illegal immigrants for profit and abetting document fraud and identity theft.
On the 11/25/08 NPR's Talk of the Nation, host Neal Conan and now-senior NPR news analyst Ted Koppel [apparently soon to replace Dan Schorr (must they be Jewish - and why was Bob Edwards fired from NPR?!)], Mr. Koppel said during a program discussing how the new Obama administration should deal with Iran, that when the bloody Iraq-Iran wars were ongoing Israel was an ally of Iran, as though that were surprising. Not so. At the time Israel saw Iraq as its mortal enemy. Now that we've eliminated (?) a hostile Iraq it is Iran that stands in opposition to Israel's plans for the Middle East. These paragraphs from the 11/26/08 NY Times lead into an astonishing opening segment on the 11/23/08 60 Minutes with Scott Pelley as reporter, on leftover nuclear material from apartheid South Africa, that may relate to present day apartheid Israel.
Iran Arrests 3 Militia Volunteers as Israeli Spies
By Nazila Fathi and Isabel Kershner
[Editor's note - Regarding nuclear weapons, Israel is the most armed rogue nation in the world, with a stockpile exceeding two hundred, and has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The fact is that current power in Israel can not abide a progressive Iran, which is striving to establish not a nuclear weapon capability, but a nuclear power system for the generation of electricity.]
TEHRAN - Israel, which has a nuclear arsenal, has said it is convinced that Iran will soon be able to make nuclear weapons.
Israel bombed an Iraqi nuclear site in 1981 and what it suspected was a Syrian nuclear site in 2007. In June, Israel conducted a major military exercise that American officials said appeared to have been a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Israel has said military action to halt Iran's nuclear progress should be a last resort, and has pressed for tougher international sanctions. But on Sunday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that a "defense establishment paper" to be presented to the cabinet next month identified "Iran's threat to Israel's survival" as its top concern. It called international cooperation the priority, but said that if other countries gave up, Israel must have a military option.
On Tuesday, Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, discussed "the danger of Israel" with Lebanon's president, Michel Suleiman. - Nazila Fathi & Isabel Kershner 11/26/08
[On the 11/23/08 60 Minutes CBS's Scott Pelley had an extensive, detailed report on a year-old story of an apparent attempt to seize some left-over nuclear material from a Pelindaba facility in South Africa where the former Apartheid regime secretly built nuclear weapons decades ago, about the same time that the Israelis were "secretly" building their nuclear arsenal (it is notable that Israel has a nuclear arsenal twice the size of India and Pakistan combined), and establishing their apartheid regime to contain the Palestinian population of Palestine that the Israelis were displacing. There may be more to President Jimmy Carter's 2007 publication title Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid than is evident on the surface. We'll look forward to Leslie Moonves' 60 Minutes following up on that Pelindaba story, perhaps with Bob Simon as reporter.]
<<<<<<
(2) As we note elsewhere, 11/22/08 was the forty-fifth marking of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy about whom, because of the hidden political machinations behind his killing, there have been few presentations on film and/or television which portray the actual promise of the man. An exception could have been seen on PBS Sunday night, 11/23/08 at 9pm, a three hour segment of the five hour dramatic mini-series Kennedy, first aired in 1983. Martin Sheen, the consummate film actor known for his portrayal of President Bartlett in the stellar television series "West Wing", which was removed from the network because it was such an embarrassment to George W. Bush. Mr. Sheen portrayed President Kennedy. That submission by General Electric/NBC Universal (regarding the cancellation of West Wing) to the Bush/Cheney administration demands was a classic example of GOP bias in the media, for which GOPBias.org was created.
And there is more about Kennedy. The Alan Landsburg Productions-Central Independent Television film, distributed by NBC and Independent Television here to the UK and elsewhere, the film portrayed the President and brother Robert as shallow and rather thoughtless men, i.e. without the qualities of depth for which they were known. John Fitzgerald Kennedy's back pain was such that he could not move quickly, even in the White House. And the Landsburg group completely sanitized LBJ. For example, Johnson intended a regular liaison with his longtime mistress Madeline Brown on that fateful trip to Dallas. Ms. Brown was employed by the Johnson television studio in Dallas and her illegitimate son Stephen was supported by LBJ throughout his life. To this day, the activities of President Johnson are little known - his bedding of author Doris Kearns Goodwin, the late night antics of Mr. Johnson and sidekick Jack Valenti in the White House with select secretaries. Alan Landsburg missed none of John Kennedy's missteps but all of Lyndon Johnson's as Vice President.
Coincidentally, the state of New York honored Senator Robert Francis Kennedy on what would have been his eighty-third birthday, November 20, 2008, by naming the historic Triborough Bridge which connects the Queens, Bronx and Manhattan boroughs of New York City much as Senator Kennedy united disparate groups of Americans in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, brutally ended in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel on June 6th, 1968, but two months following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 4, 1968. These three dates - 11/22/63, 4/4/68 and 6/6/68 along with 12/12/00, the date that the Republican Supreme Court cabal of Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and O'Connor stole the 2000 presidential election from the winner Vice President Albert Gore and gave it to the loser, George W. Bush, who has come close to destroying our nation - these dates should be embedded in every truly patriotic American's psyche - now miraculously joined by the historic November 4, 2008! Senator and presidential candidate of 1968 - Robert Francis Kennedy.
(3) "Rather's Lawsuit Shows Role of G.O.P. in Inquiry" - Page B-1 N Y Times 11/17/08, article by Jacques Steinberg. "Some of the documents unearthed by his investigation include notes taken at the time by Linda Mason, a vice president of CBS News. According to her notes, one potential panel member, Warren Rudman, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire, was deemed a less-than-ideal candidate over fears by some that he would not 'mollify the right.'
Meanwhile, Mr. Thornburgh, who served as attorney general for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, was named a panelist by CBS, but only after a CBS lobbyist 'did some other testing,' in which she was told, according to Ms. Mason's notes, 'T comes back with high marks from G.O.P.'
Another memorandum turned over to Mr. Rather's lawyers by CBS was a long typed list of conservative commentators apparently receiving some preliminary consideration as panel members, including Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. At the bottom of that list, someone had scribbled 'Roger Ailes,' the founder of Fox News."
(4) The, it must be said, brilliant Bob Herbert 11/15/08 column headed ''Drop Dead' Is Not An Option' - - -
"The famous Daily News headline, 'Ford to City: Drop Dead,' ran on Oct. 30, 1975.
New York was on the verge of bankruptcy, and President Ford (who never actually said 'drop dead') had made it clear, after listening to conservative hard-liners both inside and outside of his administration, that he planned to veto any federal rescue plan.
It was yet another case of the worshipers of abstract economic notions (let the markets run their infallible courses) ignoring the potential consequences of their smug certainties." - Bob Herbert 11/15/08
- - - answers the "Gaming" by lame-duck George W. Bush who, noted on 11/11/08 front page NY Times Jackie Calmes' article, essentially told our nation "Go To Hell" when he agreed to Barack Obama's mainstream suggestion that Bush use the approaching lame-duck Congressional session to support some critically-needed aid to the auto industry "which supports one in every ten jobs in our country", that Bush responded he would agree only if the same session approves the highly controversial trade pact with Columbia, the support for which cost John McCain dearly in his trouncing election loss on 11/4/08.]]
Now - A Rare Partial Recognition by The New York Times
THE WAR WITHIN
"Israel is becoming a nation at war with itself. The conflict is not just with militant Palestinians. Militant Jewish settlers in the West Bank clash regularly with Israeli police who remove illegal homes. Israeli security officials have warned of possible assassination attempts on peace-seeking Israeli leaders.
In September, Jewish militants tried to assassinate Professor Zeev Sternhell, a supporter of Peace Now, which documents settlement construction. Settlers are damaging Palestinian property in retaliation for government actions against the outposts.
The Israeli cabinet on Sunday branded the disturbances 'a threat to the rule of law and order in Israel.' The situation is so bad that Ehud Olmert, the departing prime minister, announced plans to halt direct or indirect government financing of unauthorized settlements -- roughly 100. Another 120 settlements are government-authorized. And any peace deal will inevitably require that the vast majority are shut down.
Mr. Olmert said he would increase the number of law enforcement personnel deployed in the West Bank and move against law-breaking settlers. It was long past time for the government to act. But we fear the measures are more symbolic than real.
Mr. Olmert's announcement exposed the fact that despite repeated pledges to dismantle settlements, the government is still abetting them. Even if financing is ended, some experts say government services to the outposts like water and electricity will continue.
As a step toward peace, Israel must freeze all settlements and reduce the roadblocks in the West Bank that are strangling the Palestinian economy. To do so, the Israeli government needs the public support of American Jews and moderate Israelis against militants who seek political change through violence.
Israeli voters are expected to choose a new government in February. Mr. Olmert's designated heir, Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, failed to put together a coalition government for the right reasons: She refused the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party's demand that there would be no negotiations on the status of Jerusalem. Such a commitment would have made any peace deal impossible. Ms. Livni's chief rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, opposes immediate talks on a Palestinian state.
Israelis need a leader who can calm the forces that are tearing Israel apart and also negotiate a just peace. The new American president must be ready to fully support that effort. The lesson of the last few months should be clear to all. Israel will have no peace -- with its neighbors or its own citizens -- without a peace agreement." - Editorial 11/5/08
"In 1948 the Jewish army expelled three-quarter of a million Palestinians from what then became the State of Israel. Ilan Pappe, the Israeli historian, said he still felt haunted by the story, and then, in 1998, the Israelis opened the military archives, and it became clear that the Zionist's movement had planned to expel the Palestinians long before 1948. In 2006 Ilan Pappe published his most recent book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. He spoke about his work at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands in January/February of 2007." - Maria Gilardin June 2007
Ilan Pappe: "(a synopsis) David Ben Gurion, who led an ideological movement ever since the 19th century, wanted to turn Palestine into a Jewish state with as few Palestinians in it as possible (when he was out of office this first Prime Minister of Israel was annoyed by the presence of so many Palestinians remaining in Israel, particularly in the Galilee). It shows that the leader of the Zionist movement, the 1st Prime Minister of Israel, someone at the heart of the Zionist movement, so annoyed by so many Palestinians in the Galilee, he is committed to a vision that sees historic Palestine as empty of Palestinians. Most of the Israeli Jews in the 1950's thought the same way, and nothing has changed in Israel in 2006. How to get there, how to de-Arabize Palestine. How to make Palestine a Jewish state, (i.e.) get rid of the people who live there (except, of course, for that number of Jewish settlers who in the 1930s had grown to one-third of the population in Palestine as they left the turmoil in Europe). How to deal with the majority in Palestine, the Palestinians. In February of 1947 the Zionists were very focused under Ben Gurion and the advisory committee he organized around him (only hardliners) and it took them a year, to February of 1948 to develop the plan to rid Palestine of the Palestinians, that as many as possible of the one million Palestinians should be expelled. How to do it? The experiment? The Jewish/Zionist army expelled about eight to nine villages. They wanted to see how the world would react. Nothing. So, you come with buses, lorrys - you go into someone's house, there are children, women, men, people have lived in these houses for hundreds of years: 'You have twenty minutes' to get on the bus and out you go. And half an hour after you leave on the bus someone detonates the house and blows it up. So Ben Gurion and others were not sure how the world and the young soldiers would react. Nothing. So, the master plan. They divided Palestine into twelve areas, the Haganah had twelve brigades, each brigade was given a list of villages, neighborhoods in mixed towns and systematically, in seven months, they expelled three-quarter of a million Palestinians, 531 villages were destroyed, eleven towns were demolished."
Obama Names More Admin Officials
"Meanwhile, Democratic Congress member Rahm Emanuel has formally accepted the offer to become Obama's White House Chief of Staff. Earlier in the day, Emanuel spoke to reporters about his future.
Rep. Rahm Emanuel: 'My parents are alive to see their middle son have a choice in his career between being a congressman with one chance, one opportunity down the road, of maybe rising in the leadership, and being the Chief of Staff to a historic presidency at a historic time. I'm very fortunate that my parents are alive to see that, whatever choice I make.'
Emanuel is thought to be on the hawkish end of the Democratic Party. He voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing the Iraq war and has vocally backed Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and its 2006 attack on Lebanon. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Emanuel was the top recipient of donations from 'hedge funds, private equity firms and the larger securities/investment industry' in the 2008 election cycle."
The President-Elect is Barack Obama and he has chosen an individual best-suited to reinforce President Obama's insistence that the adversaries in the Israel-Palestinian conflict truly seek "common ground", including the status of Arab East Jerusalem.
BEYOND THE "LEGACY" OF BUSH/CHENEY/MCCAIN THE MAJOR OBSTACLE THAT THE LINCOLNESQUE-ELECTED BARACK OBAMA WILL HAVE TO OVERCOME IS THE INSIDIOUS, WELL-ESTABLISHED AND FORMIDABLE NETWORK OF GENERAL ELECTRIC NBC UNIVERSAL, DISNEY ABC AND THE LESLIE MOONVES-DOMINATED CBS. ON THE SUNDAY FOLLOWING THE TRULY MIRACULOUS OUTPOURING OF VOTER SUPPORT FOR MR. OBAMA AND MR. BIDEN MOONVES' SUNDAY MORNING PROGRAM LED WITH A SALUTE TO THE NOTORIOUS LAS VEGAS MULTI-BILLIONAIRE SHELDON G. ADELSON, THE SOURCE OF LITERALLY MILLION$, ALL DISGUISED UNDER A VARIETY OF "FREEDOM" LABELS, BUT IN UNIFIED SUPPORT FOR THE MOST RIGHT-WING REPUBLICAN CAUSES AND PRINCIPALS.
SIGNIFICANTLY, TWO OF MR. ADELSON'S BENEFICIARIES, THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN OF JOHN SIDNEY MCCAIN III AND THE WEST COAST SENATORIAL CAMPAIGN OF MULTI-MILLIONAIRE GORDON SMITH OF OREGON WERE DEFEATED BY AMERICA'S VOTERS. EXCEPT FOR THAT WISDOM MR. MCCAIN AND MR. SMITH WOULD SURELY HAVE BEEN NOTED GUESTS OF MR. ADELSON IN LAS VEGAS. FORTUNATELY FOR THIS NATION OTHER VENTURES OF MR. ADELSON'S BEHIND-THE-SCENES ACTIONS HAVE FAILED, LARGELY BECAUSE OF BARACK OBAMA, BUT MR. ADELSON'S EARLIER INVOLVEMENTS IN, FOR EXAMPLE THE RATCHETING-UP OF THE FALSE REPUBLICAN/RIGHT-WING JEWISH CLAIMS OF SADDAM'S WMDS HAVE YET TO BE FULLY EXPOSED. STAY TUNED.
Note: Perhaps hundreds of our Iraq and Afghanistan military veterans, many seriously wounded, were treated to five day, four star all-expense paid vacations at Adelson's Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Hopefully, these men and women are on their way to full recovery and our heartfelt thanks for their heroic service. However, these positive developments do not begin to erase the incalculable damage which Mr. Adelson's fortune has inflicted on our United States, and the rest of the world, including Israel.
[ Surely "Shelly" is not a mystery to either Shaila Dewan or her N Y Times' editors...as it would seem from this paragraph in the Friday 11/14/08 edition -
"The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is spending $700,000 this week on television time, and a group called Freedom's Watch have been running advertisements on behalf of Mr. Chambliss (it is Mr. Chambliss, a notable draft dodger, who in his 2002 defeat of Senator Max Cleland, a man who left three limbs in Vietnam, criticized Mr. Cleland as being non-patriotic, but Chambliss is now being supported by "Shelly" Adelson and The New York Times doesn't know it?...). 'It all comes down to Georgia,' one advertisement warns."
Ms. Dewan's A-20 story includes a large photo of Senator John McCain campaigning for Saxby Chambliss. How ironic that in 2002 John McCain defended Mr. Cleland. Politics does make strange bedfellows. This effort by The New York Times is a classic example of "gaming the politics", the refusal to name Sheldon G. Adelson, who is not "a group".]
Fortunately, there are true patriotic Americans determined to reverse the immense cost wrought upon our nation by Mr. Adelson and his cohorts. Prominent among these saviors is Albert Arnold Gore Jr., Al Gore.
EXCERPTS -
"As Abraham Lincoln said during America's darkest hour, 'The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.' In our present case, thinking anew requires discarding an outdated and fatally flawed definition of the problem we face.
Here's what we can do -- now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.
Looking ahead, I have great hope that we will have the courage to embrace the changes necessary to save our economy, our planet and ultimately ourselves.
In an earlier transformative era in American history, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.
This year similarly saw the rise of young Americans, whose enthusiasm electrified Barack Obama's campaign. There is little doubt that this same group of energized youth will play an essential role in this project to secure our national future, once again turning seemingly impossible goals into inspiring success." - AL GORE NYTimes 11/9/08
Al Gore, the vice president from 1993 to 2001, was the co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He founded the Alliance for Climate Protection and, as a businessman, invests in alternative energy companies. How fortunate Mr. Gore is still with us.
And in eleven more days we mark forty-five years since the brutal assassination of the thirty fifth President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The perfidious misrepresentation of Mr. Kennedy on network television and in film (with the singular exception of the brilliant, yet seldom shown, 1974 ABC production Missiles of October starring William Devane and Martin Sheen), that malicious slander against Mr. Kennedy will begin to dissipate as the American people, buoyed by the Obama/Biden victory, gain the understanding to confront that libelous segment of our society that dominates AM radio, pollutes religious broadcasting and has, over recent years, created, up to 11/4/08, the most virulent force in American politics. Thanks to Barack Obama and the awakening American people President Kennedy's June 10, 1963 American University commencement address (which some investigators see as having activated the assassination plot), will reacquaint American society with the terrible loss which we, and the rest of the world, suffered on 11/22/63. Mr. Kennedy's compelling words on June 10, 1963, are surely part of what has inspired President-Elect Barack Obama. Hallelujah!
Brief excerpt: "I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived--yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.
What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time." - JFK 6/10/63
The egomaniacle, ever-grasping Middle East avaricious faction which is responsible for what follows would do well to review the commencement address at American University on 6/10/63 by President Kennedy.
DemocracyNow 11/11/08: "In Israel and the Occupied Territories, the Israeli government has re-imposed a cutoff of fuel shipments to the Gaza Strip. Gaza's main power plant shut down last night, leaving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians without electricity. Areas across the Strip were plunged into darkness, and hospitals reported imminent shortages that could shut them down. Israel authorized a limited shipment earlier today. Israel has imposed several fuel blockades on Gaza, citing Palestinian rocket fire on nearby Israeli towns. Visiting Gaza, British Parliament member Nazir Ahmed said Israel should face international isolation for its siege of Gaza.
Nazir Ahmed: 'It's time that the international community said enough is enough, and if Israel is prepared to go down this route, then they must face isolation. This is unacceptable at a time when people of Gaza are already suffering. We have seen the result of bombing [of the plant last year], and those equipment has not been replaced even now. The capacity of this plant is down to one-third, when it was supplying half of the Gazan electricity.'
As darkness fell across Gaza Monday, hundreds of children gathered for a candlelight vigil to protest the blockade. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh called the move an act of collective punishment.
Ismail Haniyeh: 'This is not a breach of truce. This is a programmed Israeli policy, and the Egyptian host of this truce should interfere for the sake of stopping the daily bloodshed of the Palestinian people.'
Israel's fuel blockade comes just days after Haniyeh said Hamas would accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. A 1967-based solution would mean Israeli withdrawal from all of Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where Israel continues to build settlements. Haniyeh made the comments at a meeting with European lawmakers who had sailed from Cyprus to protest Israel's Gaza blockade."
DemocracyNow 11/13/08: "In Afghanistan, at least twenty Afghan civilians and a US soldier have been killed in a suicide attack on a US military convoy. Another seventy-four people were wounded. The attack occurred outside a town in eastern Afghanistan.
In Israel and the Occupied Territories, the Israeli government has committed another violation of a months-long truce. On Wednesday, Israeli troops killed four Hamas militants after crossing into Gaza. Israel says the dead were planting explosives. Israel has imposed a week-long fuel and food blockade on Gaza after Hamas responded to the killing of six Palestinians in an earlier Israeli attack. Hamas spokesperson Ayman Taha called the latest killings another provocation.
Ayman Taha: 'We in Hamas assure that these statements will not scare us, and it is only a storm in a mug. The Zionist enemy tried several times to hinder the Palestinian resistance. We assure that these threats will not scare us and will not stop us from achieving our resistance.'
Earlier today, Israel held up a UN food delivery after Palestinians fired rockets overnight. The UN has warned it will be forced to halt food distribution unless deliveries resume.
In addition to the humanitarian blockade, the Israeli government is now barring all foreign journalists from entering Gaza for at least a week. An Israeli military spokesperson said only international aid workers and Palestinian medical patients will be allowed to enter or leave. In a statement, the Foreign Press Association called the media ban a 'serious violation of press freedom.'
In Iraq, at least twenty-five were killed in bombings across Baghdad Wednesday, continuing more than a week of daily attacks that have killed dozens of people.
Meanwhile, in Mosul, two US soldiers were killed and another six wounded when an Iraqi soldier opened fire. The Iraqi soldier, Barzan Mohammed, died when US troops fired back. Iraqi police say Mohammed had reported being slapped by a US counterpart before the attack.
In other Iraq news, the private military company Blackwater is facing millions in fines for shipping automatic weapons into Iraq without the proper permits. Some of the weapons reportedly ended up on the Iraqi black market. The fine is expected to come out of a long-running investigation, but criminal charges are not expected. Blackwater has yet to be charged or hit with any other punitive action over the unprovoked massacre of seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nissour Square on September 16, 2007. The company has received more than $1.2 billion in government contracts since then.
In Pakistan, an American aid worker has been killed in the northwest city of Peshawar. The victim, Stephen Vance, was a private contractor overseeing a development program for the State Department."
[It is crucial to remember the key connection of Israel to the makeup of present Bush/Cheney/McCain American involvement in the Middle East -
Here is the 6/18/04 review by Michiko Kakutani of James Bamford's groundbreaking A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies:
"What he does focus on is the role that Israel has played in shaping American policy. Mr. Bamford contends that 'the blueprint for the new Bush policy' on the Middle East 'had actually been drawn up five years earlier by three of his top national security advisors' (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) for the Israeli prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu (who rejected the plan) -
- The plan was titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing The Realm (Israel), the first step of which was the elimination of Saddam Hussein, who Israel saw as the first obstacle to their plans for control of the Middle East! A Clean Break incredibly refers to the 11/4/95 assassination of the warrior/peacemaker Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Mr. Rabin's assassin was Yigal Amir, who was inspired by, it must be said, "Bibi" Netanyahu's blood-thirsty political attacks on Mr. Rabin. These people are vicious.
- and that when they entered office in January 2001, all these hawks needed was 'a pretext' for war against Iraq. Citing a report from the British newspaper The Guardian, Mr. Bamford adds that the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon unit set up by Mr. Feith, 'forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence unit within Ariel Sharon's office in Israel,' which 'was designed to go around the country's own intelligence organization, Mossad.'" THIS IS EXTREME "GAMING OF POLITICS". THIS IS THE "WHY" OF OUR WAR AGAINST IRAQ.]
DemocracyNow 11/14/08: "The United Nations says it's been forced to halt food aid to 750,000 Palestinians because of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. Israel says it won't allow food shipments into Gaza, because Palestinian militants continue to fire rockets at nearby Israeli towns. The rocket fire began last week after an Israeli missile attack killed six people. The top UN aid official in Gaza, John Ging, called the situation a 'disaster.'
John Ging: 'The situation here in Gaza is desperate. There's 750,000 refugees depending on handouts of food from UNRWA. Why? Because the economy has been destroyed in this period of time when crossings have been closed. These people have been reduced to be dependent on this food, and now we can't even get that food into Gaza. It's a disaster.'
Meanwhile, the Israeli government has also forced Gaza's main power plant to shut down after cutting off its fuel supplies. The plant provides between a quarter to a third of Gaza's electricity. In addition to the food and fuel blockades, Israel has also barred foreign journalists from Gaza."
There are no awards for the season's slimiest political messages (Swift Boat statuettes?), but two deserve consideration in the character assassination category.
In the first, Republicans in Pennsylvania flooded 75,000 Jewish voters with an e-mail alarm from a retired Jewish judge equating a vote for Barack Obama with the "tragic mistake" of Jews who ignored the warning signs of the Holocaust. Quick apologies and retractions were offered once this surfaced in the press, but too late for the unspeakable to be spiked.
In the second, the campaign of Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, who is in a very tight race, broadcast her desperation by attacking her opponent, State Senator Kay Hagan, for accepting "godless money" at a "secret" fund-raiser whose hosts included a leader of a secularist group.
At the end, the TV screen fills with a shadowy photo of Ms. Hagan, an elder at her Christian church, as a female voice fairly shrieks: "There is no God!"
Then there is the fringe madness of "Letter from 2012 in Obama's America" -- an apocalyptic fiction making the rounds from the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family Action. It foresees an Obama incumbency marked by terrorist attacks on American cities, rampant crime as guns are confiscated, a nuclear attack on Israel and the Boy Scouts' disbanding to avoid court-empowered gay leaders.
It seems just another straight-line for Jon Stewart until the nation remembers that the group's leader is James Dobson. He is one of the most prominent leaders on the evangelical right, with an audience measured in the scores of millions.
The Democrats have their share of slimy ads, like one targeted at the elderly that falsely claims John McCain would cut Social Security benefits in half. We're not excusing that ad or any other policy distortions. But frankly, it's not even an also-ran compared with what the McCain campaign and its allies have been up to. - Editorial - The New York Times A-26 11/3/08
AND THE PHILOSOPHIES YOU HAVE EMPOWERED
How is it...in this nation...in the most critical presidential election in our lifetimes...American voters can be required to wait in line for ten hours (seven hours in Virginia - 52% for Obama 11/4/08 - Gail Collin)...to exercise their Constitutionally guaranteed franchise...but only in heavily Democratic precincts?
Group releases anti-Obama DVD in 5 newspapers
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Readers of Ohio's three largest newspapers, along with papers in Florida and Nevada, are finding an anti-Barack Obama DVD in editions this week.
Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group based in Washington, plans to release a 95-minute film in the five swing-state publications to highlight Obama's record on abortion rights, foreign policy and his past associations, including his relationship with former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The group said it planned to spend more than $1 million to distribute about 1.25 million copies of "Hype: The Obama Effect."
[This is an extremely costly infusion of dirty politics in the last week of the McCain/Palin campaign and, as such, has all the "earmarks" (one of McCain's favorite terms) of Las Vegas multi-billionaire Sheldon G. Adelson.]
"We think it's a truthful attack. People can take it anyway they want," said David Bossie, Citizens United's president.
Readers of The Columbus Dispatch received their copy Tuesday. The Cincinnati Enquirer, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post and the Las Vegas Review-Journal are scheduled to receive them in coming days.
The film raises questions about Obama's political base in Chicago and the media's reporting on Obama.
Among those interviewed are conservative columnist Robert Novak, former Clinton strategist-turned-pundit Dick Morris and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and discredited Obama critic Jerome Corsi also give interviews.
Bossie was involved in the House's investigation of President Clinton that led to his Senate impeachment trial.
Obama campaign spokesman Isaac Baker said middle-class families are tired of "slash and burn politics."
"Ohio voters aren't buying John McCain's increasingly negative and desperate smear tactics, and we're confident they'll see right through these dishonest, debunked attacks from the fringes of the far right," Baker said. - PHILIP ELLIOTT Associated Press Writer
McCain's Health Care Plan
To the Editor:
In "Ceding the Center" (column, Oct. 26), David Brooks says that John McCain has "a good health care plan that was never fully explained."
Mr. McCain has proposed a disastrous plan that most experts agree would destroy the tax-exempt employment-based insurance system and leave employees on their own to shop for whatever private insurance they could afford, supported by a tax credit of only $2,500 for an individual or $5,000 for a family.
The average current cost of decent private plans is more than double those amounts and is very likely to increase rapidly over the next four years.
Mr. McCain claims that individuals should be able to shop for insurance bargains, which would bring the cost of premiums down. Anyone who understands how the private health insurance industry operates would know that this is not a workable idea. Individuals have little or no consumer bargaining power, and insurers have no incentive to sell insurance to those most likely to need coverage.
The McCain plan would very probably increase, not decrease, the ranks of the uninsured and the underinsured. - Marcia Angell Cambridge, Mass. 10/27/08
The writer, a medical doctor, is a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
AMY GOODMAN NOTES THE RECORD -
McCain Faults Obama for Ties to Professor He Once Funded
"On the Republican side, Senator McCain has revived an old attack on Obama by bringing up his alleged ties to Palestinian American professor Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi teaches Arab Studies at Columbia University, where he also heads the Middle East Institute. The McCain campaign has cited few allegations against Khalidi aside from the fact that he is a Palestinian and supports Palestinians' right to resist Israeli military occupation. Speaking last night on CNN's Larry King Live, McCain criticized the LA Times for refusing to release a video of Obama appearing at a 2003 event honoring Khalidi.
Larry King: "Speaking of newspapers, there is the LA Times."
Sen. John McCain: "Yeah."
King: "They apparently--your campaign says that they're suppressing videotape of a 2003 banquet when Barack Obama praised Palestinian activist and scholar Rashid Khalidi. What's this all--what is this?"
Sen. McCain: "Why shouldn't they--"
King: "Why would the paper suppress this?"
Sen. McCain: "I have no idea. If they have the tape, they ought to make the American people aware of it, let them see it and make their own judgment. Frankly, I've been in a lot of political campaigns, a whole lot. I've never seen anything like this, where a major media outlet has information and a tape of some occasion--maybe it means nothing. Maybe it's just a social event. I don't know. But why should they not release it? And why shouldn't the Obama campaign want it released?"
King: "Is this Palestinian some sort of terrorist?"
Sen. McCain: "We know that at that time, the PLO was a terrorist organization."
King: "He was PLO?"
Sen. McCain: "Yeah, yeah--that's what the allegation is, Larry. I haven't seen the tape. So--but we should see the tape to make it--the American people make a judgment."
McCain went on to compare Obama's appearance at the dinner to appearing at a "Neo-Nazi" event. The LA Times says it won't release the tape because of a promise made to the source who provided it. Khalidi has never worked as a spokesperson for the PLO. McCain's attack on Khalidi marks the latest in a series of efforts to disparage Obama because of real or concocted ties to Arabs and Muslims. Khalidi is a respected scholar who has called for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict in accordance with a majority of public opinion in the US and worldwide. The so-called Khalidi "controversy" also comes as a surprise in light of McCain's own previous ties to Khalidi's work on behalf of Palestinian rights. During the 1990s, McCain chaired the International Republican Institute when it gave several grants to Khalidi's Center for Palestine Research and Studies." - Amy Goodman 10/30/08
[Much as the rest of the "news business" refused to name Sheldon G. Adelson, Elizabeth Bumiller managed to skip the phrase "Larry King Live" in her lengthy piece 10/30/08 in The New York Times in which she joins John McCain in an incendiary accusation that both Barack Obama, Democratic candidate for President of the United States, and respected Columbia University Palestinian author, history professor and scholar Rashid Khalidi are "terrorists". But Ms. Bumiller in her article, for some reason describes Mr. McCain as appearing on "radio station WAQI in Miami", with no mention of "Larry King Live". Apparently Ms. Bumiller fears the obvious, the "ethnicity factor", which, like acknowledging Sheldon G. Adelson, puts into perspective the most solid support for John McCain. Incidentally, it is Senator Obama's call for the people of the Middle East to "seek common ground" which antagonizes some demographic sectors of the American electorate.]
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE HAVE MADE THEIR JUDGMENT. AN OBAMA PRESIDENCY AND A DEMOCRATIC LEGISLATURE ARE MORE DESPERATELY NEEDED NOW THAN AT ANY TIME SINCE OUR GREAT DEPRESSION. THE EIGHT YEARS OF GEORGE W. BUSH, WITH ITS VITAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BY JOHN SIDNEY MCCAIN III, HAS SURELY BEEN THE MOST DEVASTATING TO THIS COUNTRY IN ITS HISTORY. TO EVEN CONSIDER A WHITE HOUSE OCCUPIED BY MR. MCCAIN AND SARAH PALIN IS LUDICROUS ON ITS FACE, AND THE PEOPLE, DESPITE THE SHENANIGANS OF THE LIKES OF BRIAN WILLIAMS AND TOM BROKAW WHO MASQUERADE AS NEWSMEN AND WILLIAM KRISTOL WHO PRETENDS HE'S A JOURNALIST, WHEN HE'S ACTUALLY JUST A CRUDE PROPAGANDIST A LA RUSH LIMBAUGH (OR, PERHAPS, BECAUSE OF THEM) AND THE BILLIONS OF SHELDON G. ADELSON WHICH FUND FREEDOM'S WATCH AND ANY NUMBER OF OTHER EXTREME RIGHT-WING NEFARIOUS CAUSES, THE PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THAT. WHAT TO DO? MCCAIN IS STILL FAILING!
FIRST, SEW FEAR AMONG THE AUDIENCE. STILL DOESN'T WORK.
SO--THE CANDIDATE HIMSELF.
JOHN SIDNEY MCCAIN III: "WE NEED TO KNOW THE FULL EXTENT OF SENATOR OBAMA'S RELATIONSHIP WITH ACORN WHO IS NOW ON THE VERGE OF PERPETRATING ONE OF THE GREATEST FRAUDS IN VOTER HISTORY IN THIS COUNTRY, MAYBE DESTROYING THE FABRIC OF DEMOCRACY."
CINDY MCCAIN: "SENATOR OBAMA IS WAGING THE DIRTIEST PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IN HISTORY."
A Choice And An Echo
The heyday of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove is over. Yet Senator McCain handed the reins of his campaign to Rove's worshipful acolytes. With the nation in a high state of anxiety over the conflagration in the credit and financial markets, Senator McCain traveled the country ranting Rovelike about Bill Ayers, trying to instill a bogus belief that the onetime '60s radical and Senator Obama were good buddies and perhaps involved in some nefarious doings together. Senator Obama was about 8 years old when Mr. Ayers was engaged in his nefarious doings. - BOB HERBERT 10/28/08
THERE IS AT LEAST ONE STRAIGHTFORWARD INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER AMONG THE NETWORKS, AND IT ISN'T BRIAN ROSS OF ABC, OR LISA MYERS OF NBC. WE ARE SPEAKING OF ARMEN KETEYIAN AT CBS, WHO IS FILLING THE RESPONSIBILITY OF BOB SCHIEFFER, WHO HAS BEEN A RELATIVELY NO-SHOW SINCE "W" APPOINTED HIS YOUNGER BROTHER TOM AMBASSADOR TO JAPAN.
NEWSCASTER: Nationwide, some 40 million voters are expected to cast early ballots this year. And they're doing so amid charges from both parties of attempts to steal the election through either voter fraud or suppression. CBS News Chief Investigative Correspondent Armen Keteyian takes a hard look at whether, at least for now, those fears are justified.
REPORTER: They've come out swinging from the left -
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA: Let's just make sure everybody is voting.
REPORTER: And the right.
PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE JOHN MCCAIN: One of the greatest frauds in voter history, destroying the fabric of Democracy.
REPORTER: Both parties have been tearing into each other; Republicans railing over bogus registration forms and bloated voter rolls, Democrats screaming about illegal voter purging and efforts designed to block the vote.
To better separate fact from fiction, CBS News conducted a detailed survey of 17 of the states that allow early voting in person. What we found so far is that charges of widespread voter fraud or suppression are far more rhetoric than reality.
As of Friday, nearly seven million people had voted early in those 17 states. CBS News made dozens of calls to top election officials, state party leaders from both sides, and watchdog groups asking for clear-cut examples of Americans being denied the right to vote or voting improperly. In virtually all of those 17 states, the response was: No problems, no issues, no complaints.
BOB BAUER, GENERAL COUNSEL, OBAMA CAMPAIGN: We're taking aggressive action to stop suppression.
REPORTER: Bob Bauer is General Counsel for the Obama campaign.
REPORTER TO BAUER: As yet, have you seen any evidence of people who wanted to vote, who are eligible to vote, that were turned away from voting?
BAUER: No, no.
REPORTER: In these three battleground states [Colorado, Ohio and Florida], political squabbles have sparked questions over the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters, yet officials there could only point to a handful of people who were denied the right to vote or have committed voter fraud.
Brian Jones is an advisor to the McCain campaign on voter issues.
BRIAN JONES, MCCAIN CAMPAIGN ADVISOR: It's hard to put an actual number on voter fraud and say it's this big or that big.
REPORTER: We're talking about, by our reporting and what you're hearing, a small handful of potential problems.
JONES: But, again -
REPORTER: Does that rise to a -
JONES: Well, here -
REPORTER: Excuse me, but does that rise to a level of one of the greatest voter frauds in history as Senator McCain said in the debate?
JONES: I think to just discount voting irregularities and say, well, it's just a small number is a very slippery slope.
REPORTER: A big part of an election battle that looks right now to be little more than a high stakes war of words. Armen Keteyian, CBS News, Washington 10/26/08.
11,000 Absentee Ballots Not Mailed Out in Colorado
Amy Goodman 10/27/08: In election news, a series of voting disputes in key swing states remain unresolved with just eight days to go before the presidential election. In Colorado, more than 11,000 voters in Denver have not received absentee ballots because of a mistake made by the company Sequoia Voting Systems. Sequoia was supposed to have delivered 21,000 ballots to a Denver mail processing facility on October 16, but the company only delivered about half of the requested ballots.
Colorado Sec. of State Sued for Vote Purges
In other election news from Colorado, the Advancement Project has sued Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman for his alleged illegal purge of voters across the state. The suit alleges that between 16,000 and 30,000 voters were purged in violation of the National Voting Rights Act.
Justice Department Pressed by Bush to Contest 200,000 Ohio Voters
The White House is intervening in an election dispute in the state of Ohio. The White House has asked the Department of Justice to look into whether 200,000 new Ohio voters must reconfirm their registration information before the Nov. 4 election because their records don't precisely match other government databases. Last week, the US Supreme Court dismissed a case brought by the Ohio Republican Party over the issue. - Amy Goodman 10/27/08
Amy Goodman 10/29/08: We're looking at voting around the country. Yes, early voting, millions of people are doing it. Harvey Wasserman with us, senior editor at the Ohio-based freepress.org. His book, How the GOP Stole America's 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008, among four books he's written on voting. Brad Friedman with us, independent journalist with "Brad Blog" at bradblog.com. He has reported extensively on issues of vote rigging.
Talk about Sequoia and Colorado. Welcome, Brad, to the video stream.
...
Harvey Wasserman, thanks so much for joining us--
HARVEY WASSERMAN: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: --of freepress.org. And Brad Friedman of bradblog.com, thanks for joining us by the DN! video stream.
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu on the Election of Barack Obama, the Israeli Blockade of Gaza, US Foreign Policy under President Bush and More
DemocracyNow - 11/21/2008
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu is one of the leading voices for peace, justice and human rights around the world. He was a central figure in the South African struggle against apartheid and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. Today he will receive the J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding for his work for peace in South Africa and elsewhere.
Guest:
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
AMY GOODMAN: The late great Miriam Makeba, the South African singer, as we turn now to the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the leading voices for peace, justice and human rights around the world, a central figure in the South African struggle against apartheid. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and currently chairs "The Elders," a group of twelve activists and former public officials advocating for peaceful solutions to global conflicts.
The Archbishop is in Washington, D.C. today to receive the J. William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding for his work for peace in South Africa and elsewhere.
I caught up with him on Thursday at the South African Vice Consul's apartment in New York, right before Archbishop Tutu received the Global Citizens Circle Award.
AMY GOODMAN: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, it's a pleasure to have you on Democracy Now!
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Thank you very much.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to the election of the first African American president, a son of an African man from Kenya?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yippee! No, "yippee" actually--it captures something that is almost inevitable. It's very close to the kind of feelings we had on April the 27th, 1994. And some, maybe a few people in this country, have said it was as it was with Mandela--Mandela moment. It's a moment when especially people of color have a new spring in their step. They can walk a great deal taller than they used to. And that even though this country, the United States, experiences very considerable racism--I mean, people being dragged to their deaths behind trucks--yet, it's a country that, in fact, has had this extraordinary experience, and it's something that has filled people with hope that the world can be a better place.
AMY GOODMAN: How did it feel for you? There were so many millions of people who voted for the first time in this election for Barack Obama. How did it feel for you? How old were you when you first voted in South Africa?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Sixty-three.
AMY GOODMAN: Sixty-three years old?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: When was it? What year?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: 1994.
AMY GOODMAN: For the election.
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: 1994. That was first time. And the first time for Nelson Mandela. And he, too, this extraordinary human being, and the many, many, many, many others.
Actually, in a way, you will say white people who had always voted in racially discriminated elections were voting for the first time, voting for the first time in a democratic--truly democratic--election. So we were all, as it were, on the same page.
But it was--I said then, when I was asked, "What is your--how do you describe how you feel?" I said, "Well, how do you describe falling in love? How do you describe red to someone who is totally blind? How do you speak about the glories of a Beethoven symphony to somebody who is deaf? Well, it's like that. I mean, I'm over the moon. I'm on cloud nine," as were most of my, if not all of my, compatriots on that day.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is Barack Obama's greatest challenge as president of the most powerful country on earth, following eight years of George W. Bush?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yes. Very clearly, it has been the fact that for those eight years you've had an America that followed a unilateralist line, an American that would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Most of the world had, and America just said, "Go jump in the lake." Most of the world had ratified their own statute that set up the International Criminal Court, which is where the people who were responsible for September the 11th should have been appearing.
That you are going to have--most people believe that he's going to be welcomed as the leader of the free world who will be more collaborative, who will be more consultative, who will not seem to want to throw the considerable weight of America around and seem to want to be the bully boy.
I have said--I did a piece for the Washington Post, and I said one of the things that will demonstrate a clean break from the previous administration would be closing the abomination Guantanamo Bay. And one would then hope that there would be a much more conciliatory approach to Iran, not the, say, the belligerence that has largely characterized the Bush administration. And I would hope, too--and that's a major challenge--that there will be something to be done to bring a viable peace proposal for the Middle East, to end what I reckon is an unconscionable suffering of the Palestinian people. We should end the firing of Kassam rockets on Israeli citizens.
AMY GOODMAN: You were blocked from going into Gaza in 2006, leading a UN delegation there after the killing of a number of Palestinians.
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to be done now with the Middle East specifically, with Israel and the occupation?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: There's been some very interesting moves with the outgoing prime minister suggesting that Israel has to consider very seriously the proposal of going back to the boundaries of 1967. That's a very important initiative, if that was taken.
I think that we would have to move very quickly to lifting the embargo. The suffering is unacceptable. It's totally unacceptable. It doesn't promote the security of Israel or any other part of that very volatile region. And it is quite contrary to the best teachings of the Jewish faith, you know. And I know, I mean, that there are very, very many in Israel who are opposed to what is happening.
And I pray fervently that there will be a boldness, you know, in saying we've got to resolve this, because I think if that--well, no, let's not say "if"--because a lot hinges on what happens in the Middle East. Let's say, when that is resolved, what we will find, I mean, that the tensions between, say, the West and the Muslim world, and large part of the Muslim world, I believe, myself, what we will find that that evaporates and that this--this is a saw, chafing, and it's mucking up too many things. And I pray that this new president will have the capacity to see we've got to do something here, for the sake of our own humility, you know, for the sake of our children.
AMY GOODMAN: Would you compare the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank to apartheid South Africa?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: I have to speak about what I know. I mean, most people--a Jew will usually speak about their experiences and maybe compare whatever it is that is happening with what happened in the days of the Holocaust. For me, coming from South Africa and going--I mean, and looking at the checkpoints and the arrogance of those young soldiers, probably scared, maybe covering up their apprehension, there's no way in which I couldn't say--of course, that is a truth. It reminds me--it reminds me of the kind of experiences that we underwent.
I mean, I was bishop of Johannesburg and would be driving from town to Soweto, where we lived, and I would be driving with my wife, and we'd have a roadblock. And the fact of our having to have passes allowing us to move freely in the land of our birth, and now you have that extraordinary structure that--the wall. And I do not, myself, believe that it has improved security, breaking up families, breaking up--I mean, people who used to be able to walk from their homes to school, children, now have to take a detour that lasts several--I mean, it's--when you humiliate a people to the extent that they are being--and, yes, one remembers the kind of experience we had when we were being humiliated--when you do that, you're not contributing to your own security. And all you are doing is you're saying to those people, in all of their desperation, "We're still human, and there are things we will not be able to accept--I mean, just sit down. We'll have to--we have to do something."
And so, you get the suicide bomber. And one does not condone them, but one understands perfectly how people can be driven into a corner, and out of that desperation--and so you have that cycle. The response of Israel to the suicide bomber, which you know is going to provoke another cycle. And one says, No way, that's not how God intended to us live, that it is possible--it's been shown; it happened in South Africa--it is possible for people who have been enemies to begin to think that they can be friends, at least to coexist.
AMY GOODMAN: The International Criminal Court--should Barack Obama as president sign onto the ICC, sign the treaty for the International Criminal Court?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Of course! I said earlier that, actually, had America been a signatory, September the 11th , 2001 would have been--the perpetrators were not a country. You know, they were guilty of a criminal--abominable criminal act. And the right thing to do would have been to seek to apprehend those who were responsible. I mean, of course, you had the ones who had died, but then they had collaborators. And the world would have done their darnedest to support America in apprehending those people and bringing them before a court.
And so, I would say, yes, if you believe in the rule of law, then you are going to say, yes, this is one particularly important instrument, because it is an instrument that is saying we will no longer tolerate impunity. The many who are guilty, as is happening just now in the DRC or in Darfur, that people who are guilty of egregious violations have to be brought to book, and it's got to be done in a way that satisfies those standards that we have. I mean, you don't hold people in detention without trial. That's what the world used to say against the South Africa government. And if it was true that that was wrong, it has to be wrong consistently everywhere.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you believe George W. Bush should be tried for war crimes?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: I would want to leave that to the world to determine. I would not, myself, want to see that happen. I mean, like, it's almost like people are wanting to settle scores. I would let it be determined by people who are a great deal more knowledgeable than I.
I'm just sad. I'm sad that he did lose an opportunity. I telephoned the White House in 2003--I was teaching the University of North Florida--to say that I wanted to speak to the President. I didn't. I--well, I mean, who am I? But as it happened, I was in Tallahassee, and Jeb Bush was still the President--
AMY GOODMAN: The Governor.
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: I mean, the Governor of Florida. And we were in his house when a call did come, actually, from the White House, and Condoleezza Rice was on the other side, and she said, "The President received your call and has asked me to return it. What did you want to tell the President?" And I said, "I just want to say please give the inspectors more time. If they find this evidence, most of the world will tend to be supportive of action being taken then against Saddam Hussein." And she said, at the time, she didn't think that the President would agree to postpone his intention to invade Iraq. And as I say, the rest is history. I mean, you don't like saying, but we told you so. You know, the world, when September the 11th happened, there was such an outpouring of sympathy for the United States almost everywhere in the world. And that was dissipated recklessly really.
AMY GOODMAN: President-elect Obama supports an end to the war in Iraq but a surge of soldiers in Afghanistan. What are your words of wisdom to him?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Well, I say that obviously it's to end the war--yeah?--to end the occupation, to--but I've also said it would wonderful if, on behalf of the American people, he were to apologize to the Iraqis and to the rest of the world for an invasion that was based on lies. You know, saying "I'm sorry," that's a very powerful phrase in human relationships. The current prime minister of Australia, one of the very first things he did was to apologize to the Aborigines. And it's amazing what those words, some of the most difficult words in any language, how powerful they are in changing. That's what I've said.
And one would hope, too, that, you know, they see that war hardly ever resolves problems. You just have an exacerbation. I mean, look at Iraq. I mean, and when you think--we don't speak about the casualties that have been suffered by them. I mean, they are spoken of as "collateral damage." I think it's an obscenity, really. But the damage that has been done to infrastructure, the insecurity that has people living, not sure from one moment to the next whether they will be alive--and say, if the money, all the funds that were expended so disastrously, had been used for building up, I mean, you can imagine. You can imagine what it would have been like.
AMY GOODMAN: And to be clear, you're saying that President Obama should apologize to the people of Iraq?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yes, on behalf--yes, it's America that invaded, and he's the president of the United States. It's happened. It's happened. I mean, German chancellors have said they apologize for the Holocaust. It's happened. And as I say, this prime minister in Australia has done it to the Aborigines.
AMY GOODMAN: You are receiving an award from the Global Citizens Circle.
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response?
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: It's a fantastic honor. But I think, much more, I would like to tell you about the people behind that, I mean, the people who did start that. I mean, they've been fantastic citizens working for change in South Africa. They've been some of the most wonderful stalwarts of the anti-apartheid movement. And they've also been very, very engaged in northern Ireland, and the Good Friday Agreement and the change that has happened there is part of the kind of thing that this Global Citizens Circle has been working at assiduously.
AMY GOODMAN: And Miriam Makeba, a quick comment on her passing.
ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Oh, Mama Africa. She's just been fantastic. And one wants to say quickly, too, pay a very warm tribute to Harry Belafonte, because Harry Belafonte took her under his wing when she was an unknown. And her singing, her voice, helped many people to know a little bit more about the vicious apartheid system. She was just a tremendous human being, a great loss to us and to Africa. And we pray that she's joining the angels and archangels, lilting away with her voice in heaven.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: The Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa.
As New York Renames the Triborough Bridge for Robert F. Kennedy, We Speak with RFK's Daughter Kerry Kennedy on Her Father's Legacy, Her Human Rights Activism and the 2008 Election
On Wednesday, the Kennedy family celebrated the renaming of the Triborough Bridge for Robert F. Kennedy. Attendees included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Harry Belafonte, New York Governor David Paterson and former President Bill Clinton.
Guest:
Kerry Kennedy, one of Robert Kennedy's children. She is a longtime human rights advocate and the founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial. She is also the founder of Speak Truth to Power, a division of the Memorial which is committed to human rights awareness.
AMY GOODMAN: The Archbishop Desmond Tutu joined several generations of the Kennedy family Wednesday celebrating the renaming of the Triborough Bridge for Robert F. Kennedy. Among those who attended were actor and activist Harry Belafonte, the New York governor David Paterson, former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Clinton.
Robert F. Kennedy, who would have turned eighty-three years old this week, was assassinated forty years ago on June 5, 1968, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. He had just won the California Democratic primary, a major boost to his campaign. Just after midnight, Kennedy addressed supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in what would be the last moments of his life.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY: What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis and that what has been going on within the United States over the period of the last three years, the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society, the divisions, whether it's between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups or on the war in Vietnam, that we can start to work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country. And I intend to make that my basis for running over the period of the next few months.
Mayor Yorty has just sent me a message that we've been here too long already. So, my thanks to all of you, and now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Kennedy never made it to Chicago. Moments after that address, he was assassinated. He was forty-two years old. A funeral was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. His younger brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, delivered the eulogy.
SEN. TED KENNEDY: My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. As he said many times in many parts of this nation to those he touched and who sought to touch him, "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not."
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Kennedy's death came just two months after Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in Memphis. Kennedy had broken the news of King's assassination to his supporters while campaigning in Indianapolis. He delivered what was to become a famous speech.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY: For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust, of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote, "Even in our sleep, pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Robert Kennedy breaking the news to his own supporters in Indianapolis. He had heard on the plane that Dr. King was assassinated.
Well, on Wednesday this week, at the dedication ceremony of the RFK Bridge here in New York, Governor Paterson reminded the audience that in 1968 Kennedy had predicted it would take forty years for a black president to be elected.
Kerry Kennedy is one of Robert Kennedy's children. She is a longtime human rights advocate, founder of the RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights, also founder of Speak Truth to Power, a division of the Memorial which is committed to human rights awareness. Kerry Kennedy joins us here in our firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!
KERRY KENNEDY: It's great to be back, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is a big week for your family.
KERRY KENNEDY: It's true. You know, it meant so much to all of us to have the bridge named for my father, because he spent so much of his life bridging divides between black and white, rich and poor, young and old. And this is a bridge that links Manhattan and Harlem to Queens and the South Bronx, but also upstate and downstate, because it's where Route 87, the New York State Thruway, comes into the city.
AMY GOODMAN: In other words, it's a bridge to somewhere.
KERRY KENNEDY: Exactly, exactly. And it's really symbolic of everything he tried to do with his life.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the RFK Memorial that you founded.
KERRY KENNEDY: Well, the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights works with people who are human rights heroes around the world, people who are on the cutting edge of social change in their countries. And we develop programs with them to enhance their capacity on the ground in their countries and also to make them more effective in lobbying Congress, for example, or at the UN, World Bank or other international fora.
In the last year, to give you a sense of some of the things we've done, we've worked with the tomato pickers, the Coalition of Immokalee Farmworkers in South Florida, who have emancipated over a thousand people from slavery. We've helped them get a wage increase for the first time in decades from Burger King.
AMY GOODMAN: Your father was very close to Cesar Chavez.
KERRY KENNEDY: He was very close to Cesar. So this is, in many ways, sort of carrying forward Cesar's work, as well. In Darfur, we're working with Dr. Mohammed Ahmed, who is one of the leaders there in putting together the peace process. And he was interested in post-conflict reconciliation issues. So we were able to help train him on those issues so that he can include those in the peace process there.
AMY GOODMAN: And right now, how does the Center continue? How does it get its support?
KERRY KENNEDY: Well, we get our support through foundations and through individual donations.
AMY GOODMAN: You were a big part this year of the election. You supported the candidate who didn't win, Hillary Clinton.
KERRY KENNEDY: Hillary, and then Barack Obama.
AMY GOODMAN: And what were your thoughts on that? How did you transition from one to the other, as your father predicted forty years from now, in 1968, there would be a black president?
KERRY KENNEDY: Well, you know, I have so much--I've always had so much admiration for Barack Obama. I worked for Hillary, because I've known her and I've worked with her for so many years. And I think that one of the things that she talks about is that when she's traveled around the world, she's seen the importance of empowering women to creating real change. And I think if she becomes Secretary of State, it will be a great thing not only for our country, but for the entire world, for that reason.
But with Barack Obama, he has galvanized so much support in our country and around the world in such a very special way. This campaign brought out so many people, not only to vote, but to go door to door to work in it, to be part of our democracy. And I think that strengthened our nation and has captured the imagination of the entire world.
AMY GOODMAN: Your father was headed to Chicago, if he hadn't been assassinated, to this now historic city, where we saw the night of the election Barack Obama in Grant Park. What was your feelings that night?
KERRY KENNEDY: Well, my feelings were that we have just come such a long way as a nation. And it was an extraordinary moment. I felt so proud. I felt so proud of us, all the people who worked so hard in this campaign, and also all those people who found it difficult to pull that lever for an African American and yet overcame their prejudice in order to do it because of the substance of his positions on policy. So I think that that is wonderful for our country.
AMY GOODMAN: Kerry Kennedy, you're holding a most unusual auction. And we only have a minute to go. But I was just learning about it before the show.
KERRY KENNEDY: Well, yes. You just go to www.rfkcenter.org. You can bid on a thirty-minute voice lesson with Aretha Franklin.
AMY GOODMAN: With Aretha Franklin?
KERRY KENNEDY: Yes. And then you can go and have a--you can bid on a thirty-minute audition with Clive Davis, who is the powerhouse behind American Idol. You can bid on a guitar signed by Santana, a guitar signed by The Who. It's a lot of fun, so go and take a look. You'll find something you want.
AMY GOODMAN: And your plans for the future of the Center?
KERRY KENNEDY: Well, you know, we're working right now--we just gave our RFK Human Rights Award to Aminatou Haidar, who is the leader of human rights in western Sahara, which is sort of a forgotten part of the world. So we're going to be working very closely with her in the future.
AMY GOODMAN: Kerry Kennedy, I want to thank you for joining us. Again, her father's name is now on the Triborough Bridge here in New York. Kerry Kennedy has also written a new book about Being Catholic Now: Prominent Americans Talking About Change in the Church and the Quest for Meaning.
Financial Times, Anchorage Daily News Endorse Obama
Barack Obama has picked up a series of prominent newspaper endorsements including the Financial Times and the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska's largest newspaper. The Financial Times applauded Obama's handling of the financial crisis, saying he displayed a "calm and methodical disposition," while McCain had offered "hasty half-baked interventions." The Anchorage Daily News said it was endorsing Obama in part because of McCain's selection of Alaskan governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. The paper said, "Few who have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth." - Amy Goodman 10/27/08
GOP Email Warns Obama Victory Could Lead to Second Holocaust
The Republican Party in Pennsylvania sent out an email last week to 75,000 Jewish voters warning that an Obama victory could lead to a second Holocaust. The email read in part, "Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let's not make a similar one this year!" The email also claimed that Obama had "taught members of Acorn to commit voter registration fraud." The Republican Party is now disavowing the email, claiming that a Republican consultant had sent it without authorization, even though the consultant, Bryan Rednick on the payroll of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, has stated that he had several levels of approval.
AMY GOODMAN, GOD BLESS HER, HAS SUMMARIZED ABOVE THIS LATE STAGE OF THE MCCAIN CAMPAIGN, I.E. EXPOSED JOHN SIDNEY MCCAIN III.
Senator Joseph Biden said that as a new president Barack Obama is sure to be tested by the international community within the "first six months" of his presidency, as would any new president. Senator John McCain, as has been his practice during these last months of his faltering campaign, immediately invented a false interpretation of Mr. Biden's remarks in the Swing State of Ohio: "Senator Biden guaranteed that if Senator Obama is elected, we will have an international crisis to test America's new president. Americans are already fighting in two wars, my friends. Senator Biden referred to how Jack Kennedy was tested in the Cuban missile crisis. I had a little personal experience on that. I was a pilot on board the U.S.S. Enterprise. I was ready to go into combat at any minute (if I could get the plane off the flight deck without crashing)". There is a major problem here. Senator Biden, perhaps not even realizing it himself, was subconsciously influenced by the series of Democrats that have had their presidential elections stolen by a series of scheming Republicans (each of whose elections severely damaged the United States), and was referring to the Bay of Pigs which occurred in April of 1961, i.e. was within the first six months of Jack Kennedy's inauguration and, of course, the "community" noted were the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, who precipitated crises in Guatemala, Iran AND Cuba. The Cuban missile crisis did not occur until October of 1962. Since the end of World War II Republicans have a history of ham-handed overreaching. Enough is enough.
May Be Designed To Counter What Follows
I - Except for the fact that his father, John Sidney McCain II was the ranking Admiral, John Sidney McCain III would have been bounced from flight training after his third crash.
II - Both of McCain's arms were broken when he ejected because he had neglected to keep his arms secure at his side. He was a poor pilot and should have "washed out" and was not qualified to be used in bombing runs over Vietnam, as he is clearly not qualified to be President of the United States.
III - While a POW he was provided "female companionship".
IV - He is at the center of the concealed classified record of POW's left in Vietnam. In other words, he's a consummate liar - and this story is told on DemocracyNow.org by Amy Goodman and Sydney Schanberg Thursday, 10/23/08 and at NationInstitute.org...
A key to Mr. Schanberg's appearance on DemocracyNow -
"John McCain's role is harder to divine the reasons for. But John McCain--there has always been talk, and there's evidence to suggest that there is truth in this, but it's in his head, and only he and his psychiatrist, if he has one, know, that he--his reasons are that if the North--if the Vietnamese were to release all the information they have on him, the full text of his confessions, how he lived the details, because there have been stories, again, just rumors, that he was provided with a woman companion, and all kinds of things like that, which are--can't be considered as fact, because they've never been confirmed, and very, very difficult, if not impossible, to confirm.
And there have even been rumors that he had an agreement, an understanding with the Vietnamese, that he would do everything to get their nation recognized in the international network and get them--our diplomatic relations, ours, the United States, relations restored, which he did, if they would never release his information. None of his military records have ever been released, and there's been no pressure to do so. And that's just his military records, where he was a sort of a screw-up pilot, crashing three planes while not on combat duty, but just in training. And everybody knows that, everybody who ever worked with him. And they don't consider that dishonorable, but they also say that if he hadn't been the son of the Rear Admiral, who was Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, his--you know, his father, John Sidney McCain II--that he would have been bounced."
Brian Williams, the anchor of General Electric/NBC Universal's NBC Nightly News on 10/22/08, thirteen days prior to the Obama vs McCain 2008 presidential election, gives John McCain an aggregate 10-minute uninterrupted commercial on a 27-minute national nightly news program - John McCain & Sarah Palin on John McCain and Sarah Palin. And it's only the first of two consecutive virtual McCain commercials on successive nights. Actually, the programming is merely a more blatant example of NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR and PBS Media/Press Republican Bias. But it also exposes perhaps the major flaw about this McCain campaign. In a sense John McCain, like Joe Lieberman, is a creature of the twisted John Donald Imus Jr., i.e. a member of the Imus cabal, as are Andrea Mitchell and Alan "Crazy Al" Greenspan (father of the "derivative"), and as was Tim Russert. Imus sponsored Brian Williams, and Imus is THE benefactor of George Walker Bush. Except for Don Imus, Al Gore would have been our forty third president, and we would have been spared the last eight years. This possibly fatal action 10/22-23/08 by Brian Williams in promoting McCain/Palin is a payoff to Imus who has been McCain's major sponsor for years...and, like McCain, walked out on his first wife. This is truly "inside politics and the media", perhaps Mr. Imus represents the reappearance of another Walter Winchell or Westbrook Pegler. But with a more deadly consequence!
Can you remember that just twenty-some years ago, before the Republican "hero" (only in Hollywood films), Ronald Reagan ended it, we had a Fairness Doctrine which legally required the commercial networks to present and maintain bipartisan balance in their political coverage! What is most significant about this Brian Williams outrage is that on the day of another precipitous drop in the world-wide financial collapse, THAT WAS NOT MENTIONED BY BRIAN WILLIAMS in his promotion of John McCain and Sarah Palin!
AS JOHN MCCAIN AND THE REPUBLICANS, BACKED BY THE COMMERCIAL NETWORKS, CNN, PBS (NOTABLY JIM LEHRER, GLORIA BORGER, ETC. 10/17/08) AND NPR ATTEMPT TO STEAL STILL ANOTHER ELECTION, BILL MOYER'S 10/17/08 JOURNAL FEATURES MARK CRISPIN MILLER, THE LEADING MEDIA-STUDIES SCHOLAR AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY (LOSER TAKE ALL: ELECTION FRAUD AND THE SUBVERSION OF DEMOCRACY 2000-2008):
"THE POINT I'M MAKING TO YOU HERE BILL, AND THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I'M GOING TO SAY TO YOU TONIGHT, IS THAT THIS IS A PRETEXT (i.e. THE CLAIM BY JOHN MCCAIN 'WE NEED TO KNOW THE FULL EXTENT OF SENATOR OBAMA'S RELATIONSHIP WITH ACORN WHO IS NOW ON THE VERGE OF PERPETRATING ONE OF THE GREATEST FRAUDS IN VOTER HISTORY IN THIS COUNTRY, MAYBE DESTROYING THE FABRIC OF DEMOCRACY')...
...BEING USED BY A PARTY, OKAY, THAT IS ITSELF COMMITTING ELECTION FRAUD AND VOTE SUPPRESSION ON AN ENORMOUS SCALE. In other words, we have a party that is itself engaged in disenfranchising, actively disenfranchising millions of Americans. It is itself complaining about a group that is supposedly planning to do the same thing but that isn't doing that at all.
BILL MOYERS: What's the evidence that say the Republican Party is disenfranchising millions of people?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, first of all, all of these voter purges, the caging of voters, as I described before.
BILL MOYERS: Well, I mean, the Brennan Center report two weeks ago said perhaps hundreds of thousands of people have been improperly purged from the rolls without even knowing about it. But they didn't talk about millions.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, I, in the aggregate, it does and could easily add up to millions of voters because we're talking about a very, very broad range of devices, you know, both legal and illegal that will have a dramatic effect and that will add up. If hundreds of thousands of people are disenfranchised nationwide simply through voter purges alone, you see? That is significant. If the caging of voters results in the disenfranchisement of another 200,000, 300,000, we're talking here about numbers that definitely do add up, you see, and that make a difference, are meant to make a difference come Election Day."
You've heard a lot about ACORN in the media lately, accused of voter fraud. But it's news fraud -- a false story instigated by right-wing operatives.
The wild charges made against ACORN aren't true. Period. It's the story the right wing wants you to hear and the media is reporting as unchallenged fact.
ACORN hired 13,000 workers to register voters. And unfortunately a few bad apples turned in registration forms with inaccurate and even made-up names.
Here's what's missing from the story: In most states, ACORN is required to submit all forms they collect, whether they appear to be bogus or not. That way election officials, not independent groups, can decide who gets registered and who doesn't. ACORN spends millions to flag cards that may not be legitimate. And many of the irregularities you've heard about only came to light because ACORN itself flagged the cards!
Meanwhile, ACORN has successfully registered over 1 million legitimate voters -- Democrats, Independents and Republicans. And there are no reported instances of organized double-voting -- so there's no chance this will affect the election.
So what's the real story?
The right wing wants to discourage low-income people and African Americans from voting. And attacking ACORN helps justify their real efforts to suppress the vote -- which are well under way.
* In Indiana, the right is considering using home foreclosure as a reason to prevent legitimate registration.
* In Philadelphia, an anonymous flier targeting African-American neighborhoods falsely warns that voters with outstanding traffic tickets may be arrested if they go to the polls.
* In Colorado, the Republican Secretary of State rejected more than 6,000 citizens' registration cards because of minor errors like not marking a checkbox.
Last week, Fox referenced ACORN 770 times on the air. That's to be expected, but then CNN and others parroted the same right-wing talking points.
Instead of hearing about the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who will be prevented from casting a vote this year, you heard about fictional people who will never cast a vote.
And that's the real fraud. - Sponsored by People For the American Way - PFAW.org/ACORN
The below-mentioned Freedom's Watch is funded by and is an Adelson creation -
"A related item: In the Medford debate, Jeff Merkley charged that Karl Rove is a key supporter of Gordon Smith's re-election. Smith was befuddled, dismissing the claim.
Turns out, Merkley's right. Karl Rove is behind the attack ads from Freedom's Watch. From the AP:
Karl Rove, a former top Bush aide, is a key adviser to Freedom's Watch, and Merkley complained at a debate this week that Rove is behind a $2 million "smear campaign" against him.
Smith shot back that Rove has nothing to do with his campaign.
In a letter to Smith's campaign, Merkley's campaign manager, Jon Isaacs, said Rove is "intimately involved" in the Senate race. He cited an ad by Freedom's Watch attacking Merkley for supporting higher taxes - a charge Merkley denies.
Isaacs urged Smith to demand that Rove and Freedom's Watch halt all campaign attacks on Smith's behalf.
Smith shot back that Rove has nothing to do with his campaign.
In a letter to Smith's campaign, Merkley's campaign manager, Jon Isaacs, said Rove is "intimately involved" in the Senate race. He cited an ad by Freedom's Watch attacking Merkley for supporting higher taxes - a charge Merkley denies.
Isaacs urged Smith to demand that Rove and Freedom's Watch halt all campaign attacks on Smith's behalf.
Between Karl Rove orchestrating multi-million dollar smear campaigns - and a shadowy right-wing corporate front group that refuses to follow election law as it launches attack ads while ballots are in hand, well, it sure is hard to make any sense of Gordon Smith's claims to be independent of the Republican Party and the special interests that fund it." - Kari Chisholm BlueOregon.com
The Real Scandal - McCain, the G.O.P. and voter suppression -
It never ends. The Republican Party never gets tired of spraying its poison across the American political landscape.
So there was a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, telling Chris Matthews on MSNBC that the press should start investigating members of the House and Senate to determine which ones are "pro-America or anti-America."
Can a rancid Congressional committee be far behind? Leave it to a right-wing Republican to long for those sunny, bygone days of political witch-hunting.
Ms. Bachmann's demented desire ("I would love to see an exposé like that") is of a piece with the G.O.P.'s unrelenting effort to demonize its opponents, to characterize them as beyond the pale, different from ordinary patriotic Americans -- and not just different, but dangerous, and even evil.
But the party is not content to stop there. Even better than demonizing opponents is the more powerful and direct act of taking the vote away from their opponents' supporters. The Republican Party has made strenuous efforts in recent years to prevent Democrats from voting, and to prevent their votes from being properly counted once they've been cast.
Which brings me to the phony Acorn scandal.
John McCain, who placed his principles in a blind trust once the presidential race heated up, warned the country during the presidential debate last week that Acorn, which has been registering people to vote by the hundreds of thousands, was "on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history."
It turns out that a tiny percentage of these new registrations are bogus, with some of them carrying ludicrous names like Mickey Mouse. Republicans have tried to turn this into a mighty oak of a scandal, with Mr. McCain thundering at the debate that it "may be destroying the fabric of democracy."
Please. The Times put the matter in perspective when it said in an editorial that Acorn needs to be more careful with some aspects of its voter-registration process. It needs to do a better job selecting canvassers, among other things.
"But," the editorial added, "for all of the McCain campaign's manufactured fury about vote theft (and similar claims from the Republican Party over the years) there is virtually no evidence -- anywhere in the country, going back many elections -- of people showing up at the polls and voting when they are not entitled to."
Two important points need to be made here. First, the reckless attempt by Senator McCain, Sarah Palin and others to fan this into a major scandal has made Acorn the target of vandals and a wave of hate calls and e-mail. Acorn staff members have been threatened and sickening, murderous comments have been made about supporters of Barack Obama. (Senator Obama had nothing to do with Acorn's voter-registration drives.)
Second, when it comes to voting, the real threat to democracy is the nonstop campaign by the G.O.P. and its supporters to disenfranchise American citizens who have every right to cast a ballot. We saw this in 2000. We saw it in 2004. And we're seeing it again now.
In Montana, the Republican Party challenged the registrations of thousands of legitimate voters based on change-of-address information available from the Post Office. These specious challenges were made -- surprise, surprise -- in Democratic districts. Answering the challenges would have been a wholly unnecessary hardship for the voters, many of whom were students or members of the armed forces.
In the face of widespread public criticism (even the Republican lieutenant governor weighed in), the party backed off.
That sort of thing is widespread. In one politically crucial state after another -- in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, you name it -- the G.O.P. has unleashed foot soldiers whose insidious mission is to make the voting process as difficult as possible -- or, better yet, impossible -- for citizens who are believed to favor Democrats.
For Senator McCain to flip reality on its head and point to an overwhelmingly legitimate voter-registration effort as a "threat to the fabric of democracy" is a breathtaking exercise in absurdity.
Miles Rapoport, a former Connecticut secretary of state who is now president of Demos, a public policy group, remarked on the irony of elected Republican officials deliberately attempting to thwart voting. Some years ago, he said, he "and all the other secretaries of state" would bemoan the lack of interest in voting, especially among the young and the poor.
Now, he said, with the explosion of voter registration and the heightened interest in the presidential campaign, you'd think officials "would welcome that, and encourage it, and even celebrate it." Instead, he said, in so many cases, G.O.P. officials are "trying to pare down the lists." - BOB HERBERT NY TIMES 10/21/2008
Amy Goodman 10/22/08: Early voting has begun, and problems are already emerging at the polls. In West Virginia, voters using touchscreen machines have claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican. In North Carolina, a group of McCain supporters heckled a group of mostly black supporters of Barack Obama. In Ohio, Republicans are being accused of trying to scare newly registered voters by filing lawsuits that question their eligibility. We speak to NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy.
Guest: Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media culture and communication at New York University. He is the author of several books, most recently Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. His previous book is called Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too.
AMY GOODMAN: Just days after reports that six early voters in at least two West Virginia counties claimed their votes were switched from Democrat to Republican, a couple in Nashville, Tennessee reported similar problems with paperless voting machines. In West Virginia, one voter said, "I hit Obama, and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines."
In Tennessee, a filmmaker couple also had difficulties casting their vote for the Democratic candidate, the Brad Blog reports. They had to hit the Obama button several times before it actually registered, and in one case it momentarily flipped from Obama to Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney. Patricia Earnhardt said, "The McKinney button was located five rows below the Obama button." The couple in Nashville were using machines made by the same company as those in the counties in West Virginia--by Election Systems and Software.
Meanwhile, there are reports of long lines at early voting sites in several other states, including some counties in Texas, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico.
Mark Crispin Miller is a media critic who's been focused on voter problems and election fraud in this country. He's a professor at New York University, author of several books. Most recently he edited Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. His previous book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too.
Mark Crispin Miller now joins us in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: What are your concerns right now, Mark?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, you've referred to a couple of them already. We now see a burst of vote flipping by machines, electronic voting machines in a couple of states. This is something that we saw in at least eleven states in the 2004 election, hundreds and hundreds of people coming forward to say, "I pushed the button for Kerry, and the button for Bush lit up." So, clearly, this was a systematic programming decision by the people in charge of the machines, which in that case and this one is the Republican Party. We're also seeing systematic shortages of working voting machines in Democratic precincts only. This is also something that did not happen only in Ohio in 2004, but happened nationwide. That election was, in fact, stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know that?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, I know because there's been an audit of the vote in eighteen counties of Ohio by a researcher named Richard Hayes Phillips, who had his team literally scrutinize every single ballot that was warehoused in eighteen Ohio counties. They took over 30,000 digital photographs. This is not speculation, Amy. This is a meticulous, careful, specific and conclusive demonstration that John Kerry actually won some 200,000 votes in those eighteen counties only that were taken away from him. Bush's official victory margin, you may recall, was about 118,000. So there is no question about it. Ohio was stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: When they--OK, so they have the pictures of all these--
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Pictures, there's a CD with this book that you can--
AMY GOODMAN: But they have the pictures of the ballots.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Of the variously altered, mutilated ballots, yes. Ballots with stickers placed over the square that people had blacked in for Kerry/Edwards; somebody else blacks in Bush/Cheney. Thousands and thousands of ballots that were pre-marked before they were distributed, so that people would mark different boxes on them, and then they would be invalidated.
Even more chilling is the fact that after Phillips did his research, the boards of elections in fifty-five Ohio counties destroyed all or some of their ballots in defiance of a court order. So we have criminal behavior here of a kind of grand and systematic kind. But the point is--not to engage in what Sarah Palin calls finger-pointing backwards, the point here is to note that we're dealing with a consistent pattern of subversive behavior by the Republican Party since 2000 and extending all the way up to the present. What we're seeing now is an especially brazen and diverse range of dirty tricks and tactics that are being used both to suppress the vote and also to enable election fraud.
AMY GOODMAN: Ohio has been very much in the news this past week, not around the issue of voter suppression, but around the issue of fraudulent registration forms, the concern about them being handed in by the organization ACORN.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, the whole ACORN thing is a first-class propaganda drive. ACORN has done nothing wrong. ACORN has, however, been guilty of trying to register low-income citizens to vote. Because they've been in the sights of the Republican Party for several years now, they've always been extremely scrupulous about checking the registration forms that they garner from their volunteers.
You know, they pay people, basically, to register other voters. So, naturally, from time to time, some volunteer who wants the money will fill out a registration form, you know, with Mickey Mouse or the names of the Dallas Cowboys, something like that. Precisely because that is an ever-present possibility, the people at ACORN have always scrupulously checked the forms before submitting them.
And ten days ago, what they did was, in Las Vegas, their office in Las Vegas, they found a number of these suspicious forms, handed them over directly to the Secretary of State in Nevada, and his response was to turn around and say, "Aha! Here is evidence that you're conspiring to commit voter fraud." Now, that effort, that drive went from Nevada to Missouri to Ohio, and now we hear that the FBI is investigating ACORN.
The important point here, Amy, is that voter fraud is practically nonexistent. Several studies have taken a close look at this and found that there really is no voter fraud of this kind.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films has put out a new short film about ACORN and the attacks against them. Let me play an excerpt.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.
GOV. SARAH PALIN: John and I are calling on the Obama campaign to release communications it has had with this group and to do so immediately.
CARMEN ARIAS: These attacks on ACORN are part of a pattern of voter suppression that the GOP has been carrying on for a long time.
PAUL WEYRICH: They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been, from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: The McCain campaign has now two camps. And one of them is already assuming that he's lost, and he's aiming for the post-election warfare in the Republican Party, and part of that is the ACORN strategy, which is trying to delegitimize the result in advance, if Obama were to win, by saying it was rigged by minority voters. That's what this is about.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Someone here keeps yelling "ACORN, ACORN." Now, let me just say to you, there are serious allegations of voter fraud in the battleground states across America. They must be investigated.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: Let's look at North Carolina. We turned in 28,000 applications in North Carolina, and there are investigations into four of them right now. Over 95 percent of the cards we turned in were error-free. So we're talking about an extremely small percentage of the overall 1.3 million cards collected. To suggest that this is some kind of widespread criminal conspiracy is just absurd.
MONTAGE OF NEWSCASTERS: ACORN. ACORN. ACORN--is a left-wing--radical--extremist community group.
CARMEN ARIAS: This is hardly the first time that these Rove-style tactics have been used to suppress low-income minorities.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: They did it in 2000.
GREG PALAST: Voters were being removed from the registries by the Secretary of State, Katherine Harris.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: They did it in 2004.
UNIDENTIFIED: Evidence has emerged that in the last presidential election the Republican Party organized efforts to suppress the votes of active-duty military, low-income and minority voters by challenging their registrations. The Republicans put in motion a plan to hold down the Democratic vote in key battleground states. Many are convinced that Republican officials broke the law.
NATHAN HENDERSON-JAMES: And they're doing it again right now.
CARMEN ARIAS: Suppressing the low-income minority voters can swing an entire election. A handful of improperly filled-out voter registration cards cannot.
AMY GOODMAN: That, an excerpt of a piece by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films. Professor Mark Crispin Miller?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, well, I think he hit the nail right on the head. The important point to get here is that the party that is itself engaging in disenfranchisement on a massive scale, the deliberate, systematic disenfranchisement of arguably millions of Americans, is clouding the issue by accusing--essentially accusing its victims of doing the same thing. OK?
Voter fraud--I want to repeat this--is virtually nonexistent. There have been several academic studies of this notion of whether individuals actually stuffed ballot boxes or show up at polling places pretending to be somebody else. There's actually not a single known case of any such type of voter fraud being prosecuted by the Department of Justice. And yet, that notion of voter fraud is used as the pretext for taking steps that do demonstrably result in tens of thousands of people being unable to vote, you see? It's a really masterful strategy. And I only wish that the Democratic Party had all this time been aggressive in pointing out that the Republicans are the party engaged in disenfranchisement.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, we have to break. When we come back, I want to ask you about a man named Stephen Spoonamore--
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: --a prominent expert, supposedly, on computer fraud, and what he has to say. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media, culture and communication at New York University is our guest. His most recent book, Loser Take All. Who is Stephen Spoonamore?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Stephen Spoonamore is a conservative Republican, a former McCain supporter and, most importantly, a renowned and highly successful expert at the detection of computer fraud. That's his profession. He works for major banks. He works for foreign governments. He works for the Secret Service. Those are his clients.
He knows personally the principal players in Bush-Cheney's conspiracy to subvert our elections through electronic means since 2000, and he has named these principal players. Specifically, he has named a man named Mike Connell. Mike Connell, according to Spoonamore, is Karl Rove's computer guru. This is the guy who has helped Bush-Cheney fix election results through computers since Florida 2000, in Ohio in 2004, also in the stolen re-election of Governor Don Siegelman in Alabama in 2002, also in the stolen re-election of Senator Max Cleland in Georgia in 2002.
AMY GOODMAN: How?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, basically, they use a kind of architecture that's called Man in the Middle, and it involves shunting election returns data through a separate computer somewhere else. This is something that computer criminals do all the time with banks. Spoonamore explains that the Man in the Middle setup is extremely effective and basically undetectable as a way to change election results.
Now, the scariest thing is that Connell told Spoonamore that the reason why he has helped Bush-Cheney still these elections for the last eight years has been to save the babies. See? We have to understand that there's a very powerful component of religious fanaticism at work in the election fraud conspiracy. We saw a little bit of that in Greenswald's film, where Paul Weyrich was talking about how we don't want people voting.
AMY GOODMAN: The conservative activist.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, because the majority is a majority of unbelievers. They're pro-choice. They're corrupt. They're evil. They don't get it. It's therefore necessary to fix election results in order to prevent the unjust and the unrighteous from taking over.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mark Crispin Miller, you keep saying the election was clearly stolen in 2004. This is not a widely held belief. Why do you think more information is not known about this?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Because the press and the Democratic Party have steadfastly refused simply to mention, much less discuss, the evidence.
AMY GOODMAN: You talked to John Kerry.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: I talked to John Kerry. In fact, the last time I was with you, I was here to talk about that conversation with him. On October 28th, 2005, we met. I gave him a copy of my book Fooled Again, and we discussed the last election, and he told me, with some vehemence, that he believed it was stolen.
AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio in 2004--and Ohio, key battleground state right now--
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And we remember at Kenyon, for example, those long, long lines in 2004, people waiting for hours.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: When you talk about the computer setup for 2004, explain further.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, what happened was, with the election results that were coming into Ken Blackwell's website, right, in real time--
AMY GOODMAN: The former Secretary of State of Ohio.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: The former Secretary of State.
AMY GOODMAN: The former chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign there.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: And co-chair of Bush-Cheney and a big-time election thief and an ardent theocrat, by the way. The election returns went basically from his website to another computer that was in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, under the control of Spoonamore and a guy with another private company, another evangelical. The data was shunted through that computer and then back to the Secretary of State's website.
Spoonamore says that this Man in the Middle setup has only one purpose, and that is fraud. There's no other reason to do it. And he believes that such a system is still in place in Ohio, it's in place in a number of other states. And the crucial fact to bear in mind here, since we're talking about John McCain attacking ACORN and so on, is that Mike Connell is now working for John McCain.
Now, on the strength of Spoonamore's testimony, right, it's driving a RICO lawsuit in Ohio. On the strength of his testimony, Connell has been subpoenaed. He was subpoenaed last week for a deposition, so that he can answer questions on the record, under oath, about what he's been up to. He and a bevy of Republican lawyers have been very, very vigorously fighting this subpoena, because, of course, they don't want him to testify 'til after Election Day.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mark Crispin Miller, the Bradley Effect that is being discussed, explain what it is and how you feel it's being used.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: The Bradley Effect is a theory which holds that African American candidates do better in pre-election polls than they do in elections, because white racists are shy about admitting to pollsters that they wouldn't vote for a black man. So they will tell pollsters, "Sure, I'll vote for him." Then they sneak into the polling booth and listen to the inner Klansman, you know, they vote as racists.
Now, the problem with this theory is that there are almost no examples of its having happened. It's named for Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, who ran for the governor of California and did much better in polls beforehand than he did on Election Day. Well, it turns out, if you study that race, that the reason why he lost was that a lot of bad news about his tenure in Los Angeles came out just before the election. That's the reason why people often lose elections. There are only two races that we know of where the Bradley Effect may arguably have obtained, both in 1989: Doug Wilder's run for the governor of Virginia and David Dinkins's first run for the mayor of New York, where Dinkins didn't do as well as we thought he would. Well, in his second run, the polls were dead on.
The point is, we're talking about two races that may form the basis for this idea that Barack Obama, with his enormous lead, may lose because of millions and millions of closet racists, you know, who will say one thing to pollsters, out of a fear of not seeming politically correct, and then vote a different way. I'll tell you why I worry about this. Something that you very, very badly need to steal elections, aside from the apparatus and the volunteers and all the money and everything, is a narrative. You have to have a convincing rationale to explain an upset victory. Four years ago, the rationale was millions of values voters materialized on the horizon at the end of the day, and like Jesus with loaves and fishes, they suddenly multiplied and voted for Bush, and then they disappeared. Well, there's no evidence that that actually happened. But it served as a narrative. This time, I'm afraid the primary narrative will be racism: Barack Obama actually lost, despite all predictions, because so many Americans are racist.
I think that this is, first of all, unverifiable. We don't know that it's true, whereas we do know all the stuff about vote suppression and election fraud. But I'm afraid that people will be encouraged to accept this line to prevent them from taking a hard look at the real reasons why Obama may have "lost"--and I put "lost" in quotation marks.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, I want to thank you for being with us. Mark Crispin Miller is a professor at New York University and author of, well, the latest book he edited, this came out just this summer, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.
Snapshots from network Sunday "News" programs 10/12/08, twenty-three days before the most critical presidential election of our lifetimes - Barack Obama vs John McCain.
- Bob Schieffer's CBS (run by the notorious Leslie Moonves who sandbagged Dan Rather) Face the Nation played the "race card", using Lindsey Graham to represent John McCain and the African American Douglas Wilder, who in the final polling in his race for Governor of Virginia was double-digits in the lead, but won narrowly. Mr. Wilder supports Senator Obama.
- Tom Brokaw's General Electric/NBC Univeral Meet the Press had Republican Congressman Rob Portman (made up to look like Bobby Kennedy) representing Mr. McCain, and Governor, former Senator Jon Corzine for Mr. Obama, with Mr. Brokaw affording, as he did in the Nashville debate, most of the time and the "Last Word" to Mr. Portman, the McCain rep.
- George Stephanopoulos, having seen "the writing on the wall" had a much more responsible, non-partisan This Week, including the great Paul Krugman. George has obviously read the Talk Of The Town lead segment of the 10/13/08 The New Yorker, an editorial just below by not David Remnick, but by "The Editors", i.e. the Newhouse Family.
- On the 10/14/08 Lehrer NewsHour w/ Ray Suarez, Mr. Suarez gave Ralph Nader 10-12 minutes uninterrupted to detail his domestic and foreign policy positions - all primarily anti-Obama (Nader ALWAYS has a spiel which is anti-Democrat & pro-Republican, which means he gets much favorable Media/Press face-time and audio in the weeks prior to each presidential election) - a week or so ago Nader was on Lehrer's ethnic buddy Scott Simon's NPR Weekend Edition and addressed him reverently, as "Mister Simon!" Again ten uninterrupted minutes of Nader on Nader. Republicans and Wall Street, what's left of it, are hoping "The Spoiler" can provide McCain a narrow win! The same aim of PBS's two-hour 10/14/08 FrontLine - The Choice, which is carefully scripted to appear bipartisan, but is decidedly pro-McCain by, of course omitting any mention of John Dramesi, a fellow POW of McCain's in Hanoi, and any scrutiny of Sarah Palin. FrontLine could have benefited from digesting the New Yorker editorial.
The Choice
We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama--a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America--would, at a stroke, reverse our country's image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader's name is Barack Obama. - The Editors
[ What a confluence! An historic coming together of one of the most challenging times in recent American history, and, miraculously, a man rooted in the American promise of "Only in America" and "Yes we can." Barack Obama Thursday night August 28 - the two hundred and fifty ninth birthday of Goethe, whose fifty years of work produced his great Faust in which Faust defeats Satan and ascends to heaven, and whose mantra was "treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being", the core of Barack Obama. The Invesco Field acceptance address of this next President of the United States was phenomenal, and as the thirty eight million people who viewed it know, one of the finest speeches with substance of the last three quarters of a century - and no disparaging, petty or distracting analyses by a Republican Media/Press can change that fact. ]
According to the most recent Federal Election Commission filings, Mr. Obama ended September with $133 million in cash on hand, after raising a record-shattering $153 million that month.
The records show that money gushed into the Obama campaign -- this from people giving more than $200 -- at an almost-daily rate of $1 million to $7 million. On only four days in September did Mr. Obama raise less than $1 million. - Leslie Wayne N Y Times 10/22/08
Abraham Lincoln March 4, 1865, concluding his second inaugural address: With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
In the next several items there is a prescient sentence from Bob Herbert's 9/13/08 column - "The likes of John McCain and George W. Bush can do the craziest, most irresponsible things imaginable, and it only seems to help them politically."
The events of 9/24-25/08 seem unreal, except for the history of unprecedented and unprincipled Republicans stealing elections.
- John McCain's poll numbers are falling as a result of his history of deregulation.
- His campaign manager has been receiving $15,000 to $30,000 monthly from Freddie Mac while McCain has been criticizing Barack Obama for "ties" to Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae.
- Obama calls McCain suggesting a joint statement on the financial mess.
- McCain sees this effort of legitimate bipartisanship as an "opportunity".
- McCain coordinates with White House.
- President Bush called Obama on Wednesday evening to invite him to attend the meeting and Obama agreed. - Robert Barns LA Times-Washington Post
We then have a scenario of John McCain, reading a teleprompter, on television, which all the networks record, announcing that the financial crisis is so serious that he is suspending campaigning and will not appear in Haley Barbour's Mississippi for the 9/26/08 presidential debate while the financial mess is unsettled. Then George Bush announces that he has "invited" John McCain and Barack Obama to the White House. Amy Goodman has details 9/25/08:
Meanwhile, tomorrow's first presidential debate is up in the air after McCain said he would suspend his campaign to focus on the economic crisis. In what Democrats are calling a transparent political stunt, McCain said the first debate should be delayed.
Sen. John McCain: "It's time for both parties to come together to solve this problem. We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved. I am directing my campaign to work with the Obama campaign and the Commission on Presidential Debates to delay Friday night's debate until we have taken action to address this crisis."
Campaigning in Florida, Obama said he would reject McCain's plea to delay the debate.
Sen. Barack Obama: "It is going to be part of the President's job to deal with more than one thing at once. I think there's no reason why we can't be constructive in helping to solve this problem and also tell the American people what we believe and where we stand and where we want to take the country."
McCain's delaying attempt comes as his ties to the financial industry are under increased scrutiny. Reports have emerged showing the lobbying firm of McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, continued to receive monthly $15,000 payments from the troubled mortgage giant Freddie Mac until last month. The New York Times reports the firm, Davis Manafort, appeared to do little work for the company but was kept on the payroll because of Davis's close ties to McCain. McCain has previously denied Davis's links to Freddie Mac. The disclosure follows revelations Davis was paid nearly $2 million to serve as president of an advocacy group set up by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As president of the Homeownership Alliance, Davis earned more than $30,000 a month for five years to beat back regulatory challenges as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing.
Amy Goodman 10/17/08: Ex-US Attorney: ACORN Probe a "Scare Tactic". The FBI is launching a voter fraud investigation into the community organizing group ACORN. The McCain campaign has accused ACORN of fraud in spearheading one of the most successful voter registration efforts in US history. Over the past year and a half, ACORN has helped sign up more than a million mostly young, mostly poor people to vote. Registration forms submitted by ACORN campaigners in a few areas around the country have been found to contain false or fraudulent names. ACORN officials have condemned the cases and insist they only amount to a tiny percentage of their registered voters. In an interview with the website Talking Points Memo, former New Mexico federal prosecutor David Iglesias criticized the probe, calling it 'a scare tactic.' Iglesias was one of prosecutors dismissed in the Bush administration's attorney firings scandal. He was let go in part because of his refusal to pursue voter fraud cases sought by Republicans.
"Obama, McCain Appear at Joint Event
On the campaign trail, both major candidates shared the same stage Thursday, one night after their third and final debate. Senators Barack Obama and John McCain appeared at the annual Al Smith fundraiser, which has drawn presidential candidates in all but two elections since 1945. Obama joked about McCain's apparent reluctance to discuss the economy.
Sen. Barack Obama: 'Of course, I am especially honored to be here tonight with my distinguished opponent, Senator John McCain. I think it is a tribute to American democracy that, with two weeks left in a hard-fought election, the two of us could come together and sit down at the same dinner table without preconditions. Now recently, one of John's top advisers told the Daily News that if we keep talking about the economy, McCain's going to lose. So tonight I'd like to talk about the economy.'
McCain, meanwhile, invoked his own mention of Joe the Plumber, real name Joe Wurzelbacher, an Ohio resident who questioned Obama about whether his tax plan would threaten small businesses. Wurzelbacher came up more than two dozen times in Wednesday night's debate.
Sen. John McCain: 'And this is a very distinguished and influential audience and as good a place as any to make a major announcement. Events are moving fast in my campaign and, yes, it's true that this morning I've dismissed my entire team of senior advisers. All of their positions will now be held by a man named Joe the Plumber.'
'Joe the Plumber' Not a Licensed Plumber
Several revelations have come out about 'Joe the Plumber' since McCain invoked his name. The Toledo Blade has revealed Wurzelbacher isn't actually a registered plumber. Wurzelbacher's company doesn't have a state plumbing license, and he does not own a license himself. That means he would be unable to operate as a plumber in Ohio. Questions have also been raised if Wurzelbacher is even a registered voter."
It's not Wall Street vs. Main Street: It's potential catastrophe on everybody's street. So insists President Bush, who retreated Wednesday night from the most audacious aspects of the bailout plan advanced by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
In his speech to the nation, Bush struck a bipartisan tone, even complimenting Democrats for their good will in addressing the nation's financial emergency. More significantly, he accepted the objections about limiting executive payouts and ensuring congressional oversight that were conspicuously absent from the initial proposal.
The president, to his credit, moved to avert the developing rift between the executive branch and Congress over the details of the plan. He appealed to Americans' sense of community and thrift, while arguing again that Congress urgently needs to pass a financial bailout bill.
By helping defuse the emerging partisan rancor, the president undercut Sen. John McCain, who sought Wednesday to pull out of his scheduled Friday presidential debate with Sen. Barack Obama on the grounds that the crisis was too pressing to permit an 81-minute debate to interfere. We're all in this together, the president said. We'll figure a way out together. McCain, in other words, should be able to act as a statesman and a candidate at the same time.
McCain should be speaking plainly to the people he is asking to install him in the nation's highest office. His unilateral announcement Wednesday that he was "suspending" his campaign to deal with the crisis reeks of political convenience.
After all, Obama had surged to leads in the latest opinion polls, primarily because respondents expressed greater confidence in his ability to manage the country through its financial crisis. With that as the backdrop for the candidates' first scheduled presidential debate Friday, the McCain camp appears to think it has more to lose than to gain by proceeding as scheduled.
McCain and Obama deserve applause for discussing a joint statement that will lay out their principles for resolving the current crisis. That very action signals a welcome note of bipartisanship in the face of an unprecedented national challenge, and it speaks well for both men. It helped pave the way for the Bush speech.
But come on. "Suspend the campaign"? What is that? Shall we suspend the election, too, to wait for a calmer time? When would be convenient for you, Senator?
What better time than now, in fact, to see how the candidates respond to the unexpected, the daunting, the frightening? If these campaigns need anything, it's less choreography and more spontaneity. After all, the president doesn't get to dictate when he gets to respond to crises.
It does make sense to shift the subject of the Friday debate from foreign policy to economics. The people who want to be president should talk about what the voters want them to talk about, and right now, it's the economy, hands down. No serious contender for the presidency should take this moment to stop making his case to the voters.
It's wonderful that McCain, Obama and other congressional leaders will meet with the president to discuss the terms of a bailout. But the American people deserve the chance to see and hear both men grapple publicly with the biggest issue of the day. Then they can assess who is best equipped to serve them during inconvenient times. - Mike Francis, The Oregonian 9/25/08
"The Commission on Presidential Debates is moving forward with its plan for the first presidential debate at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., this Friday, Sept. 26. The plans for this forum have been under way for more than a year and a half. The C.P.D.'s mission is to provide a forum in which the American public has an opportunity to hear the leading candidates for the president of the United States debate the critical issues facing the nation. We believe the public will be well served by having all of the debates go forward as scheduled."
Letterman, Spurned.
Senator John McCain may have disappointed many expectant voters and debate viewers with the decision to suspend his campaign, but none more so than a late-night talk show host on CBS.
David Letterman was so unhappy that Mr. McCain canceled his scheduled appearance on his show Wednesday night that he spent much of the first segment assailing the senator's decision and suggesting "something doesn't smell right" about the Senator's plan to go to Washington to work on the financial crisis.
Mr. Letterman told his audience that Senator McCain had called him directly on short notice Wednesday, to tell him he had to cancel his appearance. After expressing his admiration for Mr. McCain and his sacrifice as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Mr. Letterman said, "When you call up at the last minute and cancel, that's not the John McCain I know." He repeated that "something smells right now" and he suggested "somebody must have put something in his Metamucil."
Mr. Letterman said Mr. McCain had said the economy was "about to crater" which necessitated that he get to Washington right away. Mr. Letterman then suggested that McCain should not be suspending his campaign at all and that he could have "sent in the second-string quarterback," his vice presidential running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, to fill in for him. "You don't quit," Mr. Letterman said.
After suggesting that Ms. Palin should be prepared to step up and "be ready," because "the poor guy is getting a little older," Mr. Letterman reconsidered and said of Ms. Palin's readiness, "Don't get me started."
Even after Mr. Letterman brought out Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC host and vituperative Republican critic as the substitute guest for Mr. McCain, he continued to assail Mr. McCain for the decision to cancel the appearance. His critique reached a high point when he learned that at the very moment Mr. McCain was supposed to be on the couch next to him being interviewed, the senator was at the CBS News center three blocks away in Manhattan, getting ready to be interviewed by the CBS News anchor, Katie Couric.
Mr. Letterman ordered his director to put on a live feed from that location, which showed Mr. McCain getting made up to go on with Ms. Couric. "He doesn't seem to be racing to the airport," Mr. Letterman observed.
After listening to some questions from Ms. Couric, Mr. Letterman said, "Hey, John, I've got a question: You need a lift to the airport?"
He then asked Mr. Olbermann if he thought this was all Mr. McCain's fault, or whether other factors had come into play.
"He ditched you," Mr. Olbermann said. - Bill Carter NY Times 9/25/08
Amy Goodman 9/26/08: The federal bailout of Wall Street is in limbo after Republican lawmakers refused to support an emerging deal between the Bush administration and Democratic leaders. The surprise move came hours after it appeared all sides were close to an agreement. The proposed deal would spend some $700 billion to buy up defaulted Wall Street debts, while also imposing some executive pay limits and granting the government equity that could possibly be sold to help recoup the bailout costs. But as talks progressed, congressional Republicans emerged to propose an alternative plan emphasizing insurance for mortgage-based assets and further deregulation of the financial sector. Lawmakers huddled at the Capitol Building until late in the evening. Democratic Congress member and House Banking Committee Chair Barney Frank blamed Republicans for the delay.
"Rep. Barney Frank: 'House Republicans stayed for a while and then left. And at this point we are told that the House Republicans have no plan to participate in helping draw this up or having any commitment to help pass it.'
Many Democrats pointed the finger at Senator John McCain, saying his involvement in the talks helped derail an emerging deal. Connecticut Senator and Senate Banking chair Christopher Dodd called the meeting 'a rescue plan for John McCain.' McCain has been accused of waging a political stunt after announcing he would suspend his campaign to help push through an agreement on the financial crisis.
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, it remains unclear if McCain will join Obama tonight for their scheduled debate at the University of Mississippi. Speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative Meeting in New York, McCain indicated he still plans to skip out.
Sen. John McCain: 'As of this morning, I suspended my political campaign, as you know, with so much on the line for America and the world. The debate that matters most right now is taking place in the United States capital, and I intend to join it. Senator Obama is doing the same. America should be proud of the bipartisanship that we're seeing.'
Obama, meanwhile, told the same crowd he wants the debate to proceed.
Sen. Barack Obama: 'Our election is in forty days, our economy is in crisis, our nation is fighting two wars abroad. The American people, I believe, deserve to hear directly from myself and Senator McCain about how we intend to lead our country. The times are too serious to put our campaign on hold or to ignore the full range of issues that the next president will face.'"
Amy Goodman (cont'): In Pakistan, US and Pakistani troops have exchanged fire near the Afghan border. Pakistan says it opened fire after a US-Afghan force crossed the border. The US says its troops were behind the Afghan side. A series of cross-border attacks by US troops have heightened tensions between the US and Pakistan.
What is going on? Obvious. Bush/McCain plans for Middle East and environs have brought about the obvious. Chaos. And now their disease has infected American presidential politics. McCain is leading the Republican Party with not "Put our country first"!, but "Rescue my failing presidential campaign...at all costs!" Typical of a hard-rock Republican. "Me first"! We saw it in 2000 as Bush used the Republican-dominated Supreme Court and now its being repeated in 2008 by John McCain. The question then is whether we, the American people, can, in McCain's vernacular, fight for our country. Paul Krugman in the last five paragraphs of his 9/26/08 column in the McCain presidential campaign leader NY Times, Mr. Krugman speaks to McCain's perfidy.
"The Congressional plan, then, looks a lot better -- a lot more adult -- than the Paulson plan did. That said, it's very short on detail, and the details are crucial. What prices will taxpayers pay to take over some of that toxic waste? How much equity will they get in return? Those numbers will make all the difference.
And in any case, it seems that we don't have a deal.
This has to be a bipartisan plan, and not just at the leadership level. Democrats won't pass the plan without votes from rank-and-file Republicans -- and as of Thursday night, those rank-and-file Republicans were balking.
Furthermore, one non-rank-and-file Republican, Senator John McCain, is apparently playing spoiler. Earlier this week, while refusing to say whether he supported the Paulson plan, he claimed not to have had a chance to read it; the plan is all of three pages long. Then he inserted himself into the delicate negotiations over the Congressional plan, insisting on a White House meeting at which he reportedly said little -- but during which consensus collapsed.
The bottom line, then, is that there do seem to be some adults in Congress, ready to do something to help us get through this crisis. But the adults are not yet in charge." - Paul Krugman 9/26/08
On the Tom Brokaw 9/14/08 Meet the Press, which followed a 9/13/08 NBC Chris Matthews Show featuring a claim that the Matthews Meter's regulars voted eleven to one that the political week was won by the McCain-Palin GOP ticket, Brokaw and NBC political director Chuck Todd introduced the "Bubba Factor", i.e. the American voter who will not vote for a "Black Man" for president. Neither mentioned that, in fact, Mr. Obama is not black, but is biracial as are many in this country today. Actually, Senator Obama has the appearance of a twenty-first century Abraham Lincoln, and the stature, predisposition and predilection to match. It may be that Brokaw, Matthews and Todd are unable to sense their inner angels, and are inhibited by their dependence on General Electric/NBC Universal.
WHAT MAY HAVE BEEN MISSED BY THE MEDIA/PRESS ON THAT FIRST OF THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES ON FRIDAY 9/26/08 WAS JOHN MCCAIN'S RETELLING OF HIS PAIRING WITH THE DIVORCED ORTHODOX JEW JOE LIEBERMAN FOR AN ANALYSIS OF 9/11, AN ANALYSIS THAT EXCLUDED THIS FACTOR - THE "NEO-CONSERVATIVES" (READ JEWISH AMERICAN/EUROPEAN) PRESSURE, WHICH HAD BEEN RESISTED BY THE CLINTON/GORE ADMINISTRATION, THE NEO-CONSERVATIVE PRESSURE ON GEORGE WALKER BUSH TO ATTACK, INVADE AND OCCUPY IRAQ TO REMOVE SADDAM HUSSEIN WHO ISRAELIS SAW AS A THREAT TO THEIR DESIRED CONTROL OF THE LEVANT, AND THEN THE MIDDLE EAST. HAVING LOST THE 2000 REPUBLICAN PRIMARY TO THE JUNIOR BUSH, JOHN MCCAIN COULD SEE THAT HIS ACQUISITION OF THE PRESIDENCY REQUIRED THE SUPPORT OF THE MOST EXTREME SEGMENT OF THE JEWISH LOBBY (AIPAC, ADL, ETC). HOW BETTER TO GAIN THEIR BEHIND-THE-SCENES BACKING THAN JOINING WITH JOE LIEBERMAN. HENCE, MCCAIN'S ATTEMPT TO SELECT LIEBERMAN AS HIS RUNNING MATE. THIS FACT ALONE SHOULD CAUSE AMERICANS TO QUESTION MCCAIN'S HONOR AND JUDGMENT.
OF ALL THE JEWISH AMERICANS IN THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS JOE LIEBERMAN IS PERHAPS THE LEAST HONORABLE. HE WAS KNOWINGLY USED BY RIGHT-WING REPUBLICAN WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR., TO DEFEAT THE HONORABLE DEMOCRAT LOWELL WEICKER, SIMPLY BECAUSE MR WEICKER HAD THRASHED BILL BUCKLEY EARLIER IN A NOTABLE DEBATE ON OUR WAR AGAINST VIETNAM. SELECTED BY ALBERT GORE AS HIS RUNNING MATE IN 2000, TO RECOGNIZE THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF JEWISH AMERICANS IN THE UNITED STATES AND BREAK THE EXISTING ETHNIC BARRIER THAT HAD PRECLUDED THEIR INCLUSION ON A NATIONAL PRESIDENTIAL TICKET, LIEBERMAN REPAID MR. GORE BY SABOTAGING THE GORE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IN ITS CRITICAL FINAL WEEKS TO MAKE WAY FOR THE BUSH/CHENEY HIDDEN AGENDA TO OCCUPY IRAQ, AT THE BEHEST OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL. HAVING LOST IN THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY IN CONNECTICUT, LIEBERMAN RAN AS AN "INDEPENDENT" TO RETAIN HIS SENATE SEAT, AND THEN JOINED GEORGE BUSH AND THE REPUBLICANS TO SUPPORT THE DISHONORABLE CAMPAIGN OF ISRAEL TO CONTROL ALL OF PALESTINE AND, ULTIMATELY, THE MIDDLE EAST.
[[ How will Senator Lieberman and, hence, Senator McCain, respond to the following Associated Press story on CNN.com -
"Israel criticized indirectly for refusing review of atomic program
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- A U.N. nuclear conference of 145 nations indirectly criticized Israel on Saturday for refusing to put its atomic program under international purview.
But the Jewish state managed to evade being targeted by Islamic countries pushing for a vote to link it to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
Iran, Israel's most outspoken foe, spearheaded the verbal attack on the Jewish state, as it has done at past general conferences of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Israel is widely considered to have nuclear arms, but has a 'no tell' policy on the issue.
Chief Iranian delegate Ali Ashgar Soltanieh said Israel's nuclear capabilities represent a "serious and continued threat to the security of neighboring and other states."
He took the United States and other Western backers of Israel to task for their 'shameful silence' on what he said was the menace posed by Israel's atomic arsenal.
The meeting voted for a resolution urging all nations to open their nuclear activities to outside inspection and work toward the establishment of a Mideast nuclear weapons free zone. With Israel the only country in the region considered to have atomic arms, passage of the resolution constituted indirect criticism of the Jewish state.
The resolution called on all nations in the Middle East 'not to develop, test or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons,' and urged nuclear weapons states to 'refrain from any action' hindering the establishment of a Mideast zone free of nuclear weapons.
But U.S. and the European Union managed to block an effort by Muslim nations and their supporters to submit a resolution more directly critical of Israel and its 'nuclear capabilities.'
Although last year's meeting followed a similar pattern, the votes for and against the two motions reflected shifting dynamics on the issues.
On Saturday, delegations had so far voted 82-0 for establishing the Mideast nuclear weapons free zone, with Israel, Syria and the U.S. among those abstaining. Last year it was 53 in favor, the U.S. and Israel against, and 47 abstentions.
Part of the shift reflected Israel's success in pushing for the resolution to include language that was indirectly critical of Iran and Syria -- two nations under IAEA review for possibly hiding undeclared nuclear activities.
The fact that the second motion more directly critical of Israel was only narrowly defeated indicated support for the Islamic nations was growing, particularly among developing countries. Of those present at the meeting, 46 nations voted against the motion, 43 voted for it, and seven abstained.
The issue of establishing a Mideast nuclear weapons free zone has been on the IAEA conference agenda for 16 years, though the vote Saturday was only the third on the topic.
The meeting usually tries for consensus, and the balloting reflected increased politicization over the Middle East dispute and, more recently, concerns about Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Muslim nations consider Israel the region's main nuclear threat. The United States and its allies see Iran's defiance of the U.N. Security Council in its development of technology that could be used to make the bomb as the greatest menace to Middle East peace. Iran says it wants to perfect the technology -- uranium enrichment -- not to make the fissile core of nuclear warheads but for fuel to generate power.
Iran was not formally on the agenda of the six-day meeting, which was scheduled to end later Saturday. But concerns about its nuclear defiance figured prominently in comments from a substantial number of Western delegations -- something Soltanieh was critical of.
'Iran is not the issue of this conference,' he told The Associated Press, adding that 'Israel is the only case' in the context of a proliferation danger in the Middle East." - Associated Press 10/4/08 ]]
THE RECENT RECORD OF JOHN SIDNEY MCCAIN III INCLUDING HIS GRAND-STANDING INTERVENTION IN THE DELICATE CONGRESSIONAL EFFORTS TO RESCUE THE NATION'S FINANCIAL SYSTEM, IS CLEARLY ONE OF PERSONAL POLITICAL ADVANTAGE TRUMPING THE NATION'S WELFARE. THE MCCAIN/PALIN REPUBLICAN TICKET IS RIDDLED WITH FRAUDULENT CLAIMS (AS THE 9/12/08 PAUL KRUGMAN LABELED IT "BLIZZARD OF LIES") AN INSULT TO OUR PEOPLE, THIS COUNTRY AND THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS A NON-STOP HISTORY OF THE DIRTIEST OF POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS, PARTICULARLY PRESIDENTIAL - NIXON & WATERGATE, REAGAN & IRAN HOSTAGES, SENIOR BUSH & WILLY HORTON, JUNIOR BUSH & 5-4 SUPREME COURT. WILL THEY SUCCEED WITH MCCAIN & PALIN? WHO HAVE ACCEPTED THE SUPPORT OF THE DVD "OBSESSION: RADICAL ISLAM'S WAR AGAINST THE WEST", THE MOST REPREHENSIBLE AND VITUPERATIVE PRESIDENTIAL POLITICAL OUTRAGE IN OVER A CENTURY!
Jake Oken-Berg 9/29/08: Yesterday morning The Oregonian (a Newhouse west coast newspaper) inserted a DVD called "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against The West" into every copy of its Sunday paper. The Oregonian was paid an undisclosed amount of money by The Clarion Fund to run the "paid advertisement."
I watched the film on YouTube last week. Here's a quick summary so you don't have to give yourself an anxiety attack:
Within the first five minutes the film shows US Airlines flight 175 plowing into the World Trade Center south tower, dead bodies being pulled from the Madrid train bombing, and lifeless, partially-clothed kids being carried out from the Beslan School Massacre in Russia. All scored with a haunting soundtrack.
The next 45-minutes contains quotes, clips, and images of Muslims declaring their intent to kill all Westerners and make Islam the dominant religion across the world.
The film suggests that 10-15 percent of Muslims support militant Islam, that Islam is a mostly violent religion, and that the "Radical Islamic" movement is comparable to Nazism -- information that is not supported by numerous Islamic and Muslim scholars. The film provides no historical context on the underpinnings of Islam nor any suggestions for reducing radical violence (besides directing viewers to "take a stand").
Interspersed throughout the DVD are comments from a rotating cast of five or so "experts" who reaffirm that the information I'm viewing is accurate and that I should be angry and afraid. Very afraid.
I am afraid. Not about being blown up by a "Radical Islamist" suicide bomber. I was already aware of the threat of zealots who kill in the name of religion or freedom. And if I wasn't, I definitely got the idea by the first two minutes of this DVD. I guess the next 50 minutes were for emphasis?
No, I'm afraid that the work that has gone on in Oregon and numerous other places across the country to build bridges and understanding between the Islamic community and other religions will be eroded.
Just this month, Oregonians brought Mustafa, a six year-old Iraqi boy to our state to receive life saving treatment after a U.S. airstrike in Fallujah severed his left leg, hip, and bowel. His visit has created and strengthened connections between many religious and cultural groups. Will the distribution of this film weaken those bonds?
I am afraid that anti-Muslim sentiment and violence will increase in our community just as it did after September 11. The federal government reported a 17-fold increase in the amount of hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. from 2000 to 2001 -- numbers that do not account for the increased verbal abuse and harassment faced by Muslim-Americans.
I am also afraid that The Oregonian thought it was appropriate to send out this "advertisement" in return for cash.
Several media outlets, community groups, and people including The Good Faith Coalition, The Portland Mercury, Kari on Blue Oregon and Mayor Tom Potter raised and reported on the numerous objections to this DVD in advance of The Oregonian distributing it. The Oregonian could have refused the DVD like the Greensboro, N.C. News & Record did calling the film "fear-mongering and divisive."
But The O sent out the film anyway. Now Fred Stickel, The Oregonian's publisher, is hiding behind "free speech" arguments. In Sunday's paper he said:
"I've always felt we have an obligation to keep our advertising columns as open as possible. Our acceptance of anything -- our acceptance or rejection -- does not depend on whether or not we agree with the content. . . . There is a principle of freedom of speech involved here. I could find no reason to reject this."
The issue is not free speech. Constitutional law experts can correct me, but my understanding of the first amendment and hate speech is that The Oregonian is within its rights to publish or distribute this type of material.
The issue is whether The Oregonian should have distributed this material since it is clearly propaganda and the film's purpose is to push a point of view using fear, half truths and graphic images.
Would The Oregonian distribute an hour-long anti-Semitic DVD celebrating the Holocaust as long as the group paid enough? Would The Oregonian put out a film by a racist group purporting to give information on the inferiority of non-white races? Would The O accept a graphic movie from an anti-war group showing the bloodied bodies of American soldiers?
If Fred Stickel and The Oregonian editors are going to say this is simply a matter of free speech, they owe our community an explanation of where they draw the line for future advertisements.
It is one thing for a nutty group to produce a film and send it directly to my mailbox. It is quite another to have Oregon's only statewide newspaper insert the DVD in its Sunday edition for a fee. With The Oregonian's declining readership and advertising revenue will the paper now be accepting any and all material as long as it gets paid enough?
The Oregonian editors also owe us an explanation of why they are willing to spread propaganda that may be Constitutionally protected, but will surely raise the level of harassment and threats against Muslim-Americans in Oregon.
I hope you will join me this morning (Monday) at 10 a.m. in front of The Oregonian (1320 SW Broadway, Portland, Oregon) at a protest organized by many of our community's leaders to demand such an explanation. - Mr. Oken-Berg 9/29/08
"Fear Mongering at its Worst
The film and its distribution would cause popular upheaval in any just and open society. This brainless, guns waving approach to the Middle East and Islam is being distributed in mass to swing states as part of an anti-Islamic and thus pro-Republican ad campaign. Too bad the nytimes couldn't resist the payoff.
If we wanted to get at the heart of the terrorist threat we could start by looking at the oppression of the people in the Middle East. It's no coincidence that the poorest countries with histories of colonization and intervention lash out against the West. It has little to do with Islam." - kuebribd NY Times Readers' Review 9/21/08
REPUBLICAN PARTY "OBSESSION": A New York non-profit called the Clarion Fund is distributing an hour long DVD, "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West," in 70 newspapers across the United States in presidential swing states.
Muslims and scholars of Islam in one of the swing states, Oregon, and across the country denounce the DVD as divisive Muslim-bashing propaganda designed to foment fear among Americans, bolster support for Israel and sway the presidential election in candidate John McCain's favor. - Bill Graves 9/28/08
The 3 A.M. Call
It's 3 a.m., a few months into 2009, and the phone in the White House rings. Several big hedge funds are about to fail, says the voice on the line, and there's likely to be chaos when the market opens. Whom do you trust to take that call?
I'm not being melodramatic. The bailout plan released yesterday is a lot better than the proposal Henry Paulson first put out -- sufficiently so to be worth passing. But it's not what you'd actually call a good plan, and it won't end the crisis. The odds are that the next president will have to deal with some major financial emergencies.
So what do we know about the readiness of the two men most likely to end up taking that call? Well, Barack Obama seems well informed and sensible about matters economic and financial. John McCain, on the other hand, scares me.
About Mr. Obama: it's a shame that he didn't show more leadership in the debate over the bailout bill, choosing instead to leave the issue in the hands of Congressional Democrats, especially Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. But both Mr. Obama and the Congressional Democrats are surrounded by very knowledgeable, clear-headed advisers, with experienced crisis managers like Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin always close at hand.
Then there's the frightening Mr. McCain -- more frightening now than he was a few weeks ago.
We've known for a long time, of course, that Mr. McCain doesn't know much about economics -- he's said so himself, although he's also denied having said it. That wouldn't matter too much if he had good taste in advisers -- but he doesn't.
Remember, his chief mentor on economics is Phil Gramm, the arch-deregulator, who took special care in his Senate days to prevent oversight of financial derivatives -- the very instruments that sank Lehman and A.I.G., and brought the credit markets to the edge of collapse. Mr. Gramm hasn't had an official role in the McCain campaign since he pronounced America a "nation of whiners," but he's still considered a likely choice as Treasury secretary.
And last year, when the McCain campaign announced that the candidate had assembled "an impressive collection of economists, professors, and prominent conservative policy leaders" to advise him on economic policy, who was prominently featured? Kevin Hassett, the co-author of "Dow 36,000." Enough said.
Now, to a large extent the poor quality of Mr. McCain's advisers reflects the tattered intellectual state of his party. Has there ever been a more pathetic economic proposal than the suggestion of House Republicans that we try to solve the financial crisis by eliminating capital gains taxes? (Troubled financial institutions, by definition, don't have capital gains to tax.)
But even President Bush has, in the twilight of his administration, turned to relatively sensible people to make economic decisions: I'm not a fan of Mr. Paulson, but he's a vast improvement over his predecessor. At this point, one has the suspicion that a McCain administration would have us longing for Bush-era competence.
The real revelation of the last few weeks, however, has been just how erratic Mr. McCain's views on economics are. At any given moment, he seems to have very strong opinions -- but a few days later, he goes off in a completely different direction.
Thus on Sept. 15 he declared -- for at least the 18th time this year -- that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong." This was the day after Lehman failed and Merrill Lynch was taken over, and the financial crisis entered a new, even more dangerous stage.
But three days later he declared that America's financial markets have become a "casino," and said that he'd fire the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission -- which, by the way, isn't in the president's power.
And then he found a new set of villains -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored lenders. (Despite some real scandals at Fannie and Freddie, they played little role in causing the crisis: most of the really bad lending came from private loan originators.) And he moralistically accused other politicians, including Mr. Obama, of being under Fannie's and Freddie's financial influence; it turns out that a firm owned by his own campaign manager was being paid by Freddie until just last month.
Then Mr. Paulson released his plan, and Mr. McCain weighed vehemently into the debate. But he admitted, several days after the Paulson plan was released, that he hadn't actually read the plan, which was only three pages long.
O.K., I think you get the picture.
The modern economy, it turns out, is a dangerous place -- and it's not the kind of danger you can deal with by talking tough and denouncing evildoers. Does Mr. McCain have the judgment and temperament to deal with that part of the job he seeks? - Paul Krugman 9/29/08
THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE
No September To Remember For John McCain
September began as John McCain's month and ended as Barack Obama's. McCain's high-risk wagers aimed at shaking up the campaign turned into very bad investments. And Friday's debate eliminated McCain's best chance to deliver a knockout blow to an opponent whose most important asset may be his capacity for self-correction.
McCain is supposed to own the foreign policy issue -- and he should have owned Friday's debate. During their respective primary battles, McCain was a better debater than Obama, who could be hesitant, wordy and thrown off his stride.
But the Obama who showed up at Ole Miss was sharper and more concise than the man who frequently lost debates against his Democratic foes. He was also resolutely calm in standing his ground against McCain, whose condescension became a major talking point after the debate. If Al Gore suffered from his sighs during the 2000 debates, McCain will be remembered for his supercilious repetition of seven variations on "Senator Obama doesn't understand."
This gave special power to Obama's peroration about McCain's "wrong" judgments on going to war in Iraq. McCain's dismissal of Obama brought back memories of how advocates of the war arrogantly dismissed those who insisted (rightly, as it turned out) that the conflict would be far more difficult and costly than its architects suggested.
McCain's derisive approach may help explain why the instant polls gave Obama an edge in a debate that many pundits rated a tie -- and why women seemed especially inclined toward Obama. CNN's survey found that 59 percent of women rated Obama as having done better, with just 31 percent saying that of McCain.
An Obama adviser who was watching a "dial group" -- in which viewers turn a device to express their feelings about a debate's every moment -- said that whenever McCain lectured or attacked Obama, the Republican's ratings would drop, and the fall was especially steep among women.
But if the debate was indeed a tie -- and McCain certainly looked informed and engaged once the discussion moved from economics to foreign affairs -- this would count as a net gain for Obama. A foreign policy discussion afforded McCain his best opportunity to aggravate doubts about his foe. That opportunity is now gone.
As for the first 40 minutes devoted to the economic crisis, Obama was more forceful in addressing public anxieties. He used the occasion to tout his middle-class tax cut that a large share of the electorate doesn't even know he's proposing. Obama's campaign quickly went on the air with an ad noting that McCain did not once mention the words "middle class" during the discussion.
Thus ends a month that began with such promise for McCain. His choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate at the end of August created a fortnight of excitement among Republican loyalists who were less than enthusiastic about McCain. Some said Palin would also enhance his appeal to female voters and help him recast his candidacy as a maverick's crusade.
But it was a reckless choice. Palin has proved herself to be spectacularly unprepared for a national campaign and embarrassingly inarticulate and unreflective. She is held in protective custody by a campaign that trusts her less and less. A few conservatives have suggested she should be dropped from the ticket.
Then came McCain's abrupt foray into Washington's negotiations over a Wall Street bailout bill. His showy call for postponing Friday's debate was serenely rebuffed by Obama, and McCain was forced to retreat. The candidate with 26 years of congressional experience lost a test of wills to an opponent with just four years on the national stage.
And when McCain intervened in the rescue package discussions, his position on the matter was muddy. This champion of bipartisanship briefly stood up for a House Republican minority that was battling against a bipartisan accord largely accepted by his Senate Republican colleagues, and then he pulled back. The McCain who had once allied with such liberals as Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold was suddenly flirting with an approach to the economic rescue that was recommended by Newt Gingrich.
The post-Labor Day period has thus brought the campaign to an unexpected point.
McCain, once the candidate of tested experience, must now battle the perception that he has become the riskier choice, a man too given to rash moves under pressure. Obama, whose very newness promised change but also raised doubts, has emerged as the cool and unruffled candidate who moves calmly but steadily forward. However one judges the first debate, it did nothing to block Obama's progress. - E. J. Dionne Jr. 9/29/08
To the Editor:
Re "Rivals Display Stark Contrasts in Clashes on War and Economy" (front page, Sept. 27):
Barack Obama was far superior in this debate. He undoubtedly demonstrated poise, knowledge and wisdom, putting to rest questions about his ability to lead as president. He held his points about the need for moderation and pushing ahead for important changes in the economy and the Bush-McCain failed policies in Iraq.
John McCain tried to attack Mr. Obama's experience, unsuccessfully, adding nothing new to resolving our current financial crisis, and taking no responsibility for the Iraq war. - Robert Garfield Merion Station, Pa., 9/27/08
To the Editor:
Barack Obama showed dignity, grace and intelligence, proving that he can be a respectful diplomat and a powerful leader. All John McCain displayed was bitter arrogance to the point that he couldn't look at Mr. Obama even once.
How can we believe that Mr. McCain will "reach across the aisle" when he can't even look across the stage? Shameful behavior, Mr. McCain. Not traits I want in a leader. - Tally Briggs Toluca Lake, Calif., 9/27/08
To the Editor:
Friday night's debate makes the choice clear: one candidate's default value is anger, the other's is thoughtfulness.
Which value do we need in the White House? - Fred LaMotte Steilacoom, Wash., 9/27/08
To the Editor:
Re "Palin's Words Raise Red Flags" (column, Sept. 27):
Beyond Bob Herbert's observations on what the CBS News interview reveals about Gov. Sarah Palin's foreign policy experience (totally lacking) and her ability to articulate her credentials (bumbling), the interview raises another red flag.
One wonders what Senator John McCain himself must have thought when discussing foreign policy with Ms. Palin, assuming he did so, before selecting her for his ticket. Katie Couric's interview may tell us as much about Mr. McCain's judgment as it does about Ms. Palin's qualifications.
For the candidate who says he puts the country first, who is trying to sell us on his own long experience and who could have tapped into an unlimited universe of highly experienced running mates, it is alarming that Mr. McCain placed such little value on this quality in the person who could end up being a heartbeat away from the presidency. - Carla L. Engler New York, 9/27/08
Amy Goodman 9/30/08: Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has told an Israeli newspaper that Israel should withdraw from nearly all territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war in return for peace with the Palestinians and Syria. Olmert told Israel's largest newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth: "I am saying what no previous Israeli leader has ever said: we should withdraw from almost all of the territories, including in East Jerusalem and in the Golan Heights." More than 450,000 Jewish settlers live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and a further 20,000 in the Golan Heights. Olmert said that traditional Israeli defense strategists had learned nothing from past experiences and that they seemed stuck in the considerations of the 1948 war of independence. He said, "With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop. All these things are worthless." Olmert recently resigned over corruption allegations but remains prime minister until a new government is approved by parliament. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki criticized Olmert for waiting until now to call for an end to the settlements.
Riyad al-Maliki: "We wish we heard this personal opinion when Olmert was prime minister, not after he resigned. I think it is a very important commitment, but it came too late. We hope this commitment will be fulfilled by the new Israeli government."
Amy Goodman 10/1/08: Back in Washington, congressional Democrats say they've effectively shelved a resolution widely decried as a possible green light for a war with Iran. H.R. 362 calls for isolating Iran with a naval blockade and a ban on oil shipments. The measure was heavily pushed by the lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. Congress member Gary Ackerman says he plans to revise the measure when Congress reconvenes after the November elections.
To the editor:
There has been a consensus that Gov. Sarah Palin is energizing women from all walks of life. I can only concur. Specifically, she has made me, and most of the women I know, fighting mad.
I find the Republicans' cynical use of her gender and her status as a mom to cover her lack of knowledge and her unwillingness to think carefully about issues facing our country to be both insulting and dangerous.
I will work for Barack Obama's election even though my own life is crazy -- busy with two daughters, running my own business and attending graduate school.
Most importantly, I will not stand by and see the U.S. Supreme Court forced any further to the right. This is one middle-aged white woman who is not running to Palin's side. Hold on to your microphones and cameras for the Palin backlash -- it's coming and it will be fierce! - Deborah Dombrowski Portland, Oregon 9/14/08
"Early in last night's vice-presidential debate, Sarah Palin said that she might not answer the questions as moderator Gwen Ifill posed them. This was the Alaska governor's way of saying she was going to stick to the talking points she had stuffed into her head, no matter what the subject.
When Palin described John McCain's health-care plan, she talked about his offer of a $5,000 tax credit so families could buy insurance. She failed to mention that McCain would pay for the credit by taxing existing insurance benefits. Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden -- politely -- pounced on her omission, warning that McCain's plan could lead millions to lose their insurance coverage. Palin didn't come back to defend her running mate.
Nor did she come back when Biden challenged her false claims about how many times Barack Obama had voted for tax increases. Palin just plowed forward, piling one attack on top of another, with leavening references to "Joe Six-Pack" and 'hockey moms.'
Oh, yes, she did correct Biden on one thing. When he said the Republican energy slogan is 'drill, drill, drill,' she quickly reminded him that 'the chant is drill, baby, drill.' Thanks for clearing that up.
Last night's debate took place at the moment when a majority of American voters had decided that Palin was unprepared to be president if she were called upon to assume the office. Surveys by The Post and ABC News and by the Pew Research Center both found that doubts about Palin have risen sharply since the beginning of September.
The key to understanding how McCain chose Palin as his running mate was provided by the New York Times last weekend when it described an episode in which he 'tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table.' Americans are increasingly uneasy about the gamble they might take by putting Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Expectations for Palin were so low that the mere fact that she managed to keep talking and to keep assailing Obama will be rated as a great victory by McCain's lieutenants. But it was Biden who knew what he was talking about, who could engage in argument and who showed he actually understood the issues. In recent interviews with CBS anchor Katie Couric, Palin came off as profoundly uninformed, as someone who had given little thought to the issues that will matter. Nothing Palin did last night changed that. Those rooting for her were relieved. Those who doubted her readiness going in were not persuaded by her endless repetition of the word 'maverick.'
Palin has also brought out the very worst in McCain, forcing him to -- and I do not use this word lightly -- lie about her. In an interview broadcast Wednesday, National Public Radio's Steve Inskeep asked McCain if there would be "an occasion where you could imagine turning to Governor Palin for advice in a foreign policy crisis?"
McCain replied: 'I've turned to her advice many times in the past. I can't imagine turning to Senator Obama or Senator Biden, because they've been wrong.'
'Many times in the past?' McCain met Palin only twice before he selected her. What McCain said could not be true. And would anyone who listened to her last night really consult Palin on foreign policy?
This week, McCain's backers signaled their fears that Palin would fail by trying to discredit the debate in advance. Although it has been known at least since July that Gwen Ifill was writing a book on 'Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,' the usual right-wing attack squad waited until two days before the debate to mount a campaign to the effect that Ifill's book project turned her into a biased moderator. In her measured questioning, Ifill showed that the attack was nonsense.
The core issue, of course, is the contrast between how Obama and McCain chose their running mates. Say what you will about Joe Biden -- and last night, he was far from being either the gaffe machine or the windbag so many predicted would appear on stage -- no one loses sleep at the idea of his being in the Oval Office. Obama picked a vice president more likely to help him govern the country than win the chance to do so.
As for McCain, he found himself in a political hole and threw the dice with Palin. At the time of her selection, voters were often compared with 'American Idol' watchers who put personality and stage presence above everything else. But it turns out that Americans take the presidency very seriously. And surviving 90 minutes on a stage with Biden did not transform Palin into a plausible president." - E. J. Dionne Jr. 10/3/08
FOURTEEN YEARS AGO RIGHT-WING REPUBLICANS LED BY THE RUSH LIMBAUGH TALKSHOW DEFEATED THE DEMOCRATIC CONGRESS. THAT DISASTROUS ELEMENT BROUGHT ABOUT EIGHT YEARS OF BUSH/CHENEY (INITIATED BY THE FIVE NOW-INFAMOUS REPUBLICAN MEMBERS OF THE SUPREME COURT: SCALIA, THOMAS, REHNQUIST, KENNEDY AND O'CONNOR). ALONG THE WAY THE THREE RIGHT-WING REPUBLICANS ON THE LEHRER NEWSHOUR [BILL SAFIRE (AKA SAFIR) PAUL GIGOT AND DAVID BROOKS] CLAIMED LEGITIMACY FOR LIMBAUGH, BUSH AND CHENEY, AND THE LAST OF THIS TREACHEROUS THREE-SOME, DAVID BROOKS, HEADLINES HIS 10/3/08 NY TIMES POST-DEBATE COLUMN THE PALIN REBOUND, REFERRING TO ALASKA'S SARAH PALIN, THE JOHN MCCAIN-SELECTED VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE WHO GARRY TRUDEAU PORTRAYS IN HIS INSIGHTFUL DOONESBURY AS AN AUTOMATED DOLL WITH BUTTONS WHICH, WHEN PUSHED, SPEAK PROGRAMMED REPLIES. THAT DESCRIBES MS. PALIN'S APPEARANCE ON THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE!
AND NONE HAVE MENTIONED, INCLUDING THE NEW YORK TIMES, THAT IT IS THE ONE AND ONLY RUSH LIMBAUGH WHO (1) INTRODUCED SARAH PALIN ON HIS RADIO PROGRAM AS THE MUST-SELECT VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE FOR THE MAVERICK - "I KNOW HOW TO FIGHT THESE GUYS!" JOHN MCCAIN, AND (2) IS NOW INSISTING THAT BARACK OBAMA HAS A "CLOSE" ASSOCIATION WITH BILL AYERS. OBVIOUSLY, THAT CHARGE IS RIDICULOUS. BUT THERE ARE THOSE IN ILLINOIS WHO ARE CLOSE TO MR. AYERS.
To the Editor:
Re "Palin, on Offensive, Attacks Obama's Ties to '60s Radical" (news article, Oct. 5): According to Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator Barack Obama is un-American for "palling around with" Bill Ayers, who was involved with the Weathermen 40 years ago. If we buy into her guilt by association, a lot of us Chicagoans are suspect. The faculty, students and administration of the University of Illinois, which hired Mr. Ayers as a professor, must all be terrorists.
Likewise, all the employees, board members, donors and recipients of grants from the Woods Fund, where Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers served together, ought to be investigated.
Mr. Obama's patriotism was questioned last year because he didn't wear a flag lapel pin. I've since noticed that no one I know wears one. Obviously, I'm surrounded by terrorists. - David Brown Chicago, 10/5/08
To the Editor:
You quote John McCain, "How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?" He was referring to Barack Obama's acquaintance with the former Weatherman Bill Ayers, but the same question might be put to his own supporters.
A Vietnamese friend once described to me the scene of carnage he witnessed as a child after a United States bombing in Hanoi. He and his family fled through a landscape strewn with the body parts of innocents.
An argument could be made that the pilot who flew 23 bombing sorties over Vietnam and the former radical were both doing what they believed right -- one in support of a war and the other in protest of it -- and that both were wrong. - Kevin Lathrop Brooklyn, 10/4/08
The Vice-Presidential Debate
"We cannot recall when there were lower expectations for a candidate than the ones that preceded Sarah Palin's appearance in Thursday night's vice-presidential debate with Joseph Biden. After a series of stumbling interviews that raised serious doubts even among conservatives about her fitness to serve as vice president, Ms. Palin had to do little more than say one or two sensible things and avoid an election-defining gaffe.
By that standard, but only by that standard, the governor of Alaska did well. But Ms. Palin never really got beyond her talking points in 90 minutes, mostly repeating clichés and tired attack lines and energetically refusing to answer far too many questions.
Senator Biden did well, avoiding one of his own infamous gaffes, while showing a clear grasp of the big picture and the details. He left Ms. Palin way behind on most issues, especially foreign policy and national security, where she just seemed lost. It was in those moments that her lack of experience -- two terms as mayor of a tiny Anchorage suburb and less than two years as governor -- was most painfully evident.
Asked about Israel, Ms. Palin reeled off her support for 'a two-state solution, building our embassy also in Jerusalem, those things that we look forward to being able to accomplish with this peace-seeking nation.' Asked about the possible use of nuclear weapons, she declared 'nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people and too many parts of our planet.' On Iraq, all she had to offer was the false accusation that Barack Obama wants to surrender.
Mr. Biden directly challenged Ms. Palin's debate prep on Afghanistan -- pointing out that the commander there had disagreed with Mr. McCain's call for an Iraq-style 'surge' in Afghanistan. Ms. Palin tried to contradict him, but the most memorable part of her answer was that she got the general's name wrong.
One can argue (and her supporters will) that Ms. Palin is a newcomer and can't be expected to know all of the wonkish details, that what matters is the image she projects. Except, anyone who is running for vice president in these very dangerous times needs to have detailed knowledge.
When it came to domestic issues, Ms. Palin mainly relied on enthusiasm and humor, talking about hockey moms, soccer moms and Joe Sixpack almost as often as she used the word 'maverick' to describe Mr. McCain or herself.
But she offered virtually no detail -- beyond the Republican mantra of tax cuts -- for how she and Mr. McCain would address the financial crisis or help Americans avoid foreclosure or what programs they would cut because of the country's disastrous fiscal problems.
Ms. Palin's primary tactic was simply to repeat the same thing over and over: John McCain is a maverick. So is she. To stay on that course, she had to indulge in some wildly circular logic: America does not want another Washington insider. They want Mr. McCain (who has been in Congress for nearly 26 years). Ms. Palin condemned Wall Street greed and said she and Mr. McCain would 'demand' strict oversight. In virtually the next breath, she said government should "get out of the way" of American business.
There were occasional, disturbing flashes of the old, pre-campaign Sarah Palin. Asked about the causes of global warming, Ms. Palin suggested that man had some role -- but she wasn't saying how much.
In the end, the debate did not change the essential truth of Ms. Palin's candidacy: Mr. McCain made a wildly irresponsible choice that shattered the image he created for himself as the honest, seasoned, experienced man of principle and judgment. It was either an act of incredible cynicism or appallingly bad judgment.
The ensuing weeks cemented those images in our minds. Ms. Palin initially injected some energy into the McCain campaign, especially among members of the right-wing Republican base, who never liked or trusted the Arizona Senator - and still do not. Then, she began lurching from one embarrassing public appearance to another, culminating in her shocking performance in interviews with Katie Couric. In those exchanges, Ms. Palin was inarticulate and shockingly unable to answer the most basic questions about government policy and even her own political philosophy.
The Republicans have tried to present the negative reaction to Ms. Palin as a matter of liberal elites sneering at someone who does not share their privileged backgrounds. That is a distraction. The problem with Ms. Palin's candidacy, which she underscored in her appearance at the debate on Thursday night, is not that she didn't attend a fancy school or go backpacking in Europe after college. It is her disdain for knowledge, education, experience and contemplative leadership." - lead editorial 10/3/08
Amy Goodman 10/10/08: Admiral Mike Mullen, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday the situation in Afghanistan will probably worsen over the next year. Mullen said, "The trends across the board are not going in the right direction. And I would anticipate next year would be a tougher year." Mullen went on to say that US-led forces are "not going to be able to kill our way to victory in Pakistan and Afghanistan." Meanwhile, the US is continuing to carry out drone attacks inside Pakistan. A missile attack on Thursday killed at least nine people.
"The Army Times is reporting Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia is asking the Pentagon to halt a $300 million program to produce pro-American news and public service messages in Iraq. Webb said, "At a time when this country is facing such a grave economic crisis...it makes little sense for the Department of Defense to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to propagandize the Iraqi people." The Pentagon recently awarded a total of $300 million in new contracts to four contractors to produce pro-US propaganda for Iraqi audiences. The contractors are the Washington-based Lincoln Group, the LA-based Leonie Industries, as well as MPRI and SOSI, both based in Virginia.
In campaign developments, a new study has found that nearly 100 percent of John McCain's recent campaign advertisements have been negative. The study by the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin examined campaign ads during the week of September 28 through October 4. During the same period, 34 percent of Barack Obama's ads were negative. On Thursday morning, the McCain campaign issued its first ad tying Obama to the 1960s militant Bill Ayers. During a campaign stop later in the day, McCain accused Obama of having a 'clear radical, far-left, pro-abortion record.' Senator Barack Obama criticized McCain's approach during a campaign stop in Dayton, Ohio.
Sen. Obama: 'I don't know if you've noticed, but they're not--they don't seem to want to talk about the economy. They want to talk about me. And his campaign actually said this. I quote them: they said, 'If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.' Well, I've got news for John McCain. This isn't about losing a campaign; this is about Americans here in Dayton who are losing their jobs and losing their homes and losing their life savings. It's about young people losing hope and losing direction.'
Meanwhile, tension remains high in the Israeli town of Acre after clashes between Jewish and Palestinian residents. The fighting began on Wednesday night when a group of Jewish teens attacked a Palestinian man for driving his car through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. The attack sparked a day of riots that saw Palestinian and Jewish residents of the town hurling rocks at each other. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports Israeli police warded off hundreds of Jewish rioters, chanting 'death to Arabs.' Ahmed Tibi, one of the few Palestinians in the Israeli Knesset, called the violence a 'pogrom perpetrated by Jews against Arab residents.'
And finally, much of the news media is catching up on a story Democracy Now! covered five months ago. On May 13, former Military Intelligence Sergeant Adrienne Kinne appeared on the program and talked about how she was personally ordered to eavesdrop on Americans working for news organizations and NGOs in Iraq.
Adrienne Kinne: 'Over the course of my time, as we slowly began to identify phone numbers and who belonged to what, one thing that gave me grave concern was that, as we identified phone numbers, we started to find more and more and more numbers that belonged not to any organizations affiliated with terrorism or with military--with militaries of Iraq or Afghanistan or elsewhere, but with humanitarian aid organizations, non-governmental organizations, who include the International Red Cross, Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, a whole host of humanitarian aid organizations. And it also included journalists.'" - Amy Goodman 10/10/08
Amy Goodman 10/14/08: On the campaign trail, Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama proposed four steps to create jobs and to cushion Americans against the effects of the economic downturn. Speaking in Toledo, Ohio, Senator Obama proposed a ninety-day moratorium on most home foreclosures.
"Sen. Barack Obama: 'For those Americans in danger of losing their homes, today I'm also proposing a three-month moratorium on foreclosures. If you're a bank--if you're a bank or a lender that is getting money from the rescue plan that passed Congress, and your customers are making a good-faith effort to make their mortgage payments and re-negotiate their mortgage, you will not be able to foreclose on their home for three months. We need to give people the breathing room to get back on their feet.'
Other parts of Obama's plan include tax credits for firms that create new jobs, penalty-free withdrawals from retirement accounts and to eliminate income taxes on unemployment benefits.
Sen. Barack Obama: 'But today I'm calling on Congress to pass a plan so that the IRS will mail out the first round of those tax cuts as soon as possible. We should get you a rebate in your pockets to deal with heating your homes this winter, making sure that--making sure that you can afford the new coat for your child or maybe even a new computer to help them in school. We should also extend and expand unemployment benefits to those Americans who have lost their jobs and are having a tough time out there finding new ones in this weak economy.'
Advisers to John McCain say the Arizona senator will make a series of new proposals for the economy today. McCain's handling of the economic crisis is coming under increasing scrutiny. Political analyst Darrell West of the Brookings Institute said McCain's campaign strategy of attacking Obama has backfired.
Darrell West: 'I think the big thing that has led to John McCain's demise in the surveys has been the financial meltdown. But it also is a time period where McCain has been on the attack against Barack Obama, and at that very time his own poll numbers have dropped and the favorability ratings of Barack Obama actually have improved compared to McCain. So McCain needs to change the tone of this campaign. The negative attacks haven't appeared to work very effectively. And so, I think over the closing days of this election he really needs to lay out his own positive vision of what he wants to accomplish as president.'" - Amy Goodman 10/14/08
Amy Goodman 10/13/08: Alaskan Ethics Inquiry: Palin Abused Power in Troopergate - In campaign news, a bipartisan Alaskan ethics inquiry has found Republican vice-presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin abused the power of her office by pressuring subordinates to fire her former brother-in-law from his job as an Alaskan state trooper. The report also found that Palin allowed her husband to use the governor's office and resources to meet and speak to state employees in an effort to find some way to get Michael Wooten fired. Republican Alaska State Senator Lyda Green defended the investigation's findings.
"Lyda Green: 'I just think we always have to be very, very, very careful when we're in a position of power, because that separating ourselves from our personal lives and bringing it into the office is always a temptation. And we need to be very careful that we do not do that.'
The McCain campaign said Palin feels vindicated by the report.
Meghan Stapleton, McCain-Palin campaign spokesperson: 'We did take a look at the findings, and the first finding, the original authorization for the hundred thousand bucks, was to see whether this governor abused any power in reassigning Walt Monegan. They said absolutely not, that there is not conclusive that she did not exert unlawful power, that she acted within her authority and within her lawful power to reassign him, and so she feels absolutely vindicated by this report today.'"
- Max Blumenthal on Sarah Palin's Radical Right-Wing Pals and Her Ties to the Pro-Secessionist Alaskan Independence Party -
As the McCain campaign continues to focus on Senator Obama's alleged ties to former Weather Underground member William Ayers, a new investigation in Salon.com sheds light on how Governor Palin's ties to the radical right are far deeper than previously thought. Journalists Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert detail how Palin was elected Mayor of Wasilla over a decade ago with the help of activists from the Alaska Independence Party and the John Birch Society. They allege that she tried to return the favor later by attempting to appoint one of them to an empty city council seat.
Guest:
Max Blumenthal, investigative reporter. He was in Alaska last month investigating Governor Palin's ties to the Alaska Independence Party. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute and his latest article, 'Meet Sarah Palin's Radical Right-Wing Pals'. His website is maxblumenthal.com
AMY GOODMAN: A new report from the Alaska legislature has concluded Republican vice-presidential nominee Governor Sarah Palin abused her power and violated state ethics law by trying to get her former brother-in-law Mike Wooten fired from the state police. The report by former Anchorage prosecutor Stephen Branchflower states, "Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda."
Palin, on the other hand, is claiming the report completely exonerates her in the so-called "Troopergate" controversy. She told reporters Saturday, "Well, I'm very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing, any hint of any kind of unethical activity."
Meanwhile, as the McCain campaign continues to focus on Senator Obama's alleged ties to former Weather Underground member William Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois, a new investigation at Salon.com sheds light on how Governor Palin's ties to the radical right are far deeper than previously thought. Journalists Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert detail how Palin was elected Mayor of Wasilla over a decade ago with the help of activists from the Alaska Independence Party and the John Birch Society. They allege she tried to return the favor later by attempting to appoint one of them to an empty city council seat.
Governor Palin is not a member of the Alaska Independence Party, but she has attended party conventions and even addressed this year's convention.
GOV. SARAH PALIN: I'm Governor Sarah Palin, and I am delighted to welcome you to the 2008 Alaskan Independence Party convention in the Golden Heart City, Fairbanks. Your party plays an important role in our state's politics.
AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal was in Alaska last month investigating Palin's ties to the Alaska Independence Party. He's a fellow at the Nation Institute. His latest article is "Meet Sarah Palin's Radical Right-Wing Pals." It's online at Salon.com. He joins us now from Arizona.
We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Max Blumenthal.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, great to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Max, let's just start out with the Troopergate report. I was just listening to her conversation with Alaska reporters on Saturday--Governor Palin's--where she said she has been completely vindicated, legally as well as any other way, in terms of any pressure brought to bear on the firing of the commissioner, the public safety commissioner of Alaska. Can you summarize for us what the report found?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, what the report found, everything Sarah Palin had said in terms of her motives for firing trooper Mike Wooten, who had divorced her sister, was completely false, that she felt threatened by Trooper Wooten, for example, was completely contradicted by the fact that as soon as she came into office, she demanded that her security detail be significantly reduced. And so, just across the board, everything she had said about Trooper Wooten being a threat to her was contradicted by this report, and that Todd Palin, the self-described "first dude" of Alaska, spent 50 percent of his personal time, you know, in the governor's office seeking ways to fire Trooper Wooten and to fire Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, who happens to be sort of a local hero in Alaska.
So, the report itself is pretty devastating, and what Sarah Palin is saying is that she hasn't--that the report finds that she hasn't broken any laws. And technically, while that's true, she also stands to be censured by the legislature and/or fined, which would completely erode her image as a reformer who's above party politics and personal corruption, something that, you know, the McCain campaign had sought her out for.
Beyond that, there's more trouble ahead for Sarah Palin. She had followed a terrible McCain campaign strategy--and this is a little bit complicated--by which she would file an ethics report against herself before the State Personnel Board. And the logic behind this was that because the governor controls the State Personnel Board, you know, reports directly to the governor, she could get a favorable report on her handling of the trooper controversy, and this would have a lot of public relations value and would sort of at least exonerate her before the public. But what wound up happening was the State Personnel Board appointed another tough prosecutor, someone named Timothy Petumenos, an Anchorage--an Anchorage lawyer, who also happens to be a Democrat. And they're going to release their report in a few weeks, and I expect that this report could be equally, if not more, devastating for Governor Palin.
AMY GOODMAN: And is that report expected to be released before the election, before November 4th?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I think it is.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Max Blumenthal, let's talk about your piece, "Meet Sarah Palin's Radical Right-Wing Pals." You're just recently back from Alaska. What did you find?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, I took a trip to Alaska about two weeks ago and interviewed the former chair of the Alaskan Independence Party. And then a reporter named David Neiwert, who's been covering the anti-government militia movement since the early '90s, took his own trip there, and in addition to interviewing, you know, the former AIP chair, Mark Chryson, we talked to people who served on the city council in Wasilla with Sarah Palin; we talked to her predecessor as mayor, John Stein; and we combed through city council records, investigating the extent of her ties to the Alaskan Independence Party, because we didn't think that this has been sufficiently covered.
And what we found was that she was more closely associated with this party and with fringe right-wing elements than the media had previously discovered or than Palin was willing to acknowledge. And not only did she, you know, associate with them in order to advance her political ambitions, she advanced their agenda on a local and state level. Beginning with Mark Chryson and a character named Steve Stoll, who's known around Wasilla as "Black Helicopter Steve," because he's rumored to have buried several high-powered automatic weapons in his front yard in expectation of the federal government ushering in the new world order, these characters are very paranoid, conspiratorial people who loathe the federal government and believe that the federal government is responsible for all the ills that have befallen their state. That's why they--you know, that the Alaskan Independence Party was founded. It was founded to find a means, some remedy, so that Alaska could secede from the union. Its founder, Joe Vogler, said, "I'm an Alaskan, I'm not an American. And I hate America and all her damned institutions." So this is what the party is about.
And these characters were--you know, befriended Sarah Palin in the early '90s, when she first started her political career. Mark Chryson sort of claimed partial credit for her conversion from sort of middle-of-the-road bipartisanship to hardcore conservative ideology. And he worked hand-in-glove with Sarah Palin when she was in the city council on reducing property taxes and legislation like that. At the same time, they encouraged her to run for mayor against John Stein. And the mayor in Wasilla was at the time considered a nonpartisan position, but she ran an extremely partisan campaign with the help of her church, the Wasilla Assembly of God. And, by the way, I have an exclusive video report about her church at a website called thedailybeast.com. And while her church put out fliers calling her the Christian candidate, which sort of subtly, in a subtle way, may have suggested that John Stein, whose name is Jewish but was actually a Lutheran, was a Jew, Mark Chryson and Black Helicopter Steve Stoll created a lot of the negative backscatter around the campaign, for example, demanding that John Stein produce a marriage certificate proving that he and his wife were legally married. They claimed that they were not actually married, which is a devastating charge in a culturally conservative environment like Wasilla. This eventually led to Sarah Palin's election.
So, as soon as Sarah Palin was elected, what did she do? She wanted to reward her supporters, for example, Black Helicopter Steve. So the city council seat she had just vacated, she nominated Steve Stoll for this seat. His nomination was blocked by a city councilmember named Nick Carney, who we interviewed, and Nick Carney told us he blocked the nomination because Steve Stoll was a violent influence on a local level. And John Stein told us this is the kind of character who, if you had a disagreement with him, he'd take you out in the parking lot and try to beat you up. And these are the people Sarah Palin was working with. Beyond that, they claim that they always had an open door into her office as mayor, and that continued as governor.
And they worked with her, and she supported them on efforts to, for example, amend the state constitution's language to make it impossible for municipalities to enact their own gun control laws. And the reason that the Alaskan Independence Party wanted to do this was to make it easier to form anti-government militias. This is a party that's been intimately connected to the militia movement on a national level, including figures like Bo Gritz. So, Sarah Palin knew the views of these groups. That's according to Mark Chryson. She knew his views, but she was willing to work with them to advance her ambition. And she was willing to enact their agenda. So it didn't matter whether or not she was a member of this group; she was at least a member in spirit.
AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, we're going to go to break. When we come back, we're going to hear a clip of the interview you did with the former chair of the Alaska Independence Party, Mark Chryson, and we'll also play the piece that you did on her church. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal interviewed the former chair of the Alaska Independence Party, Mark Chryson, about how well he knew Governor Palin.
MARK CHRYSON: There were a number of times I had to do stuff over inside the city where I just showed myself up over at City Hall and said, "Hey, Sarah, we need to talk to you." And I think there was only one time where I was not able to talk to her, and that was because she was over in some other meetings on there. But any other time, she made--the door was open. I do; I consider her a friend.
All--she knew mine. The entire--the entire state knew mine. I wasn't afraid of being on camera in front of the news speaking my views.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, you've got to be proud of it
MARK CHRYSON: And I was not afraid of saying my views. However, that doesn't mean that just because you say, hey, you're a friend to somebody who's got those views, it means you--it doesn't mean that you share those views.
AMY GOODMAN: Mark Chryson, the former chair of the Alaska Independence Party. And again, Max Blumenthal, for people just joining us, explain what the Alaska Independence Party is. And wasn't Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, a member of it?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: The Alaskan Independence Party is a neo-secessionist political party in Alaska that has links to thirty other neo-secessionist groups, including neo-Confederate groups and white--and parties that have served as havens for white nationalists and theocrats across the country. It's essentially a fringe right party that's gained a political foothold in Alaska because of anti-government sentiment in that state. And a lot of people have joined that party, because they were sympathetic to parts of its party platform. Todd Palin was among those people; however, he was not an active member. But that's besides the point.
In 2007, Alaskan Independence Party Vice Chair Dexter [Clark] unveiled the party's new strategy at a neo-secessionist convention in Tennessee, which was attended by all the neo-Confederate groups that the Alaskan Independence Party affiliates with. And his new strategy was called the infiltration strategy, that because these fringe parties can't get anyone elected running under their own party banner, he urged them to infiltrate the other two, the two major political parties, the Republican and Democratic parties. And he pointed to Sarah Palin as the most successful example of this strategy, that she was essentially--this is in his words, and I'm paraphrasing his words--she was essentially an Alaskan Independence Party cadre, boring from within the Republican Party's infrastructure.
And while the McCain campaign was able to discredit his claim that she was an AIP member, they weren't able to discredit the fact, and they haven't even addressed the fact, that she worked hand-in-glove with the Alaskan Independence Party during the early '90s and throughout her governorship. And when she spoke before the Alaskan Independence Party in 2008, she pointedly refused to or just did not address the Democratic Party. So that raises questions in itself.
AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, I wanted to play the report you referred to earlier about Governor Palin's former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God. It begins with a clip from a 2005 sermon by the visiting Kenyan Pentecostal preacher Thomas Muthee. He is praying over Sarah Palin.
BISHOP THOMAS MUTHEE: In the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus, every form of witchcraft is what we're revoking in the name of Jesus. Father, make our way now, in Jesus' name, amen.
REV. HOWARD BESS: I probably have paid a real price for my speaking out. The name of the book is Pastor, I Am Gay. I describe myself as a born-again evangelical Christian in the tradition of American Baptist. The book was published, and the religious right in the community decided to pursue the book, and they were successful in keeping it out of all of the bookstores here in the valley, including Walden Books. And it was in that context then that we know that Sarah Palin came and put pressure on the librarian to get rid of certain books, and one of them was Pastor, I Am Gay. If she is elected vice president, it is going to be a rough four or eight years for all of my gay friends.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Why is that?
REV. HOWARD BESS: Because she believes they're evil.
BISHOP THOMAS MUTHEE: We come against that python spirit. We come against that spirit of witchcraft as the body of Christ right now in the name of Jesus. Oh-raba-saka-tala. Pray, pray. Raba-sandalala-bebebekalabebe. Shanda-la-bebebeka-lelebebe. That's why we come against all forms of witchcraft. All the python spirits that are released against the body of Christ and bring this nation into the kingdom.
UNIDENTIFIED RUSSIAN PASTOR: …seriously, and right now we exercise our power. We go against the spirit, and we put our feet against the heads of the enemy in the name of Jesus.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I've been attending Sarah Palin's church, that she attended since she was four, for the past few days, seeing a guy named Bishop Thomas Muthee speak. How did the theology of Sarah Palin's church influence her decisions in dealing with people who she sees as her political enemies?
ED O'CALAGHAN: That's not a fair question. And--
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I think it's a very fair question, and she wants her life to be an open book, and she wants to tell her story, and we have to go through you.
ED O'CALAGHAN: If that question was posed in a--
MEGHAN STAPLETON: And she's waiting for the appropriate and nonpartisan manner in which to tell her story.
ED O'CALAGHAN: Thank you. Thank you.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I think this would be an appropriate time to tell her story.
REV. HOWARD BESS: During this same period of time, they also organized and took over the area politically. They took over the Wasilla City Council, the Palmer City Council, the borough assembly, the school board and the board of our local hospital. It was in that context in which Sarah Palin was fully active, was very involved in the political takeovers of all of the community organizations. In the case of the hospital, they were able to pack the board, and at their very first meeting passed a resolution banning all abortions.
AMY GOODMAN: Retired Baptist minister, Reverend Howard Bess, talking to journalist Max Blumenthal. Bess's 1995 book Pastor, I Am Gay was among those Governor Palin tried to remove from the Wasilla Public Library when she was mayor. Max Blumenthal, how do you know this?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Howard Bess, you know, described to me three separate occasions when Sarah Palin went to the Wasilla Public Library to demand the removal of that book, and I went to the library myself, and they told me it wasn't there for space reasons. But Howard Bess and people in the community know otherwise. Howard Bess estimates that he has lost, you know, $500,000 for his church, which was de-fellowshipped, because he allowed gay people to pray there. And Sarah Palin was, you know, working--was directly involved with the forces that have worked to destroy and demonize him simply for tolerating homosexuals in his church. And this is the context in which, you know, she was groomed and cultivated as a political leader.
The character you heard at the beginning and whose kind of garbled preaching you heard in the middle of that video, for your radio listeners, is a Kenyan pastor named--a Pentecostal pastor named Bishop Thomas Muthee, who claims that he cast a witch out of a town named Kiambu, Kenya, and then, you know, miraculously planted eighteen churches there. When the Wasilla Assembly of God, Sarah Palin's church for over twenty years, found out about him through a popular video disseminated through Christian right channels, they flew him over there to bless Sarah Palin when she was running for governor. And he blessed her by saying that we need more Christian leaders in all of the seven spheres in society, and he complained that there are too many Israelites--that was his, you know, obvious codeword for Jews--in government and that Sarah Palin would be a remedy to that. She, after he said that, walked up and turned her hands up to the sky and closed her eyes and allowed him to lay hands on her and protect her from the spirit of witchcraft.
Now, this is the language of spiritual warfare that comes out of her church, the idea that behind reality is a secret spiritual world, a clash between Satan and God. And this is what they believe, and this is, you know, the Manichean worldview that informs Sarah Palin's extreme conservatism. It's why she treated someone like Howard Bess so harshly.
And I went to this McCain-Palin press conference, which you heard and saw there, about the firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to ask how the theology of her church influenced her decisions in dealing with perceived political enemies like Walt Monegan. Of course, they treated it like an illegitimate question, but I think it really is an essential question to understanding how Sarah Palin thinks about the world. In a way, she's more George W. Bush than George W. Bush was.
AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, I want to thank you for being with us, Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute. His website, maxblumenthal.com. His latest article, "Meet Sarah Palin's Radical Right-Wing Pals," online at Salon.com. - Amy Goodman 10/13/08
(...yet, on the Tuesday night (10/7/08) presidential debate from Nashville, to protect his generous General Electric paycheck, he orchestrated the seating of a seasoned U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer next to the stage so that then when Brokaw granted the last question from the audience to the Republican candidate, i.e. a loaded question on Israel submitted by the veteran chief, McCain could say "Everything I learned in the Navy I learned from a chief petty officer", and the delighted man could shake McCain's hand. That's why this website is GOPBIAS.org.)
Tom Brokaw's Meet The Press 10/5/08 - an interlude which exposes McCain's inability to conceive that he may not gain the presidency. This fault makes him unfit for the Oval Office.
PEGGY NOONAN: Can I make a point, also, that I think part of the reason this is going to get so rough in the next month, trying to get my, my hands around this thing, is that we live in the age of political strategists. We live in the age of the guys on the plane. We live in the age of the BlackBerry guys saying, "Let's get them this way. Let's get them this way." It exists on both campaigns, the instinct, "Hey, we have nothing to do now but go to, to the jugular." I have the sense sometimes lately that these guys on the plane think history is their plaything. History is not their plaything. This is big. This is a nation having two ground wars and an economic recession--we hope just a mild recession. This is not a time for playfulness and mischief. It ain't right.
MR. BROKAW: We've been talking a lot about Barack Obama here, but let's talk for a moment, if we can, about John McCain. He came to Iowa, which surprised a lot of people, because Iowa has been going south for him in the campaign, as far as we know. And he had a kind of contentious meeting with your Des Moines Register editorial board. We want to share just some of that, when they were raising questions about Sarah Palin's qualifications.
(Videotape, Tuesday)
Offscreen Voice: There...
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: They...
Voice: ...seems to be a pretty strong disagreement over whether there are people who are great fans of hers, and there are people who feel very uncomfortable that she does not have a lot of experience in public office.
SEN. McCAIN: Mm-hmm.
Voice: You know, even, even among, you know, fairly conservative Republicans...
SEN. McCAIN (unbelievably smug, snide, dismissive and confrontational...to the editorial board of a reputable newspaper): Really?
Voice: ...about her policy positions.
SEN. McCAIN: I hadn't detected that.
Voice: So how do you reassure them?
SEN. McCAIN: And I haven't detected that in the polls, I haven't detected that amongst the base. We get 20,000 people that come to our, our rallies. So, again, I fundamentally disagree. Now, if there's a Georgetown cocktail party person who, quote, calls himself a "conservative" and doesn't like her, good luck. Good luck.
(End videotape)
MR. BROKAW: Now, that's the John McCain that we've all come to know over the years...
MS. NOONAN (in jest): God bless him.
MR. BROKAW: ...from time to time, and people have found it to be part of his charm. I wonder if it works for him, however, with a month to go in the election.
MS. NOONAN: Well, the--I think more and more with Mr. McCain--we're seeing two different things with the candidates. Mr. McCain has--there's a sense of containment that you see with him more and more, where he is containing a certain amount of "hm," indignation, anger, what it is, but--whatever it is, but he has to contain it.
MS. IFILL: Not terribly well. I mean, sarcasm really is not containment.
MS. NOONAN: Well, yeah. Containment can be exhausting, too, you know?
MS. IFILL: Yeah.
MS. NOONAN: Sort of like he'd rather deck the guy, and--but instead he's a little sarcastic. With Obama, there is a greater sense that if there's a tiger in that tank, he doesn't have to work hard to contain it. There's still that languidness and calm that is serving him well, and it is one of the unspoken things that's helping him now, I think. American people in the past year in this long campaign have gotten to watch him long enough that they don't know him quite, but they kind of have a sense of him. I think the impression he's making is an "interesting" one.
[[ The Real John McCain - Tim Dickinson Rolling Stone 10/6/08 -
At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation's capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It's the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.
McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.
There's a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam -- call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a "confession" to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn't survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service's highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as "one of the toughest guys I've ever met."
On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.
"I'm going to the Middle East," Dramesi says. "Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran."
"Why are you going to the Middle East?" McCain asks, dismissively.
"It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi says.
"Why? Where are you going to, John?"
"Oh, I'm going to Rio."
"What the hell are you going to Rio for?"
McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.
"I got a better chance of getting laid."
Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. "McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man," Dramesi says today. "But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."
McCAIN FIRST
This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.
In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward.
When McCain became a senator in 1986, filling the seat of retiring Republican icon Barry Goldwater, he was finally in a position that a true maverick could use to battle the entrenched interests in Washington. Instead, McCain did the bidding of his major donor, Charlie Keating, whose financial empire was on the brink of collapse. Federal regulators were closing in on Keating, who had taken federally insured deposits from his Lincoln Savings and Loan and leveraged them to make wildly risky real estate ventures. If regulators restricted his investments, Keating knew, it would all be over.
In the year before his Senate run, McCain had championed legislation that would have delayed new regulations of savings and loans. Grateful, Keating contributed $54,000 to McCain's Senate campaign. Now, when Keating tried to stack the federal regulatory bank board with cronies, McCain made a phone call seeking to push them through. In 1987, in an unprecedented display of political intimidation, McCain also attended two meetings convened by Keating to pressure federal regulators to back off. The senators who participated in the effort would come to be known as the Keating Five.
"Senate historians were unable to find any instance in U.S. history that was comparable, in terms of five U.S. senators meeting with a regulator on behalf of one institution," says Bill Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, who attended the second meeting. "And it hasn't happened since."
Following the meetings with McCain and the other senators, the regulators backed off, stalling their investigation of Lincoln. By the time the S&L collapsed two years later, taxpayers were on the hook for $3.4 billion, which stood as a record for the most expensive bank failure -- until the current mortgage crisis. In addition, 20,000 investors who had bought junk bonds from Keating, thinking they were federally insured, had their savings wiped out.
"McCain saw the political pressure on the regulators," recalls Black. "He could have saved these widows from losing their life savings. But he did absolutely nothing."
McCain was ultimately given a slap on the wrist by the Senate Ethics Committee, which concluded only that he had exercised "poor judgment." The committee never investigated Cindy's investment with Keating.
The McCains soon found themselves entangled in more legal trouble. In 1989, in behavior the couple has blamed in part on the stress of the Keating scandal, Cindy became addicted to Vicodin and Percocet. She directed a doctor employed by her charity -- which provided medical care to patients in developing countries -- to supply the narcotics, which she then used to get high on trips to places like Bangladesh and El Salvador.
Tom Gosinski, a young Republican, kept a detailed journal while working as director of government affairs for the charity. "I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. senator has driven her to . . . cover feelings of despair with drugs," he wrote in 1992. When Cindy McCain suddenly fired Gosinski, he turned his journal over to the Drug Enforcement Administration, sparking a yearlong investigation. To avoid jail time, Cindy agreed to a hush-hush plea bargain and court-imposed rehab.
Ironically, her drug addiction became public only because she and her husband tried to cover it up. In an effort to silence Gosinski, who was seeking $250,000 for wrongful termination, the attorney for the McCains demanded that Phoenix prosecutors investigate the former employee for extortion. The charge was baseless, and prosecutors dropped the investigation in 1994 -- but not before publishing a report that included details of Cindy's drug use. - Make-Believe Maverick ]]
MR. TODD: You know...
MR. BROKAW: Chuck, is there a longing for civility in American politics? I mean, we always talk about it, but when it comes down to the final stages, it becomes a blood sport.
MR. TODD: Yeah. Look, you've had--I think you've experienced this, where you, you go out and you talk to folks and you have these meetings, and, and they sit there and say, "I'm tired of red vs. blue. I wish you would stop with the red vs. blue." And that there was a sense--remember six months ago, we were talking about this, the anti-polarization, and I remember when, when McCain gets the nomination and Obama got the nomination, there were a lot of, a lot of folks writing, saying, "Boy, this is going to be the nonpolarizing election. This is the first time we're going to get one of those."
MS. NOONAN: Yeah.
MR. TODD: We're not getting one of those because winning, you know, isn't the only thing, as--Lombardi didn't say it, it's another coach. I got, I got lectured about that once. But it was a coach at UCLA--it is everything.
MR. BROKAW: He is widely credited for saying that.
MR. TODD: Yes, he is widely credited.
MR. BROKAW: David Maraniss put that record straight.
MR. TODD: And, and I think we're seeing "the winning is, is everything" approach right now. And with 30 days, it, you know, elections are worth winning.
MS. NOONAN: Yeah.
MR. BROKAW: Peggy Noonan has written a book called "Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now." I'd like to share just a segment, if you'll allow me to read your words...
MS. NOONAN: Thank you, sir.
MR. BROKAW: ...if I, if I can, off the screen here for our audience, so we'll know what we're talking about. "I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. ... I think a lot of people are carrying around in their heads ... a sense that the wheels may be coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks, that in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed anytime soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with 'right track' and 'wrong track' but missing the number of people who think the answer to 'How are things going in America?' is 'Off the tracks and hurtling toward an unknown destination.'"
It seems to me that those are the very same conditions that were existent in 1980 when your political hero, Ronald Reagan, was running for president.
MS. NOONAN: Oh maybe it's all more so, but I actually think we're living in a different world. The intensity of our economic crisis seems to me to be greater. But, Tom, also there's something that we all know, and it's in the back of our minds but we don't quite think of it enough, and it is this: We are living in the age of the unknowable, of weapons of mass destruction, of crazy people who can get and harness these things and who can come and hurt us. When you--you don't want to be dark and you don't want to be preoccupied, but when you keep your mind on that fact and that we may in our country face difficult days ahead, and even immediately ahead, when you keep your mind on that, you realize, whoa, this old partisan gamesmanship, this "tear out his throat," all of that stuff, it's over, it's yesterday. What we need now is grace. We need real patriotism, which patriotism isn't used as a weapon in a campaign. Patriotism actually needs grace in order to function. We got to be our best selves right now. We got to hit our game in a higher way. We got to be forbearing. We got to be adults. I sometimes think one of the problems in America is there are too many people that don't want to embrace the role of the simple grown-up and show the maturity and forbearance of a grown-up.
MS. IFILL: You know, Peggy, I think that's what we saw this week, too, when we saw what happened on Capitol Hill. I think people looked at what was happening in Washington...
MS. NOONAN: Yes, yes.
MS. IFILL: ...and thought, "What is it we sent you there to do?" And they had to scramble and realize they had to pass something. It was, it was not a pretty moment for Washington.
MR. BROKAW: David...
MS. NOONAN: No, it was not.
MR. BROKAW: ...Gregory, let me introduce a moment of heresy into the political campaign. Isn't it also time for these candidates to reflect just what Peggy was saying and say to the American people, "You've got a role in this, too. You've got to step up." We're not going to make gain without some pain here in the next year, and, in fact, the American people have been part of the problem that we have right now. A lot of them took loans that they should--ought not to have taken. Credit card debt is very high. And they want to turn a blind eye to things like entitlements, Medicare and how we're going to pay for it.
MR. GREGORY: Yeah, I mean, the idea that this is going to be tough, that you're going to have a president who inherits a very difficult problem, and that there's going to have to be some pain that's incurred by the American people. And neither candidate has really stepped up to say, in the middle of all this, "You're going to have to deal with all that."
MS. NOONAN: Mm-hmm.
MR. GREGORY: I think that the test for Obama is how he deals with the next 30 days and how he continues to deal with the economy. He's trying to project calm in the face of all this. But you're right. I mean, perhaps he wants to name an economic team before the campaign is over to say, "Look, we're going to get after something that's going to be a huge problem, and it's not going to get any easier for Americans here in the next administration."
MR. BROKAW: The question is, if he's going to name an economic team, who's going to be left to name on that team?
MR. GREGORY: Right.
MR. BROKAW: Because some of the very biggest names in America are now looking out for homeless shelters in which they can spend some time in the next nine months or so. - meet the press 10/5/08
The most dishonest campaign ever?
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, "Thanks, but no thanks" when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?
These stories have two things in common: they're all claims recently made by the McCain campaign -- and they're all out-and-out lies.
[[...and yet the dissembling Cindy McCain, following the lead of her husband (and desperate to be "First Lady") said on the campaign trail 10/9/08: Barack Obama is waging the dirtiest presidential campaign in history!]]
Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 -- my first year at The Times -- trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign's claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.
But I can't think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign's lies in 2000 were artful -- you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.
Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn't say "no thanks" -- she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would "not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that's so negative."
Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn't righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.
So the whole story of Ms. Palin's alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.
Or take the story of Mr. Obama's alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for "age and developmentally appropriate education"; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.
And then there's the claim that Mr. Obama's use of the ordinary metaphor "putting lipstick on a pig" was a sexist smear, and on and on.
Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they're probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being "balanced" at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn't say that he's wrong, it reports that "some Democrats say" that he's wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.
They're probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being "McCain campaign lies," it becomes "Obama on defensive in face of attacks."
Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign's lies? I mean, politics ain't beanbag, and all that.
One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues -- on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.
But there's another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I'm not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team's ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
I'm talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
What it says, I'd argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse. - Paul Krugman 9/12/08
The silly season descends into absurdity.
While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I've gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail.
How is it that this woman could have been selected to be the vice presidential candidate on a major party ticket? How is it that so much of the mainstream media has dropped all pretense of seriousness to hop aboard the bandwagon and go along for the giddy ride?
For those who haven't noticed, we're electing a president and vice president, not selecting a winner on "American Idol."
Ms. Palin may be a perfectly competent and reasonably intelligent woman (however troubling her views on evolution and global warming may be), but she is not ready to be vice president.
With most candidates for high public office, the question is whether one agrees with them on the major issues of the day. With Ms. Palin, it's not about agreeing or disagreeing. She doesn't appear to understand some of the most important issues.
"Do you believe in the Bush doctrine?" Mr. Gibson asked during the interview. Ms. Palin looked like an unprepared student who wanted nothing so much as to escape this encounter with the school principal.
Clueless, she asked, "In what respect, Charlie?"
"Well, what do you interpret it to be?" said Mr. Gibson.
"His worldview?" asked Ms. Palin.
Later, in the spin zones of cable TV, commentators repeatedly made the point that there are probably very few voters -- some specifically mentioned "hockey moms" -- who could explain the Bush doctrine. But that's exactly the reason we have such long and intense campaigns. You want to find the individuals who best understand these issues, who will address them in sophisticated and creative ways that enhance the well-being of the nation.
The Bush doctrine, which flung open the doors to the catastrophe in Iraq, was such a fundamental aspect of the administration's foreign policy that it staggers the imagination that we could have someone no further than a whisper away from the White House who doesn't even know what it is.
You can't imagine that John McCain or Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman would not know what the Bush doctrine is. But Sarah Palin? Absolutely clueless.
Ms. Palin's problem is not that she was mayor of a small town or has only been in the Alaska governor's office a short while. Her problem (and now ours) is that she is not well versed on the critical matters confronting the country at one of the most crucial turning points in its history.
The economy is in a tailspin. The financial sector is lurching about on rubbery legs. We're mired in self-defeating energy policies. We're at war. And we are still vulnerable to the very real threat of international terrorism.
With all of that and more being the case, how can it be a good idea to set in motion the possibility that Americans might wake up one morning to find that Sarah Palin is president?
I feel for Ms. Palin's son who has been shipped off to the war in Iraq. But at his deployment ceremony, which was on the same day as the Charlie Gibson interview, Sept. 11, she told the audience of soldiers that they would be fighting "the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."
Was she deliberately falsifying history, or does she still not know that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks?
To burnish the foreign policy credentials of a vice presidential candidate who never even had a passport until last year, the Republicans have been touting Alaska's proximity to Russia. (Imagine the derisive laughter in conservative circles if the Democrats had tried such nonsense.) So Mr. Gibson asked Ms. Palin, "What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?"
She said, "They're our next-door neighbors. And you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska. From an island in Alaska."
Mr. Gibson tried again. "But what insight does that give you," he asked, "into what they're doing in Georgia?"
John McCain, who is shameless about promoting himself as America's ultimate patriot, put the best interests of the nation aside in making his incredibly reckless choice of a running mate. But there is a profound double standard in this country. The likes of John McCain and George W. Bush can do the craziest, most irresponsible things imaginable, and it only seems to help them politically. - Bob Herbert 9/13/08
Struggle For A Balance
By Michael Cooper - Vienna, Ohio - On Monday morning, as the financial system absorbed one of its biggest shocks in generations, Senator John McCain said, as he had many times before, that he believed the fundamentals of the economy were "strong."
Hours later he backpedaled, explaining that he had meant that American workers, whom he described as the backbone of the economy, were productive and resilient. By Tuesday he was calling the economic situation "a total crisis" and denouncing "greed" on Wall Street and in Washington.
Mr. McCain replied. "And I believe in the American worker, and someone who disagrees with that -- it's fine. We are in crisis. We all know that. The excess, the greed and the corruption of Wall Street have caused us to have a situation which is going to affect every American. We are in a total crisis."
Amy Goodman 9/16/08: On the campaign trail, Senator John McCain said that the fundamentals of the economy remain strong.
Sen. John McCain: "You know that there's been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall Street. And it is--people are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think, still, the fundamentals of our economy are strong, but these are very, very difficult time. And I promise you we will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall street. We will reform government. And this is a failure."
Senator Barack Obama accused McCain of subscribing to the same economic philosophy as President Bush.
Sen. Barack Obama: "For eight years, we've had policies that have shredded consumer protections, that have loosened oversight and regulation and encouraged out-sized bonuses to CEO's while ignoring middle-class Americans. The result is the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression. And I certainly don't fault Senator John McCain for these problems, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to, because it's the same philosophy we've had for the last eight years."
To the Editor:
Bob Herbert's column about Sarah Palin ("She's Not Ready," Sept. 13) should be the beginning of a groundswell of media attention to the utterly indefensible Republican selection of her as a vice-presidential candidate.
The fact that conservatives are so enthusiastic about the possibility of Ms. Palin's becoming the leader of this country is telling. It indicates that, in their quest for power, they would knowingly install a complete incompetent in charge of our government. They are, as usual, pandering to the least sophisticated Americans to achieve their goals.
John McCain is not a great thinker, leader or hero. He is simply an old man who wants one more shot at the brass ring and will do anything to reach it. - Bill Carman Pleasanton, Calif., 9/13/08
Amy Goodman 9/16/08: In Alaska, 1,500 people took part in a protest Sunday organized by a new group called Alaska Women Reject Palin. The Anchorage Daily News described the event as the largest demonstration in Anchorage in recent memory. Earlier in the day, the Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin spoke at a smaller rally of supporters in Anchorage.
Amy Goodman 9/16/08: In election news, the Michigan Messenger reports the chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan is planning to use a list of foreclosed homes to block people from voting in the upcoming election as part of a Republican effort to challenge some voters on Election Day. The Republican plan to challenge voters who have defaulted on their house payments is likely to disproportionately affect African Americans who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters. In Michigan, more than 60 percent of all sub-prime loans were made to African Americans. John McCain's campaign stands to benefit in other ways, as well, from the burgeoning number of foreclosures in Michigan. McCain's regional headquarters are housed in the office building of foreclosure specialists Trott & Trott. The firm's founder, David Trott, has raised between $100,000 and $250,000 for the Republican nominee.
Amy Goodman 9/16/08: The Bush administration has announced it plans to supply the Israeli Air Force 1,000 new bunker buster bombs built by Boeing that are designed to penetrate fortified facilities located deep underground. The Jerusalem Post reports the bombs would likely be used in the event of an Israeli strike on Iran. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency notified Congress about the planned sale of the GBU-39 bombs over the weekend. Congress has thirty days to object to the $77 million deal.
Amy Goodman 9/17/08: And in Israel and the Occupied Territories, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas held their last meeting Tuesday before Olmert's Kadima party picks a new leader. Abbas said Palestinian demands remain as they always have: a state in the West Bank and Gaza and the right of return for displaced refugees.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas: "We demand East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and it is land occupied since 1967. We demand the right of return to refugees. We demand the '67 borders. We demand rights to West Bank water. We demand security and peace. We all know, and even many in Israel say, that settlement activity is illegal, and we say this is illegal."
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz are the leading candidates to replace Olmert. Mofaz has recently come under scrutiny after it was revealed he called for the mass killing of Palestinians while commanding the Israeli army during the Second Intifada.
McCain's Radical Agenda
Talk about a shock to the system. Has anyone bothered to notice the radical changes that John McCain and Sarah Palin are planning for the nation's health insurance system?
These are changes that will set in motion nothing less than the dismantling of the employer-based coverage that protects most American families.
A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.
There is nothing secret about Senator McCain's far-reaching proposals, but they haven't gotten much attention because the chatter in this campaign has mostly been about nonsense -- lipstick, celebrities and "Drill, baby, drill!"
For starters, the McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on.
"It means your employer is going to have to make an estimate on how much the employer is paying for health insurance on your behalf, and you are going to have to pay taxes on that money," said Sherry Glied, an economist who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
Ms. Glied is one of the four scholars who have just completed an independent joint study of the plan. Their findings are being published on the Web site of the policy journal, Health Affairs.
According to the study: "The McCain plan will force millions of Americans into the weakest segment of the private insurance system -- the nongroup market -- where cost-sharing is high, covered services are limited and people will lose access to benefits they have now."
The net effect of the plan, the study said, "almost certainly will be to increase family costs for medical care."
Under the McCain plan (now the McCain-Palin plan) employees who continue to receive employer-paid health benefits would look at their pay stubs each week or each month and find that additional money had been withheld to cover the taxes on the value of their benefits.
While there might be less money in the paycheck, that would not be anything to worry about, according to Senator McCain. That's because the government would be offering all taxpayers a refundable tax credit -- $2,500 for a single worker and $5,000 per family -- to be used "to help pay for your health care."
You may think this is a good move or a bad one -- but it's a monumental change in the way health coverage would be provided to scores of millions of Americans. Why not more attention?
The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. (We're seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.)
Taxing employer-paid health benefits is the first step in this transition, the equivalent of injecting poison into the system. It's the beginning of the end.
When younger, healthier workers start seeing additional taxes taken out of their paychecks, some (perhaps many) will opt out of the employer-based plans -- either to buy cheaper insurance on their own or to go without coverage.
That will leave employers with a pool of older, less healthy workers to cover. That coverage will necessarily be more expensive, which will encourage more and more employers to give up on the idea of providing coverage at all.
The upshot is that many more Americans -- millions more -- will find themselves on their own in the bewildering and often treacherous health insurance marketplace. As Senator McCain has said: "I believe the key to real reform is to restore control over our health care system to the patients themselves."
Yet another radical element of McCain's plan is his proposal to undermine state health insurance regulations by allowing consumers to buy insurance from sellers anywhere in the country. So a requirement in one state that insurers cover, for example, vaccinations, or annual physicals, or breast examinations, would essentially be meaningless.
In a refrain we've heard many times in recent years, Mr. McCain said he is committed to ridding the market of these "needless and costly" insurance regulations.
This entire McCain health insurance transformation is right out of the right-wing Republicans' ideological playbook: fewer regulations; let the market decide; and send unsophisticated consumers into the crucible alone.
You would think that with some of the most venerable houses on Wall Street crumbling like sand castles right before our eyes, we'd be a little wary about spreading this toxic formula even further into the health care system.
But we're not even paying much attention. - Bob Herbert 9/16/08
Senator John McCain's top domestic policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said recently in a conference call with reporters that Mr. McCain's health care proposal would "put 25 to 30 million individuals out of the ranks of the uninsured, into the ranks of the insured."
In an article released Tuesday 9/16/08, a panel of prominent health economists concluded that Mr. Holtz-Eakin's projection is off by, well, 25 to 30 million. - Kevin Sack 9/17/08
To the Editor:
John McCain's swipe at the "greed" of Wall Street bankers recalls another famous Republican politician, who was elected president 80 years ago this fall ("In Candidates, Two Approaches to Wall Street," front page, Sept. 16).
Amid the worst economic crisis in American history, the president was asked to comment on the problems of capitalism. "The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists," he said. "They're too darn greedy."
But the real problem lay in the president's free-market ideology, which he refused to revise in light of new knowledge and experience.
It also reflected his outsized ego, which made him believe that he could alter business behavior simply through the force of his own personality.
You already know his name: Herbert Hoover. - Jonathan Zimmerman New York, 9/16/08
The writer is a professor of education and history at New York University.
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and PATRICK HEALY
WASHINGTON -- Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska will have meetings at the United Nations next week, officials with Senator John McCain's presidential campaign said on Wednesday. The campaign was vague on which foreign officials Ms. Palin might meet as well as the time and place of the sessions.
But the campaign did say that Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, would attend a protest against Iran outside the United Nations on Monday. Ms. Palin's planned attendance promptly caused Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York to cancel her appearance at the same rally.
"Her attendance was news to us, and this was never billed to us as a partisan political event," a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Philippe Reines, said on Wednesday. "Senator Clinton will therefore not be attending."
A spokeswoman for the McCain-Palin campaign swiftly replied that the rally should not be seen as a partisan event.
"Governor Palin believes that the danger of a nuclear Iran is greater than party or politics," said the spokeswoman, Tracey Schmitt. "She hopes that all parties can rally together in opposition to this grave threat."
Beyond the protest rally, Ms. Palin's planned United Nations meetings are intended to heighten her foreign policy credentials. Ms. Palin, who has been governor of Alaska for less than two years, got her first passport last year.
A State Department official said on Wednesday afternoon that the department had received no requests for assistance with any meetings, as would normally come from a member of Congress or a governor meeting a foreign head of state. A White House official said that he was not aware that either Ms. Palin or Mr. McCain would attend a speech that President Bush is scheduled to give on Tuesday, the opening day of the United Nations General Assembly.
In Grand Rapids, Mich., as she took questions from voters on Wednesday for the first time since being tapped as Mr. McCain's running mate, Ms. Palin was asked about her "perceived lack of foreign policy experience." She invited people to play "stump the candidate."
"As for foreign policy, you know, I think that I am prepared," she said at a town-hall-style meeting with Mr. McCain. "And I know that on Jan. 20, if we are so blessed as to be sworn into office as your president and vice president, certainly we'll be ready. I'll be ready. I have that confidence. I have that readiness. And if you want specifics with specific policy, or countries, go ahead and you can ask me. You can even play stump the candidate, if you want to. But we are ready to serve."
The rally on Monday is sponsored by several leading American Jewish organizations as a protest against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Mrs. Clinton, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination this year and is now supporting Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, was one of several New York officials who planned to speak at the event.
The political response of the presidential candidates Monday 9/15/08 to the 500 point drop in the DOW was instructive. Senator McCain's "gut" reaction was...the fundamentals of the economy are "strong." Senator Obama's response was "what economy is Senator McCain talking about?" Then the press reinterpreted those reactions. A Jackie Calmes on the front page of the NY Times wrote neither Obama or McCain "has yet offered a detailed plan" for the economy, or how to regulate the financial system, but in the 21st paragraph of a lengthy 24 paragraph article Ms. Calmes "modified" her statement: "In March 2007 he (Obama) warned of the coming housing crisis, and a year later in a speech in Manhattan outlined six principles for overhauling financial regulation." Ms. Calmes is also a favorite on Gwen Ifill's PBS Washington Week.
Regardless of the issue in this critical presidential election, from the economy to financial regulation to Iraq/Middle East to health insurance, the Republican Party will resort to an endless arsenal of illegal tactics that they have used over the years to maintain their power - Nixon/Watergate, Reagan/Iran Contra, Bush I/Clarence Thomas, Bush II!!!!!. John McCain placed himself among this group with his most important appointment - his vice president. Further, in February, 2006, when Republicans were in control of the Senate, Senator Obama sponsored legislation to reduce, remove and end consumer credit fraud with regard to mortgage lending (a major factor in today's economic collapse), and McCain was chair of the Senate Commerce Committee at that time...and refused to support Senator Obama's legislation. Now, McCain, seeking cover, wants a "committee" formed to study the issue.
Amy Goodman 9/9/08: In media news, MSNBC has announced Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews will no longer anchor any of the network's live political coverage for the rest of the presidential campaign season. NBC News' White House correspondent David Gregory will become the primary host of the network's coverage of the upcoming debates and on election night. In May, White House Counselor Ed Gillespie sent a letter to NBC News accusing Matthews and Olbermann of being "blatantly partisan." The McCain campaign and several right-wing groups have also complained that Matthews and Olbermann are too liberal. It's not the first time MSNBC, which is owned by General Electric, has shifted its programming because of political pressure. In 2003, prior to the invasion of Iraq, the network canceled its highest-rated program, hosted by Phil Donahue. A leaked internal NBC study indicated Donahue was fired because of his antiwar views. The study found that Donahue "seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."
Note 8/18/08: We will comment on the John McCain/Reverend Rick Warren "collaboration" next edit. - Followup: Among a host of other "journalists", Mr. William Kristol, even in a lengthy NY Times' OP-ED, failed to mention that the Reverend Rick Warren conspired (the "cone of silence" was actually a "cone of collusion") with the ever-accommodating John McCain to allow McCain to HEAR THE QUESTIONS POSED to Barack, so as to prepare his answers - and the Media/Press loved it! There is a reason NPR is known as the National Podium for Republicans and PRI represents Public Radio for Israel.
[We will remember this coming Thursday, September 11, 2008, that seven years ago we were subject to a despicable attack by Al Qaeda (the Republicans, as is their custom, will use the day to advantage for presidential candidate John S. McCain III), an attack in which we were defenseless because of the ineptitude and disinterest of the new Bush administration's primary focus on invading Iraq, even though there were numerous warnings by the Clinton/Gore people of the imminent threat TO THE UNITED STATES posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda (the Bushies characterized the warnings as "feckless and naive"). We must also remember, on November 4, 2008, this current eight year history of Republican Party Rule, what it has wrought on our country, its people and the world, and what prospects for the future would be represented by John S. McCain III and Sarah Palin.]
Referencing the above three paragraphs - and the forecast that the last two months of this campaign will be "a streetfight for the presidency of the United States" - on NPR's Weekend Edition 8/31/08 Leanne Hanson featured an extreme right-wing evangelical Republican enraptured by McCain's VP choice of Sarah Palin, and a Joe Trippi, former "Democratic" campaigner for Howard Dean and John Edwards, Trippi's live upbeat analysis of McCain's Palin selection, with no mention of any of the key Palin components which the following letters highlight and even the mainstream media acknowledges as threatening TO THIS NATION in the person a heart beat away from the presidency, a presidency, not withstanding McCain's pre-convention Hurricane Gustav pretentious flight to Mississippi's Haley Barbur (another Republican with a checkered past), a presidency which would not only be a threat to the rest of the world but features a man who obviously views our country with contempt (He sent his wife Cindy to Georgia, the country, not the state.)! Ms. Palin has a nursing child, in the Oval Office would be helpless, and, yet, has been solely chosen as a Vice Presidential candidate by an arrogant and single-minded man who is seventy two years old and has undergone cancer treatment and severe surgical reconstruction. A Mr. Joseph Russo from Rhode Island describes the Palin choice as shameless cynicism. What has happened to John Sidney McCain III, the fabled scion of a distinguished military family? Classic. Ambition overcoming national responsibility.
John McCain's campaign acknowledged this weekend that Sarah Palin is unprepared to be vice president or president of the United States.
Of course, McCain's people said no such thing. But their actions told you all you needed to know.
McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all subjected themselves to tough questioning on the regular Sunday news programs. Palin was the only no-show. And it's not just the Sunday interviews. She has not opened herself to any serious questioning since McCain picked her to be next in line for the presidency.
McCain's advisers clearly don't trust Palin to answer questions about policy and don't want her to answer many of the questions that have been raised about her tenure as governor of Alaska.
Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, gave the game away when he said on "Fox News Sunday" that she would not meet with reporters until they showed a willingness to treat her "with some level of respect and deference."
Deference? That's a word used in monarchies or aristocracies. Democracies don't give "deference" to politicians. When have McCain, Obama, Biden or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton asked for deference?
A few hours later came the announcement that Palin would grant an interview to ABC News's Charlie Gibson. Recall that Gibson was the co-host of an ABC News debate last April during which Obama faced a relentless pounding. Here's hoping that a sense of fairness will lead Gibson to be comparably tough on Palin this week. If he treats her more deferentially than he did Obama, we will know that McCain's war on the media is working.
From the moment Palin was picked, reporters immediately began to ask questions, a lot of them. Because she was so little known outside Alaska, her views on many issues, particularly foreign policy, are a mystery. Voters also need to know how McCain went about reaching what will probably be the most important decision he makes during this campaign.
A week ago, Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times cited McCain sources questioning "how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket." She reported that Palin had been selected "with more haste than McCain advisers initially described." (She also mistakenly reported that Palin belonged to the Alaskan Independence Party. It was her husband, Todd, who had been a member.)
McCain's people trashed Bumiller, saying she had opted to "make up her own version of events." Steve Schmidt, McCain's chief strategist, said the Times had written "an absolute work of fiction" about the vetting process while Karl Rove told his Fox News viewers that the Times "got it wrong."
It turned out that the McCain side misled journalists. Bumiller was right about the vetting. The lesson is that McCain's counselors are not interested in fair treatment, and they are certainly not interested in the truth.
If the media cave to McCain's pressure, it will be the third time this decade that conservative attacks led reporters to tilt to the right.
During the 2000 battle over Florida, Al Gore's perfectly defensible efforts to win a hand recount ran into a buzz saw of criticism from nonpartisan commentators, many of whom urged Gore to withdraw "gracefully." In the buildup to the Iraq war, the Bush administration and its supporters savaged the patriotism of many who raised questions about its strategy and its plans. Now, McCain hopes Palin will skate through the next two months without any real scrutiny or questioning.
It is hugely unfortunate that the first big story about Palin -- other than questions raised about whether she fired the head of the Alaska state police for refusing to dismiss her former brother-in-law -- concerned her 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy. It's not just that Bristol Palin should be left alone, but also that the intense interest in this story gave McCain's bullies an excuse to push aside legitimate questions about Palin's record and knowledge.
Of course, Palin's handlers are being hypocritical: They want to focus on her family life and her identity as a hockey mom when doing so helps them and to push aside any story that mars this perfect picture. Conservatives are always against identity politics until they are for it.
Nonetheless, what matters is not Palin's personal life but whether she is prepared to assume the presidency if called upon. The actions of McCain's lieutenants suggest that they know the answer. And they are doing everything they can to keep the media from finding it. - E. J. Dionne Jr. 9/9/08
To the Editor: Senator John McCain's choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate is irresponsible.
Senator McCain has repeatedly said that he puts his country first, not his ambition. This is an example of raw ambition.
Governor Palin is undoubtedly a talented new Republican. But she has no experience outside of Alaska, one of our least populated states. And the experience she does have as governor amounts to less than two years.
Governor Palin is not prepared to be "a heartbeat away" from the presidency. Mr. McCain has made a mockery of his own campaign and of his party. - Elizabeth H. Rounds, San Francisco, 8/29/08
To the Editor: John McCain's choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate is reminiscent of President George H. W. Bush's choice of Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court.
Faced with public sentiment for an African-American to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall, Mr. Bush said, in effect: "You want an African-American? Here's one who will consistently work against most African-American interests."
Mr. McCain, thinking that he can seduce supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton, says: "You want a woman on the ticket? Here's a solidly anti-choice woman who'll work against women's interests."
Interestingly, both choices play the same game of identity politics that Republicans claim to abhor.
Their cynicism is shameless. - Joseph Russo, Bristol, R.I., 8/29/08
To the Editor: John McCain's choice of a woman as his running mate may be a historic one for the Republican Party, but it feels deeply cynical.
Mr. McCain clearly has more political than governing aims. He seems determined to capture the vote of the dispirited supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. I will be disappointed if the tactic works.
Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska is a deeply conservative women who holds anti-choice and other positions that starkly contrast with those of Mrs. Clinton.
After years of hard work by Democratic activists in an attempt to push Mrs. Clinton to the top of the Democratic ticket, her supporters should be dismayed to see their effort transformed into support for a woman (and, more important, a man) who opposes most of the positions and policies that Mrs. Clinton stands for. - Bryan Shuman, Laramie, Wyo., 8/29/08
Amy Goodman 9/8/08: In campaign news, a video has emerged of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin telling ministry students at her former church that the US invasion of Iraq is a task from God.
Sarah Palin: "Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan. So bless them with your prayers, your prayers of protection over our soldiers."
During the same address, Palin said the construction of a new oil pipeline in Alaska is God's will.
Sarah Palin: "I can do my part in doing things like working really, really hard to get a natural gas pipeline, about a $30 billion project that's going to create a lot of jobs for Alaskans, and we'll have a lot of energy flowing through here. And pray about that also. I think God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."
The video of her speech was originally posted on the Wasilla Assembly of God's website.
To the Editor:
Re "A Heartbeat Away" (column, Sept. 8): So now William Kristol, referring to Sarah Palin, is trying to convince us that voters will find the idea of "a Wasilla Wal-Mart Mom a heartbeat away" from the presidency to be "no problem."
Eight years ago a candidate sold himself as the kind of regular guy you'd like to sit down and have a beer with. George W. Bush went on to become president and brought our nation to a breaking point with two continuing wars and a ballooning national deficit, and ruined the United States' reputation and standing around the world.
Given the similarity between Mr. Bush's ideology and Ms. Palin's (deeply religious, anti-choice, wants to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, cut taxes and so on), I do not think our nation can continue on the same path for an additional four years.
Just the very thought should induce the public to steer as far away as possible from this conservative and toxic Republican ideology. - Michael Hadjiargyrou 9/8/08 Stony Brook, N.Y.
continued...
[key to the great November, 2008 Presidential Election, as the following letters and columns regarding John Sidney McCain III illustrate, and the resurrection of the "strategic framework agreement" by Admiral Mike Mullen (now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), an agreement that will continue to be troublesome, along with the "Status of Forces".">link] [No Comments]
